Gate Institute: BTC and ETH recover from lows after decline | Ark Invest predicts BTC will reach $762,000 by 2030

Summary

• BTC and ETH retraced and recovered at lower levels; risk-averse sentiment increased, flowing into tokenized commodities, payments, and privacy-oriented solid altcoins.
• Solayer established a $35 million ecosystem fund to accelerate the implementation of high-performance on-chain applications.
• Ondo expanded to Solana, adding tokenized stocks and ETF assets.
• Vitalik proposed a native DVT solution for Ethereum; Mask Network took over Lens Protocol.
• Ark Invest’s “Big Ideas 2026” report predicts the total crypto market cap will reach $28 trillion by 2030, with Bitcoin priced at approximately $762,000.

Market Analysis

Market Commentary

• BTC — Over the past week, BTC stabilized after a rapid decline, trading around a key support zone. Short-term moving averages remain below medium- and long-term averages, indicating the trend has not fully reversed. However, MACD is rising from lows and bearish momentum is weakening, suggesting a temporary easing of downward pressure and a recovery phase.
• ETH — ETH’s movement is similar to BTC, with a rebound after previous declines, currently oscillating above previous lows. Moving averages remain bearish, but the decline has slowed, MACD shows a bullish crossover, and momentum is gradually improving, indicating a short-term stabilization and a wait-and-see stance.
• Altcoins — Funds have shifted away from trading-focused sectors over the past week, with tokenized commodities, payments, and privacy-related sectors performing relatively well. Amidst mainstream asset volatility, the market favors infrastructure assets with real-world mapping and long-term application certainty.
• Stablecoins — The total market cap of stablecoins is currently $309.2 billion, up $57.2 million (0.19%) over the past week.
• Gas Fees — Ethereum network gas fees have generally remained below 1 Gwei over the past week, with a peak of 2.32 Gwei in the past hour. As of January 22, the average gas fee for the day was 0.031 Gwei.

Popular Tokens

In the past 24 hours, the crypto market experienced a slight rebound, with major assets turning positive overall, though market sentiment remains cautious. The fear and greed index dropped to 20, in the “extreme fear” zone, indicating that price recovery has not effectively boosted risk appetite. Structurally, BTC and ETH rebounded approximately 1.1% and 1.8%, respectively, providing main support for the index. Mainstream coins like XRP, SOL, etc., gained 1%-3%, showing a broad rally. However, overall gains are limited, with weak trading momentum, reflecting that current movements are more about emotional recovery and technical rebounds, with funds mainly in a wait-and-see mode.

PIPPIN Pippin (+30.79%, Market Cap $364 million)

According to Gate data, PIPPIN is currently priced at $0.36801, up over 30.79% in 24 hours. Pippin is an SVG unicorn IP project generated based on ChatGPT-4o’s latest LLM architecture, founded by AI and venture capital figure Yohei Nakajima. His influence in AI for VC, BabyAGI, and other open-source projects gives Pippin high topicality and dissemination potential since inception.

This rally was not accompanied by significant official announcements or community updates, likely driven by short-term capital renewed interest in AI concepts and IP narratives. With a relatively limited circulating market cap, sentiment-driven and capital-absorbing dynamics amplified price elasticity, causing rapid token appreciation, mainly driven by speculative and narrative trading in the short term.

ROSE Oasis Network (+23.32%, Market Cap $153 million)

According to Gate data, ROSE is currently priced at $0.02041, up over 23.32% in 24 hours. Oasis Network, driven by Oasis Labs, is a decentralized blockchain platform focused on privacy protection and high-performance needs, positioned as a “cloud computing blockchain platform.” By separating consensus and execution layers and integrating trusted execution environments (TEE) and privacy computing tech, it enhances on-chain computation efficiency while ensuring data security and privacy, enabling complex applications in data privacy, finance, and AI.

The recent rise was driven by narrative and event resonance: Oasis emphasized “Trustless Privacy” and the value of privacy computing in AI scenarios, showcasing ecosystem and infrastructure progress. Meanwhile, official signals about $ROSE buybacks, lowering barriers to use, and launching end-user products reinforced market expectations of its infrastructure role and long-term demand, attracting capital inflows and amplifying short-term gains.

ALCH Alchemist AI (+23.92%, Market Cap $95.71 million)

According to Gate data, ALCH is currently at $0.11233, up over 23.92% in 24 hours. Alchemist AI is a multi-agent AI application platform for developers and creators, featuring a self-developed multi-agent orchestration engine capable of managing 16+ large language models simultaneously, with real-time logical coordination to complete complex generation tasks, supporting direct application, game, and interactive content creation during generation. The platform emphasizes “what you see is what you get.”

This rally was driven by product progress and narrative expectations: the release of version 3.5 with enhanced multi-agent and parallel reasoning capabilities increased market confidence in its technical barriers and usability; additionally, recent signals of technological upgrades, ecosystem collaborations, and partnerships with platforms like Wikicoin, along with the expectation that ALCH token holders will gain product access rights, led to concentrated capital inflows and short-term price amplification, amid a relatively limited circulating supply.

Key Data

BTC faces short-term pressure, capital structure diverges, but long-term signals remain bullish

As gold and silver prices continue to strengthen, Bitcoin retreated to around $90,000 in the short term, showing a structural rotation of “risk-off assets attracting capital, risk assets under pressure.” However, on-chain data indicates that the correction mainly reflects portfolio adjustments rather than a trend reversal.

Large addresses and long-term holders continue to accumulate during the pullback, while small retail wallets have significantly reduced holdings, indicating short-term cautious sentiment. This “retail selling, whale buying” divergence often appears at bottom or consolidation zones, suggesting that while Bitcoin’s price weakens short-term, long-term capital continues to accumulate, signaling a medium- to long-term bullish divergence.

Ondo expands to Solana, adding tokenized stocks and ETF assets

Ondo Finance announced that its Ondo Global Markets has officially expanded to the Solana network, introducing over 200 tokenized stocks and ETF products for its approximately 3.2 million active users. This expansion enhances Solana’s capacity in real-world assets and enriches tradable traditional financial assets on-chain, further strengthening its role as a high-performance financial blockchain.

The tokenized products cover a broad range, including tech stocks, growth stocks, blue chips, and ETFs tracking overall markets or specific sectors, with leverage long and short ETFs also introduced. In commodities and thematic investments, products extend to gold, silver, and other commodities, as well as AI and electric vehicle sectors, supporting diversified asset allocation and trading strategies within the Solana ecosystem.

Solayer launches $35 million ecosystem fund to accelerate high-performance on-chain applications

Solayer announced a $35 million ecosystem fund focused on supporting high-throughput, revenue-oriented on-chain applications based on the infiniSVM architecture. The fund targets early and growth-stage development teams, helping them create products suitable for high-frequency on-chain operation, pushing high-performance blockchain applications from concept to scale.

Application areas include DeFi protocols, consumer-facing apps, payment infrastructure, and AI systems requiring real-time execution and on-chain settlement. This strategy aims to leverage infiniSVM’s performance advantages to host applications closer to real business needs, with the ecosystem fund acting as a catalyst to attract teams with clear revenue models and technical capabilities, fostering sustainable on-chain applications and capital cycles.

This Week’s Focus

Vitalik Buterin: Exploring native integration of distributed validator technology into Ethereum staking protocol layer

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed integrating distributed validator technology (DVT) natively into the Ethereum staking protocol layer, called “native DVT.” This design allows validators (staking ≥ n × 32 ETH) to register multiple independent keys (up to n ≤ 16) and set a threshold m (recommended m > n/2), forming an m-of-n threshold signature scheme. Validator groups act as a single identity in consensus, requiring at least m signatures from independent nodes to attest or propose, while maintaining slashing safety (proof of ≥ m malicious conflicting votes). Compared to current externally coordinated DVT solutions like SSV and Obol, the native approach greatly simplifies operations—users only need to run n standard clients with minimal configuration, reducing single points of failure and dependence on large staking providers.

The proposal aims to significantly enhance Ethereum’s decentralization by encouraging more medium/large holders to self-stake directly rather than delegating to centralized providers, potentially improving Nakamoto coefficient and Herfindahl index, and offering safer self-custody options for institutions and conservative participants. Protocol-level integration can also accommodate future signature schemes, simplify key rotation, and avoid current DVT reliance on BLS linearity (which may be quantum insecure). The idea is still in the research discussion stage on ethresear.ch, with community feedback positive but also raising concerns about consensus overhead, coordination failures leading to reward loss, and insufficient coverage for small stakers. Further review and consensus are needed for implementation.

Mask Network takes over struggling decentralized social protocol Lens

Mask Network announced it has officially taken over Lens Community (LC) as the new management entity. Since its launch in 2022, Lens has been a pioneer in Web3 social graphs, initially attracting significant speculative traffic through NFT Profile systems, with daily new accounts exceeding 10,000 and daily active users in the tens of thousands. However, the bear market quickly burst this bubble, with speculators retreating and many accounts becoming dormant, causing daily active users to plummet. Early Lens also required gas fees for high-frequency social actions like likes, posts, and comments, which, despite later moving off-chain to reduce costs and delays, came too late to prevent user attrition. The open, permissionless modular infrastructure seemed promising but overlooked the importance of polished consumer UX, onboarding for non-crypto-native users, and timely creator incentives, preventing network effects from fully materializing.

Mask Network’s experience positions it as an ideal partner to break this deadlock. The team focuses on Web2-Web3 social bridging, including Twitter integration plugins, decentralized identity tools, and support for Mastodon and other ecosystems. Its multi-chain social client Firefly and creator club Orb Club have deeply integrated Lens, enabling users to own identities, access token-gated content, and share subscription revenue. After Avara (formerly Lens Labs) shifted to an advisory role, Mask will focus on intuitive product iteration, community culture, and SocialFi monetization, rather than developing new underlying primitives.

Ark Invest: Bitcoin expected to reach $762,000 by 2030

Ark Invest, in its annual “Big Ideas 2026” report, offers an optimistic outlook on the crypto market, projecting a total market cap of about $28 trillion by 2030 (CAGR approximately 63%), with Bitcoin maintaining 60%-70% dominance, reaching a market cap of $16 trillion. Under a fixed supply assumption of 21 million BTC, this implies a price of about $762,000 per BTC.

The report positions Bitcoin as “digital gold,” benefiting from accelerated institutionalization: by 2025, Bitcoin ETF holdings will account for 12% of supply; corporate Bitcoin holdings will have increased by 73%; corporate treasury exposure will expand further; volatility will continue to decline, enhancing its recognition as a store of value globally. The remaining market share includes smart contract platforms with a combined market cap of $6 trillion and annual revenue of about $192 billion, driven by on-chain financial activities, tokenized securities (projected over $11 trillion), and decentralized applications. Value will concentrate on 2-3 Layer 1 platforms, which rely more on store-of-value attributes than traditional cash flow discount models.