On January 6th, according to TheBlock, Bitcoin mining company MARA Holdings, Inc recently announced that it has used its 16% BTC holdings (worth nearly $730 million in 7377 coins) for short-term third-party loans to generate a "moderate single digit yield". Robert Samuels, Vice President of Investor Relations at MARA, stated that the company's Bitcoin lending program has been active throughout 2024, focusing on short-term arrangements with mature third parties and generating revenue, but the borrower's identity has not been disclosed. In 2024, the company purchased 22065 bitcoins at an average price of $87205 and mined 9457 bitcoins. Its reserves currently total 44893 bitcoins, valued at over $4.4 billion at current prices. MARA also stated that it achieved its computing power target of 50 EH/s in December.

The Binance HIVE/USDT perpetual funding rate is currently -1.58%, and bears need to pay funding fees to bulls, indicating a high bearish sentiment in the market. AICoin [PC - Home - Popular Rankings] has launched the "Fund Rate" ranking, which provides a list of rate arbitrage opportunities. Capital fees are an important mechanism for anchoring spot prices in perpetual contracts, used to balance long and short sentiment. When the funding rate is greater than 0, long positions pay funding fees to short positions; When the funding rate is less than 0, short sellers pay funding fees to long sellers.

Odaily Planet Daily News: Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley stated in an article on X that "the Trump administration may unfreeze mergers and acquisitions (MA) transactions. Large corporations (such as the Big Seven) may eventually be able to leverage their market value. Amazon can acquire Instacart, Google can acquire Uber, and so on. Large companies may become bigger, while medium-sized companies may shrink. If this happens, I believe it will accelerate the development of cryptocurrency. The concept of cryptocurrency is based on not believing that large institutions will do what is in your best interest. The increasing size of large companies highlights this point even more. 2025 will be fascinating

Jamie Coutts, Chief Cryptocurrency Analyst at investment firm Real Vision, stated in an article on X platform that the last major cryptocurrency hype cycle was from November 2020 to May 2021, approximately 6 months. The sub sectors such as DeFi and NFT continued for about 6 to 12 months. People's interest in AI agents in cryptocurrency began to rise in November 2024. Based on historical experience, this trend is expected to continue for at least four more months, but possibly longer. AI agents are different from other fields - they unleash the potential of every established and new use case. There will be many fraudulent activities (need to be cautious/allocate positions reasonably), just like every hype cycle, selling will be very fierce, but I suspect that this trend still has a lot of room for development.

JAN3, the developer behind the AQUA Bitcoin wallet, raised a $5 million seed round from Fulgur Ventures, Tether, and others, with a focus on developing its Bitcoin and Liquid Network wallet AQUA. The company plans to use $1 million worth of the funds to establish a bitcoin treasury.