Epstein's Early Crypto Investments Resurface, Tether Launches Bitcoin Mining OS: What's the Overseas Crypto Community Talking About Today?

marsbitОпубліковано о 2026-02-03Востаннє оновлено о 2026-02-03

Анотація

In the past 24 hours, the crypto market evolved across multiple fronts. Key discussions centered on structural changes in stablecoins and trading infrastructure, alongside governance and risk debates around exchanges and market-making mechanisms. Mainstream topics included newly disclosed files showing Epstein’s early investments in Coinbase and Blockstream, sparking community debates on Bitcoin’s reputation and decentralization. Several blockchains, including Solana and Monad, launched AI-focused hackathons to advance agent-based trading and automation. Binance’s CZ responded to FUD with selective clarifications, drawing mixed reactions. Tether released MOS, an open-source Bitcoin mining OS aimed at improving efficiency and hardware compatibility. Ecosystem-wise, Solana set new records in daily active transactions, signaling a strong recovery in utility and adoption. Ethereum explored cross-rollup atomic composability to improve interoperability between L2s. Perp DEX Hyperliquid introduced CLI tools for AI-agent trading, advancing automated infrastructure. Other notable updates: stablecoin monthly trading volume surpassed $10 trillion, highlighting growing adoption. Wintermute’s founder criticized internal market makers at some exchanges, raising concerns over liquidity and risk management. Overall, sentiment is cautiously optimistic, with emphasis on infrastructure maturity, AI integration, and the need for robust, decentralized solutions.

Over the past 24 hours, the crypto market has evolved on multiple fronts. Mainstream discussions have focused on structural changes in stablecoins and trading infrastructure, as well as risk and governance debates surrounding trading platforms and market-making mechanisms; in terms of ecosystem development, Solana set a new record for on-chain activity under high load, showing signs of a practical utility recovery; Ethereum's technical exploration around cross-rollup composability continues to advance; Perp DEX is accelerating its evolution towards a proxy-based, automated trading infrastructure, with competition in the sector heating up further.

I. Mainstream Topics

1. Documents Reveal Epstein's Involvement in Early Investments in Coinbase and Blockstream

Newly disclosed documents related to Epstein show that in 2014, Epstein, through a fund managed by Joi Ito, made a small equity investment in Bitcoin infrastructure company Blockstream; the fund later exited the investment due to potential conflict of interest issues. The documents also mention that Epstein may have indirectly invested approximately $3 million in Coinbase through the capital network associated with Brock Pierce, and had funded Bitcoin Core developers through MIT as a channel.

Additionally, the documents disclose that Epstein met with then-New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) Superintendent Ben Lawsky during the formulation of New York State's BitLicense regulatory rules. BitLicense is regarded as a significant milestone in early Bitcoin regulation in the U.S., but it has long been controversial within the industry for restricting innovation and raising compliance barriers.

The related information has sparked strong reactions within the community. Some users criticized Blockstream founder Adam Back for having met with Epstein, questioning his moral stance and even calling for him to exit the Bitcoin space; other voices linked this to Coinbase's early refusal to list XRP, further extending to speculation about political party influence. More radical comments included accusations about the originality of the PoW mechanism, controversies over support for large on-chain data volumes, and even evolved into conspiracy theory-like speculation.

Overall, the discussion sentiment is highly divergent, but the core demands focus on "repairing Bitcoin's reputation" and "promoting a stronger path to decentralization," including renewed calls to expand block size and reduce infrastructure power concentration.

2. Public Chains Intensively Promote Moltbot / AI Hackathon Competitions

Solana announced the launch of its first AI Hackathon, lasting two weeks, with a total prize pool exceeding $185,000, covering six tracks including AI Agent infrastructure, DeFi Agent, and trading agents, with support from multiple ecosystem partners.

Meanwhile, Monad launched the Moltiverse Hackathon, setting a $200,000 prize pool, focusing on the application of AI agents in scalable trading, community operations, and commercial scenarios, emphasizing endowing Moltbot with native crypto asset capabilities, backed by sponsorship from several funds and AI projects.

Community reaction is generally positive, seeing this as a sign that competition among public chains in the direction of AI Agents has entered a substantive stage, potentially giving rise to new application forms like chat agents and social agents. Some developers have already begun forming teams to register, actively seeking technical and resource support.

However, cautious voices exist, pointing out that Monad still needs to rely on low-market-cap meme coin narratives for market attention, reflecting the intensity of competition among public chains in the AI ecosystem. Overall, market sentiment is optimistic, widely believing that such hackathons will serve as a stress test for the security, usability, and real demand of AI agents.

3. CZ Responds to FUD, Sparking Controversy Over "Selective Clarification"

Binance founder CZ recently published a lengthy article responding to various FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) surrounding Binance, specifically refuting some extreme allegations, such as claims that "Binance was involved in the 10/10 incident." However, the article did not directly address the core criticisms that have garnered higher community attention.

Some community members interpreted this as a defensive strategy: by amplifying clearly untenable claims to weaken or divert attention from reasonable criticism. Other users criticized the highly selective nature of his responses, tending to reply to supporters while avoiding key issues.

Mockery and dissatisfaction continued to ferment in the discussions, with some comments directly pointing out that this communication style undermines the sincerity of public discourse. Overall, the community calls for distinguishing between facts, signals, and emotional venting in a highly noisy environment to prevent the dialogue from further losing focus.

4. Tether Launches MOS Bitcoin Mining Operating System

Tether officially released Mining OS (MOS), an open-source operating system for Bitcoin mining infrastructure, featuring a modular architecture, energy management optimization, and broad hardware compatibility, covering various application scenarios from home miners to industrial-scale mining farms, and supporting peer-to-peer operation without relying on centralized services.

Community reaction is generally positive, viewing the launch of MOS as a symbol of Bitcoin mining infrastructure moving further towards openness and standardization, helping to improve operational efficiency and sovereign control. Some developers have already begun studying the related documentation, looking forward to subsequent actual deployments and performance verification.

From a broader perspective, the market sees this as a signal of the increasing maturity of Bitcoin infrastructure, also indicating that Tether's business landscape is expanding from stablecoin issuance to energy and computing power layer infrastructure construction, potentially enhancing the resilience and risk resistance of the Bitcoin network in the long term.

II. Mainstream Ecosystem Dynamics

1. Solana

During last week's market volatility, the Solana network reached two key milestones: On January 30, it set a new single-day record for activity, processing 148 million non-vote transactions, which the community compared to roughly 130% of Cardano's total historical transaction volume; simultaneously, weekly on-chain activity also hit a record, with transaction volume nearing 1 billion, average non-vote TPS reaching 1505, and described as "close to Ethereum's total transaction volume over the past two years." These data are seen as evidence of Solana's stability and growth momentum under high load, with on-chain fee income also rising alongside increased activity.

The community is generally excited about Solana's "recovery." Supporters emphasize that real usage is driving fee and demand growth, with Solana once again being viewed as a leading chain, and anticipate that chain activity has further room to explode as market sentiment improves. Some developers added that active addresses increased by about 115% week-over-week, with daily active addresses exceeding 5 million, even higher than some Ethereum L2s; discussions about institutional capital回流 (returning flow) and the SOL ETF narrative also emerged.
Controversy mainly centers on transaction quality: critics believe a portion may come from compressed NFTs, short-term speculation, and spam from "pump-and-dump junk." But the overall atmosphere remains optimistic, believing these metrics at least prove Solana has moved past the "dead chain" narrative and will attract more builders to participate, with frequent mentions of the Colosseum hackathon and the upcoming Breakpoint conference.

2. Ethereum

Jordi Baylina published a new proposal on EthResearch, exploring how based rollups with real-time validity proofs can achieve atomic L1↔L2 and L2↔L2 interactions: executing synchronously across multiple rollups via a single transaction, attempting to restore cross-rollup composability as much as possible. The proposal introduces mechanisms like proxy contracts and execution tables, aiming to eliminate the fragmented experience caused by current asynchronous bridging, making cross-rollup calls closer to internal EVM calls, and supporting return values, nested calls, and failure rollbacks.

The community has a high degree of approval for this direction, seeing it as directly addressing the rollup fragmentation issue and helping Ethereum move closer to the unified experience of "one computer." Vitalik Buterin also expressed support for native rollups, emphasizing that with the maturation of ZK-EVMs, it有望 (holds promise) to achieve a withdrawal experience closer to instant in the future, reducing the 2-7 day wait and the centralization risks brought by multi-signature bridging. Developer discussions focus more on engineering and trade-offs: including simplifying the rollup tech stack, reducing centralization exposure (e.g., anchoring sequencing to the Ethereum validator set), and the synergy and boundaries between this exploration and others like MegaETH's real-time execution route and Espresso's coordination layer testnet. Overall views are optimistic, believing that if realized, it would significantly improve cross-domain efficiency for DeFi infrastructure and attract more builders, but a balance between speed and decentralization still needs to be found.

3. Perp DEX

Chris Ling released a CLI tool for Hyperliquid, positioned as an AI agent-friendly trading entry point: supporting the direct deployment of algorithmic trading strategies from backtesting in GT Protocol to Hyperliquid, executed natively;同时 (simultaneously) integrating OpenClaw, providing experiences like real-time monitoring, Telegram notifications, and "gas-free first touch," covering Perp and Spot trading. The community普遍 (widely) interprets this as: Hyperliquid is expanding from a "single DEX product" to infrastructure more suited for agent-based trading.

Discussion sentiment is generally excited. Supporters believe the CLI lowers the migration cost of strategies from simulation to live trading, and agent-based trading is beginning to have a replicable engineering path, while also strengthening Hyperliquid's competitive narrative around speed and transparency. Users further emphasize Hyperliquid's HyperBFT consensus delivering sub-second finality and high throughput capabilities, citing TVL and revenue growth data as endorsement. At the developer level, SDK and automated vault experiences are shared, believing it is forming a decentralized trading benchmark comparable to CEXs. Other viewpoints note that with the advancement of HIP-3 market expansion and ecosystem moves like multi-DEX locking approximately 500,000 HYPE, retail trading volume may further increase, driving larger daily trading volumes.

4. Others

Stablecoin Trading Volume Exceeds $10 Trillion

Community-circulated statistics show: January trading volume broke through $10 trillion, a year-on-year increase of 72%; among which USDC trading volume was about $8.4 trillion, USDT about $13.3 trillion. Total stablecoin market capitalization is about $308 billion, having processed approximately $46 trillion in trading volume over the past year, and was compared in scale to traditional payment networks like PayPal and Visa+Mastercard.

Overall sentiment is positive, with users seeing it as a signal of stablecoin infrastructure maturity, believing it will further promote the expansion of global payments and DeFi; others emphasized that USDC's dominant position in transfer volume sends a market signal of "stronger reliability," and predicted that stablecoins will continue to erode the boundaries of traditional payment networks.

Wintermute Founder Questions Exchange Internal MMs

Another discussion thread comes from Wintermute founder Evgeny Gaevoy. He questioned the professional capabilities of some exchanges' "internal market makers (MMs)," believing their proprietary trading is immature, citing Alameda as a typical negative example;同时 (simultaneously) pointing out that top market makers (Tower/Jump/Optiver, etc.) have no essential difference in capability between crypto and non-crypto markets, whereas exchange internal MMs lack competitiveness.

The community mostly agrees with this, believing internal MMs are more prone to distortion in environments with information asymmetry, with related discussions about Crypto.com also mentioned, further extending to the risks of low liquidity phases combined with high leverage. Overall, mainstream opinion tends to believe market crashes are difficult to attribute to a single exchange, but rather the result of the combined effects of bearish sentiment, leverage structure, and liquidity constraints; at the same time, many are optimistic about the liquidity provision capabilities of institutions like Wintermute, and the support that advancing regulatory legislation provides for the industry's long-term development.

Пов'язані питання

QWhat early cryptocurrency investments was Jeffrey Epstein involved in, according to newly disclosed documents?

AAccording to newly disclosed documents, Jeffrey Epstein invested in Bitcoin infrastructure company Blockstream through a fund managed by Joi Ito in 2014. The documents also suggest he may have indirectly invested approximately $3 million in Coinbase through Brock Pierce's capital network and funded Bitcoin core developers through MIT.

QWhat new product did Tether launch and what is its primary purpose?

ATether launched an open-source Mining OS (MOS), a modular operating system designed for Bitcoin mining infrastructure. Its primary purpose is to optimize energy management, offer broad hardware compatibility for everything from home setups to industrial mining operations, and support peer-to-peer operation without relying on centralized services.

QWhat significant on-chain activity milestone did the Solana network achieve recently?

AThe Solana network set a new record for daily active addresses, processing 148 million non-vote transactions on January 30th. For the entire week, it neared 1 billion transactions with an average non-vote TPS of 1505, signaling high network activity and stability under load.

QWhat proposal did Jordi Baylina introduce to address Ethereum's rollup fragmentation issue?

AJordi Baylina proposed a new mechanism for based rollups using real-time validity proofs. The proposal aims to enable atomic-level L1↔L2 and L2↔L2 interactions through a single transaction, restoring cross-rollup composability. It introduces mechanisms like proxy contracts and execution tables to make interactions more seamless, similar to internal EVM calls.

QWhat criticism did Wintermute's founder level against some cryptocurrency exchanges?

AWintermute founder Evgeny Gaevoy criticized the professional competence of internal market makers at some exchanges, citing their proprietary trading as immature and pointing to Alameda as a negative example. He argued that top market makers like Tower, Jump, and Optiver are competent across both crypto and traditional markets, whereas internal exchange MMs often lack competitive strength.

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