🔍 February 4, 2026 Daily Briefing
📊 I. Key Data
Fear & Greed Index: 14 (Extreme Fear)
US BTC Spot ETF: Net inflow yesterday -$272 million
US ETH Spot ETF: Net inflow yesterday $14.06 million
📰 II. Important News of the Day
1️⃣ Macroeconomics and Regulation
1) According to CLS News Agency, US President Trump signed a government funding bill at the White House on February 3, ending the partial government shutdown. Earlier that day, the US House of Representatives passed a funding bill for several federal government departments for the remainder of the fiscal year, resolving the partial shutdown that began on January 31. The bill will provide funding for several federal government departments until September 30, the end of the fiscal year, and will provide two weeks of funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which has recently faced controversy and protests due to immigration enforcement actions.
2) On February 4th, Patrick Witt, Executive Director of the Presidential Advisory Council on Digital Assets, stated that the White House would not accept any provisions in the legislation concerning the structure of the crypto market that directly target President Trump or his family's digital asset business; such content has been clearly marked as a red line. Witt stated that anti-corruption or ethical provisions previously proposed by some Democratic lawmakers are completely unacceptable, and emphasized that the core of the bill is the regulation of the crypto market, not ethical censorship. He admitted that the Democrats' demands to restrict the involvement of senior government officials and their families in the crypto industry are one of the main obstacles to the legislation's progress.
3) On February 3rd, the Financial Times reported that US President Trump and his allies raised $429 million in political donations for the midterm elections over the past year, a record high for a midterm election year. A significant portion of these funds came from the cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence industries, reflecting strong capital bets on his policy direction. The largest disclosed single donation came from Crypto.com, when the trading platform donated $30 million to Maga Inc.; venture capital giants a16z co-founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz each donated $3 million, and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and his wife donated a total of $25 million.
2️⃣ Industry News
1) On February 3, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin posted on social media that the original "scaling" positioning of Ethereum Layer 2 needs to be re-examined. He pointed out that the progress of L2 towards Phase 2 is significantly slower than expected, while Ethereum L1 is continuously scaling (transaction fees have dropped significantly, and the gas cap is expected to increase significantly in 2026). Therefore, L2 should no longer be regarded as a "branded shard" of Ethereum. Vitalik Buterin believes that L2 should focus more on differentiated value beyond scaling, such as privacy features, efficiency improvements for specific applications, and non-financial application scenarios, while at least meeting Phase 1 security standards. He also proposed introducing native rollup pre-compilation to enhance interoperability and security between L2 and the Ethereum mainnet, emphasizing that developers should explore innovative features rather than solely serving L1 scaling. According to incomplete statistics from L2Beat, there are currently about 135 Ethereum L2 networks on the market, of which 109 had less than 1 User Operations Per Second (UOPS) in the past day. Community reactions to this are divided: some users agree with his viewpoint, believing that the L2 scaling narrative is weakening; others worry that this statement will damage confidence in L2 projects and affect funding and ecosystem stability.
2) On February 4th, according to on-chain analyst Yu Jin, Trend Research reduced its holdings by 153,500 ETH (worth $352 million) over the past two days at an average price of $2,294, and repaid 266 million USDT to reduce leverage. Trend Research currently holds 498,000 ETH (worth $1.11 billion), with accumulated losses of $605 million and 743 million USDT in leveraged loans.
3) On February 3rd, Ondo Finance disclosed on its website that it had secretly filed a registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Once effective, this statement will enable Ondo to provide global investors with issuer-level disclosures compliant with SEC requirements, but regulatory approval has not yet been obtained. On the same day, Ondo announced the launch of Ondo Global Listing, aiming to allow U.S. stocks to be listed on the blockchain almost in real-time on IPO day and provide trading services on mainstream blockchains through the Ondo Global Markets platform from day one. In addition, Ondo launched Ondo Perps, offering 24/7 trading of US stock and ETF perpetual contracts to non-US users, supporting leverage, and planning to allow the use of tokenized securities as collateral, no longer limited to stablecoins.
4) On February 4th, Tom Lee responded on the X platform to reports of $6.6 billion in unrealized losses on ETH holdings. He stated that some market opinions misunderstood the operating logic of the Ethereum Treasury. BitMine's core objective is to track the ETH price and strive for outperformance throughout the entire market cycle. When the crypto market is in a downtrend, a synchronized decline in ETH price is normal. Tom Lee emphasized that BitMine has no debt, and given the strengthening fundamentals of Ethereum, the recent market correction is highly attractive. In the long term, Ethereum will remain a crucial infrastructure for the future financial system.
5) On February 4th, according to the Financial Times, stablecoin issuer Tether lowered its fundraising target from $15-20 billion to $5 billion, due to investor skepticism regarding its $500 billion valuation target. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino stated in an interview that the $15-20 billion fundraising amount was a misunderstanding; it was simply the maximum amount they were willing to sell, not a target. He added that the company had not yet decided how much equity to sell, partly because insiders were unwilling to reduce their holdings. It is understood that Tether's profit last year was approximately $10 billion, mainly from returns on its asset holdings, but profits are projected to decline by approximately 25% year-on-year in 2025.
6) On February 4th, Aave founder Stani.eth announced the gradual shutdown of the Family iOS wallet, but it will continue to support the Aave App as infrastructure. Aave Labs will no longer use the Avara umbrella brand, which includes the Family and Lens brands; Lens is now managed by Mask. Aave plans to focus its resources on enhancing Aave brand awareness to refocus on its DeFi business.
7) On February 4th, BNB Chain released new application layer standards BAPs and the non-fungible proxy (NFA) token standard BAP-578. BAPs are standards that allow the community to propose how BNB chain applications should communicate and interact, standardizing collaboration between applications, including application programming interfaces (APIs), wallet and identity specifications, token and NFT utility standards, and interoperability between applications. BAP-578 is the non-fungible proxy (NFA) token standard; NFAs are AI-driven assets that can operate autonomously on-chain.
3️⃣ Focused Stock Developments/AI-Related Progress
1) On February 3rd, US AI startup Anthropic released an AI tool for corporate legal teams, capable of automating tasks such as contract review, confidentiality agreement classification, and legal briefing drafting. Affected by this news, the professional information and data services sector in Europe and the US collectively declined: legal and information services giant RELX fell by approximately 14% at one point during trading, while industry benchmarks such as credit reporting giant Experian, financial data service provider London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), and Thomson Reuters all saw share prices drop by 8% to 11%. Market analysts believe that the emergence of this tool signifies that the threat of AI to the traditional media and information service business models has entered a substantial stage.
2) On February 4th, WeChat's official information release platform, "WeChat Official Account," released an "Announcement on Combating Third-Party Induced Sharing Behavior," publicly announcing the results of its handling of the Spring Festival marketing activities related to Tencent's AI application "Yuanbao." The announcement revealed that during its Spring Festival marketing campaign, the product induced users to frequently share activity links to private domain scenarios such as WeChat groups through tasks and red envelope giveaways, severely disrupting the platform's ecosystem. WeChat officially took action against the illegal links for "Yuanbao" starting today, restricting their direct opening within WeChat.
3) On February 3rd, at the Cisco AI Summit in San Francisco, Intel CEO Chen Liwu announced that the company would officially enter the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) field, planning to develop its own data center-grade GPUs for AI training and inference. Intel has just appointed a new chief GPU architect to lead this work, stating that this is to better meet customers' needs for AI computing power. Chen Liwu pointed out that the industry currently has very high demand for memory and storage chips in GPUs, and the entire market is facing a severe shortage of storage chips, which he predicts will continue until at least around 2028.
4) On February 3rd, Ant Financial CEO Zhao Wenbiao released an all-staff letter titled "Working Together to Usher in a New Era of Large-Scale Models," announcing the formal establishment of the "Large-Scale Model Technology Innovation Department." The department's core mission is to build foundational large-scale models and industry-specific models for enterprise-level (To B) scenarios, collaborating with internal Ant Group teams to promote the commercialization of large-scale models in enterprise services. Official data shows that Ant Financial has already covered all state-owned joint-stock banks and over 60% of local commercial banks, extending to industries such as energy, transportation, and manufacturing. This organizational restructuring is seen as a significant step in the company's accelerated deployment in the enterprise AI services sector.
