The cryptocurrency market continued its strength over the past 24 hours, with risk aversion sentiment resonating with incremental capital.

**Geopolitical tensions catalyze safe-haven buying**

The Trump administration signed an executive order to initiate emergency asset seizure of Venezuela's oil assets due to "national security threats," triggering global geopolitical concerns and directly igniting market risk aversion. BTC rebounded strongly overnight, recapturing the $94,000 level, just one step away from the round number of $100,000. As a safe-haven choice among risk assets, Bitcoin's surge reflects institutional investors' pricing of uncertainty.

**XRP spot ETF attracts capital, pushing market cap beyond BNB**

Ripple's performance is particularly impressive. Driven by continuous net inflows into the spot ETF (over $1.1 billion in a single week), XRP surged over 8% overnight, with market cap surpassing $140 billion, once again overtaking BNB to become the third-largest cryptocurrency globally. Market expectations suggest that by 2026, the regulatory environment will become more transparent. As a representative of "cross-border payment settlement," XRP is attracting allocations from commodity traders. Institutional holdings have reached a historic high, with this rally supported by both policy expectations and genuine institutional engagement.

**L2 security incident weighs on Ethereum performance**

The Truebit protocol was hacked, with 8,535 ETH transferred to the mixer Tornado Cash for laundering, totaling $26 million. This incident rekindled discussions on Layer 2 security. Ethereum's performance was relatively weak amid BTC's rally, with the exchange rate hovering around 0.034, reflecting a reassessment of risks within the L2 ecosystem by investors.

**Dubai's 2026 regulatory policies attract compliant players**

Dubai Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) sent a strong signal, emphasizing support for RWA and stablecoin settlement infrastructure in 2026. The new policy offers a three-year tax exemption for compliant tokenization platforms registered in Dubai, aiming to establish Dubai as a global digital asset pricing hub. This move marks a formal embrace of Web3 by traditional financial centers.

**Starknet downtime accelerates L2 upgrade pace**

This week, Starknet's mainnet experienced a failure caused by conflicts between Blockifier and the proof layer. After releasing a root cause analysis, the team committed to making "zero downtime" a top priority in 2026, with plans to significantly reduce L2 transaction fees in February to improve user experience and competitiveness. This reflects the maturing of the L2 track—issues are quickly exposed, rapidly fixed, and swiftly iterated.

**AI agent deployment expectations ignite AI tokens**

OpenAI's autonomous agent "Operator" entered developer beta testing, fueling market enthusiasm for AI automation narratives. Projects with AI attributes (WLD, RENDER, etc.) saw an average overnight increase of 12%. Investors are proactively positioning for large-scale commercial deployment of AI operators by 2026. This hot trend reflects both advances in AI technology and market imagination regarding the commercialization of "agent economy."