An address allegedly tied to BitMine withdrew 20,000 ETH from Kraken on Jan. 17, worth an estimated $65.40 million, Lookonchain data show. The withdrawal occurred three hours prior to the report, with the address moving funds from the exchange again.

Garrett Jin, described as an agent of "BTC OG's insider whale," wrote on Jan. 16 that the rise of AI applications is expected to rapidly scale AI-assisted trading, with Ethereum's smart contracts and Layer 2 solutions offering a programmable, transparent and secure environment for automating trading, client interaction and marketing, BlockBeats reports. He said this emerging ecosystem is highly likely to be built on Ethereum using smart contracts, DeFi protocols and decentralized AI agents, and argued that the convergence of Ethereum's DeFi and AI ecosystems underscores ETH's technology- and growth-oriented characteristics while driving higher demand for stablecoins and increasing on-chain stablecoin activity that supports ETH's valuation, similar to the link between oil and GDP growth. From a broader macro perspective, Jin stated that AI could fuel a long-term deflationary cycle and significantly lower global interest rates well below 2-3%, in which case Ethereum's roughly 3% staking yield may increasingly be viewed as an attractive fixed-income return that is not yet fully priced in, potentially leading more institutional capital to treat ETH as a strategic reserve asset and giving its valuation both high-dividend and high-tech growth attributes.