I'm back with another #AlphaOfTheWeek update! In the latest crypto news, this is what has been happening on and off CT:

🍏Ledger co-founder David Balland and his wife were kidnapped last Tuesday morning in their home in central France. They were taken to two separate locations and tortured. The kidnappers demanded ransom in cryptocurrency from another @Ledger co-founder in exchange for their release. Per @Reuters, “Balland, who Ledger said no longer worked for the company, was rescued after a police operation on Wednesday and his wife was freed the following day.”

But not before Balland lost a finger. He has since received treatment at the hospital for his hand injuries. Currently, all crypto assets paid to the kidnappers have been traced, retrieved, and frozen.

🍏@opencampus_xyz educational DAO has launched its mainnet EDU CHAIN. The blockchain has since launched several initiatives onchain, starting with EDULand NFTs. Go check it out at @educhain_xyz!

🍏US stocks experienced a significant drop on Monday, January 27, with chipmaker @Nvidia losing nearly $600 billion in market value, following a breakthrough from Chinese AI company DeepSeek. @DeepSeek_ai, a one-year-old startup, unveiled a low-cost AI model called R1, which operates at a fraction of the cost of popular AI models from OpenAI, Google, and Meta. The company spent only $5.6 million on computing power for its base model, compared to the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars US companies invest in their AI technologies.

This development sent shockwaves through the tech sector, with the Nasdaq and S&P 500 experiencing significant declines.

🍏 TikTok’s ban in the US has been temporarily reversed, with @POTUS Trump providing a 75-day extension for the social media platform as one of his executive orders. This decision has been critized by senior scholars as falling into a grey area. Per federal law, it remains illegal for US companies to distribute and update TikTok.

The ban of TikTok has led to many “TikTok refugees” considering a migration to RedNote (小红书) and a surge on Duolingo of users actively looking to learn Mandarin.

That’s it for this week. Hope you enjoyed it. Drop some thoughts if there’s anything you’d like to comment on further.