Group 1: Investment Trends - Venture capitalists invested $588 million in crypto startups in the first two weeks of January 2026, indicating strong investor appetite for institutional-grade tools [1] - Major investors include Arthur Hayes' Maelstrom Fund, Citadel Securities, and various venture capital firms such as Lightspeed and Paradigm [1] Group 2: Privacy in Crypto - Analysts highlight that privacy is essential for traditional financial institutions to adopt on-chain solutions at scale [2] - There is a growing interest in building privacy infrastructure to support institutional-grade financial use cases [2] Group 3: Key Technical Areas - Areas attracting investor interest include zero-knowledge proofs, fully homomorphic encryption, multi-party computation, compliant privacy computing, and privacy-preserving payments [3] Group 4: Notable Fundraises - Rain secured $250 million in its Series C round, raising its valuation to nearly $2 billion and positioning itself as a core infrastructure for stablecoin commerce [4] - Rain processes over $3 billion in annualized transaction volume and plans to expand internationally across five continents [5] - Alpaca raised $150 million in a Series D round, increasing its valuation to $1.2 billion, and serves clients across 40 countries [6] - Indonesian centralized exchange ICEx raised $70 million to enhance its spot trading infrastructure and digital asset services [9]