South Korea’s customs agency charged three suspects over a more than $100 million crypto-linked remittance scheme using WeChat Pay and Alipay, per Yonhap. South Korean authorities have uncovered an underground remittance operation that moved roughly 150 billion won (about $100 million to $110 million) through digital assets, according to local media reports. The Korea Customs Service has referred three suspects for prosecution, including a Chinese man in his 30s, on charges of violating the Foreign Exchange Transaction Act, Yonhap News reported Monday. Over the past four years, the illicit operation has allegedly laundered more than $100 million collected through WeChat Pay and Alipay, which was converted into cryptocurrencies through overseas exchanges and transferred into South Korean wallets before being converted back to fiat currency. Read more
Cross-chain bridges concentrate risk and centralize trust, creating vulnerabilities that could trigger a systemic crypto crisis under stressed market conditions. Opinion by: Kadan Stadelmann, chief technology officer of Komodo Platform Crypto didn’t get wrecked by regulators or some shadowy conspiracy. The industry did this to itself. It handed control of cross-chain liquidity to a handful of intermediaries, who it called “bridges,” wrapped assets in slick tickers, and pretended that was decentralization. Every time one of these house-of-cards systems collapses, billions vanish, and the rest of the industry shrugs, as if these were isolated accidents instead of warning sirens blaring across the ecosystem. Read more
The decentralized perpetuals exchange said multiple core services were affected as it worked through a rollback and recovery process. Update Jan 19, 1:44 pm UTC: This article has been updated to add information from Paradex’s Telegram channel. Crypto derivatives exchange Paradex reported a platform-wide service outage on Monday, leaving its trading interface and supporting infrastructure unavailable as the team investigates the issue. According to its public status page, the disruption affected multiple business services, including its user interface, cloud and API services, blockchain components, bridge, block explorer and remote procedure call proxy. Read more
Bitcoin drove 71% of last week’s $2.17 billion in crypto fund inflows, while Ether and Solana held up despite US CLARITY Act proposals to restrict stablecoin yields. Crypto investment products continued gathering steam last week, with fund inflows outpacing every other week in 2026 so far and marking the largest gains since October. Crypto exchange-traded products (ETPs) drew $2.17 billion of inflows last week, European crypto asset manager CoinShares reported on Monday. The bulk of inflows came earlier in the week, but Friday saw sentiment shift as $378 million in outflows amid Greenland geopolitical escalation and fresh tariff worries, CoinShares’ head of research, James Butterfill, said. Read more
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says DAOs must move beyond simple token-voting treasuries and be redesigned to power core infrastructure like oracles and onchain courts. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has called for new decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) designs, arguing that the sector needs more than token-voting treasuries if it wants to improve on traditional corporate and political structures. In a Monday X post, Buterin said that current DAOs often amount to “a treasury controlled by token holder voting.” That model is widely copied but it is “inefficient, vulnerable to capture and fails utterly at the goal of mitigating the weaknesses of human politics,” he said. Read more
Despite Ether’s rejection from $3,400, data suggested that ETH price could see a sustained recovery over the next few weeks, as long as a key support level held. Ether’s (ETH) price had dropped 7% since being rejected from the $3,400 mark last week, falling to key support levels. Data suggested that increased staking demand, coupled with renewed ETF inflows and strong technical support, could lead to a sustained recovery. Key takeaways: Ether queued for staking goes parabolic, with a 44-day wait time Read more