Crypto

US President Donald Trump’s stance on Sam Bankman-Fried pardon, BitMine’s purchase in Ethereum shows continued confidence: Hodler’s Digest

US President Donald Trump’s stance on Sam Bankman-Fried pardon, BitMine’s purchase in Ethereum shows continued confidence: Hodler’s Digest Nasdaq, CME Group join forces to launch Nasdaq-CME Crypto Index The Nasdaq Stock Exchange and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) Group joined forces to unify their crypto indexes, rebranding the Nasdaq Crypto Index (NCI) as the Nasdaq CME Crypto Index. The NCI benchmark index includes Bitcoin, Ether, XRP, Solana, Chainlink, Cardano, and Avalanche, spokespersons for Nasdaq confirmed to Cointelegraph. Read more

Crypto enters 2026 on a positive footing, but retail sentiment remains fragile and driven by immediate news catalysts.

Banks are fighting stablecoin rewards to protect a secret $360 billion revenue machine. When Coinbase chief policy officer Faryar Shirzad posted a thread on Jan. 8 warning that stablecoin rewards “remain under debate” as Congress marks up market structure legislation, he attached numbers that banking groups would rather keep quiet. US banks earn $176 billion […] The post Banks are lobbying to kill crypto rewards to protect a hidden $1,400 “tax” on every household appeared first on CryptoSlate.

The Bitcoin mining difficulty continued to push through to new all-time highs in 2025 amid a turbulent year for the mining industry. The Bitcoin (BTC) network mining difficulty, the relative computing challenge of adding a new block to the decentralized blockchain ledger, fell slightly to 146.4 trillion on Thursday, in the first difficulty adjustment of 2026.  “The next Bitcoin difficulty adjustment is estimated to take place on Jan 22, 2026, 04:08:12 AM UTC, increasing the Bitcoin mining difficulty from 146.47 T to 148.20 T,” according to CoinWarz.  Average block times are 9.88 minutes at the time of this writing, slightly below the 10-minute target, which means the next difficulty adjustment will increase slightly to align better with the target block time. Read more

The outage was the second major network disruption in 2025, with both incidents requiring a block reorganization that rolled back some activity. The team behind Starknet, an Ethereum layer‑2 (L2) scaling network, released a post-mortem report outlining the root cause of the temporary mainnet downtime on Monday. The root cause of the mainnet downtime was a discrepancy in the network state between the blockifier execution layer and the proving layer that checks that the execution layer is processing transactions correctly, according to the report. The Starknet team explained: This incorrect execution never saw L1 finality thanks to Starknet’s proving layer,” the StarkNet team said, highlighting how the proving layer functioned properly by flagging the error and not committing the faulty transactions to the ledger. Read more

CoinDesk sat down with Robinhood’s head of crypto, Johann Kerbrat, to get an update on its upcoming layer-2 network, its tokenized stocks program, and its staking offerings.

Chains with built-in privacy may attract finance, healthcare, and real-world asset projects that cannot operate on fully transparent ledgers.

Many in the Bitcoin community continue to speculate that cryptographer Hal Finney was Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. The Bitcoin (BTC) community is celebrating the anniversary of cypherpunk and Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney’s post on January 10, 2009, telling the world that he was running the Bitcoin node software “Running Bitcoin,” Finney said on X, formerly known as Twitter. Finney was the recipient of the first Bitcoin transaction on the network. He was born on May 4, 1956, and pursued a career in computer science and cryptography, and was one of the first people to respond to Satoshi Nakamoto’s publication of the Bitcoin whitepaper.  Read more

BlackRock is telling clients to stop looking at artificial intelligence as software and start treating it as energy. In its 2026 Global Outlook, the BlackRock Investment Institute argued that the AI buildout is pushing against physical limits and highlighted electricity as the constraint investors are underpricing. The report’s headline-grabber is its warning that AI-driven data […] The post BlackRock warns crypto’s love affair with AI is over as an energy war with Bitcoin miners begins appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bitcoin whales began repeating a classic bull signal as they took BTC long positions off the table after a year of declining overall market exposure. Bitcoin (BTC) whales are “aggressively” reducing long exposure as a classic bull signal reappears. Key points: Bitfinex whales are rotating out of BTC long positions — something that preceded major price gains in the past. Read more

Lawmakers will (finally) vote on a market structure bill next week.

The firms, federally regulated by the CFTC, were told to shut down Tennessee-based activity, refund deposits, and void open contracts by Jan. 31.

Ethereum’s DeFi TVL surpassed $99B, over nine times larger than the next Layer 1, showing dominant network adoption in decentralized finance.

The stablecoin sector is expected to grow to $500 billion, while altcoin ETFs are projected to reach $10 billion, driven by regulatory clarity and adoption.

Bitcoin continues to consolidate near the $90k mark as global financial markets remain under pressure. Geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, growing uncertainty around fiat currency stability in emerging markets, and macro volatility have once again pushed BTC into the spotlight. Bitcoin Price Analysis: The Daily Chart On the daily timeframe, BTC has broken out […]

Tokenized real-world assets reached $19.72 billion on Jan. 9, the closest the market has come to the $20 billion threshold. That figure measures distributed assets, which are tokens that circulate on-chain and can be transferred between user wallets. As a result, it excludes another $19.78 billion in active private credit loans, which are tracked as […] The post Tokenized Treasuries skyrocketed 125%, creating this “programmable cash” loop that banks are scrambling to copy appeared first on CryptoSlate.

A platform's onboarding polish should not be confused for its ability to execute trades and handle immense volumes, argues Bridgeport co-founder and CCO Chris Soriano.

Solana issues urgent v3.0.14 validator update as SOL holds $136 support. Technical compression signals a potential breakout toward $144–$146. The post Solana Price Prediction: SOL’s Critical v3.0.14 Upgrade Drops as $76.8B Network Eyes $144 Rebound appeared first on Cryptonews.

The popular and award-winning cryptocurrency exchange, Toobit, today announced a major suite of upgrades regarding one of its most popular features – Copy Trading. Undoubtedly, the most important highlight of this release is the introduction of customizable leverage, so let’s dive deeper. Toobit’s Copy Trading Feature Receives Major Boost Customizable leverage will allow followers to […]