Visa selected UK-based BVNK to support Visa Direct pilots that enable some business customers to pre-fund cross-border payouts in stablecoins and send digital U.S. dollars to eligible wallets in select markets. The initiative extends prior onchain settlement tests with USDC on Ethereum and Solana and is aimed at enabling money movement outside traditional banking hours.

The Bank of Italy modeled an extreme Ether price shock to zero in a new study, examining how validator incentives, staking security and block production would react. It assesses potential spillovers to settlement and payment uses built on Ethereum and outlines policy options for supervisors, including either ruling out public chains or imposing robust risk‑mitigation measures.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has pushed back its decisions on the Canary Pudgy Penguins (PENGU) ETF and the T. Rowe Price Active Crypto ETF through extended 19b-4 review periods. At the same time, the regulator opened a public comment window on a proposal to list standardized options on the Grayscale CoinDesk Crypto 5 ETF, which tracks five large-cap digital assets.

On Dec. 11, 2025, South Korea's Supreme Court issued its first explicit ruling that Bitcoin held in centralized exchange accounts can be seized under the Criminal Procedure Act. The decision, which upheld the confiscation of 55.6 BTC from a suspect under a money laundering investigation, classifies Bitcoin as electronic information with independent economic value and aligns the country's enforcement approach with US and EU practices.

On Jan. 1, 2026, China permitted commercial banks to pay interest on e‑CNY wallet balances, aiming to integrate the CBDC into bank balance sheets. On Jan. 7, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said the shift gives China an edge, colliding with the GENIUS Act’s July 2025 prohibition on stablecoin yields and raising competitiveness concerns for US dollar stablecoins.

Bitcoin Core developers released version 30.1 on Jan. 1 and, on Monday, disclosed a migration bug affecting 30.0 and 30.1 that can delete wallet directories during legacy upgrades. Developers pulled both binaries and advised against using migration tools until 30.2 is available; Coin Dance reports Bitcoin Core powers about 78% of reachable nodes.

Starknet, an Ethereum layer-2 ZK-rollup used by DeFi and gaming applications, is undergoing a new bout of mainnet downtime in 2026 after a series of outages in 2025. The team said on X that engineers are investigating the disruption and working to restore services, with the latest incident lasting just over two hours at the time of writing, while the STRK token price remained largely unchanged.

Solana, BNB Chain, Base, Tron and NEAR processed the most transactions in 2025, led by Solana's 23.01 billion. BNB Chain handled 3.89 billion, Base 3.29 billion, Tron 3.22 billion and NEAR 1.89 billion, as activity concentrated on high‑throughput, low‑fee networks. Retail‑oriented use cases were the main drivers across these ecosystems.

Coinbase plans to emphasize stablecoins, Base and an 'everything exchange' through 2026, per CEO Brian Armstrong. In a New Year's post he reaffirmed the vision, and in December the firm launched stock trading and prediction markets while rebranding its wallet as an 'everything app'.