The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission issued guidance on Wednesday classifying tokenized securities into issuer-supported and third-party models. It clarified that federal securities laws apply regardless of onchain or offchain recordkeeping and noted that third-party structures can take custodial entitlement or synthetic exposure forms.

Deribit reports that heavy Bitcoin options activity and concentrated open interest around key strikes are helping to confine BTC's price near $90,000. The exchange notes that traders are favoring hedged and structured positions over outright leveraged futures as a major Jan. 30 options expiry approaches.

BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes argues that simultaneous yen weakness and rising Japanese government bond yields could push Japanese investors to offload US Treasuries. He suggests the Federal Reserve may eventually create dollar reserves to support the yen and JGB market, which would expand its balance sheet and, in his view, supply the liquidity needed for Bitcoin to break out of its current range.

Cybersecurity researchers have warned that a misconfiguration flaw in the Clawdbot AI assistant is exposing control servers, API keys and private chat logs. The open-source tool, created by Peter Steinberger and run locally on user devices, can be discovered via internet scans when its gateway sits behind an unconfigured reverse proxy. Investigators say the issue could allow unauthorized access to credentials, message histories and remote command execution across hundreds of installations.

Fundstrat managing partner Tom Lee told CNBC on Monday that Bitcoin and Ethereum could see a strong move higher once record-breaking rallies in gold and silver cool down. He argued that a weaker dollar and an easier Federal Reserve should already be supporting crypto, but recent deleveraging and fear-driven flows into precious metals are delaying the upside. On-chain and market analysts added that for Bitcoin to benefit from dollar weakness, it needs risk-on sentiment rather than panic-driven demand for traditional safe-haven assets.

Gold climbed above $5,080 after a 17% year-to-date jump, according to Gold Price, while Bitcoin retreated toward $86,000 at a five-week low. The performance gap widened amid trade tensions and government shutdown risks, with silver crossing $107 per ounce and Ether staying below $2,800.

In January, Ethereum’s mainnet recorded more daily active addresses than leading layer-2 networks, with activity peaking at around 1.3 million on Jan. 16 before easing to about 945,000. Security researchers said a notable share of this rise was linked to address poisoning campaigns enabled by lower gas fees, while Ethereum still hosts over $400 billion in on-chain assets and leads in stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets.

Thailand’s securities regulator is preparing rules for crypto ETFs and for trading crypto futures on TFEX, with formal ETF guidelines targeted early this year. The plan classifies digital assets as another asset class with a suggested allocation of up to 5% in diversified portfolios, and also advances market-making and a tokenization sandbox.

U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee chair John Boozman said Republicans on the panel have not reached agreement with Democrats on key elements of a new crypto market structure bill, even as a Republican draft was released for a Jan. 27 markup. The proposal outlines how the SEC and CFTC would oversee digital asset markets and adds protections for DeFi developers and certain intermediaries while excluding stablecoin yield rules, which fall under the Banking Committee.