Former SafeMoon CEO Braden Karony has been sentenced in February 2026 to 100 months in prison for diverting $9 million from the platform's liquidity pool in 2021 to fund personal luxury purchases. He was also ordered to forfeit about $7.5 million, while ex-CTO Thomas Smith has pleaded guilty and awaits sentencing, and platform creator Kyle Nagy remains at large. The case adds to a growing list of high-profile crypto executives convicted over misconduct during the 2021‑2022 market cycle.

On Tuesday, Bitcoin mining rig maker Canaan saw its Nasdaq-listed shares slide 6.87% to $0.56, extending its decline away from the $1 level it must regain by July to avoid a potential delisting. This came even as the firm reported fourth-quarter revenue of $196.3 million, up 121.1% year-on-year, record computing power shipments and a Bitcoin treasury that reached 1,750 BTC alongside 3,950 ETH.

The Ethereum Foundation is sponsoring Security Alliance (SEAL) to strengthen defenses against wallet drainers and social engineering attacks on Ethereum users. As part of the effort, SEAL and the foundation have launched a Trillion Dollar Security dashboard to monitor risks across six key areas of the Ethereum ecosystem. SEAL reports that coordinated security work has coincided with phishing and drainer losses falling to $84 million in 2025 from nearly $1 billion over several years.

Base App will discontinue its Creator Rewards program and remove its Farcaster-powered social feed to concentrate on tradable assets. According to the app's X account, roughly $450,000 was distributed to 17,000 creators over seven months, with final payouts set for Feb. 18. The app opened to the public in December.

On a Friday post, CoinShares researcher Christopher Bendiksen argued that just 10,230 of 1.63 million quantum-exposed Bitcoin sit in addresses large enough to be attractive for an attack. He claimed most at-risk coins are in smaller wallets that would each take around a thousand years to crack, even under highly optimistic assumptions about quantum computing progress.

On Thursday, Tether said it invested $150 million for about a 12% stake in Gold.com and plans to integrate Tether Gold (XAUt) into the platform. The companies are also studying ways for customers to buy physical gold using USDt (USDT) and USAt (USAT), which Tether launched with Anchorage Digital on Jan. 27.

On Feb. 5, 2026, Bitcoin-buying firm Strategy reported a net loss of $12.4 billion for the fourth quarter of 2025 after Bitcoin fell 22% over the period to below $88,500. The company's revenue for the quarter rose 1.9% year-on-year to $123 million, but its share price dropped 17% to $107 as Bitcoin extended its decline and pushed Strategy's 713,502 BTC holdings 17.5% underwater. Executives Phong Le and Andrew Kang said Strategy still has a strong balance sheet, supported by $2.25 billion in cash and no major debt maturities until 2027.

Bhutan transferred 184 BTC worth $14 million on Wednesday and another 100.8 BTC worth $8.3 million last Friday, routing the $22.3 million to QCP Capital, according to Arkham. The firm added that the country has mined about $765 million in Bitcoin since 2019, but its holdings have declined from 13,295 BTC in October 2024 to 5,700 BTC as post-2024 halving costs rose.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has shifted away from his earlier view that layer-2 networks should be the main path to scaling Ethereum, arguing many are still controlled by multisig bridges rather than fully inheriting mainnet security. He now favors scaling the Ethereum base layer via higher gas limits and precompiled native rollups, while encouraging L2s such as Arbitrum, Optimism, Base and Starknet to focus on specialized use cases. The comments follow internal discussions among Ethereum developers about mainnet scaling and past proposals targeting up to 10,000 transactions per second.