TRM Labs said in a January 9 report that UK‑registered exchanges Zedcex and Zedxion enabled about $1 billion in flows linked to Iran's IRGC. Illicit share peaked at 87% in 2024, with transfers largely in USDT on TRON, and corporate records tied Zedcex to sanctioned financier Babak Morteza Zanjani.

According to local media, a tax employee in Bobigny misused internal government software to compile files on crypto specialists, billionaire Vincent Bolloré, and public officials, then sold one dossier for €800 that led to a violent home attack on a prison officer in Montreuil. Her appeal was rejected on Jan. 6, highlighting how insider abuse of French state databases and new crypto wealth registries is turning self-custody into a physical coercion and identity-security problem.

In 2025, Russia's Social Fund handled about 37 million inquiries, with many asking about pension payments in crypto and whether mining income affects benefits. Officials said all state payments are in rubles and crypto taxation is under the Federal Tax Service. Senior official Maxim Oreshkin urged treating mining as export activity, while exchanges prepared for rules taking effect by July 1, 2026.

Elon Musk stated on the X platform that the service will release as open source the code used to recommend both organic and advertising posts, with the first release set for seven days after his announcement and subsequent updates every four weeks. The move follows a sharp rise in bot-driven crypto posts, including a reported 7.75 million bot messages in one day and a 1,224% jump in such activity, and could alter how sensitive the algorithm is to crypto-related content.

On January 10, 2026, BlockSec's Phalcon flagged suspicious transactions against Arbitrum's Futureswap and estimated losses of around $395,000 after a suspected exploit that drained USDC via repeated changePosition calls. BlockSec said it tried to contact the team without success and noted the closed-source contract leaves the root cause under investigation.

On January 10, 2026, Vitalik Buterin warned about what he calls "corposlop", urging crypto builders to prioritize sovereignty, privacy and user agency. Responding to a tweet forecasting 2026–2030, he said he agreed with 60% of the predictions and outlined tools to resist anti-user designs, including local-first apps, user-controlled social platforms, open and private AI, and mission-driven DAOs.

On Monday, the Starknet team published a post‑mortem on a temporary mainnet outage, attributing it to a state mismatch between its execution blockifier and proving layer. The incident triggered a block reorganization that reverted 18 minutes of activity. In September 2025, a sequencer bug caused a separate five‑hour halt, two reorganizations, and about 1 hour rolled back.

The Federal Communications Commission cleared SpaceX to add 7,500 second‑generation Starlink satellites, taking its authorized constellation to 15,000. The order requires 50% of the approved Gen2 units to be launched, placed in assigned orbits, and operating by December 1, 2028, with full deployment due by December 2031. The agency approved half of SpaceX’s nearly 30,000‑satellite request.