Rain, a U.S.-based stablecoin infrastructure provider and principal member of the Visa network, has closed a $250 million Series C round at a $1.95 billion valuation to accelerate its international expansion. The company, which saw its active card base grow 30-fold in 2025 and annualized payment volume jump 38 times, plans to use the capital to scale its platform and enter markets across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa. Existing and new investors, including Iconiq and several major venture firms, joined the round, bringing Rain's total funding to $338 million.

A Polymarket account identified as "0x31a56e" that made roughly $400,000 from a wager on former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro's capture and removal is now inaccessible on the platform. The account had placed about $32,000 on Maduro's ouster and related U.S.-Venezuela conflict markets, and later moved more than $436,000 in USDC from its Polygon address on Jan. 3. Its disappearance, while other user pages remain visible, is intensifying scrutiny over potential insider trading and transparency issues on prediction markets.

Dfns has incorporated Concordium's layer-1 identity features into its wallet-as-a-service platform to offer verified Web3 wallets for institutional compliance. The move builds on Dfns' collaboration with IBM and targets banks and enterprises needing privacy-preserving identity controls. The integration aims to streamline onboarding to tokenized assets, stablecoins and on-chain financial services.

Analysts are examining claims that Venezuela may control a hidden Bitcoin reserve worth up to $60 billion, based on estimates from its gold sales since 2018. Blockchain intelligence firms say they have found no onchain evidence supporting a 600,000 BTC stash, even as Venezuela's long-running crypto experiments and use of digital wallets for oil trade keep its actual holdings opaque.

Ledger said a data incident at its e-commerce partner Global-e was limited to the partner's systems and did not compromise Ledger's hardware or software. Global-e, which Ledger integrated in October 2023, saw unauthorized access to order data that exposed some customers' names and contact details, while payment information and account credentials were not affected.

Crypto exchange-traded products attracted about $47.2 billion of inflows in 2025, slightly below the $48.7 billion peak in 2024, with Bitcoin products seeing a 35% decline to roughly $27 billion. Ether, XRP and Solana funds recorded strong gains, helping push global crypto ETP assets under management to about $180 billion by the end of 2025, while US products accounted for $152.6 billion.

Ghana's parliament has approved the Virtual Asset Service Providers Bill, making cryptocurrency trading legal and placing the sector under the supervision of the Bank of Ghana. Governor Johnson Asiama said the new law gives the central bank authority to license and oversee crypto asset service providers to address fraud, money laundering and systemic risks. The move follows earlier plans to introduce crypto regulation by the end of 2025 and comes as Ghana ranks among the top Sub-Saharan African crypto markets by value received.

Hyperliquid said that a wallet its community identified for allegedly shorting HYPE belongs to a former staff member who left in the first quarter of 2024. The co-founder stressed that the person's trades do not represent the firm's ethics and reiterated that employees face strict bans on HYPE derivatives trading and use of material non-public information. HYPE, which launched near a few dollars in November 2024 and later touched about $60, was trading around $25.40, roughly 24% lower over the past year but still up about 290% since inception.

Metaplanet, a Japan-based Bitcoin treasury firm, will begin U.S. trading via American Depositary Receipts under the OTC ticker MPJPY. The sponsored ADR program uses Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas as depositary and MUFG Bank as custodian, and is designed to improve investor access without raising new capital.