On-chain data shows A7A5, a ruble-pegged stablecoin, was the fastest-growing stablecoin over the past 12 months and added about $90 billion to circulating supply in 2025. Issued via a Kyrgyz entity on Tron and Ethereum, it surpassed USDT and USDC despite an EU ban on ruble-backed transactions.

On January 8, 2026, on-chain activity showed an anonymous wallet (0x6C8EC8f1) receive about 8,535 ETH, and Truebit Protocol's TRU plunged amid an alleged exploit worth roughly $26.44 million. According to Cyvers, real-time monitoring flagged the transfer as anomalous, with around half of the funds routed via Tornado Cash. Truebit said it is working with law enforcement, and TRU was near $0.072 at publication.

On January 8, 2026, India's stock market saw its steepest single-day decline in four months as benchmark indices fell sharply alongside heavyweight Reliance Industries. The Sensex dropped about 0.93% and the Nifty 50 lost around 1.04%, extending weekly losses while exporters and sector indices also recorded notable declines amid rising concerns over potential U.S. tariff hikes.

On January 8, 2026, Vitalik Buterin argued that prioritizing higher bandwidth is safer for Ethereum's scalability than pushing for lower latency. He highlighted PeerDAS and Zero-Knowledge Proofs as paths to potentially scale the network thousands of times, and outlined P2P improvements and smaller per-slot node counts (e.g., 512 vs 30,000) to cut propagation delays without sacrificing decentralization.

According to Santiment, XRP whale activity reached a three-month high on January 7, with nearly 2,802 transfers exceeding $100,000, pointing to rising volatility. On-chain data also showed Ripple moved 300 million XRP on January 6, while a CryptoQuant analyst flagged heavier exchange flows amid a near 25% slide to $2.11 over the past three months, per CoinGecko.

Stripe and Crypto.com announced a partnership on January 6, 2026 to design settlement and payment solutions for businesses. The collaboration will integrate Crypto.com Pay with Stripe, enable debit and credit card crypto purchases, and convert merchant payments to local currency, including support for stablecoin-based features.

As of January 7, 2026, Solana has become the largest blockchain by market capitalization for tokenized stocks, with tokenized equity volume on the network reaching $874.19 million. Across all chains, tokenized equity products now total $1.2 billion in market value, while Solana's broader RWA ecosystem includes $874.2 million in tokenized RWAs excluding stablecoins and a stablecoin market cap of $14.77 billion. Six SOL ETFs approved in October last year have attracted $801.3 million so far, and SOL was trading at $137.24 with a $77.4 billion market cap at the time of publication.

On January 6, GameStop's board agreed to grant Chairman and CEO Ryan Cohen a performance-based stock option package valued at about $3.54 billion, which still requires shareholder approval. Cohen will only benefit if GameStop's market capitalization reaches $100 billion and the company delivers $10 billion in cumulative performance EBITDA, while he forgoes guaranteed salary and cash bonuses.

According to Matthew Sigel of VanEck, Riot Platforms sold 383 BTC in November 2025 for about $37 million and 1,818 BTC in December for roughly $161.6 million, totaling approximately $198.6 million. Sigel said the proceeds could jump-start the firm's 2026–27 AI build-out, as Riot ended 2025 holding 18,005 BTC.