Brazil and China collectively bought 12 tonnes of gold in November 2025, worth about $1.88 billion, according to the World Gold Council. Reuters reports Morgan Stanley expects the metal to reach $4,800 per ounce by 2026, while spot gold was $4,442, nearly 3% below its December 2025 high near $4,560.

On January 8, 2026, Coincheck Group said it will acquire about 97% of Canadian manager 3iQ via a stock exchange valuing the firm at roughly $111.8 million. Monex Group will swap its stake for 27.1 million new Coincheck shares at $4 each, with 810,435 additional shares enabling full ownership, and closing is expected in the second quarter of 2026.

Temple Digital Group has introduced a private institutional trading platform on the Canton Network, offering round-the-clock access to cryptocurrencies and stablecoins through a non-custodial, central limit order book model. The live venue supports asset managers, market makers and financial institutions, with support for tokenized equities and commodities targeted for 2026. Recent activity on Canton also includes tokenized US Treasury financing trials and plans to bring JPM Coin and tokenized Treasurys onto the network.

On January 8, 2026, Morgan Stanley was reported to be preparing an expansion of its digital asset offerings, including spot BTC and Solana ETFs and a new proprietary wallet. The bank's wealth management head outlined plans to enable BTC, ETH, and SOL trading on its E*TRADE platform in the first half of 2026, alongside infrastructure for broader tokenized asset support.

In 2026, Morgan Stanley plans to introduce bitcoin, ether, and solana trading on its E-Trade platform and launch a proprietary digital wallet, according to its head of wealth management. The firm has also filed for BTC, ETH, and SOL-based ETFs and progressively opened spot bitcoin ETF access from select high-net-worth clients to all client accounts, including retirement plans. These moves build on prior infrastructure investments and reflect a broader shift among major Wall Street banks toward digital assets.

On Jan. 7, the full developer team at Electric Coin Company, which leads work on the Zcash protocol, resigned following a conflict with its parent nonprofit board and said it will launch a new firm and wallet. U.S. spot XRP ETFs recorded their first daily net outflows on Wednesday, with $47.3 million leaving 21Shares' TOXR and contributing to a 5% XRP price drop to about $2.13, while Bitcoin, Ethereum, prediction markets, stablecoins, and onchain crime trends also moved markets.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a survey conducted December 1–31, 2025 found one‑year inflation expectations rising to 3.4% from 3.2% in November, while job‑finding confidence fell to a record‑low 43.1%. Respondents also put debt‑delinquency risk at 15.3%. The BLS jobs report is due Friday, with CPI data on Jan. 13.

On January 8, 2026, Changpeng Zhao stated that his upcoming memoir's Chinese edition may be titled "币安人生" but stressed it has no link to the Binance Life meme coin. He added that he does not hold the Binance Life token and has no plans to buy it, and that the English version will use a different title. The Binance Life token, launched in October 2025 on BNB Smart Chain, briefly reached a market cap above $500 million before crashing after clarifications that his posts were not endorsements.