NFT

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.

The Flow Foundation published a technical post-mortem on Tuesday detailing a Dec. 27 protocol exploit that enabled counterfeit tokens, with confirmed losses of about $3.9 million. Validators halted the network within six hours and resumed operations two days later under a governance-approved recovery that preserved legitimate history and destroyed fake assets.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin changed his X profile picture to a Milady NFT, coinciding with the collection's floor price jumping almost 30% within a day. Milady Maker's minimum price climbed to about 1.07 ETH as trading volume and sales spiked, while Buterin also shared a New Year message outlining Ethereum's key technical progress in 2025 and longer-term mission.

South Korea’s Financial Intelligence Unit fined crypto exchange Korbit ₩2.73 billion (about $1.90 million) after an on-site AML/KYC inspection conducted October 16–29, 2024 identified nearly 22,000 rule breaches. The FIU also flagged 19 overseas transfers tied to three unregistered foreign VASPs and confirmed the sanction on December 31, 2025.

Layer 2 networks built on Ethereum allow users to process transactions faster and at significantly lower cost while still relying on the main chain for security. By bridging assets from Layer 1 to networks such as Arbitrum, Optimism, or zkSync, users can trade, stake, and handle NFTs with reduced congestion and fees. This approach helps make DeFi platforms and NFT marketplaces more scalable and accessible for everyday crypto activity.

Following a Dec. 27 exploit on the Flow blockchain, loan settlements on NFT lending platform Flowty were halted after the Cadence execution environment was paused until the morning of Dec. 29. Flowty reported 11 loans maturing during the outage, with multiple defaults and two unsettled positions, and has since stopped all settlements while keeping affected loans outstanding. The FLOW token price fell sharply after the incident and continued to decline to $0.086 as ecosystem functionality, including token swaps, remains impaired.

South Korea's Financial Intelligence Unit issued an institutional warning and fines totaling ₩27.3 billion ($1.89 million) to crypto exchange Korbit after an on-site inspection conducted October 16–29, 2024. According to the FIU, roughly 22,000 AML breaches were found, spanning customer identification failures, transaction-restriction gaps, transfers via unregistered overseas platforms, and deficient risk assessments for new products.

According to CryptoSlam, NFT supply grew to over 1.34 billion in 2025, up 25% from 1 billion in 2024, while sales value dropped 37% to about $5.63 billion and the average sale price declined to $96 from $124. CoinGecko data indicates market capitalization peaked near $17 billion in April 2022 and ended 2025 around $2.4 billion.

Rarible's RARI token surged 94.5% in the past 24 hours, with daily trading volume expanding 20-fold and market cap at $7.27 million. Despite the spike, RARI failed to overcome the $0.5 resistance and was trading around $0.35, while long-running downtrend signals and weak user metrics pointed to limited chances of a sustained reversal.

On Monday, Shiba Inu introduced "Shib Owes You", a restructuring plan that tokenizes exploit-related losses as transferable NFTs on Ethereum. The framework lets affected users hold, split, or sell claims while ecosystem revenues are redirected to a repayment pool. The infrastructure has been audited, and the interface is not yet live.