Barclays announced an investment in U.S.-based stablecoin platform Ubyx, aiming to strengthen regulated digital money connectivity. The move was reported on January 7 and, according to the report, follows Ubyx's $10 million seed funding in June, with executives emphasizing interoperability and the role of digital wallets.

Investment bank B. Riley forecasts a move by 2026 in which digital assets shift from speculation to utility within financial infrastructure. Key drivers include stablecoin regulation and tokenization of real-world assets. Per CoinMarketCap, BTC stood at $91,132.33 with $1.82 trillion market cap as of January 8, 2026.

On January 8, the Financial Action Task Force recognized the T3 Financial Crime Unit as a model of public-private collaboration for policing illicit blockchain activity. Launched in September by TRON DAO, Tether and TRM Labs, the unit has supported freezes over $250 million, and the partners report more than $300 million across five continents.

On January 8, 2026, Polygon Labs introduced the Open Money Stack to support regulated stablecoin payments and connect wallets, fiat access, compliance and onchain settlement. The stack targets fragmentation with a single integration for cross-chain transfers and on/off-ramps. Polygon cited a three-year high $3.3 billion stablecoin supply and more than $2 trillion in transfers over six years.

Zscaler ThreatLabz reported three malicious Bitcoin-themed npm packages that installed a remote access trojan dubbed NodeCordRAT. The packages bitcoin-main-lib, bitcoin-lib-js, and bip40 were removed from the npm registry in November 2025 after accumulating over 3,400 downloads, and the malware targets Chrome credentials, .env tokens, and MetaMask wallet secrets.

World Liberty Financial is seeking a U.S. national trust bank charter through WLTC Holdings LLC, with its filing to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency aimed at placing stablecoin operations under federal oversight. The plan would transform WLFI into a regulated trust institution focused on USD1 issuance, reserves, and custody rather than consumer banking. Since 2024, the project has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and its bid has triggered intense political debate.

On January 8, 2026, Amazon Web Services and Ripple were reported to be testing Amazon Bedrock's generative AI to improve monitoring and analysis of the XRP Ledger's system logs. The effort targets XRPL's globally distributed C++ infrastructure, where more than 900 nodes each generate tens of gigabytes of logs, and aims to cut incident investigations from multi-day efforts to just a few minutes. AWS engineers outlined a pipeline that ingests logs and code into services such as Amazon S3, Lambda, SQS, CloudWatch, and EventBridge so AI agents can better detect anomalies and explain network behavior.

Kinexys, J.P. Morgan's blockchain unit, and Digital Asset said on Wednesday they will issue JPM Coin (JPMD) natively on the privacy-enabled Canton Network to support near‑real‑time settlement. A phased rollout through 2026 will set up issuance, transfer, and redemption on-chain, while exploring links to J.P. Morgan's Blockchain Deposit Accounts for institutional workflows.