On February 16, 2026, XRP Ledger introduced an official digital hub inside the xSPECTAR metaverse to support learning, interaction, and community building for the XRPL ecosystem. The initiative offers a structured virtual venue for developers, users, and partners without adding new protocols or financial products, while broader metaverse usage data shows strong NFT adoption and identity tooling. On-chain metrics for late 2025 further indicate rising XRPL transaction volumes, significant stablecoin circulation, and real‑world asset value that recently edged past Solana on a key tokenization measure.

On February 16, 2026, OpenEden said attackers compromised the DNS for openeden.com and portal.openeden.com, creating a phishing risk for anyone accessing those domains. The team sclaimed reserves remain verifiable via Chainlink Proof of Reserve, but users could lose assets if they connect wallets to spoofed pages. The team is investigating and advised against interacting with the sites.

According to the report, scammers are mailing hardware wallet users letters that mimic Trezor and Ledger notices, pushing recipients to scan QR codes and enter recovery phrases. The messages cite urgent security checks and route to clone setup pages that accept 12-, 20-, and 24-word seeds. Hardware wallets are not compromised, but revealing a seed enables immediate wallet takeover.

On 16 February 2026, a federal judge in Florida entered a default judgment awarding Kevin O’Leary $2,828,000 in a defamation case against crypto influencer Ben Armstrong. The award comprises $2,000,000 in punitive damages, $750,000 for emotional distress, and $78,000 for reputational harm. Armstrong’s effort to vacate the judgment was later denied.

On February 16 2026, an analysis examined whether current crypto infrastructure can adequately support neobanks and bank-like services. The discussion highlighted unresolved conflicts around stablecoin issuers paying interest, the dominance of card-based products, and the risks of DeFi lending and fake platforms. It also noted that despite user-friendly crypto cards and wallets, complexity, regulation, privacy exposure on public chains, and intense competition still hinder fully fledged crypto neobanks.

On 16 February 2026, Animoca Brands received a virtual asset service provider license from Dubai's VARA, allowing it to operate crypto broker-dealer and investment services in the emirate. Around the same time, Arkham Intelligence tracked a newly created wallet allocating about $2.75 million in USDC into WLFI, highlighting renewed speculative flows into emerging tokens.

Cryptocurrency exchange OKX has obtained a Payment Institution license in Malta under the European Union payments framework to support its stablecoin-based services. The authorization aligns products such as OKX Pay and the OKX Card with MiCA and PSD2 requirements and follows the firm's earlier MiCA license from the Malta Financial Services Authority in January 2025. The OKX Card, launched in late January, enables users to spend stablecoins including USDC and USDG.

R3E Network has released neo-rs v0.7.2, a Rust-based implementation of the Neo N3 blockchain node and CLI tools, on Feb. 12 with targeted fixes for RPC issues during initial node synchronization. The update resolves a cold-start problem affecting the getnativecontracts method and significantly improves execution-spec validation on local neo-rs instances. Neo-rs and the associated NeoRust SDK now offer a comprehensive Rust toolchain for running Neo infrastructure and building applications across Neo N3 and Neo X.