On January 5–6, 2026, the People's Bank of China set out a work plan to steadily advance the digital yuan and upgrade infrastructure for cross-border RMB use. The central bank aims to promote e-CNY in trade and investment, broaden international payment system links, and deepen QR code payment cooperation with other countries. It will also maintain a moderately loose monetary stance in 2026, refine Bond Connect and Swap Connect, and tighten oversight of virtual cryptocurrencies and related illicit activities.

On January 6, 2026, Tether announced Scudo, a unit of account for Tether Gold (XAUT) intended to streamline pricing, transfers, and everyday use. One Scudo equals one‑thousandth of a troy ounce to reduce awkward decimals and make gold‑denominated payments more intuitive. The company also introduced tooling for self‑custodial wallets supporting XAUT, other stablecoins, and Bitcoin.

On Jan. 5, Ledger informed customers that a breach at its third‑party payment processor Global‑e exposed names, contact details, and order information, while leaving hardware wallets, passwords, and 24‑word recovery phrases untouched. Although no crypto assets were directly compromised, past incidents show that such personal data dumps can fuel long‑running phishing, extortion, and even physical robbery attempts that target confirmed hardware wallet owners. The latest leak renews scrutiny of the broader commerce infrastructure around self‑custody and highlights the offline risks created when shipping and billing data is linked to crypto holdings.

China's major financial industry associations have jointly stated that real-world asset tokenization falls under illegal fundraising, securities, or futures activities and is treated as unlawful finance. The directive targets Hong Kong-linked and offshore structures with mainland staff and applies liability across the Web3 service chain, from token issuers to technology, marketing, and payment providers.

Seven leading Chinese financial industry associations have jointly classified real-world asset tokenization as an illegal financial activity under current securities and criminal laws. The notice defines RWA as token-based financing and trading, links it to risks such as fictitious assets and speculation, and places it alongside stablecoins and crypto mining as major forms of unlawful virtual currency activity. It further establishes joint liability across the Web3 service stack, warning that domestic staff, service providers, and promoters assisting RWA projects targeting Chinese users may face legal consequences.

On 6 January 2026, leading Chinese financial industry associations issued a joint notice classifying real-world asset tokenization as illegal financial activity rather than a regulated innovation. The document states that no RWA projects, platforms, or services have regulatory approval in mainland China, and that token-based fundraising, trading, and yield distribution fall under existing bans on unauthorized securities and financing.

Fred Wilson expects crypto to become more accessible in 2026, with blockchains effectively hidden behind improved consumer interfaces that simplify spending, trading, and transfers. On January 3, 2026, Vitalik Buterin said recent upgrades combining PeerDAS and ZK‑EVMs move Ethereum toward resolving its security, decentralization, and scalability trilemma.

Neo SPCC has released NeoGo v0.115.0 as a backwards-compatible update that improves Notary service concurrency, refines NeoFS state synchronization, and adds operational enhancements. The new version also adjusts the default MainNet MaxBlockSystemFee to 150,000,000,000 datoshi and introduces several features gated behind the future Faun hard fork, including a native Treasury contract and fee whitelists. The release remains compatible with NeoGo v0.114.0 and does not require a full resync unless nodes are upgraded mid-sync with the NeoFS state sync extension active.