Monad’s MON token climbed more than 19% in the latest 24-hour period, with price action turning higher after a brief consolidation. On-chain data showed recovering network activity, rising user numbers and over 1.6 million daily transactions, while USD1 stablecoin integration and new staking options boosted liquidity and limited circulating supply. Technically, MON broke out of a wedge pattern and must hold above $0.02169 to target $0.02667, though a short-term pullback remains possible.

Silver climbed to a record $75 per ounce in early Friday trading, extending its 2025 gain to 158% amid heavy vault inflows and concerns over potential US trade curbs. Gold moved closer to its $4,525 per ounce peak as investors sought safety, while US pressure on Venezuela's oil sector and President Donald Trump's announced strike on a terrorist group in Nigeria rattled broader markets.

Tsinghua University in northwest Beijing has emerged as a core hub for China’s AI strategy, with government backing, homegrown chips, and startups like DeepSeek founded by its alumni. Between 2005 and the end of 2024, the university filed 4,986 AI and machine learning patents, while students developed models that reportedly rivaled larger systems from US labs. China has expanded AI education from elementary school onward and dramatically increased its share of the world’s top AI researchers, even as US institutions still lead in the most influential patents and top-performing models.

The Uniswap protocol's fee switch proposal, called UNIndication, received backing of nearly 125 million UNI tokens with only 742 against, leading to activation of the mechanism on Ethereum mainnet. Under the plan, Uniswap Labs will burn 100 million UNI after a two-day lock-up, while UNI traded around $5.79 with a market cap near $3.65 billion on December 26, 2025 and had risen 17.62% over seven days.

On Thursday, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said Grok, X's AI chatbot, makes the platform more truth-seeking by challenging users' assumptions. He argued it is a net improvement despite concerns about fine-tuning and recent hallucinations, while Elon Musk blamed adversarial prompting for errors.

Recent on-chain and derivatives metrics indicated that Bitcoin's sell pressure has reached a three-year high, while spot ETF flows have remained negative. Analysts highlighted liquidation clusters around $83.5k and between $90k and $94.7k, with expectations of a possible BTC move down toward $82k followed by a bounce toward $95k linked to a large options expiry.

On Tuesday, Strategy CEO Phong Le said Bitcoin's market setup "couldn't be better," urging less focus on short‑term swings. BTC set a $125,100 all‑time high on Oct. 5 before dropping nearly 30% to $87,687, and the Fear & Greed Index has shown "Extreme Fear" since Dec. 12 as Strategy's mNAV traded at 0.93.

The crypto market is moving quietly during the holiday period, with low volatility and calm trading activity as several major assets form different technical setups. Shiba Inu has been sliding for weeks into oversold territory, while XRP shows early structural signs of recovery and Bitcoin trades in a narrow range with falling volume. These diverging patterns could shape how traders position themselves going into the new year.