Changpeng Zhao has called for coordinated industry measures to combat address poisoning scams after a trader lost about $50 million in USDT in a single phishing incident. He is pushing for wallet-level spam filters, blacklists, and warnings, as security firms highlight rising dusting attacks and broader crypto fraud losses running into tens of billions of dollars.

Rippled version 3.0.0 for the XRP Ledger, released earlier in December, introduces five new amendments that are now in the validator voting phase. These changes refine price oracles, MPT escrows, AMM clawbacks, ledger entry fields and MPT payment metadata. Additional amendments for a protocol-native lending system, Dynamic MPT and fixDelegateV1_1 remain disabled but are expected to reach validator voting in late January 2026.

Russian banking group Sberbank is examining the launch of ruble loans secured by cryptocurrency, according to Deputy Chairman Anatoly Popov. The move follows a new regulatory concept from the Central Bank of Russia, which plans to recognize cryptocurrencies and stablecoins as currency assets and broaden access for retail investors by July 1, 2026. Sberbank is also expanding activity on its digital asset platform, where it has supported over 160 issues of digital financial assets, including the country's first real estate and oil tokens.

The Asia Web3 Alliance Japan and Web3 Salon have launched the JFIIP accelerator with Ripple Labs and several major Japanese financial institutions to support compliant finance projects on the XRP Ledger. The program offers Japanese startups a grant of about $10,000 and prioritized access to Ripple's broader grant pool, with a strong focus on real-world banking and tokenization use cases.

Sentiment gauges show extreme fear, with the Crypto Fear & Greed Index recording fear or extreme fear for more than 30% of 2025. Since mid-November, other trackers have read 10–25 out of 100, while Bitcoin fell about 30% after an October all-time high near $126,000 and many large altcoins slid up to 90% from their highs.

On Christmas, Shiba Inu's burn rate reportedly surged 505.74%, with 5,984,918 SHIB destroyed over a 24-hour period while the token traded around $0.00000719. Despite the headline jump in burns against a backdrop of over 410.75 trillion SHIB already removed from the initial supply, the price action stayed slightly negative and continued to reflect a pattern of lower highs into late December.

BlackRock expects only measured Federal Reserve rate reductions in 2026 as policy moves toward neutral. The December 2025 dot plot shows a median path from about 3.6 percent in 2025 to roughly 3.4 percent in 2026, implying one to two 25 bp cuts. The firm's baseline centers on 25–50 bp of easing, conditional on incoming data.

This week, regional Bitcoin flows split as US trading hours showed persistent net selling while Asian sessions captured most of the buying. At the same time, cycle charts indicated the current market phase still mirrors prior bull and consolidation patterns, and a Glassnode capitulation gauge shared by Gordon Gekko jumped to its highest level on record as price slid from above $110,000 toward $100,000 in late 2025.