Global Settlement Network announced a pilot to tokenize eight government-contracted water treatment sites in Jakarta, according to a Wednesday statement. The plan aims to raise up to $35 million for upgrades and to test rupiah‑stablecoin settlement rails, with a target to scale to $200 million in tokenized assets across Southeast Asia over the next 12 months.

On Thursday, the Crypto Fear & Greed Index registered a 61 "greed" reading, one day after moving to 48 neutral and the first such signal since October. Bitcoin's seven‑day rally took it from $89,799 to a two‑month high of $97,704 on Wednesday. The index had sunk to low double digits in November and December after Oct. 11's $19 billion liquidation.

Paradigm vice president Justin Slaughter warned in an X post that implementing the crypto market structure bill could span nearly two presidential terms due to 45 required rulemakings. The measure heads to a Senate Banking Committee markup on Thursday, while the Senate Agriculture Committee postponed its hearing to Jan.27.

On Monday, Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan called efforts to keep Bitcoin out of 401(k) menus "ridiculous," arguing BTC was less volatile than Nvidia over the past year. Senator Elizabeth Warren published an open letter pressing the SEC for safeguards and set a Jan. 27 deadline. In August last year, President Donald Trump signed an executive order opening the door to crypto in 401(k)s.

U.S. Senators Cynthia Lummis and Ron Wyden introduced the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act on Monday, seeking to confirm that software authors and network maintainers who do not handle user funds are not money transmitters. Similar protections appear in the market-structure bill set for a Senate Banking Committee markup on Thursday.

Iran's government cut internet access as protests over economic conditions spread, constraining routine on‑chain activity. Statista estimates about 7 million of 92 million residents use crypto, and TRM Labs tracked roughly $3.7 billion in flows between January and July 2025; satellite and mesh tools could offer temporary workarounds until connectivity returns.

As of May 2025, the Global Sanctions Inflation Index estimated that just under 80,000 entities and individuals worldwide were subject to sanctions, while Chainalysis reported that illicit cryptocurrency addresses received at least $154 billion that year. The firm said volumes linked to nation-states on-chain activity reached unprecedented levels in 2025, driven in part by sanctioned actors and Russia's ruble-backed A7A5 token, even though illicit activity still accounts for less than 1% of total crypto transaction volume.

Wyoming has released public access to its Frontier Stable Token (FRNT), a state-backed stablecoin that can be purchased on Kraken and runs on Solana. Governor Mark Gordon said it is "the first fiat-backed, fully-reserved stable token" from a U.S. public entity, with peer-to-peer fees near $0.01 and reserve interest flowing back to the state.

Coinbase head of investment research David Duong stated on Monday that quantum computing threatens not only Bitcoin's wallet-level cryptography but also its wider economic and security model. He argued that quantum machines capable of running Shor's and Grover's algorithms could undermine ECDSA-based signatures and SHA-256 mining, even as sceptics such as Adam Back maintain that such risks remain decades away.