Ethereum

SG-Forge said on Thursday it completed exchange and settlement of tokenized bonds using its euro-pegged EUR CoinVertible as part of SWIFT interoperability testing. The firm called EURCV the first MiCA-compliant on-chain settlement asset natively compatible with SWIFT. SWIFT announced in September 2025 a blockchain-based shared ledger and named at least 30 partner banks.

On Jan. 15, 2026, Shiba Inu marketing lead Lucie outlined how the "SHIB Owes You" (SOU) recovery plan will function following the Shibarium bridge exploit. According to Shibburn, the SHIB burn rate climbed 910.98% in the last day, with 4,369,584 SHIB destroyed across four transactions, including burns of 2,717,708 and 1,000,000 SHIB.

Mantra confirmed January 15, 2026 as the final day to migrate OM from Ethereum to its mainnet, with about 7% of supply still unmigrated as ERC-20 tokens. On January 14, 2026, CEO JP Mullin said the company will restructure and reduce roles after OM's April 2025 crash and weaker market conditions.

Developers shipped the Fusaka upgrade in December, cutting Ethereum transaction fees by over 80%. According to the article, wallet creation averaged 327,000 per day and peaked near 394,000 in early January, with a January 11 record, while the network settled 8 trillion dollars in stablecoin transfers late last year and ETH traded between 3,000 and 3,300 dollars.

Institutional inflows into crypto exchange-traded products rebounded on January 14, 2026, led by spot Bitcoin ETFs with $840.6 million in net additions. Ethereum funds drew $175.1 million, Solana $23.6 million, and XRP $4.91 million, with allocations spread across several issuers. BlackRock IBIT captured more than $648 million, while outflows from higher-fee legacy products stayed limited.

Ethereum is up 14% in 2026, with a major leg on 13 January after a softer U.S. inflation print and President Donald Trump's push for rate cuts. According to Garret Bullish, a self-described White House whale, ETH could target $5,413 in a base case or $7,155 in an aggressive scenario under an Elliott Wave framework. Standard Chartered and other analysts also outline a path for ETH to outperform BTC.

Bitcoin traded close to $96,000 on Thursday, while major Asian equity benchmarks moved in different directions following another tech-led decline on Wall Street. BTC open interest has dropped more than 31% from its 2025 high to around $10B, pointing to a broad deleveraging even as spot volumes approach $60B and total crypto market capitalization sits near $3.34 trillion.

OP led Layer 2 tokens with a gain of more than 13% as trading volume jumped over 140% to above $200 million. It ranked fifth among the top 100 coins by performance, while Optimism's network activity strengthened since 2025, with daily transactions surpassing 2.5 million and the cumulative count at 921.9 million.

Ethereum has moved out of a multi-week range, breaking above $3,330 and confirming a bullish breakout pattern on the daily chart. With price gains backed by higher volume and Binance futures open interest at a three-month peak of $8.6 billion, analysts are now watching resistance zones between $3,350 and $3,800 as potential waypoints toward the $4,000 level.

Arbitrum-based leverage trading protocol Futureswap has suffered another exploit within four days, with attackers draining about $74,000 through a newly exposed reentrancy vulnerability in an existing contract. The latest breach follows a separate $395,000 attack on the same contract and a December 2025 governance exploit of at least $830,000, bringing total losses on the platform to over $1 million across three incidents.