On December 18, 2025, the U.S. SEC filed proposed final judgments against former FTX and Alameda executives Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang, and Nishad Singh. The settlements include permanent anti-fraud injunctions, a 10-year officer/director ban for Ellison, 8-year bans for Wang and Singh, and a further five-year conduct injunction.

On 18 December 2025, Fasttoken (FTN) surged nearly 200% within 24 hours, climbing from about $0.37 to above $1.30 amid broad altcoin weakness. The rebound followed a year in which FTN fell over 90% from early-2025 highs, while analysts cited oversold conditions, fading MEXC delisting fears, and thin liquidity as possible catalysts.

A renewed clampdown on domestic Bitcoin mining in China drove a sharp hashrate decline and a price slide to $86,000. The restrictions focused on Xinjiang forced large operations offline, removing about 100 EH/s of computing power within 24 hours and intensifying selling as miners sought liquidity for costs and relocation.

On Wednesday, Bitcoin miner Hut 8 revealed a $7 billion AI data centre lease with Fluidstack at its River Bend campus in Louisiana, supplying 245 megawatts of capacity over a 15-year base term. The deal, which could reach about $17.7 billion with extensions and includes Google as financial guarantor, sent Hut 8 shares up roughly 20 per cent in pre-market trading.

In December 2025, the Solana network reportedly handled a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack peaking at about 6 terabits per second without downtime or a meaningful rise in fees. Co-founders and infrastructure operators attributed this resilience to upgraded defences, validator clustering, the QUIC protocol, and local fee markets, as the validator set shifts toward larger professional operators.

On 12 December 2025, Tether proposed an all-cash deal to purchase Exor's entire 65.4% shareholding in Juventus Football Club, alongside a pledge to invest up to €1 billion in the club. The offer, which would have led to a subsequent public tender for remaining shares at the same price, has been unanimously rejected by Exor, cancelling the transaction. Tether had framed the move as a strategic expansion beyond stablecoins into elite sport, media and global fan markets.

YouTube has added PayPal's PYUSD as an opt in payout rail for eligible US creators, according to Fortune. The workflow issues earnings, makes them available via PayPal Hyperwallet, and lets creators cash out to PYUSD, with the stablecoin's market cap around $3.91 billion and YouTube's creator payments exceeding $100 billion in four years.

Bitcoin is on track for its first full‑year break from stock market performance in more than a decade, as equities rally while BTC posts a yearly loss. Data show the S&P 500 has gained over 16% this year while Bitcoin has fallen 3%, forcing investors to reassess whether the asset is in a normal correction or facing a deeper structural shift.

Russian cryptocurrency exchange Garantex is reportedly operating again under Western sanctions, with Global Ledger tracing over $34 million in related wallets and at least $25 million already paid out to former users. Investigators describe a structure that routes funds through mixers, cross-chain bridges and aggregation wallets, while Russia's A7A5 rouble-pegged stablecoin has processed more than $87 billion in trade as companies convert roubles into USDT for cross-border payments.