On Dec. 18, the Bank of Japan raised its benchmark interest rate to 0.75%, the highest level since 1995, marking a clear departure from its long-running ultra-loose policy. Bitcoin traded near $87,800 after the move, but analysts warned that a sustained tightening path in Japan, combined with possible U.S. rate cuts, could squeeze yen-funded leverage and dampen demand for risk assets, including crypto. Market data also indicated U.S. investors sold into the news, while some observers argued that Japan’s negative real rates and potential balance-sheet dynamics could still support Bitcoin over the longer term.

Alphabet’s Google is providing at least $5 billion in credit support to help several Bitcoin miners repurpose sites for AI hosting through long-term leases. On Dec. 17, Hut 8 disclosed a 15-year, 245‑megawatt deal in Louisiana; earlier deals at TeraWulf and Cipher included multibillion‑dollar revenue commitments underpinned by Google. The structure allows banks to treat these projects as infrastructure debt rather than speculative crypto financing.

On Dec. 17, Intersect's Product Committee published the "Vision 2030" roadmap, setting strict Key Performance Indicators for Cardano, including 324 million annual transactions, 1 million monthly active wallets, and around $3 billion in TVL. The plan aims for at least 16 million ADA in yearly protocol revenue by 2030 and uses an illustrative $5 ADA price — about 500% above current levels — to show potential earnings, while shifting the network toward an enterprise-focused "operating system" model that relies heavily on Layer 2 infrastructure.

According to data from Pipe, Solana's network absorbed a distributed denial-of-service attack peaking around 6 terabits per second this week without downtime or notable fee spikes, a performance later confirmed by co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal. The event coincides with a more than 35% drop in active validators in 2025 and growing concentration of stake among large infrastructure providers, even as Solana processes roughly $1.6 trillion in annual trading volume and supports about $15 billion in stablecoins.

XRP has dropped under $2 to around $1.87, with its price down roughly 6% in a day and about 17% over a recent institutional inflow streak. A nearly seven-year-old wallet that accumulated XRP near $0.40 realized more than $721.5 million in profit around the $2 level on Dec. 11, amid falling leverage on Binance and a sharp decline in XRP futures buying volume.

Industry insiders caution that Ethereum could fade by 2030 unless urgency returns, prompting the Ethereum Foundation to pivot toward faster iteration from early 2025. Leadership changes, including Tomasz Stańczak and Hsiao-Wei Wang as Executive Directors, accompany performance-focused upgrades and a proposed "Beam Chain" to address scaling and fragmentation.

US lawmakers are pushing toward federal crypto rules, but negotiators say the treatment of stablecoin yield is the main sticking point. The debate escalated in mid-August after the Bank Policy Institute warned that permissive designs could shift up to $6.6 trillion of deposits into stablecoins. The House has advanced the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act as the Senate crafts a parallel package.

After the Federal Reserve delivered a quarter-point rate cut, Ethereum extended its advance above $3,300 and began outperforming Bitcoin near $92,000 as traders rotated into higher-duration assets. On-chain and derivatives data indicate the move has been driven by spot buying, with large holders accumulating nearly 1 million ETH and mainnet fees dropping below 300 ETH per day, the weakest revenue level since 2017, according to market data providers.

Security researchers captured North Korean operatives in real time after deploying a honeypot workstation that mimicked a developer environment. The operatives, linked to the Lazarus Group's Famous Chollima division, used legitimate AI hiring tools and cloud services to establish trusted insider access rather than exploit code vulnerabilities. The operation revealed systematic use of job-automation software, VPN masking, and persistent remote-access protocols to bypass corporate security measures.