On December 18, Intuit said it partnered with Circle to enable USDC payments across TurboTax and QuickBooks. The collaboration aims to deliver faster, lower‑cost settlement for users, but a launch timeline and user‑flow specifics were not disclosed. The news was met with a positive market reaction.

On December 18, 2025, DPRK-linked hackers were reported to have taken more than $2.02 billion in crypto since January, lifting their lifetime haul above $6 billion. Total crypto theft in 2025 exceeded $3.4 billion across 158,000 incidents, with at least 80,000 unique victims. A March $1.4 billion Bybit breach underscored the shift to fewer, larger attacks.

According to Delovoy Peterburg this week, St. Petersburg‑based Rozetki SPb filed a patent for an EV charging station with a built‑in crypto mining module. The company estimates mining could cover 7,200 rubles while 300 kWh of monthly charging costs about 2,600 rubles at 6.2 rubles per kWh, though experts cited by RBC note public network tariffs can reach 18–19 rubles per kWh.

On December 17, E‑Estate said it integrated AI to guide property selection and risk checks, and on December 18 it released a Tokenized Property Disclosure & Asset Report. The firm cites $18.4 million invested and 11 properties tokenized, and plans a January 31, 2026 Miami summit to outline its Vision 2034 roadmap and tokenization plans.

On 18 December 2025, after the ECB's latest rate decision, Christine Lagarde outlined the bank's focus on stability, digital payments and stablecoins. She said a digital euro remains under review and must be simple, affordable, privacy‑respecting and usable offline, while noting MiCA enables oversight but reserve exposure in stablecoins could pose risks requiring vigilance by regulators.

Researchers from the Ethereum Foundation's Stateless Consensus team have warned that the protocol's ever-growing state is making it harder and more costly for nodes to store, serve, and sync data. They outlined three paths — State Expiry, State Archive, and Partial Statelessness — aimed at containing state growth, reducing node bottlenecks, and preserving decentralization while longer-term stateless validation is developed.

Kraken said Thursday that xStocks, a tokenized securities platform it backs, is now live on TON Wallet, the self-custodial wallet integrated with Telegram. At launch, the service will be accessible in nearly all markets where TON Wallet operates, but not in the U.S., the European Union, or Australia, according to Egor Danilov.

EDENA Capital Partners has secured a $100 million structured investment from New York-based GEM to scale its government-approved digital securities infrastructure and launch Security Token Offering exchanges in Indonesia and Egypt. The Singapore-based blockchain firm plans to roll out a fully regulated STO marketplace in Indonesia in the first quarter of 2026, followed by Egypt later that year, listing tokenized assets such as real estate, carbon credits, corporate equity, bonds, and commodities. EDENA aims to support 20 to 30 STOs across both markets next year and targets operating in over 30 countries with more than $10 billion in tokenized assets by 2030.