Crypto

TRM Labs revealed UK-registered exchanges Zedcex and Zedxion facilitated $1 billion in IRGC-linked transactions through shell structures connected to sanctioned financier Babak Morteza Zanjani. The post Iran Used UK Crypto Platforms to Evade Sanctions With $1B in Secret Flows: Report appeared first on Cryptonews.

Bitcoin trades near $90,700 as ETF outflows hit $343M and price compresses below $91,520, signaling a potential breakout or renewed downside risk. The post Bitcoin Price Prediction: BTC Holds $90K as $343M ETF Outflows Raise One Big Question appeared first on Cryptonews.

Crypto-related questions about pension payments are reaching Russia’s Social Fund hotline, suggesting digital assets are entering mainstream financial concerns. Inquiries about whether pensions can be paid in crypto have become one of the most frequent non-standard requests received by the Social Fund of Russia, a state-run institution responsible for managing Russia’s public pension system. In 2025, the Social Fund’s call center handled roughly 37 million calls, the vast majority related to routine matters such as pensions, benefits and maternity capital. However, operators also increasingly fielded questions about digital assets, according to a Saturday report from Rossiyskaya Gazeta (Russian Gazette), the official daily newspaper of the Russian government. Among the most common crypto-related inquiries were whether Russian citizens could receive pension payments in cryptocurrency and whether income from crypto mining would be factored into the calculation of social benefits. The fund said these questions a...

A tax employee in Bobigny used internal software to compile dossiers on cryptocurrency specialists, billionaire Vincent Bolloré, prison guards, and a judge. She passed the information to criminals who paid €800 to attack a prison officer at home in Montreuil. Her appeal was rejected Jan. 6, as reported by local media. The case matters less […] The post Insiders sell government crypto database to violent home invaders as transparency laws backfire appeared first on CryptoSlate.

ZEC stands in one corner, while POL is in the other.

Russia's Social Fund fielded numerous crypto inquiries among 37 million total calls in 2025 regarding pension payments in digital assets and mining income recognition, as senior Kremlin official Maxim Oreshkin advocated classifying mining as export activity. The post Russian Pension Fund Flooded With Crypto Questions as Mining Income Debate Heats Up appeared first on Cryptonews.

X’s head of product said Crypto Twitter’s reach problems are self-inflicted, blaming overposting rather than algorithmic suppression. CryptoQuant founder Ki Young Ju has criticized X for suppressing crypto-related posts while failing to rein in a surge of automated spam, arguing that the platform is punishing legitimate users instead of addressing the underlying bot problem. In a Sunday post on X, Ju pointed to a sharp spike in automated activity tied to the keyword “crypto,” citing data showing more than 7.7 million posts generated in a single day, an increase of over 1,200% compared with prior levels. According to Ju, the flood of low-quality content has triggered algorithmic crackdowns that also affect genuine crypto accounts. “As AI advances, bots are inevitable,” Ju wrote, adding that X’s inability to distinguish automated accounts from humans is the real issue. He also criticized the platform’s paid verification system, saying it has failed as a filtering tool and now allows bots to “pay to spam,” while...

US spot Bitcoin and Ether ETFs opened 2026 under pressure, with investors pulling nearly $750 million from the two largest crypto-linked ETF categories. The post ETF Investors Pull Back From Bitcoin and Ether as Altcoin Funds Buck Trend appeared first on Cryptonews.

Two years ago, Bitcoin gained something it had chased for a long time: a place in the tradfi default menu. Plenty of people could get exposure to Bitcoin in 2023, as anyone with an exchange account and a tolerance for operational risk could click “buy.” Yet most capital in the US moves through brokerages, retirement […] The post Bitcoin’s $25 billion legacy exodus secretly cemented Wall Street’s grip on liquidity within 2 years appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Tennessee ordered Kalshi, Polymarket and Crypto.com to halt sports-related contracts and issue refunds by Jan. 31, 2026. The post Tennessee Orders Kalshi, Polymarket, and Crypto.com to Halt Sports Betting Contracts appeared first on Cryptonews.

XRP is already down by double digits since its recent peak, is there more pain ahead?

Bitcoin’s mining difficulty edged lower in the network’s first difficulty adjustment of 2026, offering a brief reprieve for miners after a year marked by intense competition and shrinking margins. The post Bitcoin Network Difficulty Dips Slightly After 2026’s First Adjustment appeared first on Cryptonews.

Tennessee regulator warned that failure to comply could trigger steep fines, court injunctions and potential law enforcement referrals for for further investigation. Tennessee’s sports betting regulator has ordered prediction market platforms Kalshi, Polymarket and Crypto.com to halt the offering of sports event contracts to residents of the state. In cease-and-desist letters dated Friday, the Tennessee Sports Wagering Council (SWC) accused all three platforms of illegally offering sports wagering products without holding a license issued under the Tennessee Sports Gaming Act, according to copies of the letters published on X by sports betting attorney Daniel Wallach. The SWC said the sports event contracts listed on Kalshi, Polymarket and Crypto.com’s North American Derivatives Exchange allow users to wager money on the outcome of sporting events, a practice Tennessee law reserves exclusively for licensed sportsbooks. The regulator argued that packaging the products as “event contracts” does not exempt them ...

Jan3 founder Samson Mow’s predictions are among the more bullish outlooks compared with most recent forecasts from other crypto market participants. Jan3 founder Samson Mow anticipates billionaire investor and Tesla CEO Elon Musk will aggressively move into Bitcoin in 2026. It was one of five bold Bitcoin (BTC) predictions from Mow for 2026, coming off a year where several Bitcoin forecasts from prominent crypto executives missed the mark. “@elonmusk goes hard into BTC,” Mow said in an X post on Saturday. Read more

Ethereum’s social media sentiment is “kind of reminiscent” of what was seen before its last major run, according to Santiment. Ethereum’s declining social media sentiment is mirroring levels similar to those seen before its 2025 price rally, which eventually pushed the asset back to its 2021 all-time highs, according to a crypto sentiment analyst. “Ethereum is actually way down, this would argue against us falling too much further,” Santiment analyst Brian Quinlivan said in a video published to YouTube on Saturday. “This is kind of reminiscent of what we saw before Ethereum went on its major run last year,” Quinlivan said. Read more

US President Donald Trump’s stance on Sam Bankman-Fried pardon, BitMine’s purchase in Ethereum shows continued confidence: Hodler’s Digest Nasdaq, CME Group join forces to launch Nasdaq-CME Crypto Index The Nasdaq Stock Exchange and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) Group joined forces to unify their crypto indexes, rebranding the Nasdaq Crypto Index (NCI) as the Nasdaq CME Crypto Index. The NCI benchmark index includes Bitcoin, Ether, XRP, Solana, Chainlink, Cardano, and Avalanche, spokespersons for Nasdaq confirmed to Cointelegraph. Read more

Crypto enters 2026 on a positive footing, but retail sentiment remains fragile and driven by immediate news catalysts.

Banks are fighting stablecoin rewards to protect a secret $360 billion revenue machine. When Coinbase chief policy officer Faryar Shirzad posted a thread on Jan. 8 warning that stablecoin rewards “remain under debate” as Congress marks up market structure legislation, he attached numbers that banking groups would rather keep quiet. US banks earn $176 billion […] The post Banks are lobbying to kill crypto rewards to protect a hidden $1,400 “tax” on every household appeared first on CryptoSlate.

The Bitcoin mining difficulty continued to push through to new all-time highs in 2025 amid a turbulent year for the mining industry. The Bitcoin (BTC) network mining difficulty, the relative computing challenge of adding a new block to the decentralized blockchain ledger, fell slightly to 146.4 trillion on Thursday, in the first difficulty adjustment of 2026.  “The next Bitcoin difficulty adjustment is estimated to take place on Jan 22, 2026, 04:08:12 AM UTC, increasing the Bitcoin mining difficulty from 146.47 T to 148.20 T,” according to CoinWarz.  Average block times are 9.88 minutes at the time of this writing, slightly below the 10-minute target, which means the next difficulty adjustment will increase slightly to align better with the target block time. Read more

The outage was the second major network disruption in 2025, with both incidents requiring a block reorganization that rolled back some activity. The team behind Starknet, an Ethereum layer‑2 (L2) scaling network, released a post-mortem report outlining the root cause of the temporary mainnet downtime on Monday. The root cause of the mainnet downtime was a discrepancy in the network state between the blockifier execution layer and the proving layer that checks that the execution layer is processing transactions correctly, according to the report. The Starknet team explained: This incorrect execution never saw L1 finality thanks to Starknet’s proving layer,” the StarkNet team said, highlighting how the proving layer functioned properly by flagging the error and not committing the faulty transactions to the ledger. Read more