Crypto

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

CoinDesk sat down with Robinhood’s head of crypto, Johann Kerbrat, to get an update on its upcoming layer-2 network, its tokenized stocks program, and its staking offerings.

Chains with built-in privacy may attract finance, healthcare, and real-world asset projects that cannot operate on fully transparent ledgers.

Many in the Bitcoin community continue to speculate that cryptographer Hal Finney was Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. The Bitcoin (BTC) community is celebrating the anniversary of cypherpunk and Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney’s post on January 10, 2009, telling the world that he was running the Bitcoin node software “Running Bitcoin,” Finney said on X, formerly known as Twitter. Finney was the recipient of the first Bitcoin transaction on the network. He was born on May 4, 1956, and pursued a career in computer science and cryptography, and was one of the first people to respond to Satoshi Nakamoto’s publication of the Bitcoin whitepaper.  Read more

BlackRock is telling clients to stop looking at artificial intelligence as software and start treating it as energy. In its 2026 Global Outlook, the BlackRock Investment Institute argued that the AI buildout is pushing against physical limits and highlighted electricity as the constraint investors are underpricing. The report’s headline-grabber is its warning that AI-driven data […] The post BlackRock warns crypto’s love affair with AI is over as an energy war with Bitcoin miners begins appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bitcoin whales began repeating a classic bull signal as they took BTC long positions off the table after a year of declining overall market exposure. Bitcoin (BTC) whales are “aggressively” reducing long exposure as a classic bull signal reappears. Key points: Bitfinex whales are rotating out of BTC long positions — something that preceded major price gains in the past. Read more

Lawmakers will (finally) vote on a market structure bill next week.

The firms, federally regulated by the CFTC, were told to shut down Tennessee-based activity, refund deposits, and void open contracts by Jan. 31.

Ethereum’s DeFi TVL surpassed $99B, over nine times larger than the next Layer 1, showing dominant network adoption in decentralized finance.

The stablecoin sector is expected to grow to $500 billion, while altcoin ETFs are projected to reach $10 billion, driven by regulatory clarity and adoption.

Bitcoin continues to consolidate near the $90k mark as global financial markets remain under pressure. Geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, growing uncertainty around fiat currency stability in emerging markets, and macro volatility have once again pushed BTC into the spotlight. Bitcoin Price Analysis: The Daily Chart On the daily timeframe, BTC has broken out […]