ETHZilla said on Thursday it launched the Eurus Aero Token I via its ETHZilla Aerospace unit, offering access to equity in two commercial jet engines leased to a leading US airline. Each token costs $100 with a 10-token minimum, and the firm targets an 11% return if held through leases that run into 2028 after buying the engines for $12.2 million in January.

Crypto-focused super PAC Protect Progress plans to allocate $1.5 million to campaign against Representative Al Green in the upcoming Democratic primary in Texas, citing his opposition to key digital asset bills. Green will face Christian Menefee in the March 3 primary for the reshaped Houston-area district, where advocacy groups rate Green as strongly anti-crypto and Menefee as strongly pro-crypto.

In a blog post on Wednesday, Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum Foundation AI lead Davide Crapis proposed a zero-knowledge–based system to keep AI API calls private while enabling payment and anti-abuse controls. Users would fund a smart contract (e.g., 100 USDC) and make unlinkable requests, with dual-staking penalties deterring double-spends and policy violations.

Circle Internet Group plans to spend 2026 strengthening its payments network and Arc, its institution-oriented layer-1 blockchain, to support broader corporate and institutional stablecoin adoption. The company aims to move Arc from testnet to production and extend the reach of USDC, EURC, USYC and partner-issued stablecoins across more chains while simplifying their everyday use.

In 2025, Bybit's trading volume climbed to a total of $1.5 trillion and its market share rose to 8.1%, even after a $1.5 billion hack in February. CoinGecko's report added that average trading volumes across the top 10 exchanges increased by 7.6% over the year, while Binance remained the largest exchange with $7.3 trillion in volume.

Ether balances on centralized exchanges have fallen from 12.31 million tokens in July to 8.15 million, while the price has traded in a tight range around the $2,800–$3,000 level. At the same time, about 3.6 million ETH are queued for staking with an estimated 63-day wait, and total staked Ether has climbed to over 36 million tokens. Large holders such as BitMine have now locked more than 2.5 million ETH, and some staking wallets have recently withdrawn over 26,000 tokens from Binance.

In its 2026 crypto crime report released on Wednesday, TRM Labs said the use of large language models in scams increased fivefold in 2025. It reported $35 billion in crypto was sent to scammer addresses last year, down from $38 billion in 2024, while illicit wallets received about $158 billion and the illicit share fell to 1.2%.

Santiment said in an X post on Tuesday that social chatter around silver and gold has outpaced crypto on most days this month. According to TradingView, silver set a new all-time high just over $117 on Tuesday before pulling back, while Google Trends shows search peaks of 100 for crypto on Jan. 21 and silver on Jan. 22.

Bitcoin services firm River reports that 60% of the top 25 banks operating in the United States have either begun offering or announced plans to launch Bitcoin-related products such as trading or custody. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, reflecting on meetings at the World Economic Forum in Davos held from Jan. 19 to Jan. 23, said most banking CEOs he spoke with were supportive of crypto, while several major institutions including JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Citigroup are exploring or providing institutional crypto services.