Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen and investor Tim Draper unveiled Grow California, a $40 million effort to elect moderate legislators and resist a union-backed wealth tax. The campaign began with $5 million from each founder in September and will target roughly a dozen state seats while emphasizing public safety, homelessness and budget discipline.

On January 31, 2026, Step Finance said several treasury and fee wallets were compromised during APAC hours, with about 261,854 SOL valued near $30 million stolen. CertiK noted the stake authorization had been transferred before withdrawal, and the STEP token fell over 90% within 24 hours as the team stated user funds were not impacted.

On January 31, 2026, a U.S. court sentenced Chinese national Jingliang Su to 46 months in federal prison and ordered $26,867,242 in restitution for laundering over $36.9 million from American victims. The scheme routed funds to Deltec Bank in the Bahamas, converted them to Tether (USDT), and moved them to a wallet in Cambodia.

On January 30, precious metals sold off sharply, with silver falling up to 36% intraday and gold down more than 12%, according to Bloomberg. The move followed President Donald Trump's nomination of Kevin Warsh as Federal Reserve chair and coincided with Bitcoin sliding to about $82,000 amid intensified spot ETF outflows cited by Bitfinex analysts.

On a Friday ruling in Delaware, Judge Kathaleen St. J. McCormick allowed a shareholder lawsuit accusing several Coinbase directors of insider trading tied to $2.9 billion in stock sales from the April 2021 direct listing to proceed. The case, brought in 2023 by investor Adam Grabski, challenges a special litigation committee’s 10-month investigation that had cleared figures including Marc Andreessen and CEO Brian Armstrong, arguing conflicts around one committee member undermined the review.

Aster (ASTER) is trading at $0.6072 and holding the $0.60 support amid broader market weakness. Technicals point to potential follow-through toward the $0.74 50-day moving average after a 75% slide from the September peak at $2.42. The protocol ranks second among perpetual DEXs with $7 billion average daily volume and a 14% share.

On January 29, 2026, Optimism introduced OP Enterprise, a production-grade suite for fintechs and financial institutions to launch managed or self-run chains in 8-12 weeks. The three-tier offering delivers 99.99% uptime SLOs, throughput up to 100+ Mgas/s, 5 billion RPC requests per month, and 160 engineering hours, with Unichain and Celo as early customers.

Binance has announced plans to convert its $1 billion Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU) from stablecoins into Bitcoin over the next 30 days, after community criticism intensified following Cathie Wood's comments about an October 10 deleveraging event. The exchange says it will regularly rebalance the fund, adding Bitcoin if needed to keep its value at $1 billion, while broader concerns persist over the October crash, token listings, and platform transparency.

Solana fell around 8% from a daily open near $125.34 to lows of $115.39 after the Federal Reserve kept benchmark interest rates at 4.25–4.50%. At the same time, Solana's network led all chains with almost $4 billion in 24-hour DEX volume and about 2.7 million active wallets, while SOL now tests support around $116 and traders watch the $134–$135 region as key resistance.