NFT

On Jan. 18, 2026, SHIB marketing lead Lucie told holders there is "no panic" and that SHIB and SOU are "moving up together" as SOU NFTs track obligations tied to the late‑2025 Shibarium exploit. The daily burn rate jumped 3,904.47%, with 29,998,516 SHIB sent to dead wallets via two transfers of 28,000,000 and 1,576,200.

On 16 January 2026, the Bank of Russia proposed expanded reporting rules requiring banks to disclose detailed information on cross‑border transactions, including crypto activity. The draft would separate buys, sells, and transfers of digital currencies and seeks to reflect such flows in the balance of payments ahead of broader market regulation expected this year.

Bitcoin’s New Year advance is stalling near the key $90,000 support area after multiple failed attempts to hold above that level since November 2025. Morgan Stanley has filed for both Solana and Bitcoin ETFs with staking features, while Shiba Inu briefly touched $0.00001 and XRP jumped about 32% in January, drawing a cautionary technical warning from John Bollinger. Bitcoin has also posted its first post‑halving red year as traders monitor tight ranges and potential Sunday volatility around $85,000 to $90,000.

On Jan. 7, the full developer team at Electric Coin Company, which leads work on the Zcash protocol, resigned following a conflict with its parent nonprofit board and said it will launch a new firm and wallet. U.S. spot XRP ETFs recorded their first daily net outflows on Wednesday, with $47.3 million leaving 21Shares' TOXR and contributing to a 5% XRP price drop to about $2.13, while Bitcoin, Ethereum, prediction markets, stablecoins, and onchain crime trends also moved markets.

The Flow Foundation published a technical post-mortem on Tuesday detailing a Dec. 27 protocol exploit that enabled counterfeit tokens, with confirmed losses of about $3.9 million. Validators halted the network within six hours and resumed operations two days later under a governance-approved recovery that preserved legitimate history and destroyed fake assets.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin changed his X profile picture to a Milady NFT, coinciding with the collection's floor price jumping almost 30% within a day. Milady Maker's minimum price climbed to about 1.07 ETH as trading volume and sales spiked, while Buterin also shared a New Year message outlining Ethereum's key technical progress in 2025 and longer-term mission.

South Korea’s Financial Intelligence Unit fined crypto exchange Korbit ₩2.73 billion (about $1.90 million) after an on-site AML/KYC inspection conducted October 16–29, 2024 identified nearly 22,000 rule breaches. The FIU also flagged 19 overseas transfers tied to three unregistered foreign VASPs and confirmed the sanction on December 31, 2025.

Layer 2 networks built on Ethereum allow users to process transactions faster and at significantly lower cost while still relying on the main chain for security. By bridging assets from Layer 1 to networks such as Arbitrum, Optimism, or zkSync, users can trade, stake, and handle NFTs with reduced congestion and fees. This approach helps make DeFi platforms and NFT marketplaces more scalable and accessible for everyday crypto activity.

Following a Dec. 27 exploit on the Flow blockchain, loan settlements on NFT lending platform Flowty were halted after the Cadence execution environment was paused until the morning of Dec. 29. Flowty reported 11 loans maturing during the outage, with multiple defaults and two unsettled positions, and has since stopped all settlements while keeping affected loans outstanding. The FLOW token price fell sharply after the incident and continued to decline to $0.086 as ecosystem functionality, including token swaps, remains impaired.

South Korea's Financial Intelligence Unit issued an institutional warning and fines totaling ₩27.3 billion ($1.89 million) to crypto exchange Korbit after an on-site inspection conducted October 16–29, 2024. According to the FIU, roughly 22,000 AML breaches were found, spanning customer identification failures, transaction-restriction gaps, transfers via unregistered overseas platforms, and deficient risk assessments for new products.