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Ripple has received preliminary approval for an Electronic Money Institution (EMI) license from the Luxembourg financial regulator, bringing the blockchain payments company closer to providing regulated digital asset services across the European Union under the European passport rules.

What happened: Preliminary EMI approval in Luxembourg

The Luxembourg Financial Sector Supervisory Commission (CSSF) issued Ripple a 'letter of green light' on Wednesday, indicating conditional approval to proceed with obtaining a full EMI license.

The Government of Pakistan announced it has signed a memorandum of understanding with SC Financial Technologies, a related entity to World Liberty Financial — the cryptocurrency venture linked to U.S. President Donald Trump's family — to explore the integration of the USD1 stablecoin, dollar-pegged, into the country's digital payment infrastructure for cross-border transactions.

What happened: Partnership agreement on a stablecoin

The Pakistan Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority unveiled the agreement on Wednesday, describing SC Financial Technologies as a "related entity" to World Liberty.

The major Zcash holders have quietly accumulated nearly 13% more privacy-focused cryptocurrency over the past week, as the token attempts to recover from a 30% drop triggered by developer departures and a decline in investor confidence at the end of December.

What happened: whale purchases signal a shift

On-chain data shows that addresses holding more than $1 million in crypto assets have increased their ZEC balances by approximately 13% over the past week.

Bitcoin surpassed $95,000 on January 13 after U.S. inflation data showed the Consumer Price Index stable at 2.7% on an annual basis, reinforcing expectations that the Federal Reserve could move toward interest rate cuts by late 2026, while President Donald Trump publicly urged Jerome Powell to lower rates 'significantly'.

What happened: CPI data triggered a rally

DZ Bank, Germany's second-largest lender, has received authorization under the European regulation on crypto-asset markets (MiCAR) from the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) and has simultaneously joined a consortium of 11 banks working on launching a regulated euro stablecoin, marking a significant expansion of the traditional bank into digital assets.

What happened: MiCAR license and push towards stablecoins

Monero surged 51% to reach a record close to $716 during the past week, significantly outperforming Bitcoin and Ethereum, although analysis data shows a sharp spike in social media interest that has historically signaled unsustainable rallies driven by fear of missing out.

What happened: the privacy-focused token reached a record

The privacy-focused cryptocurrency reached its all-time high earlier today, around $695, before slightly correcting.

Solana broke through the $142 resistance zone amid broader market gains in the cryptocurrency sector, with technical indicators now pointing toward a potential test of the $150 threshold as traders await confirmation of a sustained bullish momentum.

What happened: SOL breaks through a key resistance

The token has risen above the resistance levels of $142 and $145 against the US dollar, reaching a peak of $148 before entering a consolidation phase. This movement followed the progress of Bitcoin and Ethereum after they stabilized above the $135 zone.

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren demands that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency delay its review of a national trust bank charter application submitted by World Liberty Financial until President Donald Trump has fully disengaged from this cryptocurrency company, citing what she describes as unprecedented conflicts of interest related to the direct involvement of the Trump family in the firm.

What happened: Elizabeth Warren targets the crypto banking candidacy linked to Trump

Bitcoin has diverged for the first time in its history from the growth of global money supply M2, a phenomenon that Capriole Investments founder Charles Edwards attributes to increasing institutional concerns about the threats quantum computing poses to the underlying cryptography of cryptocurrency.

What happened: Bitcoin is diverging from liquidity

Edwards published an analysis on X showing that Bitcoin's annual variation remained nearly flat in 2025 while the global money supply M2 of major economies continued to grow. The pattern marks a break from historical correlation.

Ethereum broke above the $3,140 downtrend line on the hourly chart and surged past $3,300, reaching a high of $3,374 before entering a consolidation phase, prompting traders to monitor the $3,250 support zone for signs of the next directional move.

What happened: ETH breaks the trend line

The second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization surged above resistance levels of $3,160 and $3,200 after remaining stable above $3,120. Exchange data shows the price broke through a significant downtrend line that had capped gains at $3,140.

The U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee has officially set a schedule to advance a highly anticipated legislation on the structure of cryptocurrency markets, marking an important procedural step toward resolving years of regulatory ambiguity surrounding digital asset markets.

What happened

Senator John Boozman announced on Tuesday that the committee will release the legislative text of its proposed crypto markets structure bill before the office closes on January 21 and will hold a 'markup' session in committee on January 27 at 3:00 PM, according to an internal panel note.

Prediction market traders assess a high probability that the U.S. Supreme Court will strike down tariffs based on President Donald Trump's emergency powers, a potential legal turning point that, according to macro investors, could affect inflation expectations, interest rates, and risk appetite—key factors for Bitcoin (BTC).

On Polymarket, the contract "Supreme Court rules in favor of Trump’s tariffs?" was trading around 27% on Tuesday, implying a market-implied probability of 73% that the Court rules against Trump.

The shareholders of Semler Scientific approved the acquisition, fully paid in shares, by Strive, marking what the companies describe as the first merger between publicly traded Bitcoin (BTC) treasury firms.

The new entity will control 12,797.9 Bitcoin, valued at approximately $1.2 billion at current prices.

Strive separately announced having purchased an additional 123 Bitcoin for its corporate treasury, at an average price of $91,561 per coin, bringing its pre-fusion holdings to 7,749.8 Bitcoin.

The long-awaited altcoin season did not occur in 2025, not because capital stayed away from cryptocurrencies, but because it entered through channels that structurally limited where it could flow, according to the market maker Wintermute.

What happened

In its report "Digital Asset OTC Markets 2025", Wintermute indicates that liquidity did enter the crypto market last year, but it remained heavily concentrated on Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), and a limited set of large-cap tokens.

CoinGecko's cryptocurrency market data platform is considering a potential sale valued at around $500 million, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Malaysia-based company has hired investment bank Moelis to advise on the process, which began at the end of last year.

CoinGecko, along with its competitor CoinMarketCap, operates one of the most visited data platforms in the sector, tracking in real time the prices, trading volumes, and market capitalizations of thousands of digital assets.

YZi Labs, the family office of Binance co-founders Changpeng Zhao and Yi He, has invested an amount of "tens of millions" of dollars in Genius Trading, marking a major bet on cross-chain trading infrastructure.

The investment, announced on Tuesday, positions Genius as an on-chain alternative to centralized exchanges by prioritizing privacy and fast execution on decentralized marketplaces.

Zhao has also joined Genius as an advisor, bringing strategic weight to this New York-based startup, which aims to solve what it describes as the "transparency bug" affecting professional traders in decentralized finance.

Old Glory Bank announced on Monday a definitive agreement to merge with Digital Asset Acquisition Corp in a deal valuing the Oklahoma-based lender at $250 million prior to external capital infusion.

The transaction includes $176 million from the SPAC's trust account, plus at least $50 million in additional private financing, with the merged company expected to be listed on the Nasdaq under the symbol OGB.

Old Glory has unveiled plans to launch its own stablecoin called OGBUSD on the ERC-20 standard and to offer crypto-backed consumer loans across all 50 states, following the anticipated closure of the deal in the first or second quarter of 2026.

The Italian central bank has published a study warning that a severe collapse in the price of ether could compromise Ethereum (ETH)'s ability to function as a settlement infrastructure for stablecoins and tokenized securities.

The January 2026 study, written by Bank of Italy economist Claudia Biancotti, examines how the market risk affecting an unbacked cryptocurrency can turn into operational risk for the $800 billion blockchain ecosystem.

The co-founder of BitMEX and investment director at Maelstrom, Arthur Hayes, argues in a new blog post that Bitcoin performed exactly as expected in 2025, following the decline in dollar liquidity, while gold and technology stocks diverged due to central bank purchases and U.S. AI policy.

What happened: Hayes defends Bitcoin's performance in 2025

The former CEO of BitMEX has published his analysis on his Substack blog, presenting what he describes as a framework to understand why Bitcoin underperformed gold and the Nasdaq 100 during the first year of President Donald Trump's second term.

Brian Armstrong stated that Coinbase can no longer support the U.S. Senate's cryptocurrency market structure bill in its current form, a decision that reveals growing divisions between lawmakers and the cryptocurrency industry on how digital assets should be regulated.

Armstrong said that the company had reviewed the Senate Banking Committee's bill over the past 48 hours and concluded that the text would be « significantly worse than the status quo ».