Web3 Wavefronts - Digestible News on Crypto, DeFi and AI

Alabama regulators found that residents deposited about $12.5 million into cryptocurrency kiosks in 2024 and lost about $6.5 million to scams. Investigators contacted more than 1,000 users and surveyed about 600, of whom 64% reported victimization and more than half were age 60 or older. Scams typically began with unsolicited calls, texts or online contact that led victims to kiosks for irreversib...

Six Democratic senators — Elizabeth Warren, Dick Durbin, Mazie Hirono, Sheldon Whitehouse, Christopher Coons, and Richard Blumenthal — sent a January 28 letter requesting ethics clearances, communications, and divestment records from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche by February 11, 2026, alleging a potential violation of 18 U.S.C. § 208(a) tied to Blanche's reported crypto holdings at the time...

Wave Digital Assets filed a request with the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General on January 27 asking investigators to review how the U.S. Marshals Service handled seized cryptocurrency and submitted related materials to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims challenging procurement and oversight decisions. The filing focuses on custody management, technical safeguards, and the integrity o...

The White House will host banking and crypto leaders on February 2 to attempt to reset negotiations on the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act after a Senate markup collapsed in early January. The bill cleared the House in July 2025, and the Senate negotiations stalled over treatment of interest and issuer-paid rewards on dollar-pegged stablecoins, the scope of DeFi oversight for front-end interfaces...

UBS will pilot spot Bitcoin and Ethereum trading for a subset of private banking clients in Switzerland using custody and execution partners outside the bank to limit balance sheet and operational exposure. The launch timing and execution depend on Swiss regulatory approvals, internal legal, compliance and risk approvals, and vendor readiness. UBS will open access only to clients who meet suitabil...

HesabPay issues a fiat-backed AFN stablecoin and settles transactions on the Algorand blockchain, moving about $60 million per month to approximately 650,000 active wallets. The company holds reserves in custody, supports feature-phone and low-bandwidth wallets, and operates an agent network for cash-out. Since February 2025 UNHCR distributed nearly $25 million to more than 80,000 returning famili...

 On January 23, 2026, BitGo priced its IPO at $18 per share and sold 11.8 million shares, producing gross proceeds of about $212.4 million and implying a fully diluted valuation of roughly $2.08–$2.10 billion on approximately 115.56 million shares outstanding. The offering was led by Goldman Sachs and Citigroup and the new ticker is BTGO. The initial public float was small relative to the ful...

The SEC brought 13 crypto-related enforcement actions in 2025, down 60 percent from 33 in 2024 and the lowest annual total since 2017. Monetary penalties tied to those matters totaled about $142 million. Five of the 13 actions were carryovers from prior leadership, and eight actions initiated under Chair Paul Atkins were framed as fraud cases. The SEC resolved 29 crypto-related matters and dismiss...

Wyoming launched the Frontier Stable Token (FRNT) on January 7 as a state-issued stablecoin reserved by U.S. dollars and short-duration U.S. Treasury securities. Franklin Templeton manages the reserves and Fiduciary Trust Company International provides custody. The Wyoming Stable Token Commission established the program, received about $5.8 million in state appropriations for technology, legal, co...

Senate Agriculture Chair John Boozman published a 161‑page Republican draft on January 21 after bipartisan negotiations stalled. The draft assigns cash and spot trading of non‑security tokens to Commodity Futures Trading Commission oversight and preserves Securities and Exchange Commission jurisdiction over securities and investment contracts. The bill requires platform registration with the CFTC,...

More than 11.6 million crypto tokens were classified as dead in 2025, representing 86.3% of all token failures recorded since 2021, with Q4 accounting for roughly 7.7 million of those failures and more than half of tokens launched since 2021 no longer trading in active markets. A dead token was defined as an asset with inactive or effectively abandoned markets, evidenced by delistings, empty order...

Congress enacted the GENIUS Act in July 2025 to create a federal framework for payment stablecoins issued by insured banks and a new class of qualified nonbanks. The law set a deadline for agency rulemaking and placed issuance under prudential supervision. Federal agencies are defining specific, risk-based rules that determine who may operate and under what terms. Interagency rules will specify ca...

An executive order in January 2025 created the President's Working Group on Digital Asset Markets, chaired by Special Advisor David Sacks, and directed Treasury, the Federal Reserve, the SEC, the CFTC, the OCC, the FDIC, the Commerce Department, the Justice Department, and the National Economic Council to coordinate federal crypto policy, harmonize supervision, propose rules, and shape internation...

On January 20, 2026 Bitcoin fell 2.8% to 92,519.6 after U.S. tariff threats targeting European imports of up to 25%. Tariffs increase import costs, transmit to consumer and producer prices and inflation expectations, and prompt central banks to keep policy tighter or raise rates; higher real yields raise discount rates on long-duration assets and compress valuations for Bitcoin and Ethereum. Lever...

On January 17, 2026, WOW Exchange announced a Hong Kong prelaunch for a crypto trading platform that emphasizes transparency, layered security, and integrated AI analytics. The platform will include a matching engine designed for high throughput, low-latency execution, and scalable order acceptance to preserve fill quality during volume spikes. The company stated it will implement multi-layer secu...

Chainalysis data show Iran's crypto economy processed about $7.78 billion in 2025. Bitcoin flows clustered around political unrest, cyber incidents, and a nationwide internet blackout. Inflation near 40–50 percent and a roughly 90 percent decline in the rial's value since 2018 drove civilian demand for Bitcoin for emergency savings, cross-border transfers, and flight capital. IRGC-linked wallets a...

On January 15, 2026, the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance informed MegPrime Holding LLC and Megatel Homes LLC that staff will not recommend enforcement if the MP Token is offered and sold without registration under Section 5 of the Securities Act and without registration under Section 12(g) of the Exchange Act, provided the project follows the factual representations submitted to staff. MegPr...

Eric Adams served as visible promoter during a January 12–13 Times Square event that introduced NYC Token, which launched on Solana with a capped supply of one billion tokens and a decentralized exchange listing. Messaging tied the project to anti-hate initiatives, scholarships, and crypto education. Within minutes of trading, retail buying and thin initial liquidity drove a fully diluted market c...

Russia finalized a draft bill to recast crypto as an investment asset effective July 1, 2026 with full operational rollout through 2027. The draft imposes a 300,000 ruble annual purchase cap for non‑qualified retail investors and requires new retail entrants to pass a mandatory risk awareness test covering volatility, possible total loss, custody exposures, and drawdown scenarios. Trading and cust...

Wyoming opened public purchases of FRNT on January 7, 2026. The Wyoming Stable Token Commission issued FRNT under the Wyoming Stable Token Act and set redemption at one-to-one for U.S. dollars. Wyoming described FRNT as a U.S. public-entity stablecoin. The reserves backing FRNT consist of cash and short-dated U.S. Treasuries, with Franklin Templeton managing the reserves and Fiduciary Trust Compan...

CoinGecko is exploring a potential sale that could value the company near $500 million, with Moelis & Company advising an early-stage, two-track outreach to strategic and financial buyers that began in late 2025; no terms or buyer have been announced and the company remains under existing leadership. CoinGecko aggregates price feeds, exchange coverage, token metadata, exchange trust scores and...

France’s markets regulator, the AMF, reported that about 90 firms registered under the national PSAN regime do not hold EU MiCA authorization. Of those firms, approximately 30% have submitted MiCA applications, roughly 40% have notified the AMF they will not apply and plan to cease operations, and roughly 30% have not responded to repeated contact since late 2025. The MiCA transition period ends J...

Illicit cryptocurrency addresses received an estimated $154 to $158 billion in 2025, a near 162% year-over-year increase, with stablecoins accounting for about 84% of that volume. Sanctions-related flows rose and nation-state-aligned actors, notably DPRK-linked groups, stole roughly $2 billion including a single exploit that cost an exchange about $1.5 billion. Criminal operations combined credent...

Tether froze about 182 million USDT across five TRC-20 addresses on the Tron network on January 11, 2026, using contract-level blacklist admin calls that took effect upon on-chain confirmation. Analytics services and block monitors flagged the addresses and immobilized balances within minutes, and exchanges and Tron infrastructure continued processing blocks and trades without visible disruption....

The Anti-Defamation League analyzed 15 extremist actors and identified roughly $142,000 moving across 22 services from 2023 into 2024, with Kraken-linked flows accounting for nearly $80,000 and Counter-Currents processing more than $61,800 in 2023; Chainalysis reports that overall extremist donations have dipped in some regions while white nationalist fundraising remained active in North America a...