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About $158 billion in funds obtained from illegal activities have flowed into cryptocurrency wallets, according to the results of last year by analysts at TRM Labs. The amount increased by approximately 146% since 2024.
The volume of criminal cryptocurrency transactions has turned out to be out of trend: over the past three years, the total amount has gradually decreased. For comparison, in 2021, gray crypto flows were estimated at $86 billion, in 2022 - $75 billion, in 2023 - $73 billion. Chinese money laundering networks transferred about $103 billion through cryptocurrencies in 2025, reported TRM Labs.

The supply of stablecoins reached nearly $300 billion at the beginning of the year, but growth has almost stopped. The October crash of the cryptocurrency market is still having an effect, analysts from ARK Invest explained.
In mid-October of last year, the supply of stablecoins was at $293 billion, the same as on January 1. As of January 28, it has even slightly decreased (to $290 billion). At the beginning of 2025, the total volume of circulating stablecoins was $200 billion, according to a recent report by ARK Invest.

Over the last day, Bitcoin has dropped by 7.4%, falling below $82 150 and returning to the lowest price level in the last nine months. Major cryptocurrencies have also gone into the red zone, and the total market capitalization of the cryptocurrency market has decreased by 6.7%.
The market capitalization of Bitcoin itself has decreased by 6.7% to $1.63 trillion, while the daily trading volume of the first cryptocurrency has increased by 78.6% to $78.45 billion. The price of Ethereum has decreased by 8% over the day to $2712. The cryptocurrencies SOL and XRP have dropped by 8% to $113.6 and $1.73 respectively.

The subsidiary of the National Bank of Kazakhstan, the 'National Investment Corporation' (NIC), received $350 million from the country's gold and foreign exchange reserves for crypto investments, announced the Deputy Chairman of the National Bank of Kazakhstan, Aliya Moldabekova.
A special account has been opened in the Central Depository for the future crypto reserve, the official said at the Annual Business Review event. According to her, NIC does not intend to purchase cryptocurrency directly. The structure of the National Bank plans to invest funds through five unnamed hedge funds and eventually wants to enter the capital of venture funds. The sources of investment will be the National Fund, where revenues from the sale of oil and gas flow.

The largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, Binance, announced the transfer of its client protection insurance fund SAFU (Secure Asset Fund for Users) from USDC stablecoins to bitcoins.
The company stated that they plan to buy bitcoins using USDC stablecoins over the next 30 days. They also clarified the procedure for replenishing SAFU in the event of a drop in BTC value.

A 22-year-old resident of Minsk lost 23,000 Belarusian rubles (about $8,000) while trying to cash out cryptocurrency, reported the October District Department of Internal Affairs of the capital of the Republic of Belarus.
The girl told the police that she became a victim of deception by an acquaintance. The resident of Minsk wanted to withdraw funds from her crypto wallet and asked a friend for help. He sent her a step-by-step instruction, and the girl followed the directions: she transferred an unnamed cryptocurrency to the specified wallet and waited for the money. By the agreed deadline, she did not receive the promised rubles, and the acquaintance stopped contacting her.

Six Democratic senators sent a letter to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, criticizing his decision to dissolve the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET), established in 2022 by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Media analysts at Outset PR reported that the websites of several major international cryptocurrency publications have stopped opening for clients of Russian home internet providers.
Outset PR reports that the restrictions affected Cointelegraph, Benzinga, CoinGeek, Criptonoticias, CoinEdition, The Coin Republic, AMBCrypto, and Nada News. These sites do not load when connected to home networks and Wi-Fi, but remain accessible through other communication channels like mobile internet.

A 42-year-old resident of the Izhemsky District of the Republic of Komi is accused of embezzling 1.5 million rubles. The Russian woman wanted to invest this money in cryptocurrency, the prosecutor's office reported.
According to the investigation, the woman was called by scammers who offered her a high income from operations on a cryptocurrency exchange. The Russian woman believed them, but she did not have any money of her own. Therefore, she deceitfully obtained her cousin's smartphone and through the bank's mobile application took out several loans in her relative's name, the supervisory authority claims. The woman immediately transferred the money first to her account, and then — to the scammers' accounts.

The company Universal Digital Intl announced the launch of the first stablecoin in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), backed by the US dollar (USDU) and officially approved by the authorities.
According to the company's statement, Universal Digital has become the first issuer of foreign payment tokens registered by the UAE Central Bank under the Payment Token Services Regulation (PTSR).

The largest American electric car manufacturer, Elon Musk's company Tesla, reported that it did not buy or sell any coins from its Bitcoin reserve between October and December. The company holds 11 509 coins, just as it did in previous months.
Despite the fact that the volume of Bitcoins remained unchanged, the price drop of the first cryptocurrency from $114,000 to $88,000 over the last three months resulted in a loss of about $239 million, Tesla reported. At the current Bitcoin price of around $89,000, the company's reserve is estimated at about $1 billion.

The daily number of Solana validators has fallen below 800, returning to the situation of 2021. In less than three years, their number has decreased by 65%. At the beginning of 2023, the number of validators in the network was a record 2500, experts from The Block reminded us.
The main activity of Solana validators is to confirm transactions and create blocks. To participate in the Solana Proof-of-Stake consensus, validators, as independent nodes, stake SOL and vote on blocks to ensure security. However, daily activity has now decreased: the number of transactions sent by validators to confirm blocks has nearly halved, from 300,000 to 170,000 per day.

The Los Angeles court sentenced 45-year-old Chinese citizen Jingliang Su to three years and ten months in prison for money laundering and cryptocurrency fraud amounting to $36.9 million, stolen from 174 American investors.
The court also ordered the offender to pay $26.8 million in damages. The man has been in custody since December 2024. In June 2025, he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit illegal money transfers.

In the village of Maidan, in the Unzukul district of Dagestan, police stopped the operation of an underground mining farm organized by a 52-year-old local resident.
The crypto farm with 68 devices for mining was located in one of the warehouses, reported the Russian police. The equipment was connected to the power grids bypassing the meters directly to the power lines. According to the local energy supply company, the farm caused damage of 1.2 million rubles. The police seized the equipment, and the question of initiating a criminal case is being considered.

The issuer of the largest market capitalization stablecoin USDT, Tether, announced the launch of the USAT stablecoin pegged to the US dollar, created specifically for the American market.
USAT is available on cryptocurrency exchanges Bybit, Crypto.com, Kraken, and OKX, as well as in the payment service Moonpay. The immediate issuer of the stablecoin is Anchorage Digital Bank. It became the first American bank to receive permission to issue such financial instruments.

Cybersecurity specialist Jeremiah Fowler discovered a leak of personal data related to 149 million accounts of online services such as social networks and government institutions. About 420,000 affected individuals are clients of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance.
The data contains usernames as well as passwords from phones and computers. Compromised data includes 48 million Gmail accounts, 17 million Facebook users, 6.5 million Instagram owners, 4 million Yahoo accounts, 3.4 million Netflix accounts, and 780,000 TikTok accounts. The volume of compromised data reaches 94 gigabytes.

The volume of funds that criminals laundered using cryptocurrencies reached $82 billion last year, according to analysts at Chainalysis. In comparison, in 2020, the volume of money laundered through cryptocurrency was $10 billion.
Criminals have increasingly stopped using centralized cryptocurrency exchanges for money laundering. Such platforms, due to pressure from authorities, have significantly intensified customer verification and security measures and have more frequently frozen suspicious assets, experts explained.

The decentralized asset tokenization platform Theo has announced the launch of the gold stablecoin thGOLD, which simultaneously acts as a tokenized share of a fund that lends against gold bars.
Unlike stable digital coins pegged to the dollar or other fiat currencies, gold stablecoins like Tether Gold (XAUT) and PAX Gold (PAXG) do not offer direct built-in returns in the classical sense (meaning they do not have an equivalent of deposit interest). The main value lies in the peg to the price of gold, allowing investors to profit from the rising value of the precious metal.

Member of the South Dakota House of Representatives Logan Manhart, a member of the Republican Party, introduced a bill allowing local authorities to spend state budget funds on the purchase of bitcoins.
Manhart proposes to allow the State Investment Council to allocate up to 10% of the state budget for bitcoin investments. According to the bill, the purchased crypto assets must be stored with a qualified custodian or acquired in the form of shares of exchange-traded products (ETP) launched by licensed investment companies. Control over the private key of the purchased bitcoins is proposed to be given to the Investment Council, and this key must be stored on specialized hardware devices located in at least two geographically different locations.

Over the past week, the market capitalization of stablecoins on the Ethereum network has fallen by $7 billion. A similar trend was observed in 2021 when the market entered a bear phase, experts from the on-chain platform CryptoQuant reported.
According to analysts, the sharp decline in the market capitalization of stablecoins was not observed earlier in the current market cycle. Large investors are increasingly converting stablecoins into fiat currencies for investments in other assets, including silver.