On January 9, the Tennessee Sports Wagering Council ordered Kalshi, Polymarket and Crypto.com to immediately stop offering sports-related contracts to state residents and refund all customer funds by Jan. 31, 2026. Regulators allege the CFTC-registered platforms are running unlicensed sports wagering in violation of the Tennessee Sports Gaming Act and warn that noncompliance could trigger civil penalties, criminal referrals and potential gambling-promotion charges.

On January 8, 2026, Nasdaq and CME Group unified their crypto benchmarks by reintroducing the Nasdaq Crypto Index as the Nasdaq-CME Crypto Index. The multi-asset gauge includes Bitcoin, Ether, XRP, Solana, Chainlink, Cardano, and Avalanche, and is calculated by CF Benchmarks with quarterly rebalancing to support regulated products exceeding $1 billion in assets.

Senate Agriculture Committee Chair John Boozman is weighing whether to delay a January 15 markup of a broad crypto market structure bill as bipartisan negotiations with Cory Booker continue. The talks aim to strengthen cross-party backing for the legislation while parallel action in the Senate Banking Committee and pressure from the White House highlight growing urgency around digital asset regulation. At the same time, US community bankers are urging Congress to tighten the GENIUS Act to curb stablecoin-related rewards they say could pull deposits from local banks.

On Friday, Betterment customers reported an unauthorized notification urging them to send up to $10,000 in Bitcoin and Ethereum for a promise of triple returns within a three-hour window. Betterment later said the message mimicked an official promotion but was sent via a third-party communications platform and was not a real offer. The incident coincides with ongoing social engineering and wallet-drain campaigns targeting EVM-compatible networks through phishing and malicious extensions.

Ripple Markets UK Ltd. has been added to the UK FCA register under anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing rules and separately obtained Electronic Money Institution authorization, enabling a broader range of regulated crypto and payment services in the country. XRP traded around $2.1 after the announcement, having risen more than 10% over the previous week, while Ripple also advanced plans for a US national trust bank charter and secured approval for its RLUSD stablecoin for institutional use in Abu Dhabi.

A newly revealed bug in Babylon's Bitcoin staking protocol could let malicious validators omit block hash data from BLS vote extensions, threatening consensus during epoch transitions. Developers warned that the flaw may cause validator crashes and slow block production if abused by multiple participants, even though no exploitation has been observed so far. The disclosure comes as Babylon expands its Bitcoin-native DeFi ambitions, backed by a recent $15 million BABY token investment from a16z Crypto and a partnership with Aave Labs.

Chainalysis reported that illicit cryptocurrency addresses received at least $154 billion in 2025, a 162% increase from 2024, as sanctioned state actors expanded their on-chain activity. Stablecoins made up the bulk of these flows, while illicit transactions still accounted for under 1% of total crypto usage, even as security firm PeckShield flagged rising exploits and social engineering scams.

India's Income Tax Department recently told a parliamentary finance committee that crypto use, especially via offshore exchanges, private wallets, and DeFi, is making income detection and tax enforcement harder. Officials warned that anonymous, borderless transfers can bypass regulated intermediaries, even as India maintains a 30% tax on digital asset profits and a 1% tax deducted at source on every transfer. The Reserve Bank of India, in its latest Financial Stability Report, also argued that fast-growing private stablecoins could threaten financial stability and reiterated its preference for central bank digital currencies.

Morgan Stanley has filed with the US SEC to launch a spot Bitcoin ETF and a separate Solana fund, a move experts describe as a strategic push into crypto rather than a pure asset-gathering play. ProCap CIO Jeff Park argues the initiative could deliver reputational and long-term benefits through ETRADE and institutional channels, even if inflows lag top rivals. The filing comes as US spot Bitcoin ETFs recently swung from early-2026 net inflows to a single-day outflow of $486.08 million, underscoring volatile investor demand.