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South Korea is reportedly planning to allow corporations to invest in crypto, a move that would see the overturn of a nine-year-old ban.

South Korea Sets Crypto Corporate Investing Limit At 5%

South Korea’s Financial Services Commission (FSC) has drafted guidelines to allow listed companies and professional investors to trade crypto, according to a report from South Korean media outlet BusinessKorea. The FSC shared the draft with a public-private task force on January 6th, and according to a high-ranking financial industry official, authorities are expected to release the final guidelines between January and February.

Since 2017, corporate and institutional players in South Korea have been under an effective prohibition from trading and investing in digital assets like Bitcoin, with the government citing speculation and money-laundering risks. The country’s stance began to shift in February 2025, when the FSC announced a plan to gradually allow institutional participation in the space. The latest guidelines are a follow-up to this announcement.

South Korea easing up on corporate crypto investments hasn’t come without restrictions, however. Authorities have reportedly set an investment cap of 5% of equity capital, which companies can only deploy into coins inside the top 20 by market cap list. These assets will be determined based on the semi-annual market cap data sourced from the top five domestic digital asset exchanges.

Stablecoins tied to the US Dollar, like USDT and USDC, currently fall inside the top 20 list, but whether they will be included as permitted investment targets is still being discussed.

While South Korea is planning on a 5% investment cap, other countries like the US or Japan have no such limits on corporate investing. One financial industry insider has raised concerns about the restriction, saying that “investment limit restrictions not found overseas could weaken capital inflow factors and prevent the emergence of virtual currency investment specialist companies.”

South Korea has also made other developments related to the crypto industry recently. The East Asian nation is planning to introduce digital asset spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) this year, looking to investment vehicles active in the US and Hong Kong as reference points.

The FSC is also working on the next phase of its digital asset legislation, which could see the establishment of a regulatory framework for stablecoins. As reported by Bitcoinist, the bill has so far been delayed due to a dispute between the FSC and the Bank of Korea (BoK).

The BoK, South Korea’s central bank, has been pushing for banks to own at least a 51% stake in any stablecoin issuer seeking approval in the country. While the FSC agrees that financial institutions should be involved in the issuance of won stablecoins, the regulator has raised concerns that a bank majority requirement could limit market participation and innovation.

Bitcoin Price

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading around $90,600, down 2.5% over the past week.

Украинская Национальная комиссия по регулированию электронных коммуникаций (НКЭК) внесла платформу для криптоставок Polymarket в реестр заблокированных интернет-ресурсов. Регулятор классифицирует сервис как организатора азартных игр, а для этого нужна лицензия, которой у Polymarket нет.

Крупнейший публичный корпоративный держатель первой криптовалюты, компания Strategy докупила 13 627 BTC на $1,25 млрд. Покупки совершались с 5 по 11 января при средней цене $91 519 за монету.  

Ethereum’s current strength is largely linked to its network performance and activity, which has been demonstrating robust growth. While the leading blockchain has witnessed sharp growth in several key areas, one area is currently standing out, and that is the economic activity on the network.

A Divergence Between Ethereum’s Real Activity And Price

With the broader cryptocurrency landscape evolving, Milk Road, a market expert and trader, has revealed that the Ethereum network is showcasing signs of robust strength. When compared to its recent price performance, the leading network subtly conveys a different narrative. 

Despite the fact that ETH’s market value has occasionally fluctuated or even lagged behind riskier assets, the quantity of economic activity being settled on the blockchain has continued to rise. The disparity highlights a crucial aspect of ETH’s current cycle that its fundamentals are strengthening beneath the surface, while market sentiment is not accurately reflecting it.

At the same time, the Ethereum network is being chosen for live deployment by increasing institutional capital. This kind of increases a chain that is becoming less of a speculative asset and more of a financial infrastructure. 

According to Milk Road, these participants are more focused on uptime, liquidity, settlement certainty, and compliance, which narrows the set of viable networks quickly. Meanwhile, the economic weight placed on Ethereum’s base layer becomes significant as more activity occurs on the chain, increasing transaction volume and fee income.

As seen in the past, ETH has had difficulty staying flat for extended periods of time when demand is high. However, the analyst expects the price of ETH to increase as adoption rises.

Real Assets Are Swamping The Network

According to a report from Leon Waidmann, the head of research at On-Chain Foundation, Tokenized Real-World Assets (RWAs) are quickly emerging as one of Ethereum’s key growth drivers. With real-world assets moving into ETH, the development is bringing traditional finance activity on-chain at a fast rate.

This change is more than just buzz as institutional infrastructure, token issuance, and settlement volumes are all growing at the same time, transforming ETH’s status. Data shows that the market cap of stablecoins found on the network is approximately $190 billion, indicating ETH’s growing choice as the major chain for crypto finance. 

Meanwhile, the total amount of tokenized funds has reached between $6 billion and $7 billion, and is still growing rapidly. Its tokenized commodities have hit over $4 billion, which appears to be still breaking out to new highs.  Furthermore, ETH’s tokenized stocks are valued at around $400 million to $500 million, but this is just the beginning. Such a scenario suggests that tokenization of real-world assets may be the foundation of Ethereum’s next significant adoption phase.

Considering the robust growth in these areas, Waidmann stated that “ETH is becoming the default settlement layer for real assets.” Waidmann’s claims are not based on simple narratives, but on the fact that the network already works at scale.

Сооснователь Эфириума Виталик Бутерин назвал условия, при которых его блокчейн смог бы стать достаточно устойчивым и «окостеневшим», чтобы выполнить свою первоначальную миссию — быть фундаментом для децентрализованных приложений и смарт-контрактов.

Приватная криптовалюта Monero (XMR) достигла нового исторического максимума $599 при рыночной капитализации $10,4 млрд. Инвестиционный директор криптофонда Merkle Tree Capital Райан Макмиллин (Ryan McMillin) объяснил происходящее возобновлением интереса трейдеров к криптовалютам, сохраняющим конфиденциальность владельца.

Глава исследовательского отдела компании CoinShares Джеймс Баттерфилл (James Butterfill) сообщил, что со 2 по 10 января биржевые криптофонды (ETF) потеряли $454 млн. Причина — надежды инвесторов на снижение процентной ставки Федеральной резервной системой США (ФРС) и удешевление банковских кредитов почти угасли, считает аналитик.

46-летняя жительница города Курска перевела 28 млн рублей мошеннику, предложившему заработать на инвестициях в криптовалюту. Вовлечение женщины в криптосхему длилось около года, сообщило региональное управление МВД России.

Просмотры посвященного криптовалютам контента на YouTube опустились до самого низкого уровня с января 2021 года. За последние три месяца спад стал особенно заметным, показали данные, опубликованные в соцсети Х основателем ITC Crypto Бенджамином Коуэном (Benjamin Cowen).  

Ethereum needs “better decentralized stablecoins,” Vitalik Buterin said this weekend, arguing that the next iteration has to solve three design constraints that today’s models keep skirting. His comments landed alongside a broader claim from MetaLeX founder Gabriel Shapiro that Ethereum is increasingly a “contrarian bet” versus what much of the venture-backed crypto stack is optimizing for.

Shapiro framed the split in ideological terms, saying it is “increasingly obvious that Ethereum is a contrarian bet against most of what crypto VCs are betting on,” listing “gambling,” “CeDeFi,” “custodial stablecoins,” and “’neo-banks’” as the center of gravity. By contrast, he argued, “Ethereum is tripling down on disrupting power to enable sovereign individuals.”

Why Ethereum Lacks A Decentralized Stablecoin

Buterin’s stablecoin critique starts with what to stabilize against. He said “tracking USD is fine short term,” but suggested that a long-horizon version of “nation state resilience” points to something that is not dependent on a single fiat “price ticker.”

“Tracking USD is fine short term, but imo part of the vision of nation state resilience should be independence even from that price ticker,” Buterin wrote. “On a 20 year timeline, well, what if it hyperinflates, even moderately?” That premise shifts the stablecoin problem from simply maintaining a peg to building a reference index that can plausibly survive macro regime changes. In Buterin’s framing, that is “problem” one: identifying an index “better than USD price,” at least as a north star even if USD tracking remains expedient near term.

The second issue is governance and oracle security. Buterin argued that a decentralized oracle must be “not capturable with a large pool of money,” or the system is forced into unattractive tradeoffs that ultimately land on users.

“If you don’t have (2), then you have to ensure cost of capture > protocol token market cap, which in turn implies protocol value extraction > discount rate, which is quite bad for users,” he wrote. “This is a big part of why I constantly rail against financialized governance btw: it inherently has no defense/offense asymmetry, and so high levels of extraction are the only way to be stable.”

He tied that to a longer-running discomfort with token-holder-driven control structures that resemble markets for influence. In his view, “financialized governance” trends toward systems that must continuously extract value to defend themselves, rather than relying on a structural advantage that makes attacks meaningfully harder than normal operation.

The third problem is mechanical: staking yield competes with decentralized stablecoins for capital. If stablecoin users and collateral providers are implicitly giving up a few percentage points of return relative to staking ETH, Buterin called that “quite bad,” and suggested it becomes a persistent headwind unless the ecosystem changes how yield, collateral, and risk interact.

He laid out what he described as a map of the “solution space,” while stressing it was “not endorsement.” Those paths ranged from compressing staking yield toward “hobbyist level,” to creating a staking category with similar returns but without comparable slashing risk, to making “slashable staking compatible with usability as collateral.”

Buterin also sharpened what “slashing risk” actually means in this context. “If you’re going to try to reason through this in detail,” he wrote, “remember that the ‘slashing risk’ to guard against is both self-contradiction, and being on the wrong side of an inactivity leak, ie. engaging in a 51% censorship attack. In general, we think too much about the former and not enough about the latter.”

The constraint bleeds into liquidation dynamics as well. He noted that a stablecoin “cannot be secured with a fixed amount of ETH collateral,” because large drawdowns require active rebalancing, and any design that sources yield from staking must reckon with how that yield turns off or changes during stress.

At press time, ETH traded at $3,118.

В 2025 году прекратили существование 11,6 млн криптовалютных проектов, в десять раз больше, чем годом ранее, сообщили аналитики платформы CoinGecko. Это рекордное количество за всю историю наблюдений.

Семь депутатов от Лейбористской партии во главе с председателем комитета по бизнесу и торговле Палаты общин Лиамом Бирном (Liam Byrne) призвали власти Великобритании запретить пожертвования криптовалюты на политические цели.

Стейблкоин USDT компании Tether стал главным инструментом обхода нефтяных санкций государственными компаниями Венесуэлы и средством выживания населения страны, рассказали опрошенные изданием Wall Street Journal (WSJ) эксперты.  

Asheesh Birla, the CEO of the largest XRP treasury company, Evernorth, has explained what his company is focused on, even as they continue to accumulate more XRP. Birla also explained what makes XRP stand out from other crypto assets in the market. 

What The XRP Treasury Company Evernorth Does 

During an interview on Paul Barron’s Podcast, Birla explained how his company’s approach differs from that of other digital asset treasury companies. He noted that the XRP treasury company helps grow the XRP ecosystem by offering both technical and financial support. The Evernorth CEO highlighted his background in creating products, which enables him and his company to innovate in the DeFi landscape. 

Furthermore, in addition to building products in the XRP ecosystem, the CEO of the XRP treasury company also mentioned that they deploy capital to earn yields through DeFi protocols on the network. As such, he believes that his company stands out from other digital asset treasury companies, since most other DATs focus solely on providing investors with exposure to crypto assets. 

Meanwhile, the CEO of the XRP treasury company stated that, in the long run, Wall Street will reward those who build in the ecosystem and provide yields to investors at the same time. It is worth mentioning that Evernorth just partnered with Doppler to advance institutional liquidity and treasury use cases on the XRP Ledger. Both firms are also exploring structured frameworks for deploying XRP at scale. 

Evernorth is backed by Ripple, which contributed some of its XRP holdings to kickstart the company’s treasury. Birla also praised Ripple, while noting how the company’s acquisitions last year will help push XRP’s institutional adoption. He also highlighted the uniqueness of the XRP Ledger (XRPL), stating that it is well-positioned to meet the DeFi needs of institutional investors. 

Future Plans For Evernorth

Evernorth’s CEO stated that his XRP treasury company plans to build more partnerships, even as it seeks to extend its business model beyond generating yields from DeFi protocols. He hinted that they are already looking to partner with some XRP stakeholders in Japan and South Korea. His company is also working closely with XRP Ledger developers. 

Birla noted that these developers are currently working on institutional lending on the XRP Ledger, and he believes his company could help by deploying capital and generating yields. Based on their roadmap, the Evernorth CEO is confident his company will remain the leading XRP treasury for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, he predicted that companies with the expertise to build in these crypto ecosystems will be the ones that will stand the test of time, even as he expects some DATs to fail. 

At the time of writing, the XRP price is trading at around $2.08, down in the last 24 hours, according to data from CoinMarketCap.