Galaxy Digital Holdings Ltd. announced this week that its board has authorized a $200 million share repurchase program for the company’s Class A common stock.

This weekend, the Bitcoin network logged its steepest difficulty cut since July 3, 2021—a moment that followed China’s sweeping ban on mining and trading, which triggered a sharp market sell-off and sent miners scrambling for exits beyond the region.

BTC lending platform Strike has updated its bitcoin-backed loan policies amid heightened crypto market volatility, extending the margin call recovery window and adjusting loan-to-value thresholds to give borrowers more flexibility.

Tether’s USDT reached record highs across usage, transfers, and reserves in Q4 2025, continuing to grow even as the broader crypto market slowed sharply after October’s liquidation event.

Prediction markets across Kalshi, Polymarket, and Myriad are signaling a strong consensus that the New England Patriots will lose Super Bowl LX on Feb. 8, with pricing one day before kickoff historically among the most reliable signals these platforms produce.

Several X accounts have reignited a long-running debate in bitcoin circles, arguing that a single onchain bitcoin now underpins multiple financial claims across exchange-traded funds (ETFs), futures, perpetual swaps, wrapped tokens, and structured products. The argument, often labeled the “paper bitcoin” theory, draws direct comparisons to gold’s financialization in the 1980s, when derivatives came to dominate price discovery.

Reports detail that Vietnam’s Ministry of Finance has floated a draft circular that would pull cryptocurrency trading firmly into the tax net, proposing a securities-style framework that levies a flat 0.1% personal income tax on every crypto transfer while exempting the activity from value-added tax.

Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) finally halted weeks of selling pressure with a strong inflow, offering a rare moment of relief. Ether and solana, however, remained under strain, while XRP continued to quietly rebuild momentum.

This week’s stories cut to crypto’s foundations. Tom Lee defended ETH treasury drawdowns as structural, not a flaw. The new Epstein file dump reignited scrutiny around Blockstream. Nic Carter showed most Bitcoin devs see quantum risk as distant, but legitimate. Vitalik called time on generic L2s, and Wintermute’s Evgeny Gaevoy argued the industry has stalled on real substance despite nonstop narratives.

On Saturday morning, bitcoin’s price sits between $68,090 and $69,162 over the last hour, with a $1.36 trillion market cap, $97.38 billion in 24-hour volume, and a wide $66,131 to $71,604 intraday range, reflecting a market that has stopped panicking but hasn’t found conviction.

Playnance, a Web2‑to‑ Web3 gaming infrastructure whose model separates gameplay from value custody, ensuring all balances are secured in audited smart contracts rather than studio servers.

Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank, stated that it was preparing to roll out a program of crypto-backed loans for corporate customers. The institution stressed that it was currently finalizing the infrastructure needed to scale up the rollout of these financial products.

XRP momentum is accelerating as Bitrue deepens integration, rolls out new RLUSD trading pairs, and doubles down on positioning traders for a potential market recovery, reinforcing XRP’s role as a core growth asset in crypto markets.

Multiple emerging crypto narratives could converge to fuel the next bull market, with structural growth drivers, institutional capital, and expanding blockchain use cases setting the stage for a powerful multiyear upswing, according to Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan.

XRP is emerging as core financial infrastructure as institutional DeFi takes shape, embedding itself into payments, liquidity and on-ledger credit while positioning Ripple’s network for regulated, scalable tokenized finance.