Revolut has applied for a full banking license in Peru as part of its Latin American expansion, aiming to target remittances and cross-border payments. The neobank plans to compete with established lenders in markets including Peru, Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, while building on strong growth in its crypto and stablecoin offerings. Its strategy comes as regional fintechs such as Mercado Libre, Nubank and Lemon ramp up dollar-pegged stablecoin products across Latin America.

Hong Kong’s crypto industry warns the OECD’s CARF rollout could burden local exchanges with complex data duties and steep penalties. A trade group’s submission seeks clarity on privacy, record-keeping after dissolution, and “per account” fines, while asking for APIs and flexibility on the five-month deadline. The city targets legislative amendments in 2026 and data exchange by 2028.

ASTER has dropped about 75% from its all-time high of $2.41 to around $0.62, even as 24-hour trading volume spiked above $300 million. Over the past week, Hyperliquid processed roughly $40.7 billion in perpetual futures volume and posted about $9.57 billion in open interest, outpacing Aster and other perp DEX rivals. Aster has launched a Strategic Buyback Reserve that allocates up to 80% of daily fees to token repurchases, but large token unlocks scheduled through 2026 continue to weigh on market sentiment.

On Jan 19, 2026, Hinkal introduced its Private Send feature, allowing users to route transfers through a smart contract so that payments appear to originate from the contract rather than their own wallets. The tool supports ETH, DAI, USDC, and USDT on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, and Polygon, and lets users split payments and schedule randomized execution windows while keeping their main public wallets.

On Monday, Ethereum co‑founder Vitalik Buterin argued that most existing DAOs function only as token‑voting treasuries and need to be redesigned for critical infrastructure such as oracles and onchain dispute resolution. He suggested different DAO models for "convex" and "concave" governance problems, emphasized privacy tools like zero‑knowledge proofs and warned that DAO governance should use but not be controlled by AI. He added that teams building new oracles or governance layers should treat DAO design and communication as a core part of their work amid a DAO token market capitalization of at least $17.5 billion.

On January 19 (SGT), SUN.io, the flagship DeFi platform on TRON, announced a Chinese rebrand to "Sun Wukong" with a new visual system, unifying products such as SunSwap, SUN DAO, SunPump, and SunX under one identity. The platform reports over $490 million in TVL on SunSwap, more than 23.94 billion USDT in cumulative trading volume on SunX, and a burn of over 650 million SUN tokens through protocol revenues and fees.

On Jan. 10, a $282 million cryptocurrency wallet compromise linked to a social engineering scam saw stolen Bitcoin bridged to Ethereum, split across wallets and funneled into Tornado Cash. Blockchain security firm CertiK reported that around $63 million was later deposited into the mixer, complicating efforts to follow the funds and recover assets.

On 19 January 2026, SWIFT detailed a January 2026 pilot with Societe Generale-FORGE, BNP Paribas Securities Services, and Intesa Sanpaolo that settled tokenised bonds using both fiat money and a euro-denominated stablecoin. The test executed delivery-versus-payment, coupon disbursements, and final redemption flows with SG-FORGE's MiCA-compliant EUR CoinVertible token, while preserving existing SWIFT messaging standards and banking roles.