Riot Platforms' share price climbed about 11% to $18.80 after the miner disclosed a $96 million purchase of 200 acres in Rockdale, Texas, funded entirely by selling roughly 1,080 Bitcoin. The company also signed a 10-year data center lease and services agreement with AMD that could generate up to $311 million in revenue, with the potential to reach $1 billion if multiple extensions are exercised, while further pivoting its data centers toward AI and high-performance computing.

On Wednesday, West Virginia State Senator Chris Rose introduced the Inflation Protection Act to let the state's Board of Treasury invest up to 10% of assets in precious metals, select digital assets and stablecoins. The bill would restrict crypto holdings to tokens with a market capitalization above $750 billion in the previous calendar year, a threshold met only by Bitcoin as of January, and has been sent to the Committee on Banking and Insurance for consideration.

Bitcoin miner CleanSpark announced on Wednesday that it has signed a definitive agreement to purchase 447 acres of land in Brazoria County, Texas, to build a 300 MW data center that could be expanded to 600 MW. The facilities are designed to support artificial intelligence and high-performance computing workloads as the firm diversifies away from pure Bitcoin mining amid record network difficulty.

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has reiterated his support for Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm after Storm was found guilty in August of operating an unlicensed money transmitter business and may still face retrial on two unresolved felony counts. Buterin said he has personally relied on Storm's software to preserve privacy when making purchases and donating to human-rights causes, while Storm maintains his innocence and awaits potential further action from U.S. prosecutors and the courts.

On Friday, Binance announced that it will delist nine spot trading pairs starting Saturday, including FLOW/BTC, after a reported $3.9 million exploit of the Flow blockchain last week. The exchange also placed FLOW and three other tokens on its monitoring tag list, while the Flow Foundation said it is progressing with a recovery plan focused on account restoration and fraudulent token remediation.

The Flow Foundation is moving into the second phase of its recovery plan on EVM following a $3.9 million exploit of the blockchain, after dropping an earlier proposal to roll back the network. It reported identifying a path to restore Ethereum Virtual Machine functionality while also raising concerns about a single exchange account that deposited 150 million FLOW, converted much of it to BTC and withdrew over $5 million before the network halt. Trust Wallet separately disclosed a $7 million loss from a Christmas Day exploit of its browser extension, with thousands of addresses affected and thousands of reimbursement claims filed.

Members of the US Senate Banking Committee are expected to hold a markup on the Responsible Financial Innovation Act in the second week of January after months of delays. The House passed a related market structure bill in July, and sources familiar with the effort expect broader consideration in early 2026. Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis said on Dec. 19 she will not seek reelection in 2026.

Grayscale Investments has submitted an S-1 registration statement to the US Securities and Exchange Commission to list shares of its Bittensor Trust (TAO) on NYSE Arca under the ticker GTAO. The move would shift its over-the-counter TAO product into an exchange-traded structure following SEC review, while TAO was trading around $222.54 and had recently undergone its first halving toward a 21 million token cap.

After a reported $3.9 million exploit of the Flow blockchain on Saturday, the Flow Foundation abandoned an earlier proposal to roll back the layer-1 chain following community criticism over decentralization and security. In an updated plan shared on Monday, Flow said affected accounts have been temporarily restricted, EVM operations set to read-only, and confirmed there will be no chain reorganization, while warning that full asset recovery remains uncertain.