U.S. CFTC Chairman Warns of Crypto Regulatory “Gaps” and Announces He Will Step Down

U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Chairman Rostin Behnam expressed concerns about the lack of adequate regulation for digital assets, highlighting a "gap" in the U.S. cryptocurrency market. He stressed the need for tighter regulation, particularly for digital commodity assets, and noted that the CFTC has the ability to become a regulator in this space. Behnam will step down on January 20, the day President-elect Trump is inaugurated.

Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is reportedly in talks to raise $2 billion in funding at a valuation of $60 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. This valuation includes the funds Anthropic plans to raise in this round, which is set to make the startup the fifth most valuable in the U.S. after SpaceX, OpenAI, Stripe, and Databricks.

Spanish banks are working on a regulatory and operational framework to offer cryptocurrency exchange-traded products (ETPs), with some platforms like MyInvestor already starting to do so. This news was shared by Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley, who highlighted the potential acceleration in the pace of ETP adoption across Europe in the coming months.

In 2024, instant messaging app Telegram provided detailed information on over 2,000 users to U.S. authorities in response to data requests, a significant increase compared to the 14 requests involving 108 users from January to September 2023. This surge in responses followed the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov in August, after which the platform updated its privacy policy to allow the provision of IP addresses and phone numbers upon valid legal orders.

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse shared a photo on the X platform of himself, Ripple Chief Legal Officer Stuart Alderoty, and U.S. President-elect Trump having dinner at Mar-a-Lago on Monday night. Garlinghouse captioned the photo with a brief "Strong start to 2025."

Sol Strategies, a Canadian listed company, announced that it will invest 25 million Canadian dollars in the Solana ecosystem through an unsecured credit line. This move comes as the company transforms into one of Solana's largest pledgers and ecosystem participants. The credit line has an annual interest rate of 5%, and the company plans to use the funds for large-scale purchases of Solana tokens to support pledge operations and acquisitions.

A U.S. District Court judge approved Coinbase's request for an interlocutory appeal in the SEC's lawsuit against the exchange, temporarily halting the proceedings. The case will now be submitted to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals for trial. The judge noted a key legal issue regarding the application of the Howey test in crypto assets, which is subject to major disagreements and will benefit from further clarification.

Ethereum Layer2 network Arbitrum awarded its largest developer grant ever to South Korea's Lotte Group to advance the integration of Caliverse, Lotte's metaverse gaming platform, with Arbitrum as its main blockchain infrastructure provider. Offchain Labs shared this news at the 2025 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Usual announced the launch of the "Revenue Switch" mechanism, which will directly distribute protocol revenue to $USUAL stakers. The activation condition is that more than 50% of $USUAL is staked as USUALx, or it will automatically start on February 1, 2025 UTC+0. Rewards are limited to full-month holders to encourage long-term staking.

Web3 mobile infrastructure provider Jambo will launch its Token Generation Event (TGE) in January 2025, with the token code $J and a total supply of 1 billion on the Solana public chain. Jambo has built the world's largest on-chain mobile ecosystem, with over 650,000 JamboPhones sold in 128 countries and over 4.5 million blockchain wallets created.

Six new IP tokens are now available for trading on the BIO Protocol, covering areas such as Alzheimer's disease, industrial hemp fiber, ovarian aging, and cryopreservation.

According to unfolded data, ETFs and listed companies alone purchased 859,454 bitcoins in 2024, which is equivalent to absorbing 4.3% of the circulating supply in one year, roughly the issuance of bitcoins in the next eight years.

Bitcoin ETFs had a net inflow of 8,238 BTC today, and Ethereum ETFs had a net inflow of 33,780 ETH, according to Lookonchain. Fidelity added 3,625 BTC (about $365 million), bringing its total holdings to 209,135 BTC (about $21.05 billion). IShares (BlackRock) added 33,618 ETH (about $122 million), bringing its total holdings to 1,114