📝 UK FCA Sets Guidelines for Crypto Firms Ahead of New Regulatory Regime

📌 The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) of the United Kingdom has released new guidelines detailing the application process for crypto firms as the country prepares to implement a new regulatory framework. This framework includes a formal application window, transitional rules, and stricter marketing requirements.

⚠️ Under the upcoming regulations, any firm wishing to engage in regulated crypto-asset activities must obtain authorisation under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (FSMA). This requirement applies to both new entrants and existing firms that are already registered under the UK's anti-money laundering rules or authorised under current payments and e-money regulations.

🚫 The FCA has made it clear that there will be no automatic conversion for firms currently registered under the Money Laundering Regulations. These firms must obtain full FSMA authorisation before the new regime takes effect. Additionally, companies already authorised under FSMA for other activities will need to adjust their permissions to include crypto services.

🔔 To assist firms during this transition, the FCA will conduct information sessions to explain the new regime, its regulatory expectations, and the application process. The regulator is also providing optional, free pre-application meetings through its pre-application support service, allowing firms to discuss their business models and improve their submissions.

🗓 An official application window will open prior to the launch of the new regime. The FCA anticipates this period will begin in September 2026 and last for at least 28 days. Applications submitted during this window are expected to be reviewed before the regime commences. Further details will be provided through formal directions published on the FCA's website.

🚀 Bitcoin Surges Past $96,000 Amid Record ETF Inflows

📈 On January 13, Bitcoin soared beyond $96,000, elevating its market cap over $1.9 trillion and the total cryptocurrency market to $3.33 trillion. This surge was propelled by unprecedented ETF inflows totaling $753.8 million, with Fidelity and Blackrock at the forefront.

Bitcoin surged past the $96,000 mark late Jan. 13 as U.S. President Donald Trump renewed his attacks on Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.

📊 The rally followed a significant net inflow into spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) on January 12, marking the highest single-day inflow since their 2024 launch. Notably, Blackrock’s IBIT saw a net inflow of $126.3 million, while Fidelity’s FBTC recorded $351.4 million.

📉 At 12:30 a.m. EST, bitcoin had risen nearly 5% from its previous price of approximately $90,500. This increase was primarily driven by growing institutional interest, but was initially sparked by Trump's administration subpoena against the Federal Reserve.

In a speech in Detroit celebrating 4.3% GDP growth in the third quarter of 2025, the U.S. President railed against Powell, whom he accused of refusing to lower interest rates to match economic momentum.

💥 The unexpected rise in the crypto economy led to the liquidation of millions in short bets, particularly in bitcoin. Data from Coinglass revealed that the surge above $96,000 resulted in over $270 million in short bets being liquidated within 24 hours, compared to nearly $24 million in liquidated long positions.

📈 With bitcoin now surpassing the $95,000 resistance level, market analysts suggest that it is nearing the $100,000 psychological barrier.

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🚀 Nexo Partners with Audi Revolut F1 Team as Official Digital Asset Partner

📈 On January 16, 2026, Nexo announced a multi-year partnership with the Audi Revolut F1 Team, becoming their inaugural official digital asset partner. This collaboration coincides with Audi's entry into the FIA Formula 1 World Championship for 2026, showcasing Nexo's digital tools on a global platform while aligning both brands with innovation and performance.

🌍 Nexo plans to engage globally through exclusive experiences, digital-first initiatives, and co-created content. Antoni Trenchev, Co-founder of Nexo, stated,

As the team’s official digital asset partner, we will bring meaningful utility and premium experiences to a global audience.

The activation of these initiatives will adhere to regional marketing strategies and jurisdictional regulations.

📉 The Shift in Crypto Markets: Moving Beyond the Four-Year Cycle

🔍 Crypto markets are undergoing a significant transformation as traditional four-year cycles fade away. According to research from algorithmic trading firm Wintermute, structural forces are now the primary drivers of digital asset pricing. The firm predicts that by 2026, cryptocurrencies will begin to be priced more like global financial instruments.

“The traditional four-year cycle is becoming obsolete. Market performance is no longer dictated by self-fulfilling timing narratives, but by where liquidity flows and investor mindshare concentrates,”

the firm stated.

📊 Wintermute's report, titled “Digital asset OTC market 2025,” highlights a shift in market behavior. Previously, crypto capital moved fluidly between assets like bitcoin and ethereum. However, in 2025, this pattern weakened as exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and digital asset trusts absorbed capital without redistributing it across the market. These vehicles acted as closed systems, maintaining demand for a limited number of large-cap assets while reducing activity in other areas.

📈 Looking ahead to 2026, Wintermute identifies three key factors that could influence pricing dynamics:

1. ETFs and digital asset trusts may expand their focus beyond major assets, allowing institutional liquidity to reach a wider range of cryptocurrencies.
2. Strong performance from bitcoin or ethereum could create a wealth effect, encouraging investors to take on more risk.
3. Investor attention may shift back to crypto from equities tied to emerging technologies, supporting new stablecoin issuance and greater market participation.

“Outcomes will depend on whether one of these catalysts meaningfully broadens liquidity beyond a handful of large-cap assets, or whether concentration persists,”

Wintermute concluded.

💰 Bitgo's IPO: A $213 Million Entry into Public Markets

📈 Bitgo has successfully priced its initial public offering (IPO) at $18 per share, raising approximately $213 million and entering the public markets with a valuation of around $2 billion. The company's shares began trading on January 22 on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker BTGO, following a late pricing the previous day. The offering was initially marketed within a range of $15 to $17 per share, but strong demand allowed Bitgo to price above that range.

📈 Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Bitgo specializes in providing digital asset custody and infrastructure services to institutional clients, including exchanges, hedge funds, and financial institutions. The firm supports over 1,550 digital assets and reports managing more than $104 billion in assets under management (AUM). Bitgo's service offerings include secure wallet infrastructure, staking, trading, and settlement tools, positioning the company as a key provider of backend services for the digital asset economy.

📊 Financial disclosures reveal that Bitgo generated $4.19 billion in revenue during the first half of 2025, representing a remarkable 273% increase from the same period the previous year. This growth has been primarily attributed to rising demand for custody and infrastructure services. The IPO marks the first cryptocurrency-related listing of 2026 and comes despite a recent pullback in digital asset prices, with bitcoin down approximately 28% from its peak at the time of pricing.

🔍 Market observers view Bitgo's listing as a significant step towards the integration of digital asset firms into traditional capital markets. However, the company will continue to face regulatory scrutiny and competition within the custody sector. Underwriters for the offering included Goldman Sachs and Citigroup.

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Lucky Train is a Web3 project on TON in a Telegram Mini App, where you earn rewards just by riding the train.

To introduce new users to the project, a giveaway is starting.

💰 Prize pool: 10,000 USDT
🏆 30 winners

How to enter (2 steps):

1. Connect your wallet in the Mini App
2. Subscribe to the official Lucky Train Telegram channel

🗓 Starts: January 26
⏳ Duration: 10 days (through February 4)
📢 Results: February 5

Winners will be selected via a smart contract on TON. Everything is on-chain and transparent, and the contract link will be available to everyone. Details and results will be posted in the official Lucky Train Telegram channel.

✅ Join now: connect your wallet and subscribe

📉 Crypto Market Update: A Week of Losses with Some Notable Exceptions

💔 Over the past week, the crypto market experienced a significant downturn, losing approximately $220 billion and hovering around the $3 trillion mark. Bitcoin fell by 6.6%, and many altcoins suffered losses; however, a few managed to post gains.

🚫 Last Sunday, Bitcoin was trading just above $95,000 per coin but has since dropped to $88,798. Ethereum (ETH) saw a decline of 11.6%, while BNB and XRP each fell by over 7%. Solana (SOL) decreased by 11.1%, and the biggest loser of the week was Merlin Chain (MERL), which plummeted by 48.74%. Other notable declines included SPX6900 (SPX) down 31.13%, Flow (FLOW) falling 25.44%, and Decred (DCR) dropping 24.93%.

🌟 Despite the overall market slump, some cryptocurrencies defied the trend. River (RIVER) surged by 131.7%, and Canton (CC) rose by 36.1%. Other gainers included Oasis Network (ROSE) with a 25% increase, Kaia (KAIA) up 23.61%, and Myx Finance Token (MYX) which saw an 18% rise. Additionally, gold-backed tokens PAXG and XAUT each gained just over 9% against the U.S. dollar.

⚖️ This week served as a stark reminder of the crypto market's volatility, swinging from severe losses to unexpected gains. While most major cryptocurrencies struggled, a small group of outliers and tokenized gold demonstrated that opportunities still exist for investors willing to look beyond the chaos. The sustainability of this resilience will depend on the market's risk appetite and whether it has more turbulence ahead.

🪙 Tether's Strategic Shift: Investing in Physical Gold

📈 Gold prices have surged significantly in 2026, increasing by 92% over the past year and reaching $5,279 per ounce as of January 28. This rise coincides with Tether's plans to deepen its involvement in physical gold.

💼 Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino announced that the company intends to allocate 10% to 15% of its investment portfolio to physical gold by the end of 2026. This marks a significant expansion of Tether's strategy towards hard assets. However, Ardoino clarified that this allocation pertains only to Tether's proprietary investment portfolio, which is funded by excess profits, and does not affect the reserves backing its stablecoin products like USDT or the gold-backed token XAUT.

For our own portfolio, it’s reasonable that we are going to have around 10% in bitcoin and 10% to 15% in gold

Ardoino told Reuters, emphasizing that this move is part of a broader diversification effort.

🏆 The gold exposure will be exclusively in physical bullion stored in secure Swiss vaults and fully owned by Tether. Purchases will be made gradually rather than through a single large transaction, with portfolio decisions reviewed quarterly.

📊 Tether already holds approximately 130 metric tons of gold, much of which supports its gold-linked products. The company added 27 metric tons in the fourth quarter of 2025 and has been acquiring about two tons per week despite rising prices.

🌍 Ardoino views gold as a hedge against global uncertainty due to ongoing geopolitical tensions and economic unease that have driven demand for tangible stores of value. He also compared gold and bitcoin, describing both as long-term holdings rather than short-term trades.

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📌 Silver Is Trading Like a Shortage Story – Bitcoin Like a Macro Beta Trade

🔔 Silver and Bitcoin have spent much of the past decade being discussed in the same breath, often framed as parallel alternatives to fiat money and beneficiaries of macro stress. That story is currently being put to the test, as the two assets are drifting in wildly different directions in late January 2026, indicating how investors are now valuing them as a vastly different trade in a tightening financial environment.

❗️ Silver shot to a fresh all-time high on Thursday and briefly hit over $121 per ounce, only to be violently pulled back, falling over 15% on Friday to about $97. Bitcoin, on the other hand, has been on a downward trend on Friday, trading around $82,800, approximately 2.2% in 24 hours after touching an intraday low near $81,300.

⚠️ There have been losses over time periods, with Bitcoin falling by almost 7% in the last week, over 13% in the last two weeks, and about 22% in comparison to a year ago. The cryptocurrency now trades over 34% below its record in October of over $126,000, which happened amid an institutionally fueled run-up related to inflows of spot ETFs.

⚡️ However, the price of silver remains approximately 25% up in the last month, nearly 150% higher in the last six months, and more than 200% up in the last year, after having shot up in a massive surge that started in 2025.

⚡️ BitGo CEO Mike Belshe: Crypto Must Separate Custody From Trading to Prevent Future Failures

🛍 Mike Belshe is not trying to build the loudest company in crypto. He is trying to build the most trusted one. As CEO and co-founder of BitGo, Belshe has spent the last decade positioning the firm as the institutional backbone of digital assets; the custody provider, settlement engine, and compliance infrastructure that large financial players can actually underwrite. Now, with BitGo becoming the first crypto IPO of 2026, he believes the market is finally catching up to that vision. “We went public because the industry is maturing,” Belshe told CryptoNews in an interview. “Institutions want infrastructure they can diligence, underwrite, and trust over long time horizons.”

❗️ In an industry still defined by cycles of hype, collapse, and reinvention, BitGo’s public debut marks something different: a bet that crypto’s future belongs less to speculative trading and more to regulated financial plumbing. The timing of BitGo’s listing is striking. Crypto markets remain volatile, and the public markets have not always been kind to digital asset firms. Yet Belshe frames the decision as almost inevitable, not opportunistic but structural. “The strategic rationale is straightforward: more transparency, more access, and a stronger platform for long-term institutional adoption,” he says.

⚠️ For BitGo, becoming a public company is not simply a capital event. It is a governance statement. Disclosure and accountability, Belshe argues, are features when your business is safeguarding billions of dollars in client assets. “It raises the bar on disclosure and governance,” he says. “That’s a feature, not a bug, when your job is safeguarding client assets.” Unlike exchanges built around retail flow, BitGo has never positioned itself as a trading destination. Instead, it has focused on what institutions actually require to participate in crypto markets responsibly: custody, wallet technology, settlement workflows, prime brokerage services, stablecoin rails, and compliance architecture.

❓ “BitGo isn’t a retail exchange,” Belshe explains. “We’re the underlying infrastructure that institutions rely on.” That distinction is more than branding. It is also a response to the industry’s most painful lessons. “A core lesson from past failures is that vertically integrated models can create dangerous single points of failure,” he says. BitGo’s philosophy is rooted in separation. Custody should not sit inside the same entity as trading, market making, or clearing. That structural division, familiar in traditional finance, is precisely what Belshe believes crypto needs to survive its next phase.

🌐 “The long-term health of this market depends on separating roles,” he says. “That’s exactly where BitGo has focused for years.”