TLDR Crypto 2026-01-21

Consumers want to use crypto like cash, and earn rewards like they would on their other cards. That's where AMARA begins: with a charge card built to turn crypto-linked value into real-world spend – not just something you hold.

…and they're looking for early investors.

>> Rewards as good as digital cash

>> AI Concierge curates travel, dining, and experiences for each member

>> Revenue from card interchange, a $60/month membership, and travel booking commissions

If you believe crypto belongs in everyday spending, invest by Jan. 29 at $2.50/share to earn up to 35% bonus shares, plus priority access to the $EMBR token.

Bermuda is partnering with Coinbase and Circle to pilot stablecoin payments across government agencies, accelerate USDC adoption among merchants and banks, and support tokenization and onchain tooling for local financial institutions while running nationwide digital-finance education and onboarding. The effort was unveiled at Davos and described as aspirational and non-exclusive. It builds on prior onchain pilots (including a USDC airdrop) and coincides with Coinbase's new Custom Stablecoins product, aiming to lower costs, speed settlement, and make dollar-denominated digital payments a practical part of everyday commerce on the island.

Portugal's gaming regulator told prediction market Polymarket to halt operations after more than €4 million flowed into presidential election markets in the hours before results, stoking fears that bets were placed on leaked exit polls. Regulators say Polymarket is unauthorized and political betting is banned, prompting potential network-level blocks as the episode adds to a growing list of jurisdictions (including France, Germany, and recent US state actions) moving against the platform.

Prediction markets are evolving from event speculation into financial primitives as DFlow tokenizes Kalshi on Solana for DeFi composability, Gondor enables borrowing against Polymarket ERC-1155 positions via Morpho vaults at 50% LTV, and Space delivers 10x leveraged exposure with multi-outcome liquidity unification. AI agents will price thin micro-markets where human attention is scarce and serve as interface layers translating plain-English views into optimal cross-platform exposure across Polymarket, Kalshi, leveraged venues, and perp DEXs. Impact Markets reveal conditional asset valuations like "BTC price if Fed cuts 75bp," while Decision Markets automate governance through futarchy and Opinion Markets trade subjective narratives. Liquidity remains the binding constraint as most order books are thin with wide spreads movable 10%+ with thousands of dollars.

Revolut has applied for a full banking license in Peru as part of its Latin American expansion strategy, targeting the country's $4.93 billion annual remittance market, where approximately 1 million people rely on money sent from abroad. The London-based neobank has seen its stablecoin payment volumes surge an estimated 156% year-over-year to approximately $10.5 billion in 2025 following its October 2025 introduction of 1:1 USD conversion for USDC and USDT. Revolut's move reflects a broader trend across Latin American fintech, with Mercado Libre launching its Meli Dollar stablecoin in Brazil in August 2024, Nubank developing dollar-pegged stablecoin credit card payments, and crypto wallet company Lemon raising $20 million to expand after issuing over 1 million wallets in Peru in under a year.

Ethereum daily transactions have surged to 2.1 million, surpassing 2021 cycle peaks with a 14% increase over two weeks, while average gas fees have dropped to multi-year lows driven by EIP-4844 and recent blob-capacity upgrades that reduced Layer 2 data posting costs. Stablecoin transfers make up the majority of network activity, with Tether's USDT volume roughly double that of Circle's USDC. Validator dynamics signal strong network confidence as the exit queue fell to zero from 2.67 million ETH in September. 2.6 million ETH awaits entry into staking – the highest queue since July 2023 – with approximately 30% of total ETH supply now staked.

Crypto card payment volumes have surged from $100 million monthly in early 2023 to over $1.5 billion by late 2025 – a 106% CAGR – reaching an $18 billion annualized run rate that now rivals peer-to-peer stablecoin transfers ($19 billion). Visa is leading with 90%+ of on-chain card volume through early infrastructure partnerships, with its stablecoin-linked card spending alone hitting a $3.5 billion annualized rate (460% YoY growth). India ($338 billion in crypto inflows) and Argentina (46.6% USDC share) emerge as global outliers, with cards serving distinct use cases like crypto-backed credit in India's UPI-saturated market and inflation hedging via stablecoin debit in Argentina.

The NYSE tokenization announcement is vaporware as it leaves out critical details like the chain, VM, stablecoins, jurisdictions, permissioning, and fees used to enable tokenization. The NYSE, a profit-driven TradFi incumbent backed by regulatory privilege, is unlikely to successfully execute the radically different, permissionless architectures tokenization requires.

Fish-to-Shark holders (10-1,000 BTC) accumulated approximately 110,000 BTC over the past 30 days, marking the fastest accumulation pace since Bitcoin dropped to $15,000 during the November 2022 FTX collapse. Bitcoin is trading roughly 25% below its October record high and 15% above its November low of around $80,000, indicating mid-to-large investors are using the range-bound market to build positions. Smaller Shrimp holders (under 1 BTC) simultaneously accumulated over 13,000 BTC, the largest increase since late November 2023, suggesting broad-based accumulation across multiple cohorts.

Strategy announced it acquired 22,305 BTC for roughly $2.13 billion at an average price of about $95,284, bringing total holdings to 709,715 bitcoin as of January 19.

US spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded $1.42 billion in net inflows during the week of January 12-16, marking the strongest weekly performance since early October when funds attracted $2.7 billion.

The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Professionals Association warned regulators that proposed virtual-asset management rules, notably removing the “de minimis” exemption that lets Type 9 managers hold small crypto allocations without a separate license, would force even tiny crypto exposures (eg. 1%) to trigger a full virtual-asset license, imposing heavy compliance costs and deterring traditional managers from experimenting with the asset class.

Ethereum is posting a rare efficiency milestone, with 7-day average transactions nearing 2.5 million, almost double year over year, while average gas fees have fallen to around $0.15, the lowest in modern ETH history.