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BitMine makes smallest purchase of ethereum as asset rises in the new year

Last week, BitMine accrued 32,977 ethereum tokens, bringing its total to over 4.1 million, more than double the combined stockpile of the next 10 ethereum treasury companies.

Sage D. Young

1/5/26 12:27PM

BitMine Immersion Technologies, the leading ethereum treasury firm, has reprised its role as the largest buyer of ethereum, even if its most recent acquisition is a considerable slowdown from its pace last year.

On Monday, the firm announced that it acquired 32,977 ethereum tokens worth $105.3 million last week, its smallest weekly acquisition since the company started its treasury strategy. BitMine’s weekly purchase of ethereum last month averaged 96,007 tokens, ranging from as low as 44,463 tokens and as high as 138,452 tokens.

Despite the slowdown, BitMine Immersion Technologies has staked 659,219 tokens worth $2.1 billion. BitMine Chairman Tom Lee said in a statement, “At scale (when Bitmine’s ETH is fully staked by MAVAN and its staking partners), the ETH staking fee is $374 million annual (using 2.81% CESR), or greater than $1 million per day.”

BitMine’s total treasury now stands at 4,143,502 ethereum tokens, which is 3.43% of the cryptocurrency’s total supply. That’s more than double the combined holdings of the next 10 biggest ethereum treasury firms, including SharpLink Gaming, Ether Machine, and Bit Digital.

The price of ethereum, like bitcoin, has been on the rise in 2026, increasing 8.8% in the past seven days. Its current range is still roughly a 35% drawdown from its all-time high of nearly $5,000 set last year.

Meanwhile, digital asset manager Grayscale announced its ethereum staking ETF distributed staking rewards to shareholders for the first time, “a landmark moment,” Grayscale CEO Peter Mintzberg said in a Monday press release.

Sage D. Young9h

Ripple launches treasury platform to manage cash and cryptocurrencies

Ripple, the firm closely tied to the fifth-largest cryptocurrency, XRP, introduced a new treasury platform for digital asset and traditional cash management for users like financial officers, treasurers, and accountants.

Ripple’s move comes more than three months after it acquired treasury software provider GTreasury for $1 billion, one of several steps to grow the firm’s position in corporate finance.

Combining Ripple’s blockchain rails and GTreasury’s software, the new platform’s goal is to simplify treasury operations. It eliminates settlement delays with payment times of three to five seconds and optimizes yield from working capital 24/7 through tokenized money market funds such as BlackRock’s BUIDL and overnight secure repo markets with RLUSD, according to a Tuesday blog post.

Ripple Treasury also aims to provide “real-time cash positions, automated forecasting, and seamless reporting across traditional cash, digital assets, RLUSD, and XRP holdings,” the blog post stated.

Last year, Ripple filed its national banking license application with the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, while the firm’s subsidiary Standard Custody & Trust Company applied for a Federal Reserve master account, which would allow Ripple to hold RLUSD reserves directly with the Fed.

XRP has seen $2.4 billion in trading volume in the last 24 hours, increasing 1.8% in the period. The token’s all-time high was set in July 2025 at $3.65. Meanwhile, spot XRP ETFs had nearly $9.2 million worth of inflows on Tuesday, bringing cumulative inflows to $1.4 billion.

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$82B

Sage D. Young1/27/26

Crypto money laundering activity totaled more than $82 billion in 2025, more than 8x higher than 2020’s figure of $10 billion, according to a Tuesday report published by crypto analytics firm Chainalysis. Chinese-language networks dominated the ecosystem, accounting for roughly 20% of the illicit activity, or $16.1 billion, last year:

“Compared to other laundering endpoints, since 2020, inflows to identified CMLNs [Chinese-langugage money laundering networks] grew 7,325 times faster than those to centralized exchanges, 1,810 times faster than those to decentralized finance (DeFi), and 2,190 times faster than intra-illicit on-chain flows.”

Tom Keatinge, director at the Centre for Finance & Security at security think tank Royal United Services Institute, told Chainalysis that the rapid development of Chinese-language networks is an “an unforeseen consequence” of China’s imposition of capital controls.

“Wealthy individuals seeking to move money out of China and evade these controls provide the impetus and liquidity pool needed to service organized crime groups based in the West,” he noted.

Keatinge told Chainalysis, “The professional enablers of this capital flight provide the services necessary to match these two independent yet mutually beneficial needs.”

Chinese-language networks offer six primary money movement techniques to clean dirty money, which include recruiting individuals to rent out their financial identities, selling illicit cryptocurrency at a discounted rate, and obscuring fund origins through multiple transactions.

Overall, this Chinese ecosystem processed nearly $44 million per day last year.

Sage D. Young1/26/26

Avalanche joins class of cryptocurrencies with at least one ETF

Investment management company VanEck on Monday introduced the first exchange-traded fund offering spot exposure to AVAX, the native token for the Avalanche blockchain and the latest cryptocurrency with an ETF.

The new investment vehicle also aims to provide staking rewards for holders, according to the press release. AVAX, which has seen over $354 million in trading volume in the last 24 hours, is up slightly today. The token is trading at $11.70 as of 1:20 p.m. ET, a far cry from its all-time high of $144.96 in 2021.

The nascent VanEck fund joins a group of its crypto-specific ETFs, including the firm’s bitcoin ETF, with $1.4 billion in total assets; its ethereum ETF, which holds $147.5 million; and its solana ETF, with assets totaling $27.9 million.

BitMine makes smallest purchase of ethereum as asset rises in the new year

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