Total3, which tracks aggregate crypto market capitalization excluding Bitcoin and Ethereum, stood at around $713 billion on Feb. 22, down roughly 40% from its October 2025 peak and near mid-November 2024 levels, BlockBeats reports. The gauge had surged more than 91% following the Nov. 5, 2024 U.S. presidential election, climbing from approximately $600 billion to $1.16 trillion by December 2024, then easing to around $900 billion before briefly rebounding to $1.13 trillion on Jan. 18, 2025; it reached an interim high near $1.19 trillion in October 2025 before a sharp pullback broke the prior uptrend. Bitcoin experienced a maximum drawdown exceeding 50% from peak to trough, falling to around $60,000 before recovering to approximately $68,000, while Ethereum has declined about 60% from its historical high near $5,000 in August 2025. The CMC Fear & Greed Index registered 14 in "Extreme Fear" territory and had dropped to 5 on Feb. 5, one of the lowest levels on record.

A shadow network of Russia-linked exchanges enables sanctions evasion via crypto, Elliptic reports. The firm identified five platforms: ABCeX, Exmo, Rapira, Bitpapa, and Aifory Pro. ABCeX processed at least $11 billion, while Rapira has been linked to over $72 million in transactions with sanctioned exchange Grinex.

At least five Russia-linked cryptocurrency exchanges continued to provide financial channels for sanctioned entities after the U.S. seizure of Garantex in March 2025, with most platforms not yet sanctioned, Elliptic said on Feb. 22. Only peer-to-peer platform Bitpapa was added to the U.S. Treasury OFAC sanctions list in March 2024, and approximately 9.7% of its outgoing funds flowed to sanctioned entities while it frequently changed wallet addresses to evade monitoring, the firm said. Elliptic reported that unsanctioned ABCeX operates from the Moscow Federal Building, Garantex's former headquarters, and has processed at least $11 billion in cryptocurrency transactions, with sizable flows linked to Garantex and Aifory Pro; Exmo, despite claiming it exited Russia after the 2022 Russia-Ukraine conflict, still shares custodial wallet infrastructure with Russia-based Exmo.me and conducted over $19.5 million in direct transactions with sanctioned entities including Garantex, Grinex and Chatex. The report added that Rapira traded over $72 million directly with sanctioned platform Grinex, and Aifory Pro offered cash-to-crypto services in Moscow, Dubai and Turkey, helping users bypass Western service restrictions via USDT virtual cards; Chainalysis previously reported illicit crypto addresses received $154 billion in 2025, including over $93.3 billion involving the ruble-backed A7A5 stablecoin, while TRM Labs estimated the annual total at approximately $158 billion.

IoTeX disclosed on X that a private key compromise led to losses of approximately $2 million in USDC, USDT, IOTX and WBTC, Odaily Planet Daily reports. The team said it has contained the incident, is reinforcing security and is working with exchanges and law enforcement to freeze stolen funds. Onchain operations and deposit functions will resume within 24 to 48 hours after security upgrades are completed. The project described the breach as a sophisticated, long-planned attack by professional actors targeting multiple blockchain networks.

The Ethereum validator queue currently lists 3,753,754 validators waiting to stake and 32 waiting to unstake. The figures reflect the latest validator queue counts for both staking and unstaking operations.

Bitcoin exchange inflows are dominated by large holders, with the exchange whale ratio reaching 0.64—the highest since October 2015—meaning 64% of inflows come from the top ten single-deposit addresses, ChainCatcher reports. The average single transaction size of Bitcoin inflows reached 1.58 BTC, a high since mid-2022; after a pullback to around $60,000 earlier this month, total inflows briefly surged to approximately 60,000 BTC before easing to a seven-day average of about 23,000 BTC. Since 2026, daily altcoin deposit transactions have averaged approximately 49,000, up 22% from around 40,000 in Q4 2025, and CryptoQuant says elevated deposits typically signal increased volatility and weakening market confidence in non-Bitcoin assets. Tether (USDT) daily net inflow fell from a $616 million peak in November 2025 to around $27 million, including a single-day net outflow of $469 million on January 25, 2026.

The cryptocurrency industry lost approximately $370.3 million to exploits and scams in January 2026, the highest in nearly 11 months and nearly four times the amount lost in January 2025, CertiK data show. A single social engineering attack accounted for approximately $284 million of the total, with 40 related security incidents recorded in January. On Feb. 22, Uniswap founder Hayden Adams warned of fake search engine ads impersonating Uniswap, with scammers purchasing keywords such as "Uniswap" to push lookalike websites to the top of search results; the fraudulent sites closely mimic the official interface, and once users connect wallets and authorize transactions, funds are immediately drained through signature authorizations rather than protocol-layer vulnerabilities, BlockBeats reports. A user identified as "Ika" on X said their wallet assets worth hundreds of thousands of dollars were lost after clicking a counterfeit link at the top of search results, and a similar interface replication incident was reported in October 2024.

Bitcoin's consolidation below $70,000 triggered a major reset in options volatility, with at-the-money implied volatility compressing to 48% and the DVOL index dropping about 10 points, Glassnode data show in its latest BTC Options Weekly Report. The volatility risk premium flipped from negative 45 earlier this month to positive territory, while the 1-week 25-delta skew climbed from 7 points to 14 points and tilted toward puts, with put contracts accounting for two-thirds of trading last week and put buying reaching 34%. Dealers are broadly short gamma in the $58,000–$70,000 band, which could amplify sharp downward moves, though a gamma cluster around $75,000 indicates some positioning for a potential rebound. Glassnode concluded that fear-driven pricing has eased but defensive positioning and structural fragility leave the short-term market exposed to additional volatility.

Pump.fun repurchased 683.9 million PUMP tokens using 16,813.70 SOL (about $1.42 million) yesterday, fees.pump.fun data show. The platform's PUMP buybacks, which began on July 15, have reached a cumulative value of $300,178,162, pushing the total repurchase amount above $300 million. These repurchases have reduced PUMP's circulating supply by 25.383%.