On February 1, 2026, the U.S. SEC signaled a policy shift during opening remarks at a joint SEC–CFTC harmonization event. Chairman Paul S. Atkins said Congress is nearer to bipartisan market-structure legislation, with regulators aiming for clearer, principle-based rules over enforcement-led actions. Cooperation with CFTC Chair Mike Selig was emphasized.

On 1 February 2026, Lighter announced Lighter EVM, an EVM‑equivalent rollup that links general‑purpose smart contracts to its low‑latency trading and liquidity. The design settles on Ethereum mainnet and enables near‑instant asset and position moves without waiting for full L1 finality, with a public release expected soon.

Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen and investor Tim Draper unveiled Grow California, a $40 million effort to elect moderate legislators and resist a union-backed wealth tax. The campaign began with $5 million from each founder in September and will target roughly a dozen state seats while emphasizing public safety, homelessness and budget discipline.

On February 1, 2026, Base said its Ethereum Layer‑2 saw intermittent slowdowns in transaction processing, while block production continued. Base engineers linked the behavior to traffic spikes and internal bottlenecks rather than a full outage. A 19‑minute interruption late last year and a separate January 14 incident on Sui have heightened reliability concerns.

On January 11, South Korea announced the end of a nine‑year ban on corporate crypto investing, and, as of February 1, 2026, regulators were weighing a 10% equity cap for listed firms and professional investors, up from 5%. The Financial Services Commission also floated a 15–20% ownership ceiling for exchange shareholders, drawing pushback from industry groups and academics.

A single wallet lost 4,556 ETH, worth about $12.25 million, in an address poisoning incident. Attackers crafted lookalike vanity addresses that appeared in the user’s transaction history, leading to a misdirected transfer. The case adds to a recent spate of large crypto thefts, including an almost $50 million loss in December 2025.

On 31 January 2026, the US Treasury announced sanctions against senior Iranian officials and financial networks said to be involved in violent protest crackdowns and domestic repression. The measures also target two UK-registered digital asset platforms, Zedcex Exchange and Zedxion Exchange, alleged to have processed funds tied to IRGC-linked wallets, with Zedcex handling more than $94 billion in transactions since 2022. These designations freeze assets under US jurisdiction, bar US persons from dealing with the listed parties, and warn foreign institutions of potential penalties for facilitating related transactions.

On January 31, 2026, a U.S. court sentenced Chinese national Jingliang Su to 46 months in federal prison and ordered $26,867,242 in restitution for laundering over $36.9 million from American victims. The scheme routed funds to Deltec Bank in the Bahamas, converted them to Tether (USDT), and moved them to a wallet in Cambodia.