Author: Kryptonews

Ukraine has requested the extradition from Poland of an archaeologist who was detained in Warsaw earlier this month on suspicion of conducting illegal excavations in Russian-occupied Crimea, according to the Polish media. The Warsaw District Prosecutor’s Office received the extradition request from Kyiv authorities for Oleksandr Butyagin, following his apprehension in Poland on December 4. Butyagin, 52, is an employee of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, where he leads the archaeology division specializing in the Northern Black Sea region, which encompasses Crimea. Polish authorities arrested Butyagin in Warsaw while on a lecture tour across Europe, with a planned…

If rising hardware prices and $80 software weren’t enough proof that gaming’s getting pricier, the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Mario Kart World price tags should seal it.But you don’t need a high-end console or premium release to have a good time. Dig into the indie scene, and you’ll find a stack of great games that cost next to nothing.Every title here costs $20 or less, and many drop even lower during sales. Better yet, they run on just about anything; some barely need a GPU at all, and those that do only ask for hardware from nearly a…

The crypto market is up today, extending gains for a second consecutive session. Total cryptocurrency market capitalization has increased by around 1%, now standing at approximately $3.07 trillion, while 24-hour trading volume sits at $91.4 billion, according to market data.Most major assets are trading in positive territory, reflecting steady risk appetite despite relatively muted volumes. TLDR: The crypto market extended gains for a second day, with total market capitalisation rising about 1%; Roughly 9 of the top 10 coins traded higher; Analysts warn Bitcoin is still struggling below $90,000, with holiday trading volumes reinforcing a choppy, high-resistance market; 10x Research…

Crypto exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are set to explode in 2026, with over 100 new ETF filings expected and billions of dollars in net inflows pouring into the investment vehicles, according to analysts.Senior Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas forecast a base case of $15 billion in capital flows in 2026 and as much as $40 billion if market conditions improve. The US Federal Reserve is “probably” going to lower the interest rate in 2026, pushing net inflows toward the mid or upper limits of the estimate, Balchunas told Cointelegraph.  Weekly inflows to crypto ETFs in 2025. Source: CoinSharesETF investors have also…

Cryptocurrency markets had a small rebound following last week’s dip, as investor activity wound down during the holidays.Bitcoin (BTC) fell to a weekly low of $86,561 on Tuesday, before bouncing back above $88,600 on Friday, according to TradingView data.Spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) demand remained weak, recording $175 million in outflows on Wednesday, which marked a fifth consecutive day of net outflows, according to Farside Investors.In the wider cryptocurrency space, members of the Aave community criticized their decentralized lending and borrowing protocol over what they described as a premature push to advance a governance proposal on brand asset ownership.The proposal,…

Forced liquidations in the crypto derivatives market reached about $150 billion in 2025, according to CoinGlass data.On its face, the figure looks like a year of persistent crisis. For many retail traders, watching price feeds turn red became shorthand for chaos. In practice, it captured something more mundane and structural: the notional value of futures and perpetual positions that exchanges forcibly closed when margin fell short.Most of the time, that flow was more of a maintenance function than a crash. In a market where derivatives rather than spot markets set the marginal price, liquidations operated like a recurring levy on…

USX, a Solana-native US dollar-pegged stablecoin, briefly traded below its peg on decentralized exchanges early Friday after heavy sell pressure overwhelmed available liquidity on Orca and Raydium, prompting issuer Solstice Finance to step in with liquidity support.In an X post on Friday, PeckShieldAlert showed USX briefly trading as low as $0.10 in secondary markets before rebounding, a move attributed to isolated trades executed during a period of extremely thin liquidity. Source: PekShieldAlertAggregated DEX data shows a less extreme move. A 15-minute USX/USD chart from GeckoTerminal’s Orca pool shows USX dipping to about $0.80, reflecting where most trading volume occurred, before recovering and stabilizing…

As 2025 draws to a close, bitcoin BTC$87,300.59 faced a tough year, down about 7% year-to-date, while gold, the S&P 500 and technology stocks continue to hit all-time highs. As a result, public bitcoin mining stocks have shown stark contrasts, driven largely by diversification into artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure. The standout performers have been companies aggressively pivoting to AI. IREN (IREN) led with a massive +300% year-to-date (YTD) gain, fueled by major GPU cloud deals and Microsoft’s backing. Cipher Mining (CIFR) followed strongly at +230%, expanding AI hosting partnerships specifically with Fluidstack. Hut 8 (HUT) also…

Zahi Hawass, a well-known Egyptian archaeologist, renewed his promise to bring an ancient bust of Nefertiti home this week, claiming that his country was readier than ever to host it once more, thanks to the recent opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum near Giza. He called once more for Berlin’s State Museums to return the bust of Nefertiti, which dates to ca. 1351 BCE–1334 BCE and is among the most famous ancient Egyptian artifacts held outside Egypt. It has repeatedly faced calls for repatriation across the years, and was very nearly given back to Egypt during World War II, when…

The BNB Smart Chain’s Fermi hard fork has been scheduled for mainnet activation on Jan. 14, following about two months in the testnet phase.Fermi will lower the block interval to 250 milliseconds from 750 milliseconds to support “time-sensitive” applications that require sub-second block times, according to the BNB community’s GitHub page.The upgrade also introduces extended voting parameters to make up for the communication lag between nodes due to the shortened block times.A new indexing mechanism is included for users who only need a portion of the ledger’s total data, instead of downloading the entire block history, a process that consumes…