Last year, traffic to crypto-native media fell even as activity across the crypto economy remained strong: stablecoin liquidity expanded, USDT transfer volume surged, and on-chain trading stayed active.

Rather than pointing to fading interest in crypto, the divergence suggested that people were increasingly following and using the industry through channels beyond specialist media.

Our recent Outset Data Pulse report, built on traffic data from Outset Media Index, showed that across crypto-native outlets, global visits reached 1.12 billion in 2025, but monthly traffic moved steadily lower as the year progressed. It started at 105.85 million visits in January and ended at 70.78 million in December.

There were temporary rebounds, including a notable jump in July, but not enough to change the broader trend. By the fourth quarter, crypto-native traffic was sitting at its weakest levels of the year.

On-chain growth continued even as media traffic fell

While media traffic declined, there was an expansion of the on-chain economy. Stablecoin supply, one of the cleanest ways of tracking liquidity inside crypto, rose from $216.95 billion in January to $307.76 billion by December.

That disconnect became clearer in the underlying market data. Tether’s USDT transfer volume, a common proxy for how much value is moving across blockchain networks, soared in the second half and reached $18.92 trillion for all of 2025.

Decentralized exchange spot volume also climbed to $1.76 trillion and hit its yearly peak in October, showing that trading activity on-chain remained strong. Taken together, the data pointed to three things rising at once: more liquidity in the system, more money moving through it, and more trading happening directly on-chain.

Taken together, this was an active market, not a shrinking one. In other words, crypto-native media traffic fell when money, settlement activity, and trading continued to move through the crypto ecosystem at scale.

Crypto became easier to follow outside crypto media

Financial technology and general news outlets that include crypto in their coverage generated 6.91 billion visits in 2025. Their traffic also grew sharply during the year, rising from 366.71 million visits in January to 585.73 million in December. That alone suggests crypto lives inside a wider media environment than it once did.

Naturally, it is wrong to assume every mainstream visit was for a crypto story. But it does mean crypto no longer needs its own niche ecosystem in the same way it once did.

A few years ago, specialist crypto publications served as the default entry point into the industry. Articles explained the basics, simplified complex developments, and tracked market sentiment. They helped readers figure out what mattered most. Anyone who wanted to keep up with the sector would typically check out a crypto-native outlet first.

That competitive advantage has weakened, not because crypto got less important, but because crypto got easier to interact with elsewhere.

Today, a reader can follow crypto developments through mainstream finance coverage, follow their favourite projects and individuals on X, watch podcasts and interviews on YouTube, interact with fellow enthusiasts on Telegram, and more.

Crypto participation no longer depends on crypto media traffic

What this means is crypto-native outlets no longer have the monopoly on attention they once enjoyed. The structure of crypto media itself also matters. The top ten crypto-native outlets accounted for just a quarter of total traffic in 2025, with smaller publications making up the rest.

It is a crowded and decentralized landscape where no single player dominates and attention is dispersed across a large number of brands. That fragmentation made sense when crypto media was the centre of the industry’s information flow.

But now it exists alongside far more competition than just other crypto sites. It competes with finance media, tech media, creators, aggregators, trading interfaces, and the networks themselves.

Just as importantly, crypto-native media traffic and blockchain activity did not move together in any clean way. The analysis did not find a consistent one-month lead or lag relationship between the two. Rising on-chain activity did not reliably follow rising media traffic. Nor did rising media traffic reliably predict stronger blockchain usage in the following month.

That suggests crypto media traffic is not a proxy for crypto participation. Traffic is an important metric. But mainstream outlets cover many subjects beyond digital currencies and assets. Their overall audiences are not the same thing as crypto readership.

Monthly data can also miss shorter attention surges that happen over hours or days. But even with that, the divergence is hard to ignore. Crypto-native traffic fell while the broader crypto economy grew.

Crypto-native media still matters, but its role is changing

Crypto-native media has not lost its value but its place in the ecosystem is definitely becoming different. As crypto gets easier to discover, talk about, and use through mainstream platforms, social media, and on-chain apps, specialist outlets matter less as the first stop and more as the place people go when they want to understand what is actually going on.
That change says something bigger about crypto too. If the industry can keep growing while specialist media traffic falls, then attention is no longer the main thing holding it up. Crypto-native media still matters – just in a different way now. Less as the centre of the market, and more as the place that helps make sense of it once the noise settles.

Ripple on Thursday introduced native digital asset capabilities inside its enterprise treasury management system, letting corporate finance teams hold, view and manage XRP and RLUSD alongside traditional fiat balances for the first time within a single platform.

The two features, called Digital Asset Accounts and Unified Treasury, are built on GTreasury, which Ripple acquired in 2025. That system processed $13 trillion in payments volume last year for clients ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies. The digital asset layer adds to that existing infrastructure rather than replacing it.

Digital Asset Accounts let treasury teams create a Ripple-native digital asset account inside the platform. Balances in XRP, RLUSD, and other supported tokens appear alongside cash positions with real-time fiat valuations using live exchange rates.

Transactions are recorded automatically with native notional amounts, fiat equivalents, and market price at the time of each event, creating an audit trail without manual entry. The system captures balances at 15-decimal precision to match on-chain accuracy and eliminate rounding discrepancies that cause reconciliation problems.

Unified Treasury connects digital asset holdings from multiple external custodians through the same API connectivity layer Ripple Treasury already uses for bank integrations.

“Digital assets have arrived at the CFO’s desk, and the question has shifted from whether to engage to how to do so without disrupting existing operations,” said Renaat Ver Eecke, SVP at Ripple Treasury.

The launch positions Ripple Treasury ahead of competing TMS providers, none of which currently offer native digital asset management.

Ripple said the two features are the first in a broader digital asset framework that will expand to cross-border settlement, intercompany payments, and overnight yield on idle cash through repo markets, all powered by stablecoins.

A key figure allegedly behind the Huione network has been extradited to China, where he will face fraud and money laundering charges.

A report from Hong Kong-based news outlet Ta Kung Wen Wei noted that Li Xiong, who was part of a group that helped scam rings in Asia launder illicit funds, was escorted back to China from Phnom Penh, Cambodia, citing a statement from China’s Ministry of Public Security on WeChat.

Xiong was a core member of the Chen Zhi criminal syndicate, according to the report, and had previously served as chairman of Huione Group, a network that supported scam centers carrying out “pig butchering” schemes and other investment frauds to extract funds from victims across the globe.

For those unfamiliar, the Huione network has been linked to one of the largest illicit online marketplaces in operation, processing more than $89 billion in cryptoassets.

Xiong’s arrest and extradition come just months after the detention of Chen Zhi, the head of Prince Group, which operated Huione Group. The U.S. Department of Justice had earlier seized over 127,000 Bitcoin tied to Zhi’s operations.

The report added that several other members of Zhi’s criminal syndicate have also been apprehended, according to statements from Chinese public officials.

Efforts to cut off Huione’s financial network have been underway in the U.S. over the past few years.

Last year, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network labelled the group a primary money laundering concern and subsequently directed financial institutions to cut off access linked to its operations.

However, third-party reports suggest that the network has resurfaced under new domains and continues to operate across platforms such as Telegram, maintaining activity despite enforcement pressure.

The crypto market has started tanking once again, dropping 2.6% to 2.37 trillion as US President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. campaign against Iran would be entering a final phase over the coming weeks to end the conflict once and for all.

Bitcoin (BTC), the world’s largest crypto asset, fell over 4% to $66,250 amid souring market sentiment over a potential drop to $65,000, which many consider the last line of defense for a potential recovery.

Ethereum (ETH) was down 3.4%, approaching the $2,000 support, while other major crypto assets such as XRP (XRP), BNB (BNB), Solana (SOL), and Dogecoin (DOGE) posted losses between 2% and 6%. The majority of the top 100 crypto assets also shared the downward trend in the red.

As crypto prices fell, they triggered over $420 million in liquidations across leveraged markets as traders unwind their positions. The majority of this tally came from long liquidations, which saw $255 million wiped out, with Bitcoin and Ethereum accounting for around $64 million in long liquidations each, which accelerated the selloff.

The Crypto Fear and Greed Index, which shows market psychology, fell by 5 points to 27, showing increasing fear and anxiety in the market as investors expect more volatility.

Crypto prices began slipping downwards shortly after Trump said in an address to the nation on Wednesday that the U.S. military is going to hit Iran extremely hard over the coming 2 to 3 weeks to try to secure a decisive win in the ongoing war in the Middle East.

Trump warned that the U.S. would target Iranian energy infrastructures if no deal is reached. He also urged Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and his allies in the region to pressure Tehran to relinquish control over the Strait of Hormuz.

Despite the rhetoric, Trump mentioned that discussions are ongoing for a ceasefire between both sides. Iran, for its part, has demanded a permanent end to the war, compensation for damages during the war, and the full withdrawal of U.S. military presence from the region.

The fresh threat of escalation pushed crude oil prices back above $100, leading to a broad selloff through crypto, stocks, and traditional safe-haven assets such as gold. Gold prices fell 4% to $4,590 today, while silver fell 7.5%. Asian stocks such as Japan’s Nikkei 225 were down 2.5% as investors moved to cash.

Surging oil prices are triggering fears of runaway inflation over the coming months. As such, the market expects the Federal Reserve to continue to hold interest rates steady or even hike them as they combat the inflation spike caused by oil prices.

Lower expectations for Fed rate cuts typically weigh heavily on risk assets like cryptocurrency.

Nishad Singh, the former head of engineering at FTX, will pay $3.7 million to resolve his case with the US commodities regulator over his alleged role in the collapse of the crypto exchange and the misappropriation of user funds.

As part of the supplemental consent order, Singh will be required to pay a disgorgement of $3.7 million and imposes a five-year ban on trading in markets and an eight-year registration ban, blocking him from obtaining a license to operate in the sector, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) said in a statement on Wednesday.

“The initial consent order and supplemental consent order resolve the CFTC’s enforcement action against Singh,” it added.

FTX’s bankruptcy in November 2022 sent shock waves through the crypto industry, erasing billions in market liquidity, shattering user confidence and prompting authorities to accuse its leadership of fraud.

David Miller, the CFTC’s director of enforcement, ruled out additional restitution or civil monetary penalties for now and said the current penalties reflect Singh’s cooperation with authorities.

“The defendant engaged in, and aided, significant violations of the Act and CFTC regulations as the former FTX head of engineering, and the consent orders reflect the severity of these violations,” Miller said.

“But this resolution also reflects the Commission’s commitment to rewarding and incentivizing material assistance in Division investigations,” he added.

Singh charged by multiple agencies after FTX collapse

Attorneys for Singh said he was grateful this latest matter was at an end, and were “pleased that the CFTC recognized our client’s limited role in the underlying conduct and his extensive cooperation,” according to Bloomberg.

The CFTC accused Singh of personally misappropriating millions of dollars in assets and charged him in February 2023 with two counts: fraud by misappropriation and aiding and abetting fraud committed by former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.

Related: FTX Recovery Trust to distribute $2.2B to creditors in March

In April 2023, Singh entered into the consent order, was found liable for the charges and agreed to cooperate with the commission’s investigators. The regulator originally sought a range of penalties, including restitution, civil monetary penalties and permanent trading and registration bans.

In a separate case brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission in February 2023, Singh was accused of misusing customer funds and committing fraud by misappropriation, in violation of securities laws. The case was settled in December with Singh receiving an eight-year industry ban.

After FTX collapsed, US prosecutors also indicted Singh and four of his colleagues on charges including fraud and campaign finance violations. He faced decades in prison if found guilty, but after testifying against Bankman-Fried and cooperating with prosecutors, he received time served and three years of supervised release.

Magazine: Ripple joins Singapore sandbox, Bhutan’s big Bitcoin selloff: Asia Express