Privacy Upgrades, Tokenized ETFs, and Retirement Bitcoin

Welcome to our Crypto news in 10, a daily podcast bringing you the latest news about crypto in under 10 minutes.

It’s Thursday, January 22, 2026, and we’ve got a tight, forward-looking slate. First, Stellar’s “X-Ray” protocol upgrade is scheduled for a mainnet vote today—a big step for privacy-preserving apps. Then, a traditional finance milestone: F/m Investments just filed with the SEC to tokenize ETF shares—potentially the first of its kind. We’ll also break down a serious security incident at Saga that paused its EVM chain after roughly seven million dollars were drained. Zooming out, ARK Invest’s new Big Ideas report sketches a future where tokenized assets balloon to eleven trillion dollars, and crypto overall to twenty-eight trillion by 2030. And to cap it off, Bitcoin is coming to a conservative corner of retirement planning: Delaware Life is adding a BlackRock index with BTC exposure to its fixed indexed annuities... let’s get into it.

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Story one: Stellar’s “X-Ray” upgrade—Protocol 25—heads to a mainnet vote today at 5 p.m. UTC. The upgrade adds native support for two zero-knowledge building blocks—the BN254 curve and Poseidon hash functions—so developers can verify proofs and build privacy tools natively, instead of bolting on expensive workarounds. That means cheaper, faster verification... and a clearer path to selective disclosure, private attestations, and compliance-forward privacy apps on Soroban smart contracts.

According to the Stellar Development Foundation, stable releases have been live since mid-December, testnet upgraded on January 7, and validators were asked to prepare for today’s vote. All eyes are on validator participation and network stability as the switch flips. If it sticks, X-Ray could make Stellar a more practical home for ZK-enabled payments and credentials—without abandoning auditability. Sources: Stellar Dev Blog and the official upgrade guide.

Story two: Tokenization just got real for ETFs. F/m Investments—the firm behind the TBIL three-month Treasury ETF—filed an exemptive application with the SEC seeking permission to record ownership of tokenized TBIL shares on a permissioned blockchain. The shares would keep the same rights, fees, and oversight as the legacy shares—the chain is essentially a controlled record-keeping and settlement layer, not a wild-west wrapper.

As CEO Alexander Morris put it, “Tokenization is coming... the question is whether it happens inside the regulatory framework investors have relied on for 85 years.” If the SEC signs off, this would be the first ETF issuer to tokenize shares under the Investment Company Act—potentially giving broker-dealers and digital-native platforms a bridge between traditional rails and on-chain settlement. Sources: Reuters and the company’s Business Wire release.

Story three: A tough twenty-four hours for Saga. The Layer-1 paused its Saga EVM chain after confirming a smart-contract exploit that bridged out roughly seven million dollars—primarily USDC later converted to ETH. The network was halted around block height six million five hundred ninety-three thousand eight hundred to contain damage.

The team says mainnet consensus, validators, and signer keys were not compromised, and it’s working with partners to blacklist the attacker address and publish a full post-mortem after validation. Several chainlets—Colt and Mustang—were impacted, and Saga Dollar briefly depegged amid the chaos. Another reminder that cross-chain and precompile surfaces remain hot zones for attackers... and that pausing a chain is never taken lightly, but sometimes buys the time needed to harden. Sources: The Block, Saga’s investigation update, and independent coverage.

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Story four: ARK Invest’s Big Ideas 2026 just landed—and the headline numbers are eye-popping. ARK projects tokenized real-world assets could exceed eleven trillion dollars by 2030, up from roughly nineteen to twenty-two billion today—with sovereign debt dominant now, but bank deposits and public equities growing on-chain over time. The report also sketches a twenty-eight trillion dollar total crypto market by 2030, with Bitcoin around a sixteen trillion market cap if adoption trends continue.

On the ground, ARK points to 2025’s surge in DeFi revenue—an estimated three point eight billion dollars—and the emergence of ultra-lean, high-throughput platforms. Takeaway for builders and allocators: the rails are maturing, regulation is converging, and tokenization plus stablecoins are doing real economic work—not just speculation. Sources: The Block’s summary and Decrypt’s coverage of ARK’s projections.

Story five: Bitcoin inches deeper into the retirement world. Delaware Life Insurance Company—part of Group 1001—says it’s adding the BlackRock U.S. Equity Bitcoin Balanced Risk twelve percent Index to its fixed indexed annuities, making it the first U.S. insurer to plug Bitcoin exposure into this traditionally conservative wrapper.

The index blends about seventy-four percent exposure to the iShares Core S&P 500 ETF, twenty-five percent exposure to BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, and a small cash sleeve—with a twelve percent target-volatility overlay—so policyholders keep principal protection features typical of fixed indexed annuities while getting a measured dose of BTC-linked upside. BlackRock’s Robert Mitchnick called it a response to client demand post-ETF approval. Important nuance... buyers don’t own Bitcoin directly—it’s an index crediting method with caps and participation rates, not spot BTC custody. Sources: the company’s press release and trade-press reporting.

Quick recap... Today’s mainnet vote on Stellar’s X-Ray aims to put zero-knowledge primitives right into the protocol. F/m’s SEC filing could make tokenized ETF shares a regulated reality. Saga’s exploit underscores how cross-chain complexity remains a prime attack surface. ARK’s Big Ideas 2026 paints an aggressive path for tokenization and crypto market growth. And Delaware Life’s move shows Bitcoin seeping into mainstream retirement products—carefully, but unmistakably. We’ll keep watching how these threads—privacy tech, tokenization, security, and institutional access—intertwine as 2026 unfolds.

Thanks for listening and see you tommorow!