DOJ cases, SEC actions, OFAC sanctions, North Korean activity, and the convictions reshaping how crypto operates.
TRM Labs and the WSJ reveal how CoinEx became Iran's go-to international crypto gateway — processing $2.7B with Nobitex alone, $6M for IRGC wallets, and even funds from North Korea's Bybit hack.
Crypto chaos: North Korea's $6.75B crypto heist, $580M liquidations, Binance's EU ban looms.
World leaders at the Évian G7 summit officially classified DPRK crypto heists as a weapons-financing threat. Seven nations. $6.75 billion stolen. Zero arrests.
CME Group CEO Terrence Duffy announced on CNBC that the $76B exchange will file suit against the CFTC on Thursday — the same agency that regulates it — over its approval of Kalshi's bitcoin perpetual futures contract.
CZ praised Hyperliquid's no-KYC trading model and said he'd 'never' run a platform like it. Then OKX's founder revealed CZ has been quietly backing Aster DEX — a Hyperliquid clone built without KYC.
The Second Circuit unanimously rejected Sam Bankman-Fried's final appeal on June 12, locking in his 25-year sentence. His projected release date is 2044. Trump already said no to a pardon.
The CFTC has filed its 8th lawsuit against a US state — New Mexico — in a sweeping federal campaign to strip states of control over prediction markets. Kalshi, Polymarket, and the entire industry hang in the balance.
A Reuters investigation tracked four Trump crypto ventures — WLFI, $TRUMP memecoin, ALT5 Sigma, and American Bitcoin — and found a near-perfect transfer of wealth: $2.3 billion to the Trump family, $2.25 billion in losses for retail investors.
Alexander Browder, the teenage son of Putin's most famous enemy, published a report exposing Russia's A7A5 ruble stablecoin — a $90B-per-year sanctions-evasion machine partly owned by a Russian state bank. Moscow's response: put him on the list.
OFAC just sanctioned Nobitex, Iran's largest crypto exchange. The founders — members of the Kharrazi dynasty tied to all three supreme leaders — registered the company under a fake surname to hide who they really were.
Operation Economic Fury has seized nearly $1 billion in Iran-linked crypto wallets. Treasury Secretary Bessent says some owners are 'typing in right now and not have realized their wallet had been grabbed.'
The CFTC approved the first regulated Bitcoin perpetual futures in U.S. history today — at Kalshi and through Coinbase's Deribit. Perps are a $90 trillion annual market that American traders couldn't legally touch. Until now.
Michele Spagnuolo, a Google security engineer known as 'AlphaRaccoon,' wagered $2.7 million across 25 Polymarket contracts using confidential Year in Search data. He netted $1.2 million — and now faces commodities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering charges in the SDNY.
Nine Polymarket accounts made $2.4 million betting on covert U.S. military operations against Iran before any news broke. Now Rep. James Comer is demanding answers from Kalshi and Polymarket CEOs — and the DEATH BETS Act wants to ban war contracts entirely.
CME Group and ICE — the corporate parents of the world's biggest futures and stock exchanges — just told the CFTC to regulate Hyperliquid out of existence. HYPE dropped 9%. Arthur Hayes said to get bent.
In 30 days, Tether silently blacklisted 371 wallets and froze $515 million in USDT across Tron and Ethereum — no court order required. That's 40% of everything they froze in all of 2025, done in a single month. Here's how the kill switch works, who's using it, and what it means for crypto.
Kraken's parent Payward just sued its former custodian Etana for misappropriating $25 million in client funds in what it calls a 'Ponzi-like' scheme. Etana allegedly stalled withdrawals with fake reconciliation issues while plugging holes with new deposits.
The FBI coordinated with Dubai Police and Thai authorities to bust 276 people across 9 pig butchering scam centers — the same fraud method that put Trump's World Liberty Financial in headlines last week.
Gemini quietly assembled the full CFTC regulatory stack — a DCM license to list derivatives and a DCO license to clear them in-house. No other purely crypto-native exchange has pulled this off. Futures, perps, and prediction markets are next.
April 2026 was the worst month in crypto hack history: 30 attacks, $625M drained, North Korea behind 76% of it. Now a developer is claiming DPRK trained an AI to autonomously exploit DeFi — and the Wasabi Protocol's $5M multi-chain drain may be its latest hit.
DeFi United drops its technical rescue blueprint today, with Consensys, Aave, Compound, the Solana Foundation and 14 other protocols pledging $300M+ in ETH to re-collateralize rsETH after the $292M Lazarus-linked KelpDAO exploit. This is the most coordinated cross-protocol rescue in DeFi history.
Kalshi launched CFTC-regulated Bitcoin perpetual futures on April 27 — and Polymarket panicked and launched theirs first to beat them. The race to own America's $100B crypto derivatives market is on.
U.S. Army Master Sergeant Gannon Van Dyke is the first person charged with using classified military intelligence to insider-trade on a crypto prediction market. The DOJ and CFTC both came for him.
Lazarus Group's new 'Mach-O Man' macOS malware is targeting crypto and fintech executives with convincing fake meeting invites, stealing keychain data and wallet credentials before erasing itself completely.
Britain's financial watchdog hit eight London crypto shops in a single day — marking the country's first-ever coordinated crackdown on illegal peer-to-peer crypto trading.
Payward's acquisition of Bitnomial hands Kraken a decade-long regulatory moat: the only full-stack CFTC-licensed crypto derivatives platform in America. No one else has all three licenses.
Operation Atlantic, a joint US-UK-Canada law enforcement strike, froze $12M and traced $45M in crypto approval phishing fraud across 30+ countries. Here's what that means for the industry.
Grinex — the sanctions-dodging successor to Russia's notorious Garantex — shut down after a $13M hack and blamed 'Western special services.' The irony is too rich.
Tether is bailing out Drift Protocol with $148M after North Korea's $285M heist — but the real play is quietly replacing Circle's USDC as Solana DeFi's settlement currency.
The DOJ just opened compensation claims for the biggest crypto fraud in history. The math is brutal: $40 million recovered, $4 billion stolen, Cryptoqueen still on the run.
Drift Protocol confirmed today that the April 1 exploit wasn't opportunistic — DPRK-linked hackers spent six months attending crypto conferences, building real relationships, and depositing real money before draining $270M.
The CFTC settled with Nishad Singh — FTX's ex-engineering chief who built the backdoor that let Alameda silently drain billions in customer funds. The case is closed. The industry can stop looking over its shoulder. Almost.
The DOJ just unsealed charges against 10 crypto executives in a massive wash trading sting called Operation Token Mirrors. The FBI built its own Ethereum token — NexFundAI — to bait them. Here's the full breakdown and what it means for the industry.
The Axios supply chain attack dropped a crypto-wallet-stealing RAT on 100M weekly installs. What happened, why AI missed it, and the security roles crypto needs now.