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But while experts say crypto owners don’t need to press the panic button yet, they warn the crypto sector that failing to rise to the challenge could spell disaster.

“Users’ assets are safe today,” Michael Heinrich, CEO of the blockchain and AI firm 0G Labs, told DL News. “But the industry needs to wake up. The danger isn’t quantum computers now. It’s the ones coming in 2035 when half the industry still hasn’t upgraded.”

The warning comes as major crypto players, including the aforementioned foundation, scramble to get upgrades in place to protect their multi-billion-dollar blockchain protocols.

Nine-minute warning

Google’s researchers used an undisclosed model to simulate the kind of computing power it would take to decrypt the algorithms that protect transactions and wallets.

While quantum computers already exist today, none of them currently have the capability to break the cryptography protecting Bitcoin.

However, the prospect of quantum computers becoming a reality in the next few years spooked crypto. And these machines, Google appears to have demonstrated, will surpass their predecessors, wielding the kind of computational power needed to crack blockchain algorithms in the time it takes to make a cup of coffee.

“The gap between theory and real-world deployment remains significant, particularly around scale and error correction, so this is not an overnight threat,” Leo Fan, the founder of the crypto firm Cysic and the former quantum resilience lead at Algorand, told DL News.

But Fan warned of “long-term risks” that could emerge if quantum systems become capable of cracking elliptic curve cryptography. That’s the protective algorithms used by most leading crypto networks, including both Bitcoin and Ethereum.

And it was precisely these attacks on elliptic curve cryptography that the Google team targeted.

“Once quantum systems cross the threshold, the signatures protecting wallets could be forged,” Fan said. “The transition to post-quantum cryptography is slow and difficult, especially for decentralised networks.”

No simple fixes

Scientists are still a decade to 15 years away from rolling out the kind of quantum computers needed to break into wallets, Heinrich said.

But when these types of machines do emerge, simple fixes won’t protect against the kind of widespread crypto thefts that could occur without adequate preventative measures, insiders warn.

“Blockchain systems can’t just push updates,” said Heinrich. “They need coordinated protocol upgrades across decentralised networks. This is an infrastructure problem disguised as a security warning.”

Google’s research “directly refutes every argument the crypto industry has used to dismiss the quantum threat,” Alex Pruden, CEO and cofounder of the blockchain firm Project Eleven, said in comments shared with DL News.

“Bitcoin can’t just push an emergency update,” said Pruden. “Protocol changes take years of consensus and testing.”

Tim Alper is a News Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at tdalper@dlnews.com.

In a new initiative announced Thursday, the firm outlined plans to use AI tools to monitor for bugs in existing XRPL blockchain software, and to detect issues in new code before it goes live.

“Advances in AI are rapidly and fundamentally changing how blockchain protocols are analysed and tested,” Ayo Akinyele, senior director of engineering at Ripple, said in a blog post announcing the initiative.

“Modern tools can now systematically explore complex codebases, uncovering edge cases and hidden failure modes that traditional approaches often miss.”

The development comes as crypto security experts warn that the threat from AI-armed bad actors is growing.

“AI has made legacy-contract hunting cheaper, faster, and more scalable,” Gabi Urrutia, field chief information security officer at Halborn, a blockchain security firm, previously told DL News.

While evidence suggests attackers are using AI to speed up and scale their attacks, crypto security firms and auditors are only just starting to incorporate the technology into their defences.

Shoring up XRP security

Ripple says it will use AI to shore up XRP Ledger security in several ways.

It will incorporate AI across the XRPL development lifecycle, using it to scan for vulnerabilities in new code, changes to existing code, and to model potential threats from new and existing feature interactions.

“We are also using AI to simulate edge cases and stress scenarios that would be difficult to generate manually,” Akinyele said.

Additionally, Ripple will establish a dedicated, AI-assisted team focused on continuously analysing the XRPL codebase and how features interact in real-world scenarios.

The team has already uncovered and disclosed over 10 low-severity bugs, which have all been fixed.

In addition to incorporating AI, Ripple says it will also strengthen security in more conventional ways. These include modernising the XRPL codebase, and introducing new security procedures. It will also collaborate with independent security researchers, validator operators, and external security firms.

Crypto security experts warn that old best practices won’t be enough to keep blockchain code safe anymore as AI enhances the capabilities of bad actors.

Instead of protocols getting audited before their code goes live, they must invest in constant screening using the latest AI models to ensure any potential exploits are discovered by developers first.

“Resilience must be continuous: not a one-time validation, but an ongoing process of hardening, testing and improving as XRPL evolves,” Akinyele said.

“The stakes have never been higher.”

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

The $40 billion company, which uses the XRP cryptocurrency for cross-border payments, announced the shift, along with new developer funding programmes, in a Thursday blog post.

“As the ecosystem matures, the focus is shifting toward expanding access to funding through more distributed and independent pathways so builders have multiple avenues to scale,” Ripple said in the post.

Historically, much of the XRP Ledger ecosystem funding flowed through Ripple-supported initiatives. The company said its goal is to create a healthier ecosystem where builders can access funding through multiple channels.

The development comes as Ripple tries to shake the impression that it exerts too much influence and control over the XRP Ledger.

While Ripple and the XRP Ledger are distinct, the two have been close for much of their existence.

After launching the XRP Ledger in 2012, many of its creators went on to found Ripple or join the firm as executives.

Ripple is also the biggest owner of XRP. The firm said it held $57 billion worth of the cryptocurrency — around two-third of all tokens in circulation — as of March 2025, the last time it reported its holdings publicly.

Ripple is also a major XRP Ledger developer.

New funding routes

In its blog post, Ripple outlined several routes it hopes will help diversify developer funding.

The firm said it will launch a new FinTech Builder Programme designed to support startups building financial applications on the XRP Ledger, including for stablecoin payments, credit infrastructure, tokenisation, and regulated financial services.

In June, the XRP Ledger also got its own decentralised autonomous organisation called XAO DAO. Its stated goal is to boost community voices and foster a culture of rapid experimentation through microgrant funding.

The XRPL Commons, a non-profit that supports XRP Ledger development, and XRP Asia, an initiative to support XRP developers across the Asia-Pacific region, will continue to support development.

Ripple’s many university partnerships, and venture capital partners Dragonfly Capital, Pantera, and Franklin Templeton, among others, will also play key funding roles, the firm said.

“The goal is to ensure that no single organisation becomes the sole gatekeeper for ecosystem support,” Ripple said.

Bleeding deposits

Despite hosting the $84 billion XRP token, the XRP Ledger has struggled to grow its DeFi ecosystem.

Since July, deposits to XRP Ledger protocols have declined from a peak of $120 million to just $49 million.

In October, Ripple chief technical officer David Schwartz stepped down. During Schwartz’s 14 years at the firm he played a key role in several XRP Ledger DeFi updates, including the launch of a native automated market maker and the introduction of programmable tokens.

There are developments that could turn the blockchain’s fortunes around, however.

Ripple developers have discussed plans to introduce XRP staking, a feature that could boost the blockchain’s DeFi ecosystem.

Ripple is also building the infrastructure for a lending market on the XRP Ledger. The hope is that financial institutions will use the lending market to borrow funds from retail investors.

The feature entered voting on January 28, and requires an 80% supermajority among XRP Ledger validators to pass.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

The Lightning Network has been promoted by Bitcoin maxis like Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who last year integrated the layer 2 into his payments platform, Cash App.

Bitcoiners argue that Lightning will help the big orange coin become — in the words of Dorsey — “everyday money”: skirting transactions around the main chain cuts costs and increases speed, allowing people to use Bitcoin for daily purchases.

And the data would have you believe that it is working. Bitcoin brokerage River this month posted figures showing that transactions on the second-layer solution in November hit $1.1 billion, much to the delight of Bitcoiners on Crypto Twitter. In the same period in 2024, volume stood at $286.5 million.

Bitcoin's Lightning Network exceeds $1B in monthly transaction volume. pic.twitter.com/USmosCQ1gM

— River (@River) February 19, 2026

Though the picture appears to be more complicated, experts told DL News.

What’s it really for?

Despite in the past being pushed for smaller transactions, Lightning, which debuted in 2018, isn’t just being used for microtransactions like tipping or buying a cup of coffee.

“We are seeing larger transactions go through right on a regular basis,” Jesse Shrader, co-founder of Bitcoin infrastructure firm Amboss, said.

He added that his company had seen Lightning transactions surge by 300% since January, and the average size of a Bitcoin transaction now stands at 74,000 sats — worth $50 at today’s price of $67,714 per coin.

Lightning made headlines this month when American crypto exchange Kraken helped facilitate a $1 million transaction on the network.

“By dramatically reducing settlement times, the Lightning Network unlocks Bitcoin’s potential at global scale, and we’re proud to help bring that future into reality,” Kraken’s head of onchain, Calvin Leyon, said of the transaction.

Indeed, exchanges using Lightning to move money may be the reason why transaction volume has spiked.

“The average transaction value on the Lightning Network has actually increased and it goes to show that it’s not so much peer-to-peer payments for coffee or whatever — it’s more like a settlement between exchanges or between businesses,” Spencer Yang, a managing partner of crypto investment firm, BlockSpaceForce, told DL News.

He added that Jack Dorsey integrating Lightning into Square’s payment terminals could also be playing a part.

Payments company Block, the parent company of Square, last year debuted a new Bitcoin payments system, allowing merchants to accept the cryptocurrency over the Lightning Network.

It isn’t clear how many merchants are using the Lightning network to accept payments. Block did not respond to questions from DL News.

Bobby Shell, VP of marketing at Lightning infrastructure company Voltage, told DL News that nearly 29% of Bitcoin transfers pass through the layer 2, with Coinbase routing around 15% of its transactions on the network.

“This isn’t a niche anymore,” he said.

Privacy and price matters

But transaction volume may also be surging due to rising costs on other blockchains, Shrader said.

“Tether on Tron is probably one of the best examples,” he noted.

The cost of sending USDT on the Tron network has risen in recent years to nearly $4 per transaction. The network was once the go-to for small-dollar transactions because of its low costs. Cheaper blockchains, though, now exist.

Using Lightning, in comparison, can cost less than a fraction of a cent.

But another reason transaction volume has shot up may be down to its privacy-centric nature: Sending coins via Lightning is harder to trace compared to a standard Bitcoin network transaction.

“But at the end of the day, lightning is incredibly private,” said Shrader. “From a practical and a data analytics perspective, there’s not a lot that you can do to track it.”

Mathew Di Salvo is a news correspondent with DL News. Got a tip? Email at mdisalvo@dlnews.com.

As of February 20, the Singapore-based Bitcoin miner holds zero Bitcoin on its balance sheet after it sold reserves of 943 Bitcoin, worth almost $62 million at current prices.

“Our decision to sell Bitcoin should not be a concern for the broader market,” Bitdeer said in a Monday X post.

“We are currently evaluating multiple non-binding powered land acquisition opportunities, and we believe it is prudent to prepare liquidity now.”

The move comes as many firms struggle to stay profitable by mining Bitcoin.

Rising energy costs and increased competition have squeezed all but the most efficient miners out of the market. Many of the largest firms have bought out their less successful competitors in recent years.

At the same time, Bitcoin’s recent plunge to a 15-month low has put even more pressure on miner profitability.

Bitcoin miners usually sell a portion of the Bitcoin they mine to cover their costs. So as the top cryptocurrency’s price declines, miners must sell more than they did before.

AI Pivot?

Bitdeer is the largest publicly traded Bitcoin miner by hashrate, commanding hardware that produces 63.20 exahashs per second.

An exahash is a unit of measurement for computing power in Bitcoin mining, representing one quintillion hashes per second.

The firm operates data facilities in the US, Bhutan, and Norway. It has a market capitalisation of almost $1.5 billion.

In recent months, many miners — Bitdeer included — have pivoted to providing more profitable artificial intelligence and high-performance computing services.

Last week, Bitdeer announced a $300 million convertible notes offering and a $43.5 million equity placement, both aimed at funding data center expansion and AI services.

Bitdeer has since reassured investors that Bitcoin will remain a key part of its business.

“Our hash rate will continue to grow, and we will continue to mine more Bitcoin for the interest of our shareholders,” the firm said.

At the start of the year, Bitdeer held roughly 2,000 Bitcoin, which declined to 1,530 Bitcoin at the end of January.

Bitdeer’s Bitcoin liquidation is unusual compared to other mining firms.

Marathon, the second-biggest Bitcoin miner, held 52,850 Bitcoin, worth around $3.4 billion, per an October update.

CleanSpark, the fourth-biggest miner, held over 13,513 Bitcoin as of January 31.

Bitdeer shares, which trade under the ticker BTDR, haven’t moved in pre-market trading. The firm’s market capitalisation is down 72% from its October all-time high.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

Hunter Beast, a Bitcoin developer, made that case during a panel at the ETHDenver conference on February 19 alongside Isabel Foxen Duke, host of the Bitcoin Rails podcast, and Alex Pruden, CEO of Project 11, a company focused on securing blockchains against the quantum threat.

“We are not prepared right now for all that this will affect,” Beast said. “It is a vast, multidimensional problem in ways that are really subtle until you dive into it and really come to understand it.”

Bitcoin, like much of the world’s digital infrastructure, will eventually need to upgrade its cryptography to new algorithms that cannot be cracked by quantum computers.

Yet indecision among the top cryptocurrency’s developers, coupled with recent quantum computing breakthroughs, has brought what was once considered a distant threat much closer to reality.

The turning point came in December 2024, when Google unveiled its Willow quantum computing chip, which showed the technology was much closer to being used in real-world applications.

“That architecture cannot scale to the point where it could break Bitcoin, but it showed the path,” Project 11’s Pruden said on the panel.

Then, earlier this month, researchers in Sydney, Australia, released a paper demonstrating that some forms of encrypted data, including Bitcoin wallets, could be cracked by a much less powerful quantum computer than previously assumed.

“The bar to clear keeps dropping, while at the same time, results like Google’s show that progress is happening, and at some point those two lines are going to cross,” Pruden said.

‘Spooks’

It’s not just tech giants like Google and Microsoft that race to accelerate quantum computing, according to Beast.

“The major players here are spooks — they’re the NSA and the PLA,” he said, referring to the National Security Agency, an intelligence agency of the US Department of War, and the People’s Liberation Army, the military wing of the Chinese Communist Party.

The reason? Quantum computers are not cheap, Beast said.

They cost billions of dollars to build and millions to run, and they are not just useful for stealing Bitcoin, either.

They are much more useful to governments because they can also break RSA, a widely used form of digital encryption. In other words, whichever nation develops a powerful enough quantum computer first could potentially gain access to other nations’ encrypted data.

“If you’re not going to have something capable of doing this, it’s kind of pointless to build,” Pruden said.

Yet the fact that quantum computers cannot currently be used for any meaningful real-world application has made it difficult to convince some Bitcoin developers that they will eventually pose a threat.

Some of the most influential names in Bitcoin development argue that a cryptographically relevant quantum computer is still decades away, while others dismiss the threat entirely.

“Quantum isn’t a real threat. Bitcoin has much bigger problems to address,” Luke Dashjr, a Bitcoin Core developer, said in December.

Those sceptics could be right if quantum computer development hits some unforeseen roadblock. But for Beast, it’s not worth the risk.

“I don’t think we should bet the future of Bitcoin on discounting future progress,” he said.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

A February 18 investigation published by security researchers who go by vmfunc, MDL, and Dziurwa found publicly accessible code that appears to send data collected by Persona, the KYC provider, to The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network — or FinCEN — a bureau of the US Department of the Treasury that safeguards the financial system from illicit use.

“The same company that takes your passport photo when you sign up for ChatGPT also operates a government platform that files Suspicious Activity Reports with FinCEN and tags them with intelligence programme codenames,” the investigation’s authors said.

“So you uploaded a selfie to use a chatbot? Congratulations! It’s now being compared against a database of every politician, head of state, and their extended family tree on earth.”

‘Unanswered questions’

Multiple IT specialists and security experts confirmed to DL News that the investigation and its findings appear legitimate.

“It appears the research is credible and you can verify that the government domains cited do exist, and are highly likely hosted on dedicated infrastructure by Persona,” Tanuki42, a pseudonymous security researcher who contributes at SEAL911 and zeroShadow, the blockchain incident response groups, told DL News.

“That said, there are still a lot of unanswered questions around motives, what this platform is used for, and who it is used by.”

Persona CEO Rick Song has since responded to the allegations publicly on X. He accused the investigation’s authors of not reaching out to him before publishing their findings.

In emails between vmfunc and Song posted by Song on his X account, the Persona CEO said his firm does not work with any federal agency today. He has yet to directly address the findings of the investigation.

“I am genuinely disappointed in how all of this has been handled,” Song said on Thursday in a since-deleted X post. “What has really been frustrating for me is that I also admire vmfunc’s work and their clear talent.”

Vmfunc, also known in online circles as Celeste, is widely regarded as credible because of their track record of technical investigations that other security experts have repeatedly validated.

OpenAI and Persona did not immediately respond to DL News’ requests for comment.

Surveillance fears

The allegations come as both crypto users and the broader public grow increasingly concerned about the mass surveillance and privacy-eroding capabilities of enforced identification checks.

The fear is that companies like Persona, working with government agencies, could use identification data collected from customers to create a vast Orwellian surveillance network that uses opaque criteria to place users on watchlists without their knowledge, consent, or public oversight.

In recent years, more and more platforms have started requiring users to hand over personally identifiable information, often in the name of preventing crime or protecting vulnerable groups.

Yet critics say the checks do more harm than good.

Many of the biggest companies that provide KYC services have been found to misuse and mishandle data.

Even when companies aren’t misbehaving, the huge swaths of data they hold make them lucrative targets for hackers. Several more platforms have in recent years suffered data breaches, leaking millions of users’ personal data.

The issue is close to the hearts of crypto advocates.

Many early Bitcoin contributors were self-styled cypherpunks, privacy activists advocating for cryptography and privacy-preserving technologies to protect the public against government and corporate surveillance.

Persistent monitoring

When a user is prompted to verify their identity with OpenAI, their KYC data — usually a photo of their passport, a selfie, and a short video of their face — is sent to Persona for verification.

That data is then automatically screened against global sanctions and warning lists, undergoes facial similarity scoring, and is checked against records of people linked to terrorism, cybercrime and other financial crimes.

That’s all standard stuff.

But at the same time, the same information is sent directly to government agencies, according to Vmfunc, MDL, and Dziurwa.

The investigation found code that gives operators the ability to file suspicious activity reports straight to FinCEN; file equivalent reports to Canada’s financial intelligence unit; tag data with intelligence programme codenames; screen associated crypto addresses through Chainalysis, a blockchain security platform; and conduct over 250 more verification checks.

According to the investigation, the Chainalysis integration assesses cryptocurrency addresses for risk, analyses the other addresses they’ve interacted with, checks the value of the funds they contain, and tries to identify their owners.

“There’s also a native crypto address watchlist system layered on top,” the investigation’s authors said. “This isn’t a one-shot lookup but a persistent monitor. Your wallet goes on the list once and gets polled indefinitely against Chainalysis’ cluster graph.”

Chainalysis did not immediately respond to DL News’ request for comment.

The problem is that it isn’t clear what criteria need to be met to trigger the crypto address screening, the watchlist system, or any of the other actions. It’s also unclear if OpenAI users are specifically warned that their data could be used in this way when undergoing KYC checks.

According to the investigation, the code that runs these functions has been in place since November 2023.

As for how long data that is forwarded to the government agencies is kept for? That’s not clear either.

“What is the actual biometric retention period?” the investigation’s authors said. ”OpenAI says ‘up to a year.’ the code says three years max. Government IDs retained ‘permanently.’ Which is it?"

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

Yet so far, that hasn’t happened.

Now, quantum researchers are warning that time’s running out for developers to seriously engage with what by many accounts will be Bitcoin’s biggest ever upgrade.

“The time to start thinking about this is now. An even better time would have been yesterday,” Scott Aaronson, a quantum computing researcher and scientific advisor at StarkWare, told DL News.

There are several reasons why Bitcoin hasn’t been upgraded yet, depending on who you ask.

Some say the biggest issue is coordinating the dozens of individual contributors who work to develop the top cryptocurrency.

Others argue it all comes down to timing.

Three to five years

Yet whatever the reason, one thing is clear: The clock is ticking.

Cryptographically relevant quantum computers could be a reality in just three to five years, Hayk Tepanyan, founder of BlueQubit, a quantum computing software developer, told DL News.

Tepanyan said he based his prediction on recent milestones achieved by companies at the forefront of quantum computer development.

A 2024 roadmap from Quantinuum predicted the company will achieve fully fault-tolerant quantum computing by 2030.

“I take all of these roadmaps with a huge grain of salt, because we don’t actually have principles that let us say how long this is going to take,” Aaronson said.

“But what gives me pause is that over the last couple of years Quantinuum and Google have actually been hitting their milestones.”

In November, the US Department of War mandated that its systems must be ready to upgrade to quantum-resistant encryption no later than December 31, 2030.

While such estimates are already alarming, the reality is the technology could progress even faster if new techniques are discovered, potentially blindsiding those who thought they had more time to work on a post-quantum upgrade for Bitcoin.

“You might think this quantum computer with 200,000 physical qubits is not enough for running Shor’s algorithm,” Aaronson said. “But someone else might have some incredible, clever encoding that they haven’t told you about, by which they could fit Shor’s algorithm into that number of physical qubits.”

Shor’s algorithm is a quantum algorithm that can theoretically be used to break the digital signatures that underpin Bitcoin transactions.

Threading the needle

For Bitcoin’s developers, the most difficult work has already been done. Several quantum resistant algorithms already exist.

In August 2024, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology officially finalised three post-quantum cryptography standards for federal use, with a fourth on the way.

We’ve seen before that NIST algorithms can break.

Chris Tam

The major hurdle, quantum researchers say, is timing.

Upgrade Bitcoin too early, and the new cryptography, which was believed to be quantum resistant, could turn out to be just as vulnerable as what it replaced.

While the NIST algorithms are understood to be quantum resistant, it’s impossible to know for sure.

“We’ve seen before that NIST algorithms can break,” Chris Tam, head of quantum innovation at BTQ, a company focused on developing post-quantum cryptography, told DL News.

In 2022, one submission to the NIST post-quantum signature competition in 2016 was broken using a consumer-grade laptop in just 53 hours, Tam said.

Yet upgrade too late, and billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin — including Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto’s $75 billion stash — will be snatched away by whoever develops the technology the fastest, obliterating confidence in the top cryptocurrency and likely destroying its value among investors.

“It’s going to be a tricky balance,” Tepanyan said. “You want to give enough time to look at the algorithms so you don’t rush and upgrade to something that’s also vulnerable to attacks.”

According to Tepanyan, Rivest-Shamir-Adleman, or RSA, the cryptographic algorithm used to secure digital communications, among other things, took eight to ten years to enter mainstream use after it was introduced in 1977.

“The current post-quantum cryptography proposals are kind of getting there,” Tepanyan said.

Coordination issues

To be sure, some Bitcoin contributors are endeavouring to make Bitcoin quantum resistant.

In February, Bitcoin developers Hunter Beast and Ethan Heilman introduced a new transaction output that defends against the easiest forms of quantum attack. But it only applies to future transactions, and doesn’t do anything to protect the some $160 billion worth of Bitcoin in vulnerable wallets.

In December, Blockstream researchers Mikhail Kudinov and Jonas Nick proposed that Bitcoin could be upgraded to rely on hash-based signatures, one of the post-quantum cryptography standards formalised by NIST.

“What hash-based signatures have going for them is that they’re some of the oldest forms of math, in that they are as old and as well understood as elliptic curves,” Tam said.

Yet overall, progress has been slow. A big hurdle is that many developers don’t agree on how soon an upgrade should be prioritised, or what the best approach is.

Quantum isn’t a real threat. Bitcoin has much bigger problems to address.

Luke Dashjr

Many of the most influential people in Bitcoin development — such as Adam Back, CEO of Blockstream, and best known for inventing the proof-of-work system used in Bitcoin mining — argue that the threat is still decades away.

Some prominent developers have even denied the threat altogether.

“Quantum isn’t a real threat. Bitcoin has much bigger problems to address,” Luke Dashjr, a Bitcoin Core developer, said in December.

Bitcoin’s development is decentralised, meaning the network is maintained by a collective of contributors and has no central authoritative body. Because of this, large upgrades need to reach a consensus among contributors to have any hope of making it to production.

History shows that’s easier said than done.

Between 2015 and 2017 Bitcoin developers clashed over whether or not to increase the amount of data Bitcoin blocks can handle. The disagreement was so contentious it resulted in the network splitting in two, creating the Bitcoin Cash blockchain in August 2017.

More recently, disputes over whether non-financial Bitcoin transactions should be allowed on the network have also split opinions.

Unknown unknowns

Still, many Bitcoin developers are confident that, as things stand, there is no rush to make Bitcoin quantum resistant.

But according to researchers, the situation can potentially change overnight.

I wouldn’t be so sure about everyone playing super nice and publishing all their results.

Hayk Tepanyan

For the most part, the development of quantum computing hardware is predictable, and its progress can be extrapolated into the future with decent accuracy.

But hardware is only half of the equation. The more unpredictable element, researchers say, is the algorithms that can be fed into quantum computers to get them to do work.

“Where things get tricky is trying to predict the algorithmic innovations,” Tepanyan said.

“We could actually wake up one day, and there’s this paper or this result from this academic group or company or governmental National Lab that cuts the resource requirements by like 100x.”

To add to the uncertainty, the closer scientists get to creating powerful quantum computers or discovering new algorithms, the less they are willing to share about their progress. Because of this secrecy, it will become increasingly difficult to know how close researchers are to creating a cryptographically relevant quantum computer.

“When you’re getting to very important milestones, and breaking Bitcoin would be a huge milestone, I wouldn’t be so sure about everyone playing super nice and publishing all their results,” Tepanyan said.

For Aaronson, the situation is similar to the development of nuclear weapons almost 100 years ago.

“In 1939 scientists were still publishing in journals whatever they figured out about nuclear fission. But then by 1940, when they’re calculating exactly how much uranium 235 would you need for a chain reaction? At that point, they realised they shouldn’t publish anymore.”

There are already signs quantum development is going dark.

Back in the 1990s, Tepanyan said, researchers would freely publish and share their designs for creating qubits, the basic unit of information used is quantum computers. Now quantum computers have gotten closer to reality, and the potential benefits — and profits — are more tangible, that doesn’t happen anymore.

And it’s not just big companies like Google and Microsoft that Bitcoin developers need to be concerned about. Nation states and government labs are almost certainly looking into quantum computing, too.

“It’s even harder to predict how they are going to behave,” Tepanyan said.

Correction, February 21: A previous version of this article stated that a NIST standardised post-quantum computing algorithm was broken in 2022. The algorithm in question was only submitted to the NIST post-quantum computing competition, and the article has been updated to reflect that.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

On Monday the agency gave the loan issuer, which accepts Bitcoin as collateral, a preliminary rating of BBB- for its Issuer Trust 2026-1.

That’s one grade above what is generally considered non-investment grade junk bond territory.

Still, BBB- is so far the best rating achieved by a crypto firm on its debt. It’s five intermediate grades higher than DeFi lender Sky and Michael Saylor’s Strategy, which both received B- ratings last year.

Ledn’s rating comes as more and more crypto firms look to bolster their credentials as Wall Street investors eye the industry on the back of landmark regulation in the US.

With industry mainstays like stablecoin issuer Circle and exchange Gemini conducting huge initial public offerings last year — and more expected in 2026 — crypto-native firms are out to prove they can hold their own against the titans of the traditional financial system.

Ledn did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

What is Ledn?

Ledn, a Cayman Islands-based firm launched in 2018, offers retail investors US dollar-denominated loans against their Bitcoin holdings.

All loans are overcollateralised, meaning that borrowers must lock up Bitcoin of a higher US dollar value than the amount they are able to borrow.

The firm’s loans are proving popular. In October, Ledn announced it had surpassed $1 billion in Bitcoin-backed loans for 2025, bringing its total loan originations since inception to over $2.8 billion.

Ledn’s Issuer Trust 2026-1 combines these Bitcoin-backed loans into an investment product. Simply put, the firm bundles many individual Bitcoin loans together into a trust, then sells shares in it to big institutional investors who earn interest generated on the loans.

The trust is split into two tranches: Class A, which accounts for $160 million and received a BBB- rating, and Class B, which holds $28 million and received a B- rating.

Ledn isn’t the first crypto project to commission a debt rating from S&P Global.

In August, DeFi lender Sky received a B- rating from the credit rating agency, putting the protocol’s USDS and DAI stablecoins on par with government bonds from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Strategy, the Bitcoin treasury company chaired by Michael Saylor, also received a reaffirmed B- rating in October.

Why BBB- rating?

Several strengths factored into Ledn’s BBB- rating.

Positives included the firm’s conservative initial loan-to-value ratios, which provide a buffer against Bitcoin price volatility.

The ratings agency also noted Ledn’s strong track record. Over seven years, the firm has successfully liquidated Bitcoin collateral on 7,493 loans and has never experienced a loss.

Yet multiple weaknesses also weighed on the rating.

Bitcoin’s high volatility is a core concern. Sharp price drops coupled with low liquidity in the market could create a situation where Ledn is unable to liquidate the Bitcoin backing borrower loans fast enough, resulting in losses for the trust’s investors.

Additionally, the relative newness of Bitcoin-backed lending, coupled with the trust’s dependence on Bitcoin, caps the rating below higher grades like A or AA, where more traditional loans, such as mortgages, might score.

Finally, because Ledn’s customers are primarily in the US and other developed countries, the general financial health of consumers can help gauge risk.

“Monitoring the interplay between consumer resilience and BTC’s price volatility is essential to understanding the stability of the borrower pool and the likelihood of systemic deleveraging,” S&P Global’s report said.

Update, February 11: Updated the first bullet point to represent that the rating is preliminary and specifically for Ledn-issued debt.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

Yet hastily upgrading the $1.3 trillion network to become quantum-proof could do more harm than good.

That’s the case for CoinShares, a digital assets manager that oversees $10 billion in crypto, as stated in a Friday blog post.

Popular proposals to shore up Bitcoin’s quantum resistance, which include upgrading its cryptography or burning vulnerable coins, warrant extreme caution, Christopher Bendiksen, Bitcoin research lead at CoinShares, said.

“Introducing new address formats before the cryptography underpinning them is fully understood and proven is extremely risky and not advisable,” he said.

“We have to keep in mind that before practical quantum computers exist, we cannot know whether quantum resistant cryptography provably works.”

In recent months, concerns surrounding Bitcoin’s theoretical quantum vulnerability have reached a fever pitch.

Coinbase, BlackRock, and Jefferies have all warned that Bitcoin’s security is entering uncharted waters following several major advances in quantum computing last year.

Pierre-Luc Dallaire-Demers, a scientist-in-residence at the University of Calgary, previously told DL News that he believes quantum computers are approximately five years away from breaking the cryptography that secures some Bitcoin wallets.

What’s the risk?

As quantum computers become more powerful, older Bitcoin wallets that use outdated cryptography will be the first to fall.

This is a problem because such wallets hold about 8% of all Bitcoin in existence, including the $75 billion stash of Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

When one of these older wallets sends a transaction, it reveals a vulnerable public key. A quantum computer could use that key to break the wallet’s encryption and steal the Bitcoin inside it.

It’s not just Bitcoin that’s at risk, either.

Much of the internet, including websites, messaging services, and financial transactions, relies on encrypted communications that are also theoretically vulnerable to quantum attack.

A November memo from the US Department of War mandated that its systems be upgraded to quantum-resistant encryption no later than December 31, 2030.

Conservative estimates

Still, CoinShares’ outlook on quantum computing is more conservative.

To break Bitcoin’s encryption within a practical amount of time — less than a year — quantum computers need to become 10 to 100,000 times more powerful, Bendiksen said, adding that such long-term attacks are at least 10 years away.

More worrisome short-term attacks that aim to steal funds when a wallet initiates a transaction, and therefore need to break the encryption within approximately 10 minutes, won’t be possible for several decades, he said.

To be sure, CoinShare believes quantum computers threaten Bitcoin — just not as soon as others.

“Bitcoin’s quantum vulnerability is not an immediate crisis but a foreseeable engineering consideration, with ample time for adaptation,” Bendiksen said.

“For the perceivable future, market implications appear limited.”

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

The transactions, executed at 10:04 pm on Friday and 3:06 am on Saturday morning, London time, saw a wallet tagged as “Team allocation” on Arkham Intelligence send $81 million worth of TRUMP to a Fireblocks custody wallet, and almost $24 million to another unmarked wallet.

Fireblocks is a crypto custody platform that also sells assets on behalf of its customers. The unmarked wallet has previously sent a test transaction to Coinbase, the crypto exchange.

It’s not clear why the tokens were sent to these wallets. The team behind the Trump memecoin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The transactions come as scrutiny of the president’s crypto dealings mounts, and as US lawmakers work to pass the Clarity Act, a broad crypto market-structure bill.

Many Democrats say they can’t support the bill, which stands to give the crypto industry a much-needed boost, because it purportedly allows Trump to continue profiting off crypto.

Token unlocks

Since its launch just over one year ago, Trump’s memecoin has cratered in value.

It’s down a whopping 94% from its all-time high of $73, and has fallen a further 14% over the past week amid a crypto market rout that saw Bitcoin shed 12% and trade at its lowest value since April 2025.

The recent activity marks the biggest single transfer of the token since it launched.

When the Trump memecoin launched, its developers released only 20% of the total one billion tokens to the market.

The remaining 80% was kept by Trump and his collaborators in reserve and is subject to a release schedule over the following two years.

The first tranches of tokens — worth around $313 million at the time — were unlocked on April 17, exactly three months after the memecoin’s launch.

So far, $2.1 billion worth of TRUMP tokens have been unlocked for trading, according to DefiLlama.

It’s not clear what portion of the unlocked tokens the team behind the memecoin have cashed out. Once funds are sent to custody platforms like Fireblocks or crypto exchanges, token movements can no longer be traced.

Wallets tied to the Trump memecoin have previously sent $96 million in USDC, the dollar-pegged stablecoin, and $8.5 million in TRUMP to Fireblocks.

Trump’s memecoin team

On the Trump memecoin’s website, the token’s creators and a firm called CIC Digital LLC are pegged to receive the 800 million reserve tokens.

Trump wholly owns CIC Digital, according to his 2024 financial disclosure.

CIC Digital jointly owns Fight Fight Fight with another firm called Celebration Cards LLC, which is registered in Wyoming by Andrew Pierce, a corporate paralegal for Wyoming LLC Attorney.

Pierce’s firm specialises in setting up anonymous shell companies and asset protection planning, according to its website.

Bill Zanker, a Trump confidante who co-authored a book with the president in 2007, is listed as the primary contact for Fight Fight Fight in registration documents.

Although Pierce and Zanker appear to be involved with Trump’s memecoin, it’s not clear if they will receive any tokens themselves.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

Only customers who purchased Ledger.com using Global-e as a Merchant of Record are potentially impacted, a Ledger spokesperson told DL News.

“Ledger was not the only brand whose customer data was affected,” the spokesperson said. “The unauthorised party gained access to a Global-e cloud-based information system containing shopper order data from several brands.”

Ledger did not respond to a question about how many of its customers were impacted by the breach.

Global-e did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The incident comes as scams targeting crypto users remain a perennial issue.

In 2025, bad actors stole almost $84 million through phishing attacks, according to crypto security firm ScamSniffer.

These attacks involve scammers using fake emails, texts, or calls to trick customers into revealing sensitive information, clicking links that install crypto-stealing malware, or inadvertently sending them their crypto.

The Global-e data breach could worsen the situation. The leaked data includes Ledger customers’ contact information, a valuable resource for scammers targeting crypto users through email-based phishing attacks.

Not the first time

Ledger’s crypto hardware wallets are designed to help users keep their crypto assets secure by adding a layer of security.

Yet for many, purchasing a hardware wallet from the firm has exposed them to phishing attacks due to multiple data breaches.

In 2020, the firm revealed that data linked to around 272,000 of its customers had been stolen through a breach of its e-commerce and marketing database.

Later that year, Shopify, one of Ledger’s e-commerce service providers, revealed that a rogue employee had leaked data from around 292,000 Ledger customers.

These previous leaks included not just customer names and emails, but also addresses and phone numbers.

Leaks of crypto users’ addresses have led to so-called wrench attacks — where criminals locate, kidnap, and extort known customers to get them to hand over the password-like private keys that grant access to their crypto.

Ledger co-founder attacked

Last year, David Balland, one of Ledger’s co-founders, was targeted by such an attack.

Balland and his wife were kidnapped from their home and held for ransom in a wrench attack that took place in France in January.

Criminals held the pair for around 24 hours before French authorities freed them.

During the attack, the assailants severed one of Balland’s fingers and sent it to his associates in an attempt to lure ransom payments, French newspaper Le Monde reported.

In June, French police arrested a French-Moroccan national, alleged to be the ringleader of the group who carried out the attack, as well as several other kidnapping plots in France.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

Hackers from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea managed to steal more than $2 billion in crypto this year.

That’s a staggering 51% year-over-year uptick, according to a new report from blockchain surveillance firm Chainalysis.

The haul pushes North Korea’s cumulative proceeds from crypto theft to $6.7 billion since it began targeting the industry in 2016.

This year was marked by a shift in North Korea’s criminal strategy, which has led to 74% fewer attacks – but much larger thefts.

“When North Korean hackers strike, they target large services and aim for maximum impact,” Chainalysis wrote in its year-end report.

Instead of external hacks, DPRK operatives are embedding IT workers inside crypto companies to gain privileged access and execute massive heists.

Fewer attacks, bigger hauls

North Korea’s strategy has changed — now it’s go big or go home.

The average North Korean hack now steals amounts that dwarf what typical cybercriminals manage.

Here’s how extreme it’s gotten. The biggest North Korean hack in 2025 was 1,000 times larger than the typical crypto hack, according to Chainalysis. It’s the difference between a bank robbery that bags $1,000 and one that bags $1 million.

For example, the Bybit hack alone — which North Korean operatives executed in February — netted a staggering $1.5 billion. That single theft amounted to three-quarters of North Korea’s entire $2 billion haul for the year.

And while other hackers are pulling off dozens of small thefts from DeFi protocols and individual wallets, hackers from North Korea are focused on infiltrating major exchanges and custodial platforms, where the big money really sits.

In 2025, North Korean actors were responsible for 76% of all major exchange and platform hacks — the highest share ever recorded.

And the problem is far worse than most realise.

“North Korea is much worse than everybody thinks,” Pablo Sabbatella, a member of the cyber investigation organisation SEAL, told DL News in November.

“Between 30% and 40% of job applications received by crypto companies are North Korean operatives trying to infiltrate these organisations.”

Flipping the playbook

According to Chainalysis, North Korean operatives are now inverting the IT worker model entirely.

Instead of applying for jobs, they’re impersonating recruiters for prominent crypto and AI firms, orchestrating fake hiring processes designed to harvest credentials, source code, and VPN access from victims’ current employers.

These recruiters reach individuals worldwide through freelance platforms like Upwork and Freelancer.

The modus operandi is elementary.

An individual either loans his verified account credentials or simply allows a North Korean hacker to use his identity remotely. In exchange, the collaborator gets 20% of earnings, while the operative keeps 80%.

“At the executive level, a similar social-engineering playbook appears in the form of bogus outreach from purported strategic investors or acquirers,” Chainalysis wrote.

For Chris Wong, a former FBI agent and North Korea expert now at crypto intelligence firm TRM Labs, the situation goes beyond a simple cybersecurity challenge.

“North Korea’s crypto theft activity is a sanctions, national security, and financial crime issue, and countering it requires real-time intelligence, operational disruption, and sustained cross-border coordination,” Wong said in comments shared with DL News.

Pedro Solimano is DL News’ Buenos Aires-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email him at psolimano@dlnews.com.

Crypto market maker Keyrock made that argument in a December 16 report that explored the impact of fast-growing platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket.

The report looked at Kalshi’s ‘Inflation in 2025’ market, which lets users place bets on where the 12-month percent change in the Consumer Price Index will fall.

“Rather than a lagging statistical update, Kalshi represents a real-time consensus on future inflation, giving traders an informational edge to anticipate macro turns before they are captured in official forecasts,” the report said.

Traders get ahead

With prediction markets offering potentially market moving insights, traders are incorporating their forecasts into their models.

“Prediction markets are already becoming a valuable data signal,” Nass Diba, co-founder of Worm, a Solana-based prediction market, said in the Keyrock report. “Hedge funds monitor these markets to get ahead of sentiment shifts.”

The Keyrock report compared Kalshi’s prediction market data to Nowcast, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland’s inflation estimate index.

It found that ahead of the April 10 CPI release, Kalshi’s implied inflation forecast climbed from roughly 3.05% to 3.58%, signalling that traders were already positioning for firmer inflation.

Nowcast, by comparison, remained anchored near 3.9% until the data hit, then abruptly dropped to 1.5% once the model absorbed the new inputs.

“This demonstrates how prediction markets synthesise dispersed information faster than backward-fitted models, making them valuable for institutional desks trading TIPS breakevens, inflation swaps, or front-end rates,” the report said.

Accurate forecasts?

It’s not the first reported instance of prediction markets providing more accurate forecasts of future events than conventional sources.

During the 2024 US presidential election, Polymarket gained mainstream notoriety when bettors gave Republican candidate Donald Trump higher odds than most other sources to win the US presidency.

A historical analysis conducted by data scientist Alex McCullough showed Polymarket previously predicted the outcome of world events one month out with 90% accuracy.

Other studies have found prediction markets to be less accurate. A study conducted by researchers at Vanderbilt University found Polymarket got only 67% of markets right, while Kalshi hit 78%, and PredictIt scored 93% accuracy.

Still, prediction markets’ ability to reflect the opinions of crowds, coupled with their broad range of sometimes contentious and "disrespectful" bets, have made them popular with both retail bettors and professional traders alike.

Since early 2024, monthly notional volume has surged from under $100 million to over $13 billion, a 130x increase that places them among the fastest growing sectors in the world, according to the Keyrock report.

Some researchers say analyses of Polymarket have overestimated the platform’s trading volume, however.

The prediction market model of binary yes-no outcomes can also be a double-edged sword.

It works well when there are tens of thousands of bettors putting millions of dollars on the line. But when liquidity dries up it’s a different story.

“Traditional models assume continuous price movements, not discrete yes-or-no outcomes,” Duncan Hennes, managing director at accounting giant KPMG, said in the report.

“When paired with thinner liquidity, this leads to wider spreads, sharper volatility, and more complex margin dynamics.”

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

Quantum computers exploit quantum mechanical phenomena to solve complex problems exponentially faster than classical computers.

They are seen as one of the biggest threats to blockchain technology because their superior computing power could be used to crack the cryptography that keeps blockchains like Bitcoin secure.

In a revised paper published on December 5, Blockstream researchers Mikhail Kudinov and Jonas Nick examined several ways the $1.8 trillion Bitcoin blockchain could be upgraded to make it quantum proof.

The pair argue that hash-based signatures are a compelling post-quantum solution because their security relies solely on hash function assumptions similar to those already underpinning Bitcoin’s design.

“These schemes have undergone extensive cryptanalysis during the NIST post-quantum standardisation process, adding confidence in their robustness,” Kudinov said in an email to the Bitcoin developer mailing list, presenting his and Nick’s work.

NIST is the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a US government agency best known for its widely adopted cybersecurity frameworks.

Researchers have long disagreed on if and when quantum computers will threaten Bitcoin’s cryptography. But recent developments in the field have reignited debate.

In February, Microsoft announced a new quantum computing chip that it says solves the scaling issues that have persistently plagued the field.

Then in October, Google released new research which it claims brings quantum computing much closer to being used in real-world applications such as medicine and materials science — or swiping Bitcoin from holders’ wallets.

At the current rate of development, quantum computers could start threatening Bitcoin within five to 10 years, Pierre-Luc Dallaire-Demers, a scientist-in-residence at the University of Calgary, previously told DL News.

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of the second-biggest blockchain Ethereum, sees the technology progressing even quicker. He warned last month that quantum computers could break Ethereum’s underlying security model before the next US presidential election in 2028.

What are hash-based signatures?

Hash-based signatures rely on hash functions, mathematical algorithms that are considered to be quantum-resistant because they aren’t easily cracked by quantum algorithms, unlike the public-key cryptography used for Bitcoin.

Hash functions can counter the brute-force searches made possible by quantum computers by simply increasing their output size, making the search space too large and keeping them secure for applications like digital signatures.

How exactly developers could implement hash-based signatures, however, is subject to ongoing debate.

Considerations such as keeping validation costs low, whether to standardise multiple hash-based signature implementations, and whether or not the entire network’s history should be necessary to validate transactions all need deciding.

The recent quantum proofing discussions follow a May proposal from Tadge Dryja, a co-inventor of the Bitcoin Lightning Network, to add a feature that will protect Bitcoin held in users’ wallets if a quantum computer-armed actor attempts to break their cryptography.

Older Pay-To-Public-Key Bitcoin wallets created before 2012 that rely on less secure cryptography will be the first to fall to quantum computers.

These vulnerable wallets, which include Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto’s $98 billion stash, contain approximately $600 billion worth of Bitcoin, per an estimate from Project Eleven, a startup aiming to secure Bitcoin against quantum computers.

“It would be nice to have a way to not deal with this issue until after [quantum computing] shows up,” Dryja said at the time.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

Coinbase currently offers between 2% and 3.5% annually in so-called rewards to eligible customers who hold USDC, the dollar-pegged stablecoin, on the exchange.

In emails sent to customers on Thursday and seen by DL News, the exchange said that after December 15, only Coinbase One customers will earn the 3.5% rate, while non-paying customers will forgo rewards.

Coinbase’s USDC rewards programme is funded by the exchange and designed to incentivise customers to hold USDC on Coinbase.

The programme is similar to those offered by other exchanges, trading platforms, and neobanks, in which customers’ idle cash deposits are automatically invested in low-risk financial products such as short-term government bonds and money market funds.

Circle, the issuer behind USDC, holds US government bonds that back its stablecoin.

Coinbase says on its website that it does not use or lend customers’ USDC without their instruction.

A Coinbase spokesperson told DL News that the firm regularly assesses the USDC rewards rate and always aims to offer its best rates at any given time.

Falling rates

It’s not clear what motivated the change.

Last November, Coinbase ended its rewards programme entirely for customers in EU countries due to new requirements introduced by the bloc’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation.

As recently as September, Coinbase reopened the rewards programme to new regions, with CEO Brian Armstrong promoting a 4.1% reward rate for non-paying Canadian customers.

Although Coinbase says its USDC rewards are not generated directly from investing customer deposits, falling interest rates may still affect them.

On Wednesday, the US Federal Reserve cut the federal funds rate by 0.25%. It’s the third reduction of the year, and brings the federal funds target range down to 3.50-3.75%

As interest rates fell over the past year, Coinbase also lowered its USDC rewards across multiple regions.

The exchange cut UK customer rewards by 0.25% twice before today in January and October, while US customer rewards fell to 4% in October before today’s reduction to 3.5%.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

The US Justice Department on Tuesday announced that Evan Tangeman, 22, of Newport Beach, California, was the latest to admit his part in a social engineering scheme that stole 4,100 Bitcoins—priced at the time of the crime at $263 million but now worth over $383 million. The scheme ran from October 2023 to May 2025.

Dubbed the “Social Engineering Enterprise” by US feds, a group of online gamers became friends before working together to commit cybercrimes, the indictment read. They then hacked databases to steal crypto users’ information and con them into providing user logins and private keys.

“Members and associates of the SE Enterprise served different roles and held different responsibilities,” the indictment said.

“The roles included database hackers, organizers, target identifiers, callers, money launderers, and residential burglars targeting hardware virtual currency wallets.”

The indictment added that after gaining the trust of crypto investors, the criminal group was able to pretend they were legitimate digital asset exchange employees and get login information or private keys.

Stolen crypto was laundered by defendants—including Tangeman—and spent on bottle service parties, private jet rentals, security guards, luxury handbags and watches, and properties in Los Angeles, the Hamptons, and Miami, according to the feds.

The indictment added that the defendants would spend up to $500,000 a night on parties and give away designer handbags worth tens of thousands of dollars.

A total of nine defendants have pleaded guilty, the Justice Department said.

The Justice Department first announced the investigation last year, naming defendants Malone Lam and Jeandiel Serrano as key players in the criminal group.

Feds at the time alleged that the two defendants used crypto mixing services—applications that obfuscate the movement of digital funds—to hide their tracks.

Crypto sleuth ZachXBT last year said that stolen funds were switched between other cryptocurrencies, including the privacy coin Monero.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to DL News’ request for comment.

Social engineering scams are becoming more common in the crypto sphere. Such crimes involve manipulating targets to hand over login information or click on compromising links.

Top hackers such as state-sponsored Lazarus Group—the culprits behind industry’s biggest hack of the Bybit exchange in February—also used social engineering techniques to steal billions of dollars.

Mathew is a Latin America-based correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at mdisalvo@dlnews.com.

Sony Bank is developing a plan to launch a US dollar stablecoin, according to Japanese outlet Nikkei.

The proposed stablecoin would be the default currency for buying PlayStation games, anime, and other digital goods inside Sony’s entertainment market.

That ambition fits into a larger corporate land grab for stablecoins, both within and outside Japan.

In Japan, the country’s three mega banks, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, and Mizuho Financial Group, are set to launch a yen stablecoin pilot backed by the country’s top financial regulator in November.

Sony Bank plans to launch its stablecoin as early as fiscal 2026 and has already applied for a national banking charter in the US through Connectia Trust, its US trust subsidiary.

The goal is to replace card payments and their considerably higher fees with stablecoins, which are seen as a cheaper alternative, according to the report.

The stakes are high for Sony as the company already runs a busy digital storefront that serves close to 120 million monthly active users on the PlayStation Network alone.

Layer that onto a global gaming market predicted to generate $424 billion in revenue by 2032, about triple the current projected earnings for this year, and Sony appears to be making a significant move.

As researchers at the Federal Reserve have noted, payment channels for business sectors like gaming that require frequent microtransactions are just as important as the content that generates revenue.

Sony’s stablecoin play is also part of the growing trend toward stablecoins as merchant settlement currencies.

There’s already an expanding roster of banks and fintech firms experimenting with their own branded stablecoins.

In November, Visa launched a stablecoin pilot for gig workers, creators, and freelancers.

Zelle and Western Union have also floated plans to integrate stablecoins into their operations. Western Union CEO Devin McGranahan said the move isn’t about speculation but giving users “more choice and control in how they manage and move their money.”

Osato Avan-Nomayo is our Nigeria-based DeFi correspondent. He covers DeFi and tech. Got a tip? Please contact him at osato@dlnews.com.

In a November 17 blog post, Binance claimed data from Chainalysis and TRM Labs, another blockchain security firm, showed that only 0.018% to 0.023% of trading volume across the top seven biggest crypto exchanges — including itself — was directly linked to illicit crypto wallets.

“Both analytics firms’ data suggest that Binance, the world’s largest digital-asset exchange, consistently outperforms the market in minimising exposure to illicit funds – despite handling far greater trading volumes than any other platform,” Binance said in the post.

But that may not be the full picture.

According to Chainalysis, Binance’s analysis did not appear to include all categories of illicit activity that Chainalysis tracks, such as funds coming from ransomware or stolen in hacks, and was only based on direct exposure only, Chainalysis said in a November 28 X post.

“In other words, if an illicit entity sends funds to a personal wallet, and then that wallet sends funds to Binance, it is not included in this analysis,” Chainalysis said.

Such wallet hopping strategies are widely used by crypto criminals attempting to cover their tracks, although security researchers can often still trace the movement of funds.

Hacks are one of the largest sources of illicit crypto funds, with criminals stealing nearly $2.2 billion through the method last year, according to Chainalysis.

Binance did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The exchange said it updated its blog post on November 19 to clarify that it conducted the analysis itself using Chainalysis and TRM Labs’ datasets, and to specify how direct illicit exposure was calculated based on Chainalysis data.

Tough on crypto crime

Chainalysis’ clarification comes as Binance attempts to signal to both regulators and the broader crypto industry that it is tough on crypto crime.

In 2023, Binance admitted it engaged in anti-money laundering, unlicensed money transmitting, and sanctions violations, resulting in a $4.3 billion penalty.

Changpeng Zhao, the firm’s CEO at the time, stepped down and was sentenced to four months in prison for failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering programme, although he received a presidential pardon in October.

The same month, victims of the October 7 attacks conducted by Hamas accused the exchange of aiding terrorists in a new lawsuit.

Binance has repeatedly said that it cannot comment on any ongoing litigation, and that it complies fully with internationally recognised sanctions laws.

Ari Redbord, global head of policy at TRM Labs, the other firm whose data Binance used in its analysis, told DL News the 0.018% figure cited in Binance’s release reflects a point-in-time analysis that his firm conducted on Binance’s activity for June 2025, and only covers direct exposure for a limited number of categories.

“The number did not come from a public TRM report — it came from a custom dataset provided directly to Binance,” Redbord said. “We would defer to Binance on any interpretation, comparisons, or framing around that statistic.”

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

Upbit confirmed the incident on Thursday and said it suffered an unauthorised withdrawal of Solana-based cryptocurrencies, including stablecoins, from its coffers.

“To prevent any damage to member assets, the entire amount will be covered by Upbit’s holdings,” Oh Kyung-seok, CEO of Dunamu, said in a statement.

Upbit has also paused deposits and withdrawals and frozen $8.2 million in Solaire, one of the tokens syphoned during the breach.

$10 billion acquisition

The hack lands at a singularly awkward moment for Upbit and its new owner-to-be.

Naver Financial, a subsidiary of Korean internet giant Naver, agreed to a $10.3 billion stock-swap deal to acquire all of Dunamu’s equity, according to regulatory filings.

Stock-swap deals allow companies to merge without the acquirer needing to pay cash. Instead, it issues its own shares to the other company’s shareholders. Naver is issuing 2.54 of its own shares per Dumanu share.

The merger is expected to catapult Naver’s fintech arm to a market value of $13.6 billion.

Record-breaking hacks

The breach at Upbit is also the latest entry in what has already become a record-setting year for losses from crypto hacks and exploits, as attackers continue to target exchanges and DeFi protocols.

Losses from these incidents have exceeded $2.4 billion, including the massive $1.5 billion hack of the Bybit crypto exchange that happened in February.

Even long-standing DeFi protocols like Balancer, which have undergone numerous security audits from several blockchain security firms, haven’t been spared.

In November, an attacker syphoned $128 million from Balancer.

Upbit isn’t a first-time victim.

In 2019, suspected North Korean hackers stole $42 million in Ethereum from the crypto exchange.

Osato Avan-Nomayo is our Nigeria-based DeFi correspondent. He covers DeFi and tech. Got a tip? Please contact him at osato@dlnews.com.

Wu Hai, CEO of the China Internet Investment Fund, made that prediction on Sunday, arguing that the integration with artificial intelligence projects will help the Middle Kingdom’s blockchain sector surge by 71% from its 2024 $816 million high.

While that’s about a tenth of the estimated US blockchain market in in the same year, Wu seemed confident that the sector is about to experience explosive growth.

“Our investment drives are helping the blockchain industry solidify its basic software and hardware foundations,” the CIIF chief told China’s Cailian Press. “We are looking to promote high-quality development.”

The bullishness comes years after Beijing cracked down on the crypto industry and as the US market has been supercharged by President Donald Trump’s pro-crypto policies.

Two-pronged blockchain strategy

Wu said that blockchain investors were following a two-pronged strategy.

The first involves building key infrastructure and application platforms. And a second focuses on integrated application and “value scenarios.”

These scenarios include blockchain adoption drives in the government space, as well as finance, culture, and tourism.

AI-powered technical support service platforms are also set to adopt blockchain technology.

‘Significant results’

Wu said that Chinese blockchain investment, financing, and industrial development have already yielded “significant results in integration and application.”

This was particularly true of the enterprise services and financial services sectors, he said.

And Wu noted that many of China’s blockchain companies were founded between 2017 and 2019, several years before their overseas competitors.

Wu added that last year saw investment flow into Chinese blockchain-powered services, financial companies, and agricultural projects.

But he indicated that over 90% of investors still back early-stage projects.

Xi’s blockchain drive

In 2019, President Xi Jinping called on the public and private sectors to “increase investment and accelerate blockchain development.”

Two years later, top Beijing policymakers included a comprehensive blockchain strategy in the country’s 14th Five-Year Plan.

However, China’s crypto purges have forced most businesses to focus on private blockchain network-powered solutions.

As a result, many of the country’s most prominent blockchain players are most active in sectors like central and local government, as well as administration.

But in recent years, telecom providers have launched blockchain-powered 5G projects.

China’s judiciary uses blockchain for a fast-growing range of purposes, such as storing and verifying electronic evidence.

The CIIF is worth $15 billion. It was co-launched by the Chinese web regulator, the Cyberspace Administration, in conjunction with the Ministry of Finance.

The parties launched the fund in 2017 with the express aim of “supporting investments in the domestic internet industry.”

Tim Alper is a news correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email at tdalper@dlnews.com.

More than half a dozen of this new breed of financial apps have launched over the past year, banking on clearer regulations and the technological savvy of younger generations to fuel their success.

“The majority of investors today are digital natives,” Zac Prince, managing director of GalaxyOne, Galaxy’s crypto neobank, told DL News. “They’re comfortable with app-based banking and want a single, modern platform that removes friction and gives them full visibility.”

The popularity of these new blockchain-powered apps comes at a key moment for the crypto industry. Having long been watched with suspicion by traditional finance and regulators, new pro-industry policies have paved the way for crypto to tap into traditional finance, and vice-versa.

Crypto neobanks have everything to play for. If they can carve out even a modest slice of the traditional banking market, the rewards will be huge.

The global banking industry is massive, with revenues hitting a record $5.5 trillion last year. The sector is estimated to be worth $3.9 trillion in 2025, according to a report from global management consulting firm McKinsey.

What are neobanks?

Neobank is the nom de guerre of a new breed of digital-only financial apps that burst onto the scene over the past decade.

Chime, Revolut and Monzo challenged traditional banks by ditching brick-and-mortar branches, enabling them to cut costs and offer higher interest rates than incumbents.

Neobanks have thrived. Revolut is now one of the most valuable fintech firms in Europe, having achieved a $75 billion valuation at a secondary share sale to employees and investors in September.

Crypto neobanks are the latest evolution in the trend. They aim to leverage blockchain technology in their products to offer fast, low-cost international payments, easy crypto investing, and double-digit interest rates on deposits.

To be sure, they are facing fierce competition. Older challenger banks are also tapping into similar services while crypto-native firms roll out their own banking services.

Tapping DeFi yields

For many crypto neobanks, the focus is on offering customers better returns than they can find in the traditional banking system.

“Interest rates are crazy low,” Vijit Katta, CEO and co-founder of Tria, a crypto neobank, told DL News. “Unless you go for financial products which are risky, you won’t be able to get more than like, 10% ever.”

Tria plans to tap into yields offered by decentralised finance protocols, which can go toe-to-toe with the best rates offered by other neobanks.

NuBank, the biggest neobank, has drawn in hundreds of thousands of customers in Colombia by offering a 13% annual effective interest rate on its savings account.

Tria is hoping to offer even higher yields.

“We want to bring delta neutral strategies with proven track records,” Katta said. “These strategies can easily have anywhere between 15% to 25% month-over-month.”

Such double-digit yields might draw in more customers. But there’s more risk involved.

On October 10 the crypto market was struck by a $19 billion leverage wipeout.

As crypto prices cratered, Binance, the biggest exchange, automatically closed thousands of users’ trades which were involved in such delta neutral strategies. This resulted in them unexpectedly losing millions of dollars.

There’s also the risk of faults in the code that underpins many DeFi protocols. This week, users of liquidity protocol Balancer lost $128 million after a hacker exploited a code bug.

Regulatory clarity

Regulatory clarity in the US is one of the primary drivers behind crypto neobanks’ bullishness.

In July, US President Donald Trump signed The Genius Act, the landmark crypto regulation in the US that defines clear rules for stablecoins, into law.

This, neobank developers say, has set a standard for other countries to follow, giving the upstart lenders a newfound confidence to deploy their products.

“The boundaries were very unclear, and therefore the fees and compliance that these players had to charge customers became more substantial,” Ying Zhong Ng, head of product at UR, a crypto neobank launched by Mantle, told DL News. “Now I know what my true costs are, and the playing field I can operate in.”

The regulatory clarity has emboldened existing payments providers to work with crypto neobanks, opening up a new customer base for them.

Visa has recently changed its internal regulations, helping align blockchain technology and existing payments rails, Katta said.

“What we are doing right now was definitely not possible, say, two years ago,” Katta told DL News. “The technical complexities that Visa has allowed has changed the game in terms of how a self-custodial neobank can operate.”

Other factors fuelling the rise of crypto neobanks include new on- and off-ramps between crypto and the traditional financial system that are cheaper and easier to use than they were before, UR’s Ng said.

Meeting customers

Then there’s customer demand. According to Ng, more people are realising that crypto has use cases beyond speculation.

“People send money to their friends or family at home through stablecoins. Or as freelancers they receive payments in USDT, USDC — that’s actually quite common,” Ng said.

The context into which neobanks are launching is important too.

Users are much more familiar with using financial apps than they were five years ago, according to Evin McMullen, the co-founder and CEO of the Billions Network, which works with Tria to provide private know-your-customer checks using zero-knowledge technology.

“The switching cost to take on these new technologies from a user perspective is much lower,” she told DL News. “It’s easier to use them because they’re designed more intuitively to the experiences you already have.”

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi correspondent. Reach out to him with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

The move falls under Ripple’s University Blockchain Research Initiative, which provides technical resources and financial support for academic research in blockchain technology.

XRP co-creator and Ripple chief technology officer David Schwartz will join the group, which includes academics from Trinity College Dublin, Nanyang Technological University, Hanyang University, and the University of Luxembourg.

“For blockchain to truly evolve, we need a constant exchange of ideas between those building the technology and those studying its future,” Schwartz said in a statement.

“We’re deepening that collaboration, bringing together academic researchers and Ripple engineers to explore new applications for XRP and its native chain that can ultimately move this growing ecosystem forward.”

The move comes amid an American crypto industry boom on the back of President Donald Trump shepherding in more favourable regulations.

Wall Street institutions are piling into digital assets, creating their own stablecoins, tokenising debt, and upgrading internal systems with blockchain technology.

The increased interest in the financial sector is spilling over into academia. More universities have started running blockchain courses and conducting research in recent years, a trend Ripple is eager to leverage.

Schwartz is set to step down as CTO at the end of the year, but has said he will remain involved with Ripple.

University of San Francisco

In addition to Ripple’s new advisory council, the firm is also collaborating with the University of San Francisco.

The university’s Center for Law, Tech, and Social Good will explore how blockchain legislation can support innovation, with the goal of publishing public-facing research and policy recommendations.

At the same time, the Department of Computer Science will run an XRP Ledger validator, software that processes transactions on the blockchain.

To fund these efforts, and those at other partner universities, Ripple said it has distributed $1.5 million worth of grants this year.

The firm’s other research initiative partners include the University of Michigan, University of Wyoming, UC Berkeley, University of São Paulo, and Duke University.

Ripple said it has supported more than 60 universities worldwide and committed over $80 million in research funding since 2018.

Crypto and academia

Ripple isn’t the only blockchain organisation cosying up to academia.

Last week, Tron DAO, a group that helps run the Tron blockchain, announced new collaborations with blockchain organisations at Columbia University and Harvard University.

Input Output, the company that designed and built the Cardano blockchain, also has strong academic-industry ties.

The firm has collaborated with the University of Edinburgh since 2015, pursuing research and development on Plutus, the native smart contract language for Cardano, and zero-knowledge proofs.

The Cardano foundation, a nonprofit that supports the Cardano blockchain, has also partnered with the University of Zurich to sponsor a PhD position in Blockchain Analytics.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi correspondent. Reach out to him with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

Agents buying and selling goods and services using a payment protocol developed by Coinbase grew more than 30,000% and 368%, respectively, over the past seven days, according to x402scan.com. The number of transactions grew more than 4,300% to 957,000.

The protocol, x402, has received support from Cloudflare and Google. It allows agents to make payments instantly with near-zero fees using any blockchain.

Agents are the AI-powered bots that could eventually handle everything from online shopping to money management. And the crypto industry has attempted to position blockchain technology as the ideal tool for empowering the so-called “agentic economy.”

Last month, the Ethereum Foundation announced dAI, a team that’s been tasked with boosting Ethereum as a settlement and coordination layer for agents. DAI and Metamask developer Consensys have since published a finalised version of a protocol that allows agents to find, vet, and work with one another without centralised intermediaries.

In May, Coinbase announced x402. The protocol is built atop HTTP, another protocol that undergirds the world wide web.

Agents that attempt to make purchases online often receive the HTTP 402 code, which signals that a payment is required. X402 allows agents to make those payments using cryptocurrency without signing up for accounts or subscriptions.

In September, Google said it would integrate x402 into its own agentic payment protocol, AP2. Later that month, Cloudflare announced NET Dollar, a US dollar-backed stablecoin that would leverage x402.

On Saturday, crypto data provider CoinGecko began tracking crypto assets associated with x402-using agents.

To be sure, even as x402 transactions boom, their value remains relatively miniscule.

While there have been almost one million x402-enabled transactions over the past week, those transactions were worth just $1.1 million. Fewer than 100 transactions were worth more than $100 over the past seven days.

But that’s by design.

“The web as we know it was never designed for small, programmatic payments. Every online service today relies on subscriptions, accounts, and login management,” Gregor Frick, a partner at crypto venture firm Renaud Partners, wrote on X.

X402, on the other hand, “allows you to pay automatically, per request, directly over HTTP: no subscriptions, no logins, no accounts. Think of it as a pay-per-use layer for the internet itself.”

Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.

That threat edged closer on Wednesday after Google released new research which it claims brings quantum computing much closer to being used in real-world applications such as medicine and materials science — or swiping Bitcoin straight from holders’ wallets.

“Google just keeps delivering milestones on schedule and that’s how the threat for Bitcoin will become increasingly more real,” Pierre-Luc Dallaire-Demers, a quantum computing researcher and founder of Pauli Group, a firm working on post-quantum cryptography for blockchains, told DL News.

Four to five years

Dallaire-Demers said the breakthrough is consistent with his previous prediction that quantum computers will be able to crack the encryption behind Bitcoin within four to five years.

Bitcoin uses a cryptographic algorithm for the digital signatures that mark transactions. The security of this system relies on the difficulty in unravelling the outputs of that algorithm.

In the future, quantum computers could become powerful enough to do so, giving bad actors the ability to transfer Bitcoin out of vulnerable wallets at will.

The impact of quantum computers capable of cracking advanced cryptography would be immense.

About 25% of all Bitcoin in circulation — around $554 billion at current prices — is vulnerable to a quantum attack, according to a 2024 note from Deloitte, a consulting and risk management firm.

And it’s not just cryptocurrencies that are at risk.

Much of the internet, including websites, messaging services, and financial transactions, relies on encrypted communications that are also theoretically vulnerable to quantum attack.

Impossible to know

Other experts are more conservative in their estimates of how much time Bitcoin in its current form has left.

Paulo Viana, a quantum computing researcher, told DL News he believes quantum computers could pose a threat in around eight years’ time.

But the few extra years of safety don’t make the threat any less unsettling.

“Considering how complicated it is to transition to a quantum resistant option, eight years seems to be concerning at least,” he said.

As Quantum computers become more powerful, the Bitcoin network won’t fall all at once.

The first part to fall to quantum computers will be older Pay-To-Public-Key wallets created before 2012, which use a weaker form of encryption.

For most users, avoiding this risk is as easy as transferring funds to a modern wallet, which hides the user’s public key behind a hash that quantum computers cannot break until a transaction is made.

Satoshi’s $122bn stash

But wallets belonging to Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto — containing some 1.1 million Bitcoin worth $122 billion — are of the older, more vulnerable type.

Nakamoto hasn’t been heard from for 14 years, making it appear unlikely that the pseudonymous developer will return to safeguard his stash any time soon.

The biggest issue, Viana said, is that it will be impossible to know when quantum computers start cracking Bitcoin’s encryption.

To those observing activity on the blockchain, such an unauthorised transaction would appear no different from an old Bitcoin wallet performing a routine transfer, something that happens frequently.

“We are safe for now, but this could lead to a market crash if people don’t start to focus on solving this problem,” Viana said.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi correspondent. Reach out to him with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

“The Solana Mobile Saga has reached the end of its support lifecycle,” the firm said in a post on its website. “Compatibility with new software or services cannot be guaranteed.”

The lack of support means that devices will no longer receive updates, making them more vulnerable to security threats and potentially causing apps to stop working over time.

“Customer support for Saga-specific issues will be limited to general inquiries only,” the post said.

Solana Labs did not respond to a request for comment.

Launched in May 2023, the Saga aimed to integrate blockchain technology and make the Web3 ecosystem more accessible to everyday users. It was also built in reaction to the restrictive app store policies of companies like Apple and Google.

The phone was built by OSOM, a California-based hardware company, in collaboration with Solana Mobile, a subsidiary of Solana Labs.

Short lifecycle

The news comes as a blow to those who bought the Solana Saga.

Its two-year lifecycle is unusually short compared to other mobile phone manufacturers.

Apple provides a minimum of five years of security updates for its devices, while Google has promised seven years of software updates for its newer phones.

It’s not clear why Solana Mobile decided to end support so soon. The firm is currently developing a new phone, called the Solana Seeker, which launched on August 4.

Over the last decade, more than a dozen bespoke crypto phones have hit the market. But none have gained meaningful traction.

Solana’s Saga originally sold for $1,000 before being reduced to $599 after slow initial sales. Customers eventually scooped up about 20,000 phones, which was well short of the device’s 50,000 unit goal.

Memecoin airdrops

Most users won’t remember the Saga for its attempt to make the crypto economy more accessible, but instead for its role in the Solana memecoin mania that swept the blockchain in late 2023 and early 2024.

When Solana Saga phones were sent to customers, they came with pre-loaded crypto wallets. Many Solana memecoin developers chose to airdrop tokens to these wallets, partly as a marketing stunt, and partly to reward them for buying the phones and supporting Solana.

Initially, these gifted memecoins were worth a few hundred dollars and essentially acted as a further discount to the Saga’s price, if not compensating users outright.

But as memecoin trading reached a fever pitch in early 2024, the airdropped tokens soared in value. At one point, they were worth many multiples of the retail value of the phone.

Even as support for the Saga ends, unopened phones are still being sold for up to three times their retail price on online marketplaces.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

Ronin’s weekly revenue from transaction fees is up more than 4,000% from its 2023 all-time low. It surged 20% just last week, an indication of growing user activity on the network, according to the project’s data dashboard on Dune.

Angry Dynomites, a crypto game with a market layer, has driven the bump by attracting significant attention from users since its mainnet launch on July 29.

The stakes are high for Ronin. Its TVL, a measure of investor funds in the blockchain, has crashed to $72 million, a 95% decline since its peak in 2022. The slump followed a devastating $600 million hack in March 2022.

Ronin’s popular mobile game Axie Infinity has also lost most of its shine. There were fewer than 200,000 daily players in the last 30 days, compared to 2.7 million daily users during its peak in February 2022. That decline has come amid a slump in the broader crypto gaming market.

But Angry Dynomites might improve Ronin’s fortunes.

Players can mine resource-themed tokens while playing the game. They can either use those tokens for worldbuilding or trade them in the game’s in-built decentralised exchange to level up.

Even before the mainnet launch, the game was already generating frenzied user activity. During the testnet phase, it attracted about 400,000 users who completed more than 1 million onchain trades.

That’s about 10% of the weekly trading volume on World of Dypians, the most popular crypto game, according to DappRadar.

GameFi slump

Ronin’s success with Angry Dynomites seems to have gone against the grain of the usual incentive-style launch of crypto games with token airdrops that often fizzle out.

Instead, the game uses in-game rewards as tradable tokens in a compounding system that appears to be keeping engagement on the platform sticky.

Still, crypto’s GameFi sector is in decline despite concerted efforts to use blockchain technology to tap into the $185 billion market for online gaming.

GameFi volume is down almost 60% in the last six months, even as other market segments like DeFi and memecoins experience a significant increase in trading activity, according to DappRadar.

In March, Arbitrum DAO’s leadership came under fire from frustrated delegates following a controversial $200 million investment into crypto gaming.

Osato Avan-Nomayo is our Nigeria-based DeFi correspondent. He covers DeFi and tech. Got a tip? Please contact him at osato@dlnews.com.

So-called trustless or decentralised VPNs that tap into blockchain technology are benefitting too, despite stiff competition from more mainstream products.

“Traffic does seem to be increasing, and users from the UK are increasing,” Harry Halpin, CEO of Nym Technologies, the firm behind NymVPN, told DL News.

Spokespeople from two other trustless VPNs told DL News they’ve also seen an uptick in signups and traffic since the UK’s new rules came into effect on July 25.

What are VPN?

VPNs are software that encrypt users’ internet traffic, making their browsing history and location harder to trace. They allow users to access websites blocked in the UK and dodge identity checks.

Their increased use comes as UK residents push back against the Online Safety Act.

The act is meant to protect children by blocking access to websites that contain material harmful to them, such as porn sites. Web users can remove the blocks by providing sites documents such as bank statements or passports to verifying their age and identity.

But critics say the rules are being applied too broadly and that even adults are struggling to access legal content.

Others argue that the blocks do little to protect children as they are easily circumvented using VPNs, and the mandatory age and identity checks threaten users’ privacy.

No control

Trustless or decentralised VPNs advertise themselves as a more private and secure alternative to commercial VPNs.

“Most commercial VPN providers are centralised,” Halpin said. “Centralised VPN providers can actually directly see all of your internet traffic, even if they claim to use encryption.”

Several commercial VPN companies that say they don’t log user activity have been caught doing so.

This is a problem, Halpin said, because it means those VPNs can easily hand over their users’ data to authorities should they request it, or lose the data in a hack.

Decentralised VPNs, on the other hand, operate similarly to blockchains in that they are made up of a network of distributed nodes. Proponents claim this means they cannot collect or log users’ data, even if they wanted to.

“There is no central point of control,” Freqnik, a pseudonymous core developer at Meile dVPN, told DL News. “Decentralised VPNs reduce the trust barrier.”

Many decentralised or trustless VPNs leverage blockchain technology.

Meile dVPN uses Sentinel, a decentralised blockchain marketplace where anyone can buy and sell internet bandwidth.

Others, like NymVPN, let users pay for their services with privacy-preserving crypto like Monero and Zcash.

Downsides

Yet there are downsides to the enhanced privacy.

“With great freedom comes great responsibility,” Freqnik said. “Any decentralised network, whether it be blockchain or peer-to-peer connections, is prone to bad actors.”

Meile says it solves this issue by assigning nodes on its network a score based on the quality of service they provide.

Some users also worry that decentralised VPNs won’t be as performant as their centralised counterparts.

According to Halpin, the extra level of anonymity NymVPN provides does slow it down. He said the speed is enough for instant messages and cryptocurrency transactions, and that Nym also offers a faster, less anonymous version of its VPN.

For privacy diehards, these downsides likely aren’t an issue. But for more casual users it might be a hard sell.

After all, commercial VPNs do just as good a job of helping users bypass website blocks, the main reason users are flocking to the software.

“From what we can tell, centralised VPNs seem to be benefiting the most,” Freqnik said.

“Decentralised VPNs are still under the radar.”

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

Beginning in 2026, Chase customers will be able to directly link their bank accounts to the US-based crypto exchange.

The bank will also enable customers to cash out points from its reward programme into Circle’s USDC stablecoin, and use Chase credit cards to fund their Coinbase accounts.

Wary banks

Calling the deal “a huge adoption unlock,” analysts at Bernstein said Coinbase will acquire new customers and access their savings activities.

The banking industry has long been wary of crypto. Analysts have previously noted that banks see digital assets as hindered by regulatory uncertainty, compliance risks, and reputational concerns.

Some banks even prevent their customers from investing in crypto due to the prevalence of scams that plague the industry.

By creating an open, two-way channel between its customers’ accounts and Coinbase, Chase is making a complete turnaround.

And it’s not the only sign things are changing. In June, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan signalled his firm is looking at creating a crypto stablecoin once key legislation passes.

In July, Citibank CEO Jane Fraser told analysts on a post-earnings conference call the bank may also issue its own stablecoin for digital payments.

Going mainstream

The partnership will expose JPMorgan Chase’s more than 80 million customers to crypto, many for the first time.

“This has a massive impact on how the public views crypto and will play a major role helping the industry go mainstream,” Carlos Guzmán, an analyst at GSR, a crypto market maker, told DL News.

Still, the move may be more symbolic than a significant source of new customers for the crypto exchange, Adam Morgan McCarthy, a research analyst at Kaiko, told DL News.

“I don’t know how many users will actively engage with this, but just having it there and Coinbase working with Chase like this is important,” he said.

Others analysts are more cautious about what the development signals.

“We should view it as tactical rather than transformative,” Will Beeson, founder of stablecoin infrastructure firm Multiliquid, told DL News. “The structural shift will come when banks themselves embed digital asset capabilities natively.”

Changing attitudes

Still, the tie-up emphasises just how quickly attitudes towards crypto are changing, McCarthy said. In the UK, his Chase bank account was blocked from sending money to crypto exchanges as recently as 18 months ago.

Moreover, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has long voiced his scepticism on crypto.

In 2022, he called digital assets “decentralised Ponzi schemes.” Earlier this year, he said Bitcoin “has no intrinsic value,” and warned about crypto’s use among sex traffickers and money launderers.

Yet Dimon said in March JPMorgan will allow its clients to buy Bitcoin. And in July, the bank said it’s exploring letting clients lend against their crypto holdings.

“The shift parallels Larry Fink’s, who also went from being crypto skeptic to having BlackRock become one of the most crypto-involved asset managers,” Guzmán said.

In recent months, crypto has taken centre stage in President Donald Trump’s administration.

Under Trump, the Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped several cases against crypto firms. The administration has also championed new crypto legislation, such as the recent GENIUS Act that provides rules for stablecoins.

The increased regulatory clarity has pushed more firms, especially those on Wall Street, to explore crypto integrations, taking advantage of the speed and efficiency boosts the technology provides.

Just the start

There’s a good chance there will be more partnerships between crypto exchanges and banks, McCarthy said. But he also cautioned that not all US banks will be receptive to the idea.

As a traditionally conservative industry, some may not yet be technically equipped to incorporate blockchain technology.

“There’s still some archaic features to contend with that might limit scope for some banks,” McCarthy said.

Guzmán said that although Coinbase is a leader, other crypto exchanges, like Kraken, also have similar crypto-as-a-service offerings for banks. He believes many more competitors will eventually enter the space.

“It’s too early to crown a winner here,” he said.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

“We want to inform you that Abra Earn international services are currently paused, effective immediately,” a July email shared with DL News said.

“This decision is part of our broader risk management efforts and is also influenced by external circumstances outside of our control.”

It’s not clear what “external circumstances” the firm is referring to. Abra, which paid out millions in 2024 to settle alleged US regulatory violations, has not publicly announced the withdrawal pause.

Unsecured lending

The situation highlights the uncertainty involved in using platforms like Abra, which offer customers lucrative yields on their crypto assets, generated through a combination of decentralised finance activities and often unsecured lending.

Several similar platforms, including Celsius, BlockFi, and Finblox blew up in 2022 after borrowers defaulted on loans, costing customers billions of dollars in losses.

Reports that customers were not receiving scheduled payments and couldn’t withdraw their funds started appearing online in early June.

In recent Trustpilot reviews, those impacted reported the firm’s customer service representatives have cut them off, and ignored their requests to know why they can no longer access their funds.

Confused users

In the replies to the Trustpilot reviews, the official Abra account confused users with stock responses, and offered little help or guidance.

“We appreciate you taking the time to leave this review. Your feedback means a lot to us and we truly value input from users like you. We will strongly consider your comments and [are] always eager to learn how we can improve Abra for you,” one response said.

Meanwhile, Abra CEO Bill Barhydt has continued to promote the firm.

He has appeared on podcasts, given interviews, and posts multiple times a day on social media. In the replies to his posts, Abra customers regularly plead with Barhydt to answer their messages and return their funds, to no avail.

Barhydt told DL News the withdrawal issues are due to Abra transitioning customers to a new version of its app.

When asked if Abra had announced the transition publicly, Barhydt said the firm was contacting users directly, not through the press.

$82 million in refunds

Launched in 2014, Abra styles itself as a crypto services and wealth management platform targeting institutions and high net worth individuals.

It boasts of managing $700 million for customers, and says it is an Securities and Exchange Commission-registered advisor and offers “fiduciary-grade compliance.”

The reports that users can’t withdraw their funds come just over a year after Abra reached a settlement with 25 US states over claims it had operated its business without the required licenses to handle crypto activities.

Abra was required to refund $82 million to US customers after halting services in the country in 2023. The states involved in the settlement all agreed to forgo fines in order for customers to be fully repaid.

The SEC declined a request for comment.

Fraud allegations

The state filings cast a spotlight on Abra’s business practices.

In June 2023, the Texas State Securities Board accused Abra of securities fraud, alleging that the firm misled investors through sales of crypto yield products, according to state records. The board also said Abra had been insolvent or nearly insolvent at the time of the case.

“To be clear, the fraud allegations are untrue and designed to create fear,” the platform said in a July 2023 email sent to its customers and viewed by DL News.

In November 2023, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority warned that Abra was not authorised to offer its services in the country and advised against dealing with the firm.

And a 2024 settlement with the state of Georgia’s Banking and Finance Department ordered that Barhydt be personally liable to return funds to US customers.

No answer

It’s not clear why the pause only impacts Abra’s international customers.

Alan, a customer from Guatemala, told DL News he can’t access $1,200 he deposited to the platform.

“A few months back I noticed that the ‘Borrow’ tab on the app, which was supposed to have your money and earn interest over time, had a 0.0% yield,” he said.

Alan said he chalked up the situation to a visual bug in the app. But after checking back multiple times, the app still said he wasn’t earning any yield.

Since then, the ability to withdraw crypto has been paused without notice, he said.

“I already wrote to support multiple times and I’ve had no answer so far.”

Update, July 30: Added comments from Abra CEO Bill Barhydt.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

Those initiatives represent the foundation’s most considerable expense last year, according to its financial insights report for 2024 released on Thursday, which offered a rare glimpse into the organisation’s finances.

Its total spend notched just over $29 million.

“The focus is on maintaining a sustainable balance between costs and income while maximising impact for the broader ecosystem,” Frederik Gregaard, CEO of the Cardano Foundation, said in a statement.

The report comes eight years after Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson founded and launched Cardano. Despite Hoskinson’s star power and a cult-like following, the blockchain has struggled to achieve the same level of adoption as its peers.

Users have deposited around $300 million into decentralised finance apps on the blockchain, a fraction of the several billion in deposits achieved by competitors Solana and Tron.

The number of transactions Cardano handles sits at around 90,000 a day, down from highs of around 460,000 in early 2022, per Cexplorer data.

Eclectic adoption

It’s against that backdrop that the foundation spent $15 million to expand the real-world utility of Cardano.

That’s a lot of cash, but it’s not uncommon for blockchains to spend that much money to encourage usage.

Rival blockchain Polkadot spent almost $87 million in the first half of 2024, half of which went to marketing efforts, like paying influencers to promote the blockchain.

The initiatives the Cardano Foundation’s money went to were pretty eclectic, however.

Among the uses were the development of blockchain-based ballistic identification systems, digital identity solutions, real estate platforms, and even tracking solutions for NASA, according to the report.

Money also went toward several enterprise and institutional partnerships, including ones with Barcelona FC, Amnesty International, Swisscom, Syngenta Foundation, and the United Nations Development Programme.

Some funds also went to more conventional uses, such as supporting Cardano developers through the creation of several new developer tools.

Cardano’s adoption efforts contrast with most blockchain usage, which is financial in nature.

For example, on Ethereum, the crypto lending, stablecoin transfers, and swapping account for the vast majority of activity.

Long runway

The amount the Cardano Foundation spent in 2024 is small compared to its total holdings.

As of December 31, 2024, the foundation held almost $660 million worth of assets, comprising approximately 77% of ADA, the native token of the Cardano blockchain, 15% of Bitcoin, and 8% of cash, cash equivalents, and financial assets.

The foundation for the first time reported its finances using Reeve, an on-chain accounting tool.

According to Reeve, the foundation reported a $1.3 million net profit for 2024.

The majority of these profits came from sales of cryptocurrencies that the foundation holds.

It sold around $36 million worth of ADA and around $5.5 million worth of Bitcoin.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

When locating World Orb stations in Germany, the company’s website indicates that the “Orbs will return soon.”

Orbs are the silver, basketball-sized spheres that scan users’ irises to verify their identity and join the company’s identification network. There were dozens of stations throughout the country as early as April.

World, formerly known as Worldcoin, is updating the stations and has plans to launch a flagship store in Munich, a company spokesperson told DL News.

They declined to share when exactly World would relaunch Orb verification in Germany. The WorldApp, the company’s crypto wallet, has not been paused.

Founded in 2019, World’s identification venture is premised on the idea that in the near future, it will be more challenging to determine who is a bot online due to the rise of artificial intelligence technology — like ChatGPT developed by OpenAI.

The bet has attracted some of Silicon Valley’s most notable venture capitalists.

In May, World raised $135 million in a WLD token sale to earlier investors a16z crypto and Bain Capital Crypto.

Today its World Chain boasts a total value locked of just over $53 million, according to DefiLlama data.

Orbs and WorldID

Orbs play a critical role in Altman’s iris-scanning venture.

They convert the iris scan into a string of letters and numbers, known as an iris code. Instead of a phone number, email address, or passport, the iris code becomes the basis of users’ WorldID.

Tools for Humanity, the company developing World, hopes that WorldID will become as ubiquitous as Google’s sign-in feature.

In exchange for scanning their eyes, users can receive the project’s native cryptocurrency, the WLD token. Users can also earn WLD tokens for referring other users to get scanned.

This process takes place at various physical stations and kiosks, including those located in malls, convenience stores, and art galleries.

The operators of the Orb stations are third-party companies that earn WLD rewards for scanning individuals. Those third-party companies must undergo a due diligence process before they can become operators.

An operator contract obtained by DL News indicates that operators cannot state that they work for World or Tools for Humanity.

These operators were at the front lines of a long-running scheme in Berlin last Spring.

Organised groups paid refugees and the unsheltered cash to scan their eyes at different Orb stations throughout the city in exchange for the WLD rewards they earned for scanning.

At least one group in Berlin that enlisted these recruits may have earned nearly $700,000 worth of tokens in March and April, when the token was at its peak, according to a DL News analysis.

GDPR gripes

The overhaul comes amid an ongoing legal battle between World and the Bavarian State Office for Data Protection, which is responsible for ensuring the company complies with Europe’s strict data privacy rules, known as GDPR.

The agency began investigating the company in 2022 due to concerns about its handling of sensitive biometric data.

In December 2024, the agency declared that World had violated data privacy rules and ordered it to delete the iris codes it had collected, according to the agency’s 132-page enforcement order.

The agency also reprimanded the company for storing plain-text iris codes in a database from July 24, 2023, to May 14, 2024.

World stated that it had deleted these iris codes when it introduced its secure multiparty computation system in May 2024. A World representative told DL News they do not know how many iris codes were deleted.

Authorities in Spain and Portugal suspended the company from operating in those countries in 2024 after they received complaints that minors were being scanned.

World quietly relaunched operations in Portugal this year.

World refuted the BayLDA’s judgment and filed an appeal in a Bavarian court in Ansbach in December 2024.

World does not need to stop operations during the appeals process.

‘Harrison Ford story’

Since then, the company has undergone numerous changes to key components of its operations, including its legal structure and data processing activities, Michael Will, president of the BayLDA, told DL News.

Instead of deleting user iris codes, World began storing and encrypting this data across several servers in May, including those at UC Berkeley and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, as well as with the Ethereum client provider Nethermind.

The objective? To make it impossible to identify any one person using the iris codes.

“Like in a Harrison Ford story, as long as no one has all the puzzle pieces of this former picture, you do not have personal information,” Will told DL News. “As long as this is really enforceable and really guaranteed, we have anonymisation.”

Will said he and his team will call upon external support from scientists to evaluate this process.

A World representative told DL News the company will update its terms of service and privacy policy to reflect these changes to its data processing in Europe “shortly.”

Meanwhile, the court procedure is ongoing.

Will expects the first hearing to take place in approximately one year.

Liam Kelly is DL News’ Berlin-based DeFi correspondent. Got a tip? Email at liam@dlnews.com.

On Wednesday, the controversial memecoin generator, which has earned more than $780 million in fees, announced its initial coin offering, or ICO, after weeks of speculation about a possible token generation that could happen either via an airdrop or a public sale.

“Our plan is to Kill Facebook, TikTok, and Twitch. On Solana,” Pump.fun said on X.

The ICO announcement highlights how token sales are poised to make a return in 2025 after slowly fading after their 2017 and 2018 heydays when some 2,000 projects raked in over $13 billion through ICOs.

They fell out of fashion as about a tenth of the money raised was lost to scams, according to Statis Group. Dozens of enforcement actions followed.

Pump.fun’s ICO

Pump.fun’s token sale will happen on July 12, with 330 billion tokens out of the 1 trillion total supply available to investors. Each token will be sold at $0.004, putting the targeted raise over $1 billion.

Institutional purchasers will be allocated 180 billion tokens, while the remaining 150 million will go to public sale purchasers.

Investors from the UK and the US are not allowed to participate in the ICO, according to the announcement.

“We’re building Pump.fun to replace existing social platforms with one that gives instead of takes,” the memecoin generator said on X.

Many aren’t buying the narrative.

Some detractors reacted to the announcement by saying that Pump.fun extracts far more than it gives, and turns low-effort joke coins into fee machines while investors are left in the lurch holding worthless tokens that crater in short order.

“Remember the word after Pump is Dump,” Adam Cochran, a crypto influencer, chimed in on X.

Pump.fun’s ICO comes at a time when the once raucous gold rush for memecoins is at a low ebb. Since peaking at $127 billion in December, the market segment has since slumped to $56 billion.

The decline has happened amid mounting controversy over failed memecoins and platforms like Pump.fun that allow them to be created en masse.

But dwindling fervour for memecoins isn’t Pump.fun’s only headache.

The platform has lost its shine in recent weeks to a new rival.

LetsBonk, another memecoin generator, has become the new power player in the sector. LetsBonk now hosts twice as many token launches each day compared to Pump.fun, according to data from this Dune dashboard by the crypto analyst who goes by Adam_Tehc.

LetsBonk give-back model has also helped the platform’s rise as it reinvests half of its fee earnings to buy Bonk, a $1.5 billion Solana-based memecoin. The platform has spent more than $7 million worth of Solana to buy Bonk, according to details from its website.

Osato Avan-Nomayo is our Nigeria-based DeFi correspondent. He covers DeFi and tech. Got a tip? Please contact him at osato@dlnews.com.

The platform said it planned to shutter its services on July 7 due to changing market dynamics, according to emails shared with DL News.

“What’s most painful is that there has been no justice,” Risto, a Finblox customer who deposited $10,000 into the platform, told DL News. “The team behind Finblox has faced zero accountability.”

Risto declined to share their last name due to privacy concerns.

Finblox customers who previously spoke to DL News accused the platform’s founders Peter Hoang and Dmitriy Paunin of fraud, moving jurisdictions to dodge regulators, and running a Ponzi scheme by attempting to raise new funds through a token sale to pay back previous depositors.

Hoang and Paunin previously told DL News the Ponzi scheme claims were “incorrect” and denied all allegations.

Crash out

Risto isn’t the only Finblox customer who says he feels left out to dry.

Launched in 2021, Finblox drew in customers by offering lucrative yields on cryptocurrencies. Its business model was similar to that of other so-called CeFi lenders, such as Celsius, Genesis, and BlockFi, which gained popularity in late 2021 and early 2022.

The platform crashed out after issuing uncollateralised loans to Three Arrows Capital, a crypto hedge fund run by Su Zhu and Kyle Davies that perished in June 2022. Genesis and BlockFi collapsed for similar reasons.

When Three Arrows Capital defaulted on its debts, Finblox couldn’t make good on customer deposits.

It’s not clear how much Finblox lost in the Three Arrow Capital default.

A version of the Finblox website from April 2022, accessed through internet archives, shows the platform advertising that deposits on the platform were insured up to $45 million.

With many Finblox customers claiming the platform didn’t refund them, it follows that the amount of deposits may have exceeded $45 million.

With few options left, Finblox converted customer funds into FBX, a token it had created itself.

Around 60 customers previously banded together on Telegram, the messaging app, to complain that the conversion wasn’t properly communicated and that they didn’t agree to it.

“Peter promised me the return of my money,” a Finblox customer called John, who lost $87,000, told DL News. “I am a father of a three-year-old girl and the money was to buy a property. Not all the money was mine and I had to repay in full to a family member.”

Hoang told DL News the conversion had “a clear, voluntary opt-in and opt-out mechanism for all of the affected users.”

DL News also asked Hoang about the promises he allegedly made to customers. He denied making such promises.

As for the FBX token customers were left with?

After a brief surge in June 2023, it has steadily bled value. It’s now down 99% from its all-time high and trades at $0.0000003.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.