The U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on six individuals and two companies it says helped North Korea convert $800 million in 2024 into crypto to launder the money and fund its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs. The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) said Thursday that the operation placed IT workers into foreign…
Bitcoin’s network has been running nonstop since 2009. The question nobody had rigorously answered until now is what it would actually take to break it. Researchers at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance last week published the first longitudinal study of Bitcoin blockchain’s resilience to physical infrastructure disruption, analyzing 11 years of peer-to-peer network data…
Circle’s (CRCL) USDC has overtaken Tether’s USDT in transaction volumes for the first time since 2019, prompting Japanese investment bank Mizuho to raise its price target for the stablecoin issuer to $120 from $100, while reiterating its neutral rating on the stock. The shares rose 1% in early trading to $115.40 and are up roughly…
Billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller said stablecoins could underpin global payment systems within the next decade or two while reiterating his long-standing skepticism toward much of the broader cryptocurrency market. “I assume our whole payment systems will be stablecoins in 10 or 15 years,” he said in an interview Morgan Stanley posted on Thursday. The fiat-pegged…
The XRP Ledger has never been busier, but traders are yet to catch up. Daily successful payments on XRPL recently hit a 12 month high of over 2.7 million, up from roughly 1 million in late 2025, according to XRPSCAN data. The network is processing between 2 and 2.8 million transactions per day at 20…
Crypto payments firm MoonPay added Ledger hardware wallet signing to its command-line interface (CLI) wallet for MoonPay Agents, a move the company says addresses a security challenge introduced by autonomous crypto trading tools. The new feature allows users to verify and sign every transaction generated by an AI agent using a Ledger hardware device, ensuring…
A federal appeals court rejected the final bid of crypto bank Custodia to challenge the U.S. Federal Reserve’s authority over granting master accounts, but the decision arrives at a time that the central bank is opening other avenues for such accounts. A Fed master account grants access to the central bank’s payment rails and full…
The fast-growing market for tokenized U.S. Treasuries has a new leader. Circle (CRCL), best known as the issuer of the USDC (USDC) stablecoin, has become the largest provider of tokenized Treasury exposure after its USYC token expanded to about $2.2 billion in supply, according to RWA.xyz data. That growth pushed USYC past BlackRock’s USD Institutional…
A crypto wallet that sat dormant for five months woke up Thursday to accumulate more than $7 million worth of TRUMP tokens as the U.S. president-linked memecoin’s official team announced a second gala event for top holders — sending the token surging more than 60% from its all-time low. Onchain data from Arkham Intelligence shows…
Why Arthur Hayes is bullish: In an interview with CoinDesk’s Jennifer Sanasie on MArkets Outlook, Hayes said Hyperliquid has separated itself from competing perpetual futures exchanges with real usage rather than incentive-driven volume. Hayes told Sanasie he sold his firm’s HYPE position around $50–$55 ahead of expected token unlock pressure but turned bullish again after…
