North Korea may be behind a hack that drained over $387 million from crypto exchange Bitget, according to the company’s CEO Gracy Chen. Speaking during an X livestream on the evening of the September 24 hack, Chen said that the attack — the biggest in 2026 so far — bore the hallmarks of North Korean state-sponsored threat actors, citing suspicious IP addresses tied to VPN infrastructure previously used by North Korean hacker groups.

According to Chen, Bitget detected abnormal transfers from some hot wallets on Thursday afternoon Eastern time. The hackers exploited a backend wallet system that processes wallet transactions, forging transfer approvals that tricked the system into authorizing the fraudulent transactions. She confirmed that cold wallets and private keys remained safe and uncompromised. The stolen assets include Ether, XRP, USDT, USDC, Avalanche, and BNB across the Ethereum, XRP Ledger, Avalanche, BSC, and Arbitrum networks. Early independent on-chain analysis initially put the total stolen value at $170 million to $183 million, before Bitget announced an initial official value of $351.6 million. Comprehensive audits revised the final official value to $387.5 million.

Bitget temporarily froze user withdrawals, while deposits and trading remained functional. The company announced that its over $464 million User Protection Fund would cover the full loss. It says it has fixed the backend vulnerability and is rolling out a staggered withdrawal schedule — starting Monday, September 28 — to manage network traffic and ensure complete infrastructure security.

After the attack, the hackers quickly converted the USDT, USDC, and tokenized gold (XAUt) directly into ETH on decentralized exchanges within minutes of the theft to circumvent on-chain blacklisting or freezing of the stablecoins. Native layer-1 assets like XRP, ETH, BNB, and TRX, which cannot be frozen or reversed, were quickly fragmented and distributed across dozens of new attacker-controlled wallets. Meanwhile, Bitget launched a recovery-bounty program offering rewards of up to 5% for funds successfully frozen or recovered.

The incident is the latest in a series of hacks in the crypto industry. Earlier this month, attackers drained $320 million in Bitcoin from the Liquid Network, emptying nearly 95% of its federation wallet. A similar incident occurred in April when crypto platform Drift lost $270 million in a hack. Many of the hacks that have plagued the crypto industry have been linked to state actors, with North Korea leading the pack. In February 2025, the FBI identified the North Korean hackers as the perpetrators behind the biggest crypto hack in history, stealing over $1.5 billion from Bybit.

An Nvidia-backed startup plans to establish a Bitcoin mining operation in space before the year is out. Starcloud will fire up its cryptocurrency mining ASICs after its second spacecraft reaches orbit later this year. “We’ll be the first to mine Bitcoin in space,” claimed Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston in a recent interview with Documenting Bitcoin.

Starcloud was founded in 2024 with the headlining goal of moving data centers to space. “As launch costs fall, data centers in space will leverage continuous solar energy and radiative cooling, rapidly scaling to gigawatts while avoiding permitting constraints on Earth,” reads its mission statement. The firm spells out its proposition in far greater detail in a white paper on its website, highlighting the appeal of training AI in space. However, the ample supply of solar energy is also great for cryptomining.

So, when Starcloud-2 reaches orbit, it will be tasked with raising some crypto-cash. In the embedded interview segment, Johnston said: “We’ll have some Bitcoin mining ASICs on the second spacecraft launching later this year.” At the time of writing 1BTC is worth roughly $86,000, quite a way down from highs several months ago.

Starcloud-2 is just the second of four currently planned satellite launches from the startup. It is framed as the company's first commercial mission, and like the prior satellite, will feature a GPU cluster. Interestingly, the official Starcloud-2 project page doesn’t mention Bitcoin mining or ASICs, so Johnston’s reveal is quite eyebrow-raising. Moreover, for something that seems a bit like an afterthought, “Potentially it [Bitcoin mining] is one of the most compelling use cases of space compute,” the Starcloud CEO told Documenting Bitcoin.

Johnson provided some financial insight into why there is now a Bitcoin side gig or pivot being considered. He cited the lower costs of ASICs vs. GPUs: they are about 30x cheaper than GPUs per kilowatt, he told the host. A specific example given was a 1KW Nvidia B200 chip at $30,000 vs. a 1KW ASIC at $1,000. Solving the energy supply situation in space for GPUs, or for ASICs, isn’t relevant to the business, said Johnson. We wonder what Nvidia will think about that.

While the availability of near-uninterrupted solar power is a big attraction of space-based compute, there are downsides. For example, satellites aren’t easy to service, and convection cooling doesn’t work in a vacuum. Commercial space-based data centers are so new that some of the problems and solutions will only become entirely clear after pioneering deployments like the Starcloud-2.

A project claimed to represent “the first organic neuron Bitcoin miner based on the fly brain” has gone live. Yes, this is a cryptomining project that leans on the fruit fly connectome recently shared by Google. FutureBit, the company behind the Apollo series of ASIC miners, introduced the world to its HashFly this week. However, HashFly is merely a proof of concept for now.

If you open the dedicated HashFly site, you can also participate in this agitation of fruit fly brains in the (vain) hope of a crypto payout. I clicked the 'Mine' button and left it running for an hour, for science, and periodically flipped back to the tab to see the gently rotating fly brain’s neuron traces firing. Looking at the website overlay, one can see the web app represents “2,914 traces firing” within the fly’s brain. It is worth mentioning that this figure is just a small subset of the full 165,122 reconstructed neurons in the MaleCNS v1.0 fruit fly connectome.

We understand that FutureBit’s HashFly focuses on the simulated photoreceptors that would usually sense light in the fly’s eye. These read a block header, and neurons called PPL101 cells light up when a double-SHA-256 target is computed. You can make the target harder and easier by adjusting the ‘zeros’ up and down. Even at maximum difficulty in this proof of concept (level 6), it is far, far easier than finding a real Bitcoin hash, and I saw about 80 blocks checked off in an hour or so.

What’s the point of this proof of concept? According to its designers, it provides some more insight into the potential efficiency of organic computing, or wetware. “Fun fact,” teases FutureBit. “If this could be scaled on real organic neurons, it would hash at ~ 1 watt per terahash... 10x the efficiency of the best silicon 3nm ASICs!” These guesstimates are based on “total power used by the fruit fly, and assuming all neurons could be used to hash Bitcoin functions and continually keep firing,” says the Bitcoin mining hardware maker in a follow-up tweet.

Those who find this experiment interesting may be happy to hear that the HashFly demo will be scaled up to its logical conclusion. “We are working on simulating all neurons in the dataset with the sha256 hash function and will publish all our findings,” says FutureBit. It certainly needs scaling up if my HashFly web performance of ~100 kH/s is typical. Compare that to the firm’s 5-inch cube Apollo III, which is claimed to deliver “up to 18 TH/s of Hashpower.”

We’ve seen a few other fly brain connectome mapping-inspired projects from the fevered minds active on social media over the last week or so. Almost immediately after Google announced it had published the complete brain and central nervous system of an adult male fruit fly, we saw people seeing if it could play Doom, indulge in financial day trading, and many more frivolous pursuits.

There’s even a rival cryptomining scheme dubbed the FlyMiner. Visiting this portal, you can see a fruit fly connectome that has been put under the control of an ASIC miner. Visiting that site will also be limited to a brain-nourishing, not money-spinning, activity, as FlyMiner admittedly has “almost zero chance” of mining success.

Symbiosis is one of the many useful DeFi networks that let users trade across almost any crypto pair without having to talk to an exchange. It's been operating for five years, and links some 50-odd chains together. The ecosystem's reliance purely on smart contracts (code that's hosted on the blockchain, visible to anyone) is fully logical but paradoxically creates an accountability problem. This was demonstrated on September 11, when Symbiosis got hacked to the tune of at least $770,000, or 9.97 BTC.

Smart contracts are published on the blockchains themselves and are open-source by definition. This means anyone can find a bug, and Symbiosis' thief found two: an undisclosed privilege escalation exploit that let them fake network administrator privileges, plus a Coding-101 failure of not checking if a transaction fee was a positive number.

The method was simple: being an admin, the thief set the transaction fee to a negative value, then issued 12 transactions. With the transaction fee now negative, instead of deducting from the moved amount, it added to it. The thief only spent 330 satoshi (the smallest unit of BTC), about 25 cents, but he managed to issue 46 billion syBTC — BTC wrapped in Symbiosis' network. For reference, the maximum theoretical amount of BTC in circulation is 21 million.

These syBTC tokens meant nothing by themselves as they weren't backed, but they were tradable. And trade the thief did, selling syBTC against matching wrapped pairs including BTCB, cbBTC, WBTC, and RBTC, draining those pools, and causing $770,000 worth of BTC in damage. It's known that they only converted about $336,000 into cash via Uniswap before being cut off.

The rest of the wrapped BTC tokens were flagged by security firms and exchanges, making it difficult for the thief to use. That's of little comfort for the victims, though, until such time as the thief returns the tokens by themselves or by law. Some of them, like Coinbase's cbBTC, are issued by centralized entities and can be nullified and re-minted after a legal process, but others like RBTC cannot.

For the uninitiated, DeFi (decentralized finance) pools can be broadly described as automated trading pots. They run on existing blockchain networks like Ethereum or Solana, via smart contracts, and let users trade directly against the money in the pool, with no third party in between. Depositors providing liquidity to the pool get a cut of transaction fees whenever other users trade for it.

Example: lock 1 ETH, and you get a small amount whenever someone buys or sells ETH, effectively netting you "interest" on held currency with next to zero effort. The trader didn't have to interact with anyone: just with a piece of code, the smart contract. To make the transactions work, DeFi networks "wrap" other tokens in their own variations, like BTC turning into syBTC.

Symbiosis says it intends to repay the incurred debts, stating that "a portion will be returned from the evacuated funds, and each LP will be offered an individual compensation plan." In practice, this ultimately means that Symbiosis is going to talk to the big wrapped-BTC holders in its pool and offer them an IOU, interest-bearing debt package, or some variation/combination thereof. In these situations, it's somewhat expected, but not guaranteed, that big holders take the deal, as forcing liquidation would end the network entirely and net them pennies on the virtual dollar.

The project also said it's going to rewrite the Bitcoin-side logic and has requested an independent audit before implementing the new code. Likewise, it claims it requested a full audit of the "entire system." Symbiosis also says that "capable AI models have lowered the cost of finding bugs like this," a perfectly valid argument — and yet one that isn't likely to find much purchase given the code's high-risk nature involving money, plus the base fact that someone missed a basic negative-value check in only what's likely only a few thousands lines of code total.

The country of Venezuela has had a few embattled decades, but it has massive oil reserves continually attracting buyers, despite the U.S.-led sanctions that effectively block dealings with the nation. A few years back, in 2023, Poland's state-backed Orlen energy group had $600m in hand and was looking to buy 6 million barrels during a sanction reprieve. Like many before him, one executive thought it expedient to use the USDT stablecoin cryptocurrency (1 USD = 1 USDT). It didn't end well, with $230 million worth of crypto unaccounted for at multiple stages in an adventure chronicled by the Financial Times.

The twisted web of transactions

Orleen enlisted an external company, Hannon, to take care of the purchase, which it did by enlisting the services of UK firm Lexcor Energy, which supposedly had a Venezuelan office. Hannon first needed to convert a large sum into USDT, and did so by exchanging $245m at multiple Dubai companies, adding $15m of its own to the deal. Only one of multiple transfers of $80m into 80m USDT was fully successful.

As for the other two, $135m exchange only produced 85m USDT out the other end, with $50m still unaccounted for. A third exchange of $30m also vanished (partially returning much later). The proverbial PNL is currently -$80m, and Hannon has 165m USDT in hand. All this while, three Polish oil tankers headed to Venezuela anchored there, continually racking up millions in demurrage and port fees, as they were being chartered for far longer than initially agreed.

Weeks of delays followed, which Hannon pinned on Venezuelan energy company PDVSA. One of Hannon's reps, Kam Tse, headed to Venezuela himself with a colleague, loaded with the USDT, stored in multiple cold wallets on USB sticks. They stayed in high-end hotels, drove around in armored cars, and employed bodyguards out of concern for the money and themselves. Tse found many brokers claiming to be from PDVSA, a cadre later revealed to contain a substantial number of con-men, many of whom fled as a local investigation came cracking down.

The buyers were nevertheless undeterred, and they handed 60m USDT in a USB wallet to a purported representative of local energy corp Synergy. After a few weeks of waiting, a Venezuelan office sent him a picture of a purported PDVSA export schedule displaying all three Polish tankers set to be loaded with 1.9m barrels of oil each, but with no predicted date. Ever-trusting, Tse's team then handed Synergy's representative another 50m USDT on another USB wallet. Said representative vanished in a cloud of smoke. PNL currently sits at -$190m.

Seemingly desperate, Tse ordered a buy of 1 million barrels of a lighter blend of oil, eventually finding it contaminated, then switched tactics to acquiring fuel oil instead, signing a contract. At last, a break: some of the money spent in the Dubai exchanges came back; only 21m USDT out of a $30m input, but still better than zero. Tse pays Consulting Services, another Venezuelan firm, 11m USDT for the fuel.

Finally, some good news: 500,000 barrels confirmed loaded onto the one ship, half of the contracted amount. Tse provides Consulting Services with another 11m USDT for the rest of the fuel, but that was never delivered, and there was no further contact. Cumulative PNL = -$186m total. With $72m in shipping costs in total (far outweighing the expected profit), plus additional expenses, the Polish government's investigation pins the total lost and spent at $424m.

The aftermath

Many folks' gut reaction may be that the use of cryptocurrency made the cash untraceable, but the problem isn't with the blockchain. In fact, for the vast majority of currencies, the on-chain ledger offers more visibility into transactions, not less. What failed here was the lack of official records linking wallets to persons or entities.

Reputable exchanges all have a form of identity verification, known as KYC, mandated by law. The problem is that apparently almost no entities Hannon traded with had any recognizable proof their crypto wallets belonged to them. The Venezuelan crude oil salesmen vanished, effectively cutting off nearly every avenue for investigation. Before their exchanges, they had even advised Tse to not keep records of their transactions due to the government's investigation into their collective's dealings.

Even in Dubai, pending court cases regarding the dollar-to-USDT exchanges hinge on the same problem, despite the presence of verifiable bank transactions. Broadly speaking, the country's legal system places the burden of proof fully on the accuser, making them prove wallet ownership before discussing the meat of the dispute. That's quite the high bar to clear for Hannon in order to prove that it wasn't handed the funds from the exchanges.

That task may well prove impossible, since one can't prove a negative when there's nothing linking the exchange to their wallet. Adding insult to injury, the two exchanges in the court were both recently created, and probably weren't a part of Dubai's VARA program for legal crypto operations. Caveat emptor.

There is increasing evidence that Mexican drug cartels are diversifying into cryptocurrency mining and are using crypto platforms to diversify their income and, at the same time, launder their ill-gotten gains and fund other illegal activities. Reuters reports that local Mexican police uncovered a clandestine cryptocurrency farm in Tlaola, a town located in the leafy mountains of Puebla's Sierra Norte region. They found 300 GPUs, electricity infrastructure, and satellite equipment. The electricity-hungry operation likely drew power by secretly tapping into the grid at Presa de Necaxa, a nearby hydroelectric dam.

While this latest hidden facility found by police may seem small, Reuters notes it is the fourth such crypto farm Mexican authorities have uncovered in this region since early last year. According to a Mexico-based security analyst, the crypto farms discovered show that the cartels are increasingly sophisticated in their operations. In the latest bust, the Mexican federal authorities, the Navy, and state police seized around 300 GPUs, 80 medium-voltage terminations, a transformer, and eight satellite antennas.

It might not be surprising to hear about the Mexican cartels being tied up in crypto. Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, as cited by Reuters, reckons illicit crypto transactions grew from $59 billion in 2024 to $154 billion last year. The firm links the surge recorded to sanctions evasion involving governments. However, in South America, cartels are increasingly interested in using this channel to launder money. The mining operations are also integrated into the scheme, as stealing electricity is easy for organized crime. Mainstream consumer GPU mining ended in H2 2022, flooding the market with used graphics cards.

The source report doesn’t say how authorities found the crypto farm. Perhaps locals in this remote area of Puebla alerted authorities to the operation. Two folks from neighboring communities told Reuters that they could hear the crypto farm noise (transformers, cooling) from a kilometer away (0.6 miles), and the place was apparently a mere 2 km (1.2 miles) from the nearest village. The other three recently uncovered crypto farms were also near the same HEP dam, it is noted. Tlaola is a small community with around 20,000 inhabitants, so the noise levels and power consumption of crypto farms are very perceptible even if the cartels try to hide them deep in the mountains.

Remote communities, such as Tlaola, are popular locations for clandestine crypto farms because the electricity is cheap and most of them are under the protection of the cartels. For example, the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) and its armed branch, La Barredora, have the strongest presence in Puebla.

According to SILIKN, a Mexican cybersecurity firm, the use of cryptomining to launder illegal money rose by at least 55.8% last year in México. Drug cartels such as the Cartel de Sinaloa and the CJNG have set up crypto farms to mine Bitcoin (BTC), Monero (XMR), and Tether (USDT).

Similarly remote, illicit cryptomining facilities exist around the world, with Reuters recalling news of raids in Brazil, the U.S., and Thailand. Do you think there’s one near you? Please call the local police and liberate those stressed GPUs. Meanwhile, analysts expect crypto-related crime will reach new heights in the coming years.

The ringleader of a cybercrime gang, which reportedly formed after meetups in Minecraft online, has pleaded guilty to a racketeering charge. Sentencing is yet to be finalized, but 22-year-old Singaporean and Miami resident Malone Lam could face 20 years behind bars. Lam is accused of helping to steal and launder hundreds of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency. Here are the full United States District Court for the District of Columbia documents (PDF), via The Register.

According to the court documents, Lam visited the U.S. to meet fellow Minecrafters Jeandiel Serrano and Veer Chetal, for the first time in real life, in 2023. Soon, Lam’s role in the cybercriminal gang seems to have become an important one. The Singaporean reportedly found high-net-worth crypto holders to target, supported social engineering operations, leveraged technology to trigger account access alerts on target devices, and was involved in laundering the pilfered digital booty.

Lam’s crypto fraud gang reportedly totaled 12 members, and this criminal fraternity operated for about two years. Documents indicate that the individual crypto thefts ranged from $800,000 to tens of millions of dollars. One crypto heist purportedly netted $245 million from a single victim.

Cybergang members enjoyed lavish lifestyles due to their swindling successes. The court documents mention members of the gang owning “a fleet of 31 exotic cars, ranging in value from $100,000 up to $3,800,000.” They would also run up nightclub service bills of up to $500,000 a night, buy luxury watches, clothing, and more. As well as rent prestigious homes in locations like Los Angeles, the Hamptons, and Miami – traveling around in private jets and protected by a team of security guards.

Lam was arrested in September 2024, though, so they didn’t really get to enjoy that lavish luxury lifestyle for very long. Since that time, their suspected criminal activities have been under deeper investigation. The last members of the ‘Minecraft crew’ threw in the towel around May 2025. Lam has now pleaded guilty to RICO violations, and a status hearing is scheduled for December 8 this year; the Singaporean faces up to 20 years in jail. The Register notes that another member of Lam’s fold, Marlon Ferro, was handed a 6.5-year sentence back in May. Ferro’s role was effectively a ‘physical plan B,’ and they reportedly took part in multiple physical burglaries at the behest of the gang if/when social engineering attacks weren’t enough.

Hackers reportedly claiming to be good actors have drained about $320 million worth of Bitcoin from Liquid Network's federation wallet, according to a CoinDesk report. In an X post on September 6, Liquid — a Bitcoin sidechain developed by blockchain infrastructure company Blockstream — confirmed that 4,000 BTC, roughly 95% of the entire wallet's balance, had been withdrawn.

Interestingly, the post referred to those behind the exploit as “purported white-hat hackers,” echoing the hackers’ own claim, after they self-identified as “whitehats” in a message embedded in a Bitcoin transaction. They also reportedly requested an audience with Liquid via the on-chain message, promising to return the money once the vulnerability that enabled the exploit is fixed.

“Please fix the bug first,” the on-chain message said. "The chain is under risk at latest commit right now. Make sure every node is patched. Then we will transfer the money back safely after confirming the fix.” Liquid responded on-chain with its security team's contact and has reportedly moved communications to an encrypted channel. Meanwhile, the platform said it has suspended transactions and warns of service disruptions as federation members work to restore service.

Launched in 2018, Liquid is a federated sidechain designed to move Bitcoin faster and more privately than the main chain. Users lock BTC on Bitcoin and receive an equivalent token, L-BTC, on Liquid, which settles blocks roughly every minute and finalizes in about two minutes. Rather than relying on miners, the network is secured by a federation of more than 80 exchanges, brokers, and other financial firms. The block signing and the multisig wallet holding the pegged-in Bitcoin are handled by 15 rotating functionaries that require 11 signatures to move funds.

The mechanics behind the exploit are also unusual, as nothing appears to have been stolen in the conventional sense. For example, in January, the Solana-based platform Step Finance lost roughly $40 million after attackers compromised devices belonging to its executive team, gaining access to the keys that guarded its treasury wallets. According to Liquid, the coins left through the Peg-out Authorization Key (PAK), belonging to SideSwap, a decentralized exchange built on the sidechain.

However, Liquid said that the key had not been compromised, nor had any others. SideSwap gave a matching account, stating a customer sent 4,000 L-BTC to its peg-out service at 14:05 UTC, the service processed the order as it would any other, and the Liquid Federation paid out 3,996 BTC to the customer's Bitcoin address twenty-three minutes later. According to SideSwap, its systems had no way of distinguishing those coins from any other L-BTC.

The incident lands in what has already been a punishing stretch for crypto infrastructure. Recently, the trading platform Drift suspended deposits and withdrawals after a suspected $270 million hack in April. In 2025, roughly $17 billion worth of Bitcoin was stolen, driven largely by impersonation schemes and AI-assisted scams.

A Nevada court has found a Las Vegas businessman guilty of 11 counts of wire fraud, two counts of mail fraud, and two counts of money laundering for defrauding over $24 million from hundreds of investors. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Brent Kovar presented Profit Connect to investors as a crypto mining operation that used an artificial intelligence supercomputer for its operations. He promised a fixed rate of return that paid 15% to 30% APR and also came with a 100% money-back guarantee. However, it turned out that the “profits” that the earlier investors made only came from the influx of newer investors, and that the company wasn’t making any money.

Kovar victimized 400 investors, telling them that the company had cryptocurrency reserves worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In reality, it had zero holdings, couldn’t afford to pay investors their interest earnings, and had no way to return their cash despite the offered guarantee. “He used investor money to operate Profit Connect, to buy gifts for employees, to buy a house for himself, and to repay investors as if those repayments came from mining cryptocurrency and verifying cryptocurrency transactions,” the Department of Justice said in its press release.

Profit Connect operated from 2017 to 2021, which is around the same time that Bitcoin made its first major rally, with the cryptocurrency hitting a peak of over $19,000 in December of that year. This, combined with the buzzwords of “AI” and “supercomputer,” made it seem to investors that they were putting money in a groundbreaking new technology that would change the way we do finance. Unfortunately, the venture turned out to be a scam and defrauded investors out of their money with nothing to show for. It’s unclear if the funds that the investors lost will ever be recovered, but Kovar is facing a possibly lengthy jail time of a maximum of 280 years for his crimes.

Another scam rooted in cryptocurrency investment from 2017 saw retail investors lose $2 billion. BitConnect offered a similar guaranteed return on investment for anyone who put up cash on its platform until 2018, but instead of using the deposited money for trading, it was just siphoned off to the organization’s private digital wallet addresses. Even before this, another Ponzi-scheme scammer made off with $6 billion from her victims in China from 2014 until 2017 and converted it into 61,000 Bitcoin. While she has already been arrested, the seized cryptocurrency is still in limbo, so it’s unclear if and when her victims will get their money back.

An enterprising young man has set off on his journey to catch up with the collective wealth of Elon Musk. Redditor Numerous-Dentist-882’s big idea was to create an “infinite money machine” with limited resources, and has conjured up “a physical NFT minting device” as the first step on the ladder to becoming the world’s second trillionaire. He demoed the portable machine with ‘strangers’ in New York, and has actually made his first NFT sale for $9.92.

In the humorous video above, you can see the who, what, why, and how of the unnamed NFT minting device. The video details don’t quite match up with those more recently penned on Reddit, so let’s take the latter as the newest, most up-to-date info on the project (the Reddit post was published more recently).

Numerous-Dentist-882’s likely real name is David Kramer, as we noticed in a link to his parody magnet fishing book on Amazon (reviews: 3.9 out of five stars). Kramer explains that the NFT minting machine was trained on an Apple Macbook M3 for just four hours in total. The dataset for the DCGAN hallucinatory image software was a collection of 2,480 face photos featuring a mix of 11 diverse personalities. Moreover, the dominant anchor class of 2,000 images ensured that the hallucinated face hybrids frequently have a certain president-with-a-penchant-for-gold theme to them.

Once training had been completed and Kramer was happy with the hallucinated face hybrids, the model was exported from PyTorch to ONNX (float32, 53MB). This made the NFT generator model portable enough for carrying around on a Raspberry Pi 4. Kramer says that even the puny Pi could run inference and generate a face NFT in 3s, but they’re hardly hi-res digital goods at 128-pixel square.

With the press of a button, the Pi fires a freshly generated face to an ESP microcontroller with a tiny screen, as demonstrated in the video. To complete the NFT creation with a meme-able slogan, whoever you snag on the street is asked to pair their image with a machine-generated phrase of the form “This is a (adjective) NFT and I want to (verb) it."

After confirming the perfect image-plus-slogan pairing, the NFT is then minted with another button push. You can look through several NFTs already made this way available on the OpenSea marketplace. We note only one was sold for what seems to convert to $9.92. The enterprise, which is clearly a parody, does actually have some impressive technical underpinnings.

Kramer has also made a website where you can try out the DCGAN from the comfort of your PC. A test image I clicked a button to generate is shown above.

A new cryptocurrency called Pearl (ticker PRL), which secures its blockchain by running the matrix multiplication behind AI workloads instead of conventional hashing, has set off a short-lived GPU mining rush, with profitability tracker hashrate.no recently listing an RTX 5090 at roughly $33.80 a day in mining revenue. The coin launched its mainnet in late April 2026 and recently drew attention when AI cloud provider Together AI announced an exclusive partnership, but PRL's price and per-card returns are already dropping precipitously as more miners pile onto the network.

Pearl, built by Pearl Research Labs, uses a consensus mechanism it calls Proof-of-Useful-Work, in which the computation that secures the network is large-scale matrix multiplication, also used in AI training and inference.

Together AI, which announced the tie-up in a May 15th blog post, launched a discounted inference endpoint for an instruction-tuned model called Gemma-4-31B-it-pearl, priced more than 25% below its usual rate and offset by the future value of PRL emissions. "Pearl changes the unit economics of AI," said Omri Weinstein, co-founder and CEO of Pearl Research Labs, in the announcement. Mining is limited to Nvidia hardware.

The protocol can extract a mining proof from genuine inference, as Together's endpoint does, but the rigs driving the rush run inference nobody requested or pays for, so the output goes nowhere. By Pearl's own research, computation is useful only if someone pays for the result, which makes most of the current mining AI-shaped proof-of-work.

Most of the mining activity has run on rented cloud capacity, with miners spinning up RTX 4090 and RTX 5090 instances on services such as RunPod and Vast.ai and pointing them at community mining pools. As that capacity flooded in, Pearl's network difficulty climbed steeply and cut the per-card payout, and hashrate.no now estimates the RTX 5090's daily revenue at $17.19, a 49% reduction compared to the previous $33.80 figure.

Pearl is a brand-new chain, and its block reward will only decline. It can also only be exchanged on minor exchanges where liquidity is thin, such as SafeTrade and MEXC. Officially, the Pearl pool is optimized for H100 and H200 cards, but as we’ve seen, community miners have produced builds that run on consumer-grade cards.

That split makes a repeat of previous crypto-rush GPU shortages unlikely, since the protocol is optimized for datacenter silicon and most of the rush has concerned rented cloud cards. With the reward set only to fall and the network's hashrate still climbing, returns are thinning in the same way past mining booms have unwound before.

Last year, a funeral services company in Korean called Bumo Sarang put 59.5 billion Won ($40 million) of its clients' money into a leveraged crypto ETF, which is now worth just 10.2 billion Won ($6.8 million), resulting in a $33 million loss. The company is downplaying this revelation, which was part of a broader investigation done by the Korean Economic Daily that highlights embezzlement as a scarily common practice in the industry.

More specifically, Bumo Sarang invested the $40 million in the T-REX 2X Long BMNR Daily Target ETF that's supposed to double the daily return of a company called BitMine — the largest Ethereum treasury in the world. This fund is a leveraged ETF, which we'll explain later in the article, but the main takeaway is that it's designed for day trading and is not supposed to be held for long periods of time.

Beyond the illegality, you can already start to piece together why keeping $40 million of customer funds in a leveraged ETF for a year was a terrible investment in general. Putting it a leveraged crypto ETF only exacerbated the losses, as the crypto market has been in a downturn for the past year. That being said, Bumo Sarang is not an isolated case — it's just the biggest one.

In the aforementioned investigation, out of 75 audited funeral service companies in Korea, 43% were technically insolvent, meaning they owe more than they own. If customers pulled out of their prepaid plans, these firms won't have the cash to pay them back. Smaller firms were even found to issue unbacked, multi-million-dollar loans to shareholders and CEOs.

To understand how all this happened, we'll have to look at how funeral services companies operate in Korea. Unlike banks, which are treated as financial institution and thus placed under much stricter scrutiny, these funeral firms are as classified as "prepaid installment businesses." They answer to the Korean Fair Trade Commission (FTC) instead and exploit the 50-50 rule that states only half of their customers' deposits are supposed to remain in cash reserves.

That doesn't mean the other half can be spent in whatever way the company desires, but it opens a loophole in which 50% of money is simply not required to be regulated. People pay these companies to arrange or prepare for their funerals ahead of time so that their loved ones aren't burdened with the process later on. The firms happily take this cash and try to make a profit on it over time, similar to how insurance companies often deny claims despite taking payments regularly.

The difference is that insurance companies are chained by laws that act as a safety net for customers, whereas funeral servicers don't even have to provide the service until years down the line in most cases. All that time leaves an opportunity for creative investments, but, unfortunately, Bumo Sarang chose quite possibly the worst one imaginable —one that's actively affected by "volatility decay."

Volatility decay is basically a mathematical phenomenon pertaining to leveraged investments (like ETFs in this case) where a bad day on the market followed by a good day doesn't guarantee a recovery. For instance, if you invested $100 in a single share of stock and it fell to $80 the next day, but rose back up to $110 on the second, you'd have not only recovered but actually made a profit.

Leveraged ETFs work differently; their goal is to amplify the movement both ways. The same $100 invested in a leveraged ETF wouldn't have fallen to $80, it would've fallen to $60 since it faced a 40% drop instead of just 20%. When it was time for recovery the next day, the 37.5% gain realized on the stock would push it to $110. Doubling that to 76% and applying it to $60 would only bring you back up to $105 instead on the leveraged ETF.

That was just one small movement. Imagine this across the highly volatile crypto market that fluctuates every minute, for a full year. Bumo Sarang treated an extremely sensitive investment that's really only meant for day trading as a long-term play. The crypto market has fallen hard from last year so not only did the company face that upfront loss, but it also has to eat up the volatility decay from each fluctuation.

Compounded across a year, that number boils down to $33 million lost so far. There's a chance it will get even worse from here, as Bumo Sarang is confident that it can keep itself afloat because it claims it has enough of a financial buffer. A spokesperson from the company said this is just a "short-term unrealized loss due to global market volatility" that it can bounce back from without hurting its customers.

Following the story, politicians in Korea immediately sprang up to tighten regulations on these funeral service companies. There are six different bills already being proposed in the country's national assembly that should overhaul the industry and ensure the $7.2 billion of customers funds it handles are protected. The government will likely ban them from speculative trading entirely, but that notion itself is speculative for now.

Whales and other large crypto holders are increasingly becoming targeted by criminals for kidnapping and coercion, especially as public blockchain records paired with leaked data and on-chain analytics have made it easier to identify the big transactions and huge wallets. Bloomberg reports that incidents of physical attacks against crypto holders have increased by 75% in 2025 — note that this only counts the 72 confirmed reports with $41 million worth of cryptocurrency lost. It’s suspected that the actual number might even be higher, as some victims do not notify the authorities and simply pay the ransom demand.

Because of this, many individuals and institutions are now investing in physical security to keep themselves and their people safe. Executive Risk Services, a security consulting and risk management firm, said that prospective clients in the crypto space reached out to the company about once a quarter about two years ago. Today, it now receives inquiries on a weekly basis. Several crypto firms are also now paying for security details for their executives, with spending set at the same level, or even higher in some cases, as that of major financial institutions, oil firms, and big pharmaceutical companies.

Aside from this, there is increasing interest in how crypto holders can protect their holdings during a home invasion. The publication says that measures include having a decoy wallet, using hardware wallets with duress features, and installing time-delay locks to prevent transfers from happening instantly while under coercion. “Unfortunately, there’s no way to keep yourself off a list,” Bitcoin-security YouTube creator Ben Perrin told Bloomberg, “And so how do you then hedge against that? People want self-sovereignty, but they want to do it right and they’re worried they’re going to mess up.”

Cryptocurrency’s defining feature is the public blockchain, meaning every transaction is visible to anyone, and it’s easy to check the balance of any wallet. One way that crypto holders can protect their holdings is by not revealing their identities, but leaks and data analytics have made anonymity difficult, if not impossible. What’s worse is that they might not even be aware that their privacy has already been compromised until they’ve been attacked.

The distributed nature of cryptocurrency makes it easy to get away with the proceeds of the crime, which only encourages and emboldens these criminals. We’ve already seen one bizarre story of physical crime stemming from Bitcoin holdings — last year, a scammer who stole thousands of Bitcoins had their parents targeted by kidnappers. It’s unclear whether the attack was orchestrated by the victim seeking revenge or by other criminals who saw the scammer’s lavish lifestyle and figured he and his family would be an easy target.

Bitcoin reached its all-time high in the fourth quarter of 2025, making a lot of holders even richer. And while it has since plunged to its lowest level for the year, it’s still valuable enough that holding a few can represent significant value. But if you have millions worth of cryptocurrency, you should reconsider your security.

A Bitcoin holder who changed their wallet password while 'stoned' and then forgot it was finally able to recover their wallet with the help of Claude. According to X user cprkrn, they’d been trying to recover their wallet for more than 11 years. Still, they didn’t give up because that wallet contained 5 BTC; this may not sound much, but it has a value of almost $400,000.

After finding a mnemonic that actually turned out to be their old password a few weeks ago, the user dumped their entire college computer files in Claude in a last-gasp effort. The bot uncovered an old backup wallet file that it successfully decrypted, while also uncovering a bug in the password configuration that was preventing recovery up to that point.

Cryptocurrency wallets during their early years were completely different beasts. Mnemonic seed phrases back then generated the HD key tree, but wallets often mixed them with non-HD and imported keys. Those cannot be recovered by the seed phrase and are stored in a wallet file that requires a password. This is what happened to cprkrn — they changed the password to the wallet file that contained some specific keys while they were stoned and then completely forgot what password they used. This meant that the Bitcoins tied to those keys were completely inaccessible, and they’ve been trying to find their way back in since then.

It seems that the user already had some candidate passwords and multiple wallets stored on their PC. They'd been trying to brute-force their way into the locked file with btcrecover, an open-source Bitcoin wallet recovery tool, but to no success. Their luck changed for the better when they found an old mnemonic seed phrase written in an old college notebook. The HD addresses recovered by the seed phrase matched those of a specific file on their computer, confirming that it was the wallet that held the 5 BTC, but it remained encrypted.

Out of frustration, cprkrn then dumped their whole college computer into Claude. This was when the AI discovered an older backup file of the wallet from December 2019 hidden in cprkrn's data. Claude also discovered an issue where the shared key and passwords that btcrecover was trying weren’t combined properly. With the bug ironed out and an older wallet predating the password change, Claude successfully ran btcrecover and was able to decrypt the private keys, allowing cprkrn to transfer the five “lost” BTC to their current wallet.

This is a happy ending for one user who forgot their wallet password, giving them a massive windfall because of Bitcoin’s massive increase in value during the past few years. And while Anthropic’s Claude did not magically guess the right set of characters to unlock the file that held the private keys, it fixed one critical issue that cprkrn missed out on, allowing him to finally regain his crypto. Before AI LLMs became popular, researchers spent at least half a year cracking open a Bitcoin wallet with a forgotten 20-character password. It was well worth the effort, though, as it contained an estimated $1.6 million in BTC back in 2024. Unfortunately, we cannot say the same thing for this poor guy who lost $780 million in Bitcoin after a 2025 court ruling prevented him from attempting to rummage through the local dump after his laptop with 8,000 BTC was discarded in the trash.

Governor Bill Lee of Tennessee just signed into law a bill that bans cryptocurrency ATMs in the state starting July 1, 2026. According to The Record, Tennessee would be the second state to impose a blanket ban on these machines after Indiana, with Minnesota working on another measure that would do the same. State governments have been acting against crypto ATMs amid FBI warnings that Americans lost $333 million to fraud that use these machines as a vehicle to steal from the victims.

While crypto ATM machines aren’t scams per se, some cybercriminals use them as a common way of transferring funds from their targets. Because this is relatively new technology, many victims think that they work similarly to banks, which can detect and prevent fraudulent transactions. Unfortunately, this is not the case, and money deposited into the ATM would often be difficult, if not impossible, to retrieve. As such, the report claims they've become the "payment portal of choice for scammers."

There has even been one incident when a county sheriff in Texas sawed open a Bitcoin Depot ATM and seized its contents after a victim deposited $25,000 into the machine. Despite the quick action, the affected person will not be able to retrieve the cash they put into the machine immediately, as it’s now evidence and must go through the legal system before they can get their money back.

Bitcoin Depot complained about its machine being hacked open by the authorities and was seeking damages. The company said that it always cooperates with law enforcement, and it would have opened the machine’s cash cabinet with the proper court order — using a power tool to destroy the ATM was unnecessary and might even be breaking banking and criminal laws.

Nevertheless, law enforcement officials have started to act against some crypto ATM operators. The U.S. Attorney General sued Athena Bitcoin, saying that 93% of the transactions on its machines were connected to fraud and scams, and that it was making money off “undisclosed fees on the backs of scam victims.” In its defense, Athena Bitcoin said that it has “strong safeguards against fraud, including transparent instructions, prominent warnings, and customer education.”

Apparently, these are not enough as crypto ATM scam victims have been rising annually. So, it seems that lawmakers across multiple states have started stepping in to protect their constituents. Cryptocurrency is decentralized by design, meaning it’s harder to place safeguards to protect the layperson who has no idea how it works. So, it seems that several states think that the best move at the moment is to just ban them altogether. While a few users might be inconvenienced by the removal of these machines, there are still many other ways that users can convert their cash into Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies.

Marisks, a Greek Maritime Risk Management company, issued a warning to vessel owners that scammers are sending fake messages posing as Iranian authorities and demanding a “clearance fee” in the form of Bitcoin or Tether. According to Reuters, at least two vessels were fired upon on April 18 when they tried to cross the Iranian-controlled Strait of Hormuz, with Marisks saying that at least one of them fell victim to this crypto scam.

“After providing the documents and assessing your eligibility by the Iranian Security Services, we will be able to determine the fee to be ⁠paid in ​cryptocurrency (BTC or USDT),” the message that the scammers allegedly sent said, as Marisks shared. “Only then will your ​vessel be able to transit the strait unimpeded at the pre-agreed time.” However, at least one vessel that seemingly paid for the toll was subsequently fired upon and forced to turn back from its attempt to cross the blocked waterway. Marisks said that these messages are a scam, while Tehran hasn’t commented on the situation to Reuters at the time of writing.

The Strait of Hormuz is practically in chaos as news of ceasefires and the lifting and reinforcement of blockades comes and goes. Aside from this, Iran’s infrastructure has continually been pounded by the U.S. and Israel, so the reliability of communications between Iranian military units is uncertain. So, it’s unclear whether the confusion was the result of the crypto scam or a miscommunication between far-flung units.

Nevertheless, it seems that crypto scammers are taking advantage of the situation to make bank, especially given that ships like these typically carry cargo worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But because Iran has previously demanded that cryptocurrency be used, the scammers’ message was convincing.

Scammers have been taking advantage of the relative novelty of crypto to victimize people and organizations. Even though crypto transactions are publicly tracked on a transparent ledger, they’re relatively easy to launder through mixers, exchange arbitrage, and many other methods that criminals use to mask the source of their funds. For example, Americans lost $333 million to Bitcoin ATM fraud in 2025, with the victims having a median age of 71.

While ship owners and operators are likely familiar with threats like this, they’re also likely keen on getting their multi-billion-dollar assets away from the area, making them easier targets for scammers who can impersonate Iranian authorities.

An inventor has showcased a “filament dryer that pays you bitcoin.” When this news popped up in our feed we weren’t surprised to see that PizzAndy from Proof Of Print was the brains behind it. It’s the same guy who created the 3D printer that mines Bitcoin. Moreover, it very likely uses the same principle of taking waste heat / watts from crypto mining ASICs for use within the 3D printing process.

A filament dryer?

A filament dryer is a desirable piece of equipment for 3D printing pros and hobbyists. It maintains the filament at a predefined controlled temperature. This stops the filament from absorbing moisture from the air. It is a more proactive step than simply keeping your filament in a decent storage box.

‘Wet filament’ problems are manifested as popping, stringing, and bubbling in the print process. Post-output, the same underlying issue may cause weak interlayer bonding and result in a poor surface finish on your objects. So, keep your filament dry, folks.

Using a dedicated filament dryer also means you don’t have to worry about “hiding from your wife that you're drying filament in the kitchen oven,” notes PizzAndy.

Is it using the same underlying tech as the 3D printer that mines Bitcoin?

Though PizzAndy doesn’t explicitly say it, we are pretty sure this filament dryer uses the same underlying tech as in his 3D printer / Bitcoin miner. In that previously revealed product the 3D printer bed was kept steadily warm because it acted as a heatsink for a number of carefully throttled BTC mining ASICs.

The prototype 3D printer / Bitcoin miner could manage 500 GH/s when the bed was at 75°C. When we reported on that hybrid printing –mining device there was already talk about scaling things up.

Looking at PizzAndy’s latest stats, the new 3D printer filament dryer that mines Bitcoins may have already implemented some of the scaling and tuning that was talked about. Remember, this dryer prototype is capable of “6 TH/s @ 140W.”

Hopefully this new 3D printing filament dryer that mines BTC and the prior 3D printer with integrated Bitcoin miner don't just remain trade show prototypes for years.

Score one for the safety-minded and cryptographic hardware checks. Joje Mendes, a Brazilian cybersecurity professional, almost got bitten by a sophisticated hardware-and-software phishing attack, in the form of a fake Ledger Nano S+ cryptocurrency wallet. The only barrier between Past's virtual currency and the device's remote operators was Ledger's software, which verified that it was running on legitimate hardware.

The story starts when Mendes decided to order the Ledger device from a "major marketplace" in China. He chose to do so because, being a non-Chinese citizen currently located in Shenzhen, importing one from abroad, directly from Ledger, "comes with its own headaches." The device's price was reportedly the same as that of a legitimate unit, but nevertheless, Mendes kept his suspicion mode engaged and installed Ledger's official software before the Nano S+ arrived.

True to the unfortunately expected form, after the device arrived, Mendes noticed it was "clearly" a counterfeit, a fact verified by the Ledger software, which marked it as non-genuine. True to his profession, Mendes decided to tear apart the device instead of tossing it, and found quite an elaborate scheme at work — one that's likely catching other unsuspecting users off guard.

After prying open the case, Mendes found that all chip markings had been scraped off, but eventually managed to identify the central unit as an ESP32-S3 system-on-a-chip (SoC). The device spoofed its identification, claiming it was a "Nano S+ 7704" from Ledger's factory, complete with a serial number. After inspecting the firmware, Mendes quickly found his test PIN and seed phrases for two wallets, as well as hard-coded credentials to reach C2 (command-and-control) servers that slurped up the data.

The presence of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth antennas initially led Mendes to believe the data would be exfiltrated via those methods when on public Wi-Fi, or perhaps via a USB keylogger. Instead, he found that it's actually a fake Ledger app that does the data harvesting. Unaware users will be led to a page that looks like a clone of ledger.com, from which they can download malicious Android, Windows, or macOS apps.

He took apart the app, and sure enough, it was signed with an Android Debug certificate, tracks the device's location even after being closed, and sends data to the C2 servers. The download link QR code, presumably on the package or paper instructions, was likewise tainted. Adding insult to injury, the firmware monitors account balances via their public keys, presumably letting the thieves hear a "ka-ching!" sound whenever funds are deposited.

The expert thinks this device is sold to first-time cryptocurrency users looking for the added security of a hardware wallet, and it's not hard to imagine it working well for that purpose. Even a sleep-deprived professional might use the download link on the box instead of going straight to ledger.com.

Mendes notified Ledger of the elaborate phishing operation and published an update in which he vowed to purchase additional devices to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. After all, someone had a lot of work setting all of this up. Needless to say, if you're buying a hardware cryptocurrency wallet or any other security-related device, always get it from the maker or an official reseller.

On October 31, 2008, Bitcoin was born in a white paper published under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, who went on to mine its genesis block a few months later. Since then, the mystery behind Satoshi's true identity has grown second only to Bitcoin's own meteoric rise. Now, a recent NYT investigation points toward recurring candidate Adam Back as the man behind the blockchain.

The 40-page-long report was published by journalist John Carreyrou — who previously exposed Theranos — piecing together evidence in an 18-month-long investigation. The article starts with several mailing lists tied to the Cypherpunk movement of the 1990s and 2000s, which Back was a regular part of. His politics aligned with those of cryptographic liberation, using code to circumvent government censorship.

Satoshi invented Bitcoin with the same ideology, a decentralized system that couldn't be controlled by any state or bank. Back even emailed community members about making an electronic cash system in the 90s that would be free from legislative oversight. He later created Hashcash to fight spam emails, but suggested combining it with another e-cash idea called "b-money" to formalize his lifelong vision.

Back is the only person cited in the original Bitcoin white paper for a technical contribution through Hashcash. A 2024 court case in the UK revealed a series of emails in which Satoshi shared an early draft of the white paper with Back, who then told him to check out b-money. Carreyrou implies these emails "exchanges" were fabricated to create the illusion of two different people.

The reporter argues that even Back's career has followed in parallel to Satoshi's, as both are experts in computer-distributed systems; Back has a doctorate in the field, and the blockchain is an example of one. When Bitcoin was created, Back was mysteriously absent from any of those early circles despite being an intense advocate of the concept, but conveniently reemerged as soon as Satoshi went silent a few years later.

Beyond his online activity, Back co-founded Blockstream in 2014, which has been critical in shaping the development of Bitcoin over the past decade or so. The company has funded key developers in the crypto scene throughout the years as well. In this context, Blockstream can be looked at as the house Satoshi built (if you assume Back is Satoshi) to give Bitcoin a corporate face and protect it in the real world.

Coming back to those mailing lists, Carreyrou says Back's writing style showed striking similarities to Satoshi's in the way they both used British spellings and incorrect hyphenation. For instance, Satoshi would switch between "optimize" and "optimise," or "check" and "cheque" in his writing. He would also conflate "it's" with "its" while merging words such as "bug fix" into just "bugfix."

Satoshi often referred to proof of work as "proof-of-work," which is a fundamental building block of crypto governed by the same concept first described in Hashcash. Through AI-driven textual analysis with fellow reporter Dylan Freedman, Carrey found out Back was the only person who matched all these linguistic quirks out of hundreds of people in the emails.

Adam Back's response

After months of gathering all the proof, Carreyrou was able to meet with Back at a hotel in El Salvador, where he was attending a conference. When presented with the mountain of evidence, the Satoshi-to-be simply refuted it, chalking it all up to coincidence and later calling it "confirmation bias" on X. The confrontation mostly lacked assimilation, as the journalist claims Back was defensive throughout.

Addressing his timely absence during Bitcoin's inception, Back couldn't come up with any convincing reply and said he was busy with work. Same with the textual analysis; Back told Carreyrou, "it’s not me, but I take what you’re saying that this is what the A.I. said with the data, but it’s still not me.” Furthermore, Back insisted he couldn't be Satoshi because he didn't even know how wallet addresses worked at the time.

Back agreed, however, that his background and skillset lined up with who Satoshi would be. It was sensible to deduce that a computer scientist obsessed with techno anarchism would come up with Bitcoin, but Back reiterated, "clearly I’m not Satoshi, that’s my position." That already felt like an admission, but it was actually what came after the interview that led Carreyrou to believe he was right all along.

At home, in New York, he listened back to the hotel recordings and came across a potential slip-up that might've sealed the deal. The journalist had brought up Satoshi's famous "I'm better with code than with words" quote, with Back when he interrupted and said, "I did a lot of talking though for somebody... I sure did a lot of yakking on these lists actually."

By saying "I did a lot of talking though," he is subconsciously admitting to being the person who said that quote — to being Satoshi. Carreyrou even emailed Back about this, but he denied that it was a mistake and asserted he was "just responding conversationally." The article ends with the reporter claiming he had no doubt left in his mind anymore that it was, in fact, Satoshi in that hotel room.

Carreyrou's reporting doesn't have a smoking gun, only a lot of circumstantial evidence that no court would find convincing. But that's the point. The hunt for Satoshi is an entirely heuristic pursuit devoid of any malicious animus, so it doesn't require the urgency of a criminal investigation.

As you can see, Back, for his part, fervently denies he is Satoshi, claiming as much in a series of tweets responding to the story, which you can read above.

Drift Protocol, which claims to be the largest open-sourced perpetual futures exchange on Solana, has just been hit by a cyberattack. The platform said on its X account that it’s suspending deposits and withdrawals due to this, and that it’s coordinating with security firms, bridges, and exchanges to contain the incident. “This is not an April Fools joke,” the company said on the social media platform.

The company hasn’t confirmed any losses at the time of writing, but various estimates point to at least $130 million worth of crypto stolen from the platform. CertiK Alert said in an X post that Drift has approximately $136 million in losses due to the exploit, while blockchain analytics platform Lookonchain says that at least $270 million was stolen, with most of it converted into USD Coin and then into Ethereum.

This potentially makes the Drift Protocol hack the largest one reported this year, so far. Before this, Step Finance was the biggest victim in 2026, with the platform losing $40 million worth of crypto due to multiple executives’ devices getting compromised. Still, the 2025 heist conducted by North Korean hackers against ByBit dwarfs these reports, which saw the platform lose $1.5 billion worth of assets.

While a significant amount of cryptocurrency has been lost through hacks, scams still remain the bigger threat. It’s reported that at least $17 billion worth of crypto assets were lost this way in 2025, with scammers using AI technology to supercharge their operations. Their increasing sophistication means that the number of victims and total amount lost could be higher this year.

Law enforcement from across the world is not taking these hacks and scams lying down, though. In February, South Korean authorities arrested two people suspected of stealing $1.5 million worth of Bitcoin held in police custody, while the FBI arrested a crypto thief who allegedly stole $46 million from seized wallets. A hacker who stole $53 million from Uranium Finance in 2021 is also currently facing up to 30 years in prison after he was charged with computer fraud and money laundering last week.

These efforts show that governments worldwide are now taking cryptocurrencies seriously. However, despite the seemingly massive amounts recovered by the authorities, it’s still a tiny drop in the ocean of stolen Bitcoin and other crypto circulating around the globe.

The U.S. has just charged a hacker for allegedly attacking Uranium Finance, a decentralized exchange, allowing him to steal $53.3 million worth of cryptocurrency. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York is charging Jonathan Spalletta, also known as Cthulhon and Jspalletta, with computer fraud and money laundering, which could land him up to 30 years in prison.

“In describing his alleged ‘heist,’ Spalletta told another individual ‘Crypto is just fake internet money anyway.’ U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said. “Stealing from a crypto exchange is stealing — the claim that ‘crypto is different’ does not change that. For the victims, there is nothing different about having your money taken. Spalletta cost real victims real losses of tens of millions of dollars, and now he’s under real arrest.”

Spalletta conducted two different attacks on Uranium Finance. During the first attack, he executed a series of transactions on April 8, 2021, that allowed him to receive cryptocurrency “rewards” that were far higher than what he was supposed to receive. He extracted $1.4 million worth of crypto using this loophole but eventually returned the sum after forcing the platform to let him keep around $386,000 as a “bug bounty.” Unfortunately, this did not satisfy him, as Jonathan exploited an error in Uranium’s smart contract 20 days later. The issue affected 26 of Uranium’s liquidity pool, allowing him to steal approximately $53.3 million in cryptocurrency, resulting in the firm’s shutdown.

He then proceeded to launder the stolen crypto, including running it through Tornado Cash to wipe the public blockchain trail. Once the funds were “cleaned,” he then proceeded to make big purchases, including a $500,000 “Black Lotus” Magic: The Gathering card, 18 Magic: The Gather “Alpha Booster” packs costing more than $1.5 million, a sealed first edition Pokémon “Booster” worth $257,500, and a first edition complete base set of Pokémon cards priced at $750,000.

Alongside the U.S. Attorney, Acting Special Agent in Charge Kevin Murphy of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) San Diego also worked on the case. They’re looking for additional victims of the Uranium hack, asking them to contact the HSI at UraniumVictims@hsi.dhi.gov.

The authorities are stepping up their efforts to crack crypto theft cases, with several alleged perpetrators being caught and tried for their offenses. However, the relative novelty and high value of cryptocurrency mean that hackers would always be tempted to make off with a lifetime's score of a lifetime.

Back in the COVID days, there was much hand-wringing about the energy use of Bitcoin (BTC) mining, reaching an estimated 204 TWh at its peak around 2022. Mining is only as profitable as the energy feeding it is cheap, and recent developments have pushed the global BTC network hashrate (computational power) down by 4% in the first quarter of 2026 alone, the first drop since 2020, and many data centers have shifted from hosting miners to hosting AI applications. The drop is not common; Bitcoin has seen double-digit hashrate growth in the first quarter since 2020.

Coindesk attributes most of the drop to the interesting times the Middle East is living in, namely the Iran-U.S. conflict and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a key passageway for oil tankers worldwide. This caused the price of oil to spike, a figure currently sitting above $100 for a single barrel of crude oil, up 49% month over month. In turn, the price per kWh of electrons is creeping up across most of the world.

Even though half the power of BTC mining is estimated to come from renewable sources, the rise in power prices still affects miners, who became stuck between a rock and a hard place thanks to 1 BTC only commanding about $66,700 as of this writing. Both factors result in math that isn't quite mathing for miners, as the price of producing one Bitcoin is about $88,000, resulting in a $19,000 loss for those looking to stay in the game.

The BTC network automatically scales mining difficulty up according to the hashrate. As miners leave the ecosystem, mining gets easier, hopefully inviting miners back in again. However, when the market is under the sign of the bear, mining operators also sell the BTC they're holding, further driving the price down and causing a spiral effect until the next upswing lifts all the boats again.

This time, it might be a bit different, as Coindesk believes that mining operators are switching to hosting AI instead. In that universe, the speedy ASICs dedicated to mining BTC are paperweights that can't do training or inference, so the mining gear is kicked out of datacenters to make room for racks full of Nvidia and AMD GPUs.

That's very likely a wise move in the current zeitgeist, as a key blocker for AI data center growth is the logistics around a facility, rather than the hardware within. Among other necessities, a data center requires absurd amounts of power delivered over stable grid connections that can take years to approve, and uses up copious amounts of water that beget environmental impact studies and permits. Considering the size of the investments in the AI space, having a readymade facility ready to roll and host GPUs is therefore a win-win for both landlord and tenant.

Nvidia is back in court over whether a significant chunk of its revenue through 2017 and 2018 was reliant on the whims of the cryptocurrency market. Specifically, a class action lawsuit has been given the green light by a U.S federal judge, reports Decrypt. This allows the plaintiffs to move forward with a case alleging Nvidia hid over $1 billion in cryptomining GPU revenue in its gaming segment, reporting over the period. Anyone who bought Nvidia stock between August 10, 2017, and November 15, 2018, is included in the class action.

Nvidia had already been raked over the legal coals and made to pay an SEC fine of $5.5m for not being clear about the scale of the income from its products used in the cryptomining business, back in 2022. After that, Nvidia continued to downplay the scale of GPU demand for crypto. But, pivotally, it hasn’t been able to back up its claims with documentary (accounting) evidence. That’s why Judge Haywood S. Gilliam Jr. certified this new class action on Wednesday in California federal court.

It was previously maintained by Nvidia that crypto mining accounted only for a small part of its business during the period under scrutiny. At that time (and until 2020), the majority of the Green Team’s revenue was traditionally from the PC gaming market. However, the plaintiffs argue that a significant amount of crypto revenue was funneled through gaming GPU sales - and thus recorded as - gaming segment revenue.

What’s the problem? Risk profiles.

Why do investors have an issue over who was buying these GeForce gaming GPUs in 2017-2018? The answer is in risk profiles. At the time, the PC gaming market was a dependable cash cow for Nvidia, and revenue from it should have been far steadier and more predictable than the volatile crypto market. Thus, as the source report notes, Nvidia’s skyrocketing revenues from gaming GPUs were far more driven by crypto than its accounting suggested.

Indeed, in November 2018, Nvidia’s CFO, Colette Kress, stated that gaming card inventory was taking longer to clear and pricing was down after a “sharp crypto falloff.” Nvidia's stock fell nearly 30% in two trading sessions following that disclosure.

Grumbling over nothing?

“Investors who purchased Nvidia in the 2017-2018 timeframe have done incredibly well, as our corporate strategy unfolded as we consistently predicted,” an Nvidia spokesperson told Tom's Hardware in a statement. “We will address the complaint in court.”

The judge will outline the next steps in this case at a case conference on April 21.

Cambridge scientists have completed the first longitudinal study of Bitcoin’s resilience to network infrastructure disruption, with a particular eye on submarine data cable incidents (PDF paper). The conclusion is that “Bitcoin is highly resilient to random cable failures,” with the scientists saying that between 72% and 92% of the world's submarine cables would need to be severed simultaneously to result in significant mode disconnection. Nevertheless, the research team observed that Bitcoin could be very vulnerable to targeted attacks.

The study took data from 11 years of P2P network traffic and measured the impacts of 68 verified cable fault events (though Bitcoin has been a thing since 2009). As hinted at in the intro, there is a stark contrast between the impacts of ‘random’ cable failure events and what could happen if someone were intent on disrupting this iconic cryptocurrency.

Central to the resiliency report is the application of a Buldyrev‑style cascade model to the data. This helps assess real-world systems full of interdependencies: things like computer networks, power grids, and transportation systems.

Using this math, the Cambridge scientists reckon Bitcoin’s failure threshold for random failures is between 72% and 92%. It is also observed that the adoption of the Tor protocol has proven to be a barrier to disruption. “Bitcoin’s shift to Tor represents a self-organized response to regulatory pressure that simultaneously enhances infrastructure resilience, where censorship resistance and physical robustness are complementary rather than competing properties,” say the Cambridge scientists in their conclusion.

As for targeted attacks on the network, that’s a different story. Bitcoin is “far more vulnerable to targeted attacks,” note the researchers. A malicious actor targeting just five of the largest routing domains (Hetzner, OVH, Comcast, Amazon, and Google Cloud) would cripple the Bitcoin network.

Overall, the study conclusions are quite positive for cryptocurrency fans. However, the resiliency of the networks that crypto needs to be maintained is under more pressure than ever before, with cables in the Baltic, waters around the Middle East, and the Taiwan Strait all attracting unwelcome disruptions in recent months.

The FBI has just arrested John Daghita, the lead suspect in a major crypto theft case tied to the U.S. government, where the perpetrator allegedly siphoned $46 million worth of cryptocurrency from state-owned wallets into his own accounts. The accused was taken into custody with the help of local French authorities in Saint Martin, an island in the northeast Caribbean, as confirmed by FBI director Kash Patel.

The investigation leading to the arrest was initiated by a crypto analyst on X — ZachBXT — who essentially published a full exposé on Daghita in late January. Daghita had reportedly taunted ZachBXT multiple times on Telegram by sending him tiny amounts of crypto (dust attacks). Eventually, ZachBXT was able to track some of these dust attacks back to certain wallet addresses and found out they were actually managed by the government.

One of these wallets held $36 million worth of crypto and was apparently tied to a $90 million seizure by the U.S. Marshals between 2024-2025. Zach reported his findings to the authorities and in just over a month, the FBI arrested the suspect. But how did John even have access to these wallet addresses?

John Daghita is apparently the son of Dean Daghita, the CEO andPresident of Command Services & Support (CMDSS), an IT firm that was contracted by the U.S. Marshals to manage seized crypto wallets. The company's contract was even protested by another competing firm at the time of its awarding. CMDSS was hired to manage and dispose of some of the currency tied to high-profile and complex seizures in 2024.

The announcement from Kash Patel labels John Daghita himself as a government contractor, so it's unclear if he was directly involved or if he just (secretly) exploited the access his father had. Moreover, whether Daghita Sr. was even aware of his son's activities remains to be seen.

Although Daghita has been taken into federal custody, he has not been formerly charged, much less convicted, of a crime. During the arrest, authorities reportedly found Daghita with a briefcase full of cash and multiple security keys.

South Korea’s National Tax Service just lost over US$4.8 million in crypto after it posted a photo of a hardware wallet that stored the private keys controlling over 4 million Pre-Retogeum (PRTG) tokens alongside a handwritten note containing the wallet’s mnemonic recovery phrase. According to Maeil Business Newspaper [machine translated], the image was included in its press release to promote the agency’s push to go after “high value and habitual delinquents,” saying that it has seized KRW 8.1 billion or around US$5.4 million worth of assets during the raid. ‘

Hardware wallets do not store the crypto — instead, they keep the private keys that control blockchain addresses, ensuring that only the person who knows the PIN can access the token. But if you lose the hardware wallet and have no backup of these keys, you could potentially lose permanent access to the blockchain address that holds your tokens. Because of this, many of these devices generate a mnemonic seed phrase during setup that lets you recreate all your private keys and addresses, even without the physical wallet.

Unfortunately, it seems that the investigators had no idea of the significance of the mnemonic recovery phrase, as they published it without redacting the information written on the piece of paper. This is like posting the number, expiry date, and security code of your credit card online before the days of multi-factor authentication or sharing your social security number on Reddit. Because of this, the first person who realized and took advantage of that mistake was able to transfer the 4 million PRTG to another wallet (presumably their own) with basically zero issues. According to blockchain analysis, the thief first deposited some Ethereum (ETH) to pay for the transaction fees, then proceeded to withdraw the huge amount in four transactions.

This isn’t the first major gaffe involving cryptocurrency and South Korean authorities. Just last month, the National Police Agency realized that 22 Bitcoin (BTC) worth over US$1.5 million had been missing for several years after the investigating agency neglected to transfer the seized BTC to its own wallet. The authorities thought the amount was safe because it had physical custody of the hardware wallet, but the original owner of the device apparently gave its mnemonic seed phrase to a hacker after it needed some cash, resulting in the loss of the cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrencies aren’t exactly new, with BTC launching in 2009, but it arguably only went mainstream around 2017 when it surged to about $20,000. Because of that, many public agencies are still grappling with the concept of virtual assets. Even though South Korean authorities have already implemented policies on how to deal with these, it seems that government employees are still struggling to catch up. Hopefully, each painfully expensive misstep is a lesson learned so that everyone avoids making these mistakes in the future.

South Korean police have arrested two individuals suspected of embezzling 22 Bitcoins from police custody. According to Dong-A Libo [machine translated], a virtual asset company voluntarily surrendered the cold wallet containing the crypto back in 2021 when they requested the police to investigate a hacking incident. Police regulations require the authorities to move any seized virtual asset to a cold wallet directly under the control of the local station and stored in a separate vault, but it seems that this wasn’t followed in this case. In fact, the bungled procedure (and ensuing crime it allowed) wouldn’t have been discovered if it weren’t for another case of stolen Bitcoin.

In January 2026, 320 Bitcoin went missing from the Gwangju District Prosecutors’ Office, leading the National Police Agency to conduct an audit on all the virtual assets managed by local police. This led to the discovery of the 22 BTC theft at Gangnam Police Station, which, according to The Chosun Daily, the authorities thought they still had because the cold wallet was still in their custody.

However, it’s been alleged that the company that originally owned the wallet containing the 22 BTC ran into financial trouble sometime in 2022. An official from the firm claimed that it borrowed the same amount from a hacker, telling them that they’d repay the loan after the police returned the crypto. However, they also gave the attacker the mnemonic seed phrase that would allow them to recover the private keys that gave access to the Bitcoin. With this information, the hacker was able to recover the contents of the cold wallet and then transfer the 22 BTC wherever they pleased, right under the nose of the police.

22 Bitcoin, which is more than 2 billion KRW or around US$1.5 million at current exchange rates, seems to be a trivial amount, especially when compared to other instances of cryptocurrency theft, like the $30 million Upbit hack in late 2025 and the record $2 billion that North Korean hackers stole last year. But the fact that it was under the control of the government showed clear lapses on its part. The Gangnam Police treated the virtual assets like physical evidence, assuming that the BTC were actually stored in the USB drive in their possession. As Korea's own police guidelines note, even if a physical hard wallet is seized during the course of confiscating virtual assets, the owner (or a nefarious third party) can still move the assets using a recovery key. In this instance, the police made a fatal error by not also confiscating the recovery code, which was then passed on to the hacker

The South Korean authorities have already released guidelines on how to handle seized digital assets, including transferring them to a cold wallet under the control of the investigative agency and stored in a separate safe. In fact, these rules had already been published just two months before the incident. Unfortunately, the Gangnam Police failed to follow them, allowing the crime to take place without them realizing it until much, much later.

The cryptocurrency rush of the late 2010s led to heavy investment in the field. However, as with every gold rush, there are always fake map sellers. One of those is Ramil Ventura Palafox, who today was sentenced to a full 20 years in federal prison by a Virginia court for running a BTC Ponzi scheme worth $201 million.

The enterprise ran from December 2019 to October 2021, and the method itself was as basic as ever, with the added allure of Bitcoin's rise in popularity during that timeframe. Palafox's venture, Praetorian Group International, advertised 0.5 to 3% daily returns to its investors, an impossible figure in any legal setting.

Predictably, those returns only partially occurred by virtue of being funded with new investors. The $201 million consisted of $171 million in BTC transfers and $30 million in fiat currency deposits.

The group wasn't even reportedly trading BTC at a major scale to begin with, and after tallying intra-group money flows, investors lost close to $63 million. Palafox has dual U.S.-Philippines citizenship, and the Philippines SEC issued a public warning in September 2021, outright telling people not to invest and directly calling Preatorian's initiative a Ponzi scheme.

As if the promised daily returns weren't warning enough, existing and potential investors became restless as early as April 2021, after Praetorian started freezing withdrawals, citing technical issues with the BTC blockchain and website problems. Meanwhile, Palafox was living quite a luxurious lifestyle, having spent at least $16 million on Las Vegas and Los Angeles properties, luxury vehicles, designer clothing and furnishings, and gifts for family members.

Palafox was officially charged by the U.S. SEC in April of 2025 and pleaded guilty in September, promising to pay back the $63 million in damages as part of the plea. Even with the sale of Palafox's assets, the chances of any investor getting more than a few pennies on the dollar are incredibly slim.

A couple days ago, South Korean crypto outfit Bithumb ran a promotion distributing small amounts of cash for engagement. Eligible folks could get prizes from a total pool worth a combined 620,000 ₩, about $425. The problem: a staffer input 620,000 BTC into the promotion instead, causing a $40 billion problem, granting millions to multiple people temporarily, and causing the exchange's BTC/KRW exchange pair to drop 17%.

The incident lasted 30 minutes and was contained to Bithumb's internal database, as by definition, the blockchain doesn't allow for currency to appear out of thin air. However, the fact that it was even possible for an exchange to issue 15 times its holdings (naked short selling) raised more than a few eyebrows, particularly in the South Korean financial world, where cryptocurrency trading is partially legislated and close to becoming fully legalized.

According to Reuters, Bithumb ended up reversing the transactions and recovered 99.7% of the issued BTC. South Korean law (paraphrased) states that people given funds out of nowhere are legally obligated to return them. That was the case with the vast majority of giftees, and Bithumb has legal standing to sue people who don't return the funds. Those who contacted the exchange for confirmation before withdrawing may be able to contest the claw-back.

The exchange is reportedly still tracking the "small" portion of BTC that were withdrawn or converted to other currencies, apparently to the tune of $9 million. Furthermore, Bithumb is offering compensation to those who sold BTC during the internal crash, with traders getting the full difference of their orders plus a 10% apology bonus.

South Korean's crypto trading landscape is undergoing a legalization phase, as January 2026 marked the lift of a nine-year ban on public companies investing in crypto assets (with some limitations), as well as the recognition of blockchain-bases securities as financial instruments. There are even upcoming laws for spot crypto ETFs and KRW-pegged stablecoins.

The incident drew comment from Lee Chan-jin, governor of the country's Financial Supervisory Service, who called for added regulatory mechanisms to prevent incidents like Bithumb's, and pointed out that the timing for this event is particularly unfortunate. He reportedly went on to state that the issue of naked selling (or "ghost coins") needs to be fixed in order for cryptocurrencies to be fully comparable to legacy assets.

A devil's advocate may argue that naked short selling is part and parcel of the stock exchange world, and allowed in the U.S with arguably tame consequences. South Korea, China, and the European union, have all made practice illegal. Bithumb and other exchanges are considered brokers and subject to specific naked-sale laws and required to hold over 100% of customer deposits, but this incident highlighted how the current detection mechanisms can fail, as they don't get triggered until an withdrawal or an audit occurs.

When we text about currencies in everyday life, we use signs to make things shorter. When it comes to monetary transactions, banks tend to use acronyms such as USD, EUR, CAD, or GEL. While banks must adhere to the ISO 4217 standard, which assigns currency codes, cryptocurrency exchanges operate under a different code. Which almost cost one of them $44 billion, according to a Reuters report. Well, every penny out of 44,000,000,000 USD.

A mistake between the '$' and 'B' signs at Bithumb, a South Korean cryptocurrency exchange, resulted in the unintended distribution of tens of billions of dollars' worth of bitcoin to users. The company said the incident was caused by an internal error during a promotional event, not by a security breach, and that nearly all of the mistakenly issued assets were reportedly recovered shortly after the event.

According to Bithumb, the problem occurred on Friday when a promotion intended to provide small cash incentives — starting at about ₩2,000 Korean ($1.40) per participant — instead sent selected users with bitcoin rewards, with recipients obtaining at least 2,000 bitcoins each. As a result, approximately 620,000 bitcoins, valued at approximately $44 billion, were distributed incorrectly. Good news (for the exchange, not for its users) said it identified the issue quickly and imposed restrictions on trading and withdrawals, which affected 695 accounts within 35 minutes, so almost nobody got rich. Well, except those 0.3% out of 99.7%, from which the assets were recovered.

The company stated that the incident was unrelated to hacking or external intrusion and that its systems and custody mechanisms remained secure, so customer funds were not compromised. In addition, Bithumb stated that the event was a procedural failure rather than a technical or security breach. ShIt happens, in short.

Unsurprisingly, South Korean authorities, including the Financial Services Commission, said the incident revealed systemic vulnerabilities in crypto exchanges and announced reviews of oversight procedures, with the possibility of searching the premises of suspects if irregularities are found. The story does not reveal why the irregularities were not discovered before the aforementioned error happened.

The People’s Bank of China (PBoC) just released a new circular expanding the current ban on cryptocurrencies and other related technologies in the country. China’s central banking institution [machine translated] broadened the 2021 restrictions to include real-world asset (RWA) tokenization, even including offshore tokenization of domestic assets and rights, unless approved by a regulated body. Aside from the PBoC, seven other agencies signed the announcement, including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), which oversees China’s telecommunications and internet infrastructure.

The new circular also banned internet providers from promoting, hosting, or even providing cryptocurrency and RWA traffic. “Internet companies must not provide services such as online business venues, commercial displays, marketing promotions, or paid traffic‑diversion for activities related to virtual currencies or real‑world asset tokenization. When they discover clues indicating illegal or non‑compliant activities, they must promptly report them to the relevant authorities and provide technical support and assistance for related investigations,” the document said. “Cyberspace, telecommunications, and public security authorities shall, based on leads transferred by financial regulatory departments, promptly shut down and handle websites, mobile applications (including mini‑programs), and public accounts that engage in virtual‑currency‑related or real‑world‑asset‑tokenization‑related business activities, in accordance with the law.”

More importantly, the new document now explicitly lists multiple agencies, including PBoC, MIIT, and the Ministry of Public Security, which is China’s primary law enforcement agency, to coordinate with each other in the enforcement of this circular. It also noted that it will “crack down on fraud, money laundering, illegal business operations, pyramid schemes, illegal fundraising, and other crimes involving virtual currencies or real-world asset tokenization” and that anyone investing in virtual currencies or RWA tokens will not enjoy civil legal protections.

It seems that the Chinese central government made this move as some users are taking advantage of loopholes to use cryptocurrencies and RWA tokens despite the earlier bans. This update to the 2021 circular tightens the noose around blockchain technology in China, helping the state keep tighter control on the inflow and outflow of money around its borders.

Four suspects were arrested by Zeeland police in the Netherlands after the authorities received a tip that they were involved in the theft of 169 NFTs. According to Dutch newspaper Politie [machine translated], the three individuals from Axel and one from the neighboring Terneuzen have been interrogated by detectives but have since been released. Nevertheless, the police action also included the seizure of various data carriers and money, as well as three vehicles and the house itself where the raid was conducted.

The stolen NFTs were estimated to be worth 1.4 million Euros (around $1.65 million), which is indeed a massive amount. However, this is a tiny drop in the Ocean of stolen Bitcoin and other crypto, estimated to be worth $17 billion in 2025 alone. We should note that NFTs are not exactly the same as cryptocurrencies, but they both run on blockchain technology and can even be stored on the same wallets that keep Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the like.

The relative novelty of cryptocurrencies and NFTs means that many people get scammed when using these technologies, especially older people who are often tricked into depositing large amounts of cash into Bitcoin ATMs. But even those who are used to the system can fall victim, either through phishing, social engineering, malware, or seed phrase theft, among others.

The large values tied to NFTs and Bitcoin make them lucrative targets for hackers, with just one well-targeted heist able to net millions of dollars in profit. There was even a true-crime story about a group of hackers who stole 4,100 Bitcoins and lived a high-roller lifestyle for a short time, before everything devolved into assault and kidnapping, eventually attracting the attention of federal agencies.

Since NFTs are tokens and are stored in wallets, the suspected thieves didn’t perform a bank vault heist with guns blazing. Instead, it was done behind monitors and keyboards, where they likely targeted individuals using phishing websites, fake wallet apps, or even with compromised browser extensions. It also seems that the Zeeland authorities do not have enough evidence against the four individuals, as they were eventually released after their interrogation. Still, the seized items should hopefully assist the police in their investigation and eventually lead to the arrest and conviction of the real perps.

Senior financial strategist Christopher Wood said in the latest issue of the GREED & Fear newsletter that he’s removing the 10% Bitcoin allocation from his recommended portfolio. He justified this move by saying that advancements in quantum computing pose a threat to the cryptocurrency’s cryptographic protections, thus undermining its argument of durability through network security. According to Bloomberg, Wood recommends replacing Bitcoin with an investment with a 5% allocation to physical gold and another 5% set for gold mining stocks.

Wood, who is the Global Head of Equity Strategy at the global investment banking firm Jefferies, first included Bitcoin in his sample portfolio in December 2020. He then grew it to 10% in 2021, citing the fear of inflation because of the stimulus checks the government released during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, advancements in quantum computing have long-term investors concerned about its implications, especially for cryptocurrencies.

Bitcoin currently uses the SHA-256 hashing algorithm, which is technically impossible to crack with current computing technology. However, there have been reports as far back as 2022 that quantum computers could crack Bitcoin by the 2030s. An event like this would cause chaos in the system, resulting in Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) losing its value overnight, especially if the break comes as a surprise. Because of this, Wood recommended moving away from it, especially for long-term investors.

Despite this, many cryptocurrency developers aren’t as concerned as Wood and other financial experts. For one, current quantum computing capabilities are nowhere near powerful or stable enough to defeat current cryptography algorithms, so they remain safe for the time being. Besides that, progress in the field of quantum computing is slow and public, meaning developers would have ample warning that they need to upgrade their algorithms.

Another big reason that cryptocurrencies aren’t particularly concerned about quantum computing right now is that if quantum computers can break Bitcoin security, then they can break cryptography algorithms all across the world. So, if their security protocols were to be broken, then the security of everything else — including traditional banking systems, secured internet protocols, government encryption, and more — will also be affected. Besides, security developers are already looking into post-quantum cryptography, with cryptocurrency developers able to take advantage of their developments as well.

Despite this, Wood says that the debate between cryptocurrency developers and quantum computing will only be a “long-term positive for gold.” It has historically held its value, reaching an 11% annual return over the past 50 years. So, investors looking for a stable, long-term asset to park their funds would probably find the precious metal an attractive option.

2025 represented the largest increase in revenue generated by crypto scams to date with an estimated $17 billion stolen that year alone, Chainalysis reports. The rise of AI-generated deepfakes, phishing, AI-assisted pig butchering, impersonation (including governmental impersonation) and more have all contributed to 2025 being the biggest year for crypto scammers worldwide.

Chainanalysis recorded a 253% YoY increase in average payments from crypto scammers. An average payment in 2024 was worth $782, but in 2025, an average payment is worth $2,764.

In the firm's current analysis for 2025, cryptocurrency scams have received at least $14 billion recorded on blockchains, representing a 34% increase compared to 2024 which saw thefts total $9.9 billion for the lifetime of Chainalysis' tracking. However, due to timing issues between reporting periods, it is expected that the 2025 figure will exceed the aforementioned $17 billion figure.

Impersonation scams are at the heart of the aforementioned 2025 figures. Chainalysis recorded a whopping 1400% growth in impersonation scams in 2025 compared to 2024, with average security payments increasing by over 600% (for each scam, the average amount of stolen crypto increased substantially).

A big part of these impersonation scams is impersonation of governmental agencies. Chainanalysis cites E-ZPass scams as one example of this class of fraud, where scammers used fake texts from America's electronic toll collection systems to scam victims out of $1 billion over three years.

AI-powered scams were significantly more effective in 2025, extracting 4.5 times more money compared to conventional social engineering tactics. Chainalysis revealed that average scams with "on-chain links to AI vendors" extracted $3.2 million per op compared to $719,000 without on-chain links. It also recorded higher daily revenue of $4,838 for AI generated scams and $518 for scams without AI. Transaction volume also increased by 9x with the assistance of AI.

Chainalysis reporting matches other reports of increased fraudulent activity in the cryptocurrency space. A few days ago the FBI warned Americans that crypto ATM scams are on the rise and "not slowing down" after reporting that American's lost $333 million to ATM Bitcoin fraud in 2025 alone. 2025 also saw the largest confiscation of crypto in history when the DoJ seized $15 billion worth of Bitcoin from a Cambodian scammer who ran a pig butchering con using forced labor.

This problem is only expected to get worse, governments are unequipped to tackle the difficulties of tracking crypto, which in and of itself is designed to be anymous to anyone looking at crypto transactions from the outside. Reports like this serve as a good reminder to always be on the lookout for scams and double-check that the last banking or money request notification you got on your phone is legitimate.

Superheat was at CES 2026 to showcase what it describes as “a water heater that pays for itself.” The new Superheat H1 is a $2,000 water heater that warms up your H2O using waste-heat from its built-in Bitcoin mining ASIC hardware, rather than an immersed resistive heating element.

It is claimed that owners of a Superheat H1 can “offset up to 80% of electricity and water costs” with earnings from cryptomining. Superheat extrapolates these numbers to suggest that a 700-apartment community could raise “up to $980,000 yearly earnings.”

The infographic above shows that a Superheat H1 can earn $1,000 in passive income per year. Therefore, your initial hardware investment should be entirely paid-off in two years, while it reduces your water heater energy spend by 80%. The H1 has a predicted service life of 10 years, very similar to a regular domestic boiler.

Waste not, want not

Cooling data centers that run demanding workloads like cryptocurrency mining is a notoriously expensive business. It is estimated that cooling is the second most costly activity after actually powering the systems to chew through the tasks central to their existence.

But what if the ‘waste’ heat became a benefit? Indeed, some businesses, and most households, spend a lot of their energy budget heating water, for washing and heating systems, and so on, and get nothing else back except a hefty utility bill.

Enter the Superheat H1 with its “dual-value operation.” It requires roughly the same amount of energy as a regular electric water heater, according to the maker. Moreover, it is claimed to be scalable beyond homes, for apartment blocks, hotels, and so on.

“Heat is one of the world’s most overlooked resources,” said Andrew Geng, Co-Founder and CTO of Superheat. “The H1 proves that home appliances can create real economic and environmental value. As we expand into distributed AI and cloud computing, Superheat will redefine how buildings produce, reuse, and monetize heat.”

Bitcoin pricing is rather volatile. In Q3 last year, it nudged over $125,000, but 1BTC is currently valued at around $91,000. Superheat H1 owners should benefit from a higher Bitcoin valuation, but no one really knows which direction, nor how high or low BTC could go in 2026. CNBC recently measured investor and analyst predictions and estimated that Bitcoin valuations of between $75,000 and $225,000 would be seen this year.

Owning a Superheat H1 might be yet another reason for not being able to tune out from watching information feeds and stressing about trends, charts, and valuations. Can I heat water with a heatsink on my forehead?

The FBI says Americans lost at least $333 million to Bitcoin ATM scams in 2025, as the cryptocurrency has continued to gain popularity for use in fraudulent transactions. The law enforcement agency told CNBC that this is a “clear and constant rise” that is “not slowing down.” Reported losses to crypto ATM scams first broke $100 million in 2023, with the amount hitting $114 million — this then doubled the following year to $247 million. While the reported losses in 2025 weren’t as huge a jump, it’s still costing private citizens a huge amount of money, with most scammers targeting older victims.

The authorities are acting against cryptocurrency ATM providers, saying that they’re “pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars in undisclosed fees on the backs of scam victims.” The U.S. Attorney General even sued Athena Bitcoin, with the lawsuit pointing out the 93% of the transactions on its ATMs “are the product of outright fraud,” with victims having a median age of 71 years. In its defense, Athena told ABC News that it has “strong safeguards against fraud, including transparent instructions, prominent warnings, and customer education.” An Athena rep also said, “Just as a bank isn’t held responsible if someone willingly sends funds to someone else, Athena does not control users’ decisions.”

Earlier this year, we saw one local government take things into its own hands using a power tool to recover almost $32,000 that a victim deposited into a Bitcoin Depot ATM. The Sheriff’s office was able to do this after securing a warrant, but the company said that it will seek damages, especially as each machine costs around $14,000. Furthermore, the victim will not be able to immediately get the recovered money, as it will have to go through the legal system before the scammed amount will be returned to them.

The U.S. isn’t the only place that is seeing a growing number of crypto ATM scam cases — Australian authorities also said that most crypto ATM users are either scam victims or money mules who were forced to deposit cash into these machines. Cryptocurrency does, of course, have some advantages and legitimate uses. But because it’s still fairly new, many don't understand how it works and often assume that it's just like any other bank. And with crypto ATMs becoming more ubiquitous in the U.S., it’s also making it much easier for scammers to extort and steal money from their unsuspecting victims.

Cryptocurrency mining has always been in somewhat of a legal gray zone. However, as Russia's war costs are increasing and incomes decreasing, the country wants to tax cryptocurrency mining. To make this happen, Russia is preparing to move cryptocurrency mining from a regulatory gray zone into the core of its criminal law, with penalties ranging from fines to prison terms of up to five years. The draft legislation is expected in 2026, reports CNews.

The Ministry of Justice has proposed amendments to the Russian Criminal Code that introduces Article 171.6, which would establish liability for "unlawful mining of digital currency" and "illegal operation of mining IT infrastructure." The key trigger for criminal responsibility is not mining itself, but the presence of large-scale damage to citizens, organizations, or the state, or the extraction of income on a large scale. Mining conducted by individuals or entities not included in the Federal Tax Service register would fall under this provision if certain limits are met.

Under the proposed legislation, basic offenses could be punished by a fine of up to 1.5 million rubles ($18,870), compulsory labor for up to 480 hours, or forced labor for up to two years. However, mining conducted by an organized group, mining activity that results in especially large damage, or income obtained on an especially large scale would carry significantly harsher penalties. These includes fines ranging from 500,000 to 2.5 million rubles ($6,289 - $31,445), forced labor for up to five years, or imprisonment for up to five years with an additional fine of up to 400,000 rubles ($5,031). In addition, Russia wants to charge for illegal intermediary activity in the cryptocurrency market.

The Ministry of Justice has already published the draft amendments on the official legal acts portal and completion of the legal framework is expected by July 1, 2026. It is unclear when this bill becomes a law, but according to CNews, the illegal intermediary activity — which is set to be viewed as a form of illegal banking — will be prosecuted starting July 1, 2027.

The proposal builds on rules already in force since 2024, under which cryptocurrency mining in Russia is permitted for legal entities and individual entrepreneurs registered in a dedicated Federal Tax Service registry. Private individuals are allowed to mine without registration, but only within an electricity consumption cap of 6,000 kWh per month and with mandatory reporting of mined assets, which creates a clear boundary between tolerated personal activity and industrial-scale operations. As a result, the proposed criminalization is the next step in regulating the cryptocurrency economy and taxing it, something which will bring more money into the Russian budget that has been hit by sanctions for years now.

In addition, Russia is considering controlled access to cryptocurrencies even for non-qualified investors, albeit with strict limits on transaction volumes and investment size. On the one hand, this might help some people hedge their money amid inflation. On the other, it exposes such investors to volatility, fraud, and losses that will not be covered by the government (unlike in cases of a bank collapse).

15 years ago, the first Bitcoin mining pool was introduced by coder Slush. This was the birth of Bitcoin CZ, which would become Slush Pool, and is still operating today under the moniker of Braiins Pool. The group claims to have mined 1,311,339 bitcoins over the last 15 years, which would be worth $115 billion at today's valuation, or $162 billion at Bitcoin's peak valuation earlier this year.

The first and original mining pool started with 60,000 KH/s of power. In 2025, this pool goes brrr-kerching at 13.56 EH/s. Thus, it wields about 225 billion times more computing power than its original incarnation.

By 2010, Bitcoin cryptomining rewards were simply becoming too variable for most solo participants to feel comfortable in their high-wattage pursuit. The difficulty of finding a block had reached the point where the mass of home enthusiasts could still mine BTC, but the painful gaps between striking crypto gold gave birth to the idea of pooling resources for a more steady, reliable, flow of income.

Mining collaborations don’t always have the desired outcome. ‘Gold’ can make men mad with desire, as seen in John Huston’s 1948 classic neo-Western, the Treasure of the Sierra Madre. However, history shows Slush and the community have put together a collaboration that would last.

The Bitcoin CZ originator noted that the mining pool server was based on an equitable sharing of rewards principle, and it worked with major CPU/GPU miners of the time. In contrast with mining solo, Bitcoin CZ would save blocks of crypto to the server wallet, and individual miners could get BTC sent to their own wallets based upon a personal customizable threshold.

Braiins Pool is now 225 billion times more powerful

From its humble forum-discussion beginnings to today, the world’s longest running cryptomining pool has grown at an astonishing rate. In the intro, we highlighted that the pool had grown from a combined 60,000 KH/s to 13.56 EH/s of hashing power. This represents a 225 billion times increase in computing power.

Bitcoin is worth around 400,000 times more than it was in December 2010

At the time the first Bitcoin pool was set up, on December 16, 2010, the value of 1 BTC was 22 cents. Along its spiky history, we saw the first astonishingly rapid BTC inflation in June 2011, with its value passing $26. The next great spike was in Nov/Dec 2013, with BTC breaking the $1,000 milestone. In 2017, it almost hit $20,000. Another milestone spike was when BTC rose above $67,000 in late 2021.

It has garnered many headlines along the way, marking numerous peaks and troughs in its valuation trajectory. Today, a single BTC is valued at approximately $86,000, but it rose above $125,000 for a period just a few weeks ago.

Braiins Pool claims it has been responsible for mining 1,311,339 BTC since it was set up, 15 years ago. Perhaps by the time you check the link, that figure will have risen somewhat.

If you are interested, Braiins Pool is still looking for new members to join up. It currently has nearly 13,000 active users, with a whole ecosystem boasting custom hardware, ASIC firmware, the mining pool, management software, and more. We’d encourage those with only a passing interest to still bookmark the site, and revisit in 15 years' time.

On December 18, 2013, a cryptocurrency investor felt compelled to pen a message rallying his fellow shellshocked troops on the Bitcointalk forums, encouraging them to hold their Bitcoin investments regardless of market fluctations. From GameKyuubi’s panicked, whisky-fuelled, typo-ridden missive, he accidentally coined the term ‘HODL’ and it entered the lexicon, sparking a million crypto and investment memes.

Amusingly, the originator of the HODL meme knew their communications were somewhat garbled. “I type d that tyitle twice because I know it was wrong the first time [sic],” wrote GameKyuubi. “Still wrong. w/e/ GF’s out at a lesbian bar. BTC crashing.”

GameKyuubi would readily admit their trading strategy flaws. “I know I am a bad trader,” and confirm they didn’t have the smarts to buy and sell to make money while riding the waves. However, their answer to the traders with 20:20 vision crowing that they “should have sold” was resolute. GameKyuubi characterized themselves as simply one of those people who have strong hands and hold for the most rewarding payoff, weathering all the storms that might beat other investors down. Or, as per the title of their most famous post, “I AM HODLING.”

Hold On for Dear Life

While its origin is almost certainly from desperately drunk messaging. HODL has been retroactively reinterpreted as being an acronym for Hold On for Dear Life. Thus, it has become a clearly distinct strategy from the simple verb hold. HODL is a long-term conviction, not an action.

Now, HODLing doesn’t just apply to cryptocurrency; it is relevant to all kinds of investments where people are happy to hold on, despite undulating fortunes, convinced of an eventual payoff. It is indeed a strategy that can work, as we have seen with Bitcoin. However, traditional investors might coolly stop losses at, say, 10% down to preserve capital for fresh plans, making trading far more sustainable than a faith-driven all-or-nothing strategy.

GameKyuubi’s 16,666% HODL payoff?

It is interesting to measure GameKyuubi’s potential payoff for their HODLing. Let’s say that they held 1BTC on that fateful drunken evening. At the time, it was valued at approximately $523. That sounds fantastic, given the context that it started the year at just $13 or so. But $523 is a sizable drop from Bitcoin’s $1,132 valuation of November 29, which was an all-time-high. Thankfully, for the frazzled HODL crowd, BTC recovered to $732 by the end of 2013.

Let’s also say GameKyuubi held that 1BTC from 12 years ago to today. Theoretically, they would be glowing with satisfaction that their investment had soared by 16,666% in the meantime. But they should have sold at $126,080 on October 6, this year. Just saying…

North Korean hackers have hit an infernal milestone of stealing $2.02 billion of crypto in 2025, which is nearly 60% of the total $3.4 billion reported crypto thefts this year. According to Chainalysis, the rogue state has stolen a total of $6.75 billion in cryptocurrency since records began — at least in known value. The biggest loss of the year was the $1.5 billion ByBit hack, with the FBI saying that it was executed by actors from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), accounting for almost 75% of the amount stolen by the country.

The DPRK is using operations like this to fund its coffers, especially as it still reels from international sanctions. One of North Korea’s techniques for breaking into crypto systems is to have its operatives pose as IT professionals and embed them among the employees of its potential targets. Aside from making money for the regime, like the infiltrator who was caught by Amazon because of the latency of their keystrokes, they also prepare the way for the attack, gaining privileged access and looking for vulnerabilities.

The DPRK has also started posting fake crypto jobs that require applicants to unknowingly install malware on their systems that exfiltrates data from the target, including credentials, source code, and SSO access, among others, from their current employer. Alongside this, DPRK hackers are also targeting senior executives with purported buyout offers. They then use their supposed due diligence actions to scan for security weaknesses and system information to compromise their wallets.

Despite this, it seems that decentralized finance protocol losses due to hacks are falling compared to the total value stored on the blockchain. Chainalysis explained that this is likely due to platforms implementing more robust security, with attackers preferring softer targets like exchanges, custodians, and even personal wallets. Nevertheless, the sophistication of North Korean hackers means that even though they’re executing fewer attacks, these can be far more damaging, resulting in larger losses, which goes against the trend of more victims losing smaller amounts from other bad actors. We saw this with its 2025 performance, where its hackers stole 51% more despite having 74% fewer known attacks, so institutions must remain vigilant as the DPRK is seemingly looking for bigger targets in the coming year.

Despite the colossal influence of cryptocurrencies on commerce, computing, and even politics, the true identity of the presumed pseudonymous Bitcoin creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, remains a mystery in 2025. Making things trickier for identity sleuths, this individual (or perhaps the name represents a group?) disappeared without a trace on this day in 2010, that’s exactly 15 years ago.

Though the last public message from the BTC founder was about technical matters, an email that appears to be from Nakamoto's account was sent to a fellow Bitcoin enthusiast, Mike Hearn, in April 2011. It began with an explanation for absence, of sorts, with the first line reading "I've moved onto other things."

Solving the ‘double-spending problem’

Benjamin Wallace, the author of The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius behind Crypto, wrote earlier this year that the BTC creator’s defining moment was the publication of an article on November 1, 2008.

On that day, the nine-page-long Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System was shared on a little-known crypto mailing list. Its significance: it would solve the double-spending problem, which had cryptographers in knots for decades prior.

In essence, Nakamoto proposed a public ledger using blockchain that would prevent fraudulent copying and thus double-spending of any digital asset. This peer-to-peer system would be developed and refined by the BTC creator over the following months before their disappearance.

Satoshi is super-rich…

Wherever they are or however they live today, the most famous name in crypto history may also be one of the wealthiest entities in the world. Recently cited as the 11th-richest ‘person,’ Nakamoto is thought to still hold the majority of the 1.1 million BTC they mined in the currency’s first year.

Today, that crypto fortune would be worth about $99 billion. However, BTC valuations have recently slid to around $90,000 after several months of oscillation around the $110,000 to $120,000 level.

…If they are alive, and the coins are still accessible

Nakamoto’s BTC fortune has remained unspent since 2010, while its valuation has fluctuated wildly. This incredible level of HODLing has led analysts to believe the BTC creator has either passed away or has tragically lost access to the crypto. Others still believe Nakamoto is intentionally maintaining an absolute silence.

Bitcoin has no expiration mechanism, with no timeouts, no inactivity penalties, or other kind of reversion to the network. Moreover, there seems to be no quantum or other new-fangled computer cryptography tech that is anywhere near breaking the SHA-256 algorithm. Thus, these coins may indeed remain inaccessible to anyone other than Nakamoto for the next 20–40 years.

However, the situation could change if any of the founders’ coins are ever moved or spent. Such an action would cause a stir in itself. Still, it would also expose the public key of that specific coin, creating a more vulnerable attack surface for a sufficiently powerful future quantum computer.

Upbit, South Korea’s largest crypto exchange, has announced that it has been hacked, resulting in a loss that amounts to about $30 million. The platform discovered the attack when it detected an unauthorized transfer of Solana network assets worth approximately 44.5 billion won to an unknown external wallet, according to the company’s press release [machine translated]. Because of this, the company has suspended all deposit and withdrawal transactions, and it has moved all its assets to a safe cold wallet as a precautionary measure.

The attack was executed just hours after Naver Corp., South Korea’s biggest search engine that offers various services, including email, blogs, forums, shopping, maps, and more, announced a $10-billion all-stock deal to acquire Upbit's parent company Dunamu. The search company made this move to expand into cryptocurrencies and fintech, and aside from the acquisition, it also plans to spend $10 trillion won or more than $6.8 billion on AI and blockchain in the next half-decade, as reported by Bloomberg. Naver’s chief executive, Choi Soo-yeon, said that Naver plans to integrate AI and cryptocurrency into its services, and that it’s looking to acquire massive amounts of Nvidia GPUs to achieve this.

This reported hack is relatively small, especially as we’ve seen billions of dollars in losses due to crypto hacks just this year. For example, ByBit lost $1.5 billion in February after North Korean hackers allegedly breached its systems. This was followed by an inside job at Coinbase, which resulted in $400 million in losses. What’s unfortunate is that some crypto hacks have even resulted in bankruptcies, the most prominent example being Mt. Gox. However, an even larger $3.5-billion heist (worth $14.5 billion today) probably resulted in the shuttering of LuBian, one of the largest mining pools in the world at its peak.

We don’t expect the hack to shut the company down or cause its $10-billion deal to implode, but the timing is still quite unfortunate, as it will definitely give the market some jitters about it, potentially causing a dip in Naver’s stock prices. The silver lining in this unfortunate event, though, is that it highlighted weaknesses in Upbit’s security, allowing the acquiring company to review it for any vulnerabilities and rectify the situation before an even larger, more devastating attack is executed against it.

A solo miner running just 6 terahashes per second of computing power has overcome odds of about 1 in 180 million to mine a full Bitcoin block via the CKpool pool. According to CoinDesk, the miner secured 3.146 BTC plus transaction fees — a payout worth around US$270,000 at current rates, despite commanding only about 0.0000007% of the network’s estimated 855.7 exahashes/sec of hash‑rate.

The figure was confirmed by CKpool creator Con Kolivas, who said that the miner only had “a one in 180 million chance” of solving a block on any given day. The miner employed an older‑generation ASIC capable of roughly 6 TH/s, submitted shares to CKpool’s solo‑mining infrastructure, and retained the full block reward minus CKpool’s 2% pool fee.

Headline‑grabbing payout aside, the miner’s win shows how rare solo mining has become for small operators. With network difficulty and aggregate hash‑power climbing steadily, the chance of a tiny miner solving a block without significant scale is vanishingly small. In practical terms, operating at 6 TH/s in a sea of hundreds of exahashes is akin to buying one lottery ticket in a contest where billions of tickets are already in play.

CKpool’s model allows hobbyists to attempt solo mining while routing their work through the pool's infrastructure. It provides a lightweight setup that connects miners to the Bitcoin network without requiring them to run a full node or manage their own backend. That means they preserve solo‑reward ownership rather than sharing a reward across many contributors as happens in standard pooled mining.

For this miner, the choice paid off. That said, the economics of solo mining remain challenging. Running ASIC hardware and paying for electricity and cooling make solo success a highly speculative endeavour or, ultimately, a gamble.

This latest win marks the 308th block mined through CKpool since the software’s launch in 2014, and the first in several months. Moments like this will become all the more rare as the Bitcoin network’s total hash rate continues to climb. They will always be mathematically possible, however, and for some, that'll doubtless be reason enough to continue hashing away.

Crypto mining rigs from Chinese manufacturer Bitmain are being investigated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) due to potential risks to U.S. national security. According to Bloomberg, the federal government launched an investigation, “Operation Red Sunset,” to determine whether Beijing can access these mining machines remotely and use them for cyberespionage or to sabotage the power grid. As part of this probe, the government intercepted some of Bitmain’s imports, dismantled the machines, and tested their chips and code.

The findings of this teardown haven’t been published yet, as the investigation is still ongoing. Aside from assessing Bitmain’s technical capabilities, the authorities are also potentially investigating tariff and import tax violations by the company. However, this isn’t the first time the company’s name has appeared on the DHS's radar. In 2024, then-President Joe Biden shut down a massive Bitcoin mining operation owned by a Chinese entity that used thousands of Bitmain’s Antminer rigs. The government gave the order because it was within a mile of Warren Air Force Base, which hosts some of the U.S.’s Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles. It also appeared earlier this year in a U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report, which said that Bitmain miners can be remotely manipulated, posing a threat to the U.S.

In its defense, Bitmain released a statement denying these accusations and saying that it “strictly complies with U.S. and applicable laws and regulations and has never engaged in activities that pose risks to U.S. national security” and that it “has no awareness of or any information at all regarding any alleged federal investigation purported to be called ‘Operation Red Sunset.’” It also acknowledged that some of its products were impounded because of issues raised by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), but that “nothing out of the ordinary” was discovered during that test.

Bitmain is the largest manufacturer of mining rigs, controlling at least 80% of the market. However, the geopolitical rivalry between Washington and Beijing is complicating its operations, with the U.S. becoming wary of large Chinese tech companies. This tension has especially heightened after China enacted its National Intelligence Law in 2017, which compelled companies and individuals to cooperate with Chinese intelligence agencies. We expect things only to get more complicated, especially as many of these manufacturers are transferring production to the U.S. as a strategic move to pivot toward more ‘politically acceptable’ sources.

Bitcoin just dropped to around $90,000, marking its lowest level since late March and early April when it traded for around $80,000. According to Financial Times, this has wiped out $1.2 trillion in value from the crypto since it peaked at over $125,000 in October 5. Although BTC slowly dropped in value after it hit its record high, the biggest drop happened on October 10 after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to massively increase tariffs on Chinese goods in retaliation for Beijing’s rare earth export controls. The cryptocurrency’s value went downhill after that, with Bitcoin now suffering an almost 30% loss in value from the first week of October.

Despite the current administration’s pro-crypto stance, higher interest rates from the Federal Reserve make cryptocurrency a less lucrative asset for investors. After all, a higher interest rate would offer greater returns on bonds and savings accounts, which are a lot safer than volatile tokens. And with experts now unsure if the Federal Reserve will reduce interest rates in December, there’s more incentive for BTC holders to liquidate their positions.

Analysts also say that the highly leveraged trades that some investors engage in are increasing the downward pressure on the price of Bitcoin. “Crypto investors love leverage,” said Bitwise Asset Management head of research Ryan Rasmussen to FT. “What we see time and time again is that traders get out over their skis. They think this time is different.” As BTC fell below $90,000, liquidations of short and long positions on the cryptocurrency and other top tokens reached over $1 billion in just a single day.

Another company holding large amounts of Bitcoin says that the drop in value isn’t a crash, but just over-leveraged investors selling their holdings. “What we are seeing now is not a collapse in crypto markets. It is the extended aftershock of October’s liquidation event,” CEA Industries chief David Namdar said. “The scale is different this time because positions are larger, leverage ran deeper, and the unwind takes longer. The fundamentals have not changed.”

This means that while short-term investors were badly hit by these big fluctuations in the price of BTC, those who HODL shouldn’t have anything to worry about. We’ve recently seen a whale holding on to 80,000 BTC purchased 14 years ago transfer nearly $8 billion worth back in July, with another user sold their holdings a couple of weeks later, netting them an 18 million percent return on their investment.

Major Bitcoin mining firm Bitfarm has announced that it will pivot its business from cryptocurrency to AI data center services by 2027. Although it’s not the largest crypto mining firm in the U.S., it still has a sizeable operation with 12 data centers dedicated to Bitcoin mining. According to Decrypt, the company’s current energy capacity sits at 341 megawatts (MW), which it could take advantage of to deploy several thousand Nvidia GB300 NVL72 server racks.

“We continue executing on our HPC/AI infrastructure development strategy with a fully funded supply chain and plan to convert our Washington site to support Nvidia GB300s with state-of-the-art liquid cooling,” said Bitfarms CEO Ben Gagnon in a statement to Decrypt. “Despite being less than 1% of our total developable portfolio, we believe that the conversion of just our Washington site to GPU-as-a-service could potentially produce more net operating income than we have ever generated with Bitcoin mining.”

Bitfarm posted a $46 million net loss during its third-quarter earnings call, which is almost a 91% year-on-year increase in net losses from 3Q2024. Although Bitcoin reached an all-time high in early October, its volatility meant that the company could not consistently rely on it for its operating costs. Aside from this, its new T21 mining rigs did not perform as expected, leading to a 14% reduction in its hashrate guidance for 1H25.

Alongside its plan to convert its Washington data center, the company also converted a Macquarie debt facility worth $300 million into financing for its Panther Creek, Pennsylvania, data center, with a potential capacity of at least 350 MW. This site, which adds to the company’s 1.3-GW energy pipeline, could potentially make it one of the larger players in the AI data center industry.

At the moment, Bitfarm has 341 MW of energized capacity, meaning it does not have to negotiate with power providers and local governments to acquire more power for its data centers. This would help them avoid the power bottleneck that other hyperscalers like Microsoft are experiencing, with its CEO, Satya Nadella, saying that the company has AI GPUs sitting idle in inventory because it does not have enough warm shells to plug into.

This pivot would help Bitfarm capitalize on the massive demand for AI processing. However, it’s also taking more risks, especially as many experts are saying that the AI industry is already in a bubble. With the investment to completely move from crypto mining to AI data centers expected to cost hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars, a crash of the AI industry could potentially bring down the company and take the lending institution with it, alongside several other companies, and lead to trillions in losses.

Zhimin Qian, also known as the 'Bitcoin Queen,' has been handed an 11-year, 8-month prison sentence by a London judge after she pleaded guilty to charges of possession of and transacting in criminal property in August of this year. According to Bloomberg, Qian ran an unlicensed investment company in China from 2014 to 2017, which duped around 128,000 investors out of US$5.6 billion. She has been on the run since 2017 after Chinese police raided a company event, travelling throughout Southeast Asia on a fake passport, before settling in the UK.

Her downfall began in 2018 when a city law firm rang alarm bells as Qian and her associates attempted to purchase London properties using Bitcoin. This led to the police scrutinizing their moves, resulting in the seizure of 61,000 Bitcoin — the largest forfeiture in cryptocurrency history, currently worth over US$6 billion, until the U.S. broke the record by confiscating over 127,000 Bitcoin tokens from the Prince Group. When she transferred 8.2 Bitcoin in February 2024 into a wallet monitored by the authorities as part of their investigation into Jian Wen, a fast-food worker who helped Qian launder her funds and was arrested in 2022, that was when they located the Bitcoin Queen, leading to her arrest in York.

Despite being on the run from the law for nearly seven years, Qian spent a lot of money and even traveled to many countries while purposefully avoiding nations with extradition treaties with China. She also planned to sell around US$250,000 worth of Bitcoin monthly to fund her lifestyle and eventually become “the monarch of Liberland” — a micronation nestled between Croatia and Serbia.

She “accepts her conviction and the mistakes that led to it,” Roger Sahota, Qian’s lawyer, said in a statement. “She never set out to commit fraud but recognizes her investment schemes were fraudulent and misled those who trusted her.” On the other hand, the sentencing judge told her, “You lied and schemed, all the while seeking to benefit yourself. With the assistance of people you recruited and whose loyalty you bought, you succeeded in evading justice for over seven years.”

We expect Zhimin Qian to serve her entire sentence within the British Isles while China and the U.K. government iron out how to return the billions of dollars she stole from Chinese investors. And given that the UK has suspended its extradition treaty with Hong Kong, there’s no easy way for Beijing to request Qian’s repatriation so she can face charges in her home country.

The China National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center (CVERC), Beijing’s primary cybersecurity agency, has accused Washington of stealing 127,272 Bitcoin — worth more than $13 billion USD at today’s exchange rate — in a December 2020 hack. According to Nikkei Asia, the CVERC outlined the details of the cyberattack on its WeChat account, saying that the stolen amount from five years ago came from LuBian, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency miners, and matches the amount the U.S. DOJ says it seized from Zhi.

Chen Zhi and his company, Prince Group, were accused of running scam call centers across Cambodia. Aside from the cases that he’s facing in the U.S., other countries and territories, like Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, have acted against the company, freezing more than $500 million in assets across borders and leading to the arrest of at least 25 people.

Although the hack happened in 2020, the stolen crypto remained dormant for over four years. Then, in 2024, the U.S. allegedly moved the funds after Zhi’s indictment. There is currently no clear link between Zhi and LuBian, although Washington contends that Chen Zhi owned the wallet that contained the Bitcoin. On the other hand, Beijing’s report says, “This is clearly not the behavior of a typical hacker eager to cash out for profits, and more like a precise operation orchestrated by a national hacking organization.”

This seizure is the largest of its kind in history, even eclipsing the $6.7 billion amount the U.K. confiscated from the “Bitcoin Queen”, who used the cryptocurrency to launder proceeds from over a hundred thousand victims in China. LuBian has no public ownership records, even though it was once one of the largest Bitcoin miners on Earth, reportedly controlling around 6% of the global hashrate, as reported by Blockscope Research. The operation seemingly disappeared overnight in 2021, though, and many analysts now link this to the 2020 hack.

U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping have recently agreed to a truce to the trade war between the two powers that has been intensifying over the past months. Because of this, it’s unclear why China released the statement, especially given that it’s not directly involved in the cases. Although LuBian reportedly used to have a presence in Iran and China, Beijing has put a blanket ban on crypto trading and mining within the country in 2021. Aside from that, even though Zhi was born Chinese, he’s now based in Cambodia and reportedly has citizenship in the country (although his exact whereabouts are unknown), and his company is registered in Phnom Penh.

This issue reveals the complication of digital assets, especially in the world of international crime and cross-border investigations. After all, if the seized amount were fiat currency, the U.S. would have to coordinate with the authorities of the host country where the seized amount is stored to recover it. But with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, the individual wallets holding them do not fall under a specific jurisdiction, and the authority over them would vary depending on who has access to them.

Despite it being the year 2025 and with all our technology at hand, financial scams are still far too common. Thankfully, authorities everywhere are on the case, as evidenced by a European operation that busted 9 conmen who scammed victims out of $689 million in cryptocurrency.

The investigative work was performed by French and Belgian authorities, who then joined prosecutors and judges from their home countries, along with Cyprus, Spain, and Germany, for a joint takedown. The arrests were made at various homes in Cyprus, Spain, and Germany.

Along with the miscreants, the authorities seized $918,504 (€800,000) in bank accounts, €415,000 ($476,444) in cryptocurrencies, $344,417 (€300,00) in cash, and even luxury watches to the tune of $114,805 (€100,00). Additionally, the authorities said that several properties linked to the network are undergoing investigation.

The potential rap sheet for the criminals includes organized fraud, money laundering, offering unlicensed investment services, and participation in a criminal association. Under French law, these offenses may be met with up to 10 years in prison and up to $1.15 million (€1 million) in fines. The thieves created multiple fake cryptocurrency investment platforms promising high returns, and dragged in victims using "various means" including social media and cold calling.

After the victims transferred their cryptocurrency, it was unrecoverable, syphoned away, and laundered via various blockchain tools. The bust occurred on October 27 and 29 and was coordinated by Eurojust, the Hague-based European Union judicial cooperation agency. The investigation goes back to 2023, when French authorities received multiple complains from scammed victims.

As an EU resident, I can personally attest that crypto and fake work scams are all the rage right now. I once got an amusing call from someone from The Blockchain (yes, really) that I entertained for a minute before going back to sleep. Every couple of days, I get a nicely-formatted phishing email from a fake exchange that looks pretty legit, save for the sender. Sometimes these imitate real exchanges, too. Thankfully, the ongoing European MiCA regulation/certification should help investors in verifying that their prospective exchange is listed and certified for some peace of mind.

Just today, Eurojust announced another huge bust, of 18 people, this time related to $344 million (€300 million) worth of credit card fraud. Last June, Europol busted a cryptocurrency investment fraud ring that took in €450 million ($517 million) and laundered it through various methods worldwide, including cash withdrawals, bank transfers, and crypto transfers.

The British Metropolitan Police seized more than 61,000 Bitcoins earlier this month from convicted Chinese national Zhimin Qian, also known as Yadi Zhang and dubbed the "Bitcoin Queen." Now, China and the U.K. government are working together to trace the movement of the stolen funds and identify additional fugitives, with the hope of returning the funds to the victims. According to the South China Morning Post, police in Tianjin, a city in the northern part of the country, are "doing everything possible" to track the more than 128,000 investors who were duped by fake investment schemes from 2014 through 2017.

The syndicate converted the proceeds from the crime into Bitcoin and property to hide their tracks, but Qian's guilty plea has finally allowed the authorities to begin recovery efforts. However, the cross-border nature of the crime, the large number of victims, and the skyrocketing value of Bitcoin have complicated matters. Tianjin authorities have already contacted claimants via an online platform, but they've warned them that the process can take time. A few experts even doubted whether the victims would be compensated at all.

Aside from determining each person's eligibility to claim the returns, the British government also has to determine whether the cash used to buy the crypto originated from the scam or was mixed with proceeds from other criminal activities. Furthermore, when the British police seized the digital wallets in 2018, one Bitcoin was valued at less than $10,000, trading for less than $ 3,300 near the end of the year.

However, it sits at around $110,000 today, even breaking its all-time high of over $125,000 earlier in October. This is a more than 30x increase in value, but it's unclear whether this growth will be disbursed equally among the victims or if they will only receive the original value they lost.

So, even though the seizure had an initial value of more than US$200 million, it's now estimated to be worth over US$6.7 billion. It's suggested that the U.K. will set up a compensation scheme for the victims, but it seems that they'll only get the verified amount that they were scammed out of, not the more than 3,000% increase in Bitcoin value.

Some members of the British government want to keep most of the seized Bitcoin, suggesting they will only return the original sum. However, others have cautioned against this, as it will likely cause diplomatic tension and would not be a good look internationally for the U.K. Furthermore, there's bound to be a protracted legal battle before the funds can even be released — whether to the victims or the British government.