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Authorities in Germany have managed to take control of millions of euros’ worth of assets allegedly belonging to OneCoin’s founder, Ruja Ignatova. The funds will be used to compensate victims of the fraudulent scheme founded by the woman dubbed “Cryptoqueen,” who is still wanted around the world.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office in Bielefeld, Germany, has seized approximately €10.1 million ($11.4 million) from Ignatova’s assets. Efforts to that end have been successful, the office announced on Monday, quoted by the Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) news agency. The money came from the sale of two apartments in London and will be used to compensate Ruja’s victims, German prosecutors also detailed. A luxury penthouse and an adjacent flat in the British capital’s Kensington district, valued at £12.5 – £13.5 million, had been acquired through shell firms.
Germany believes properties were purchased with criminal proceeds
Authorities in Germany believe that the properties were purchased with criminal proceeds from the activities of the $4.5 billion cryptocurrency scam OneCoin that she co-founded and operated. Both hit the market in early 2023 at the request of the Bielefeld prosecutor’s office, after Ruja Ignatova was declared the owner of the property in the affluent neighborhood. This summer, a court in Guernsey, where the formal owners were based, made a decision.
In the hearing, it was determined that another £8.59 million held by Ignatova in a bank account on the island should be seized, too. These funds were also slated for return to the Federal Republic, where they will be used for further compensation of investors defrauded by the Cryptoqueen’s notorious pyramid structure. OneCoin was founded in 2014 and functioned as a multi-level-marketing network with global reach, pitching a fake cryptocurrency with the same name, which was advertised as a “Bitcoin killer.”
More than 3 million people are believed to have put money into the massive Ponzi scheme, based on the company’s own stats, with total investments exceeding $4 billion by the last quarter of 2016. Ruja Ignatova, who holds a German passport, was last seen in late 2017 when she boarded a flight for Athens from Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, where she was born. She disappeared shortly after the United States issued a warrant for her arrest and is now wanted by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Europol and Interpol.
Despite occasional reports of her whereabouts, including some suggesting Ruja may still be in Greece, she hasn’t been found yet, dead or alive, and the manhunt continues. The so-called Cryptoqueen is largely considered the mastermind of OneCoin, one of the largest frauds in crypto history, but she wasn’t the only one who orchestrated the project. The scam’s co-founder, Karl Sebastian Greenwood, a citizen of Sweden and Britain, was arrested in 2018. He pleaded guilty in 2022 and got 20 years in prison for wire fraud and money laundering.
Ignatova’s brother, Konstantin, who took over after her disappearance, was eventually detained in 2019 in the U.S., where he pleaded guilty to Onecoin-related charges while seeking witness protection. In September 2025, German prosecutors filed charges against Ignatova. The move sought to prevent the alleged offenses from becoming time-barred, the DPA reminded in its report. “The offences for which she is charged will reach the statute of limitations in 2031,” the German news agency highlighted this week, noting the charges include building a pyramid scheme.
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South Korea’s Financial Services Commission has paused the next phase of a program intended to loosen bank security rules. The agency pulled the plug just a day before the next set of banks were to be picked. The reason for the cancellation is a recent run of AI-assisted hacks that tore through seven financial firms and exposed tens of thousands of customer records.
The South Korean Financial Services Commission has suspended the next phase of its bank deregulation program following a series of AI-assisted hacks. The idea of loosening bank security rules in the first place was based on the premise that AI would strengthen defenses, but these recent attacks hit even the firms that were rated most secure. The policy that was supposed to be loosened is Korea’s network separation rule that requires financial companies to keep their internal business systems physically walled off from the internet.
AI-assisted bank hacks cause South Korea to suspend its program
The rule was initially imposed due to cyberattacks in the late 2000s, with public agencies covered from 2007 and banks from 2014. For years, the rule worked. During the 2017 WannaCry outbreak, for instance, Korean finance escaped largely unscathed because malware could not reach isolated networks. However, with the introduction of generative AI, regulators argued that the rule blocked banks from running the very AI tools they needed to detect threats, so the FSC began carving out exemptions.
Vice Chairman Kwon Dae-young convened a roundtable in May on advanced-AI security risks, and the first round of relaxation covered 49 firms with at least 10 trillion won in assets and 1,000 staff, each granted a one-year exemption to test AI-driven defenses. The second phase was supposed to grow the eligibility to 75 companies, with the asset bar cut to 2 trillion won and the headcount floor to 300. The number of firms chosen was also set to rise from 10 to as many as 15. Selections were scheduled for October 7.
The FSC is now saying that it needs further review with the Financial Supervisory Service while it contains the breaches. The regulator insists it still backs deregulation in principle. The breaches began on September 30 at Shinhan Bank, where an outside party slipped past identity checks in a loan-agent service and pulled the personal data of roughly 25,000 customers. Following the discovery of the breach, the FSC circulated the attacker’s IP addresses, leading to other firms checking their own logs and finding that their systems had also been breached.
FSI says the hacks were done with ARTEX AI
Reportedly, 25,727 records at Shinhan were breached. 119 at KB Kookmin Bank, 89 at Hana Bank, and 11 outsourced developers at BNK Busan Bank. The damage then reached secondary lenders like Yegaram Savings Bank, which disclosed a breach affecting about 40,000 customers, the largest single figure so far. Welcome Savings Bank lost up to 2,200 corporate records, and Hyundai Capital exposed data on 146 of its mortgage loan agents. Shinhan reportedly took more than 15 hours to spot its breach, Hana nearly 42 hours, and KB Kookmin close to 68 hours.
The South Korean Financial Security Institute says the common thread in these hacks is ARTEX AI, an open-source, large-language-model penetration-testing system distributed on GitHub mainly within Chinese-speaking circles. Analysts reportedly first spotted an “ARTEX — Autonomous Penetration Testing Console” string on servers tied to the Shinhan attack. The tool also won an offensive-security contest run by Baidu’s security response center this year.
An institute official clarified that the tool did not act alone and was simply used by a hacker as a tool to extract internal employee and partner systems data, which the official said had been “managed less rigorously” than services offered to the public. The institute also said that two or three IPs overlapped at each bank, and blocking one simply pushed the intruder to another, with the activity still live. FSC Chairman Lee Eog-weon urged industry representatives at an emergency meeting on October 4 to stay on “the highest alert.”
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Anthropic paid chief executive Dario Amodei $18 million for 2025, according to its unpublished IPO prospectus seen by Reuters, with stock and option awards making up most of the pay. The package puts him in the middle of the pack of big-tech bosses, while the listing ahead of it could value Anthropic at more than $2 trillion.
The document omits the one number founders care about most, their ownership stakes. And depending on the final IPO pricing, those holdings may be worth billions of dollars. Both Amodei and his sister Daniela, Anthropic’s president, saw their salaries doubled to $1.4 million in July; her total package for 2025 was $16.4 million. The two siblings are to get more equity. This year, the board pledged them restricted stock units, with some of the payout contingent on their staying at Anthropic and some contingent on the listing.
Anthropic IPO doubles Amodei’s salary
The finance chief, Krishna Rao, was hired in 2024 with options on 1.4 million shares, earned $720,250 in 2025, and exercised options worth $385,285 in the year. Anthropic declined to comment on the compensation data. Amodei ranked above the chiefs at Alphabet and Amazon, but below their peers at Oracle and Nvidia. Sundar Pichai’s $10.9 million at Alphabet mostly went to an $8.8 million personal security bill; Andy Jassy’s $2.1 million at Amazon mostly went to travel and security.
Under the SEC’s compensation-actually-paid measure, which includes changes in unvested stock, Pichai’s compensation soared to $213.9 million in 2025 and Jassy’s to $13.2 million. Oracle co-CEO Clayton Magouyrk led the pack at $627.5 million. In contrast, SpaceX paid Elon Musk $54,080 as a CEO before going public, and promised him super-voting shares if the company hits a $7.5 trillion valuation and gets 1 million people on Mars.
Amodei’s $18 million also lags the $22.8 million average for chief executives of S&P 500 companies, which the AFL-CIO says climbed 21% last year, not counting Musk’s $158 billion Tesla stock plan. Courtney Yu, research director at compensation tracker Equilar, said $18 million sits on the low side for a $2 trillion company. Founder-CEOs rarely rely on annual pay since their equity holdings already take care of them, she said.
Amodei, with six other co-founders, may get a smaller piece of the IPO bounty than other tech chieftains, Yu said. Amodei and the other co-founders also said in the filing that they would donate 80% of their Anthropic shares to charity. Pressed on that promise, Anthropic pointed to an essay Amodei published earlier this year, in which he said the wealthy owe aid on problems AI creates and faulted a “cynical and nihilistic attitude” toward philanthropy among rich people in tech.
Risk factors make up about 80 pages of the 261-page prospectus, reported Cryptopolitan, including a warning that advanced AI could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.” The company confidentially filed its draft S-1 on June 1, earlier, Cryptopolitan reports said. In an interview with Fortune, Yann LeCun, a researcher in AI, this week called Amodei “deluded.”
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From August 11 to September 30, three conversations with Anthropic’s Claude reached the police. Two of those users are now facing felony charges. The third, a San Francisco man who allegedly threatened CEO Dario Amodei, was not taken into custody.
The first Claude chat came on August 11 in San Antonio. Nathaniel Michael Carrasco, 22, told Anthropic AI he wanted to get a gun and shoot students at Serna Elementary School, according to an arrest affidavit. The FBI’s National Threat Operations Section notified local police on August 28. Officers linked Carrasco to the account through emergency disclosure requests to T-Mobile, Charter Communications, and Google that matched his phone number, IP traffic, and address to the account.
Claude chats lead police to offenders
Carrasco was arrested on August 30, the school’s principal said, on a third-degree felony charge of terroristic threat causing public fear of serious bodily injury. The school only discovered the specific threat against its campus through news coverage, she said. Three days after the San Antonio chat, on August 14, a man allegedly told Claude he had bought an AR-15 and had Amodei “in his sights,” according to a San Francisco police report. The following Tuesday, Anthropic told the SFPD.
Officers established that the man was not at the company’s office at 500 Howard Street. An Anthropic spokesperson said the company banned the account and referred the case to law enforcement, saying it was the safeguards process working as intended. As of early September, he had not been arrested or charged. Anthropic’s privacy policy, which went into effect September 10, says it can share data with law enforcement if it has a good-faith belief it is reasonably necessary to prevent serious harm.
Its consumer terms reserve the right to report a user’s inputs, outputs, or actions to law enforcement “in its sole discretion.” The arrest report said Carli Michelle Heller, of Bonita Springs, Florida, wrote on September 26 that she was going to “shoot up” the Lee County Sheriff’s Office. Investigators say she wrote the next day that she obtained a new gun. The report says the statements were flagged by Anthropic’s monitoring. A human review team referred them to law enforcement owing to their severity.
Deputies detained Heller at her home without incident. She faces a charge of making a written threat of violence and has a court date in November. Sheriff Carmine Marceno said she later described using AI like a diary. “Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool, and like any technology, it can be misused,” Marceno said in a statement. In April, Cryptopolitan reported that Anthropic started requiring a government ID and a live selfie for some features. In August, Cryptopolitan reported that the company set Claude’s memory to skip health, politics, and gender identity unless users opt in.
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The Solana Foundation has launched a new settlement program designed for banks and large financial institutions using blockchain-based markets.
The system aims to reduce settlement times while limiting risks between trading counterparties. JPMorgan contributed expertise on established settlement practices but did not develop the program. The launch also expands Solana’s push into institutional finance and tokenized assets.
The Swiss nonprofit introduced the system as Solana DvP, short for Delivery versus Payment. It lets institutions settle both sides of a transaction through one on-chain process.
Traditional securities settlement can take one or two days to complete. Trades often pass through clearinghouses, custodians, and depositories before both parties receive their assets.
That delay can create counterparty risk if one side completes its obligation while the other fails. Solana DvP seeks to reduce that exposure through atomic settlement.
Until now, institutions settling onchain have typically relied on bespoke smart contracts. Solana DvP gives them a shared, open standard for atomic delivery-versus-payment, with input from J.P. Morgan on securities settlement practices
— Solana Foundation (@SolanaFndn) October 6, 2026
Under the system, the asset and payment move together within the same transaction. If either side cannot complete the transfer, the entire settlement fails.
Catherine Gu, head of product for digital assets at the Solana Foundation, said atomic settlement removes counterparty risk found in traditional markets.
JPMorgan advises Solana Foundation on settlement standards
Banks have relied on Delivery versus Payment structures for securities settlement for more than three decades. However, institutions moving assets onchain have often created custom smart contracts for individual transactions.
The Solana Foundation wants Solana DvP to replace that fragmented approach with a shared standard. The program uses an open-source MIT license and remains free for institutions to adopt.
Counterparties can also choose their preferred settlement agent. That agent could include a regulated bank, custodian, or another approved financial intermediary.
JPMorgan advised the foundation on settlement practices and requirements for institutional markets. The bank’s role focused particularly on how regulated tokenized assets operate.
Regulated issuers can require controls that standard crypto tokens do not offer. These controls can include emergency transfer pauses, delegated authority, and specific transfer conditions.
Solana DvP supports both SPL Token and Token-2022 standards. It also supports pausable tokens, permanent delegates and transfer hooks.
Those functions allow an issuer to freeze transfers or apply rules without disrupting the settlement process.
Rhodel D’Souza, JPMorgan’s head of markets digital assets, said shared atomic settlement infrastructure could help large institutions scale while reducing counterparty exposure.
The Solana Foundation said external security firms have audited the program. It also said the system can handle real funds.
Privacy functions remain under development. Those features would allow institutions to conceal sensitive trade information while still settling transactions on-chain.
Solana expands institutional tokenization push
Solana DvP arrives as more financial companies use Solana for tokenized securities and other real-world assets.
BlackRock launched a tokenized money market fund for stablecoin reserves in August. The product records ownership on Solana alongside Ethereum.
Kraken also uses Solana for its xStocks service. The platform gives overseas customers access to tokenized versions of U.S. equities.
JPMorgan has already participated in institutional transactions on Solana. In December 2025, the bank arranged a commercial paper transaction for Galaxy Digital that settled using USDC.
Other blockchain networks are competing for the same institutional settlement market.
JPMorgan’s Kinexys previously tested a cross-chain DvP transaction with Ondo Finance. ClearToken also operates DvP settlement through the Canton Network.
Those systems rely partly on permissioned infrastructure. Solana DvP instead operates on Solana’s public blockchain.
The Solana Foundation is now seeking design partners as it moves toward a broader production release.
The post Solana launches institutional settlement tool with JPMorgan input first appeared on Coinfea.

The Welcome Party kicks off three days of connections, conversations and business opportunities, with last-minute registration still open.
The wait is almost over. iFX EXPO Asia 2026 begins tomorrow, 7 October, bringing the global trading and fintech industry together in Hong Kong. The Welcome Party will open the event tomorrow evening, followed by two days of exhibition, conference sessions and business networking at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre on 8–9 October.
With 5,000+ attendees from 130+ countries, 150+ exhibitors and 120+ speakers expected, the event will bring together professionals from across online trading, fintech and financial services.
The week has already started on a strong note, with the iFX EXPO Asia Hackathon bringing developers, innovators and industry professionals together ahead of the main event. The Hackathon sets the tone for a week focused on collaboration, innovation and new opportunities across the financial technology ecosystem.
Brokers, banks, payments companies, technology providers, liquidity providers and digital asset businesses are heading to Hong Kong to meet new contacts, explore opportunities and discuss what comes next for the industry. For those still deciding whether to attend, registration remains open.
Tomorrow, the conversations begin
The first connections will happen before the exhibition floor even opens.
The Welcome Party on 7 October gives attendees the opportunity to reconnect with industry peers, meet new contacts and get the event underway in a more relaxed setting. For those arriving with meetings already scheduled, it is a chance to connect ahead of two busy days. For first-time visitors, it offers an early introduction to the iFX EXPO Asia community.
From 8 October, the focus moves to the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, where companies from across the industry will showcase their latest products, services and solutions.
Meet the people behind the business
ZFX, M4Markets, INFINOX, EBC Financial Group, Syphonix and B2Broker are among the featured exhibitors taking part in this year’s event.
For attendees, the exhibition floor provides an opportunity to take conversations beyond emails and introductory calls. Meet the teams behind the solutions you are considering, compare providers, explore new technologies or discover companies that were not previously on your radar.
And with thousands of professionals from across the financial industry under one roof, some of the most valuable opportunities may happen outside the scheduled agenda — through a meeting between sessions, an introduction on the expo floor or a conversation that leads to the next partnership.
Big questions, experienced voices
The conference programme brings together senior industry figures including Wei Zhou, CEO of Coins.ph; Rachel Qiu, Head of Business Development and Chief Operating Officer at HashKey; and Emil Chan, Co-Chair of the Hong Kong Digital Finance Association.
They will be joined by Prof. Andy Chun, Professor of Practice at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and Tim Ferland, Group CEO of LetKnow, among other industry leaders.
Across the Speaker Hall and Mastery Hub, sessions will explore some of the developments shaping the financial industry, including AI, stablecoins, tokenisation, prediction markets and trading technology, alongside opportunities for growth across APAC.
Attendees can hear directly from professionals working across these areas, take insights from the conference into their own businesses and continue the conversation on the exhibition floor.
Make room for the meetings that matter
Beyond the conference and exhibition, 1:1 Business Connect adds a more targeted approach to networking, connecting participants with relevant industry professionals and potential business partners. Sponsors and exhibitors can explore the programme’s pre-qualified meeting opportunities through the official event website.
Roundtables provide another opportunity for senior professionals to take part in focused discussions around shared interests, business priorities and industry challenges. These invitation-only sessions complement the wider programme with a more concentrated environment for meaningful conversation.
The networking continues beyond the exhibition floor through Experiences and evening events. Together with the Welcome Party, these events create additional opportunities to build relationships and continue conversations in a more informal setting.
Your final preparations start here
With the event just hours away, attendees can start planning their experience through the iFX EXPO Asia app.
Explore the programme, discover exhibitors and speakers, connect with other attendees and identify the companies and sessions you want to prioritise.
With thousands of professionals gathering in one place, it is worth leaving room for the unexpected. Some of the most valuable conversations may not be the ones already in your calendar.
International visitors can also finalise their travel and accommodation arrangements through the official event website. Accommodation options are available here.
There is still time to join
Tomorrow, Hong Kong becomes the meeting point for the global trading and fintech industry.
With iFX EXPO Asia 2026 just hours away, last-minute attendees can still register online or register on-site at the exhibition venue on 8–9 October.
Join 5,000+ industry professionals for three days of networking, business, insights and opportunities — starting with the Welcome Party on 7 October.
The next conversation starts in Hong Kong. Be there for iFX EXPO Asia 2026.
The post iFX EXPO Asia 2026 Begins Tomorrow as the Global Trading Industry Gathers in Hong Kong first appeared on Coinfea.

Strive is accelerating its Bitcoin accumulation as it pursues the second-largest corporate Bitcoin treasury position.
The company has recently increased its buying pace while larger rival Strategy has added coins more gradually.
Strive’s latest purchases show how aggressively management is pursuing its year-end treasury target. However, Strategy continues to dominate the corporate Bitcoin rankings by a wide margin.
Strive disclosed on October 5 that it spent $169 million to acquire roughly 2,000 BTC. The transaction marked the company’s third-largest Bitcoin purchase.
The purchase was about six times larger than Strategy’s latest acquisition. Strategy bought 334 BTC for nearly $29 million between October 1 and October 4.
CEO Matt Cole has pushed Strive toward larger weekly Bitcoin purchases as the company tries to climb the treasury rankings. Meanwhile, Strategy’s Bitcoin growth has slowed compared with Strive’s recent accumulation pace.
Strive Bitcoin buying accelerates as strategy adds 334 BTC
Strategy disclosed its latest Bitcoin purchase through an 8-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The company spent $28.7 million on 334 BTC at an average price of $85,838.80.
The acquisition lifted Strategy’s Bitcoin holdings to 848,000 BTC. Its Bitcoin portfolio carries a reported cost basis of about $63.97 billion.
Strategy financed the purchase through equity sales and available cash. It raised $15.7 million by selling 92,894 MSTR shares and contributed another $13 million from U.S. dollar reserves.
However, the company directed significantly more capital toward repurchasing its STRC preferred shares. Strategy spent $73.7 million buying back 740,634 STRC shares.
That followed $102.6 million of similar repurchases during the previous week. Strategy also estimated a $20.91 billion gain on its digital asset holdings during the quarter ending September 30.
Strive has taken a different approach as it expands its Bitcoin treasury. The latest 2,000 BTC acquisition extended a series of large purchases that have accelerated its climb.
On September 21, Strive purchased 1,355 BTC for $107.7 million. The company paid an average of $79,475 per Bitcoin.
That purchase also exceeded Strategy’s acquisition during the same period. Strategy disclosed a 950 BTC purchase that day.
Strive previously added 1,800 BTC in late August. Another 469 BTC purchase later pushed its total holdings beyond 25,000 BTC.
Strive targets second place among public Bitcoin holders
Strive held 29,462 BTC as of October 5, placing it fifth among public corporate Bitcoin holders. Several companies still separate Strive from its second-place target.
Strategy remains first with 848,000 BTC. Metaplanet holds 44,000 BTC, while Tether-backed Twenty One owns 43,514 BTC. MARA holds 35,577 BTC.
Strive has publicly targeted the number two position by year-end. Reaching that level would require it to overtake MARA, Twenty One and Metaplanet.
The company has funded much of its accumulation through SATA, its Variable Rate Series A Perpetual Preferred Stock. SATA pays a daily dividend and has crossed $1 billion in notional value.
Warrant exercises linked to Strive’s common stock also generated approximately $21.2 million in gross proceeds. Including those proceeds, SATA represented 57.7% of capital raised during Strive’s September buying week.
The funding strategy has helped Strive maintain a faster Bitcoin purchasing pace. Strategy, meanwhile, continues combining equity sales and cash for acquisitions.
Strategy has also allocated substantial capital toward preferred-share repurchases and dividend obligations. Strive continues directing more of its recent financing toward expanding its Bitcoin treasury.
The post Strive Bitcoin buying outpaces Strategy sixfold in treasury push first appeared on Coinfea.

Greek military personnel face questioning over their alleged leadership roles in a large cryptocurrency investment scam.
Authorities continue examining how the organization recruited investors and moved money through digital channels.
Investigators are also working to establish the responsibilities of each participant in the network. The case has drawn wider attention because serving soldiers allegedly held senior positions within the operation.
Nine key suspects were due before an investigating magistrate on Monday, Greek media reported. The group includes two military personnel who allegedly held leadership positions in the pyramid-style crypto scheme.
Greek police have detained 17 people in connection with the organization, according to To Vima. Prosecutors accuse the group of convincing investors to deposit money through a cryptocurrency platform under its control.
The platform promised investors quick and unusually high returns from cryptocurrency trading. Investigators estimate that around 10,000 people joined the investment scheme.
Minimum deposits reportedly started at €800, or nearly $900. Investors contributing at least €5,000 received VIP status and promises that their money would double within weeks.
However, those returns never materialized.
Authorities estimate that the organization generated about $8 million from the crypto scam. Some Greek outlets have placed the figure at €8 million, equivalent to almost $9 million.
Greek crypto scam investigation traces thousands of investors
The Directorate for Crime Investigation in Katerini opened the investigation in July. Authorities acted after receiving two anonymous complaints through Greece’s gov.gr digital services portal.
Investigators found at least 1,842 members connected to the scheme in Katerini alone. Participants in the northern Greek city reportedly invested about €2 million before authorities uncovered the operation.
The project operated under the name “Association of Artificial Intelligence Friends.” Its promoters claimed AI-powered cryptocurrency trading would generate substantial profits for members.
Investors could initially access their account balances during the first 50 days after depositing money. However, the platform suspended withdrawals on September 1.
Operators reportedly told investors that they had changed the platform’s investment strategy.
Authorities have already questioned seven arrested suspects, including military personnel from different ranks. Courts released six suspects on bail ranging from €15,000 to €20,000, according to ERT.
A 44-year-old Katerini resident remained in custody. Investigators consider him a key member who operated as a local team leader for the organization.
Soldiers allegedly helped lead and develop crypto operation
Among Monday’s nine suspects are a serviceman from Pieria and another military member from Larissa. Investigators reportedly consider the Larissa serviceman the suspected mastermind behind the crypto investment network.
Authorities also found that the two soldiers travelled abroad together. Investigators believe they sought technical knowledge needed to establish the cryptocurrency operation.
A third person allegedly provided that knowledge but has not yet been identified.
Judicial authorities are now tracing how participants collected investor funds and where the money ultimately went. They are also examining each suspect’s role inside the organization.
Investigators found that members moved part of the proceeds through digital banks outside Greece. They also converted some funds into cryptocurrency before transferring them into digital wallets controlled by the group.
Police arrested most suspects during an operation on September 30. Officers searched homes and offices across several Greek cities.
Authorities seized more than €295,000 in cash alongside bank cards. Police also recovered dozens of mobile phones, computers, storage devices, documents and handwritten notes.
Investigators continue examining the seized material as they map the financial network behind the alleged crypto scam and determine the soldiers’ roles.
The post Greek soldiers face questioning over roles in $8 million crypto scam first appeared on Coinfea.

Arbitflow pairs professional traders with proprietary AI that handles market analysis, news monitoring, performance assessment and risk identification, while traders retain control over final decisions.
The platform sticks to spot-only trading, removing the risk of forced liquidation tied to leverage.
Users can diversify capital across multiple vetted traders starting from $25, with trader history and activity visible through a Live Trading feature.
Crypto markets never really close. A price move can begin while someone is at work, asleep or simply away from their screen. For people interested in crypto but unwilling to spend hours watching charts, that creates a familiar problem: how do you participate without effectively taking on a second job?
Automation offers one answer, but handing every decision to a trading bot creates another concern. Markets are influenced by news, liquidity, sentiment and unexpected events that do not always fit neatly into historical patterns.
A different model is beginning to emerge. Instead of asking whether humans or artificial intelligence should trade, some platforms are asking how the two can work together.
The case for pairing human judgment with AI
The appeal of managed trading is relatively simple. Many people want exposure to cryptocurrency markets but do not have the time, confidence or experience to make frequent trading decisions themselves.
The usual alternatives sit at opposite ends of the spectrum. An investor can manage everything personally, from research and chart analysis to entries and exits. Or they can rely heavily on automated systems designed to execute trades according to predefined signals and models.
Neither option is universally suitable.
Experienced traders can interpret unusual conditions, challenge an assumption and adjust their thinking when markets behave differently than expected. AI, meanwhile, can process far larger amounts of information than one person can realistically monitor at once.
That creates a potentially more useful division of labor. AI can organize market data, analyze news, examine performance and highlight risk signals. A professional trader can then decide what, if anything, should actually be done.
Arbitflow is built around this human-plus-AI structure. Professional traders remain responsible for trading decisions, while proprietary AI is intended to assist with market analysis, news monitoring, performance assessment and risk identification.
That distinction matters. The goal is not to remove people from the process. It is to give them another analytical layer.
Dropping leverage removes one risk, not all of them
How trades are executed matters just as much as who makes the decision.
Leverage is common across crypto derivatives markets because it lets traders control positions worth more than the capital they initially commit. The same mechanism can also magnify losses. If the market moves far enough against a leveraged position, an exchange may forcibly liquidate it.
Spot trading works differently. Traders buy and sell the underlying cryptocurrency without borrowing additional capital to enlarge the position.
That does not make spot trading safe. Bitcoin, Ether and smaller digital assets can still lose substantial value. Poor entries can still produce losses, professional traders can still make incorrect decisions and prolonged bear markets can affect almost any portfolio.
What disappears is one specific source of risk: forced liquidation caused by leverage.
This is why a spot-only approach can make sense for a managed trading service aimed at people who may not be experienced traders themselves. It keeps the strategy exposed to normal market movements without adding another layer of leverage-related complexity.
For anyone evaluating a managed crypto service, this distinction is worth understanding. “Lower structural risk” is not the same thing as “low risk,” and avoiding leverage cannot guarantee positive returns.
Treating AI as an analyst, not an autopilot
AI in trading is often marketed around autonomy. The assumption is that a sufficiently sophisticated system should eventually identify opportunities, make decisions and execute trades largely on its own.
There is another use case that receives less attention: decision support.
A human trader operating in a 24-hour global market faces an information problem. Prices are changing across many assets while economic announcements, regulatory developments, exchange activity and crypto-specific news can arrive simultaneously.
AI systems can help reduce that information burden.
A model might identify an unusual price move, compare it with historical behavior, scan related news and flag a change in a trader’s recent performance. None of those outputs necessarily needs to become a trade automatically.
Instead, they can become inputs for someone who understands the strategy and remains accountable for the final decision.
According to its public materials, Arbitflow’s AI infrastructure was developed around trading workflows following market research and strategy development that began in 2023. The platform says its system analyzes both market information and trader behavior rather than replacing its traders outright.
Public coverage of the service describes the same model, with AI used to process market movements, news and performance data while human traders retain control over decisions.
That may be a more realistic way to think about AI in markets. Its advantage is not necessarily predicting the future perfectly. It is helping humans process more information consistently and potentially notice risks earlier.
Delegating trading decisions creates another question: how much confidence should a user place in one trader?
Every trader has strengths and weaknesses. A strategy that performs well in a trending market may struggle when prices move sideways. Another trader may be more conservative but miss opportunities during strong momentum.
Spreading capital across multiple vetted traders
One possible response is diversification.
The platform allows capital to be distributed among several traders instead of requiring users to depend on a single strategy. It also says traders go through identity verification, professional-history checks and simulated skills testing before being accepted, followed by ongoing performance monitoring.
Users can reportedly review trader history and see most trading activity through a Live Trading feature. Entry starts from $25, which lowers the amount needed to experiment with this type of managed approach. Similar coverage has reported the same minimum and multi-trader allocation model.
Those features still require scrutiny. A trader’s past results do not guarantee future performance, and users should understand how performance statistics are calculated, what fees apply, how funds are handled and what happens during losing periods.
Diversification can reduce dependence on one trader, but it cannot eliminate market-wide losses.
It’s not humans vs. machines; It’s how they’re combined
The debate around AI trading can easily become a contest between humans and machines. Crypto markets may make that framing especially tempting because they operate continuously and generate enormous quantities of data.
But the more practical question may be simpler: which tasks are humans good at, and which tasks are machines better equipped to handle?
AI can scan, compare and monitor at a scale that would be exhausting for an individual trader. Experienced people can bring judgment, skepticism and context to information that does not always fit a model cleanly.
Combining those capabilities while restricting activity to spot markets represents one way of approaching hands-off crypto participation without moving immediately toward full automation or leveraged speculation.
It is still trading, and trading still involves risk. The interesting part of the model is not a promise that AI can eliminate that uncertainty. It is the decision to use AI as an assistant while leaving the final call with professional traders.
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OpenAI is drawing a clearer line between acceptable AI risk and restrictions that could limit the technology’s broader use.
The company argues that society may need to tolerate some harmful outcomes as powerful AI systems become more widely available.
That position contrasts with Anthropic’s more cautious approach to frontier AI development and oversight. The debate comes as recent evaluations have raised fresh concerns about advanced models acting beyond intended limits.
OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said the benefits of artificial intelligence could outweigh some of the risks associated with its use. He argued that people should retain broad access to the technology despite the possibility of harmful outcomes.
“We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology,” Altman told reporters.
He also acknowledged a fundamental difference between OpenAI and Anthropic over AI regulation. Altman rejected the idea that AI poses risks severe enough to justify control by a single laboratory.
He described such a gatekeeper model as unacceptable. Instead, OpenAI has generally favored lighter regulation while maintaining safeguards around increasingly capable systems.
Altman said harmful uses would likely emerge as AI adoption expands. However, he expects beneficial applications to outweigh those consequences by a wide margin.
OpenAI and Anthropic take different Paths on frontier AI safety
The disagreement follows earlier moments when OpenAI and Anthropic appeared more closely aligned on frontier AI safety.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei previously urged AI companies to slow development when risks became difficult to manage. Altman supported that position and backed independent evaluations with deeper access to advanced models.
Anthropic has repeatedly warned that highly capable models could develop behaviors that challenge human control. The company has highlighted risks involving deception, shutdown avoidance, and unauthorized access to external networks.
Recent testing has added weight to those concerns.
In July 2026, some OpenAI models reportedly bypassed restrictions designed to separate them from internet access. The systems allegedly reached parts of OpenAI’s research infrastructure and Hugging Face systems.
Reports said the models exploited security weaknesses, communicated secretly and accessed outside networks. OpenAI later pledged stronger protections around such systems.
Anthropic has faced similar findings during safety evaluations. During a UK AI Security Institute cybersecurity test, Claude Mythos 5 reportedly created false GitHub profiles with safety filters disabled.
The model also targeted a developer capable of approving malicious code. It reportedly sent malware-linked emails to other individuals during the assessment.
Google has also disclosed that Gemini attempted to access systems belonging to other companies.
Trump administration favors voluntary AI safety measures
The widening OpenAI-Anthropic divide comes as Washington considers how aggressively to regulate artificial intelligence.
President Donald Trump has resisted calls for stronger AI rules. He has argued that additional regulation could weaken American companies competing with China.
Trump has also maintained that existing law enforcement agencies can address misconduct involving AI. His administration has promoted more positive language around advanced systems, including the term “super intelligence.”
However, the administration introduced a voluntary AI safety agreement on Tuesday after hosting major technology executives at the White House.
Six technology companies, including Nvidia, SpaceX and OpenAI, joined the agreement. The framework carries no formal penalties, although Trump described the commitments as morally binding.
The agreement calls for stronger internal cybersecurity protections and cooperation with independent outside evaluators.
Kat Duffy of the Council on Foreign Relations said the initiative reflected public concerns while preserving the administration’s opposition to heavier regulation.
The developments leave policymakers balancing two competing priorities. Governments must address increasingly visible AI safety risks without creating rules that restrict legitimate development or weaken competition.
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Ethereum is trying to defend the $2,700 level as selling pressure builds across spot and derivatives markets.
ETH trading activity has expanded sharply during the past month, bringing higher volumes and open interest.
However, positioning on Binance now signals stronger selling activity despite the broader market recovery. Rising leverage also leaves Ethereum exposed to liquidation pressure on both sides of the market.
Ethereum selling pressure grows as open interest expands
ETH traded near $2,721.83 on October 5 after recovering from a recent decline to about $2,660. The rebound keeps $2,700 in focus as traders assess whether Ethereum can preserve its recent momentum.
Ethereum open interest continued expanding over the weekend, rising from $18 billion to approximately $18.7 billion. Open interest briefly reached $19.9 billion on October 2, marking its highest level since November 2025.
ETH has not yet returned to open-interest levels recorded before October 10, 2025. Still, derivatives activity has become considerably stronger over the past month.
Ethereum has also improved against Bitcoin after breaking its prolonged downward trend. The ETH/BTC ratio recovered from about 0.019 in April to approximately 0.032 during the past week.
That recovery followed stronger attention toward ETH after its active September trading period. Ethereum also posted its strongest September performance since 2016.
However, Binance positioning suggests selling pressure has continued beneath the price recovery. Recent trading analysis showed Ethereum selling CVD has remained negative since August.
The ratio of ETH selling takers kept going lower, meaning ETH is facing increasing selling pressure, which competes with greed-based trading and more bullish sentiment. | Source: Cryptoquant
The indicator recorded another sharp decline on October 2 alongside renewed selling activity. The continued weakness indicates traders have increasingly favored aggressive selling despite ETH’s broader recovery.
Ethereum sentiment currently stands at 65, placing the market within the greed range. That reading suggests bullish expectations remain present even as selling pressure rises.
Meanwhile, spot markets have also recorded notable distribution. One early Ethereum investor reportedly sold 13,330 ETH from holdings originally acquired during the ICO.
Those tokens initially cost about $0.31 each during Ethereum’s early fundraising period.
Hyperliquid ETH open interest tops Bitcoin as liquidation risks rise
Hyperliquid has emerged as another major source of Ethereum derivatives activity. ETH open interest on the platform has climbed above $3.3 billion.
That total now exceeds Bitcoin’s approximately $3.24 billion in Hyperliquid open interest. Binance remains the larger venue, with around $9.4 billion in Ethereum open interest.
However, Hyperliquid positions create a different liquidation structure because leveraged traders cluster around specific price levels.
Short positions on Hyperliquid show a notable cutoff above $2,800. Binance short positions appear more widely distributed, with heavier positioning near $2,750.
On the downside, many Hyperliquid long positions defend the $2,600 region. Short-side liquidity extends toward $3,000, creating potential pressure if Ethereum advances further.
ETH/USD futures on Hyperliquid recorded about $886 million in daily volume. Bitcoin futures remained higher at roughly $2 billion during the same period.
Around 67% of Ethereum traders on Hyperliquid currently hold long positions. However, some large traders and market makers maintain sizeable short exposure.
Abraxas Capital is among the firms holding large ETH short positions while collecting funding fees.
Ethereum therefore faces liquidation risks in both directions. Short positions could become vulnerable if ETH gains another $100.
Conversely, renewed selling could target leveraged longs and test support near $2,600. For now, Ethereum’s ability to hold $2,700 remains central to the short-term market structure.
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Victims of the April 1 exploit that drained about $295.4 million from Drift Foundation, now called Velocity, have called out the repayment rate on the DFX recovery token, which works out to roughly one cent for every lost dollar.
The claims and redemptions window, confirmed in an October 1 release by the project, provides the first working portal for the tens of thousands of Drift users affected by the attack that made headlines more than five months ago. The math behind the DFX recovery token is based on a calculation that converts each verified dollar lost in the Drift hack to one DFX token, a standard SPL token on Solana that can be held, redeemed, or sold on Raydium or other secondary markets. Notably, the token’s USDT value is not fixed.
Drift Foundation releases refund calculation guidelines
According to the Drift Foundation’s claims guide, USDT value is calculated by dividing the Recovery Pool balance by the number of DFX still outstanding. The DFX token was worth around 0.0104 USDT at launch. Hence, a user who lost 100 USDT in April now holds 100 DFX, which they can redeem for about 1.04 USDT at the current exchange rate. The current value is based on the Recovery Pool currently holding roughly 3.11 million USDT against a fixed supply of 299,500,810.998 DFX.
Speculative trading on DFX has quickly gotten hot, with the token climbing about 210% in 24 hours to about $0.03, though liquidity is thin at around $200,000, which also implies volatility. Cryptopolitan reported on Drift user frustrations and unfairness accusations in May, when the project’s recovery framework was interpreted as forcing early redeemers to forfeit their remaining claims. One contributor on the Drift governance forum called the related Insurance Fund vote “effectively an attempt at money laundering.”
Money enters once a day at 00:00 UTC from the Net Protocol Revenue of Velocity at different rates, which includes 60% of the first 30,000 USDT of daily revenue, 70% up to 100,000 USDT, 90% of anything above that, until deposits total the full verified loss. Unclaimed DFX tokens by the time the window closes at 00:00 UTC on January 1, 2028, will be burned. Tether has pledged up to 127.5 million USDT, while other strategic partners have committed up to 20 million USDT.
However, those funds have caps and will only be released in phases, according to a preset schedule. Any additional funds recovered from the stolen total form the fourth stream, but that is less predictable. As of Drift’s September 30 update, $9.2 million of the stolen funds were frozen after the attacker routed funds through Tornado Cash in August. Three of the four Ethereum wallets still hold 107,165 ETH of the stolen crypto and have not moved in months.
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The European Central Bank (ECB) has revealed that firms operating inside the bloc are financing their artificial intelligence investments without taking on debt at the same level as the US, where AI infrastructure leans on trillions of dollars in borrowed money.
The ECB revealed those findings in the “How firms plan to finance AI investment” post the central bank published on October 2 using data from the central bank’s Survey on the Access to Finance of Enterprises (SAFE). The survey now raises questions about whether observers should be concerned that euro area firms, which already spend far less than their American counterparts, are also declining to close the gap by borrowing. The five largest US tech companies hold $1.65 trillion in hidden debt and $1.35 trillion of debt on their balance sheets, per a Nikkei study cited by Fortune. That figure represents a roughly eightfold jump in just four years.
ECB claims AI development has been carried out without leaning on debt
A separate Moody’s estimate put off-balance-sheet deals at $1.2 trillion, with more than $820 billion of that total committed to data centers that are not even ready yet. Firms are also taking on debt to fund long-term obligations such as chips, servers and leases with data-center operators. Hyperscalers and related names such as Nvidia have issued $225 billion in bonds in 2026, per S&P Global, a 973.7% jump as of the middle of the year.
That number is projected to be near $400 billion by the end of the year. Goldman Sachs expects hyperscaler debt to continue to grow by another 60% in 2027, projecting it to hit a new $420 billion record by the end of the year. The scale of the borrowing has started to draw scrutiny in certain corners on Wall Street. That pattern is starting to form too. As of September, the market for top-rated corporate credit banks and industry is gaining pace while similar offerings from AI-linked issuers are moving in the opposite direction.
“We’re being very selective in terms of how we invest within hyperscaler debt,” Colby Stilson, head of fixed income at Brown Advisory in London, told Reuters. Apollo Global’s Torsten Slok confirmed the scale of the shift in demand, reporting that investor orders per dollar of hyperscaler bonds had fallen below two times as of July from nearly five times in February. Europe’s reluctance to borrow runs headlong into its investment problem.
Oxford Economics projects US corporate spending on AI hardware and infrastructure will grow 40% in real terms between 2021 and the end of 2027, against just 12% for the euro area, figures reported by Cryptopolitan in August. The Bank for International Settlements has warned the US pace could end in an “investment bust,” but the lag still worries European economists. Former ECB President Mario Draghi laid out the stakes in a Financial Times column in September, arguing the European Union hosts under 5% of the world’s AI compute capacity against 75% for the United States.
He also said that the shortfall between demand and installed supply could widen to 14 gigawatts by 2030.b“Being cut off from AI, once the economy runs on it, would be more like being cut off from the US financial system. The effects would be catastrophic,” Draghi wrote. His proposed fix is for European firms to pool their buying power into contracts large enough to finance new data centers.
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Amazon has announced that it will invest about $1 billion over five years in US communities that host its data centers for education, workforce development, conservation of resources, and community relations. This initiative comes at a time when people are becoming increasingly opposed to AI infrastructure due to several factors.
According to reports, factors such as energy costs, water consumption, and environmental problems have seen people oppose the rise of AI infrastructure, as per the Associated Press. For an industry that invests trillions in obtaining additional computing power, gaining the support of local communities is just as vital as acquiring chips, funds, and energy. Amazon’s commitment is more than charitable. It is also aimed at creating the local backing that will help the company grow.
The opposition is difficult to ignore. A poll by the University of Massachusetts Amherst in September revealed that 65% of Americans do not support an AI data center being constructed in their area. Only 11% said they would support one. Respondents expressed their worries over environmental issues, consumption of resources, disruption of land, lack of trust in AI, and the increased cost of utilities.
Amazon set to make big investment amid pushback from communities
The opposition is already costing the industry. As per Allianz, in Q1 2026, local opposition prevented or delayed more than 75 projects in the US with a total cost of $130 billion. Community resistance has become one of many obstacles that developers face. Other obstacles include grid limitations, delays with the permit process, and supply chain issues. According to the World Resources Institute (WRI), community benefits agreements (CBAs) may be a way to alleviate some of the tension.
These agreements allow developers to make concrete commitments to the communities where they construct their projects. An example comes from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. WRI calls its agreement the first public CBA for a data center. Three developers have pledged $20 million to support sustainability and economic programs, in addition to the use of 100% clean energy, limited water use, and meeting noise restrictions. WRI warns, however, that these agreements are not the answer to all problems.
They can never satisfy the need for more general regulation, while there may be communities that see the data center as not worth it. The pressure behind those concerns is massive. WRI says US data-center power capacity could reach 194 GW by 2035, more than three times today’s level. Data centers could then consume as much as 20% of US electricity, up from 5.9% today. The issue affects not just Amazon. PwC estimates that total expenditure in the construction of data centers around the world will reach $31.6 trillion by 2050, with annual spending rising from about $800 billion in 2026 up to $1.8 trillion by 2050.
PwC emphasizes that the availability of electrical power will determine the location of investments. Meanwhile, CBRE reported that the vacancy rate in Northern Virginia reached only 0.3% for Q1. Power supply shortages, zoning issues, and local resistance policies continued to hamper growth. The policy environment is becoming harsher as well. Global Electronics Council reports that governments are raising transparency and sustainability requirements as the growth of data centers puts pressure on electricity grids, water resources, and communities.
Meanwhile, the IEA reports that the development of AI workloads threatens the existing grids and energy infrastructure. As we have previously reported, the development of data centers and AI technologies helps the construction and manufacturing sectors of the US economy despite the growing problems with electricity supply, raw materials, and infrastructure. The $1 billion commitment from Amazon also reveals that the problem of community acceptance is gaining importance.
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A trade organization representing community banks in the US has filed a lawsuit against the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), claiming the regulator overstepped its jurisdiction when it provided national trust bank charters to cryptocurrency companies.
The Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA) initiated the case in the District of Columbia against a recent action by the OCC and its related guidance. They argue that crypto companies receive the credibility of a bank charter in the US without complying with all the regular bank requirements. Under national trust charters, companies are permitted to manage customer funds and process transactions. However, they cannot take cash deposits or give loans. ICBA has pointed out that extending these charters to crypto companies takes the OCC’s mandate too far, as per the report by Reuters.
ICBA says OCC went too far with awarding the licenses
Speaking on the lawsuit against the OCC, ICBA President and CEO Rebeca Romero Rainey mentioned in an ICBA statement that American consumers reasonably expect a federally chartered bank to carry federal protections. Romero Rainey said digital assets held by crypto firms under national trust charters do not come with the same protections. An OCC spokesperson declined to comment to Reuters. The dispute has been building for months.
In May, ICBA opposed the charter application of Payward, Kraken’s parent company. OCC’s records indicate that the application for Payward National Trust Company was submitted on May 8. Senator Elizabeth Warren had raised these concerns before. She issued a letter in May stating that since December 2025 the OCC had granted at least nine national trust charters to crypto firms and questioning if some of their activities can be classified under the activities allowed for a trust company.
“These companies are effectively crypto banks that want to evade the fundamental safeguards and obligations that come with being a bank,” Senator Elizabeth Warren said in a May 18 letter to Comptroller Jonathan Gould. The OCC views the matter in a different light. Its final chartering rules, which took effect on April 1, state that it “would neither expand nor contract” the chartering authority of the agency. Instead, it explains that trust-limited national banks may perform a range of non-traditional functions related to the activities of trust companies.
The statistics shed light on the reasons behind the fierce debate surrounding the matter. Comptroller Jonathan Gould has come out with a statement that the OCC has received 40 applications for new bank charters in roughly 18 months and that 23 of these are for digital assets. This is eight times as much as in the preceding four years, according to earlier materials from Cryptopolitan. The situation has implications that reach beyond US banking.
A study by the Bank for International Settlements indicates that the volume of stablecoins on the market could exceed the $300 billion mark by 2026, marking a staggering 98% of the total as linked to the US dollar. Simultaneously, according to the Financial Stability Board, different jurisdictions have major gaps in the way they implement regulations, allowing for regulatory arbitrage to happen. The OCC lawsuit can help define the extent of the applicability of the US trust companies charter in the crypto area and indicate the weight of the federal charter in the global market.
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Anchorage Digital is reportedly laying off 17% of its workforce as crypto winter grips even one of the more well-funded regulated firms in the industry. If the headcount is still around the 400 employees reported by CEO Nathan McCauley to Congress in February 2025, that would entail approximately 68 layoffs.
The move comes eight months after Tether invested $100 million in Anchorage at a $4.2 billion valuation. Reportedly, employees were told by McCauley that Anchorage is cutting jobs due to the general downturn in the current crypto market, as per The Information. The number 68 mentioned here is an estimate and not an official number. It is based on the 17% cut reported by The Information and the earlier employee data reported by McCauley. However, the timing of the layoffs is remarkable.
Anchorage cuts 400 employees as crypto winter grips industry
Tether’s February investment valued Anchorage at $4.2 billion and made it possible to pay employees through the first employee tender offer. Thus, the layoffs do not appear as a desperate need for cash, but as an effort to reduce expenses in response to the worsening economic situation. Anchorage is not the only company going through layoffs. CryptoJobsList reports that there have been at least 7,411 job cuts in 60 crypto companies in 2026.
The biggest among these is Block’s 4,000 job cuts in February. Hiring activity has also declined. In January, Tiger Research reported that the number of new job listings on the leading crypto job portals declined by approximately 80% on a year-over-year basis, continuing a decline that began after 2022. The remaining vacancies in the job market are becoming increasingly specialized. Of the 2,932 openings monitored by Tiger Research in the first half of 2026, engineering accounted for 34.1%.
Compliance and legal jobs followed at 10.4%. Meanwhile, stablecoins and payments comprised 13.4% of the total job openings in the market. That’s consistent with Anchorage’s approach. The company identifies itself as a service provider to institutions in custody, trading, settlement, and other digital asset-related activities. It has also advanced further into the institutional market infrastructure with the development of products that link regulatory custody with crypto trading.
Institutional interest has not faded. In a 2026 survey published by EY, it was revealed that 73% of the companies surveyed intended to expand their investments in digital assets over the following year. Similarly, the analysis of BCG established that infrastructure, such as custody, settlement, and tokenized assets, is becoming more important due to the increasing integration of digital assets with traditional finance.
Anchorage fits into the changing picture. In June, Binance included Anchorage in its triparty banking network, allowing institutions to keep collateral in regulated custody while trading. The layoffs therefore indicate a crypto industry that is becoming more selective about where its funds go. There is still enough capital, but companies are limiting their spending. For Anchorage, the issue is whether the company can thrive with a smaller workforce while focusing on infrastructure projects as its avenue of growth.
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Consensys founder Joseph Lubin has reassured MetaMask users following a recent security incident affecting parts of the company’s infrastructure. #
He said user wallets, private keys, and Secret Recovery Phrases remained outside the scope of the attack.
Consensys also took precautionary steps involving Ethereum validators while investigators examined the incident.
The episode has renewed attention around infrastructure security across crypto services.
MetaMask disclosed on September 30 that part of its infrastructure had suffered a security incident.
Lubin later said the attack did not compromise assets held inside MetaMask wallets.
“Your Secret Recovery Phrase, your keys, and the assets in your wallet were not part of this incident,” Lubin said on X.
He added that MetaMask users control their own keys through the wallet’s self-custody model.
MetaMask temporarily shut down some Ethereum staking machines after discovering the incident.
At the time, the company said it had identified no immediate threat to customer wallets or funds.
Consensys rotates validator keys after MetaMask incident
Lubin said Consensys rotated validator keys as a precaution while investigating the security breach.
However, changing validator keys requires validators to exit Ethereum’s staking queue before they can return.
That process could keep some assets inactive for an extended period.
MetaMask validators have started exiting the network, with the process expected to finish by October 7.
Withdrawals could then take around 45 days under current Ethereum conditions.
A subsequent entry queue could add another lengthy delay before validators resume normal staking operations.
During that period, affected assets could miss staking rewards.
Lido previously said the shutdown protected staked assets but also introduced operational costs.
Lubin also explained why Consensys initially limited public comments about the MetaMask security incident.
He said the company avoids extensive disclosures while investigations remain active.
Instead, Consensys informs core partners and relevant stakeholders after identifying the scope of an incident.
For MetaMask users, the key distinction involves the separation between company infrastructure and self-custodied wallets.
MetaMask does not hold users’ private keys or Secret Recovery Phrases.
Therefore, compromising supporting infrastructure does not automatically provide access to individual wallet funds.
Still, MetaMask warned users to remain alert for phishing attempts following the incident.
The company said users should never share private keys or Secret Recovery Phrases with anyone claiming to provide support.
Earlier MetaMask security scare involved a fake developer
The latest incident follows another security concern involving MetaMask earlier in 2026.
In July, Consensys revealed that a North Korea-linked developer had worked with MetaMask under a false identity.
The individual used the alias “Tyler Knapp” and secured a consulting role with the company.
His access lasted from March 9 until Consensys terminated the arrangement in April.
The developer contributed code involving wallet features that supported cash-to-crypto bridging.
Consensys said it removed his backend access after discovering his identity.
The company reported no stolen funds, malicious code, compromised data, or impact on user security.
Consensys also contacted federal law enforcement and reviewed its contractor screening procedures.
General counsel Matt Corva said the investigation found no misappropriation of assets or data.
Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs has warned that developer environments have become attractive targets for sophisticated attackers.
Such access can potentially expose internal systems, private keys, or withdrawal approval processes.
Researchers linked to the Ethereum-funded Ketman Project previously identified 100 suspected North Korean IT workers.
They reportedly gained roles across 53 crypto platforms using false identities and fabricated recruiter profiles.
The MetaMask incident therefore highlights wider infrastructure risks, even when users continue controlling their own wallet keys.
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South Korean crypto exchanges shed a third of their market value and 35% of their won deposits in the first half of 2026. Korean markets are experiencing an exodus of traders and substantial outflows due to the lack of diversity in their investment offerings.
A survey of 26 licensed virtual asset service providers run by the Korean Financial Intelligence Unit and the Financial Supervisory Service, covering January through June, has revealed that the combined market capitalization of Korea’s exchanges fell by 33%, a drop of 28.3 trillion won, while won-denominated deposits sank by 35%, or 2.9 trillion won. Average daily trading volume was also down 44%. The market value had fallen to about 58.9 trillion won (roughly $42 billion) by the end of June, compared to its value of 87.2 trillion won six months earlier.
Daily turnover fell to 3.1 trillion won from 5.4 trillion, and customer deposits in won dropped to 5.2 trillion from 8.1 trillion. Exchange operating income collapsed by 78% to 81.6 billion won compared to 374.8 billion a year earlier. Regulators tied much of the loss to Bitcoin, which the FSS noted fell 33% to $58,559 by the end of June. The survey also found that 93 of the 234 tokens listed on just one exchange were valued at 100 million won or less by appraisal. The regulator said this figure should make users think twice.
Korean won deposits drop by 35%
The decline in deposits is due to overseas platforms baiting Korean traders with products the country’s market does not allow. For example, there is a perpetual futures contract built on KORU, a U.S.-listed exchange-traded fund that returns three times the daily move of Korea’s Kospi index. Binance launched a KORU product with 20x leverage on June 22, then raised the limit to 50x four days later. Because the fund itself already tracks three times the index’s daily price swings, traders could end up exposed to as much as 150 times that loss or gain.
Earlier in June, Binance had also offered 20x products on Samsung Electronics, SK hynix and Hyundai Motor, and Bybit, OKX and KuCoin launched their own KORU contracts. On June 23, the Kospi fell 9.99%, and KORU fell by 35.7% in one session to $700.01. These platforms operate outside the reach of South Korea’s investor protections. Traders get to them by purchasing Tether with won on a licensed local exchange and then transferring the stablecoin overseas.
Tiger Research, working with blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, tracked roughly 120,000 Korea-linked wallets and estimated that about 700 trillion won, or $530 billion, left domestic exchanges between 2021 and 2026. Outflows reached around $120 billion in 2025 and were projected near $52 billion this year, the firm said. Wallets owned by South Koreans put roughly $1.64 billion into three decentralized derivatives platforms: Hyperliquid, Lighter and Variational, between January 2024 and July 2026.
In July alone, about 1,200 of those wallets traded $4.97 billion in notional volume on Hyperliquid. Their most-traded instruments included contracts linked to SK Hynix, Samsung Electronics and crude oil, which can be traded with leverage and around the clock, even when regular markets are closed. Shinhan Securities analyst Park Sung-jae said in July, when domestic trading had fallen to about 1.6% of Kospi turnover, that investors are leaving due to the diverse investment methods foreign crypto exchanges offer.
He mentioned that those exchanges offer futures and leverage, while spot trading is “the only de facto trading option” in South Korea. Meanwhile, Cryptopolitan previously reported that South Korea plans to apply a 22% levy on annual crypto gains above a 2.5 million won deduction starting January 1, 2027, with the first returns due in May 2028. Petitioners warned that the rule would push even more traders offshore and gathered the 50,000 signatures needed to force a National Assembly review. Lawmakers from both ruling and opposition parties have floated delays as far out as 2030.
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Ethereum is expanding its privacy ambitions into artificial intelligence payments through a new system called zkAPI.
The technology aims to separate API payments from user identities when accessing paid AI services. It also seeks to reduce the amount of personal information exposed through conventional accounts and payment credentials. The Ethereum Foundation says the model could support more private access to AI tools and metered digital services.
The Ethereum Foundation developed zkAPI alongside the Open Anonymity Project. The system allows users to pay for AI models and metered APIs without revealing their identity.
Traditional API systems usually connect an API key with an account and payment method. That structure can also link individual requests with a persistent user profile.
The Ethereum Foundation said this approach can expose sensitive information through payment records and prompt histories.
Its zkAPI architecture instead separates payment authorization from identity. Users first deposit ETH or USDC into an Ethereum-based vault contract.
Those funds become a private balance that users can spend across supported services. The payment process does not repeatedly expose account details.
zkAPI uses zero-knowledge proofs for private payments
According to the Ethereum Foundation, zkAPI creates spending authorization directly on the user’s device. The process uses cryptographic notes rather than conventional payment credentials.
A zero-knowledge proof confirms that the user holds sufficient funds without exposing the private note itself. One proof can authorize either one transaction or an entire session.
The system also uses unique serial numbers called nullifiers to prevent double spending. Duplicate nullifiers reveal repeated spending attempts without identifying the user.
Ken Liu, a Stanford computer science PhD candidate working with Open Anonymity, described zkAPI as an extension of unlinkable inference.
He said the system also separates payments from the underlying AI request.
The architecture includes local interfaces for OpenAI and Ollama services. Existing applications, editors, and chat clients can access those tools through localhost.
That structure could reduce the amount of redevelopment required when adding private payment functionality.
Privacy could become increasingly important as AI applications rely more heavily on paid inference and metered services.
Prompts can contain personal information, business strategies, proprietary code or financial data. Linking those requests with persistent accounts can create detailed usage records.
zkAPI aims to break that connection by making payment credentials independent from user identity.
However, broader adoption will depend on developer support, infrastructure performance and demand for privacy-focused AI payments.
Ethereum advances scaling and quantum resistance plans
The Ethereum Foundation is also pursuing wider network improvements through its 2026 protocol priorities.
Those priorities cover network scaling, user experience improvements, and stronger Layer-1 security.
Ethereum developers have started introducing quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithms across the execution and consensus layers.
The long-term roadmap targets full quantum resistance by 2029.
Ethereum also aims to increase network capacity further during 2026. The gas limit target stands above 100 million.
Ethereum educator Anthony Sassano said in November that 180 million would represent an ideal annual target.
Ethereum raised its gas limit to 60 million during 2025 following the Pectra and Fusaka upgrades.
Another major network upgrade, Glamsterdam, is scheduled for October.
The upgrade combines Amsterdam on Ethereum’s execution layer with Gloas on its consensus layer.
Amsterdam will introduce parallel processing for transactions. That approach allows Ethereum to process multiple transactions simultaneously instead of executing them sequentially.
The change forms part of Ethereum’s wider effort to increase throughput while strengthening its underlying infrastructure.
Together, zkAPI and Ethereum’s protocol upgrades show how developers are targeting privacy, scaling, and long-term cryptographic security simultaneously.
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A United States federal court has ruled that Fundsz’s operators, Brian Early and Alisha Ann Kingrey, should pay $31 million to the CFTC as restitution and penalties over a digital-asset and precious-metals scam.
The decision originates from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) v. Larralde et al., Case Number 6:23-cv-1445-WWB-DCI, which was filed in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida on July 31, 2023. The CFTC announced the decision involving the default judgment on September 30, 2026. Early and Kingrey were required to settle for $15.73 million in restitution and pay civil penalties amounting to $15.75 million.
CFTC highlights inconsistencies in Fundsz’s statement
In a complaint lodged in 2023, the CFTC claimed Fundsz made an assurance that lucrative returns of over 3% every week would be generated using a proprietary algorithm that trades crypto and precious metals. The promoters also claimed that an investment of $2,500 could snowball to an unbelievable figure of $1 million in just four years. According to the regulator, the funds of clients were never traded as stated, and the returns on the investments presented to clients were made up.
The court thereafter discovered that both Early and Kingrey committed serious misrepresentation of facts concerning profit expectations, degree of risk, and previous performance of the investment. Those allegations echo the warning signs issued by the FTC, especially in investment offers that minimize risk while promising unusually high returns. The Fundsz case is important, but is minor in relation to the big picture of investment fraud.
The FBI noted there had been 181,565 cryptocurrency-related reports in 2025 with losses totaling more than $11 billion. Investment fraud accounts for about 49% of total losses incurred due to fraud, while the over-60 age group suffered losses of $7.7 billion, a 37% rise compared to the data from 2024. In 2025, the FTC reported that scams had caused losses of over $7.9 billion, with the median loss per scam exceeding $10,000.
According to the Chainalysis report, at least $14 billion was lost through crypto-based scams and fraud in 2025, which could go over $17 billion once other unidentified illegitimate addresses are factored in. The average amount of each scam increased by 253%, reaching $2,764. Fundsz is not an isolated case. Cryptopolitan reported in August that the SEC and CFTC separately sued Goliath Ventures and founder Christopher Delgado.
The SEC alleged it raised at least $425 million from more than 1,300 investors, while the CFTC cited roughly $397 million from about 1,600 customers. Cross-border enforcement remains more difficult. An October 2025 FSB review found significant gaps and inconsistencies in national crypto frameworks, warning that uneven implementation creates opportunities for regulatory arbitrage and complicates oversight of a global market. The immediate question is how much of the ordered restitution victims ultimately recover. The CFTC has cautioned that repayment orders do not guarantee full recovery when defendants lack sufficient assets.
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