Cointelegraph

Verifying Satoshi Nakamoto: A matter of math, not media

From time to time, individuals claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator. Such announcements generate headlines, spark heated debates and trigger instant skepticism. Yet after years of assertions, lawsuits, leaked files and media interviews, no claim has been backed by definitive proof.

The reason is simple. Proving someone is Satoshi is not a matter of storytelling, credentials or courtroom victories. It is a cryptographic problem governed by unforgiving rules.

Nakamoto built Bitcoin (BTC) to function as a peer-to-peer (P2P) cryptocurrency without requiring trust in people. It is widely assumed that Satoshi Nakamoto is an adopted name rather than a real one. As a result, anyone who claims to be Satoshi, or is presented as such, must prove that identity. That proof would likely involve identity documents, historical communication records and, most critically, control of a private key associated with one of Bitcoin’s earliest addresses.

Over the years, several individuals have been speculated to be Satoshi Nakamoto, but only a few have publicly claimed to be the creator of Bitcoin.

The most prominent claimant is Craig Steven Wright, who repeatedly asserted that he was Satoshi. That claim collapsed after a UK High Court ruling explicitly determined he was not Satoshi Nakamoto and sharply criticized the credibility of his evidence.

Dorian S. Nakamoto was identified by Newsweek in 2014 as Satoshi Nakamoto, but he immediately denied any connection to Bitcoin’s creator. Early Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney also rejected speculation that he was Satoshi Nakamoto before his passing. Nick Szabo has likewise been speculated to be Satoshi over the years and has consistently denied the claim.

What constitutes genuine proof of ownership in Bitcoin

In cryptographic systems like Bitcoin, identity is bound to private key ownership. Demonstrating control requires signing a message with that key, a process that anyone can verify publicly.

This distinction is clear:

Evidence can be debated, interpreted or challenged.

Cryptographic verification is binary; it either checks out or it does not.

Bitcoin’s verification model does not rely on authority, credentials or expert consensus. It depends on mathematics, not people, institutions or opinion.

Did you know? Early Bitcoin forum posts and the white paper used British spellings like “colour” and “favour.” This sparked theories about Satoshi’s geographic background, though linguists caution that spelling alone can be easily imitated or deliberately altered.

The gold standard: Signing with early keys

The most conclusive proof of being Satoshi would be a public message signed using a private key from one of Bitcoin’s earliest blocks, particularly those associated with Satoshi’s known mining activity in 2009.

Such a signature would be:

Verifiable by anyone using standard tools

Impossible to forge without the actual private key

Free from dependence on courts, media or trusted third parties.

The tools required for such proof are simple, accessible and decisive, yet no one has ever provided it.

Did you know? Satoshi gradually stepped away from public communication in 2010, just as Bitcoin started attracting developers and media attention. Their final known message suggested they had “moved on to other things,” fueling speculation about motive and timing.

Moving early coins: Even more powerful, but improbable

An even stronger demonstration would be transferring Bitcoin from an untouched Satoshi-era wallet. That single onchain action would dispel nearly all doubt.

Yet it carries massive downsides:

Instant worldwide scrutiny

Severe personal security threats

Potential tax, legal and regulatory fallout

Market disruption from anticipated dumps.

The most ironclad proof is also the most disruptive. It makes inaction a rational choice, even for the true creator.

Did you know? Blockchain researchers estimate that early mining patterns linked to Satoshi may represent roughly 1 million BTC, making those dormant wallets some of the most closely watched in crypto history.

Why documents, emails and code don’t settle the ownership

While emails, draft papers, forum posts and code contributions can support a claim, they do not constitute definitive evidence. Such materials can be forged, edited, selectively leaked or misinterpreted.

Code authorship does not prove key control. In Bitcoin, keys define identity, and everything else is secondary. Analysis of emails, draft papers and forum posts may offer intriguing correlations between an individual and Bitcoin, but it lacks certainty. The samples are limited, and styles can overlap or be mimicked.

In social settings or conventional legal disputes, identity can be supported by personal testimony or documentation. However, such evidence is irrelevant within Bitcoin’s decentralized model.

Human memory is fallible, and incentives can be misaligned. Bitcoin was designed specifically to avoid reliance on such factors. Cryptographic proof removes any human role from the verification process.

Why partial proof is not proof

Some claimants offer evidence behind closed doors. However, material shown only to select individuals, or signatures produced using later Bitcoin keys, does not meet the required standard.

To convince the world, proof must be:

Public: Visible to anyone

Reproducible: Independently verifiable

Direct: Tied to Satoshi-era keys.

Anything less leaves room for doubt, which is unacceptable to the Bitcoin community.

For Bitcoin to function, its creator does not need to be known or visible. On the contrary, its decentralization narrative is strengthened by the creator’s absence. There is no founder to defer to, no authority to appeal to and no identity to attack or defend.

While most organizations or projects rely on founders or management teams, Bitcoin functions precisely because identity is irrelevant.

Advertisements for the Super Bowl — the championship game of American football — are some of the most watched and most expensive.

The game on Sunday boasted some 127 million viewers, making it the most-viewed sporting match of the year in the US, as well as the most-watched Super Bowl of all time.

Advertisers pay a premium for the limited number of commercial spots. Some companies shelled out as much as $4 million for a 30-second slot. The high sticker price, as well as the massive audience, drives companies to make their advertisements unique.

But tech industry observers have noted one particular trend in Super Bowl ads: If there’s novel tech all over the ad space, a bubble will soon pop.

Super Bowl ads and bubbles, from dot-coms to crypto

In January 2000, the dot-com boom was in full swing due to the widespread adoption of the internet. At the Super Bowl that year, which became dubbed “the dot-com bowl,” 17 different ads were about the world wide web.

One from trading platform e-Trade featured a 20-second clip of a dancing chimpanzee, followed by a screen that read, “Well, we just wasted 2 million dollars. What are you doing with your money?”

Two months later, the dot-com bubble began a steep decline that lasted until October 2002.

The same happened with the “crypto bowl” in 2022. At Super Bowl LVI, four different crypto companies aired ads: Coinbase, Crypto.com, eToro and FTX.

The now-defunct FTX aired an ad with “Seinfeld” showrunner Larry David, encouraging investors not to “miss out” on crypto. Crypto companies spent an estimated $6.5 million each per 30-second slot that year.

Just months later, the crypto market unraveled. Terra’s stablecoin ecosystem imploded in May. FTX, Celsius, Voyager Digital and BlockFi were insolvent by the year’s end. Genesis followed in January 2023.

The following Super Bowl, only one crypto-related ad appeared: a non-fungible token promotion related to the video game Limit Break. There were none in 2024 and 2025.

Coinbase’s sole crypto ad at Super Bowl LX missed the mark

After a two-year hiatus, one major crypto company has returned to the Super Bowl. Coinbase ran an ad in the form of a karaoke sing-along to the Backstreet Boys, which was also screened on the Sphere in Las Vegas.

Not everyone was thrilled. For many, crypto’s image has not improved since the FTX days. Political streamer Jordan Uhl posted, “From crypto to AI to Trump accounts, every Super Bowl has its own scam ad theme.”

Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management publishes formal ratings of Super Bowl ads and puts them in two categories: touchdowns (successful/good advertisements) or fumbles (ineffective/poor advertisements).

The Kellogg survey found that Coinbase’s 2026 ad “failed to establish a clear connection to the brand or its value proposition.” It received an “F.”

But the crypto industry now has some serious legislative victories under its belt. Coinbase’s ad may be a signal that the industry will keep promoting its brands on the largest single night for advertising in the US.

Do Super Bowl ads signal an end to the AI bubble?

While Crypto.com didn’t make any crypto-related advertisements, it did announce its new AI platform, imaginatively named AI.com.

A total of 10 ads at this year’s Super Bowl were about AI. Anthropic boasted its ad-free AI model, Claude. Meta showed off its AI-enabled Oakley smart glasses, and Google’s commercial featured a mother and son furnishing their home with Nano Banana Pro, the company’s AI-enabled image generator.

Amazon debuted its new Alexa+ in an ad with actor Chris Hemsworth, in which he imagines that AI is out to get him, either by closing the garage door on his head or attempting to drown him in the pool.

Svedka Vodka’s 2026 ad revived its “fembot” character that was made primarily with AI. Source: YouTube

The rapid proliferation of AI tech has coincided with eye-watering company valuations and doubt about whether firms like OpenAI will turn a profit. Now, some observers are wondering if the “AI bowl” was a harbinger of an impending bubble burst.

Gary Smith, an economics professor at Pomona College, and Jeffrey Funk, an independent consultant with Carnegie Mellon, wrote on Sunday:

“In this AI bubble, the prices of AI-dependent stocks have become untethered from realistic projections of future profits. LLM-dependent companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic are losing enormous amounts of money yet are given valuations in the hundreds of billions of dollars as if they were real companies making real profits.”

Ads focus on onboarding new users to the technology. Smith and Funk said, “In the absence of profits, the tech bros increasingly emphasize an old metric that was popular during the dot-com bubble: the number of users, with a new flavor.”

Ahead of the Super Bowl, software developer and researcher Carl Brown said, “I don’t know exactly how many AI commercials are going to be in the game this weekend. I already know there will be a lot more than it seems like there ought to be.”

E-Trade may have “wasted” $2 million in 2000, but it was still around to gloat about surviving the dot-com bust the next year. FTX and other smaller crypto platforms went under in 2022, but Coinbase and the Backstreet Boys were playing on the Vegas Sphere this time around.

The AI bubble could burst, but if past patterns point to anything, a few companies will survive — and maybe make a commercial about it.

Magazine: Bitcoin’s ‘biggest bull catalyst’ would be Saylor’s liquidation: Santiment founder

Malicious MEV attacks pose a significant threat to traders on Ethereum. Our latest research shows that almost 2,000 sandwich attacks happen daily and more than $2 million is extracted from the network each month. Even traders who execute large WETH, WBTC or stable swaps remain at risk and can lose a substantial portion of their trades. 

MEV thrives because of the transparent nature of blockchains, where transaction data is visible before transactions are executed and finalized. One path toward mitigating MEV is mempool encryption, particularly through the use of threshold encryption. In our earlier articles, we examined two different models for threshold-encrypted mempools. Shutter, one of the first projects to apply threshold encryption to protect the mempool, introduced a per-epoch setup. Batched threshold encryption (BTE), a newer model, decrypts multiple transactions with a single key to reduce communication costs and raise throughput.

In this piece, we analyze Flash Freezing Flash Boys (F3B) by H. Zhang et al. (2022), a newly proposed threshold encryption design that applies encryption on a per-transaction basis. We explore its mechanics, explain its scaling properties as concerns latency and memory, and discuss the reasons it has not yet been deployed in practice.

How Flash Freezing Flash Boys implements per-transaction encryption

Flash Freezing Flash Boys addresses limitations in early threshold encryption systems that relied on per-epoch setups. Projects such as FairBlock and the early versions of Shutter used a single key to encrypt every transaction within a selected epoch. An epoch is a fixed number of blocks, e.g., 32 blocks on Ethereum. This created a vulnerability where some transactions that fail to be included in the specified block ends would still be decrypted with the rest of the batch. This would expose sensitive data and open up MEV opportunities to validators, thus making them vulnerable to front-running.

F3B applies threshold encryption on a per-transaction basis, which ensures that each transaction remains confidential until it reaches finality. The general flow of the F3B protocol is shown in the figure below. The user encrypts the transaction with a key that only the designated threshold committee, known as the Secret Management Committee (SMC), can access. The transaction ciphertext and the encrypted key are sent to the consensus group as a pair (Step 1). Thus, nodes can store and order transactions while retaining all required decryption metadata for prompt post-finality reconstruction and execution. Meanwhile, the SMC prepares its decryption shares but withholds them until the consensus commits the transaction (Step 2). Once a transaction is finalized and the SMC releases enough valid shares (Step 3), the consensus group decrypts the transaction and executes it (Step 4).

Per-transaction encryption had long remained impractical due to its heavy computational load for encryption and decryption as well as the storage requirement from large encrypted payloads. F3B addresses this by threshold-encrypting only a lightweight symmetric key instead of the full transaction. The transaction itself is encrypted with this symmetric key. This approach can reduce the amount of data that needs to be asymmetrically encrypted by up to ~10 times for a simple swap transaction. 

Comparison of different cryptographic implementations of F3B and their latency overhead

Flash Freezing Flash Boys can be implemented with one of two cryptographic protocols, either TDH2 or PVSS. The difference lies in who bears the setup burden and how often the committee structure is fixed, with corresponding advantages and disadvantages in flexibility, latency and storage overhead.

TDH2 (Threshold Diffie-Hellman 2) relies on a committee that runs a distributed key generation (DKG) process to produce individual key shares along with a collective public key. Then, a user creates a fresh symmetric key, encrypts their transaction with it, and encrypts that symmetric key to the committee’s public key. The consensus group writes this encrypted pair onto the chain. After the chain reaches the required number of confirmations, committee members publish partial decryptions of the encrypted symmetric key together with NIZK (Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge) proofs, which are required to prevent chosen-ciphertext attacks, where attackers submit malformed ciphertexts to try to trick trustees into leaking information during decryption. NIZKs guarantee the user’s ciphertext is well-formed and decryptable, and also that trustees submitted correct decryption shares.  Consensus verifies the proofs and, once a threshold of valid shares is available, reconstructs and decrypts the symmetric key, decrypts the transaction, and then executes it.

The second scheme, PVSS (Publicly Verifiable Secret Sharing), follows a different path. Instead of the committee running a DKG in every epoch, committee members each have a long-term private key and a corresponding public key, which is stored on the blockchain and accessible to any user. For each transaction, users pick a random polynomial and use Shamir’s secret sharing to generate secret shares, which are then encrypted for each chosen trustee using the respective public key. The symmetric key is obtained by hashing the reconstructed secret. The encrypted shares are each accompanied by an NIZK proof, which allows anyone to verify that all shares were derived from the same secret, along with a public polynomial commitment, a record that binds the share-secret relationship. The subsequent steps of transaction inclusion, post-finality share release, key reconstruction, decryption and execution are similar to those in the TDH2 scheme. 

The TDH2 protocol is more efficient due to a fixed committee and constant-size threshold-encryption data. PVSS, by contrast, gives users more flexibility, since they can select the committee members responsible for their transaction. However, this comes at the cost of larger public-key ciphertexts and higher computational overhead due to per-trustee encryption. In the greater scheme of things, the prototype implementation of the F3B protocol on simulated proof-of-stake Ethereum showed that it has minimal performance overhead. With a committee of 128 trustees, the delay incurred after finality is only 197 ms for TDH2 and 205 ms for PVSS, which is equivalent to 0.026% and 0.027% of Ethereum’s 768-second finality time. Storage overhead is just 80 bytes per transaction for TDH2, while PVSS’s overhead grows linearly with the number of trustees due to per-member shares, proofs and commitments. These results confirm that F3B could deliver its privacy guarantees with negligible impact on Ethereum’s performance and capacity.

Incentives and punishments in the Flash Freezing Flash Boys protocol

F3B incentivizes honest behavior among Secret Management Committee trustees through a staking mechanism with locked collateral. Fees motivate trustees to stay online and maintain the level of performance the protocol requires. A slashing smart contract ensures that if anyone submits proof of a violation, which demonstrates that decryption was performed prematurely, the offending trustee’s stake is forfeited. In TDH2, such proof consists of a trustee’s decryption share that can be publicly verified against the transaction ciphertext. Meanwhile, in PVSS, the proofs consist of a decrypted share together with a trustee-specific NIZK proof that authenticates it. This mechanism penalizes provable premature disclosure of decryption shares, increasing the cost of detectable misbehavior. However, it does not prevent trustees from colluding privately off-chain to reconstruct and decrypt transaction data without publishing any shares. As a result, the protocol still relies on the assumption that majority of committee members behave honestly. 

Because encrypted transactions cannot be executed immediately, another attack vector is for a malicious user to flood the blockchain with non-executable transactions to slow down confirmation times. This is a potential attack surface common to all encrypted mempool schemes. F3B requires that users make a storage deposit for every encrypted transaction, which makes spamming costly. The system deducts the deposit upfront and refunds only part of it when the transaction executes successfully.

Challenges to deploying F3B on Ethereum

Flash Freezing Flash Boys offers a comprehensive cryptographic approach to mitigating MEV, but it is unlikely to see real-world deployment on Ethereum due to the complexity of integration. Although F3B leaves the consensus mechanism untouched and preserves full compatibility with existing smart contracts, it requires modifications to the execution layer to support encrypted transactions and delayed execution. This would require a far broader hard fork than any other update introduced since The Merge.

Nevertheless, F3B represents a valuable research milestone that extends beyond Ethereum. Its trust-minimized mechanism for sharing private transaction data can be applied to both emerging blockchain networks and decentralized applications that require delayed execution. F3B-style protocols can be useful even on sub-second blockchains where lower block times already significantly reduce MEV, to fully eliminate mempool-based front-running. As an example application, F3B could also be used in a sealed-bid auction smart contract, where bidders submit encrypted bids that remain hidden until the bidding phase ends. Thus, bids can be revealed and executed only after the auction deadline, which prevents bid manipulation, front-running or early information leakage. 

Bitcoin’s sharp correction at the start of the month may represent a critical “halfway point” in the current bear market, according to new research from Kaiko Research.

Bitcoin (BTC) fell to $59,930 on Friday, marking its lowest level since October 2024 and before the re-election of US President Donald Trump, according to TradingView data. 

The decline suggests the market has moved out of the euphoric post-halving phase and into what Kaiko described as a historically typical bear market period that lasts roughly 12 months before a new accumulation phase begins.

In a research note shared with Cointelegraph on Monday, Kaiko said Bitcoin’s 32% crash was the most significant correction since the 2024 Bitcoin halving and may mark the “halfway point” of the current bear market.

“Analysis of on-chain metrics and comparative performance across tokens reveals a market approaching critical technical support levels that will determine whether the four-year cycle framework remains intact,” Kaiko said.

Bitcoin halving cycles, all-time chart. Source: Kaiko Research

Related: Trend Research cuts ETH exposure by over 400K as liquidation risk rises

Kaiko’s report highlighted several emerging onchain bear market signals, including a 30% drop in aggregate spot crypto trading volume across the 10 leading centralized exchanges, from around $1 trillion in October 2025 down to $700 billion in November.

At the same time, combined Bitcoin and Ether (ETH) futures open interest declined from $29 billion to $25 billion over the past week, a 14% reduction that Kaiko said reflects ongoing deleveraging.

Open interest for BTC and ETH futures, top 10 exchanges. Source: Kaiko Research

While Bitcoin has realigned with the historical four-year halving cycle since the beginning of the year, determining the depth of the current bear market is complex, as “many catalysts that fueled BTC’s rally to $126,000 are still in effect,” said Shawn Young, chief analyst, MEXC Research.

“With oversold indicators emerging on multiple timeframes, the rebound conversation around BTC is more a question of when, not if,” Young said, adding that Bitcoin may be entering a new cycle that will only become clear over the next year.

Related: Binance adds $300M in Bitcoin to SAFU reserve during market dip

Is $60,000 the bear market bottom?

The key question for investors is whether the dip to $60,000 represents the low of the current bear market. The level roughly aligns with Bitcoin’s 200-week moving average, which has historically acted as long-term support.

However, more market volatility is expected in the absence of crypto-specific market catalysts, Nicolai Sondergaard, research analyst at crypto intelligence platform Nansen, told Cointelegraph, adding:

“With that said, it is still very hard to say if it means we are going back to the conventional 4-year cycle. I have seen many prominent figures in the space air the idea, but equally many who do not think so.”

However, Kaiko pointed to a 52% retracement from Bitcoin’s previous all-time high being “unusually shallow” compared to previous bear market cycles.

A 60% to 68% retracement would “align more closely” with historical drawdowns, which implies a Bitcoin cycle bottom around $40,000 to $50,000, Kaiko said.

Source: Michaël van de Poppe

Still, some market participants argue that $60,000 already marked a local bottom. Analyst and MN Capital founder Michaël van de Poppe called the crash to $60,000 the local market bottom for Bitcoin’s price, citing a record low in investor sentiment and a critical low in the Relative Strength Index, which sank to values last seen in 2018 and 2020.

Magazine: Would Bitcoin survive a 10-year power outage?

Bitcoin (BTC) a fost atent la minimele de mai multe zile în deschiderea de marți de pe Wall Street, deoarece analiza a avertizat că urșii încercau să „recâștige controlul.”

Puncte cheie:

Bitcoin își pregătește o retestare a suportului la fundul intervalului său local, spune analiza.

Urșii vor din nou „control”, cu lichidările afectând atât comercianții long, cât și pe cei short.

Lipsa continuă de cerere adaugă probleme pentru taurii Bitcoin.

Ursii luptă pentru tendința prețului BTC local

Datele de la TradingView au înregistrat pierderi zilnice de 2,3% în prețul BTC, cu 68,500$ acum ca punct de interes.

Bitcoin (BTC) a intrat în „cele mai întunecate zile” ale corecției pieței sale bear, pe baza unui indicator clasic de preț BTC care atinge minime aproape de patru ani.

Câteva concluzii cheie:

Multiplicatorul Mayer al Bitcoin a scăzut la 0.65, corelându-se cu minimele profunde ale pieței bear din mai 2022.

O repetare a anului 2022 ar vedea BTC scăzând și mai mult, până la un minim de 40.000 $. 

Multiplicatorul Mayer revine la nivelurile din mai 2022

Prăbușirea de 45% a Bitcoin de la vârful său de 126.000 $ a pus indicatorii onchain în centrul atenției, pe măsură ce participanții la piață caută unde este probabil ca prețul BTC să atingă minimul. 

Opinie de: Emir J. Phillips, profesor asociat de finanțe, economie și drept comercial la Universitatea Lincoln din Missouri

Peg-ul unei stablecoin nu mai este o competiție de branding despre a fi „pe deplin susținut”. Devine o întrebare cvasi-constituțională: Într-o panică, cine are dreptul aplicabil — și capacitatea practică — de a răscumpăra la paritate, la cerere, cu rezerve care rămân accesibile atunci când încrederea se prăbușește?

Următoarea criză a stablecoin-urilor nu va fi decisă de existența rezervelor; va fi decisă de accesul la rezerve și de prioritatea legală.

Bitcoin ETF blowup shortlists a handful of Hong Kong funds

A popular theory explaining Bitcoins recent selloff points to an Asian fund whose leveraged spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) options trade blew up.

Parker White, chief of operations and investments at DeFi Development Corp, said in a viral tweet that a Hong Kong-based company is believed to have used cheap Japanese yen funding before being forced into liquidation across multiple markets.

BlackRocks Bitcoin ETF (IBIT) posted a record $10 billion trading volume on Thursday, when Bitcoin slid to its lowest level of the week near $60,000. Liquidations on centralized cryptocurrency exchanges remained relatively muted despite the sell-off, which White said suggested stress from large IBIT holders.

Franklin Bi, general partner at Pantera Capital, shared a similar theory explaining why it has largely flown under the crypto radar. (Franklin Bi)

White found that some Hong Kong funds hold the bulk of their assets in IBIT. Funds typically diversify holdings, while single-asset structures are often used to isolate margin risk so losses dont contaminate other investments.

Based on that context, the theory holds that a fund borrowed cheap yen to buy IBIT options and bet on Bitcoins rebound. As losses mounted and funding conditions tightened, the position may have been forced to unwind.

The IBIT blowup hypothesis links the activity to a broader cross-asset margin unwind tied to yen-funded leverage, with silver which also plunged on Thursday cited as one example.

We know that Asian traders, particularly in China, have been deeply involved in the Silver and Gold trade, White said. We also know that the JPY carry trade has been unwinding at an increasingly rapid pace.

Whites theory has been cited by media outlets and widely shared across Crypto Twitter, but it remains unproven. The industry will likely have to wait until May, when Form 13F filings for the first quarter are released, to determine whether any funds disclose significant changes in IBIT holdings.

Bithumbs fat thumb sent more Bitcoin than it had

South Korean crypto exchange Bithumb is facing questions over so-called phantom Bitcoins after an administrative error distributed far more rewards to users than intended.

A Bithumb promotional campaign mistakenly sent more than 2,000 Bitcoin to each winner. In total, it mistakenly distributed roughly 620,000 Bitcoin, an amount worth nearly $42.5 billion at current prices.

Bithumb said it recovered 99.7% of those assets. However, some users managed to flip 1,788 Bitcoin before the exchange clawed them back.

A more troubling issue has emerged beyond the scale of the error. In a mid-year filing submitted in August to the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS), Bithumb reported holding approximately 42,031 Bitcoin. That figure is about 15 times less than the amount distributed during the incident.

Bithumb had way less Bitcoin than it recently distributed in its mid-year report. (FSS)

If the exchange did not accumulate 577,969 BTC after the filing, then Bithumb distributed more cryptocurrency to user accounts on its platform than it actually holds. Because some users were able to immediately sell the supposedly non-existent assets, the local industry has dubbed the incident Bithumbs phantom Bitcoin case.

Under South Koreas crypto user protection law, exchanges are required to hold the assets deposited by customers. FSS governor Lee Chan-jin said regulatory action may be possible under existing rules. The regulator has since launched on-site inspections following the incident.

Read also

Features Thailands Crypto Utopia 90% of a cult, without all the weird stuff

Features GENIUS Act reopens the door for a Meta stablecoin, but will it work?

The rise and fall of Ethereum whale Trend Research

Ethereum whale Trend Research has sold off all of its Ether, leaving just $10,000 in USDC across wallets tracked by Arkham.

As of last weeks Asia Express, Trend Research had already reduced its Ether exposure by 73,000 ETH, largely held as Aave wrapped Ether. Despite those sales, the firm still held 578,000 ETH as of last Monday. Over the week, Trend Research continued selling Ether to unwind leveraged positions. By Sunday, its Ether balance fell to zero.

Trend Research has been linked to Yi Lihua, also known as Jack Yi, the founder of Hong Kong-based crypto venture firm Liquid Capital. The firm first drew the attention of blockchain analysts in November after aggressively accumulating Ether. By the end of January, it held roughly 651,000 AWETH.

One of the most aggressive Ether buyers became the most aggressive seller when prices dropped. (Arkham)

Yi built the position through leverage. He purchased Ether on centralized exchanges, deposited it into Aave as collateral and borrowed stablecoins, which were then used to buy additional ETH. When Ether prices declined alongside Bitcoin and the broader crypto market, Trend Research was forced to unwind its position to repay its loans.

While the firm no longer holds ETH or AWETH, a machine-translated post from Yi claimed that he believes cryptos broader consensus remains intact.

On the flip side, when crypto enters a bear market, it is often the best time to build positions, just as we benefited in the previous cycle by accumulating during the bear market, Yi wrote.

Pessimists are often right, but optimists win in the end, he added.

Read also

Features Why Virtual Reality Needs Blockchain: Economics, Permanence and Scarcity

Features Capitalisms Perestroika Moment: Bitcoin Rises as Economic Centralization Falls

Japans snap election landslide keeps crypto on track

Japans Lower House snap election on Sunday handed a two-thirds super-majority to the Liberal Democratic Party under Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, reducing uncertainty around ongoing crypto policy discussions.

Those discussions include proposals to revise crypto tax treatment and to review whether digital assets should remain regulated under the Payment Services Act or transition to the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act.

The tax debate centers on how crypto gains are classified under the income tax system. Currently, most individual crypto gains are treated as miscellaneous income and taxed up to 55%. Lawmakers have been discussing whether crypto gains should instead be taxed under a separate flat-rate framework similar to securities, which are taxed at around 20%.

The Japanese yen has been free-falling but bounced up on Takaichis landslide victory. (TradingView)

Japans tax discussions are tied to broader questions about how crypto should be legally categorized.

Moving crypto to the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act would place digital assets within the same legal framework that governs ETFs and other investment products, making crypto ETFs legally possible in Japan.

Japans government has also signaled interest in developing market infrastructure that could support such products if permitted. Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama said in her New Year speech that Japan should pursue blockchain-based fintech initiatives, like ETFs.

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O funcție de mesagerie încorporată în portofelul crypto Phantom atrage atenția cercetătorilor în securitate după ce un investitor a pierdut aproximativ 264.000 USD în Wrapped Bitcoin într-un atac de phishing descris de investigații ca fiind activat de otrăvirea adreselor.

Investigatorul blockchain ZachXBT a împărtășit date blockchain care indică că o victimă a pierdut 3.5 Wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC) într-un atac de phishing suspect legat de Phantom Chat.

Datele arată o tranzacție în care 3.5 WBTC a fost transferat de la adresa “0x85c” la adresa “0x4b7” miercuri, marcată ca o adresă cu „sold mare” pe platforma de inteligență blockchain Nansen. Modelul tranzacției este consistent cu otrăvirea adreselor, o tehnică de phishing care exploatează istoricul tranzacțiilor utilizatorilor în loc să compromită cheile private.

Supraveghetorul financiar din Regatul Unit a inițiat acțiuni în instanță împotriva schimbului de criptomonede HTX, susținând că a promovat ilegal servicii de active criptografice consumatorilor britanici, încălcând regulile de publicitate financiară.

Autoritatea de Conduită Financiară din Regatul Unit (FCA) a declarat că a început proceduri împotriva HTX și a mai multor persoane asociate în Divizia de Chancery a Înaltei Curți în octombrie 2025.

Într-o actualizare publicată marți, regulatorul a declarat că a primit permisiunea pe 4 februarie de a servi cazul în afara Regatului Unit și prin metode alternative, menționând că HTX (cunoscut anterior sub numele de Huobi Global) este încorporat în Panama.

Companiile listate public care dețin Solana ca activ de trezorerie au pierderi nerealizate de peste 1,5 miliarde de dolari, pe baza costurilor de achiziție dezvăluite și a prețurilor de piață curente urmărite de CoinGecko.

Pierderile sunt concentrate în rândul unui mic grup de companii listate în Statele Unite care controlează împreună peste 12 milioane de tokenuri Solana (SOL), aproximativ 2% din oferta totală. Deși pierderile rămân nerealizate, piețele de capital au recalibrat deja firmele, majoritatea tranzacționându-se bine sub valoarea de piață a tokenurilor lor.

Autoritatea financiară din Coreea de Sud a deschis o anchetă asupra Bithumb după ce bursa a acreditat din greșeală sute de mii de Bitcoin în conturile utilizatorilor pe care nu le deținea de fapt.

Serviciul de Supraveghere Financiară (FSS) a lansat o anchetă asupra Bithumb pentru încălcări presupuse ale platformei în legătură cu acreditarea eronată a miliardelor de dolari în Bitcoin (BTC) inexistent în conturile utilizatorilor, a raportat Yonhap News marți.

Bithumb a recunoscut incidentul sâmbătă, afirmând că platforma „a plătit incorect” 620.000 BTC (42,8 miliarde dolari) utilizatorilor în timpul unui eveniment promoțional.

Un cetățean cu dublă naționalitate, din China și St. Kitts și Nevis, a fost condamnat la 20 de ani de închisoare federală în SUA pentru orchestrarea unei escrocherii globale cu criptomonede care a furat mai mult de 73 de milioane de dolari de la victime, multe dintre ele fiind investitori americani.

Daren Li, în vârstă de patruzeci și doi de ani, a primit cea mai mare pedeapsă prevăzută de lege în Districtul Central din California, împreună cu trei ani de eliberare supravegheată, conform unei declarații emise marți de către Departamentul de Justiție al SUA (DOJ).

Procurorii au declarat că Li și cel puțin opt complici au stabilit domenii și site-uri web falsificate care imită platformele de tranzacționare legitime pentru a promova investiții frauduloase în criptomonede după ce au câștigat încrederea victimelor, o schemă cunoscută sub numele de 'pig butchering' sau escrocherii de tip phishing.

Decizia Gemini de a părăsi Regatul Unit, Uniunea Europeană și Australia pentru a se concentra pe Statele Unite și Singapore a acutizat întrebările cu privire la faptul dacă regulamentul încă neterminat al Regatului Unit descurajează chiar și jucătorii bine reglementați pe care guvernul spera să îi atragă.

În aprilie 2022, atunci când cancelar Rishi Sunak a spus că este „ambitia sa de a face din Marea Britanie un centru global pentru tehnologia cryptoasset”, a dezvăluit măsuri ale Trezoreriei, cum ar fi reglementarea stablecoin-urilor, și a lansat o „CryptoSprint” a Autorității de Conduită Financiară (FCA) pentru a ajuta firmele să investească în țară.

Fondurile de investiții în Bitcoin ETF din SUA au extins o revenire tentativă după ce au atras 371 de milioane de dolari în intrări nete vinerea trecută, adăugând la semnele că cererea instituțională ar putea să se stabilizeze după săptămâni de vânzări susținute.

Fondurile de investiții în Bitcoin (BTC) ETF au atras încă 145 de milioane de dolari în intrări luni, în timp ce BTC se menținea în jurul valorii de 70.000 de dolari, conform datelor de la SoSoValue și CoinGecko.

Intrările nu au compensat încă ieșirile de 318 milioane de dolari de săptămâna trecută și aproximativ 1,9 miliarde de dolari în răscumpărări de la începutul anului, dar ritmul încetinit al pierderilor ar putea indica o potențială inversare a tendinței pentru produsele de investiții cripto, conform CoinShares.

Ethereum a atins o zonă asociată în mod obișnuit cu vânzări în masă, cu un scor MVRV Z-Score care returnează un scor de -0.42 — deși analiștii sunt împărțiți cu privire la faptul că prețul Ether este aproape de a atinge minimul.

Scorul MVRV Z-Score este o metrică utilizată pentru a evalua dacă un activ crypto este supraevaluat sau subevaluat prin compararea valorii sale de piață cu valoarea sa realizată, care reflectă valoarea totală a Ether pe baza prețului la care a fost tranzacționat ultima dată.

Metrica a fost creată pentru a arăta perioade de euforie sau capitulare pe piață atunci când valoarea de piață era considerabil mai mare sau mai mică decât valoarea realizată.

Guvernatorul Rezervei Federale Chris Waller spune că hype-ul crypto care a venit odată cu victoria electorală a președintelui american Donald Trump a început să scadă pe măsură ce piața a devenit mai interconectată cu finanțele tradiționale.

„Cred că o parte din euforia care a intrat în lumea crypto odată cu actuala administrație, unele dintre acestea cam dispar”, a spus Waller la o conferință luni.

„O mulțime din aceasta a fost adusă în finanțele mainstream”, a spus Waller. „Apoi, știți, lucrurile trebuie să se întâmple acolo, așa că cred că a fost o mulțime de vânzări doar pentru că firmele care au intrat în acest domeniu din finanțele mainstream au trebuit să-și ajusteze pozițiile de risc.”

Co-fondatorul Chainlink, Sergey Nazarov, susține că recenta scădere a pieței cripto este diferită de orice piață bear anterioară - nu au existat colapsuri majore de tip FTX, iar creșterea activelor tokenizate din lumea reală (RWA) rămâne substanțială.

Ciclurile de piață sunt normale, "dar ceea ce este important este ceea ce aceste cicluri dezvăluie despre cât de mult a progresat industria", a spus Nazarov pe X marți.

Capitalizarea de piață a criptomonedelor a scăzut cu 44% față de maximul istoric din octombrie de 4,4 trilioane de dolari, cu aproape 2 trilioane de dolari părăsind spațiul în doar patru luni.

Fundația Ethereum sponsorizează organizația nonprofit de securitate crypto Security Alliance (SEAL) pentru a „urmări și neutraliza” drainer-ii crypto și alți atacatori de inginerie socială care vizează utilizatorii Ethereum.

SEAL a spus luni că a lansat inițiativa „Securitate de Trilioane de Dolari” cu EF pentru a sprijini aceste eforturi după ce a contactat EF la sfârșitul anului trecut în legătură cu finanțarea inginerilor de securitate pentru a urmări mai îndeaproape dezvoltarea drainer-ilor și a proteja împotriva atacurilor pe scară largă.

EF sponsorează acum un inginer de securitate al cărui „singur obiectiv” este să colaboreze cu echipa de informații a SEAL pentru a combate drainer-ii care vizează utilizatorii Ethereum, a spus SEAL.

Backpack, o bursă cripto fondată de foști angajați ai FTX, spune că va lansa un token cu o ofertă de 1 miliard în viitor, cu un program de distribuție legat de obiectivul său de a deveni public în SUA.

Backpack a postat pe X luni că lansarea token-ului său va începe cu 25% din oferta intenționată, sau 250 de milioane de token-uri, care vor deveni disponibile într-o dată de lansare ce nu a fost încă dezvăluită.

Un alt 37,5% din oferta totală, sau 375 de milioane de token-uri pre-IPO, vor fi disponibile „la atingerea unor repere cheie”, ceea ce Ferrante a spus că ar include deschiderea într-o nouă regiune sau lansarea unui nou produs.