Tag: Crypto

US Treasury report acknowledges legitimate uses for crypto mixers

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For the better part of three years, the US government treated crypto mixers like they were exclusively tools for money laundering. On March 5, the Treasury Department quietly published a 32-page report that essentially says: “Actually, some of this is fine.” The report to Congress formally acknowledges that mixing services serve legitimate purposes, including protecting personal wealth, shielding business payment details, and enabling anonymous charitable donations. It’s a remarkable pivot from an agency that, not long ago, was sanctioning mixer protocols and pursuing criminal charges against their developers. What the…

Nigel Farage Invests in Stack BTC as UK Debates Crypto Donations

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Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage has invested 215,000 pounds (around $286,000) in Stack BTC, a London-listed Bitcoin treasury company chaired by former UK Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, as the Reform UK leader deepens his ties to the crypto sector.  The investment gives Farage a 6.31% stake in the company through his media vehicle Thorn In The Side, according to a Monday release. Stack said it raised $346,000 by issuing 5.2 million new shares at $0.65 each in a strategic funding round that included Farage and Blockchain.com. The company said Blockchain.com…

Crypto ETPs Turn Green Year-To-Date With $619M Inflows

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Crypto investment products held firm last week, clocking decent inflows despite ongoing market turmoil caused by fears of an energy crisis fueled by the US-Israel war with Iran. Crypto exchange-traded products (ETPs) recorded $619 million in inflows last week, led by $521 million into Bitcoin (BTC) investment products, CoinShares reported Monday. The gains followed the previous week’s $1 billion in inflows, marking two consecutive weeks of gains after a major sell-off that saw roughly $4 billion in outflows in a five-week streak. Despite ending the week in the green, sentiment…

US Banks Need Clear Crypto Rules to Stay Ahead, ex-CFTC chair says

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US banks are the ones most in need of crypto regulatory clarity, according to Chris Giancarlo, former chairman of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, who argues that they risk falling behind the rest of the world in payment innovation. During an episode of Scott Melker’s The Wolf Of All Streets Podcast on Sunday, Giancarlo said the crypto industry will continue to build, even if the Senate’s crypto market structure bill doesn’t pass. However, banks will be hesitant to invest in the technology without clear rules. “The banks, however, can’t…

Crypto Funding Up 50% in 12 Months Despite Fewer Deals

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Crypto fundraising increased by almost 50% year-on-year between March 2025 and March 2026, despite the number of deals dropping 46% as VCs concentrated bets on late-stage and strategic mega-rounds. Messari’s crypto fundraising overview shared by the company’s CEO Eric Turner on Sunday shows that the average deal size increased to $34 million in the last 12 months, up 272% from a year earlier. This came as the number of active investors fell 34.5% to 3,225. “Capital concentration is heavily skewed by late-stage and strategic mega-rounds,” Messari said, noting that in…

AI Agent Diverted GPUs to Crypto Mining During Training: Researchers

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A research team behind an autonomous AI agent said that the model unexpectedly attempted to use computing resources for crypto mining during training. In a recent technical report, researchers said ROME, an experimental autonomous AI system designed to complete tasks through interaction with tools, software environments and terminal commands, went rogue and attempted crypto mining on its own. According to the report, the unusual behavior surfaced during reinforcement learning runs, when the team noticed security alerts triggered by outbound traffic from training servers. Firewall logs flagged activity resembling crypto mining…

Crypto Fear and Greed Index Stumbles Back to ‘Extreme Fear’ Territory

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The Crypto Fear and Greed Index, one of the most widely used gauges of crypto investor sentiment, has fallen back down to “extreme fear” levels after briefly recovering on Wednesday. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index is at 18 at the time of this writing, down from the 20 recorded on Friday, according to CoinMarketCap. 20 signals “fear,” an atmosphere of caution among investors, but an improvement over rock-bottom market sentiment. Sentiment briefly spiked to 25 on Wednesday, but contracted as geopolitical tensions between the US, Israel and Iran continue…

US Treasury Says ‘Lawful’ Crypto Users Have Valid Reasons To Use Mixers

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The Treasury’s report to the US Congress was commissioned as part of directives under the GENIUS stablecoin regulatory framework. The United States Treasury Department acknowledged the legitimate use of mixers, which obfuscate crypto transfers to preserve user privacy, in its report to Congress on “Innovative Technologies to Counter Illicit Finance Involving Digital Assets.”  “As consumers increase their use of digital assets for payments, individuals may want to use mixers to maintain more privacy in their consumer spending habits,” the report said. The Treasury report continued: “Lawful users of digital assets…

South Korea moves to exclude USDT, USDC from corporate crypto investment rules

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South Korea is preparing to open the crypto market to corporate investors, but stablecoins like USDT and USDC may be left out of the rulebook, according to a new report from Herald Economy. The country’s financial watchdog says including stablecoins would conflict with existing foreign exchange laws that do not recognize them as official payment instruments. Regulators are also concerned about early-stage market risks. South Korea’s Foreign Exchange Transactions Act requires all international transactions to be conducted through licensed foreign exchange banks. Since stablecoins are not classified as legitimate foreign…

US National Cyber Strategy Pledges Support For Crypto And Blockchain

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Crypto industry executives are combing through US President Donald Trump’s National Cyber Strategy after it was released on Friday, searching for hints about what it could signal for government support of the crypto industry. “Crypto and blockchain are explicitly named as technologies to be ‘protected and secured.’ This is a first for any US cybersecurity strategy,” Galaxy Digital’s head of firmwide research Alex Thorn said in an X post on Friday. Crypto and blockchain were mentioned once in the six-page report: “We will build secure technologies and supply chains that…