Thailand’s central bank and SEC are jointly auditing large USDT transfers to combat money laundering, targeting structured transactions that obscure origins. The crackdown follows a major romance-scam bust that routed $122.5M through crypto, exposing how stablecoins enable financial crime.
A Robinhood co-founder’s wallet was compromised during a live broadcast, and an attacker exploited it to pump a memecoin from $500K to $14M in two hours. Thousands of traders blindly followed the recognizable wallet’s trades, turning a simple exploit into a $20M+ scheme that hurt everyone except the original owner.
SBI Holdings and the Solana Foundation launched a strategic alliance to build Japan-originated on-chain financial infrastructure, backed by major institutions including Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group. The venture will focus on JPY stablecoin issuance, tokenized real-world assets, cross-border payments, and institutional blockchain services.
Federal prosecutors secured a guilty plea from Karen Serobovich Vardanyan, a 34-year-old Armenian national, on charges tied to a Ryuk ransomware campaign that extracted roughly 1,610 bitcoin from US businesses. The attacks, which occurred between November 2019 and April 2020, were worth more than $15 million at the time.
Pakistan’s crypto regulator clashes with influential Islamic scholar over whether 30-40 million crypto owners can operate legally. A fatwa banning cryptocurrency under Islamic law threatens the regulator’s framework requiring Sharia approval for digital asset services.
Liquidity pools backing dozens of Sui ecosystem tokens were drained on July 11, with BlueMove, a decentralized exchange, identified as the source of losses estimated between $400,000 and $550,000. The BlueMove team allegedly shipped a backdoor themselves through a May 31 package upgrade that added a double-mint mechanism, then made the code immutable to lock it in place.
A Brazilian court ordered Coinbase to repay $100,000 to a customer, rejecting the company’s defense that self-custody wallets eliminate liability. The ruling applies consumer protection law to crypto products, requiring companies to ensure security regardless of technical architecture.
On-chain investigator ZachXBT traced a LAB team wallet that sold 18.4 million tokens worth $18.3 million, crashing the price 56% from $1.20 to $0.55. His analysis reveals over 95% of LAB tokens remain under insider control, raising serious questions about the token’s market integrity.
Ripple spent $150 million fighting the SEC’s claim that XRP was an unregistered security, even when walking away would have been cheaper. CEO Brad Garlinghouse refused a settlement offer to protect hundreds of jobs and prove that XRP—which confers no ownership rights—doesn’t fit the legal definition of a security.
A $5 million theft from the Hedera network on July 11 showcased sophisticated laundering tactics, with the attacker bridging funds to Ethereum via LayerZero and converting assets within hours. Hedera’s hashgraph architecture and poor block explorer made the theft harder to trace in real time, highlighting how non-EVM chains’ tooling gaps can compound security incidents.