Crypto exchange Bybit has become the first crypto exchange to debut stablecoin payments for regulatory fees in Kazakhstan’s AIFC. Kazakhstan’s financial regulators have allowed license and supervision fees to be paid in USD-pegged stablecoins. Kazakhstan’s Astana Financial Services Authority (AFSA), a designated financial authority for the Astana International Financial Centre (AIFC), has launched a project enabling AIFC members to pay regulatory fees in USD-pegged stablecoins. The regulator announced on Thursday that the project was officially launched at the local event Astana Finance Days 2025, signing a related multilateral memorandum of understanding (MMoU) with the centralized crypto exchange (CEX) Bybit. Read more
The $1-to-Bitcoin-millionaire story is mostly a myth. Discover why early buyers faced extreme volatility, exchange collapses, lost private keys and more. It’s almost an irresistible daydream: step into a time machine, buy a pile of Bitcoin for pennies in 2010 and return to the present to find millions sitting in your account. In March 2010, the first recorded Bitcoin exchange price was about $0.003 per Bitcoin (BTC), and prices never rose above $0.40 that year. Today, BTC trades well into the six-figure range. Read more
OnlyFans and Pornhub creator accounts may be harder to secure than a crypto account, but stricter hurdles don’t always mean stronger KYC. The verification process on adult platforms can be more cumbersome than Know Your Customer (KYC) checks on cryptocurrency exchanges — though added difficulty doesn’t necessarily reflect stronger compliance. Signing up as a model on OnlyFans or Pornhub isn’t all that different from opening an account on a crypto trading platform. The process often begins with a Google login (or other online accounts, depending on the exchange), followed by the familiar ritual of selfies and ID uploads. Both adult platforms and crypto exchanges are under mounting scrutiny over how they verify users — one to prevent minors from selling explicit content, the other to stop criminals from laundering money. Read more