Crypto

The announced crypto freeze came just one day after Tether said it had frozen $344 million of its USDt stablecoin in response to a request from US law enforcement. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that the department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned several wallets tied to Iran, resulting in authorities freezing $344 million in cryptocurrency. In a Friday X post, Bessent said that the move by OFAC was part of the US’ efforts to “systematically degrade Tehran’s ability to generate, move, and repatriate funds.” The US and Israel launched joint airstrikes on Iran in late February. “We will follow the money that Tehran is desperately attempting to move outside of the country and target all financial lifelines tied to the regime,” said Bessent. Read more

Here's what's new and catching attention around XRP, ETH, and DOGE.

The federal regulator has been suing states that seek to curtail prediction markets activity and claim it should be deemed state-regulated gaming.

The hard fork will introduce a new, competing layer-1 blockchain and seven layer-2 scaling networks, according to Sztorc's announcement. Bitcoin developer Paul Sztorc announced on Friday that a new hard fork of the Bitcoin network called eCash will be deployed in August. Bitcoin holders will be able to exchange their BTC for eCash at a 1:1 ratio once the hard fork is live, Sztorc said in an X post. He added that the layer-1 node software for the chain will be a “near-copy” of the BTC Core client software and will use the SHA-256 hashing algorithm used by the Bitcoin blockchain, with a reduced initial mining difficulty to make it easier for participants to mine blocks. Source: Paul Sztorc Read more

Brazil’s Finance Ministry cited investor protection concerns and rising gambling addiction as it blocked platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi.

The US President has confirmed his attendance for the Florida event, but it's unclear whether Tron founder Justin Sun, suing the Trump family's crypto business, will appear. In a repeat of 2025, top holders of US President Donald Trump’s memecoin, Official Trump (TRUMP), will gather for a private event that many critics have described as selling access to the presidency. On Saturday, Trump and up to 297 of his memecoin holders will meet at the president’s Mar-a-Lago property in Florida. According to the project behind the memecoin, attendees will include stablecoin issuer Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino, cryptocurrency exchange Upbit founder and CEO ChiHyung Song, Bitcoin (BTC) advocate Anthony Pompliano, Anchorage Digital co-founder and CEO Nathan McCauley and many others associated with financial institutions, crypto and blockchain. Notably, however, there was no public statement confirming the appearance of Tron founder Justin Sun, a prominent supporter of the president, an investor in the Trump family crypto bus...

Strong earnings season trumps geopolitical risks for now, one trader said, as equities and crypto markets "stopped caring" about Iran war headlines.

Highly popular companies like Tesla continue to attract the kind of attention that active cryptocurrency traders understand all so well. Similar to other high-profile technology names such as Meta Platforms and NVIDIA, Tesla is also very liquid, a widely-followed and oftentimes reactive market which sees a lot of volatility during times of earnings reports, sentiment […]

Tennessee has become the second U.S. state to outlaw Bitcoin and crypto ATMs, making it a criminal offense to own or operate the machines.

The XAUE protocol lets holders earn yield on tokenized gold through lending and trading strategies while maintaining exposure to the underlying asset. Aurelion, a Nasdaq-listed company building a Tether Gold-backed treasury, has allocated 10,000 units of the token, worth about $48 million, to a newly launched protocol designed to generate yield on tokenized gold. The DeFi protocol, XAUE, was introduced earlier this week by the Aurise Foundation as a treasury layer for Tether Gold, allowing tokenized gold to be used in yield-generating strategies while maintaining exposure to the underlying asset. Aurelion is the rebranded form of wealth and asset manager Prestige Wealth and is positioning Tether Gold as a primary reserve asset. In October 2025, the company raised $150 million in financing, including a $100 million private investment in public equity and a $50 million debt facility, to support the strategy. Read more

Aave founder has also backed the effort with a personal ETH pledge.

The Justice Department moved to intervene in xAI’s lawsuit challenging Colorado’s algorithmic discrimination law.

Ethereum traders are rebuilding bullish exposure to the second-largest cryptocurrency, with derivatives markets showing renewed demand for upside bets. According to CryptoSlate's data, ETH has gained about 11% this month on the back of a four-week stretch of gains, its longest in nearly a year. This uptrend pushed ETH to around $2330, its highest price […] The post Ethereum’s 4 consecutive weeks of price rallies fuel bullish bets of $3200 appeared first on CryptoSlate.

A man created an AI-generated image of escaped wolf Neukgu "for fun." It fooled authorities, triggered emergency alerts, and derailed a nine-day search operation.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the U.S. is seeking to choke off "all financial lifelines" for the regime.

Claude maker Anthropic reported that its latest AI models scored 95-96% on political neutrality tests ahead of the 2026 midterms.

The Bitcoin community continues to debate whether cryptographically relevant quantum computers are imminent or decades away. Project Eleven, a quantum security research company, awarded a prize to researcher Giancarlo Lelli for using a quantum computer to break a 15-bit elliptic-curve key — a small-scale version of the same cryptography used in Bitcoin, which relies on far larger 256-bit keys. Lelli was able to derive a private key from the public key paired to it, using a “variant” of Shor’s algorithm, an integer factorization algorithm for quantum computers, according to Project 11’s announcement on Friday. Bitcoin’s keys are 256 bits long, representing a “large” gap from the 15-bit key Lelli was able to crack, Project 11 said. However, the gap between Bitcoin’s 256-bit keys and the number of bits a quantum computer can factor has “fallen sharply” since 2025. Project 11 added. Read more

The Justice Department closed the Jerome Powell probe, removing a barrier to Senate action on Kevin Warsh's Federal Reserve nomination.

Bitcoin held near $78,000 on Friday as oil prices climbed past $100 a barrel, testing whether the largest digital asset can sustain its April rebound while the US-Iran conflict keeps energy markets on edge. The move came after President Donald Trump escalated his rhetoric over the Strait of Hormuz, saying the US Navy controlled the […] The post Bitcoin ends week resilient around $78,000 as Trump’s new rhetoric sent oil price back above $100 appeared first on CryptoSlate.

After reporting more than $1.7 million to election officials, a crypto-aligned political action committee has reportedly backed out of advertising for a Texas Senate candidate. The Fellowship political action committee (PAC), which launched claiming to have more than $100 million from crypto-aligned backers, has reportedly backed out of an advertising deal to support Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a crucial US Senate race. According to a Thursday report from Axios, Republican leaders contacted US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on his connections to Fellowship, which has been partially funded by Cantor Fitzgerald. Lutnick, as the former president and CEO and whose sons are now in charge of the financial services company, reportedly faced questioning from Republicans about Fellowship’s support of Paxton, whom on Tuesday the PAC reported spending $1.75 million in supportive advertising. Read more