Crypto

Changpeng Zhao, the founder of crypto exchange Binance who was pardoned by President Trump in October, returned to the U.S. this week and attended a Trump-backed crypto conference alongside the president’s sons and senior administration officials.

Ricardo Salinas Pliego, the Mexican billionaire behind Grupo Elektra, thought he’d done enough due diligence when he decided to invest $400 million in Bitcoin as the value of the cryptocurrency surged in the spring of 2021. 

Stablecoins have become both core crypto “plumbing” and a key rail for the most consequential forms of crypto-enabled crime, with illicit activity increasingly concentrated in a handful of large, sanctions-linked networks.

Cryptocurrency usage is surging in the United States. You wouldn’t know that from the number of federal examiners tasked with supervising the industry for anti-money-laundering (AML) compliance though. 

Binance fired members of its internal compliance investigations team after they raised concerns that Iran-linked entities may have moved more than $1 billion through the crypto exchange, according to new reporting by Fortune. 

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) added Kuwait and Papua New Guinea to its “grey list” of countries under closer monitoring, saying both have pledged to fix weaknesses in their safeguards against illicit money flows. 

Cryptocurrency flows to suspected human trafficking services surged 85% in 2025, reaching hundreds of millions of dollars across identified services.

Paxful Holdings Inc., a peer-to-peer virtual currency trading platform, was sentenced on Tuesday to pay a $4-million criminal penalty after pleading guilty to conspiracies tied to illegal prostitution, anti-money-laundering failures and transmitting criminal proceeds.

Drug cartels and other criminal groups are increasingly using cryptocurrencies and a growing “gig” workforce of freelance brokers and couriers to launder cash and evade law enforcement, Bloomberg Businessweek reported.

The European Commission has proposed a blanket ban on cryptocurrency transactions linked to Russia and new trade restrictions on Kyrgyzstan in an effort to close loopholes used by Moscow to fund its war in Ukraine.