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View More NewsUS Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed the US government ordered the freezing of more than $130 million in cryptocurrency held in wallets linked to Iran on Tuesday, as hostilities ramped up in the Middle East. Earlier on Tuesday, blockchain investigator Specter pointed to onchain data showing Tether froze four Tron wallets holding $131 million worth of USDt (USDT). Bessent confirmed on X that the wallets were tied to the Central Bank of Iran. “US Treasury is committed to disrupting and degrading Iran’s illicit financial activities, including its abuse of digital assets,” Bessent said Tuesday. “We will continue to aggressively follow the money…
Ironically, some critics of the bill have pointed to recent reporting by the Wall Street Journal on the Hong Kong exchange CoinEx as evidence of the risk. CoinEx is actually a story of how to use a public ledger to track, trace, and disrupt nation state activity.Investigators traced roughly 3.84 billion dollars in transactions tied to Iran, connecting wallets controlled by Iran’s central bank to sanctioned military networks and to funds stolen separately by North Korean hackers. That level of detail is knowable today because it happened on a public blockchain, the same visibility critics are treating as the risk.What…
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Opinions & Debates
Four years ago, a colleague asked me whether I could chair a debate with some guy called ‘Gary Stevenson’, who was, apparently, an anti-inequality campaigner and a YouTube commentator of some description. I had never heard of Stevenson, but accepted. The debate went all right, even though it was mostly a case of talking past each other (which, given that I was the moderator, was probably my fault). It was otherwise not especially memorable. Britain does not exactly have a shortage of left-wing media figures and activists. In the first half of the 2010s, there was the campaign for a…
Latest News
New York, July 14, 2026 –The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Jordanian authorities and the Jordan Press Association (JPA) to provide a full…
A team of former Ethereum Foundation researchers focused on institutional privacy has launched EthSystems, a new for-profit company aimed at building confidentiality infrastructure for…
Bitcoin (BTC) spiked past $64,000 into Tuesday’s Wall Street open as US inflation saw a surprise sudden downturn.Key points:Bitcoin returns to near the top…
In brief U.S. consumer prices fell 0.4% in June, denting rate hike expectations and marking the largest monthly decline since April 2020. Bitcoin and…
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch discuss New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new Commission on Government Efficiency (COGE). The panel examines Mamdani’s…
Keyrock, a Brussels-based digital asset services firm, is in the process of acquiring bankrupt crypto trading and lending firm Blockfills, according to two people…
Bitcoin’s realized volatility has fallen to 17.2%, one of its lowest levels in recent months. Multiple Bitcoin analysts have said that long periods of…
In brief SpaceX added a warning to its amended IPO filing that it may issue a significant amount of equity in future transactions. Issuing…
from the here-we-go-again dept John Deere is facing a second class action lawsuit for its ongoing, ham-fisted effort to monopolize tractor repair and drive…
Judge Eleanor Ross, who serves on the federal bench in Atlanta, engaged in multiple acts of misconduct. She carried on a secret affair with…
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is exploring a new way to build crypto investment products that could reduce one of decentralized finance’s biggest risks: sudden…
Shares of Michael Saylor’s Strategy fell Monday after the company disclosed its first Bitcoin sale since adopting a “never sell” philosophy, prompting fresh scrutiny…