Argentina’s Public Prosecutor’s Office has trained prosecutors, officials and staff to trace, analyse and seize virtual assets as cryptocurrency plays a larger role in criminal investigations across the country.

The Ministerio Público Fiscal, or MPF, said it held a specialised course titled “Virtual Assets: Financial Analysis, Tracing, Detection and Seizure” as part of its optional academic programme, with sessions conducted remotely on Aug. 19 and Sept. 2.

The training was restricted to employees, officials and magistrates within the institution and focused on the technical knowledge required when digital assets become part of financial or criminal investigations.

Carmen Chena, a lawyer specialising in anti-money laundering controls, led the sessions through Zoom. The programme covered financial analysis of digital wallets, cryptocurrency tracing, asset recovery and the legal procedures available when investigators seek to restrict or seize digital funds.

Argentina prosecutors study crypto tracing and seizures

The course began with changes in asset recovery methods created by virtual assets before moving into financial and patrimonial analysis of digital wallets.

Participants studied Argentina’s domestic legal framework alongside international rules governing virtual assets and examined the structure of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. The programme covered different methods for imposing precautionary measures on digital funds and used practical cases to show how such procedures can work during an investigation.

For the MPF, the subject falls within its role as an independent institution in Argentina’s justice system. The agency promotes judicial action in defence of legality and the general interests of society, while one of its central responsibilities is directing public criminal investigations.

Crypto tracing has already become part of several major Argentine cases, requiring investigators to follow transactions across wallets, blockchain networks and exchanges.

In July, an Argentine judge ordered the identification of people behind 25 cryptocurrency wallets connected to the $LIBRA investigation and ordered assets linked to the addresses frozen.

Investigators had reconstructed movements involving millions of dollars across several blockchain networks. A report from the Cybercrime Technical Department of the Argentine Federal Police found that four of eight wallets identified as belonging to the Libra Team had consolidated funds into a single address.

Authorities later traced 498,539 USDT transferred through a cross-chain protocol to a wallet on the Tron network. The receiving address divided the funds into 17 transactions, while investigators identified transfers involving Binance, Bybit, OKX and Bitfinex.

The court sought know-your-customer records, IP addresses, transaction histories and other information that could help identify people behind the transactions.

$LIBRA probe has required extensive wallet analysis

The $LIBRA case has given Argentine investigators a recent example of the technical work required when crypto assets move through several addresses and trading platforms.

Crypto.news previously reported in July that investigators were examining roughly $8.2 million that had remained dormant before moving again in May through wallets placed under judicial scrutiny.

The investigation stems from the February 2025 launch of LIBRA, a token promoted on social media by Argentine President Javier Milei. Its price climbed rapidly following Milei’s post before collapsing, triggering criminal and civil investigations into the people involved with the project.

Phone records reviewed by prosecutors later showed that Milei had seven calls with an entrepreneur connected to LIBRA around the time of his social media post. Investigators did not disclose what was discussed during the calls.

Milei has denied wrongdoing and previously said his involvement was limited to sharing information about what he understood to be a private project supporting the Argentine economy.

The judicial investigation has continued to examine financial relationships, communications and transactions associated with LIBRA. Prosecutors have had to analyse both conventional records and blockchain activity as they reconstruct the movement of funds linked to the token.

Such investigations can require authorities to identify wallet addresses, establish links between addresses and individuals, follow assets when they move between blockchains and obtain customer records when funds pass through centralised exchanges.

Those subjects overlap with the MPF course, which specifically covered financial analysis of digital wallets, tracing methods, precautionary measures and asset seizure procedures.

Argentine courts have previously frozen stablecoins

Argentina’s justice system had already used crypto tracing and asset restrictions before the LIBRA investigation.

In December 2024, an Argentine court seized a USDT wallet containing approximately $3.5 million during an investigation into Rainbowex, an alleged trading Ponzi scheme.

Authorities froze cryptocurrency wallets and bank accounts connected to the case, while experts from Argentine crypto platform Lemon and blockchain forensic firms Chainalysis and Qlue provided technical support to trace the funds.

More than 15 raids were carried out across Argentina as part of the Rainbowex investigation, and at least four people were arrested. Authorities worked with Interpol to locate individuals from Malaysia suspected of involvement in creating and operating the platform.

Rainbowex had offered investors daily returns of between 1% and 2%, with the alleged scheme affecting people in San Pedro, Buenos Aires.

Argentine courts have dealt with other disputes involving the recovery of cryptocurrency. In 2022, a court ordered Binance to return Bitcoin to the victim of a theft, another example of judicial authorities dealing directly with digital assets held or transferred through crypto platforms.

The MPF’s training comes as cryptocurrency use has remained substantial in Argentina. Stablecoins accounted for 94% of peso-denominated cryptocurrency trading volume in data published by a16z Crypto on Aug. 30 using figures from Artemis.

The analysis estimated that roughly one in five Argentines uses cryptocurrency, while downloads of the country’s 15 leading crypto applications increased 93% during 2024 compared with the previous year.

Argentina has formalised oversight of crypto providers

Crypto businesses operating in Argentina have faced a more defined registration and compliance system as authorities bring virtual asset providers within existing financial oversight structures.

The National Securities Commission, known locally as the CNV, maintains the country’s Virtual Asset Service Provider registry. Companies admitted to the system must comply with requirements connected to anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing controls.

Bitget, for example, secured VASP registration in Argentina in June, bringing the exchange within the country’s regulatory framework for cryptocurrency service providers.

Registered businesses are subject to reporting and compliance obligations involving Argentina’s Financial Information Unit and other relevant authorities.

At the same time, cryptocurrency activity has extended into products being developed by traditional financial groups. In July, BIND Group and Petersen Group were developing peso stablecoins through separate digital-asset businesses for uses including programmable payments, treasury operations, collateral management and onchain settlement.

For prosecutors investigating transactions within that expanding ecosystem, the MPF course covered both the national and international rules applicable to virtual assets, alongside the practical methods used to analyse wallets, trace transactions and apply precautionary measures to cryptocurrency funds.

The price of lumber has declined 35% since crypto exchanges first listed crypto-native lumber contracts for trading.

At the time, using blockchain technologies to tokenize, trade, or track an off-blockchain commodity seemed like a welcome revolution.

The price of lumber, in early 2021 during the COVID housing boom, had been rallying amid soaring demand for home renovation projects and limited supply from quarantined workers and broken supply chains.

When a client named Rusty contacted crypto recovery specialist Chris Brooks in 2021, he said he and two others had won 5,000 Bitcoin in a court case, worth around $53 million at the time.

They immediately set up a Zoom call to discuss the case.

“There were three guys on the call, and one of them holds up a phone. It has like $53 million in a Bitcoin address,” says Brooks, founder and chief executive of Crypto Asset Recovery.

The men claimed they were able to withdraw as much as $300,000 a week but wanted to get the whole fortune out. If Brooks and his son, Charlie, flew to Georgia to help them crack the wallet, they would make them millionaires.

Brooks and son bought plane tickets and went the next day.

At lunch, Rusty, a 6-foot-3 Army veteran, revealed the wallet didn’t only contain 5000 BTC.

“Rusty pulls out his phone, and he shows us a billion dollars in ETH. And that’s when I was like, okay, something very odd is going on here.”

The men then drove about an hour to a strip mall owned by one of them, where they went into the back office and were handed notebooks containing dozens of recovery seeds. The pair spent the day opening wallets.

They found about $10 in Bitcoin.

Brooks never established whether the wallets they were given had previously held the BTC or ETH Rusty claimed to own. They were never reimbursed for the flight tickets either.

Related: Do the Coldcard attacks mean all hardware wallets are now insecure?

Brooks now suspects Rusty had fallen victim to scammers who convinced him he had a large crypto fortune when he didn’t.

It was an early lesson for their crypto recovery business.

Sometimes crypto is lost. Sometimes the wallet is lost. Sometimes the password is lost.

And sometimes, it turns out, the money was never there in the first place.

Losing your crypto doesn’t always mean it’s gone

For wallet recovery specialists, “lost crypto” can mean several very different things.

They aren’t recovering Bitcoin from the blockchain; they’re recovering the information needed to access a wallet that already exists.

While someone may have thrown away a hardware wallet, forgotten a password or part of their seed phrase, none of those things necessarily mean the underlying crypto has disappeared.

Bruno Krauss, co-founder and chief technical officer of recovery firm ReWallet, tells Magazine:

“If you have some missing words, then you can often recover them.”

Bitcoin’s BIP39 seed phrase standard uses a list of 2,048 words, meaning that if someone knows most of the words, specialists can sometimes systematically search the remaining possibilities. The fewer pieces missing, the more manageable the puzzle.

Password recovery can work in much the same way.

Bitcoin’s BIP39 standard uses a list of 2,048 words. Source: GitHub

Krauss says ReWallet once recovered a 20-character password protecting roughly $3 million after reverse-engineering a flawed password generator.

Other cases depend less on technical exploits than on understanding how a particular person creates passwords.

That means asking clients about personal preferences like favorite foods and places, children’s names and birthdays, personal milestones or memories.

In one case, he says a customer was convinced she had used her children’s names, only to remember that the password was actually a phone number connected to a local delivery service:

“She didn’t know why, but then she thought about it, and she realized, oh, okay, it was because on this day I got the package delivered to the store and I thought, okay, this would be a nice password.”

Passphrases add another layer of complexity

Tom Bennet, a Bitcoin educator who has studied wallet security, says there is another particularly confusing category: the passphrase.

A passphrase is an additional piece of information layered on top of a seed. Enter a different passphrase, and you don’t necessarily get an error message. You can simply get another valid wallet. He tells Magazine:

“A wrong passphrase doesn’t throw an error; it succeeds and shows you a zero balance.”

So you can have the correct seed phrase and enter it correctly, and still think your BTC has vanished.

“Passphrases also don’t have any features to protect users from themselves; no list of 2,048 valid words, no checksum. So if you’ve forgotten a passphrase, it’s basically the same question again: how random was your passphrase? If it’s sufficiently random, there’s often no way to recover it.”

With lost or broken hardware wallets, even having the broken device isn’t always much help. If the wallet’s backup seed phrase survives, the keys can generally be restored on another device.

That’s why recovery specialists don’t necessarily need the original hardware, but enough information to reconstruct access to the keys.

Related: Irish police open Bitcoin wallet years after keys were apparently lost

Recovery can also mean fixing mistakes rather than recovering a lost wallet. Crypto sent to the wrong blockchain, like BNB to Ethereum, may sometimes be recoverable if the receiving wallet is under the user’s control.

Brooks says Crypto Asset Recovery has been contracted to crack more than 3,000 wallets belonging to around 1,500 people, and has cracked passwords for about 63% of them.

Sometimes you really have lost it

There is, however, a hard boundary. Bennet says:

“If your seed is truly random and you lose it completely, your Bitcoin is gone.”

That is one of the fundamental trade-offs of self-custody. A Bitcoin wallet does not have a bank-style recovery system or a central administrator who can verify your identity and restore your account.

Lucien Bourdon, Bitcoin analyst at hardware wallet maker Trezor, puts it even more starkly. If the wallet backup is lost and the wallet containing the keys is inaccessible, “no recovery company can help.” He warns:

“If they could, the wallet could be cracked, and self-custody would be fundamentally compromised.”

Thanks to randomness, crypto wallets make guessing a private key effectively impossible. In the recent case of Bitcoin hardware wallet Coldcard, a firmware bug weakened seed randomness on some wallets, making the seeds brute-forceable without physical access.

Weak random number generation is not a new problem. Source: Jameson Lopp

But if a genuinely random seed or private key has been completely destroyed, the number of possibilities is simply too large.

Krauss says recovery specialists can occasionally find technical paths into wallets that owners had assumed were permanently inaccessible, and that old wallet software, corrupted files, poorly generated passwords and hardware vulnerabilities can all create unusual opportunities:

“Don’t give up on edge cases.”

Recovery specialists can sometimes be scammers

There is an uncomfortable irony in the recovery business.

The person who may be able to help you regain access to your crypto needs the very information that gives someone access to it.

A seed phrase isn’t like a password that can be changed after someone sees it. Anyone who possesses the necessary wallet backup can often control the funds.

That makes choosing a recovery specialist a security decision in itself. Bourdon says:

“If you decide to do it, do the homework. Look for firms with a real track record and reviews you can trace to actual customers. Check that they charge on success rather than up front. And move your funds to a fresh wallet with a new backup as soon as you’re back in.”

He says users should also be wary of any unsolicited messages claiming that someone can recover their funds.

Krauss says other warning signs include people pushing users onto WhatsApp or contacting them from personal email addresses like Gmail, demanding upfront payments or asking them to open accounts at an exchange.

Recovery firms that charge a percentage of successfully recovered funds are not unusual; but paying money upfront to someone who promises to recover a wallet should set alarm bells ringing.

Brooks learned another lesson from the Rusty case.

While crypto recovery might sound like a technical job, a person who believes they are sitting on millions or billions of dollars can also be a security risk.

Crypto Asset Recovery no longer flies out to meet clients in person as it did with Rusty. The company now handles cases remotely, with sensitive wallet information processed through automated and air-gapped systems.

Brooks says around 71% of the wallets they crack contain less than $100, and the company doesn’t charge a fee for asset recovery under that amount.

If there’s one thing he wishes crypto users knew about asset recovery, it’s this:

“Learn what in the world a recovery seed is and why they’re important. That’s the simplest way to make sure you never have to talk to us.”

Magazine: Mystery surrounds why an OG burned $1M in Bitcoin

Kraken delayed its initial public offering (IPO) on Wednesday to at least April 2027. If the reader has lost count of how many times it has delayed, Protos is here to help.

The exchange has been hyping its IPO for over half a decade, and was previously very confident it would IPO in 2022.

In April 2021, Kraken CEO Jesse Powell told CNBC, “We’re looking at being able to go public sometime next year.”

He’s still looking.

By June 2021, according to Fortune, Powell reconsidered a direct listing after Coinbase’s debut. He delayed slightly to a “second half” of 2022 prediction in that article.

However, by September 2022, that target still looked doubtful. Incoming CEO Dave Ripley told a reporter, “No specificity on IPO plans that we can share.” 

The year ended with only delays and no IPO.

In June 2024, Bloomberg reported that Kraken was raising “final” pre-IPO financing for an IPO that never happened.

Then, in March 2025, the same outlet reported that Payward — the parent company of Kraken —  was re-scheduling its IPO for January-March 2026.

By November 2025, Payward had actually submitted a draft IPO document to the SEC on Form S-1. Its announcement said an offering was expected after SEC review.

Reuters reiterated its first quarter 2026 forecast.

Crypto wallet maker Ledger neglected customer safety after it failed to prevent and subsequently adapt to a string of data breaches, according to a $500 million class action lawsuit.

The August 27 lawsuit was filed by Douglas Kim, a Ledger user who claims to have lost almost $2 million to thieves who used data stolen from the company in 2020 and 2023, to target his crypto. 

According to the lawsuit, around the time of these attacks, Ledger demonstrated “a disturbing pattern of negligent, reckless, and irresponsible behavior with regard to its security posture and a callous disregard for its obligations to the privacy of its customers’ [personally identifiable information].”

Ledger keeps getting breached

In the 2020 breach, the personal data of almost 300,000 Ledger users was leaked and uploaded to an online marketplace for stolen data. 

Meanwhile, the 2023 phishing attack targeting one of Ledger’s employees resulted in the dissemination of malware capable of redirecting crypto stored in Ledger wallets to the attackers.

Unmentioned in the lawsuit, however, is the 2026 data breach that saw Ledger users’ personal data leaked when payments processor, Global-e, was hacked. 

On December 1–2, Blockchain Life 2026 will once again bring the global crypto industry together in Dubai: 15,000+ attendees from 130+ countries, 200+ speakers, and 200+ sponsors.

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The Love Island USA effect is not limited to these four women. The show has also brought notoriety and fame to their male partners and other Islanders, as well. But the breakout stars of the Peacock dating series are experiencing these phenomena on another level, with built-in fanbases that follow and support every campaign they take part in, both on and off social media. In a landscape where fame equates to followers and followers equate to money, these four Black women are raking in the profits and new opportunities their newfound fame has brought, and Black women are to thank for it. 

But even as their fans prop them up, it often seems as though they are taken for granted by other Islanders, those cast members’ fanbases, and ITV America and Peacock, which have seen their bottom lines grow significantly as a direct result of the dating franchise. Despite their success, Tatum, Bosse, Harvey, and Moreno have been subjected to constant anti-Black racism and sexism, and the support network that should be there to protect them has been conspicuously absent: There’s been no statement of support or condemnation from the networks, while cast members defend their mistreatment of the core four rather than have their backs. What’s more, the harm to these women is experienced by Black women watching the show as vicarious racism—an indirect exposure to racial and gender discrimination—that elicits feelings of fear, sadness, and anger. (As of publication, representatives from Peacock and ITV America had not responded to a request for comment.)