U.S. federal prosecutors have been investigating whether Binance knowingly allowed trading that violated Iran sanctions, nearly three years after its $4.3 billion federal settlement, according to a Sept. 22 Bloomberg report.

Bloomberg said the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office is leading the inquiry, while the Justice Department’s Criminal Division in Washington is participating. Prosecutors are examining Binance’s compliance controls and whether the exchange knew about the transactions under review, according to the report. Reuters said it had not independently verified Bloomberg’s account.

Binance responded that it maintains a zero-tolerance policy for sanctions violations. The exchange said, “We fully cooperate with law enforcement, and we remain committed to rooting out and shutting down bad actors.” The Justice Department declined to comment to Reuters, while the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office was not immediately available for comment outside normal business hours.

Breaking: U.S. Prosecutors Probe Binance Over Possible Iran Sanctions Violations

U.S. federal prosecutors are investigating whether Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, violated U.S. sanctions on Iran by knowingly allowing certain transactions to proceed, Bloomberg… pic.twitter.com/P1VBmC1Jfu

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) September 22, 2026

Binance Iran sanctions probe focuses on compliance controls

The reported investigation centers on whether Binance knowingly permitted trading that should have been stopped under U.S. sanctions, according to Bloomberg’s account cited by Reuters. The report did not identify the transactions under review or disclose when prosecutors began examining them.

Scrutiny of the exchange’s Iran-related controls had surfaced months earlier. In March, crypto.news reported that Senators Elizabeth Warren, Chris Van Hollen and Ruben Gallego planned congressional oversight of a reported Justice Department investigation involving Iran-linked transactions. At the time, the inquiry was described as examining whether networks connected to Iran used Binance to evade U.S. sanctions.

Binance disputed claims made in several February reports. In a March 6 response to a Senate inquiry, the company described parts of the reporting as “demonstrably false, unsupported by credible evidence, and defamatory in several material respects.” Binance said its know-your-customer rules prohibit users residing or located in Iran from accessing Binance.com.

$61 million forfeiture complaint names Binance-linked accounts

A separate court action filed on Sept. 14 provides fresh public records concerning Iran-linked funds that moved through accounts on Binance. The Southern District of New York filed a verified civil forfeiture complaint seeking all USDT held in 10 cryptocurrency addresses, court records show. The case is United States v. All USD Tether Held in the Following Cryptocurrency Addresses, No. 1:26-cv-08010.

Prosecutors valued the targeted cryptocurrency at approximately $61 million and alleged it represented proceeds from black-market Iranian crude oil and petroleum sales. The complaint says the money was intended to finance Iranian government and military bodies, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The filing alleges two Chinese companies, Blessed Trust and Hexa Whale, used Binance trading accounts while handling proceeds connected with Iranian oil sales. Prosecutors said a network of cryptocurrency actors laundered more than $1.5 billion in illicit oil proceeds, while Blessed Trust and Hexa Whale used the U.S. financial system to send or receive tens of millions of dollars.

The forfeiture complaint does not accuse Binance itself of wrongdoing in that proceeding. The Justice Department states that a civil forfeiture complaint contains allegations that remain unproven until a court enters judgment for the government. As crypto.news reported in related coverage, the case is directed at the cryptocurrency held in the identified wallets, not a criminal charge against Binance.

Court records describe the assets as USDT held on addresses operating on the TRON network. The complaint says Tether would burn the tokens covered by a seizure warrant and issue replacement tokens of equal value for transfer into U.S. government custody.

Binance says the firms were offboarded after reviews

Binance has given its own timeline for Hexa Whale and Blessed Trust. In its March congressional response, the exchange said law enforcement contacted it in April 2025 about transactions between Binance wallets and outside addresses with possible terrorism-financing connections. Binance said it supplied KYC and transaction records connected with Hexa Whale in June 2025 and continued reviewing the account afterward.

The company said it removed Hexa Whale from Binance.com on Aug. 13, 2025. A separate set of law-enforcement requests concerning transactions involving other outside wallets arrived during summer 2025, according to Binance. The exchange said investigators then performed a source-of-funds review and offboarded Blessed Trust in January 2026.

Binance maintains that, to its knowledge, no Binance account transacted directly with an Iran-based entity. In another March statement, the company said its investigation found approximately $126.1 million eventually reached wallets linked to Iran after multiple blockchain hops, with as much as $24.1 million reaching IRGC-related wallets. The figures are Binance’s account of its internal review and have not been presented by the company as findings of a court.

The exchange said claims that it fired compliance employees for escalating concerns were false. Binance acknowledged that one employee was dismissed after an internal investigation over what the company described as an unauthorized disclosure of user information, while other compliance workers left voluntarily.

Binance has pointed to staffing and monitoring data while defending its controls. The company says more than 1,500 people work in compliance-related functions, representing roughly 25% of its global workforce. It reported processing more than 71,000 law-enforcement requests during 2025 and claimed exposure to four major Iranian crypto exchanges fell 97.3%, from $4.19 million to $110,000 over two years.

2023 guilty plea imposed monitors and compliance reforms

The current scrutiny follows Binance’s November 2023 criminal resolution with U.S. authorities. The exchange pleaded guilty to offenses involving the Bank Secrecy Act, operating an unregistered money-transmitting business and violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Binance agreed to a total criminal financial penalty of $4.316 billion.

In that case, the Justice Department said Binance knowingly failed to install controls that would stop U.S. customers from trading with users in sanctioned jurisdictions. Federal prosecutors said Binance caused more than $898 million in trades between U.S. users and users ordinarily resident in Iran from January 2018 through May 2022.

The settlement required Binance to retain an independent compliance monitor for three years and improve its anti-money-laundering and sanctions systems. Separate coordinated resolutions involved FinCEN, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Later scrutiny centered on whether the post-settlement controls were functioning as required. As crypto.news previously reported, Treasury-related oversight gave authorities access to Binance books, records and systems under separate monitoring obligations, while Iran-linked transaction reports prompted renewed questions about compliance.

Meanwhile, the Sept. 14 forfeiture matter is proceeding separately in the Southern District of New York. Prosecutors are seeking a judgment allowing the United States to retain the USDT named in the complaint, while the filing itself states that its allegations remain unproven unless the court awards judgment to the government.

XRP added 7% to nearly $1.52 and SOL 5% to just under $117. Ether rose 3% to nearly $2,740, while BNB and TRX each picked up between 1% and 2%. ZEC was the only large token to fall, down 4% to just above $1,450.

Liquidations in the past hour came to under $11 million, down from more than $300 million an hour at the peak of Monday’s move, which leaves the next leg dependent on buyers rather than sellers being forced out.

AI trade roars back

Equities set a firm tone through the Asian session, meanwhile.

MSCI’s Asia Pacific gauge rose nearly 1% for a fifth straight day of gains, led by chipmakers Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, which tracked Monday’s rally in U.S. semiconductor stocks. South Korea’s Kospi advanced 2% and Taiwan’s benchmark hit an intraday record.

Artificial intelligence is doing the pulling. The Wall Street rally followed early signs of success for Meta Platforms’ new AI agent, and AMD is on course to pass $1 trillion in market value.

Meta Platforms released Muse, an AI agent that works across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, nearly two weeks ago and it has since passed ChatGPT to become the top free app on Apple’s U.S. App Store. The app has drawn nearly 3 million installs worldwide and almost 40% more iOS downloads in the U.S. and Canada than ChatGPT managed in its own first 12 days on mobile, data from app-tracker Apptopia shows.

Cardano has been added to the official x402 software kit, giving developers the code needed to let an app or AI agent pay for an online service using ADA or tokens issued on the network.

x402 turns the web’s largely unused “402 Payment Required” response into a checkout built directly into an internet request. A service sends back its price and payment instructions, the agent signs a payment and receives the requested data or computing power after the transaction is verified.

That means an agent preparing a report could buy a single dataset when it needs it, without a person opening an account, entering card details or paying for a monthly subscription.

Coinbase created x402 in 2025 before contributing it to a Linux Foundation-backed organization whose members include Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Google and Amazon Web Services. Solana, the XRP Ledger and several Ethereum-compatible networks already support the standard.

Cardano Foundation engineers began with a specification accepted in June, then built the client and server software needed to request payments alongside a so-called facilitator that verifies and submits them. The initial release supports TypeScript, with Python planned next.

Prediction market platform Trueo plans to migrate from Base to Ethereum, citing broader integration opportunities and plans to build the next iteration of its oracle system.

The project, which launched on Base in March 2025, said its priority after the migration will be attracting liquidity and launching the next generation of its oracle, the system used to verify real-world outcomes that are used to resolve prediction markets.

Trueo said it chose to move from Base to Ethereum because it offered higher integration potential and product upside, while on Base, integrations are limited to the immediate ecosystem.

“Ethereum is the best chain for the most credibly neutral and truthful oracle system and prediction markets,” Trueo co-founder known as “Lumberg” said on X.

Source: Vitalik Buterin

“As a new app and experiment, an L2 like Base was the right choice for many reasons. At the time, Mainnet gas costs were still elevated and some features of our app were experimental,” Trueo said on X.

“The final form of Trueo is to be a platform that is widely adopted, broadly integrated, fully permissionless, mostly immutable, and highly credible. Ethereum is the best fit for this combination of properties.”

Trueo is ranked as the 14th-largest onchain prediction market with a total value locked of $795,687, according to DefiLlama.

Related: World Cup generated $20B in blockchain prediciton market volume: Chainalysis

Cointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently.

Kakao Pay and KakaoBank, two major players in South Korea’s Kakao ecosystem, have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with digital asset infrastructure provider Fireblocks to explore new opportunities in crypto infrastructure—specifically including stablecoins. The parties said they will run proof-of-concept tests aimed at building digital asset capabilities that fit South Korea’s regulatory, security, and service expectations.

The announcement, made on Monday, did not disclose any launch plans, investment commitments, or implementation timelines. Instead, it frames the effort as an engineering and compliance-oriented exercise to identify how onchain infrastructure can be deployed responsibly in a market that is still taking shape under an evolving regulatory framework.

Key takeaways

• Kakao Pay and KakaoBank are partnering with Fireblocks to test digital asset infrastructure use cases, including stablecoin-related work.
• The MoU centers on proof-of-concept testing tailored to South Korea’s regulatory and security requirements, without any announced rollout timeline.
• Fireblocks says it supports more than 2,500 institutions, including over 100 banks, positioning the partnership as focused on enterprise-grade custody and infrastructure.
• The move adds to a growing cluster of South Korean finance and fintech firms exploring won-denominated stablecoin pathways as regulation develops.

Why Kakao’s infrastructure search matters

Unlike pilots that focus purely on payment trials, this MoU is primarily about the infrastructure layer—how institutions can securely connect to digital assets and operate systems that meet banking-grade standards. Kakao Pay and KakaoBank sit in the heart of South Korea’s digital payments and banking ecosystem: Kakao Pay provides mobile payments and financial services, while KakaoBank is one of the country’s largest internet-only banks.

For firms like these, the practical challenge is not simply adopting blockchain technology, but integrating it in ways that satisfy security controls, operational reliability, and compliance expectations. By working with Fireblocks on proof-of-concept tests, the companies are signaling that they want to validate onchain systems that can withstand enterprise requirements—an issue that often determines whether stablecoin concepts can move from experimentation to production.

What Fireblocks brings to the table

Fireblocks provides digital asset infrastructure used by institutions, and the company says it supports more than 2,500 institutions, including over 100 banks. In enterprise crypto deployments, that kind of track record is often tied to capabilities such as secure custody and infrastructure tooling used to manage digital assets at scale.

While Monday’s MoU announcement does not describe specific technical components, it does clarify the target outcome: secure onchain infrastructure that aligns with South Korea’s regulatory and security landscape. For investors and builders watching South Korea’s stablecoin trajectory, this is a meaningful signal that large local financial institutions are seeking infrastructure partners capable of meeting banking-level standards.

A wave of stablecoin exploration in South Korea

The Kakao-Fireblocks agreement arrives amid a broader pattern of experimentation across South Korea’s financial sector as the country continues building out its digital asset regulatory framework.

Earlier activity includes a separate MoU between Kakao Group and stablecoin issuer Circle, announced in July. According to Cointelegraph’s earlier coverage, that MoU was intended to explore blockchain-based payment infrastructure and digital asset technology, including opportunities around won-denominated stablecoins and related services (see Kakao Circle won stablecoin payment infrastructure).

The stablecoin push is not limited to Kakao. In May, Cointelegraph reported that KB Financial Group completed a won-denominated stablecoin pilot spanning issuance, offline merchant payments, and cross-border remittances (see KB Financial stablecoin pilot offline payments). And in July, fintech company Toss partnered with Optimism and Sunnyside Labs on a proof of concept for won-based stablecoin payment infrastructure (see Toss partners Optimism won stablecoins).

Taken together, these efforts suggest the market is moving beyond pure “whether” questions and increasingly focusing on “how”—including what infrastructure is needed to support stablecoin payments and settlement, including in scenarios that require offline functionality or integration with cross-border flows.

What to watch next for investors and operators

For now, the MoU provides a direction of travel rather than a product roadmap. The lack of a launch or implementation timeline means stakeholders should treat the announcement as an early-stage initiative: proof-of-concept testing will determine what technical and compliance hurdles need to be cleared before any wider deployment.

As South Korea refines its approach to digital assets, the next milestones to monitor are not only regulatory developments, but also whether these infrastructure-focused pilots can evolve into operational systems—especially for won-denominated stablecoin use cases, where payment reliability and security controls are central.

Readers should watch for details on the proof-of-concept scope, results, and whether Kakao’s infrastructure testing leads to further partnerships or public pilots aligned with the country’s expanding stablecoin and payment framework.

South Korean financial companies Kakao Pay and KakaoBank have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with crypto infrastructure provider Fireblocks to explore digital asset opportunities, including stablecoins. 

Under the agreement, the companies will conduct proof-of-concept tests for digital asset infrastructure suited to South Korea’s regulatory, security and service requirements. The initiative aims to help establish secure onchain infrastructure for the country’s emerging digital asset market. 

The announcement on Monday did not include a launch, investment or implementation timeline. 

Kakao Pay operates mobile payments and financial services, while KakaoBank is one of South Korea’s largest internet-only banks. Both are part of the broader Kakao ecosystem. Meanwhile, Fireblocks provides digital asset infrastructure to more than 2,500 institutions, including over 100 banks, according to the company. 

The agreement follows a separate memorandum signed by Kakao Group and stablecoin issuer Circle. In July, the two companies signed an MoU to explore blockchain-based payment infrastructure and digital asset technology. The collaboration included examining opportunities around won-denominated stablecoins and related services. 

Kakao Pay and KakaoBank are among several South Korean financial and technology companies exploring stablecoin opportunities as the country develops its regulatory framework for digital assets.

In May, KB Financial Group completed a won-denominated stablecoin pilot covering issuance, offline merchant payments and cross-border remittances. In July, fintech company Toss partnered with Optimism and Sunnyside Labs on a proof of concept for won-based stablecoin payment infrastructure.

Related: South Korean bank stocks surge on stablecoin trademark filings

Cointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently.

Key takeaways

• XRP rose more than 8% in 24 hours as the broader crypto market rallied.
• Its trading volume increased 55% to approximately $4.7 billion.
• Crypto-wide short liquidations reached about $665 million; that figure is not specific to XRP.

XRP outpaces major cryptocurrencies

XRP gained more than 8% over 24 hours amid a broad cryptocurrency rally. Trading volume rose 55% to approximately $4.7 billion, equivalent to about 5% of XRP’s circulating market value.

The higher volume shows that trading activity increased alongside the price. It does not, by itself, establish how much of that activity came from new buyers rather than sellers closing positions.

A wider short squeeze may have contributed to the move. Across the crypto market, short liquidations climbed to approximately $665 million, according to the figures cited in the report. Liquidations force some traders betting on falling prices to close their positions, which can amplify a rally.

XRP’s gains also come as Ripple continues to expand its payments business and develop uses for the XRP Ledger.

The report points to a newly released developer kit for building AI agents that can make payments using the ledger and Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin. It also describes Stripe as potential supporting infrastructure for that use case. The scale of any resulting payment activity remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, two XRP Ledger proposals under consideration could help establish a framework for lending that uses XRP as collateral and RLUSD for settlement. Their eventual effect depends on approval, implementation and adoption.

RLUSD’s market capitalization was near $2.4 billion in the figures cited by the report. Growth in the stablecoin may increase activity in Ripple’s ecosystem, though it does not guarantee a corresponding rise in XRP’s price.

XRP faces $1.50 breakout test

The technical analysis in the report identifies a breakout from a descending flag pattern on XRP’s daily chart. 

The next test is $1.50: a sustained move above that level would strengthen the case for a rise toward $1.80.

The analyst also projects a medium-term target of $2.10 based on the pattern’s measured move, implying roughly 41% upside from the price used in that forecast.

Those targets remain conditional. After a sharp rally and substantial short liquidations, XRP will need continued buying interest to hold its breakout and advance through $1.50.