Victims of a £1.5 million cryptocurrency investment scam are finally set to see some of their money returned, after Britain’s financial watchdog secured court orders forcing two convicted fraudsters to hand over hundreds of thousands of pounds.

The Financial Conduct Authority announced on Monday that it had obtained confiscation orders against Raymondip Bedi and Patrick Mavanga, following a hearing at Southwark Crown Court. Bedi was ordered to repay £603,404.28, while Mavanga must hand over £247,997.99. The regulator said it would now work to return the recovered funds to the victims it defrauded.

The case is the latest chapter in a scheme that ran for more than two years, from February 2017 to June 2019, during which the pair cold-called members of the public and talked them into pouring money into bogus cryptoasset investments. Prosecutors say the fraud was carried out through companies including CCX Capital and Astaria Group LLP — outfits that gave the scheme a veneer of legitimacy while, in reality, funnelling investor money away with no genuine crypto trading behind it.

In total, the FCA identified at least 65 people who were duped into the scheme, losing a combined £1,541,799 — sums that, for many, represented significant personal savings gambled on the promise of quick returns from the then-booming digital asset market.

Bedi and Mavanga were convicted following an FCA prosecution and sentenced last year. In July 2025, Bedi received five years and four months in prison, while Mavanga was handed a longer term of six years and six months, reflecting what the court determined was his greater role in orchestrating the fraud. Monday’s confiscation orders, made under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, are a separate legal step aimed specifically at stripping the men of their ill-gotten gains — or the value of whatever assets they still hold, whichever figure is lower.

Steve Smart, the FCA’s joint executive director of enforcement and market oversight, framed the outcome as a warning to others who might see cryptocurrency’s complexity and hype as cover for fraud. “Bedi and Mavanga defrauded investors and left them out of pocket,” Smart said. “These orders bring victims a step closer to getting money back. We’ll keep coming after fraudsters and holding them to account.”

The case underscores a persistent problem regulators around the world have grappled with since digital assets went mainstream: the same features that make cryptocurrency attractive to legitimate investors — its novelty, technical complexity, and promise of outsized returns — also make it a magnet for con artists. Fraudulent schemes dressed up as crypto opportunities have proliferated over the past decade, often targeting people with little technical understanding of blockchain technology but plenty of appetite for the kind of returns splashed across headlines during bull markets.

The FCA has increasingly leaned on tools like cold-call warnings, its public list of unauthorised firms, and criminal prosecutions to combat the trend, while urging consumers to treat unsolicited investment pitches — crypto or otherwise — with deep suspicion. The regulator maintains dedicated guidance for the public on spotting crypto investment scams and reporting suspicious firms, part of a broader push to bring oversight to a sector that has historically operated in regulatory grey zones.

For the 65 victims of the Bedi and Mavanga scheme, Monday’s ruling offers a measure of justice, though the recovered sums fall well short of the full £1.5 million lost. It also serves as a reminder that even after criminal convictions and prison sentences are handed down, recouping stolen money can take years — and rarely results in victims being made completely whole.

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Wall Street’s embrace of altcoin exchange-traded funds reached another milestone this week as Bitwise Asset Management launched the first U.S. spot ETF offering direct exposure to NEAR Protocol, the layer-1 blockchain known for its bets on artificial intelligence and cross-chain “intents” infrastructure. The fund, trading on NYSE Arca under the ticker NRR, began operations on September 29, arriving just as NEAR’s token completed a dramatic multi-week rally that nearly doubled its price.

The launch marks a notable expansion of the crypto ETF landscape beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum, signaling that issuers believe investor appetite for regulated, brokerage-friendly access to smaller blockchain networks is real — and growing. For NEAR holders and the broader altcoin market, the debut raises an old but unresolved question: does an ETF listing actually move the needle on price, or does it simply formalize gains that speculators have already banked in advance?

NRR charges a 0.75% management fee and, unlike some crypto investment vehicles that rely on derivatives or futures contracts, holds NEAR tokens directly. That structural choice matters. Because the fund must back new shares with actual NEAR, sustained investor demand for NRR could translate into real purchases of the token on the open market — a mechanic that has driven notable price effects for other spot crypto ETFs in the past. Creation and redemption units are sized at 10,000 shares, according to Bitwise’s fund filings, meaning large blocks of investor demand would be needed to meaningfully dent circulating supply.

Adding a further wrinkle, Bitwise plans to stake a significant portion of the fund’s NEAR holdings through its institutional staking arm, funneling rewards back into the fund’s net asset value rather than distributing NEAR directly to shareholders. As of late September, Bitwise pegged the annualized staking yield at roughly 5%, though it cautioned the rate floats and is not guaranteed. Staking, however, comes with its own risks: tokens committed to a proof-of-stake validator are temporarily removed from immediate trading availability, and the arrangement exposes the fund to potential slashing penalties, operational hiccups, and liquidity strain if redemptions spike unexpectedly.

That staking wrinkle also has supply-side implications. NEAR’s network already has close to 45% of its total token supply locked into staking, according to Bitwise’s own research from earlier this year. If NRR grows and funnels a chunk of its holdings into staking as well, an even larger share of NEAR’s supply could become less liquid — a dynamic that boosters argue could support prices over time, but that also concentrates risk if large holders need to unwind positions quickly.

The timing of the ETF’s debut is impossible to separate from NEAR’s blistering run-up. The token sat near $2.62 in mid-September before climbing steadily as Bitwise’s listing cleared its final regulatory hurdles, eventually touching close to $5 — a roughly 43% jump in just the seven days after NYSE Arca approved the fund’s application. By the time NRR opened for trading, NEAR was changing hands around $4.93, giving the network a market capitalization of about $6.5 billion, and leaving the token up an eye-popping 176% for the year.

That pre-launch rally illustrates a familiar pattern in crypto markets: anticipation of institutional products tends to pull forward much of the buying pressure before the product itself ever opens. Traders positioning ahead of ETF approvals have, in past cycles, captured much of the upside, leaving the actual launch day as something closer to a confirmation event than a catalyst. Whether NRR can sustain momentum from here will likely hinge less on the symbolism of its NYSE Arca listing and more on cold, measurable inflow data in the weeks ahead.

NEAR’s rally wasn’t happening in a vacuum. The network has seen a flurry of ecosystem activity in recent weeks that likely fed investor enthusiasm independent of ETF speculation. A NEAR/USDC spot market went live on the decentralized exchange Hyperliquid on September 23, with perpetual futures open interest on the platform reaching roughly $344 million and funding rates suggesting bullish traders were willing to pay a premium to stay long. Separately, NEAR Intents — the network’s system for enabling private, cross-chain transaction execution across more than 30 connected blockchains — saw its confidential total value locked cross $70 million earlier in the month, triggering the first rewards snapshot under a new incentive program designed to bootstrap usage.

Bitwise has explicitly woven that infrastructure narrative into its pitch for NRR, framing NEAR not just as a speculative token but as a bet on rails that could eventually support autonomous software agents executing transactions across multiple blockchains without manual routing. It’s a forward-looking thesis that echoes broader industry chatter about AI agents and on-chain automation, even if the practical adoption of such systems remains in its early stages.

For now, market watchers say the real test for NRR — and for NEAR’s price — will play out over the coming weeks as actual fund flow data becomes available. An ETF listing alone guarantees nothing; it is the pace of net creations, not the ticker symbol, that will determine whether Wall Street’s newest crypto product becomes a durable source of demand or simply a footnote to a rally that had already run its course before trading began.

The Mark Zuckerberg-backed Meta AI predicts an insanely wild price for Chainlink (LINK) by January 1, 2027. It claims that $150–$250, with a stretch target toward $300+ are possibilities under the assumption of a full-blown crypto bull market returning and being turbocharged by a landmark catalyst.

LINK is currently trading around $15.20–$15.50 as of September 29, 2026. This extreme outlook predicts a strong late-2026 bull market, driven by major financial institutions and government agencies designating Chainlink as the primary decentralized oracle for tokenized real-world assets and cross-border settlements.

In this speculative scenario, massive institutional demand could push LINK from ~$15 to $150–$250 by early 2027, potentially even $300. However, this would require significant coordination among traditional finance, regulators, and Chainlink, making it a highly unlikely base-case prediction.

Meta AI Predicts LINK to $300: Is There Any Technical Analysis that Backs this Wild Target?

On the higher timeframes, LINK has been building a constructive recovery, recently breaking higher from the $12–$13 region and pushing into the mid-$15s with expanding volume. Price is holding above rising short- and intermediate-term moving averages after reclaiming key levels.

In a standard bull market, a sustained break above $18–$20 would open the path toward the prior cycle high near $53. Under the extreme institutional-adoption scenario outlined above, clearing that previous all-time high would likely trigger a powerful measured-move extension and Fibonacci projections from the multi-year base, theoretically supporting a move into the $150–$250+ zone if volume and momentum expand dramatically.

RSI has room to run from current levels before reaching the kind of extreme overbought readings typical of parabolic advances. Key nearer-term supports sit in the $13.50–$14.50 and $12.00–$12.50 zones; holding those would keep the broader recovery structure intact while the market prices in any major narrative shifts.

Overall, while the current chart supports continued upside in a normal bull market, only an extraordinary surge in real-world institutional utility and demand could justify the kind of multi-thousand-percent extension implied by the $150–$300 targets.

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LiquidChain Targets Early Mover Upside as Ethereum Tests Key Levels

Traders who bought LINK near $15 aren’t wrong to feel validated by this range hold. But let’s be honest about the math: moving LINK from $15 to $300 would take a wildly unlikely catalyst and remains improbable.

For capital chasing asymmetric exposure to cross-chain infrastructure themes (the same theme driving the CCIP narrative), early-stage projects offer a different risk-reward profile.

LiquidChain ($LIQUID) is building a Layer 3 execution environment that fuses Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana liquidity into a single unified layer.

Rather than forcing developers to deploy separate contracts per chain, LiquidChain’s Deploy-Once Architecture lets builders ship once and access liquidity across all three ecosystems through Single-Step Execution and Verifiable Settlement.

The presale has raised almost $980K at a current token price of just $0.01496.

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The post Mark Zuckerberg Meta AI Predicts Chainlink to $300 (LINK) if This Happens appeared first on Cryptonews.

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UK Chancellor of the Exchequer John Healey has compared Nigel Farage’s fiscal policies to a “BTC account” handled by one of the UK’s most financially irresponsible prime ministers.

UK Chancellor of the Exchequer! “Don’t make me laugh,” John Healey has compared Nigel Farage’s fiscal policies to a “BTC account” handled by one of the UK’s most financially irresponsible prime ministers.

This is from Healey the most useless piece of communist crap ever appointed to this position. This man is really as stupid as they come. Support the British people? NO, he supports the communist socialist failed agenda and the EU, like the rest of Labour’s traitor MPs. Certainly not you the British people, and you voted for the new Communist socialist Islamic republic of Britain.

Now he and Burnham are going to piss all over you while calling for another referendum on rejoining the dictatorship called the EU, OH, AND THEY WILL USE THE WORD DEMOCRACY, SOMETHING THEY DON’T SUPPORT AND NEVER HAVE.

Healey’s jab at the Reform leader during Labour’s 2026 party conference referred to the perceived economic failure of the UK’s shortest-serving prime minister, Liz Truss.

Truss’s financial policies were widely criticised for their negative impact on financial markets. This led to a rebellion from several Tory MPs, and she was forced to resign within 44 days of her premiership.

Healey appeared to suggest that a “BTC account” is an equally financially irresponsible form of finance, and that only by pairing it with Truss would you recreate the “fantasy funding” ideals of Nigel Farage.

Healey’s comments upset a lot of Bitcoiners, who claimed his “derogatory” description of a “BTC account” demonstrated “staggering ignorance.”

Freddie New, CEO of the BTC Lightning transaction fee firm B HODL, said Healey is “gleefully ignorant that he thinks it is possible to have a ‘BTC account.’”

UK podcaster Peter McCormack said, “Healey making a dismissive joke about Bitcoin shows that he likely has a woeful understanding of economics, particularly scarcity.”

Most criticisms were technical and took offence at the use of the word “account,” which contrasts with the phrase “crypto wallet” used by crypto holders.

Healey wants a ‘new age of industrialisation’

Healey was defence secretary under Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership before he resigned in June. He argued that the government wasn’t willing to spend enough on national defence. 

During yesterday’s conference, Healey announced new measures to support a “new age of industrialisation,” which includes a £300 million investment from Rolls-Royce toward its factories, and £6 billion in government contracts to build new submarine docks. 

A so-called “Union Learning Fund” was also announced, as were a National Wealth Fund to help create 130,000 jobs by 2030, and a £100 million-backed local apprenticeship scheme. 

Got a tip? Send us an email securely via Protos Leaks. For more informed news and investigations, follow us on X, Bluesky, and Google News, or subscribe to our YouTube channel.

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“Onchain transactions between two individuals shouldn’t mean publishing your financial history to the world,” Joe Andrews, CEO of Aztec Labs, said in a statement.

Andrews added that Aztec Labs chose DAI because it considers it “the most decentralized of the mass-market stablecoins used today on Ethereum.” He said the wallet could support other assets later.

Ethereum already has apps that hide payments, though transfers from an ordinary wallet remain public. Its developers are weighing changes for the planned 2027 Hegotá upgrade that could let privacy apps handle transaction approvals and fees with less help from outside services. Those proposals are still under consideration, while Aztec Labs is bringing back a wallet people can use on its own network.

Read More: Ethereum’s next big upgrade has 66 proposals, including a major privacy fix

What zk.money can and cannot hide

Moving money into the system still leaves a public trace, however. Aztec’s documentation says a deposit from Ethereum reveals the sender and amount, even though the recipient on Aztec can remain private.

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The relaunch comes with limits, however. Each deposit, payment and withdrawal must be below $2,500. All users share a $50,000 daily deposit allowance, which replenishes over time. The documentation describes those caps as a safeguard while the system is new and says raising them would require a new contract.

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Author: Cryptoman

Cryptocurrency is edging further into the financial mainstream this year, even as the industry’s relationship with traditional banking and regulators remains fraught in key markets like the United Kingdom. From Morgan Stanley’s new laboratory for testing tokenized finance to a British parliamentary group’s pointed letter to bank chief executives, the story of crypto in late 2026 is one of institutions moving cautiously toward digital assets while grappling with unresolved questions about risk, access and regulatory readiness.

On Wall Street, the direction of travel is unmistakable. Morgan Stanley has launched a Digital Asset Lab dedicated to testing stablecoins, tokenized deposits, central bank digital currencies, money-market funds and decentralized finance vaults, according to reporting by Bloomberg. The lab, part of the bank’s existing network of innovation hubs, allows employees to experiment with blockchain-based applications without touching Morgan Stanley’s core systems — a sandbox approach that mirrors, in miniature, the kind of controlled testing environments regulators elsewhere are trying to build.

Megan Brewer, who leads market innovation and labs at the bank, told Bloomberg the team is exploring how software might execute investment strategies around the clock, a question that goes to the heart of what tokenization promises: markets and money that never sleep. The lab’s remit spans the technical distinction between a tokenized deposit, which represents a claim on money held at a bank, and a stablecoin, which is backed by a separate pool of assets — a distinction that has become increasingly important as regulators worldwide try to draw clear lines around different forms of digital money.

This research effort builds on products Morgan Stanley has already brought to market. In April, the firm launched a Stablecoin Reserves Portfolio designed to help stablecoin issuers meet reserve requirements under the U.S. GENIUS Act, holding cash, short-dated Treasurys and repurchase agreements. Its E*TRADE platform completed a rollout letting eligible clients trade Bitcoin, Ether and Solana directly, while three separate exchange-traded products tracking those same assets have drawn tens of millions of dollars in inflows since launching earlier this year. Together, these moves suggest a major Wall Street institution treating crypto not as a speculative sideline but as infrastructure worth building out across trading, custody and reserve management.

The contrast with the United Kingdom is instructive. There, momentum is real but noticeably more contested. Lord Kulveer Ranger, co-chair of Parliament’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on Digital Markets and Digital Money, recently offered a candid assessment of where the Bank of England stands on stablecoins and the prospect of a digital pound. His verdict, after 18 months of engagement: the Bank is listening, but it is cautious — and caution alone, he argues, will not be enough to keep Britain competitive.

Ranger’s core complaint is about tempo. While the Bank of England takes its time absorbing feedback on systemic stablecoin rules, other jurisdictions are moving ahead with their own frameworks, some more permissive and some more experimental. Capital and confidence, he warns, do not wait for perfect policy alignment. He points to the Bank’s Digital Securities Sandbox — a testing ground for distributed ledger technology in capital markets — as a case in point: enthusiasm within the Bank has not translated into enthusiasm among firms, many of whom see sandbox participation as costly in time and resources with an unclear payoff. Without a credible bridge from experimentation to real-world deployment, he argues, elegant regulatory frameworks risk attracting interest without retaining commitment.

That tension between innovation and caution is playing out concretely in the banking sector itself. In August, the UK’s Crypto and Digital Assets APPG wrote directly to the chief executives of every major British bank, demanding explanations for why crypto and digital asset firms continue to struggle to open basic bank accounts. The letter, signed by co-chairs Gurinder Singh Josan and Lord Vaizey of Didcot, cited persistent reports of firms being shut out of banking services or having crypto-related payments restricted outright — even as the UK moves toward a comprehensive regulatory regime for the sector.

The APPG’s language was blunt: banking access, the letter said, “could be one of the single biggest barriers to growth” for UK crypto businesses, with the potential to undermine the very regulatory regime the government is trying to build and to influence whether firms choose to invest in Britain at all. Notably, the group acknowledged that banks have legitimate obligations to guard against financial crime, but argued that decisions should be based on individual firms’ risk profiles rather than blanket sector-wide exclusion. That view echoes an assurance given in Parliament back in March by Economic Secretary to the Treasury Lucy Rigby, who told MPs that firms authorized by the Financial Conduct Authority should not face banking restrictions simply for operating in crypto.

The letter is now feeding into a formal Parliamentary Inquiry into banking access for the sector, which gathered written evidence from banks, crypto businesses and regulators through the end of August before a report and recommendations to government.

Taken together, these developments capture an industry at an awkward but consequential midpoint. In the United States, a heavyweight institution like Morgan Stanley is quietly normalizing crypto exposure across trading platforms, exchange-traded products and now dedicated research infrastructure, treating stablecoins and tokenization as inevitable features of modern finance rather than fringe experiments. In Britain, meanwhile, the debate remains more elemental: not just how sophisticated the regulatory framework should be, but whether crypto businesses can even get a bank account in the first place.

Both stories point to the same underlying reality. Cryptocurrency’s next phase of growth will be determined less by technological breakthroughs than by the willingness of banks, regulators and central banks to treat digital assets as a normal, if carefully managed, part of the financial system. Wall Street appears to be answering that question with capital and infrastructure. Westminster and Threadneedle Street, for now, are still working out the terms.

Iran War Polymarket odds price a US announcement ending the naval blockade of Iran no earlier than March 31, 2027, with the contract trading at 74.5% Yes to 25.5% No as of mid-morning on Tuesday, 29 September, according to live pricing on the platform.

The event has logged over $33M in cumulative volume since launch, and the highest-priced outcome sitting nine months out raises an obvious question: if US-Iran talks are genuinely progressing, why is the smart money betting on delay rather than a near-term resolution?

Got a Gut Feeling? It Could Pay Out Big on Polymarket

Iran War Polymarket Odds: What is the Diplomatic Backdrop Traders Are Watching?

Pricing is influenced by ongoing negotiations, as Reuters reported on September 24. U.S. and Iranian negotiators are considering a phased deal where Tehran would reopen the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for lifting the U.S. economic blockade. Both sides are hesitant to yield leverage; the U.S. maintains economic pressure, while Iran controls a key shipping artery for global oil.

However, current conditions do not trigger resolution under market rules. Polymarket specifies that only official announcements from the U.S. government can count for contract resolution, excluding speculation or conditional statements.

This discrepancy between market sentiment and strict legal requirements is causing outcome expectations to shift later in the timeline. Observers can also see how the Iran-U.S. ceasefire proposal is affecting Bitcoin price expectations, reflecting broader risk sentiment.

What the Full Ladder of Contracts Actually Shows

Polymarket’s blockade market features multiple deadline contracts that gauge the odds of a qualifying announcement on specific dates. These contracts can’t be combined into a single event probability, as each one represents a distinct bet.

Together, they suggest traders expect the diplomatic process to extend beyond the current news cycle. Once a qualifying announcement is made, it resolves as “Yes,” even if the blockade later continues or if a partial concession is made; such concessions do not qualify.

This distinction is important, as past U.S.-Iran ceasefire agreements have quickly unraveled, reflecting a tendency for narrower resolutions, similar to market bets on the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, which require specific triggers for resolution.

Got a Gut Feeling? It Could Pay Out Big on Polymarket

Total volume across the event stands at $33,486,973, with liquidity of $519,322 as of the last update at 09:07:57 UTC Tuesday. The March 31, 2027 contract – the current price leader – carries relatively thin volume of just $24,290, meaning its 74.5% Yes print reflects a smaller pool of capital than the headline number suggests.

The heaviest trading has run through nearer-dated contracts already priced for near-certain No outcomes: the September 30 deadline alone has drawn $5,238,179 in volume against a mere 3.3% Yes price, and October 31 has seen $2,604,557 change hands at 24.5% Yes.

December 31 sits between the two extremes at $2,596,836 in volume and 57.9%. Yes. That distribution suggests most capital has already been deployed betting against a quick resolution, leaving the March contract as a comparatively low-conviction, low-liquidity outlier at the top of the ladder, a dynamic worth weighing against how Polymarket’s NATO-related contracts have similarly shown thin markets producing headline-grabbing but fragile probability prints.

The post Iran War Polymarket Odds: $33.5M Placed on a 2027 Blockade End appeared first on Cryptonews.

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