Crypto World
Crypto Has 559 Million Users Nobody’s Talking About It
More users than ever. Less capital than ever. That contradiction tells you everything about where crypto actually is and why the entire marketing playbook needs to change.
The Number That Should Be Everywhere
559 million people worldwide now hold or use cryptocurrency.
That’s close to one in ten internet users on the planet.
That’s more than the entire population of the European Union.
That’s more users than Twitter at its peak. More than LinkedIn. More than TikTok had in its first three years.
559 million people. Using crypto. Right now.
And the market is down 48% from its all-time high.
That contradiction should be the most discussed story in crypto. Instead, everyone’s watching the price chart.
What The Numbers Actually Say
Let’s look at both data points together:
559 million users worldwide, the highest adoption number in crypto’s history, driven by regulatory clarity in major markets, spot ETF access in the US, and MiCA implementation across the EU.
$2.19 trillion total market cap, significantly below the October 2025 all-time high of $4.27 trillion.
In any other industry, record users with declining revenue would trigger an immediate strategic pivot. In crypto, everyone just keeps watching Bitcoin’s price.
But the data is telling a clear story if you’re willing to read it:
Crypto stopped being a speculation game. It became infrastructure.
And infrastructure doesn’t pump. Infrastructure just works.
Why More Users With Less Capital Makes Perfect Sense
In crypto’s early years, users and capital moved together. More users meant more buyers. More buyers meant higher prices. Higher prices attracted more users. The cycle was self-reinforcing.
That cycle is breaking, not because crypto is failing, but because it’s maturing.
Here’s what maturity looks like in every industry:
The early internet had millions of users and almost no revenue. Companies were burning cash, valuations were astronomical, and the actual utility was thin.
Then the bubble popped. Valuations collapsed. But users stayed. And the ones who stayed built the infrastructure that made the internet indispensable.
Crypto is at that inflection point.
559 million people using crypto aren’t all speculating. Many of them are using stablecoins for remittances. Using DeFi for savings in countries with broken banking systems. Using NFTs for digital ownership. Using crypto rails for cross-border payments.
They’re not trading. They’re using.
That’s infrastructure adoption. Not speculation adoption. And infrastructure adoption looks completely different on a price chart.
The Marketing Problem Nobody’s Solving
Here’s the strategic crisis that the 559 million number reveals:
Crypto’s entire marketing playbook was built for speculation. It doesn’t work for infrastructure.
Speculation marketing is easy: show price charts going up, promise life-changing returns, create FOMO, drive adoption through greed and fear.
It works. We know it works. It drove crypto from nothing to $4.27 trillion in market cap.
But it attracts the wrong users. Users who leave when the chart goes down. Users who have no loyalty to the technology because their loyalty was to the returns. Users who become critics when the price drops.
Infrastructure marketing is completely different: show reliability, prove utility, build trust slowly, demonstrate real-world use cases that don’t depend on price.
It’s slower. It’s harder. It requires patience that crypto culture was never built for.
But it’s the only marketing that works when your product has 559 million users and a declining price.
The Audience That Exists vs The Audience You’re Marketing To
Right now, most crypto marketing is aimed at a target audience that looks like this:
- Retail investor looking for the next 10x
- Crypto-native who already understands the technology
- Institutional investor looking for portfolio diversification
- Trader looking for volatility to profit from
But the 559 million people actually using crypto look like this:
- A Filipino worker sending remittances home cheaper than Western Union
- A Venezuelan saving in USDC because their local currency lost 80% this year
- A Nigerian freelancer getting paid in crypto because their bank won’t process international wires
- A small business owner in Southeast Asia using stablecoins to pay suppliers
- A European investor holding Bitcoin as a hedge through a Fidelity ETF
These people aren’t reading crypto Twitter. They’re not watching Bitcoin price alerts. They don’t care about the next altcoin cycle.
They care about whether the technology keeps working. Whether the fees stay low. Whether the product is reliable.
That’s a completely different user. And almost nobody is marketing to them.
Why The Price Chart Is The Wrong Metric
Crypto measures success in price. Every project’s homepage has a price chart. Every announcement mentions market cap. Every media outlet covers price movements first.
But with 559 million users, price is increasingly the wrong metric.
Think about how we measure the success of other infrastructure:
We don’t measure the internet’s success by the stock price of backbone providers. We measure it by uptime, speed, users, and transactions.
We don’t measure electricity grids by commodity prices alone. We measure them by reliability, coverage, and consumption.
We don’t measure banking infrastructure by bank stock prices. We measure it by accounts, transactions, and access.
Crypto has 559 million users, trillions in transaction volume, and critical infrastructure for millions of people’s financial lives.
And everyone’s staring at a chart that’s down from its ATH.
The measurement framework is wrong. And until the measurement framework changes, the marketing will keep targeting the wrong people.
The Trust Problem At Scale
Here’s what makes marketing to 559 million users fundamentally different from marketing to speculators:
Speculators need excitement. Infrastructure users need trust.
A speculator buys because they think the price will go up. Trust is almost irrelevant, if the price goes up, the speculator is happy regardless of whether the technology is trustworthy.
An infrastructure user relies on the technology for real financial needs. Trust is everything. A single hack, a single regulatory action, a single project failure can drive them away permanently, not because they lost money speculating, but because they lost something they were actually depending on.
Roughly 559 million people worldwide now hold or use crypto, close to one in ten internet users, largely due to strong regulatory clarity in major markets, spot ETF access in the US, and MiCA implementation across the EU. The audience has grown and moved further into the mainstream, yet trust is harder to earn. They are not looking for the next 100x thread on X. They are researching before they trust, and AI assistants are becoming part of that process.
That last line is critical. The new crypto user isn’t reading a whitepaper or following influencers. They’re asking ChatGPT if the product is safe before they use it.
Marketing that worked in 2021, hype, FOMO, influencer promotion, doesn’t build that kind of trust. It actively destroys it.
What Infrastructure Marketing Actually Looks Like
If you’re building crypto products for the 559 million who are already here and the next 559 million who haven’t arrived yet the marketing has to change completely.
Stop leading with price. Start leading with utility.
“Bitcoin is up 40% this year” speaks to speculators.
“Over 559 million people use crypto for real financial needs, here’s what they’re using it for” speaks to infrastructure users.
Stop creating FOMO. Start building trust.
FOMO drives speculation cycles. Trust drives infrastructure adoption. They require completely different content strategies, completely different channel choices, completely different measurement frameworks.
Stop targeting crypto natives. Start targeting the unmet need.
The Filipino worker sending remittances doesn’t identify as a “crypto user.” They identify as someone trying to send money home cheaply and reliably. Speak to the need. The technology is just how you solve it.
Stop measuring by price. Start measuring by utility.
Transaction volume. Active wallets. Use cases solved. Problems eliminated. These are infrastructure metrics. They don’t spike and crash with market cycles. They grow steadily over years.
The Opportunity In The Contradiction
The gap between 559 million users and a declining market cap isn’t a crisis. It’s an opportunity.
It means there’s an enormous, largely unaddressed audience of people who are already using crypto for real purposes but aren’t being spoken to by crypto marketing.
It means the next wave of adoption won’t come from convincing speculators to buy more. It’ll come from showing infrastructure users that crypto can solve more of their problems.
It means the brands that figure out how to market infrastructure, reliability, trust, utility, accessibility, will build something more durable than any price cycle.
The speculation era made crypto rich. The infrastructure era will make it indispensable.
Those are different goals. They require different strategies. And almost nobody is building the second strategy yet.
The Question Every Crypto Marketer Should Be Asking
Not “how do we make people excited about the price?”
But: “What are 559 million people actually using this for? And how do we make that experience better, more accessible, and more trustworthy for the next 559 million?”
That’s the marketing question crypto needs to be asking in 2026.
The users are already here. The capital will follow, but only if the infrastructure is worth trusting.
What are you actually using crypto for in 2026? Not investing using. Because that answer is more important than any price prediction.
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Stripe has reportedly finalized an agreement to acquire AI model-routing platform OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, months after the startup was valued at $1.3 billion in its latest funding round.
Summary
- Stripe has reportedly agreed to acquire OpenRouter for more than $7 billion.
- OpenRouter was valued at $1.3 billion after raising $113 million in May.
- The platform provides access to more than 500 AI models from over 80 providers through a single interface.
- Stripe has been expanding its infrastructure for AI agents and machine initiated payments.
Bloomberg reported on Sunday that Stripe had reached a deal to buy OpenRouter, citing people familiar with the matter, while TechCrunch later reported the transaction and noted that Stripe had not formally announced the acquisition.
A Stripe spokesperson declined to confirm the deal, telling TechCrunch that the company “does not comment on rumors or speculation.” The reported agreement therefore remains unconfirmed by Stripe or OpenRouter despite multiple reports that negotiations have concluded.
OpenRouter gives developers a single interface for accessing hundreds of artificial intelligence models from providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and DeepSeek. Developers can move workloads between models without rebuilding their integrations, while its system also manages billing, routing and fallback providers when services become unavailable.
The model has turned OpenRouter into a fast-growing layer between AI developers and the companies supplying the underlying models. OpenRouter currently lists more than 500 models and over 80 providers under its paid plans, according to its website.
CEO Alex Atallah has previously described the service as the “Stripe for AI,” comparing its single integration for multiple AI providers with Stripe’s role in simplifying access to payment infrastructure. Axios reported the comparison in July as Stripe was already discussing a possible takeover of the startup.
OpenRouter acquisition follows rapid growth in AI usage
OpenRouter’s reported sale price comes less than three months after a major financing round that placed a much lower value on the business.
The company announced in May that it had raised $113 million in Series B funding led by CapitalG, Alphabet’s independent growth fund. NVentures, ServiceNow Ventures, MongoDB Ventures, Snowflake Ventures, Databricks Ventures, AMP PBC and Pace Capital participated alongside existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures.
TechCrunch reported at the time that the financing valued OpenRouter at about $1.3 billion on a post-money basis. A $40 million Series A completed in June 2025 had put its estimated valuation at about $547 million, meaning the reported Stripe agreement would value the startup at more than five times its May level.
Usage increased at a similar pace. OpenRouter said in May that weekly processing volume had reached 25 trillion tokens, equivalent to about 100 trillion tokens per month, compared with 5 trillion tokens per week six months earlier. The company described the increase as fivefold growth in processing volume.
OpenRouter was already serving more than 400 models across over 60 providers by June 2025, when Menlo Ventures said the platform had more than 2.5 million developers. The company has since expanded the number of models and providers available through its interface.
OpenRouter’s role in AI infrastructure has also extended into decentralized computing. A June io.net development covered by crypto.news identified the decentralized GPU network as one of the inference providers using OpenRouter, with io.net reporting more than 4 billion inference tokens processed each day at the time.
Stripe has expanded into AI agent payments
Stripe’s reported OpenRouter deal comes as the payments company builds infrastructure designed for transactions initiated by AI software.
During July talks over a possible acquisition, Axios cited an earlier Stripe statement saying that as tokens become more interchangeable with money, real-time streamed payments would form an important part of the company’s economic infrastructure for AI.
Stripe has already entered machine-to-machine payments through Coinbase’s x402 protocol. As reported in May, Stripe launched x402 payments on Base that allow AI agents to pay for APIs, data and computing resources with USDC.
The protocol lets software agents make payments for online services without relying on the account and checkout systems built around human customers. Coinbase has positioned x402 as a payment standard for services including data access, API calls and other machine-readable products.
Stripe is also among the companies supporting the x402 Foundation. Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, American Express, Mastercard, Visa, Circle and other technology and payments companies have backed the standard as autonomous software begins handling more commercial tasks.
By April, Coinbase had also launched Agentic.market, a service where AI agents can find and purchase online services through x402. Its agent services marketplace included providers covering inference, data, media, infrastructure and trading, with OpenAI among the named inference services available at launch.
A later Keyrock study found that AI agents had settled more than $73 million across 176 million transactions during a 12-month period, with USDC accounting for 98.6% of payments tracked in the report. The findings placed Stripe, Coinbase, Google, Visa and American Express among companies developing different approaches to machine payments.
Stripe could control model routing and transaction infrastructure
OpenRouter would give Stripe infrastructure at another part of an AI agent’s workflow if the reported transaction closes.
OpenRouter handles the model-selection side by giving applications access to different AI systems through one API. Its documentation says customers can use a unified interface and billing system while taking advantage of provider fallbacks, allowing requests to move between available providers when required.
Stripe, meanwhile, supplies payment infrastructure used by internet businesses and has been expanding its work around stablecoins, AI billing and autonomous payments. The Wall Street Journal reported in July that OpenRouter already used Stripe to accept payments from its customers, meaning the companies had an existing commercial relationship before acquisition talks emerged.
The Journal reported on July 23 that Stripe was discussing an OpenRouter purchase that could value the company at roughly $10 billion, although negotiations had not been completed and other companies had shown interest. The reported price under the finalized agreement is now more than $7 billion.
OpenRouter’s model-neutral approach remains central to its product
OpenRouter has built its service around giving developers access to competing AI models without requiring separate integrations with every provider.
Its current pricing page lists more than 500 models from over 80 providers, while features include automatic routing and the ability for customers to select preferred vendors. OpenRouter says underlying provider prices are passed through without a model-level markup, while the platform charges customers when they purchase credits.
The structure allows developers to select models based on factors including price, capabilities, and availability instead of committing an application to one AI company.
Researchers have also used OpenRouter’s traffic to study AI adoption. A study released this year by researchers from OpenRouter and Andreessen Horowitz analyzed more than 100 trillion tokens of real-world interactions across different models, tasks and locations, finding substantial use of open-weight models as well as increased agent-based inference.
Stripe has not disclosed whether OpenRouter would continue operating independently, become part of its existing developer products, or be integrated with its AI payment infrastructure if the reported acquisition is completed. No public announcement from either company has detailed product changes for OpenRouter users following the reported agreement.
In this photo illustration, the stock market information of Synchrony Financial displayed on a smartphone while the logo of Synchrony Financial seen in the background.
Igor Golovniov | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Editor’s note: A previous version of this story, based on information provided by a Synchrony Financial executive, mischaracterized the collaboration between Synchrony and OpenAI. Details, quotes and characterizations attributed to Synchrony and the executive have been removed. A corrected version is below.
Synchrony Financial, the credit card issuer for brands including Amazon, Walmart and Lowe’s, on Monday announced a collaboration with OpenAI allowing the artificial intelligence company’s models to power the card company’s consumer portals.
“AI is creating an opportunity to reimagine the entire commerce experience, from how customers discover products to how they pay, earn rewards, and build loyalty,” said Kaylin Voss, vice president of Americas and Industries at OpenAI, in a press release.
“Synchrony is approaching that opportunity from both sides: bringing OpenAI into the experiences it creates for customers and partners, while deploying our most advanced models and tools across its own enterprise,” she said.
By using OpenAI’s models, Synchrony hopes it can remain relevant in a future where AI agents help to research and purchase items. The partnership, which is in its early stages, is a step toward enabling Synchrony customers to have smoother online shopping experiences.
Separately, Synchrony said it is launching a ChatGPT plugin that lets consumers browse its marketplace deals, promotional financing and partner offers, and that it is deploying OpenAI’s latest models internally to speed up product development.
The moves come as OpenAI prepares for its massive potential initial public offering, adding pressure on the company to turn ChatGPT into a broader platform for online commerce.
The People’s Bank of China has added eight commercial banks to its digital yuan operating network, taking the number of e-CNY service operators to 30 as the central bank continues expanding access to its state-backed digital currency.
Summary
- China’s central bank has added eight banks to the digital yuan network, taking the number of operators to 30.
- The new banks will begin offering e CNY services after completing business and technical preparations.
- The expansion follows changes allowing verified digital yuan wallets to earn interest from January 2026.
- China has also increased cross border e CNY trials, including a July payment between China and Singapore.
According to an Aug. 17 statement from the People’s Bank of China, Ping An Bank, Hengfeng Bank, China Bohai Bank, Bank of Shanghai, Bank of Hangzhou, Huishang Bank, Bank of Changsha and Guangxi Beibu Gulf Bank have been approved as banking institutions permitted to operate digital yuan services.
The eight banks have also been connected to the central bank-side digital renminbi system, putting the technical link needed for them to provide e-CNY services in place. Customer-facing operations will begin after each institution completes its remaining business and technical preparations, the PBOC said.
With the additions, the number of authorized digital yuan operators has risen from 22 to 30. The central bank said it will continue bringing more institutions into the system under market-oriented and rule-based principles while seeking an open and fair competitive environment for digital renminbi services.
Digital yuan operator network has expanded rapidly in 2026
The latest additions come just over four months after the PBOC approved another group of banks to provide digital yuan services.
On April 2, the central bank added 12 institutions, including China CITIC Bank, China Everbright Bank, Hua Xia Bank, China Minsheng Bank, China Guangfa Bank, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, China Zheshang Bank, Bank of Ningbo, Bank of Jiangsu, Bank of Beijing, Bank of Nanjing and Bank of Suzhou.
That round increased the number of banking operators to 22, according to the PBOC announcement at the time. The newly approved institutions were similarly required to complete business and technical preparations before commencing digital yuan operations.
Adding another eight banks in August has taken the network to 30 operators within the same year, extending participation to institutions including national joint-stock banks and several city and regional commercial banks.
The PBOC tied the latest expansion to China’s 15th Five-Year Plan for 2026–2030, which calls for the steady development of the digital renminbi. The central bank said the additional operators are intended to improve access to e-CNY services and respond to demand for payment options that are secure, convenient and efficient.
China has been developing the digital yuan through a two-tier structure in which the central bank controls the underlying currency and infrastructure while approved commercial institutions handle services for users. Earlier PBOC documentation described commercial banks as a key part of the distribution model, allowing the central bank to use existing financial infrastructure instead of serving every retail user directly.
Digital yuan now operates more like a bank deposit
The expansion of the operator network follows a major change to how digital yuan balances are treated within China’s banking system.
Beginning Jan. 1, 2026, banks were allowed to pay interest on verified digital yuan wallets after the PBOC changed the framework governing e-CNY balances.
As crypto.news previously reported, verified digital yuan balances became eligible for interest under the same self-regulatory arrangements used to determine rates on conventional deposits. The balances also received protection under China’s national deposit insurance system.
Before the change, the e-CNY had primarily operated as a digital form of cash. Under the revised structure, commercial banks can manage eligible digital yuan balances within their asset-liability operations, while non-bank payment firms must keep customer reserve funds in digital yuan at a 100% reserve ratio, according to the PBOC framework.
Official figures cited when the changes were announced showed that the digital yuan had processed 3.48 billion transactions by November 2025. Chinese authorities have continued testing new uses for the currency after years of domestic pilot programs involving retail payments, public services and commercial transactions.
The addition of more commercial banks gives the PBOC another route to extend e-CNY services through institutions that already maintain customer relationships and payment infrastructure across different parts of China.
Cross-border digital yuan use has also advanced
Alongside domestic banking changes, Chinese institutions have continued testing digital yuan infrastructure for cross-border payments.
In July, the Shanghai branch of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and ICBC Singapore completed the first China-Singapore payment through the upgraded Digital Currency Express comprehensive settlement platform, known as CBETS.
The transaction covered nearly 10 million yuan in import shipping costs for a subsidiary of a centrally owned enterprise. Funds were settled entirely in digital renminbi and reached the recipient in Singapore on the same day, according to Mobile Payment Network.
CBETS was developed by the International Operation Center for the digital renminbi under the guidance of the PBOC’s Digital Currency Research Institute. The upgraded infrastructure combines earlier cross-border payment, blockchain service and digital asset systems while supporting ISO 20022 messaging standards used across international financial networks.
ICBC has also established digital yuan payment and collection links involving Singapore and Laos through the system, while its Inner Mongolia branch completed a 220 million yuan transfer to Hong Kong through the multilateral CBDC bridge, according to the same July report.
Guangdong is seeking more digital yuan payment trials
Regional authorities have also included e-CNY expansion in financial policy proposals for the 2026–2030 period.
Earlier in August, Guangdong published a draft development plan proposing more cross-border e-CNY trials within the China (Guangdong) Pilot Free Trade Zone. The consultation document called for additional digital yuan use cases alongside cross-border financial products, offshore finance, green finance, asset management and fintech testing.
The Guangdong proposal also called for larger cross-border digital yuan payment programs and further development of the Cross-boundary Wealth Management Connect scheme. Public consultation on the draft is scheduled to remain open until Sept. 5.
According to the same proposal, financial institutions in the free trade zone could also be encouraged to develop cross-border supply chain finance products and intellectual property pledge financing, while authorities intend to continue trials involving cross-border credit asset transfers and multi-currency integrated accounts.
The upgraded international digital yuan platform had signed direct participant agreements with an initial group of 26 financial institutions by June, including ICBC Asia, Bank of China Hong Kong, Standard Chartered China and ICBC branches operating in Singapore, Thailand, Laos, Macau and Qatar.
Blockstream has launched Blockstream Swaps in beta testing after noncustodial swap provider Boltz suspended its services following months of automated probing and several exploits.
Summary
- Blockstream has launched Blockstream Swaps in beta after Boltz suspended its swap services.
- Boltz blamed months of automated, AI assisted probing and several exploits for the suspension.
- Blockstream said its swap service was already in development and will support transfers across Bitcoin, Lightning and Liquid.
- Boltz said no user funds were at risk because its architecture is self custodial.
Blockstream said in an Aug. 10 announcement that the in-house service is already being tested with select participants, with development now being accelerated after Boltz stopped processing swaps on Aug. 3. The Bitcoin infrastructure company said the product was under development before the shutdown and is intended to add another option for users moving funds between Bitcoin, Lightning and Liquid.
Boltz said its suspension followed a steady increase in automated, AI-assisted attempts to probe its infrastructure, along with several exploits that the team said were contained. The company kept its swap services offline because attackers were iterating faster than its developers could identify and patch weaknesses.
“Attackers now iterate faster than a team our size can find and patch,” Boltz said in the statement quoted by Blockstream.
The swap provider said customer funds were never at risk because its architecture is self-custodial. Refund mechanisms also remained available while normal swap operations were disabled.
As crypto.news reported on Aug. 4, Boltz initially restricted swaps involving assets such as USDT, USDC, WBTC, TBTC and RBTC after identifying a bug in its Ethereum Virtual Machine integration on Aug. 1. Bitcoin, Lightning and Liquid swaps remained available at that stage before the company suspended all swap services two days later.
Blockstream Swaps enters beta after Boltz shutdown
Blockstream described its new service as an in-house swaps feature built for the Lightning and Liquid networks, with organizations now able to request access to the beta program.
Development was already “well into” its testing process before the Boltz suspension, according to the company. Blockstream said the recent disruption reinforced its decision to speed up the rollout, while stressing that the product is not intended to displace existing providers.
“We are not seeking to replace any providers,” Blockstream said. “We see Blockstream Swaps as a much-needed addition to improve redundancy and resilience to the ecosystem.”
Boltz had previously worked with Blockstream and other Bitcoin applications that relied on its infrastructure to move assets between Bitcoin mainnet, Lightning and Liquid. Its Aug. 3 shutdown also affected services at Bull Bitcoin, Aqua and ZEUS that depended on the provider’s swap infrastructure, according to the earlier report.
For Blockstream, adding its own implementation gives its ecosystem another swap provider without requiring users to hand custody of their bitcoin to an intermediary during the transaction.
The company said Blockstream Swaps can support users holding BTC on Bitcoin mainnet or LBTC on Liquid who need to interact with Lightning without managing Lightning channels directly.
Atomic swaps let users move bitcoin between networks
At the technical level, Blockstream said an atomic swap lets two parties exchange assets without relying on a trusted intermediary to hold both sides of the trade.
The transaction is structured so that both transfers complete or neither one does. If the swap cannot be completed within its specified conditions, the funds remain recoverable by their original owners.
Boltz uses a form built around hashed time-locked contracts, or HTLCs. Under the setup described by Blockstream, one party generates a secret and publishes its cryptographic hash, while payments on both sides of the swap are locked to the same condition.
Revealing the secret to claim one payment allows the other side to use it to complete the corresponding transaction. Timelocks provide a refund route when the swap is not completed within the required period.
Boltz later incorporated Taproot and MuSig2 into the construction, according to Blockstream, allowing cooperative transactions to settle through a normal key-path spend while keeping the script path available as a fallback.
Different transaction directions also use separate swap types. A submarine swap moves BTC or LBTC into Lightning, while a reverse submarine swap takes Lightning funds back to Bitcoin mainnet or Liquid. Chain swaps allow BTC and LBTC to be exchanged without a custodial intermediary.
Atomic swaps have formed part of Bitcoin development for years. An earlier Liquid Network launch report covered Blockstream’s 2018 rollout of the Bitcoin sidechain, which introduced L-BTC as a bitcoin-pegged asset designed for faster transfers and other functions outside the main chain.
Blockstream also developed LiquiDEX, a separate swap protocol for exchanging two assets issued on Liquid in a single transaction. According to the company, LiquiDEX does not require the same hashlock and timelock structure used in HTLC-based swaps.
Instead, a maker signs an input using SIGHASH_SINGLE and SIGHASH_ANYONECANPAY, allowing a taker to add inputs and outputs without invalidating the maker’s signature. Blockstream said the protocol is already used by platforms including SideSwap and can support trustless over-the-counter trading and order books.
Blockstream Swaps targets Lightning channel complexity
Lightning users normally need access to channels with enough liquidity to send or receive payments. Running Lightning directly can require users or service providers to operate a node, open channels, commit capital and obtain inbound liquidity.
Blockstream said its swap model is designed to handle that conversion when a payment is made, allowing a user to keep BTC or LBTC and exchange it into the required Lightning payment as part of the transaction.
Under one example given by the company, a user can pay a Lightning invoice using a balance already held on Bitcoin mainnet or Liquid without first opening and funding a Lightning channel.
Incoming Lightning payments can also be converted into LBTC. Blockstream said its wallet setup allows an incoming Lightning transaction to settle as LBTC into a wallet secured with its Jade hardware device while Jade remains offline during receipt of the payment.
Merchants can similarly accept a Lightning payment and settle the funds on their preferred supported network, according to the company.
Blockstream’s own product lineup already spans the three networks involved in the swap service. Its current wallet supports on-chain Bitcoin, Lightning and Liquid, while the company also develops Core Lightning and operates the Liquid Network.
Boltz, meanwhile, has not announced a date for restoring its swap services. Its Aug. 3 notice said the API would remain available for cooperative refunds, while unilateral refunds would continue to work without depending on Boltz infrastructure. Support services also remained available while the team assessed the attacks and its next steps.
Disclosure: This content is provided by a third party. Neither crypto.news nor the author of this article endorses any product mentioned on this page. Users should conduct their own research before taking any action related to the company.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has invoked unprecedented emergency authority to allow prediction market Kalshi to continue operating, directly responding to a lawsuit filed by New York State Attorney General Letitia James.
Summary
- CFTC used emergency authority to keep Kalshi operating as New York moved to shut down the prediction market.
- New York accused Kalshi of operating without a state gaming license and is seeking penalties and forfeiture of profits.
- The CFTC maintains that event contracts fall under federal derivatives law and should not be subject to state gaming rules.
- Kalshi remains locked in legal disputes with several states over whether its event contracts amount to regulated derivatives or gambling.
The CFTC has already sued nine states– Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, Kentucky, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin. The Commission has also filed amicus briefs in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth and Ninth Circuits and the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts– in an ongoing turf war claiming exclusive jurisdiction over event contracts under the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA), over prediction markets asserting that event and prediction contracts are federally overseen swaps, making state-level gambling bans or enforcement unconstitutional and preempted.
State attorneys general –a broad coalition of 44 state attorneys including New York State Attorney General Letitia James — counter that sports-related event contracts bypass local gaming compacts, consumer protections, and state-regulated sports betting frameworks. For example, Nevada maintains a strict, court-enforced ban against Kalshi for offering unlicensed event contracts, centering on core disputes over state gaming control, federal preemption, and geofencing compliance.
The Nevada Gaming Control Board argued that Kalshi’s sports and election contracts constitute illegal, unlicensed sports pooling, while Kalshi claimed exclusive federal oversight under the Commodity Exchange Act. State judges backed local regulators, issuing a temporary restraining order followed by a preliminary injunction blocking Kalshi from offering sports, elections, and entertainment contracts without a state gaming license. Federal and appellate courts largely favored the state’s right to regulate local gambling, making Nevada one of the most aggressive states enforcing restrictions against prediction markets.
Regulators and Kalshi entered agreements requiring the platform to implement strict geofencing to block Nevada-based users from accessing restricted event contracts. State authorities pushed for strict daily financial penalties and oversight audits if the platform failed to completely block local trade execution.
These cases remain active in federal courts with no definitive nationwide final outcome yet, though the CFTC has actively used emergency powers to block state enforcement.
The unparalleled emergency action by CFTC was triggered after KalshiEX, LLC notified the Commission of that New York Governor Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit against the prediction market Kalshi on July 31, 2026, accusing the platform of running an illegal, unlicensed gambling operation. The state seeks to halt its operations, force the forfeiture of profits, and demand heavy financial penalties of more than $36 billion in damages.
State arguments and allegations include Kalshi lacks a permit from the New York State Gaming Commission. The platform allows 18-to-20-year-olds to wager, while New York law requires sports bettors to be at least 21. The company bypasses state taxes that normally fund public schools and addiction treatment. Event and sports contracts are pure games of chance rather than legitimate financial trades.
The standoff centers on a fundamental disagreement regarding the legal definition of prediction market contracts with the CFTC maintaining that prediction platforms function as national derivatives exchanges offering federally regulated “swaps”. Under the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA), the agency claims exclusive jurisdiction to ensure a uniform national market and maintain market stability.
Kalshi’s Betting Contracts
Kalshi sells to anyone who is 18 years old and older in the United States and most other countries federally regulated binary Yes/No financial event contracts tied to real-world outcomes across economics, politics, sports, weather, and culture. Each contract settles at $1.00 if your prediction is correct and $0 if it is wrong.
Economics & Finance: Inflation rates, GDP growth, interest rate decisions by the Federal Reserve, and unemployment numbers.
Politics & Elections: Congressional decisions, government policy outcomes, local or national election results, gruesome war outcomes with “Stew, a 35-year-old from Montana, wagering $10 on the odds that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be “out” by 1 March.
Sports: Pro and college league outcomes, game results, and player performance metrics (including NFL, NHL, MLB, and NBA).
Weather & Climate: Temperature benchmarks, hurricane landfalls, and seasonal climate patterns.
Culture & Novelty: Entertainment awards, box office performance, auction/collectible markets (such as fine art and specialty assets) and entertainment event contracts hosting high-volume markets on specific high-profile celebrity weddings such as multi-million dollar trading activity around Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s events.
The Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) regulates U.S. derivatives and commodities markets
The CEA requires the Commission to provide a uniform national market in derivatives transactions. As part of this obligation, the CFTC ensures public confidence in its markets by safeguarding market resilience and orderliness. The Commission is also tasked with providing competitive, fair, and efficient markets that protect the price discovery process of trading in the centralized derivatives markets. Major market disruptions hamper these efforts. CEA primarily gives the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) authority over futures contracts, commodity options, swaps, and certain event contracts/prediction markets.
Futures Contracts: Are agreements to buy or sell a specific commodity or financial instrument at a set price on a specific future date.
Commodity Options: Are contracts giving the buyer the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell a futures contract or commodity at a set price within a set time.
Swaps: Are Over-the-counter or cleared financial agreements to exchange cash flows or risk based on interest rates, currencies, or commodities (non-security-based swaps).
Event Contracts: Binary options or prediction-style contracts where payouts depend on the occurrence or non-occurrence of specific real-world occurrences (such as economic indicators or weather outcomes) listed on designated exchanges which can be found at CFTC Industry Filings Registry .
“New York intends to make event contract derivatives waste away under its iron curtain of state gaming laws before the courts get the chance to issue final rulings,” said Chairman Michael S. Selig. “Congress did not intend for derivatives exchanges to be regulated under a patchwork of state gaming laws. These are financial exchanges that offer financial instruments and operate across state lines. They match the bid from a resident of one state with the offer of a resident from another state and submit the trade to a clearinghouse that backstops the transactions of customers throughout the country. New York has no business regulating these interstate financial markets. The Commission is required by law to ensure order in these markets, and that is what we have done today.”
I wonder since when betting on the odds that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be “out” by 1 March or contracts on whether Taylor Swift will get married or not are financial contracts. I suppose the courts will eventually decide.
About the Author:
Selva Ozelli Esq, CPA, is an international digital asset legal expert and author of Sustainably Investing in Digital Assets Globally and an award winning artist. Her writings are translated into 45 languages and republished in over 200 global publications. She is recognized as an expert media/TV commentator on global AI, digital asset regulation, tax, and technology matters.
Disclosure: This content is provided by a third party. Neither crypto.news nor the author of this article endorses any product mentioned on this page. Users should conduct their own research before taking any action related to the company.
Harmony has proposed rolling back its blockchain to two Aug. 11 checkpoints, a recovery plan that would discard more than 109,000 regular transactions as the network removes ONE created through a forged mint.
Summary
- Harmony plans to roll back its blockchain to two checkpoints from Aug. 11 following a forged ONE mint.
- More than 109,000 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions would be discarded under the recovery plan.
- One forged mint wallet moved 2.385 trillion ONE through 477 successful transfers in 106 seconds.
- Harmony said exchanges, bridges and law enforcement are assisting with the investigation.
According to Harmony’s latest incident update on X, validators would retain shard 0 block 92,730,034 and shard 1 block 94,978,278, both recorded at 11:25:37 p.m. UTC on Aug. 11, before restarting the network from replacement databases built around those checkpoints.
Under the plan, new blocks would begin at heights 92,730,035 on shard 0 and 94,978,279 on shard 1. Harmony said client version v2026.1.2 has been configured to reject the abnormal block hashes linked to the incident, preventing validators from accepting the affected chain history after the restart.
The first confirmed forged mint reached shard 0 at block 92,730,036, according to the network. Block 92,730,035 contained no regular or staking transactions, incoming receipts or gas usage, while its state remained unchanged from block 92,730,034.
Harmony said it selected block 92,730,034 to provide a one-block safety buffer. The database, recovery scripts and validator procedures had also been prepared and reviewed around that block, while changing the checkpoint at a late stage could leave validators working from different recovery targets.
Shard 1 was not where the forged mint occurred. Harmony said its corresponding checkpoint was included as a precaution using the same timestamp.
Harmony rollback would use replacement databases
The recovery plan would replace the affected shard databases instead of using Harmony’s existing in-place rewind function.
According to the team, the network’s –revert function mainly moves chain heads and does not fully clear later receipts, indexes, snapshots and cross-shard information. Leaving some of that data behind could preserve an attack route or cause validators to reach different states.
Harmony said a replacement database gives validators a single reviewed state from which to resume consensus.
The team also considered burning or repairing the forged ONE directly, but said the tokens had already passed through exchanges, decentralized exchange pools, contracts and numerous wallets. Removing assets at individual destinations could therefore affect funds belonging to unrelated users.
A blacklist was rejected because it would leave the forged supply in existence while potentially restricting wallets holding legitimate assets. Selectively replaying transactions was also ruled out because the state of the replacement chain would differ from the discarded chain, meaning identical transactions could produce different results.
Token migration was another option reviewed by Harmony, but the team said it would cause substantially more disruption.
The decision comes after another blockchain faced a similar choice following an exploit. In December 2025, Flow revised rollback plans following a $3.9 million execution-layer exploit, dropping an initial full rollback proposal in favor of targeted token burns after bridge operators and other participants raised concerns about the effect on legitimate activity. crypto.news reported at the time that Flow also planned a phased network restart and restrictions on flagged accounts.
More than 109,000 transactions face removal
Harmony’s rollback would discard all blocks created after the selected checkpoints, including regular transactions made by users during the affected period.
To measure the impact, the team built a shard 0 archive covering blocks 92,730,035 through 92,871,662. The dataset contained 141,628 consecutive blocks, 109,126 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions, with 109,441 exact transaction-to-receipt matches.
Harmony said it checked parent-hash continuity and receipt completeness throughout the archived range.
Automated activity accounted for most of the transaction count. Of the 109,126 regular transactions, 104,545, or 95.80%, were classified as automated. DEX automation represented 99,863 transactions, including 75,430 successful swaps and 11,804 failed bot attempts.
As a result, Harmony cautioned that the number of discarded transactions should not be treated as the number of affected users.
The team also examined whether some regular transactions could be safely restored after the rollback. Only 22 were simple native transfers without an obvious dependency in the available data, but Harmony said even those could not automatically be considered safe for replay.
Another 860 native transfers raised questions involving balances, funding sources, nonces or later spending. A further 80,630 transactions depended on contract or blockchain state, while 27,614 were failed transactions, incident-linked activity or movements involving exchanges, bridges and consolidation routes.
All 315 staking transactions also depend on chain and epoch state, according to the update.
Harmony said balances, nonces, token approvals, swap deadlines, liquidity pool reserves and staking conditions would change once the replacement chain starts. Under that altered state, a transaction that previously failed could succeed, while a swap, approval or staking transaction could generate a different outcome.
Full EVM traces are also unavailable through the RPC data used in the review, leaving internal contract transfers and storage changes subject to application-specific analysis.
Forged ONE moved through exchanges, pools and bridges
The investigation has separately mapped the movement of the newly created ONE across the network.
According to Harmony, one wallet involved in the forged mint attempted 534 transfers of 5 billion ONE each within 106 seconds. A total of 477 transfers succeeded, moving 2.385 trillion ONE.
Investigators created a time-ordered graph beginning with all wallets associated with the forged mints, separating transactions signed by those wallets from successful transfers, failed attempts and subsequent movements through other addresses.
The traced activity was checked against blocks, transaction receipts and balances through shard 0 block 92,805,850. Harmony said the funds reached standalone wallets, exchange accounts, DEX routers and pools, liquidity provider positions, bridge contracts, wrapped ONE, staking wallets and high-volume service wallets.
When forged ONE became mixed with other assets, the tracing model followed transfers chronologically and capped the amount attributed to the forged tokens at each wallet’s available balance. According to the team, the method was intended to prevent the same tokens from being counted repeatedly as they moved between addresses.
An earlier model traced more than 99.9% of the forged ONE to a wallet or service boundary, while a later version reconciled almost all of the amount across those boundaries and transaction fees at the selected cutoff.
Harmony stressed that route coverage does not mean investigators can identify the individuals controlling every destination. Exchange accounts, pools, contracts and other service clusters can contain funds belonging to many users.
The amount that can be safely destroyed is smaller still, according to the team. Forged tokens left untouched in a standalone wallet may be possible to isolate, while ONE that entered an exchange wallet, liquidity pool, bridge, staking position or another shared balance could no longer be removed in full without risking unrelated assets.
A comparable problem has surfaced in other token-minting attacks. In June, Humanity Protocol disclosed that compromised administrative keys allowed attackers to take control of bridge infrastructure and mint additional H tokens on BNB Smart Chain. The protocol halted affected bridge operations and coordinated with exchanges and law enforcement while investigators tracked the stolen assets.
Investigation continues alongside validator recovery
Harmony said it has made initial progress toward tracing the hacker and is working with exchanges, bridges and law enforcement to preserve records and continue the investigation.
An independent third-party security company also reviewed the incident separately and corroborated the forged mint and the main findings from the fund-flow analysis, according to the network.
Harmony has dealt with a major cross-chain security incident before. Its Horizon Bridge lost about $100 million in June 2022 after private keys controlling the bridge were compromised. The project subsequently worked with exchanges, law enforcement, and blockchain analytics firms to identify the attacker, while raising its hacker bounty to $10 million.
Funds from that attack continued moving months later. In January 2023, on-chain investigators tracked stolen ETH through hundreds of addresses, while Binance and Huobi froze accounts linked to the movement and recovered 124 BTC.
For the current incident, Harmony said it is working with exchanges and bridges to assess the effect of discarding post-checkpoint activity and determine how affected parties can be handled. The team said all blocks after the checkpoints would be removed under the proposed recovery, including regular transactions that were unrelated to the forged mint.
BitMart’s founder Sheldon Xia is facing fresh public pressure as the exchange’s official Chinese-language X account demanded he explain the status of user funds and lay out a verifiable repayment plan. The dispute escalates amid claims of halted withdrawals and concerns that employees have not received final pay or compensation.
Separately, the tokenized-stock market continues to reshuffle as Binance bStocks overtook xStocks to become the second-largest tokenized stock issuer by value less than two months after launch. Across the industry, banks and regulators are also pushing into crypto rails—ranging from new stablecoin distribution in Hong Kong to mandatory crypto tax reporting in Singapore—while other stories highlight custody moves, tokenization pilots, and ongoing legal fights.
Key takeaways
- BitMart’s account demanded founder Sheldon Xia provide a verifiable asset disclosure and repayment plan, warning it will continue presenting evidence to regulators, law enforcement, lawyers, and media.
- Xia rejected the allegations as “fabricated rumors” and said he will pursue police reporting and technical/data forensics after collecting evidence of the posts.
- Binance bStocks surpassed xStocks to become the second-largest tokenized stock issuer, reaching about $624M versus xStocks’ roughly $579M on Aug. 3, based on Token Terminal data.
- Singapore finalized rules requiring crypto firms to report user transactions to the tax department, with timing that starts for new users in 2027 and continues for existing users later in 2027.
- Israel’s Bank Leumi plans to offer trading in Bitcoin, Ether, and Solana via Galaxy Digital’s platform from early 2027.
BitMart demands answers on user funds as Xia pushes back
BitMart’s official Chinese-language X account said some users are unable to withdraw funds and claimed that some employees have not received their final salaries or compensation. It directed Sheldon Xia to explain where user funds are and to produce a repayment plan by a stated deadline.
The account also warned that if Xia does not provide a verifiable disclosure and repayment plan, it will continue submitting supporting evidence to regulators, law enforcement, lawyers, and the media. The thrust of the message is that the exchange wants actionable accountability rather than general statements—particularly where withdrawals are reportedly affected.
Xia responded by calling the accusations “fabricated rumors.” In his reply, he said BitMart had “collected full evidence” of the content posted on X and vowed to file a police report during U.S. daytime hours and send a lawyer’s letter, seeking technical and data forensics.
What to watch in the BitMart dispute
This back-and-forth is more than a public argument; it centers on practical investor questions: whether funds are identifiable, whether withdrawals are genuinely blocked, and what repayment mechanism could be verifiable to affected users. Until there is independent disclosure or a documented plan that can be checked against on-chain activity, custodian reports, or other evidence, both sides’ claims will likely remain difficult for outsiders to validate.
Readers should watch for two key developments: (1) whether regulators or law enforcement filings are made public, and (2) whether any asset disclosure includes details that can be corroborated by third parties.
Tokenized stock market: Binance bStocks climb past xStocks
In a separate thread shaping market infrastructure, Token Terminal data shows Binance bStocks overtaking xStocks to become the second-largest tokenized stock issuer by value. According to the figures cited, bStocks reached about $624 million as of Aug. 3, moving ahead of xStocks at roughly $579 million.
Ondo Finance remained larger in the same snapshot, with total value tracked at about $927 million, according to Token Terminal. Still, the relative ranking change is notable because it happened quickly—less than two months after bStocks began operating.
Rapid growth—and the shifting ranks—behind tokenized equities
The tokenized stock sector appears to be moving faster than many early entrants expected. The same Token Terminal data referenced in the report indicates that a year earlier xStocks led with about $40.7 million, Robinhood-related issuance tracked around $37.2 million, and Ondo was far smaller at roughly $65,000. In contrast, the overall value tracked by Token Terminal has risen sharply from around $80 million to about $2.7 billion.
For investors and traders, these numbers matter because issuer size often correlates with liquidity expectations, listing stability, and integration into trading venues. However, market participants should also treat tracked “value” as a metric that depends on how specific tokens are issued, redeemed, and accounted for on-chain—so it’s worth monitoring methodology as tokenized asset ecosystems evolve.
Banks, stablecoins, and regulation push forward
Israel: Bank Leumi, described as Israel’s largest bank, announced a partnership with Galaxy Digital to let customers trade Bitcoin, Ether, and Solana via the bank’s investment platform beginning in early 2027. The plan is to make these assets available through a dedicated section of the Leumi Trade app, including buy, hold, and sell functions, including through Pepper, Leumi’s mobile banking arm.
Singapore: Singapore finalized regulations that require crypto firms to report user transactions to the tax department. The rules implement the OECD’s Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework into domestic law. The schedule takes effect from Jan. 1, 2027 for new users, while existing users are given time until Dec. 31, 2027.
Hong Kong: In Hong Kong, HashKey Exchange began beta distribution of HKDAP, described as a Hong Kong dollar-backed stablecoin regulated in the territory. HashKey Exchange is positioned as an authorized distributor, with initial retail access limited and early focus placed on institutions as the local stablecoin market continues to develop. The report also noted that the Securities and Futures Commission reportedly identified 65 fraudulent websites impersonating HashKey.
Ongoing industry friction: legal battles and tokenization experiments
There’s also continued legal and operational uncertainty in parts of the market. Binance and RedotPay are disputing whether a Singapore case connected to their nearly $473 million Hong Kong legal battle is nearing an end. RedotPay told Cointelegraph it expects Binance to discontinue the Singapore proceedings and will seek legal costs; Binance, in turn, said it is not abandoning its claims and has informed the court and RedotPay accordingly. The underlying Hong Kong allegations center on whether RedotPay diverted more than 470,000 Binance Card users by using Binance Pay funds for stablecoin top-ups outside a commercial agreement.
Meanwhile, tokenization experimentation continues. In Korea, Shinhan Asset Management signed a memorandum of understanding with Plume to develop a proof of concept for a Korean won-denominated tokenized fund. The stated aim is to test overseas use of won-denominated financial products onchain, an ecosystem that has so far been dominated by dollar-denominated assets.
Across these developments, the next signal to watch is whether regulators and institutions can translate new rules and bank/stablecoin rollouts into clear, verifiable user outcomes—especially where withdrawals, custody, and reporting obligations are at stake. For now, BitMart’s dispute and the rapid ranking changes in tokenized equities both suggest the industry is entering a phase where accountability and execution will increasingly matter as much as product launches.
Disclosure: This article does not represent investment advice. The content and materials featured on this page are for educational purposes only.
The crowded fraud recovery market raises concerns over second scams, while this Insight Guard review examines how investigative consulting differs from recovery services.
Summary
- Insight Guard focuses on structured fraud investigations and case documentation, offering victims an alternative to recovery services that guarantee refunds.
- As fraud recovery scams target victims again, Insight Guard highlights transparency, defined deliverables, and realistic expectations.
The market for fraud recovery help is crowded and often predatory. Many services that promise to retrieve lost funds are themselves a second scam. This Insight Guard review examines the firm against that backdrop, and asks what actually separates a legitimate investigation service from the operations that target victims a second time.
Insight Guard is a professional investigative consulting firm based in St. Petersburg, Florida, focused on evidence review and structured case documentation, not fund recovery.
The recovery-scam problem
Secondary fraud is well documented. After losing money to a scam, victims are frequently approached by services claiming to recover their funds. These operations use unsolicited outreach, reference details of the original fraud to appear credible, and request upfront fees before performing any real work. The victim then loses again.
The defining feature of these operations is the guarantee. They promise a specific outcome, usually the return of funds, in exchange for payment up front. No legitimate investigative service can make that promise, which is why the guarantee itself is the clearest warning sign.
These schemes are effective precisely because they target people at their most vulnerable. Someone who has just lost a significant sum is motivated to believe that recovery is possible, and an operation that references the specific details of their case can seem informed and credible. The emotional pull is strong, and it is exactly what the operators rely on. Understanding this dynamic is the first step in evaluating any firm that offers help after a scam.
How Insight Guard differs
Measured against that pattern, this review found several structural differences. The firm does not guarantee outcomes and states plainly that it does not operate as a fund recovery service. It does not conduct unsolicited outreach. Its deliverable is a defined document, a structured investigation report, rather than an open-ended promise. And it is transparent about the limits of what evidence, including blockchain tracing, can actually establish.
The firm’s work centers on organizing a victim’s evidence, reconstructing a verified timeline, and preparing structured documentation for banks, dispute bodies, and legal professionals. That is a fundamentally different proposition from a service that simply promises money back for a fee.
There is also a difference in how the two types of operation make contact. Recovery scams reach out to victims, often repeatedly and through channels the victim never signed up for. A documentation-focused firm works the other way around: the client approaches it, shares what happened, and receives an explanation of whether and how the evidence can be organized. That direction of contact is a small but telling signal of which kind of service someone is dealing with.
What to check before engaging any service
This review also serves as a checklist for evaluating any fraud service. A legitimate firm will not guarantee recovery. It will not demand large upfront fees before explaining its process. It will define its deliverables and its role clearly. And it will be honest about what it cannot do. Insight Guard meets those criteria; many services competing for the same searches do not.
It is worth applying that checklist to every service that appears in a search for fraud help, not just the first one. The category is designed to be confusing, and legitimate firms sit alongside predatory ones in the same results. A few minutes spent checking how a service describes its guarantees, its fees, and its limits will usually reveal which side of the line it falls on. Transparency about limitations, not confidence about outcomes, is the marker most worth looking for.
The Verdict
In a category where the biggest risk to a victim is being scammed twice, Insight Guard stands out for building its positioning on transparency and documentation rather than promises. It is not the right choice for anyone seeking a guaranteed refund, because that offer is itself the warning sign. For victims who want a credible, professionally documented account of what happened, it is a sound match.
More information is available on the official website. The FTC’s guidance on recovery scams provides further context on how these secondary operations work.
Disclosure: This content is provided by a third party. Neither crypto.news nor the author of this article endorses any product mentioned on this page. Users should conduct their own research before taking any action related to the company.
Mumbai, India, 12 August 2026 — Unchained Summit will make its India debut on 5–6 November 2026 in Mumbai, bringing together global and Indian leaders across financial markets, digital assets, trading, Web3 and emerging technology.
Following editions in Dubai and Vietnam, the third edition of Unchained Summit will bring founders, investors, active traders, wealth and financial-market participants, global blockchain companies, technology leaders, policymakers and builders together in one of the world’s most active digital asset and technology markets.
The confirmed speaker lineup includes S B Seker, Head of APAC at Binance; Ashish Singhal, Co-Founder of CoinSwitch; Praneeth Srikanti, Partner at Ethereal Ventures; Eva Wong, General Counsel at Parity Technologies; Prabal Banerjee, Co-Founder of Avail; Sanat Rao, Chief Investment Officer at Monarq Asset Management; Dilip Chenoy, Chairperson of the Bharat Web3 Association; Saumya Saxena, India Lead at Base; Roshan Prabhakar, Head of Product – India at Coinbase; Vineet Budki, CEO of Sigma Capital; Kunaal Patel, Head of Institutional – Asia and MENA at Ondo Finance; and Jaideep Reddy, Partner at Trilegal, among others.
India continues to see strong participation in crypto markets, ranking first in Chainalysis’ 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index, while taking a more cautious regulatory approach than several other major jurisdictions. Unchained Summit India will bring international perspectives into this conversation, examining how different markets are approaching regulation, adoption and market development.
At the same time, interest in tokenisation and enterprise blockchain continues to grow. The Reserve Bank of India has explored asset tokenisation through its CBDC sandbox, while the National Blockchain Framework reflects broader government and enterprise interest in blockchain-based infrastructure.
As India’s financial capital, Mumbai provides a natural meeting point for traders, wealth managers, family offices, financial institutions, fintechs and Web3 companies, connecting the country’s active digital asset market with its broader financial and technology ecosystem.
Sharath Kumar, Founder and CEO of Aeternum, the organiser of Unchained Summit, said:
“India has a unique mix of active digital asset participation, growing interest in tokenisation and blockchain, and one of the world’s strongest developer ecosystems. Unchained Summit India brings together the capital, policy and technology sides of that story, with global voices adding perspective to where the market goes next.”
That dual focus will define the two days of Unchained Summit India.
Day One will focus on Markets, Finance & Digital Assets, bringing together traders, investors, wealth managers, family offices, traditional finance participants and digital asset companies for discussions around regulation and policy, trading and markets, tokenisation and real-world assets, stablecoins and payments, wealth and portfolio management, capital markets, custody and liquidity.
For S B Seker, Head of APAC at Binance, India’s importance extends well beyond the size of its market.
“India is a crown jewel for Binance in terms of impact, not just scale. With deep digital penetration and a young, tech-savvy population, it is a market unmatched globally for meaningful blockchain adoption and innovation.”
Alongside the financial-market conversation is another major Indian advantage: its technology talent.
India had 21.9 million developers on GitHub in 2025, making it the platform’s second-largest developer community globally, with more than 5.2 million developers added during the year.
Day Two will focus on Web3, Infrastructure & Emerging Technology, creating a technology-led programme for developers, founders and builders around blockchain infrastructure, AI and Web3, DeFi, scaling, interoperability, security and digital trust, staking, consumer applications and emerging technologies.
Ashish Singhal, Co-Founder of CoinSwitch, said:
“Web3 represents one of the most exciting opportunities to build the next generation of internet infrastructure, and India is one of the world’s largest hubs with talent, entrepreneurial spirit, and technical expertise to play a leading role in shaping the industry’s future.”
The technology itself will be another important part of the discussion.
Uttam Singh from Alchemy said:
“We’re witnessing the financial system become programmable. The next wave of innovation will come from developers building onchain.”
Across two days, wealth managers and traders will interact with digital asset companies. Founders will meet investors. Traditional finance participants will examine tokenisation and new market infrastructure. Enterprises will explore blockchain applications. Developers and builders will engage with global protocols and technology companies, while policy and industry leaders will hear perspectives from jurisdictions taking different approaches to digital assets.
The summit will also bring international speakers, companies and participants into Mumbai, connecting India’s financial and technology ecosystem with global leaders across digital assets and Web3.
For Unchained Summit, the objective is straightforward: create a setting where capital and technology, traditional finance and digital assets, and Indian builders and global markets can meet.
Mumbai will host that conversation on 5–6 November 2026. More information is available on the event’s official website: [unchainedsummit.com/india] (https://unchainedsummit.com/india)
About Aeternum Consulting Ltd
Aeternum organizes business-to-business events in the emerging tech space, provides strategic consulting, and tailored services to a diverse range of clients, from corporations to governments and startups to individuals. Aeternum specializes in crafting impactful B2B platforms that foster meaningful connections, drive business growth, and facilitate knowledge sharing through conferences, exhibitions, and bespoke networking opportunities.
For more information visit: [aeternuminc.com] (https://aeternuminc.com)
For further details about the announcement, please contact:
Maya K V
media@aeternuminc.com | +91 95383 91838
Partnerships Associate, Aeternum
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