Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has taken Telegram to court, launching civil penalty proceedings in the Federal Court over allegations that the messaging platform failed to address terrorism-linked content under the country’s Online Safety Act. The action was filed on Thursday, according to an eSafety statement.

The regulator’s complaint focuses on what it describes as repeated failures to remove pro-terror material after becoming aware of it, along with insufficient steps to prevent repeated breaches. The case is likely to add pressure to Telegram as governments across Europe and beyond continue testing how large platforms should moderate harmful content.

Key takeaways

• eSafety says Telegram breached obligations under Australia’s Online Safety Act by not responding adequately to multiple user complaints about pro-terror content.
• The regulator alleges some unlawful material remained visible for as long as three weeks after Telegram was aware of it.
• eSafety also claims Telegram did not take sufficient measures to curb repeat distribution, including removing accounts, channels, and groups tied to the content.
• The proceedings seek civil penalties, with potential fines under Australia’s online safety rules reaching up to 54.6 million Australian dollars.
• The case follows heightened legal scrutiny of Telegram and CEO Pavel Durov in other countries, including recent Russian actions.

Australia’s civil penalty case centers on alleged moderation failures

In its filing, Australia’s online safety regulator alleges Telegram failed to remove certain unlawful material after it had notice of the content. eSafety described a year-long investigation that, in its view, showed Telegram did not act in time once it became aware.

According to eSafety, the issue wasn’t limited to a single piece of content. The regulator alleged that reported pro-terror material continued to be visible for up to three weeks, even after warnings were raised. It also claims Telegram did not do enough to prevent repeat violations by adequately disrupting the accounts and communities used to distribute the content.

The allegations include failures to detect known extremist material—specifically footage connected to two major mass shootings: the 2019 Christchurch mosque attack and the 2022 Buffalo mass shooting—before the material was later removed, eSafety said.

Why this matters for Telegram users and platform compliance

Beyond the immediate legal stakes, the case underscores how regulators are increasingly tying platform expectations to concrete operational outcomes: timeliness of takedowns, responsiveness to reports, and the ability to limit repeat distribution. For Telegram users, the dispute highlights a growing tension between broad claims about speech and encryption-based design choices versus statutory duties that require platforms to manage certain categories of harmful content.

For Telegram, the compliance challenge is not only about removing content after it is identified, but also about demonstrating systems that can detect and disrupt known extremist material and prevent reappearance via networks of channels, groups, and related accounts. eSafety’s emphasis on alleged repeated violations suggests the regulator may treat moderation as an ongoing obligation rather than a one-off response to individual reports.

Regulatory pressure is widening internationally

The Australian proceedings arrive amid a broader wave of legal scrutiny targeting Telegram’s moderation approach. The case adds to pressure on both the company and its CEO, Pavel Durov, as multiple governments seek more direct accountability from major communication platforms.

eSafety’s move comes a day after Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) charged Durov with facilitating terrorist activity and said it had started steps to add him to an international wanted list. Russia’s allegations include claims that Telegram failed to remove channels, chats, and bots used by Ukrainian intelligence services, terrorist groups, and extremist organizations to coordinate attacks, recruit operatives, and carry out cyber fraud.

Telegram has not issued an official statement on the Australian case. However, the platform’s official X account posted content described as related to “freedom of expression.” In response to international criticism, Telegram has repeatedly framed moderation and legal pressure through the lens of free speech and user rights.

France and Russia-related cases continue to develop

Durov is also facing legal exposure in France following his August 2024 arrest at Le Bourget Airport. French prosecutors have charged him with offenses that include complicity in the distribution of illegal content, including material related to organized crime, through Telegram.

The broader regulatory environment has also shaped Telegram’s public positioning. Durov has criticized what he described as increasing threats to online privacy, arguing that governments were rolling back protections for the free internet. In a post on X dated October 2025, he warned that the promise of free information exchange was being turned into a “tool of control.”

While the Australian case is not identical to the allegations in Russia or France, the common thread is that regulators are increasingly testing whether Telegram’s platform model can meet legal expectations around harmful content—particularly content connected to terrorism and violent extremism.

As the Australian proceedings move forward, investors, traders, and builders will likely watch not only for any outcomes in court, but also for whether Telegram changes its moderation and enforcement processes in a measurable way—especially around response timelines, repeat distribution, and the handling of clearly identified extremist media.

A Russian court transferred Igor Runets, the founder of the country’s largest crypto mining company BitRiver, to a pretrial detention facility to face trial for fraud, Pravo.ru reported on Thursday.

Runets is charged with “large-scale” fraud, according to the news service. Investigators allege he caused damages exceeding 1 billion rubles ($12.5 million) by failing to deliver equipment to Infrastructure of Siberia, a subsidiary of En+, a multibillion-dollar corporation that produces 5% of the world’s aluminum and also manages digital, technology and crypto mining infrastructure projects.

Russian law enforcement officials say that in 2023, Runets entered into an equipment supply contract worth $8 million that it never fulfilled, according to Pravo.ru.

Runets, a crypto mining pioneer in Russia, was reportedly detained and placed on house arrest in February on three charges of tax evasion. The Stanford University MBA graduate began building a crypto mining data center in Siberia in 2017, the same year he founded BitRiver. He later expanded the operation to 15 data centers with more than 175,000 servers.

Following the closure of several of his crypto mining centers due to a six-year government ban across 10 regions, BitRiver began facing financial issues. A regional arbitration court opened insolvency proceedings against its controlling shareholder, Group of Companies Fox, which owns 98% of BitRiver’s authorized capital, in February.

Robinhood’s Q2 revenue grew 32% year-over-year, hitting a record $1.31 billion as growth across options, equities, and event contracts surged. Wall Street had predicted $1.26 billion in revenue for Robinhood during Q2.

Despite the impressive numbers, the platform’s crypto revenue fell substantially, declining 38% year-over-year to $100 million.

Robinhood’s Record Quarter

Robinhood has reported robust growth across its equities, events contracts, and options segments. According to the company’s earnings report, its net income grew 48% year-over-year to $573 million, while diluted earnings per share increased 48% to $0.62. The quarterly results also include $129 million in gains tied to the deconsolidation of the Robinhood Ventures Fund I. Chief Financial Officer Shiv Verma stated,

“We delivered record revenues and drove new highs across equity, option, and event contract volumes, as we continue to win market share.”

Robinhood’s record numbers were primarily driven by a surge in transaction-based revenue, which increased 44% year-over-year to $776 million. The platform generated $156 million from events contracts, a 10x increase from the previous year. Revenue from options jumped 29% to $342 million, and equities revenue jumped 95% to $129 million. Revenue from net interest rose 9% to $389 million. However, these gains were partly offset by lower short-term interest rates and securities lending activity. CEO Vlad Tenev stated,

“Whether it’s the Robinhood Chain, Robinhood Ventures, or Trump Accounts, our product velocity is focused on one goal: making everyone an owner.”

Meanwhile, Robinhood’s operating expenses rose 33% year-over-year to $734 million, largely due to investments in marketing and growth, restructuring charges linked with its June workforce reduction, and other expenses related to Trump Accounts and Rothera. Lastly, Adjusted EBITDA rose 35% to $741 million. Despite the strong numbers, HOOD is trading around $89.84, down over 3%.

Crypto Business Struggles

While Robinhood’s numbers are impressive, its crypto business struggled, declining 38% year-over-year to $100 million. The decline can be attributed to a broader downturn in the cryptocurrency market due to geopolitical and policy headwinds. However, the trading platform reported record trading activity, including an equity notional trading volume of $956 billion, 774 million options contracts, and 13.6 billion events contracts. Robinhood reported a crypto notional trading volume of $40 billion, with $18 billion through the Robinhood app and $22 billion through Bitstamp.

Analysts Bullish On Robinhood

Market analysts are bullish on Robinhood, with Bernstein raising its price target on HOOD from $130 to $160. Analysts expect the platform’s retail trading, prediction markets, and equities businesses will drive significant growth. They also expect new revenue from perpetual futures and Robinhood Chain. Bernstein analysts have applied a calendar-year earnings-per-share estimate of $4.56 for 2028, with revenue from prediction markets estimated to reach $1.7 billion by 2028.

Robinhood debuted in the prediction markets space in October 2024, offering presidential-election contracts. It launched a dedicated prediction markets hub in March 2025, and Rothera, a CFTC-licensed exchange and clearinghouse, in June. Rothera is independently managed via a joint venture with Susquehanna International Group.

Robinhood Chain

Robinhood recently launched Robinhood Chain, a layer-2 network built using Arbitrum’s tech stack. The total value locked (TVL) in Robinhood Chain is $325 million as of Tuesday. CEO Vlad Tenev stated Robinhood Chain has seen “great initial traction,” and decentralized exchanges have processed over $12 billion in trading volume. Tenev added that Robinhood Chain has already surpassed 150 million transactions and was the fastest to reach 100 million.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Ask most people how a crypto price gets set and they will describe spot trading: buyers and sellers meet on an exchange, and the last trade prints the price. But that has not been how it actually works for years as far as bitcoin, ether and the broader crypto markets are concerned.

Perpetual futures, also called perpetual swaps or “perps” for short, are leverage-friendly contracts that never expire, and they now account for roughly 93% of all crypto futures volume, with daily perp volume routinely running larger than the spot market underneath it.

A traditional futures contract has a settlement date, which is when it comes due and its price is forced to meet the spot price of the thing it tracks, also called the underlying. But a perpetual has no such date and can be held indefinitely (by paying a cost known as ‘funding rate,’ which varies daily).

A body of market-microstructure work has asked which venue “discovers” a bitcoin price first, meaning where new information enters the market before it shows up anywhere else. The answer has repeatedly come back pointing at derivatives.

A study in the Journal of Financial Markets by Carol Alexander and co-authors found that perpetual swaps on unregulated venues were the strongest instruments for bitcoin price discovery, with regulated futures and U.S. spot exchanges reacting to, rather than leading, those moves.

Other work has identified Binance’s perpetual market as the primary source of price formation across the fragmented crypto landscape.

The evidence is not conclusive, however, and some studies find spot still leads at certain frequencies or during stress. But the direction of the literature over the past few years has been toward the derivatives market as the place where the price is made.

“Historically, we have seen perps leading mostly during bear market price rallies,” Julio Moreno, head of research at CryptoQuant, told CoinDesk. “For example, Bitcoin perps demand growth (blue bars in the chart) led the price rallies of January 2026, and April-May 2026.”

“In these periods, spot demand was contracting, while perps demand expanded, thus the perpetual futures market was leading prices despite demand contracting on the spot market,” he said.

Which brings us back to the funding rate. Because a perpetual contract never settles, nothing forces its price back toward spot the way an expiry date does for a traditional future. Instead, every few hours, whichever side of the trade is crowded pays the other.

When the perp trades above spot, traders who are long (or betting on higher prices) pay those who are short (betting on lower prices), which nudges the contract back toward the underlying price.

The funding rate is both the tether that keeps the contract anchored and a live readout of sentiment, which is why some traders watch it as closely as price.

“We actually surveyed more than 100 of our traders,” Hong Yea, co-founder at onchain trading platform Grvt, told CoinDesk. “The traders who actually rely on us to hold real conviction positions want predictability there, not another data point to interpret.”

“If you’re holding a directional position for weeks, funding isn’t telling you something new about the market, it’s just eating into your PnL while you wait to be right. That’s the honest way our users describe it to us, not, ‘what is the market telling me,” Yea added.

The SpaceX use case

None of this requires a spot market to exist. And for about three weeks in May and June, one of the most-watched markets in the world was for a company that had never sold a public share was running on crypto rails.

Elon Musk-owned SpaceX priced its record $75 billion initial public offering at $135 a share and began trading on the Nasdaq on June 12. Well before that, traders on Binance, Coinbase, Hyperliquid and others were already buying and selling exposure to the company through pre-IPO perpetual futures, or contracts structured to track an implied valuation rather than a share price.

The first mover was Hyperliquid, the onchain derivatives exchange, where a synthetic SpaceX perpetual went live on May 18. Binance opened its own SpaceX market on May 21, Coinbase followed on June 4, and BitMEX, Bitget and OKX later added contracts of their own.

The striking part is how right they were at the one moment their accuracy could be tested. On the night before SpaceX listed, perpetuals on Hyperliquid and Binance were quoting the equivalent of roughly $170 a share, well above the $135 the underwriters had set.

The next day SPCX opened, ran to an intraday high above $176, and closed its first session at $161, up 19%. The stock printed almost exactly where the perps had it, and a market dominated by leverage-seeking retail traders had read first-day demand more accurately than the banks that spent months building the offering price.

That gap was also where the money was. The perpetual market was pricing SpaceX well above the $135 IPO price, so traders could buy the contract before listing and bet the two would meet. Every one of these contracts was built to automatically switch over to SpaceX’s real share price the moment the stock began trading, so any gap between the perp and the eventual opening price would close on its own. With the IPO already four times oversubscribed, the direction was rarely in doubt, and the pre-listing window was the only place to make the trade.

Then reality caught up with the market that had predicted it. SPCX has fallen more than 40% from its June peak, dropping from the $135 IPO price to about $115 as of publication.

The reason is one the perp could never have priced — supply. Only a sliver of SpaceX’s shares were sold at the IPO, and starting around August 6, roughly 900 million locked-up insider shares become eligible to sell.

What SpaceX showed in the extreme is what the research says is already true in ordinary crypto trading — the derivatives market is increasingly where price gets discovered. Spot follows.

Perps are excellent at pricing demand and blind to supply, which is worth remembering every time a bitcoin rally or a flush starts in the funding rate before it reaches spot.

China Business Journal warned on July 30 that fraudsters had impersonated the publication while demanding Bitcoin from companies threatened with negative news coverage.

According to the newspaper’s statement, the scammers contacted businesses through an address hosted by Proton Mail. They claimed that undercover investigations had uncovered damaging information about the targeted companies.

The senders allegedly threatened to publish the purported findings unless the companies transferred Bitcoin. The publication said it had not authorized the messages and considered the operation a suspected fraud scheme.

Scammers allegedly used negative coverage as leverage

The emails appeared to combine two established fraud methods: impersonating a recognized organization and threatening reputational damage to force payment.

China Business Journal said the perpetrators presented themselves as representatives of the newspaper. They then offered to suppress the alleged investigation in exchange for Bitcoin. The publication did not reproduce the full emails or identify the businesses contacted.

The allegation remains based on the newspaper’s account. No suspect has been named, and no law enforcement agency had publicly announced an arrest or criminal filing connected to the emails as of July 30.

Chinese authorities have previously prosecuted people who impersonated journalists or used negative coverage to demand money. In a 2025 case published by China’s news regulator, three people were convicted after using purported environmental reporting to extort 16 companies. 

China Business Journal says the emails were unauthorized

The newspaper said the messages did not come from its authorized reporting or business operations. It is collecting evidence and reserved the right to pursue civil and criminal action against those responsible.

The warning is intended to help companies distinguish genuine reporting inquiries from payment demands. A legitimate request for comment may contain difficult questions, but demands for cryptocurrency in exchange for suppressing publication are a clear warning sign.

China Business Journal was established in 1985. It operates under the supervision of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and is organized by the academy’s Institute of Industrial Economics.

The scammers’ use of the publication’s identity could therefore make the emails appear credible to executives unfamiliar with its official contact procedures.

The newspaper did not disclose a Bitcoin wallet address, requested amount, transaction hash or payment deadline. It also did not say whether any targeted company transferred funds.

Without a wallet address, independent researchers cannot examine the blockchain for payments linked to the alleged scheme. The available information confirms the warning, but not whether the fraudsters successfully collected Bitcoin.

The use of Proton Mail does not establish who sent the emails. Proton allows users to report suspected phishing and abusive messages to its security team. Its guidance asks recipients to preserve and submit the original message when reporting suspicious activity.

The newspaper also did not announce whether it had contacted Proton or Chinese police. Any account suspension, identification request or criminal investigation would require further action by the relevant service provider and authorities.

Companies face a familiar impersonation tactic

China’s internet regulator has previously warned that criminals sometimes pose as legitimate news organizations, threaten to publish negative material and demand payment from companies or individuals. 

The latest case adds Bitcoin to that model. Cryptocurrency allows a recipient to request direct payment without using a conventional company bank account. However, the demand itself does not prove that the scammers received funds or successfully concealed their identities.

U.S. prosecutors charged a teenager over an alleged $8 million crypto ransom scheme tied to corporate intrusions and impersonation tactics.

Additionally, Coinbase refused a $20 million ransom demand after attackers claimed they possessed stolen customer information.

China Business Journal said it would continue gathering evidence. The next verified update could come from the newspaper, Proton, police authorities or a company that received one of the emails.