The Bitcoin (BTC) price fell to about $58,000 on Thursday, its lowest level since September 2024, after hotter US inflation dimmed hopes for near-term Federal Reserve rate cuts.

US stocks slid in tandem, with the Nasdaq 100 erasing an intraday rally. Both markets turned lower after the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge rose faster than expected in May.

Hot Inflation Dims Rate-Cut Hopes

The Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) price index rose 4.1% in May from a year earlier, its highest reading since April 2023. That was up from 3.8% in April, according to the government report. Core PCE, which strips out food and energy, climbed 3.4%.

The figures pointed to a resilient economy rather than a slowing one. Consumer spending rose 0.7% in May, above forecasts, while first-quarter gross domestic product was revised up to 2.1% from 1.6%. Some economists now see room for possible rate hikes instead of cuts.

Under Chair Kevin Warsh, the Fed held its benchmark rate at 3.5% to 3.75% in June and projected higher rates ahead. It tied part of the price pressure to energy supply shocks from the Middle East conflict. That stance has weakened Fed rate-cut hopes across markets, where traders had expected easing this year.

Follow us on X to get the latest news as it happens

Bitcoin Price Slide Mirrors Nasdaq Reversal

BTC had traded above $61,800 earlier in the session before the Bitcoin price decline accelerated. The token changed hands near $59,200 afterward, down about 2.6% on the day. That left it roughly 53% below its October 2025 record of $126,080.

The drop triggered a wave of forced selling. More than $450 million in leveraged long positions were liquidated within roughly an hour.

Across the market, total crypto liquidations reached $1.26 billion among more than 209,000 traders over 24 hours, according to Coinglass.

Crypto and tech stocks have tracked each other closely this year. The Nasdaq 100 had climbed before reversing, echoing a big tech selloff earlier in June that also dragged Bitcoin lower. \

Higher rates raise the cost of holding risk, weighing on both.

Whether $58,000 marks a floor may hinge on the Fed’s next meeting in late July. With inflation rising and growth steady, policymakers have little reason to cut. That leaves risk assets exposed to further swings.

The post PCE Inflation Shakes Markets: Nasdaq Rally Collapses, Bitcoin Falls to New 2026 Low appeared first on BeInCrypto.

Source link

Indonesia parliament just passed the revised crypto law, formally cementing OJK’s authority over crypto as a regulated financial asset just as Europe’s MiCA transitional window closes on July 1. Two of the world’s most consequential crypto jurisdictions are hardening their frameworks in the same month, from opposite sides of the globe.

The structural logic is identical: reclassify crypto from a peripheral asset into a supervised financial instrument, require licensing, and push non-compliant platforms out. The era of operating across major markets on thin regulatory registrations is closing simultaneously in Jakarta and Brussels.

Don’t Miss Out on Our $1,000 USDT Airdrop on ByBit

Indonesia Crypto Law: OJK Gets Full Authority

The P2SK Law revision, passed by the Indonesia Parliament expands OJK’s mandate across banking, capital markets, fintech, and digital financial assets, consolidating supervisory authority that was previously fragmented between OJK, Bappebti, and Bank Indonesia. For crypto specifically, this completes a reclassification that tokens are no longer traded commodities sitting inside Bappebti’s commodity-futures perimeter.

OJK can now impose bank-style prudential requirements on exchanges, capital adequacy, custody segregation, governance standards, and conduct rules. The law also amends Indonesia’s Capital Markets Act to expand the definition of securities to include investment contracts in digital form that confer economic benefits, opening the door for certain tokens and DeFi instruments to fall under full securities regulation. That is a direct structural parallel to MiCA’s treatment of asset-referenced tokens.

The immediate compliance pressure point governing governance and risk management for fintech innovation platforms, including digital asset providers, takes effect on July 1, 2026. Indonesian OJK crypto regulation now has its own hard deadline running in parallel with Europe’s. Exchanges operating in Indonesia crypto markets that have not completed their transition from Bappebti-era structures face an enforcement exposure window starting this month.

Tokocrypto CEO Calvin Kizana welcomed the revision but flagged the implementation gap that matters most to operators.

“We are also waiting and looking forward to the final draft being distributed to industry players so that they can see in more detail what changes will affect the ecosystem,” Kizana said. He added that “strong, clear, and adaptive regulations will be the key to increasing public confidence and accelerating the growth of the Indonesian crypto industry.”

That reads as an implicit acknowledgment that the law’s passage is a narrative event, the implementing rulebooks from OJK are the execution events that will define actual compliance costs.

Although not all industry voices are welcoming. The Indonesian Blockchain Association has raised concerns that draft provisions requiring all digital asset activity to flow through a single exchange could reduce existing platforms to brokers, concentrating market power in ways the original framework never intended.

Discover: The Best Token Presales

MiCA July 1 Hard Deadline: The Compliance Cull Arrives

Europe’s MiCA deadline is not a narrative event. July 1 is the date after which unlicensed crypto-asset service providers lose legal access to the EU’s 450 million users across all 27 member states.

As of today, of the approximately 3,000 firms that previously operated under national transitional arrangements, just about 230 have cleared the ESMA MiCA register. This has left the overwhelming majority either in the process of exiting EU markets or racing to complete authorization before enforcement begins.

Coinbase Luxembourg opened its MiCA hub on June 24, securing a single EU passport from the Luxembourg CSSF that covers all 27 member states. Ripple also secured preliminary CASP approval under MiCA, positioning RLUSD for compliant EU distribution. Kraken is similarly cleared.

Don’t Miss Out on Our $1,000 USDT Airdrop on ByBit

However, Binance, the biggest crypto exchange in the world by volume, withdrew its Greek license application days before the deadline, leaving it absent from the ESMA register. Binance’s $4.3 billion DOJ settlement from 2023 is now a live liability in the EU authorization process.

The USDT situation underscores the reach of the regulation. Several EU exchanges delisted Tether ahead of the deadline because USDT does not meet MiCA’s e-money token requirements, while Circle’s USDC, structured to comply, retained listings.

Discover: The Best Crypto to Diversify Your Portfolio

The post Indonesia Crypto Overhaul and Europe’s MiCA Deadline: Who Gets Cut from Major Markets appeared first on Cryptonews.

Source link

Source link

Poland’s Central Bureau for Combating Cybercrime (CBZC) arrested four members of an alleged crypto crime gang. The group drained cryptocurrency through SIM swap attacks, the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations revealed.

The suspects face charges that include running an organized criminal group, theft by hacking computer systems, and money laundering. All four remain in pre-trial detention and could face up to 25 years in prison.

How the Crypto Crime Gang Ran its SIM Swap Scheme

Investigators say the group broke into the IT systems of firms that work with telecom operators. Social engineering, rather than brute-force hacking, gave the attackers their initial foothold. They also obtained access to employee email accounts using specialized software.

That access let them run SIM swap attacks, which clone or hijack a victim’s phone number. With control over SMS and email, the group reset passwords, bypassed two-factor protections, and seized accounts on cryptocurrency exchanges.

Once inside, they drained the digital assets held in those accounts. The method exploits a known weakness, since many platforms still lean on phone-based recovery despite repeated telecom security failures.

The FBI counted more than $68 million in U.S. SIM-swap losses in 2021, taken from bank and virtual currency accounts.

Laundering and Cross-Border Cooperation

Police say the stolen funds moved quickly through a spread-out financial network. Prosecutors add that the suspects treated the thefts as a steady source of income. The group used personal bank accounts in Poland and abroad, payment platforms, and multi-currency crypto wallets.

Officials estimate the laundered total exceeds tens of millions of Polish zlotys, or several million dollars. The scale places it alongside other European crypto laundering networks disrupted this year.

U.S. prosecutors have pursued similar crews. Federal indictments describe the same playbook against cryptocurrency exchanges. One of the largest involved roughly $400 million stolen from the failed exchange FTX in 2022.

The Regional Prosecutor’s Office in Krakow supervises the case. The role of the FBI and HSI points to victims or infrastructure outside Poland. Such international crypto crime cases increasingly depend on cooperation across borders, echoing earlier FBI SIM swap arrests.

The CBZC, formed in 2022, has not named any suspect or released identifying photos, citing the active investigation. It did publish video of the operation on its official channels.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel to watch leaders and journalists provide expert insights

Unverified social media speculation has linked one detainee to a known online alias, “Merry.”

Police have not confirmed the claim. Officials say the case is still developing, and more arrests could follow as the inquiry continues.

The post Polish Crypto Raid: FBI-Backed Arrests Hit Alleged SIM-Swap Gang Behind Millions in Theft appeared first on BeInCrypto.

Source link

Source link

Source link

Abracadabra.money declared emergency measures Wednesday after its dollar-pegged stablecoin Magic Internet Money (MIM) fell roughly 50% below its $1 target. MIM was trading around $0.48 Thursday, its worst sustained depeg on record. "We're acutely aware of the $MIM depeg and are taking emergency… Read the full story at The Defiant

Source link

According to analyst Shanaka Anslem Perera, the story everyone has been telling about Bitcoin (BTC) this year, that big money fled to gold and left crypto behind, is wrong.

He laid out the actual flow of data in a post on X, showing how the picture is considerably different from what the rotation narrative suggests.

ETF Flows Tell a Different Story

The analyst argued that, based on spot Bitcoin ETF data, investors have not abandoned the flagship cryptocurrency. Since their launch in January 2024, they have attracted more than $53 billion in net inflows, something that took gold ETFs some five years to achieve.

Things changed during the recent market correction, when about $4.4 billion flowed out in 13 consecutive trading sessions. But Perera pointed out that the money left Bitcoin to chase highs in AI and semiconductors, describing investors who made the shift as tourists who react to every changing narrative.

Per his analysis, BTC has found itself caught between two competing trades.

“When the market wanted offense, the money left Bitcoin to chase AI and chip stocks at fresh highs,” he wrote. “When the market wanted defense, the money left Bitcoin for Treasuries and cash.”

He also claimed that the gold side of the story had a similar hole in it. Indeed, big gold ETFs bled this year, but, according to Perera, the money didn’t go to BTC as some headlines had suggested, but it went into cheaper gold products, essentially meaning it was a “fee swap” and not a defection to Bitcoin.

There was a similar misread inside crypto, as XRP and Solana funds pulled money while BTC bled. Many market watchers thought it was a changing of the guard, but Perera pointed out that since those funds sit on bases 40 to 50 times smaller than Bitcoin’s, relatively modest inflows may look dramatic on a chart while having very little meaning at scale.

Debate Over Safe Haven Continues

What makes Perera’s analysis worthwhile is how it makes a distinction between what he called Bitcoin’s two shareholder bases: short-term ETF investors that react quickly and emotionally to economic data and market sentiment, and long-term holders who continue accumulating during periods of weakness.

According to the analyst, when most headlines about ETFs focused on outflows, the long-term holders added about 125,000 BTC to their holdings, basically buying the coins that the ETF crowd was panic-selling on every CPI print.

The debate around Bitcoin’s role has become quite loud this year, with billionaire Ray Dalio saying in March that gold and BTC cannot be compared, as institutions still prefer the metal as a store of value.

Other research also cast doubt on the rotation narrative, with analyst Charlie Bilello finding that both gold and Bitcoin were trading below their long-term trend levels at the same time, suggesting parallel weakness rather than capital moving directly from one to the other.

The post Bitcoin Didn’t Lose to Gold, the Rotation Story Is Wrong: Analyst appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Source link

So far, 2026 has been an interesting year for crypto VC funding. After dropping significantly in Q1, funding has recovered strongly. In May alone, crypto projects raised over $3.52 billion. Unsurprisingly, the majority of these fundings are being directed to AI-based ventures. 

Canopy Network is one such project that successfully attracted investors with its AI pivot. The project has raised $8.5 million in seed funding for its AI-native blockchain development. 

The Panama City-based project is developing a framework built to help founders, developers, and coding assistants create onchain applications with far less engineering overhead. The funds will support the mainnet launch, engineering hires, and continued work on developer experience and AI-native tooling.

The company also acquired Tanssi technology, a decentralized protocol for deploying customized apps on blockchains in minutes. Arrington Capital, Fenbushi Capital, Borderless Capital, and SNZ Capital joined Canopy as key stakeholders through the acquisition, bringing more investor backing around the project’s next phase.

AI-Native Development Brings Builders Closer to Launch

Canopy is designed to help people build blockchain apps with less technical work.

A founder could describe an app idea, such as a loyalty program, rewards platform, or onchain marketplace, then use Canopy to turn it into working code with help from AI coding tools. The code remains readable, so developers can review, edit, and improve it as the product grows.

Because the output is code, teams can extend or upgrade their applications over time. The same code can be read by human developers, giving founders a faster path from idea to deployed application.

Liposky said Canopy is “opening blockchain development to an entirely new audience of builders.”

Keli Callaghan, Partner at Arrington Capital, said Canopy’s combination of templates, security, interoperability, and a complete development framework gives builders a faster route from idea to launch.

“Builders can move from idea to launch in a fraction of the time,” Callaghan said.

Tanssi Technology

The Tanssi acquisition gives Canopy some of the blockchain infrastructure it needs before mainnet.

In simple terms, Tanssi was built to help teams launch their own app-specific blockchains without starting from zero. It gave builders a dashboard to set up a chain, manage tokens, fund block production, and bring the network online from one place.

This was important for Canopy as its pitch depends on speed. AI tools can help generate an app, but the app still needs blockchain infrastructure to run. Tanssi gives Canopy parts of that back-end system, including tools for appchain deployment, block production, and links to Ethereum.

The deal, announced on June 3, 2026, includes Tanssi’s core technology. That covers its appchain control panel, its sequencer system for producing blocks, and its Snowbridge-based Ethereum bridge for cross-chain communication.

Canopy plans to fold this technology into its own development framework. The standalone Tanssi network was expected to wind down over 30 days after the announcement.

Testnet Activity

Canopy’s public testnet has produced strong early activity. Builders launched nearly 27,000 projects during the first 12 days, and total launches have since surpassed 331,000.

The numbers point to demand from founders and developers seeking faster ways to create onchain products through AI-assisted tools. 

Canopy’s near-term focus is mainnet, while its long-term roadmap centers on an integrated environment where non-technical founders can create, deploy, and upgrade applications from one place.

Canopy is currently live on public testnet.

The post Canopy Raises $8.5M to Bring AI-Native Blockchain Apps Closer to Mainnet appeared first on BeInCrypto.

Source link

Blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs traced $3.84 billion in flows from wallets linked to more than 60 sanctioned Iranian entities through CoinEx since 2019, identifying the exchange as the primary external conduit for Iran-linked capital moving into global crypto markets.

Of that total, $2.7 billion flowed specifically between CoinEx and Nobitex, Iran’s largest domestic exchange, at an average rate of approximately $1 million per day since 2018. By any documented measure, this is the largest single-exchange crypto sanctions-evasion pipeline tied to Iran yet identified.

The TRM Labs report landed three weeks after the US Treasury sanctioned four Iranian crypto exchanges as part of its Economic Fury campaign, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent separately confirming the seizure of $1 billion in crypto from Iranian exchanges and wallets since the start of the war.

CoinEx is not among the sanctioned entities. That gap, between what the blockchain data shows and what enforcement has acted on, is the structural tension this report forces into the open. The Iran-CoinEx controversy is now squarely on the US Treasury’s radar.

Don’t Miss Out on Our $1,000 USDT Airdrop on ByBit

CoinEx’s 8% Illicit Rate Is 27x the Industry Benchmark

The compliance gap TRM Labs documents is not marginal. CoinEx’s share of illicit transaction volume sits at nearly 8%, against a 0.3% threshold observed at compliant exchanges, a ratio of roughly 27 to one.

That number is not cosmetic; it is the quantitative basis for TRM’s conclusion that the CoinEx-Nobitex relationship reflects a “coordinated arrangement rather than organic adoption.”

The specifics reinforce that reading. By 2024, CoinEx was Nobitex’s largest external counterpart by volume, nearly nine times larger than the next-biggest exchange, a concentration TRM called “inconsistent with independent market behaviour.”

Major Iranian domestic exchanges route between 5% and 10% of their trading volume through CoinEx, a uniformity across platforms that would be statistically improbable if each exchange were making independent routing decisions.

CoinEx-affiliated mining pool ViaBTC adds another layer. TRM Labs traced $154 million in ViaBTC exposure to Nobitex through mining payouts.

More pointedly, ViaBTC supplied emergency liquidity to Nobitex following the Predatory Sparrow hack in June 2025, a $90 million breach that left Nobitex operationally stressed. An affiliated mining pool stepping in as a liquidity backstop for a sanctioned exchange is not a pattern that emerges from coincidence.

Discover: The Best Token Presales

Nobitex Was the On-Ramp, CoinEx Was the Exit

The architecture of the pipeline is straightforward. Sanctioned Iranian entities, including IRGC-linked wallets and entities tied to Iran’s domestic financial system, moved funds into Nobitex, which handled approximately 50% of Iran’s crypto trading volume, per a June 2 Chainalysis report.

Nobitex then routed capital outward through CoinEx, which provided access to global liquidity and the ability to convert into dollar-equivalent stablecoins beyond the reach of Iranian sanctions enforcement.

This flow pattern has been running since at least 2018 on the CoinEx-Nobitex corridor, and since 2019 for the broader universe of sanctioned entities TRM Labs tracked. Nobitex’s own political exposure sharpened the stakes: in May 2026, the exchange was reportedly linked to members of a powerful family with ties to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, suggesting the pipeline served interests at the apex of the Iranian state, not just retail traders seeking dollar access.

The displacement of other exchanges from Nobitex’s external routing is also analytically significant. CoinEx overtook Binance as Nobitex’s largest foreign counterparty by 2024, after Binance faced US enforcement pressure. That transition illustrates precisely the rerouting dynamic critics of venue-specific enforcement consistently flag: pressure on one exchange does not eliminate the demand, it reassigns it.

CoinEx Denies Government Ties. The On-Chain Data Is Not a Contract.

CoinEx issued a denial on X following the TRM Labs report, stating it has no commercial relationship with the Iranian government or domestic Iranian exchanges and has never provided funding channels to sanctioned parties.

The exchange also disputed TRM Labs’ interpretive framework directly, arguing that “onchain fund flows do not demonstrate a platform’s knowledge of or participation in illicit activity.”

The denial addresses contractual relationships; the TRM Labs report documents transaction flows. Those are not the same evidentiary category, and the distinction matters.

OFAC sanctions exposure does not require proof of a formal commercial agreement – it requires demonstrated facilitation of transactions involving sanctioned parties.

Whether CoinEx knew the identities behind the wallets routing $3.84 billion through its platform is a compliance question. That the flows existed at 27 times the illicit-volume rate of compliant exchanges is the data point that precedes that question.

Discover: The Best Crypto to Diversify Your Portfolio

The post CoinEx Named as Iran Largest Crypto Sanctions Exit Route by TRM Labs appeared first on Cryptonews.

Source link