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US sanctions 2 crypto exchanges over Iran-linked funds

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Justin Sun’s HTX lands on EU sanctions list over alleged Russia ties

U.S. authorities sanctioned crypto exchanges Shelbit and Aban Tether after alleging that the platforms helped Iran evade restrictions and move funds connected to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Summary

  • OFAC sanctioned Shelbit, Aban Tether and Siavash Kayvanpour over alleged sanctions evasion.
  • IRGC-linked wallets allegedly sent more than $1 million in crypto to Shelbit addresses.
  • Shelbit addresses reportedly transferred over $2 million to wallets controlled by the IRGC.
  • Kayvanpour-linked wallets allegedly sent more than $2 million to sanctioned exchange Nobitex.

OFAC targets Shelbit and Aban Tether

The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control announced the sanctions on Aug. 7 as part of Washington’s effort to disrupt Iran’s access to international financial markets.

OFAC accused Shelbit and Aban Tether of facilitating illicit cryptocurrency transactions and sanctions evasion. The agency said the Iranian government relied on exchanges with limited or no regulatory oversight to move digital assets through corporate networks and an online gambling operation.

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The sanctions also cover Iranian national Siavash Kayvanpour and companies tied to him in Georgia, Poland and the United Arab Emirates. Treasury described Kayvanpour as the operator of a network of front companies connected to Shelbit.

IRGC-linked addresses sent more than $1 million in crypto to Shelbit, according to Treasury. Shelbit-linked wallets allegedly transferred more than $2 million to addresses controlled by the IRGC.

Wallets owned or controlled by Kayvanpour also sent over $2 million to Nobitex, Iran’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Treasury said.

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“Whether in dollars, rials, or crypto, Treasury will hunt down and dismantle the illicit financial networks that keep the regime afloat,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said.

Aban Tether processed funds for sanctioned exchanges

OFAC separately accused Iran-based Aban Tether of processing millions of dollars in transactions involving entities already under U.S. sanctions.

Those entities included Nobitex, Wallex, Bitpin and Ramzinex. The four Iranian exchanges were sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in June after officials accused them of helping restricted entities access digital asset markets.

Chainalysis estimated that Nobitex accounts for roughly half of Iran’s cryptocurrency trading activity. The exchange has denied having a direct relationship or contractual arrangement with the IRGC, Iran’s central bank or other government bodies.

Shelbit has also rejected claims that it knowingly participated in money laundering, terrorism financing or sanctions evasion. Its former management said the company stopped accepting new business in December 2025 and completed its customer wind-down in January.

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The sanctions represent administrative designations rather than criminal convictions. However, they block property and interests in property belonging to designated parties when those assets enter U.S. jurisdiction.

US widens Iran crypto crackdown

The latest action expands a U.S. campaign targeting exchanges, wallet addresses and companies accused of helping Iran bypass restrictions during its military conflict with Washington.

In July, U.S. authorities froze $131 million in Iran-linked crypto held in wallets connected to the country’s central bank. That followed an April action in which Tether froze approximately $344 million in USDT across two Tron addresses linked by authorities to Iranian networks.

Bessent previously said the United States had seized or frozen nearly $1 billion in cryptocurrency connected to Iranian exchanges and wallets since the conflict began.

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The use of centralized stablecoins gives authorities an enforcement tool that does not exist with assets such as Bitcoin. Issuers can block transfers from designated addresses, while transactions involving decentralized assets generally require control of the private keys.

What the sanctions mean for crypto firms

U.S. persons and companies are generally prohibited from providing funds, services or other economic benefits to the sanctioned exchanges and individuals. Entities owned at least 50% by one or more blocked parties are also covered, even when they are not named separately.

Foreign exchanges, stablecoin issuers and payment providers may also face secondary sanctions exposure if they knowingly process certain transactions involving the designated parties.

OFAC published several Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tron and Solana addresses as part of the action. Crypto companies will need to add those identifiers and the sanctioned entities to their transaction-screening systems as Washington continues tracing Iran-linked digital asset flows.

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Magic Labs Sells Wallet Business to Kraken Parent Payward

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Magic Labs Sells Wallet Business to Kraken Parent Payward


Magic Labs, the company behind the embedded wallet infrastructure used by apps including Polymarket and WalletConnect, sold its wallet business to Payward, the parent company of Kraken, and is rebranding itself as Newton Labs. Co-founder and CEO Sean Li announced the two decisions Monday in a post… Read the full story at The Defiant

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Dominic Sessa Summons the Rapscallion Spirit of Anthony Bourdain in the Exhilarating, Tender Tony

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Dominic Sessa Summons the Rapscallion Spirit of Anthony Bourdain in the Exhilarating, Tender Tony

This is how Tony, who will eventually become Anthony, falls for the restaurant life: The chaos of the kitchen, the unruly, often drug-addicted personalities, the power to put together meals that people can enjoy with friends, and maybe even remember long after the fact. Sessa is perfect as the swain Bourdain: He’s got that just-fallen-out-of-bed look—perhaps because he literally has just fallen out of bed, or, more accurately, a hammock—but he’s also hungry and inquisitive in a touching way. At first charged with the lowly task of dishwashing, he furtively watches his kitchen colleagues—including Leo Woodall’s Sal, who becomes both a friend and a terrible influence—as they expertly shuck oysters, or slam the lever on a heavy-duty potato slicer as if it were the arm of a slot machine, usually while talking trash about one another. Suddenly, he’s found the place where he belongs. Banderas’ Chef spots Tony’s spark of potential before he does: One of the cardinal rules he’s instituted for his employees is that they must never be even 15 minutes late. To that end, every workday morning he rouses Tony from the snoozy coziness of his hammock with a bucket of water. He doesn’t want this kid to fail, and though Tony has loving, albeit perhaps too permissive, parents (they’re played by Rich Sommer and Dagmara Dominczyk), this is just the kick in the pants he needs.    

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Nvidia Stock Forecast: NVDA Targets Record-High After New $2 Billion AI Deal

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Nvidia (NVDA) Stock Performance. Source: TradingView

Firmus, an Nvidia-backed artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure firm, raised $2 billion in a fully subscribed equity round, lifting its valuation above $10.5 billion. The round closed as NVIDIA (NVDA) shares traded within about $13 of their all-time high.

The raise is the latest in a string of multibillion-dollar commitments tied to Nvidia’s ecosystem. For NVDA bulls, it signals that heavy AI spending remains intact ahead of the August 26 earnings report.

Nvidia (NVDA) Stock Performance. Source: TradingView
Nvidia (NVDA) Stock Performance. Source: TradingView

Nvidia Doubles Down on Firmus’ AI Infrastructure Buildout

Nvidia and Coatue Management returned as follow-on investors in the round. Blackstone-managed funds and trading firm Jane Street joined for the first time, Firmus said in a statement.

The deal follows the SpaceX satellite computing deal announced earlier this week and a June agreement for Firmus to buy Nvidia infrastructure and resell Nvidia-powered cloud services. Each new commitment feeds the same demand story that supports the stock.

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The Australian company will use the proceeds to accelerate Project Southgate, its rollout of AI training and inference factories across Australia. The capital also funds expansion into Asia-Pacific markets, including a recently announced development in Indonesia.

Firmus began as a supplier of cooling technology for Bitcoin mining before pivoting to data centers built on Nvidia’s DSX reference architecture. The firm has raised over $3 billion in equity in the past year, nearly doubling its $5.5 billion April valuation.

Emanuel Ajay Datt, managing director of investment manager Datt Group, told Reuters the raise reflects how scarce such opportunities have become.

“The pace at which Firmus has re-rated demonstrates how private capital views AI infrastructure as one of the few capital-scarce opportunities in global markets right now.”

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NVDA Stock Nears Record High as Wall Street Stays Bullish

NVDA changed hands at $223.67 in midday trading on Friday, up 2.14% from the prior close of $218.99, per Yahoo Finance data. The stock sits about $13 below its record $236.54, set on May 14.

NVDA Stock Performance. Source: Yahoo Finance
NVDA Stock Performance. Source: Yahoo Finance

Wall Street remains firmly behind the trade. Among the 37 analysts covering NVIDIA, 36 rate the stock a Buy, with one Hold and no Sells.

Their average 12-month target of $308.69 implies roughly 38.77% upside from current levels. Forecasts range from $250 to $500, while Bernstein and Wells Fargo each hold $315 targets.

NVDA analyst price targets and Strong Buy consensus. Alt: NVIDIA analyst forecasts point to AI infrastructure upside. Source: TipRanks
NVDA analyst price targets and Strong Buy consensus. Alt: NVIDIA analyst forecasts point to AI infrastructure upside. Source: TipRanks

However, skeptics still question the demand behind the spending wave. Michael Burry has warned of a 1987-style crash and argues Nvidia helps finance the customers buying its chips.

One financing round will not settle that argument, which feeds a wider AI bubble debate. It does show multibillion-dollar checks for Nvidia-aligned projects keep arriving, three weeks before earnings test the demand behind them.

The post Nvidia Stock Forecast: NVDA Targets Record-High After New $2 Billion AI Deal appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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The True Story Behind Tony

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The True Story Behind Tony
Dominic Sessa stars as celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain in the biopic Tony. —Seacia Pavao

Before Anthony Bourdain was a famed chef with eight Emmys for his travel series Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, he started out as a dishwasher in Cape Cod’s hippie enclave Provincetown in the mid-1970s. Tony, out in theaters Aug. 7, explores this period in Bourdain’s life, imagining how that kitchen job whet his palate for working in the restaurant industry.

In the movie, Dominic Sessa portrays Anthony Bourdain, a student at Vassar College who follows his crush Nancy Putkoski to Provincetown, where she works in the summer at a pizza shop. She doesn’t exactly feel the same at first, and so one night, a heartbroken Bourdain drowns his sorrows at a casual seafood restaurant and gets into a fight there, ending up too drunk to go home. The restaurant’s chef (Antonio Banderas)—known simply as “Chef” in the film—brings him back to his house. The chef lets him stay for the summer because he has nowhere to go and puts him to work as a dishwasher in his restaurant. 

The staff is full of miscreants, who are snorting lines of cocaine left and right. But the chef becomes a mentor, showing Bourdain the particulars of running a Provincetown kitchen: how to shuck oysters and make homemade salt out of seawater. Bourdain arrives looking for love and ends up finding it in food and kitchen culture—a passion that would shape the rest of his life.

The real Bourdain died by suicide in 2018 at the age of 61. Tony, taking place over one summer, does not delve into questions about his death. “We wanted to remind people why they loved him in the first place, focus on the beginning of his life where he figured out how to share his superpower with the world of curiosity, empathy and connecting people through food,” says Lou Howe, one of the Tony screenwriters. 

Here’s the real dish from Bourdain’s time in Provincetown, where he decided to become a chef.

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Bourdain’s real Cape Cod shenanigans

When Bourdain went to Provincetown for the first time, he wasn’t craving lobster rolls, but the company of one particular woman. As he wrote in his 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential, he was 18 and “unhappily in love” when he went there to find his high school crush and future wife Nancy.

They were both students at Vassar, and they shared a house with roommates, where he says there was a lot of cocaine, pot, acid and sunbathing nude—in other words, as he put it, “healthy teenage activities.” 

Nancy worked at Spiritus Pizza, and while Bourdain didn’t actually move in with a chef, as the movie depicts, he did sleep in the crawl space over a walk-in refrigerator at Spiritus Pizza at one point.

One of the roommates hooked Bourdain up with a dishwashing gig at the Flagship, best known for serving up fried seafood to summer tourists. 

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“He was forced to get this job. He didn’t have any money in Provincetown,” says Todd Bartels, one of the Tony screenwriters.

The rag-tag kitchen crew included an ex-con and part-time methadone dealer who worked the salad station. They nicknamed Bourdain “Mal,” short for “mal carne,” which is what they called bad meat. Bourdain was doing all of the grunt work at the Flagship, scrubbing pots and pans, scraping plates, peeling potatoes, and cleaning shrimp. 

Bourdain was attracted to a certain kind of swagger that the kitchen crew boasted. In one dramatic example in Kitchen Confidential, he wrote that when he watched a chef at the Flagship rear-end a bride celebrating her wedding at the restaurant, “I knew then, dear reader, for the first time: I wanted to be a chef.”

Chefs at the restaurant were hailed for “total number of waitresses screwed, cocktails consumed without visible effect.” He gushed about the chefs, not only for their ability to churn out so many dinners in a sweltering kitchen, but also because they were “sexual athletes” who lived a life of “adventure, looting, pillaging, and rock-and-rolling through life with a carefree disregard for all conventional morality.”

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Bourdain dishing on Bourdain

In Tony, Sessa as Bourdain is obnoxious, talking himself up and lying to everyone he meets, even pretending that he’s writing a book about the restaurant to impress Nancy. The real Bourdain was definitely known as an arrogant kid in Provincetown. Per Kitchen Confidential, back then he was “angry” and “undisciplined,” writing, “I treated the world like my ashtray.” 

“He was very brutally honest in critiquing his younger self, so that gave us some free rein to paint this wayward young man in all his warts,” says Howe.

As one of the Flagship’s chefs, Alex Getmanov, said in Laurie Woolever’s Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, Bourdain “didn’t know anything, and he had this attitude that he could do anything, which doesn’t get you far in a working kitchen.” 

Working in the Flagship’s kitchen, Bourdain wrote, “essentially pushed me down the path I still walk to this day.”

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In an episode of his food travel series Parts Unknown, Bourdain described the Flagship as the place “where my cooking career started, where I started washing dishes, where I started to have pretensions of culinary grandeur.”

True to life, the movie ends with Bourdain dropping out of Vassar to enroll at the Culinary Institute of America in upstate New York.

(L-R) Bourdain (Sessa) and the “Chef” (Antonio Banderas), who is a composite of the many chefs who inspired Bourdain. —Seacia Pavao

What Bourdain learned from the Cape Cod food scene

The chef and mentor in Tony (Antonio Banderas) is a composite of different chefs who inspired Bourdain. 

One chef he especially looked up to in Provincetown was Howard Mitcham, author of the Provincetown Seafood Cookbook (1975), who would host an annual clambake like the one in the movie. As Bourdain wrote in a 2018 introduction for Mitcham’s cookbook, “He understood always that the best place to enjoy seafood was on the beach, among friends, in a pretense-free zone, preferably accompanied by many drinks.” Mitcham also taught him that “there is no difference between the joys of a great meal at a three-star Michelin and at a humble fisherman’s bar—as long as it’s made with love and with pride.” 

More than that, he learned a passion for food. “Howard showed us how to cook for ourselves, for the pure pleasure of eating, not just for the tourist hordes,” he wrote in Kitchen Confidential, “that food could be a calling. That the stuff itself was something we could actually be proud of, a reason to live.”

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He also learned that you don’t need to do much to fresh seafood to make it taste good. As the movie shows, local foodies would swarm the ocean whenever striped bass appeared, reeling them in with pieces of Wonder Bread and then whacking them on the head. In Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain described filleting the fish under gas lamps—covered in gore—and broiling the fish with lemon and butter to make “a meal that made me feel better about things, made me better for eating it, somehow even smarter.” 

He left Cape Cod with an appetite for food and vice. As he said in Parts Unknown, “I left Provincetown with restaurant experience, a suntan, and an ever deepening relationship with recreational drugs.”

Provincetown also gave Bourdain, an aspiring writer, something to finally write about, says Bartels. “He found a purpose. I don’t know if there’s anything more profound than that.”

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Solana Perp DEX Flash Trade to Wind Down Unless It Finds a Buyer

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Solana Perp DEX Flash Trade to Wind Down Unless It Finds a Buyer


Flash Trade said on Friday it will wind down operations unless it finds a party to acquire the Solana perpetuals exchange, and that the decision was not driven by money. "This decision is not calculated based on monetary reasons," the team wrote on X, citing "direction, shrinking market… Read the full story at The Defiant

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CEX Perpetual Futures Volume Falls to $4T, Lowest Since Late 2023

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CEX Perpetual Futures Volume Falls to $4T, Lowest Since Late 2023

Crypto perpetual futures trading volume on centralized cryptocurrency exchanges (CEXs) fell to $4 trillion in July, marking a 31-month low last seen in December 2023.

Binance led CEXs with $1.4 trillion in monthly perpetual futures volume, followed by OKX with $607 billion and Bybit with $300 billion, analytics platform CryptoRank said in a Friday X post.

Perpetual futures volumes briefly recovered between April and June before declining across all major venues in July.

The 31-month low in perpetual futures activity came as daily spot crypto trading volume fell 23.6% between July 1 and July 31, from $17.8 billion to $13.6 billion, according to analytics provider Coinglass.

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Source: CryptoRank

Perps volume on DEXs nears one-year low

Perpetual trading volume on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) fell to $531 billion in July, the lowest level since June 2025 and a 21% decline from the $676 billion seen in June 2026, according to data aggregator DefiLlama.

Perpetuals trading volume on decentralized exchanges. Source: DefiLlama

Perps trading volume on DEXs has trended lower since the $1.36 trillion seen in October 2025.

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Open interest on DEXs has also fallen to $17.9 billion in July from a peak of $19.4 billion in September 2025. Open interest measures the total value of active, unsettled contracts and can indicate whether new capital is entering or exiting the market.

Related: Hyperliquid RWA contracts grow to 32% of trading activity in Q2

Hyperliquid was the leading DEX with $199 billion in reported trading volume over the past 30 days. A growing share of Hyperliquid’s trading volume has come from tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), which accounted for 32% of Hyperliquid’s second-quarter trading activity, generating 6.6% of the protocol’s $169 million quarterly revenue. 

Tokenized assets became Hyperliquid’s largest trading category for the first time last month, with RWAs accounting for 52% of its total weekly trading volume between July 13 and July 19.

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Magazine: How Bitcoin and gold reacted differently to the Iran war shock

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

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Donald Trump’s media company to terminate Crypto.com deal

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Donald Trump’s media company to terminate Crypto.com deal

Donald Trump’s media company to terminate Crypto.com deal

The president’s company will unwind an agreement with Crypto.com to create a multibillion-dollar CRO treasury and reportedly not integrate prediction markets onto Truth Social.

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One American Stock Benefits as Smartphones, MRI, and AI Servers Want the Same Chip

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One American Stock Benefits as Smartphones, MRI, and AI Servers Want the Same Chip

Your next phone costs more, a hospital scanner is competing for the same parts, and an AI server is outbidding both. All three run on the same memory chips, and one company sells to each of them.

That company is Micron Technology (MU), and the reason the three now fight over one chip is an AI memory shortage that has quietly rewired the market.

Why One Wafer Now Has Three Buyers

Start with the AI server. A single one uses 10 to 20 times as much memory as an ordinary computer. As data centers scale, they now absorb most memory made in the world, about 70% of output.

Want more insights like this? Sign up for Editor Harsh Notariya’s Daily Newsletter here.

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Here is the part that ties the three devices together. The high-bandwidth memory AI needs come off the same production lines as the ordinary DRAM inside a phone or a scanner. Chipmakers cannot run both at full speed at once.

The Memory Price Shock: BeInCrypto

Worse, one high-bandwidth wafer uses up the capacity of two or more standard ones. So every AI server that gets built removes memory that would otherwise reach other devices.

That is why supply for everyone else keeps shrinking while prices keep climbing. The same shortage that feeds a data center raises your phone’s price and pushes a hospital’s scanner into a queue.

Your Phone Is Paying for the AI Boom

Phones use the same memory families as data centers, so they felt it first. The average smartphone price is heading to a record smartphone price of about $523 in 2026, up 14%, according to IDC.

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Makers are protecting margins by cutting corners you can see. Some are trimming camera modules and displays, and a few base models have reverted to 4GB of memory, a level not normal since 2020.

In other words, your phone is getting more expensive and a little worse, and an AI data center is the reason.

The Hospital Scanner Cannot Just Wait

Medical imaging, robotics, and monitoring machines draw on the same DRAM and NAND, and Micron supplies memory into medical imaging systems through its embedded business.

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This is the cruelest leg. A phone buyer can delay an upgrade, but a hospital replacing a scanner cannot swap the memory inside it, because medical parts carry multi-year qualification cycles.

So these buyers bid against hyperscalers with almost no leverage. Their volumes are tiny compared to a cloud order, which means they either pay a higher price or wait.

The AI Server Outbids Everyone

At the top of the queue sits the AI server, because high-bandwidth memory is the most profitable use of every wafer. Micron is one of only three suppliers worldwide and holds about 25% of the DRAM market, according to Counterpoint Research.

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Its sold-out HBM supply shows how binding the constraint is, and the company has signed an Anthropic AI deal to tune memory for its models.

Three buyers, one shrinking pool of wafers. The supplier that sells into all three collects the pricing power, no matter who outbids whom.

The Stock That Collects

That is the case for Micron stock. It carries a Strong Buy consensus, with 28 of the 29 analysts covering it rating it Buy. The consensus target of about $1,569 sits roughly 75% above the current price of $893.

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Micron Stock Analyst Figures
Micron Stock Analyst Figures: TipRanks

Wall Street’s repricing has been violent. Targets ran from $190 last September to a high of $2,200 by June, and recent calls from TD Cowen and KeyBanc still point toward $1,600.

Wall Street's Micron Repricing
Wall Street’s Micron Stock Repricing: BeInCrypto

The valuation is the part that stands out. Even after a 718% year, Micron trades at about five times forward earnings, because profits have grown faster than the share price.

How Far Micron Has Run
How Far Micron Has Run: BeInCrypto

Smart money leans the same way. In Nansen’s tracking of Hyperliquid perpetual traders, Micron holds the largest net-long position among chip names, with a position near $7.7 million spread across 39 wallets.

Smart-Money Perps Positioning
Smart-Money Perps Positioning: Charlie Quant Lab

TSMC shows a higher long-to-short ratio, yet its net-long dollars are a tiny fraction of Micron’s.

Why the Micron Stock Pullback Is Not the Story

Micron did slip about 5% before Thursday’s open after peer SanDisk gave soft guidance. Additionally, the entire memory group sold out of sympathy. Yet the flow read on the drop is “rally distribution,” which is profit-taking after a huge run rather than a top forming.

Micron Price Action
Micron Price Action: Yahoo Finance

The context matters here. The stock is still up 213% this year. It sits only about 26% below its June high, so this looks like a breather, not a break.

Micron Chip-Flow Read
Micron Stock Chip-Flow Read: BeInCrypto

The real risk is that the market decides memory is priced at its peak, a worry behind the latest fears of a memory glut. Multiple analysts trimmed peer targets within hours of SanDisk’s report.

Still, a chip fabrication plant, or fab, takes years to build. SK Hynix has warned the shortage could last beyond 2030.

As long as it lasts, the phone, the scanner, and the AI server keep fighting over the same chips, and Micron keeps selling to all three. That is why one weak forecast from a rival does not change the bullish MU story. The real test is Micron’s own report on September 29.

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‘Bitcoin Doesn’t Need CLARITY:’ Michael Saylor Responds to Bill’s Delay

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The big news over the past 12 hours is the delay of the highly anticipated CLARITY Act in the US, and numerous prominent figures in the cryptocurrency space have commented on it.

Michael Saylor has stayed true to himself, focusing only on Bitcoin. In his post on the matter, the co-founder of Strategy noted that Bitcoin does not need CLARITY, but America does.

Saylor doesn’t believe the market leader requires certain regulations to thrive, but he expressed his support for the bill last week. At the time, he noted that bipartisan work to establish clear, durable rules, protect property rights, promote innovation, and strengthen American capital markets is required for both the nation and the rest of the crypto market.

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Recall that the most anticipated legislation faced another setback hours ago as the US Senate delayed voting on it before the August recess.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune confirmed the lack of a vote now but said the bill is set to return in focus once the Senate returns in September.

“The Dems are insistent on no CLARITY vote… I worked with sponsors of the bill. Senator Lummis was great, and we’re getting that queued up first thing when we come back,” he said.

The post ‘Bitcoin Doesn’t Need CLARITY:’ Michael Saylor Responds to Bill’s Delay appeared first on CryptoPotato.

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Reform UK Chair Urges Investigation Into Alleged SBF-Linked Donation

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Crypto Breaking News

UK politics is facing fresh scrutiny over alleged crypto-linked political donations tied to former FTX CEO Sam “SBF” Bankman-Fried. Lee Anderson, chair of the UK Reform party, has called for an investigation into Defense Secretary Wes Streeting after reports surfaced of a reported £50,000 donation routed through a think tank during 2022 and 2023.

The renewed controversy comes as Bankman-Fried continues to serve a 25-year prison sentence in the United States. In parallel, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has issued a formal mandate upholding his conviction, narrowing the legal avenues available to him.

Key takeaways

  • Reform UK chair Lee Anderson says parliamentary standards should investigate a reported £50,000 donation involving Wes Streeting.
  • The reported funds were said to come from Labour for the Long Term, whose founder allegedly received a $675,000 gift from Bankman-Fried before sending money to Streeting.
  • Streeting reportedly claims he never had contact with Bankman-Fried, and that a donor list provided by the think tank did not include the former FTX CEO’s name.
  • UK law permits larger donations by unincorporated associations, creating potential compliance loopholes around donor transparency.
  • Bankman-Fried’s conviction remains upheld after a Second Circuit mandate, reinforcing the finality of his sentence while he considers further legal steps.

Reform’s complaint over a reported Streeting donation

According to a Friday report from The Telegraph, Lee Anderson urged the parliamentary commissioner for standards to probe Wes Streeting over reports of approximately $50,000 in donations made via a think tank.

The donations in question were reportedly made between 2022 and 2023 and were said to originate from Labour for the Long Term, a political research and policy group. The Telegraph reports that Labour for the Long Term’s founder allegedly accepted a $675,000 gift from Bankman-Fried before later directing funds to Streeting.

Anderson’s call centers on whether parliamentary standards rules were met, particularly given the reputational and compliance concerns surrounding Bankman-Fried after his criminal conviction and imprisonment. The allegation is not that Streeting himself dealt directly with Bankman-Fried, but that donations may have been intermediated through an organization linked to the accused fraudster.

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Donor transparency and the UK “association” loophole

The controversy also touches on how UK donation rules are structured. As described with reference to guidance from the International Bar Association, unincorporated associations are permitted to donate more than $675 directly to politicians. The regulations can function as a loophole, potentially allowing money to move through entities in ways that reduce visibility into the original source.

In practice, this matters because investors, civil society groups, and voters increasingly treat political funding transparency as part of broader governance and compliance risk—especially when large sums appear connected to high-profile failures in the crypto sector. When donors are routed through intermediaries, scrutiny may shift from direct donor relationships to the processes that political figures use to vet where contributions come from.

While the UK rules allow certain structures for donations by associations, the reporting raises the question of whether vetting was sufficient and whether the think tank properly disclosed relevant contributors at the time.

Streeting’s response and the think tank founder’s denial

Per The Telegraph, Streeting asked Labour for the Long Term for a list of donors before accepting the reported $50,000. The report states that Bankman-Fried’s name did not appear on the donor list provided to him.

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The same coverage claims that Streeting said he had never had any contact with the former FTX CEO. Bankman-Fried is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence after being convicted on seven felony charges.

David Lawrence, the founder of Labour for the Long Term, also pushed back on the implication that Bankman-Fried was the ultimate source of Streeting’s contribution. According to The Telegraph, Lawrence said Streeting’s contribution was funded by a donor other than Bankman-Fried and that Labour for the Long Term “did not receive any donations from the FTX Foundation or Mr. Bankman-Fried.”

Even so, Anderson’s intervention suggests Reform believes the compliance question is not settled by denials alone. The focus for an official standards investigation would likely be whether disclosures and processes matched the expectations of transparency and accountability under parliamentary rules.

US mandate keeps SBF’s conviction intact

The UK donation allegations land against a background of legal closure for Bankman-Fried’s US case. Earlier this week, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued a formal mandate upholding Bankman-Fried’s felony conviction and 25-year sentence. The update builds on an earlier decision reported in June that limited his remaining options.

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As Cointelegraph previously reported, the Second Circuit’s ruling reduced the number of routes available to pursue early release. Bankman-Fried still has the possibility of appealing to the US Supreme Court or waiting for a potential presidential pardon.

For readers watching the intersection of crypto and politics, the key point is that Bankman-Fried’s criminal status remains firmly established in the US. That matters because it may influence how other institutions interpret donations and intermediary arrangements tied to him or to parties connected with him—even after his conviction.

Why voters and crypto stakeholders should watch the investigation

Whether parliamentary standards decide that Streeting’s reported donation arrangements were properly vetted—or whether process gaps and association-based structures warrant stronger disclosure—will be crucial. The next steps to watch are the commissioner’s findings and any clarification on how donor lists were compiled and validated by the think tank, particularly in light of a conviction that the US appeals court has now fully cemented through a formal mandate.

Risk & affiliate notice: Crypto assets are volatile and capital is at risk. This article may contain affiliate links. Read full disclosure

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