Crypto & Web3

Japan stablecoin payments advance with Lawson trial, Netstars launch

Lawson will test yen stablecoin payments in Tokyo as Netstars launches a merchant service supporting USDC, USDT and JPYC.

Here's What to Buy to Prepare for the Next Crypto Bull Market (Hint: It's Not Just Bitcoin)

Tokenization is going to bring a lot of value on-chain in the next crypto bull market.

U.S. inflation, second-quarter earnings reports: Crypto Week Ahead

Your look at what's coming in the week starting July 13.

ICP Traders Pile $243 Million Into Multi/DEX Where Nobody Can Lose a Cent

Chinese Prosecutors Float Treating Crypto Mixer, Privacy Coin Use as Sign of Money Laundering

An article in the top prosecutors' paper urges new blockchain evidence rules, presumptions of intent, and a state platform to sell seized coins.

Bitcoin falls below $63,000 as markets give Hormuz traffic just 3% chance to normalize by August

Bitcoin slipped below $63,000 as renewed fighting between the United States and Iran pushed oil prices higher, drove bond yields up, and revived concern that an extended disruption in the Strait of Hormuz could keep inflation elevated. Data from CryptoSlate shows the largest cryptocurrency traded near $62,940, down about 1.4% over 24 hours. Other leading

The $292M KelpDAO Bridge Hack: Why the Audit Wasn't the Problem

On April 18, 2026, attackers drained about 116,500 rsETH, roughly $292 million, from a cross-chain bridge KelpDAO built on LayerZero. It is the largest DeFi hack of the year so far. I spend my days finding bugs in smart contracts, and the most uncomfortable thing about this hack is that finding bugs would not have stopped it. Here is the post-mortem and what it should change about how you think about security. The bridge held the reserve of rsETH backing the token across more than 20 chains: Base, Arbitrum, Linea, Blast, Mantle, Scroll, and others. When the reserve drained, every wrapped version downstream was suddenly under-collateralized. The root cause, per LayerZero's post-mortem, was not a Solidity bug. The attack began on March 6, six weeks earlier, when a developer was socially engineered. The contract code did what it was written to do. The keys that controlled it ended up in the wrong hands. KelpDAO froze the system about 46 minutes after the drain. The attacker tried twice more to take another $100 million and failed because of that freeze. The 46 minutes is the one genuinely good part of this story. KelpDAO is not an outlier in 2026. Two weeks earlier, Drift Protocol lost $285 million on Solana. That post-mortem also found no code exploit. It was a six-month social engineering operation against the people who held the admin keys. Drift's TVL fell from $550 million to under $300 million in an hour. Put the two together and the theme is unmissable: the most expensive failures of 2026 are not bugs. They are humans being patiently targeted. Security firms attribute 76% of crypto hack losses this year to North Korea-linked actors, up from 64% in 2025. These are not smash-and-grab opportunists. They are state-backed teams running multi-month campaigns. I want to be precise here because "audits are useless" is the wrong takeaway. Audits are not useless. They are scoped. An audit answers: does this code do what it claims, and does it have known classes of vulnera

Bank of Thailand audits high-volume stablecoin trades to crack down on illicit finance: report

The central bank and the SEC have reportedly begun using data analytics tools to examine abnormal stablecoin trades, with a focus on USDT.

Japan’s SBI Group to launch JPYSC stablecoin lending service this month

The SBI's service would offer users a 3% annual yield for deposited JPYSC stablecoins, according to Nikkei.

After MiCA deadline, majority of Binance users sent funds to self-custody not other compliant exchanges

The unaudited company split suggests Europe removed an unauthorized intermediary without moving most departing assets to supervised rivals.

Pakistan's Crypto Fatwa Debate: Why Sharia Compliance Became a Digital Asset Catalyst

Darul Uloom Karachi fatwa labels crypto purchases impermissible as PVARA courts scholars and drafts VASP rules. Investors weigh risk, compliance, adoption paths.

Live markets: Bitcoin slips below $63,000 in an Asian-session leverage flush

The liquidations were minor, running at about a sixth of what the market saw at its worst over the past 30 days, per CoinGlass.

Bitcoin Drops 3% as US-Iran Hostilities Escalate

The Bitcoin price has refused to break and hold above the $64K horizontal resistance level. Middle East conflict escalation could be the cause of the recent dip below $63K. Could the dip worsen, or will major support structures hold?

Bitcoin’s $60K price floor is back in play as Hormuz oil shock returns

BTC fell below $63,000 after new U.S. strikes as oil, the dollar and yields rose and equity futures retreated.