Crypto Convergence: Regulation Meets Tech (2026-05-26)

A whale opened long positions for 2,340,000 NEAR tokens in the past ~10 hours and placed orders to add 813,000 more.

On May 26, according to Lookonchain monitoring, the whale 0x7be1 is going long on NEAR.

Within the past 10 hours, it opened a long position of 2.34 million NEAR (USD 6.45 million) with 10x leverage and placed a limit order to add another 813,000 NEAR (USD 2.00 million) at USD 2.46.

[PANews]

Coinbase Execs Drop Crypto’s Most Bullish Stablecoin Message Yet on CLARITY Bill

Coinbase executives mounted a coordinated defense of payment stablecoins, pushing back against a Wall Street Journal column. The article questioned whether privately issued digital dollars pose systemic risk to the US economy. Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal and Chief Policy Officer Faryar Shirzad both endorsed the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act. Their statements signaled top-level support for the market-structure bill currently working through the Senate.

Grewal framed stablecoin oversight as a risk-management question, not a public-versus-private debate. The Coinbase CLO, who has pushed for regulatory clarity in past testimony, compared digital dollars to private healthcare and transportation. He argued that the regulatory floor matters more than the issuer.

Shirzad expanded the argument in a longer Coinbase policy response, noting that roughly 90% of M2 already consists of privately issued instruments. These include commercial bank deposits and money market fund shares.

The GENIUS stablecoin framework, signed last July, requires payment issuers to hold cash and short-dated US Treasuries. Reserves must back outstanding tokens one-to-one. The statute bans loans, leverage, and fractional reserves outright.

Bank-style supervision would miss the actual risk profile, Shirzad said. Commercial banks earn their regime because they lend, transform maturities, and run 10-to-1 leverage. Stablecoin issuers do none of those by law. He also pointed to monthly reserve attestations and real-time on-chain visibility. The framework, he said, offers transparency that bank deposits cannot match.

The endorsement lands while the Senate Banking CLARITY vote pushes the bill toward a full floor test. Markets are reading Grewal’s stance as a political marker. Industry support at this stage could shape final language on stablecoin yield and market-structure rules.

Only two windows before midterms remain for CLARITY to pass. The question now is whether the Senate can reconcile its version with the House-passed bill. November will close the legislative runway.

SHIBA INU futures netflow plunges 306% in CoinGlass data

SHIB futures netflow plunged 306% as outflows exceeded inflows, according to CoinGlass derivatives data. CoinGlass tracked SHIB futures netflow dropping 306%, with the total value of SHIB leaving derivatives exchange wallets outpacing inflows.

The metric tracks movement of tokens in and out of derivatives platform wallets and is used as an indicator of how traders are positioning in the perpetual futures market. The 306% negative netflow signals that derivatives traders are actively reducing exposure rather than opening new leveraged positions. Open interest stands at $61.2 million, with $42,485 in SHIB futures positions liquidated in the latest 24-hour session.

Negative futures netflow does not necessarily indicate an impending price crash, but it does reflect a reduction in the number of traders willing to hold derivative exposure to SHIB at current prices. SHIB was trading near $0.00000575 at time of writing, down approximately 54% over the past 12 months from a peak near $0.000012. The token broke below key support near $0.0000054 this week according to technical analysis on CoinMarketCap, raising concern about a possible retest of March 2026 lows.

Crypto.news has reported on over 3 billion SHIB tokens hitting exchanges in a single session earlier this month, adding sell-side pressure as broader crypto market liquidations accelerated. The pattern of negative futures flow alongside exchange inflows suggests holders are repositioning rather than accumulating.

Crypto.news has also covered how declining SHIB futures open interest and funding rate pressure had already signalled weak conviction among derivatives traders in February 2026. The Shiba Inu (SHIB) price page tracks live movements as the futures data raises questions about SHIB’s near-term direction heading into the US Memorial Day holiday weekend.

[Crypto.news]

Prometheum says $24B tokenized securities lack distribution

Prometheum launched new infrastructure on May 25 allowing broker-dealers and registered investment advisers to offer tokenized securities and crypto assets through traditional brokerage accounts. The company positions the launch as a bridge between blockchain-based securities and the conventional financial system.

“Crypto has solved tokenization, but it hasn’t solved distribution,” said Aaron Kaplan, co-founder and co-CEO of Prometheum. “There are tens of billions of dollars of tokenized securities already issued on blockchain rails, but almost no mainstream distribution channel to reach investors at scale.”

More than $24 billion in securities products have already been issued on blockchain networks according to RWA.xyz data. The rapid growth of tokenised Treasuries has moved from $380 million in 2023 to $13.4 billion by April 2026, with tokenised equities emerging as the fastest-growing sub-sector.

The challenge Kaplan identifies is structural. Issuers can now tokenize securities relatively easily, but reaching mainstream investors requires access to regulated brokerage accounts, settlement infrastructure, and investor onboarding that most blockchain-native platforms do not provide.

Prometheum’s network of SEC-registered and FINRA-member broker-dealers provides correspondent clearing, custody, execution, and recordkeeping for third-party broker-dealers, enabling their clients to access on-chain securities within existing legal frameworks. BlackRock recently filed a second tokenised fund application with the SEC through Securitize, signalling institutional demand for regulated tokenization infrastructure is growing from both issuer and distribution sides.

The Prometheum approach targets the distribution gap that well-resourced issuers still face, since retail brokerage access to on-chain securities remains limited to a small number of registered platforms. Securitize has also unveiled plans to launch natively tokenized public stocks with full on-chain settlement. Whether Wall Street brokerage firms adopt Prometheum’s infrastructure will depend partly on whether the Clarity Act’s passage reduces regulatory uncertainty enough to justify the compliance investment.

[Crypto.news]

Bitcoin quantum proof by 2029? Stanford cryptographer warns against rushed transition

Stanford cryptographer Dan Boneh says Bitcoin should prepare for quantum risk now, but warns a rushed post-quantum migration could cause worse failures than the threat itself. Bitcoin’s post-quantum transition debate is escalating after Isabel Foxen Duke highlighted a fresh interview with Boneh, who argued that the bigger near-term danger may be a buggy migration rather than an imminent quantum attack on the network.

In the interview, Boneh said, “Don’t panic, but don’t ignore,” framing quantum risk as a serious long-range engineering problem rather than an immediate doomsday event for Bitcoin (BTC). He stated, “A hasty transition to post-quantum, in my mind, is more likely to cause a catastrophic bug…than the probability we’ll be attacked by a quantum computer.” His most pointed remark was the one amplified on X: “If you try to aggressively move to a post-quantum architecture, like for example by 2029, I think that would be a mistake for the blockchain.”

The immediate trigger is a March 30 whitepaper from Google Quantum AI, coauthored by Boneh, which said Shor’s algorithm against the 256-bit elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem on secp256k1 could run with “≤1200 logical qubits and ≤90 million Toffoli gates” or “≤1450 logical qubits and ≤70 million Toffoli gates.” The paper added that, on superconducting architectures with 10⁻³ physical error rates and planar connectivity, those circuits “can execute in minutes using fewer than half a million physical qubits.”

Boneh told Foxen Duke that Google’s estimates matter, but he still views a cryptographically relevant quantum computer before 2035 as possible yet unlikely under current funding levels. He said anything by the end of the decade “seems very aggressive,” though not impossible if the field were treated like a national priority.

That tension has already spilled into Bitcoin governance. BIP 361, titled “Post-Quantum Migration and Legacy Signature Sunset,” says more than 34% of all bitcoin had revealed a public key on-chain as of March 1, 2026, leaving those UTXOs theoretically vulnerable to a sufficiently powerful quantum attacker. Boneh is not arguing for complacency; he said Bitcoin “will survive” quantum risk and called claims that it cannot “insane,” because the core path is already known: move users toward post-quantum addresses and signatures, then phase out vulnerable legacy paths over time.

However, he criticized compressed migration windows, noting that a proposal like BIP 361 needs more complete design work and more time. The dispute is broader than timelines, as Boneh argued Bitcoin should strongly consider hybrid signatures that combine existing elliptic curve cryptography with post-quantum schemes, rather than forcing a binary jump. He also said he would prefer lattice-based signatures over purely hash-based designs because they preserve more room for threshold signatures and further cryptographic innovation.

That argument sits inside a wider industry push. Coinbase advisers similarly warned that the threat is not immediate but preparation cannot wait. Current consensus remains that no existing machine can break Bitcoin today, even as the estimated resource threshold is falling.

How Ledger’s approach to the AI security arms race will keep wallets safer

AI is transforming both crypto security and crypto attacks. Ledger is approaching AI-powered threats, human verification, and secure wallet infrastructure by leveraging AI to detect suspicious transactions, phishing attempts, malware, and unusual wallet behavior faster than humans. It can also help users identify fake websites and dangerous smart contracts.

On the other hand, attackers use AI to create convincing phishing emails and fake support chats. It can also automate hacking attempts, generate malware, and scale social-engineering scams much more efficiently than humans, which is why crypto wallets are increasingly exposed to AI-powered attacks. Increasing interactions through AI agents are inevitable, and crypto users are especially vulnerable, because these transactions are irreversible.

This is why leading cold wallet vendor Ledger’s recently released AI security roadmap places equal focus on protection from AI scams and wallet security, building around the principle that humans must remain in control of authorization and signing. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say the future of crypto wallet security depends on whether AI is used more effectively to strengthen human control or to help attackers automate deception at scale.

“Humans will orchestrate that work,” says Ian Rogers, Ledger’s Chief Human Agency Officer. “AI will handle a tremendous amount of work for us in the middle, but humans will guide and verify at endpoints throughout the process.” Stronger verification systems, hardware isolation, secure transaction interpretation, and human oversight will be indispensable features of wallet security in the future.

Already considered leaders in crypto wallet security, Ledger’s new roadmap positions the brand around AI-assisted security while preserving human authorization. AI is making crypto attacks more scalable by automating deception, impersonation, and social engineering. It has introduced operational security risks and virtually innumerable ways to deceive users, amplified by the fact that crypto transactions are irreversible.

AI can generate malware that searches a computer for wallet files, browser extensions, or copied seed phrases, and bots automatically probing weak smart contracts or exchange APIs for vulnerabilities. Deepfake videos of crypto-related influencers promoting “giveaways” and AI chatbots pretending to be customer support for wallets are just two sources of danger. AI phishing sites imitate exchanges, causing users to authorize irreversible withdrawals. Deepfake investment calls convince victims to transfer crypto to scam wallets with no recovery option.

Finally, the risks of agentic trading shouldn’t be overlooked. When a user tells an agent to maximize short-term profit, it might move all funds into extremely risky leveraged trades or buy manipulated memecoins based on bullish social media sentiment. AI agents often read external data like social media posts or Discord messages, in which an attacker might have hidden malicious instructions. The combination of AI agents being able to execute financial actions and blockchain transactions being final and anonymous creates a much larger and harder-to-secure attack surface than traditional manual trading ever could.

“Five years ago we already knew at Ledger that crypto was the first step towards a greater journey of providing that same secure infrastructure for digital identity, or what we now call Proof of You,” says Rogers. “Humanity spends more and more of their time within a digital world, where their memories, value, and access is controlled by fewer centralized platforms, with hacks and phishing attempts increasing on a daily basis. Ledger’s mission is not only a nice to have, but an essential part of daily life for individuals and institutions around the world.”

In light of the ever-increasing risks, Ledger has built its AI-security roadmap around the idea that users should remain the final authority over transaction approval and wallet access. The company’s signers – Stax, Flex, and Nano Gen5 – are the first secure and intuitive touchscreens. Ledger is bridging the gap between AI agent access to money and credentials and software-only security through hardware-anchored security, including Skills, Agent Identity, and Ledger CLIs in Q2, Agent Intents and Policies in Q3, and Proof of Human in Q4, 2026.

The Device Management Kit, available now, enables agents to use Ledger hardware for human-in-the-loop approval. Moonpay’s AI agent wallet has integrated Ledger signing to ensure that every transaction requires the user to press a physical button, and the private keys remain confined to the hardware. Agent Intents will be able to propose actions, but the human user will review them on a Trusted Display and confirm with a physical button. These and other features reflect Ledger’s cautious view of AI autonomy and focus on authorization integrity.

As AI-generated deception becomes more convincing, trusted hardware verification is assuming an increasingly prominent role in crypto security. AI increases the danger of compromised endpoints, manipulated interfaces, and deceptive applications, making trusted hardware verification more important. Ledger wallets use Secure Element chips, which hold cryptographic data in a highly protected environment, and transactions are only signed within the Secure Element.

The host computer sends unsigned transaction data to the device, and the transaction is returned to the computer without the private key. Even if malware controls the computer, it can’t extract the keys directly. Secure wallets feature mechanisms that delete sensitive data when they detect manipulation efforts. The protective mechanisms culminate in the principle of endpoint compromise separation, which essentially means that wallets isolate secrets and authorization processes from potentially infected devices.

Ledger’s approach focuses on using AI to improve user awareness and threat detection while preserving explicit human authorization. In other words, AI isn’t to replace user authorization, but to help humans make better decisions. One way it can do this is by translating complex blockchain data into clear interpretations, so people know what they’re signing. AI-powered scam detection systems can identify phishing, known malicious addresses, or suspicious dApp behavior before a transaction is confirmed.

Contextual risk analysis involves evaluating transaction patterns, destination wallets, and behavioral anomalies in real time. AI models can flag things like unusual account activity and other interactions that differ from a user’s normal behavior. These risks emerge early via user-warning systems and anomaly detection mechanisms. Final approval remains with the user. The next generation of crypto wallets may be defined not only by key storage, but by how effectively they help users identify and resist AI-driven manipulation.

The concept of AI-powered attackers vs AI-assisted defenses is relevant here. Attacker uses include AI-generated malware that changes its code to avoid detection, bots that scan blockchains for wallet vulnerabilities, and automated smart contract exploit discovery. As a defense, AI can detect unusual smart contract activity or monitor wallets for laundering patterns, such as login attempts in rapid succession from countries that are very far away from each other, followed by a large withdrawal to a new wallet.

In the past, a wallet would ask whether to approve a contract interaction, and a non-native user might not have understood what that meant. As AI increasingly informs the wallet user experience, wallet owners may soon be asked to confirm that an app is authorized to spend unlimited funds in a given cryptocurrency, which dramatically improves safety. Instead of raw code, Ledger uses Clear Signing to make blockchain transactions understandable to users.

Earlier transactions showed a hash (a string of characters), but now, you can clearly review all of the details before you sign, minimizing the risk of accidentally approving a malicious smart contract. Ledger’s system interprets transaction intent and shows users plain-language explanations on the device screen, such as “1000 USDC transfer to wallet X.” You understand who receives funds and how much they receive. You are asked to approve a spending limit, so you also know what permissions you are granting.

One final important change involves explainable security systems. Earlier, security alerts came in the form of numerical risk scores, which didn’t mean much to users. Now, an alert might be, “This wallet interacted with a known phishing contract and received funds from a sanctioned mixer.” Each agent must thus try to answer four pillar questions. In an era of AI-generated deception, keeping humans securely in control of wallet authorization may become one of the most important principles in crypto security.

AI is transforming the threat landscape by generating attacks at a massive scale. Phishing attacks, fake interfaces, deepfakes, and automated scams are becoming increasingly convincing, and the importance of trusted human authorization has never been greater. Users need reliable ways to verify what they are actually approving before any transaction is executed, which is why manual transaction authorization remains essential.

Automated systems cannot fully replace human judgment and its ability to provide contextual awareness. Verification and trusted interfaces are becoming foundational security requirements. Users need to know that the information displayed to them is accurate, understandable, and independently verified, which is why Ledger has been pioneering verification infrastructure, an element within the evolution of crypto security.

Secure hardware confirmation reduces the risk of manipulation by verifying transaction details and displaying them in a protected environment before approval occurs. Devices that isolate private keys and independently confirm transaction details create a trusted layer between users and increasingly sophisticated threats. The stronger approach is not AI-controlled finance, but AI-assisted defense. AI can help detect phishing attempts, identify suspicious contracts, interpret transaction risks in real time, and improve transparency for users, but the final authorization step should still belong to the individual.

This is why Ledger is combining AI-assisted threat detection with secure human authorization. “Think of it this way: the agent logic, the model, and the tools live in the software layer,” explains Rogers. “But the moment that agent proposes to do something consequential, Ledger is the layer that ensures the right human authorized it.”

Chris Larsen XRP wallets go active ahead of US midterms

Chris Larsen’s XRP wallets have resumed on-chain activity ahead of Tuesday’s Texas Democratic primary runoff. The reactivation draws immediate attention given Larsen’s history of significant XRP transfers at notable market and political junctures.

Larsen serves as executive chairman of Ripple Labs. His estimated 2.58 billion XRP holdings across eight wallets tracked on XRPScan represent one of the largest known individual positions in any single cryptocurrency, worth approximately $3.5 billion at current prices near $1.35. Cryptoquant data estimates Larsen is sitting on over $764 million in unrealized gains.

In January 2025, wallets that had been idle for six to seven years reactivated and sent more than $109 million in XRP to exchanges including Coinbase, Bitstamp, and Bybit. In July 2025, on-chain researcher ZachXBT reported an additional $140 million in XRP transfers from Larsen-linked addresses coinciding with XRP trading near an all-time high above $3.40. “Since July 17, 2025, an address linked to Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen transferred out 50M XRP ($175M) to four addresses. ~$140M ended up at exchanges/services,” ZachXBT wrote on X in July 2025.

Larsen had not commented publicly on today’s activity at time of writing. Whether the current movement precedes exchange transfers or represents internal wallet management is not confirmed from on-chain data available at time of publication.

Crypto.news has covered Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse’s legislative activity in 2026 as the Clarity Act moves through Congress. The outlet has also reported on why the Clarity Act’s progress is particularly consequential for XRP, context that gives any Larsen wallet movement added political timing significance ahead of Tuesday’s runoff.

[Crypto.news]

Tokenized real world assets triple to $34 billion as Treasuries and Ethereum lead

The on-chain market for tokenized real-world assets has hit a fresh record near $34 billion, more than tripling from roughly $5.4 billion at the start of 2025. Ethereum carries about 60 percent of that value, and tokenized U.S. Treasuries alone now account for around $15 billion.

Several independent data sources converge on the same order of magnitude for current RWA size. MetaMask, citing RWA.xyz, says that as of April 2026, tokenized U.S. Treasuries held about $12.88 billion on-chain and that “the total distributed value of tokenized RWAs surpassed $31 billion by May 2026.” InvestaX’s Q1 2026 market report puts the tokenized RWA market (excluding stablecoins) at roughly $29 billion by the end of March after growing about 30 percent in the quarter, while Binance Square’s May update notes that the sector “has seen significant growth, reaching approximately $31.4 billion by May 2026.”

A separate State of RWA rundown circulating in the market pegs on-chain RWA TVL at $24.6 billion in April 2026, up from around $6 billion in early 2025. FintechWeekly cites RWA.xyz in saying the distributed asset value for tokenized RWAs stood at $27.65 billion as of April 6, with represented asset value – the off-chain collateral behind those tokens – at $441.38 billion.

Taken together, that cluster of estimates makes the $33.99 billion figure now circulating in trading chats entirely plausible as an updated snapshot. The sector has clearly moved from the low single-digit billions in early 2025 to the low to mid $30 billions by mid-2026 once you aggregate Treasuries, commodities, tokenized funds, stocks, and private credit and include fresh flows this month.

Securitize’s own year-end review corroborates the trajectory, as do major crypto players such as Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, who has highlighted the tokenization of real-world assets—including real estate, stocks, bonds, and funds—as a major area where the financial system needs an update for instant settlement and fractional ownership. The tokenization platform says the RWA market it tracks (excluding stablecoins) grew from approximately $5.5 billion at the start of 2025 to $18.2 billion by year-end, before exceeding $20 billion by January 11, 2026, implying a near fivefold increase in just over a year.

The single largest driver is U.S. government debt. Intellectia and other fixed-income-focused outlets report that the tokenized Treasury market has crossed $15 billion in assets under management as of May, describing it as a “historic milestone” that reflects soaring demand from stablecoin issuers, DeFi protocols, and institutional treasuries for on-chain T-bill exposure.

BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, known by its ticker BUIDL, has become the flagship product in that segment. OpenPR and other disclosures say BUIDL has surpassed $2 billion to $2.4 billion in AUM, making it the largest tokenized Treasury fund globally, while Securitize explains that the fund holds assets such as U.S. Treasury bills and repos and issues security tokens representing fund units to qualified purchasers.

Ethereum is the main settlement layer for that activity. MetaMask’s explainer notes that “Ethereum currently dominates the RWA space” and that most tokenized bond and fund products are issued as ERC-20 tokens, a point echoed by Hilbert Group’s macro tokenization report, which says that from 2022 to 2025 the value of tokenized RWAs jumped from about $6 billion to more than $30 billion, with Ethereum hosting the bulk of that growth.

Beyond Treasuries, there is a long tail. Ondo Finance has pushed deep into tokenized bonds and stocks: KuCoin reports that Ondo Global Markets, which offers tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs, recently crossed $1 billion in total value locked, calling it “one of the fastest-growing real-world asset tokenization products in crypto history.” Commodities and structured products are a smaller slice but still material, and private credit has emerged as a fast-growing niche as platforms tokenize trade finance, revenue share notes, and SME loans, a trend flagged in both InvestaX’s market report and IMF-linked policy papers.

RWA.xyz’s dashboard, which tracks individual tokenized assets and platforms, shows that as of late May the universe includes everything from tokenized money market funds and bond ladders to real estate slices and exotic assets such as music royalties, with more than 700,000 distinct asset holders and on-chain RWA value up over 4 percent month-on-month.

The punchline is simple: a market that was still a niche talking point in 2022 is now a roughly $34 billion pillar of on-chain finance, increasingly anchored by household names like BlackRock and multi-chain platforms like Ondo, and projected by some analyses to scale into the tens of trillions in represented assets by 2030 if current institutional adoption and regulatory clarity continue.

Garrett Jin increased his HYPE holdings to 184,200 tokens; his BTC long position and ZEC short position have unrealized losses exceeding $1.7 million.

May 26th news, according to Onchain Lens monitoring, Garrett Jin, the agent of “1011 insider whale”, has increased his HYPE holdings to 184,182.0000, worth $11.00 million.

He still holds a 5x BTC long position and a 3x ZEC short position, with floating losses exceeding $1.70 million.

[PANews]

AI risk faction sparks controversy by advocating trillion-dollar UBI to address potential unemployment

PANews, May 25: Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, and Chris Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, along with other AI company executives, are advocating for a “preemptive universal basic income (UBI)” to address potential large-scale unemployment caused by AI.

The article notes that Amodei described AI as a “general-purpose labor substitute” in a lengthy post, while Olah stated at the Vatican that large-scale replacement of human labor would entail a “historic moral responsibility.” Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, is also promoting UBI pilot programs.

[Dossier.today]

YZi Labs launches YZi Talent recruitment platform, integrating portfolio positions in Web3, AI, and biotechnology.

YZi Labs announced the launch of the YZi Talent recruitment platform, integrating open positions across Web3, AI, and biotechnology within its portfolio.

Initial roles available include Lead Backend Engineer, Senior Frontend Engineer, and AI Operations at predict.fun, as well as Founding Business Lead at AgriDynamics Robotics; additional companies will join progressively.

[Foresight News]

MoonPay ChatGPT app lets users buy Bitcoin and XRP

MoonPay ChatGPT app is now the first crypto onramp inside OpenAI’s platform, supporting Bitcoin, XRP and Solana. MoonPay launched a dedicated app inside ChatGPT’s App Store on May 22, allowing users to generate cryptocurrency purchase links without leaving OpenAI’s chatbot. The company called itself “the first and only crypto onramp integrated in ChatGPT” in its announcement post.

The integration supports Bitcoin, XRP, Ethereum, Solana, USDC, and more than 100 other digital assets across more than 30 chains. Users complete KYC and payment on moonpay.com after the chatbot generates a checkout link, with payment options including card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and bank transfer.

Users search for MoonPay in ChatGPT’s Apps section, connect their account, and then ask the chatbot about a cryptocurrency before requesting a specific purchase amount. ChatGPT fills in the asset, chain, and amount automatically and generates a checkout link. Returning MoonPay customers can use saved payment methods without setting up a new account.

“We’ve seen this with commerce and AI, where a lot of people get shopping recommendations within ChatGPT,” said Kevin Arifin, MoonPay Blockchain Engineer and Product Lead. “Now people are starting to do financial research within ChatGPT as well, and it’s always been surprising to me that there hasn’t been an on-ramp where you could buy crypto within ChatGPT.”

Arifin described the app’s role as educational. “It’s like a broker that sits by you, not making financial recommendations, but educating you about the asset you’re buying,” he said. The app is designed for mainstream consumers learning how crypto works through conversation, not autonomous AI trading.

MoonPay joins Kraken, OKX, CryptoAudit, and RealOpen as crypto-related apps active in the ChatGPT App Store. MoonPay’s integration is the only one allowing direct purchases rather than querying blockchain data. The Bitcoin price (BTC) and XRP (XRP) price pages track live movements for users who engage with either asset through the ChatGPT app.

[Crypto.news]

YZi Labs launches recruitment platform YZi Talent, with the first batch of openings in Web3, AI, and biotechnology positions.

On May 25, YZi Labs announced the launch of its recruitment platform, YZi Talent, which serves as a unified hub for open positions across its portfolio companies in the Web3, AI, and biotechnology sectors.

The first batch of roles includes Principal Backend Engineer, Staff Frontend Engineer, and AI Operator at prediction market project predict.fun, as well as Founding Business Lead at agricultural robotics company AgriDynamics Robotics.

[PANews]

Brad Levy warns cross-chain compliance is crypto’s AML gap

Cross-chain compliance gaps at blockchain bridges are crypto’s most dangerous AML blind spot, ThetaRay CEO Brad Levy says. Compliance teams monitoring crypto transactions lose the trail the moment assets cross a blockchain bridge.

Brad Levy, CEO of ThetaRay, calls this the Cross-Chain Compliance Gap, the blind spot that emerges when funds move from Ethereum to a Layer 2 or alternative chain and the transaction data fragments at the crossing point. “Somewhere between where Ethereum ends and an L2 or alternative chain begins, the data becomes fragmented as the money moves through blockchain bridges,” Levy said.

In 2026, real transaction volumes are scaling through these routes and legacy banks are encountering a frontier their AML systems were never built for. TRM Labs has documented that most illicit actors in 2026 move assets through bridges and privacy tools within minutes. The structural problem: retail bank AML sees fiat, blockchain analytics tools see the crypto side, and neither sees the bridge. “No one sees the bridge,” Levy said. “Since ThetaRay’s AI is agnostic to the rail, it provides the connective tissue that monitors the behavioral fingerprint of the individual across both worlds.”

ThetaRay recently flagged a UK retail customer declared as a packer, an occupation not associated with high-volume financial activity. The system found she had received over £134,000 from nearly 40 counterparties, including nine companies with no previous history, then executed regular crypto purchases multiple times a month, often on consecutive days. “While traditional rule-based systems would have classified these as isolated transfers, our AI connected the dots and flagged them as an unlicensed crypto exchange or illicit investment portal,” Levy said.

Levy describes L2s and blockchain bridges as reset buttons, resetting the financial history of funds at each hop. By the time a legacy bank flags a fiat withdrawal as suspicious, the money has already moved through multiple chains. “Criminals understand that a retail bank’s AML system isn’t talking to a Solana explorer in real time,” Levy said. “They reset their financial history by leveraging the complexity of L2s and bridges.”

Levy’s outlook for the next 12 to 24 months is a structural shift he calls “converged monitoring,” collapsing separate Retail AML and Crypto Risk teams into a single AI-driven overlay that tracks an individual’s behaviour across all transaction types. “Having separate teams for Retail AML and Crypto Risk will no longer be a viable strategy,” Levy said. The overlay he foresees maintains a risk profile for each individual continuously, not just when they cross a monitored threshold on a single rail.

Levy sees the direction as unambiguous regarding the US Treasury proposing AML rules for stablecoin issuers under the GENIUS Act. “If there are any blind spots between fiat and crypto over the next year, they will be viewed as governance failures,” he said.

[Crypto.news]

Babylon proposes integrating native Bitcoin collateral on Aave V4, eliminating the need for cross-chain bridges and custodians.

May 26th news, Babylon Labs has initiated a temperature check proposal in the Aave community, proposing the integration of native Bitcoin as collateral on Aave V4 through the Babylon Trustless Bitcoin Vaults protocol.

This scheme eliminates the need for wrapping, cross-chain bridges, or custodians. Users lock Bitcoin in Taproot UTXOs, and redemption is controlled by on-chain rules (such as loan repayment), settling directly to Bitcoin UTXOs.

The proposal deploys two Aave V4 Spokes: the Babylon Core Lending Spoke (lending) and the BTC Vault Swap Spoke (post-liquidation settlement). Collateral exists in the form of vaultBTC, a transfer-restricted ERC-20 token that can only be transferred between fixed whitelisted addresses.

[PANews]

The U.S.-Iran ceasefire agreement will be extended for 60 days.

On May 26, it was reported that the ceasefire agreement reached between the United States and Iran in early April will be extended for 60 days.

All countries’ vessels will be able to navigate freely and safely, just as they did before the strait was closed.

[TechFlow]

Trader Linked to Whale now down $128 million after ETH wipeout

Onchain analytics firm Bubblemaps says a Hyperliquid whale linked to former BitForex CEO Garrett Jin and the infamous 10/10 short trade would have been up more than $70 million if he had never traded Ethereum, but is instead sitting on roughly $128 million in net losses after catastrophic ETH longs erased huge prior gains. In a new onchain breakdown shared on X, Bubblemaps reconstructs the PnL of the wallet cluster it associates with Garrett Jin, arguing that if the trader had simply held BTC and avoided the ETH leverage spiral, his net profit would stand north of $70 million; instead, the account is now “down $128M overall” after a brutal series of Ether trades.

The cluster has been in the spotlight since the so-called 10/10 crash on October 10, 2025, when a Hyperliquid whale built massive short exposure into Bitcoin and Ethereum shortly before President Donald Trump announced 100 percent tariffs on Chinese imports, triggering a violent risk-off move. Binance Square’s retrospective on the “10/11 flash crash” notes that the whale held more than 100,000 BTC equivalent and was behind a $735 million BTC short on Hyperliquid, with Arkham Intelligence later estimating between $190 million and $200 million in profit on those shorts across BTC and ETH as prices cratered.

Yahoo Finance separately described the same trader as the “Hyperliquid whale who made nearly $200M on the Oct. 10 crash,” and reported that blockchain sleuths linked the address to Garrett Jin, though Jin denied owning the wallet while acknowledging that he knew the person behind it. From there, the trade morphs into a case study in overconfidence. Binance coverage of a March 2025 liquidation recounts how an address on Hyperliquid opened a more than $200 million long position on ETH using 50x leverage, staking about $4.3 million in USDC to control 113,000 ETH before being liquidated in a move that left the protocol itself with a roughly $4 million loss due to insurance fund slippage.

Panoptic’s market intelligence notes and other whale tracking reports suggest that similar oversized ETH longs followed, taking the wallet’s aggregate realized loss on ETH north of $200 million as repeated attempts to time reversals ran into continued volatility and margin calls. Against that backdrop, Bubblemaps’ claim that the trader swung from a hypothetical +$70 million to –$128 million net is entirely plausible: the original 10/10 BTC short win was massive, but the later ETH leverage series appears to have more than erased it.

Despite the drawdown, the same cluster is back on Hyperliquid with a familiar mix of high-conviction bets. Bubblemaps says a connected address has recently deposited several million dollars of collateral to the perpetuals exchange, bought approximately $10 million worth of HYPE, the platform’s native token, and opened a $38 million short position on privacy coin Zcash (ZEC). That dovetails with other recent whale tracking reports. Bitcoin.com News described how a trader dubbed “Evaded” accrued about $7.5 million in profit in under four days from leveraged longs on ZEC and HYPE on Hyperliquid, then rolled into a $38.63 million ETH long using 25x leverage, a position that would be automatically liquidated on a roughly 4 percent adverse move.

Whale Alert and PANews have documented the same address pattern closing profitable HYPE, ZEC and ETH longs for about $4.6 million in gains, then opening a 990 BTC short worth nearly $75 million on Hyperliquid as BTC came under pressure from ETF outflows and derivatives liquidations. While those reports focus on a pseudonymous trader called Evaded, Bubblemaps’ new thread argues that at least one of these high-frequency, high-notional Hyperliquid whales can be tied through address clustering and historical flows back to the 10/10 short and the entity it links to Garrett Jin.

The picture that emerges is of a trader who oscillates between periods of spectacular success and ruinous overreach, with the core pattern unchanged: concentrated directional bets on BTC and ETH around macro events, and now similarly aggressive positioning in platform tokens like HYPE and high-beta names such as ZEC. On an absolute scale, a net PnL of –$128 million is a rounding error in a multi-trillion dollar crypto market, but the 10/10 whale saga is a vivid illustration of how even elite operators with accurate reads on one regime can blow up when they assume the same playbook will work forever.

It also underscores how much of the Hyperliquid and perps venue narrative is driven by a handful of very large accounts whose wins and losses can distort funding rates, liquidity and sentiment for the rest of the market in the short term, especially when they pivot from being the bid to being the offer on assets like BTC, ETH, HYPE or ZEC. For traders watching flows, Bubblemaps’ work adds another lens: rather than treating each new whale as an isolated story, it invites you to look at the entire career arc of a wallet cluster, and to ask whether you are front-running a disciplined asymmetric player or shadowing a gambler who just torched nearly nine figures trying to replay last cycle’s script.

Nathan Allman, founder of Ondo Finance, passed away unexpectedly; President Ian De Bode will assume the role of CEO.

On May 26, Ondo Finance announced that its founder Nathan Allman has passed away unexpectedly. The announcement stated that Nathan Allman’s vision, humility, and execution shaped the development of Ondo Finance, and his philosophy of promoting a more open and inclusive financial system will continue in the company’s future development.

Ondo Finance also announced that long-time President Ian De Bode will assume the role of CEO. The announcement noted that Ian De Bode has been responsible for the company’s strategy, products, and daily operations for over two years and has received full support from the management team.

[TechFlow]

The United States and Iran agree to open the Strait of Hormuz and clear naval mines.

The U.S.-Iran agreement draft stipulates a 60-day extension of the ceasefire, renewable upon mutual consent.

The draft agreement stipulates continued nuclear negotiations to reach a long-term understanding.

The United States and Iran have agreed to open the Strait of Hormuz and clear naval mines.

[Odaily]

Crypto PAC Fairshake backs Menefee with $5M in Texas

A crypto PAC affiliated with Fairshake has poured $5 million into a Texas congressional runoff ahead of Tuesday’s vote. Protect Progress, an affiliate of the crypto-backed Fairshake PAC, spent $5 million supporting Democratic challenger Christian Menefee in Tuesday’s Texas 18th District runoff and a further $2.8 million opposing incumbent Al Green, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Fairshake reported $193 million cash on hand heading into 2026.

The Kalshi prediction market gave Menefee a 91% probability of winning, with Polymarket at a similar figure. Total betting volume on the parallel Texas Republican Senate race between Ken Paxton and John Cornyn topped $16 million, with Paxton holding roughly 96% odds following a Trump endorsement.

Al Green has been among the more vocal crypto critics in Congress. He voted against both the GENIUS Act stablecoin bill and the Clarity Act, and Stand With Crypto awarded him an F grade. “I am an unbought, liberated, unafraid Democrat, unbought by crypto cash,” Green told colleagues on the House floor, accusing Menefee of making a “deal with the devil” by accepting Fairshake support.

Fairshake, backed primarily by Ripple Labs and Coinbase, also secured the endorsement of the Blockchain Leadership Fund, backed by Anchorage Digital and Chainlink Labs, in the Menefee race. Menefee was elected to Congress in a January 2026 special election and quickly became the industry’s preferred candidate over Green. The Texas result will be read as a signal of how far pro-crypto PAC spending can move congressional seats in contested districts.

The Clarity Act’s compressed legislative calendar heading into the 2026 midterms, the US Treasury’s AML rules for stablecoin issuers under the GENIUS Act (the specific legislation Green opposed that made his seat a target), and the broader legislative push to institutionalise crypto policy are all areas currently being tracked as Fairshake’s congressional spending continues.

[Crypto.news]