Crypto: 20th May 2025

• Telegram has shut down $35 billion black markets linked to cybercrime and money laundering, including Chinese-language marketplace Xinbi Guarantee which facilitated scams and trafficking.

• Coinbase's recent cyber-attack could cost between $180m and $400m, with the company offering a $20m reward for information while enhancing security measures.

• Crypto executives and investors face increasing safety concerns due to rising abduction attempts, with the daughter of 'crypto boss' Pierre Noizat narrowly escaping kidnappers in Paris.

• Twelve suspects face RICO and wire fraud charges for a cryptocurrency crime spree involving social engineering attacks and exploiting tools to facilitate theft.

• Robinhood Markets agreed to acquire Canadian crypto exchange WonderFi for $179M to enhance its crypto services in Canada.

• Circle, the USDC stablecoin issuer, is reportedly in talks for a potential acquisition by Coinbase or Ripple for over $5 billion.

• Yuga Labs sold the legendary CryptoPunks NFT collection to the NODE Foundation to preserve digital art and enhance accessibility.

• AI and blockchain technologies are merging to enhance energy systems, enabling peer-to-peer trading and optimizing consumption toward a decentralized future.

Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset (economist.com, 2025-05-18). Crypto, originally aspiring to transcend politics, has devolved into a hub of self-dealing, paralleling the conflicts of interest seen in traditional governance, as highlighted by recent events and practices within the industry

Digital Assets Market: Technology, Policy and Law (lawgazette.co.uk, 2025-05-14). Dr. Joseph Lee Nazzini discusses digital assets, including regulation via EU MiCA, the impact of quantum technology on security, asset tokenization, and the evolving role of lawtech in compliance and legal education

Private Money in a Public World (electriccoin.co, 2025-05-14). The article discusses the importance of financial privacy in a digital world, highlighting the risks of financial surveillance and the Zashi wallet as a tool based on Zcash for secure transactions

The Fairest Casino (quant.am, 2025-05-16). Omni's 'fairest casino' thesis proposes a community-owned platform minimizing value leakage through a peer-to-peer trading architecture, enabling lower trading costs and features like loss refunds for users

United Against Big Tech: How Journalists and Geeks Can Fight for a Fairer (Digital) Future (babakfakhamzadeh.com, 2025-05-16). Babak Fakhamzadeh discusses strategies for combating Big Tech's influence at CryptoRave, focusing on issues of security, privacy, and digital freedom within corporate control and technology practices

Enumerating All 69,788,231 Ethereum Contracts (zellic.io, 2025-05-15). Zellic examines methods to enumerate all Ethereum contracts, using tools like RPC calls, Debug API, and Trace API, ultimately retrieving 69,788,231 contracts and their bytecodes in five days for community benefit

Celebrating a year of Ethrex (blog.lambdaclass.com, 2025-05-16). Ethrex, an Ethereum L1 and L2 client, simplifies crypto development using Rust, reducing complexity and enhancing performance, while supporting ZK Rollups and various proving systems like SP1 and RISC Zero for minimal code divergence

☕ Coffee-break with a dyne, Vol.1 (news.dyne.org, 2025-05-15). Matteo shares his journey from a math student to a key contributor at Dyne.org, exploring tools like ECDSA, EDDSA, zero-knowledge proofs, and the importance of preparing for quantum cryptography challenges

The Company Closed, I'm Unemployed Again (en.smallyu.net, 2025-05-15). Backend developer reflects on a month at Tantin Chain, where they built a transaction aggregation service for crypto wallets before the company unexpectedly laid off all employees on the day of the planned release

The Pacaya Fork is arriving on the Taiko Alethia Mainnet (taiko.mirror.xyz, 2025-05-16). The Pacaya Hardfork is set to enhance the Taiko Alethia mainnet with based preconfirmations, introducing batch based protocol and multiproving, while removing proof contestation to improve user experience and efficiency

Go Cryptography Security Audit (go.dev, 2025-05-19). Go's cryptography libraries were audited by Trail of Bits, revealing a low-severity memory management issue and several informational findings related to timing side-channels and compliance with NIST specifications

New attack can steal cryptocurrency by planting false memories in AI chatbots (arstechnica.com, 2025-05-13). A new context manipulation attack can exploit ElizaOS, a framework for AI agents, to redirect cryptocurrency transactions to an attacker's wallet by planting false memories through prompt injections

Crypto Chaos: Unpacking the Ripple Effects of Coinbase's Alarming Data Breach (eliza-ng.me, 2025-05-16). The Coinbase data breach exposed sensitive user information, highlighting risks such as identity theft and phishing. It underscores the need for end-to-end encryption, robust access controls, and the role of regulators in cryptocurrency security

On Graphs of Incremental Proofs of Sequential Work (eprint.iacr.org, 2025-05-13). Graphs of incremental proofs of sequential work are characterized, emphasizing dynamic graphs and a generic construction of iPoSW. A refined definition of iPoSW addresses triviality, yielding efficient blockchain light-client bootstrappers

Understanding and Characterizing Obfuscated Funds Transfers in Ethereum Smart Contracts (arxiv:cs, 2025-05-16). This study presents a transfer-centric obfuscation taxonomy and introduces ObfProbe to analyze over 3,000 obfuscated Ethereum contracts, revealing that obfuscation significantly complicates detection and increases financial losses

DeFeed: Secure Decentralized Cross-Contract Data Feed in Web 3.0 for Connected Autonomous Vehicles (arxiv:cs, 2025-05-15). DeFeed is a secure protocol for decentralized cross-contract data feeds in Web 3.0, optimizing gas costs through functions like pool, cache, subscribe, and update, enhancing CAVs' smart contract interactions on Ethereum

Guiding LLM-based Smart Contract Generation with Finite State Machine (arxiv:cs, 2025-05-13). FSM-SCG is a smart contract generation framework leveraging finite state machines and Large Language Models to enhance code quality, achieving up to 48% higher compilation success rates and reducing vulnerability risks by approximately 68%

Blockchain-Enabled Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Group Purchasing for Energy Plans (arxiv:cs, 2025-05-16). Decentralized privacy-preserving group purchasing leverages blockchain, secure multi-party computation, and smart contracts to enable users to coordinate energy plan switches without a trusted third-party, ensuring privacy and fairness

Detecting Sybil Addresses in Blockchain Airdrops: A Subgraph-based Feature Propagation and Fusion Approach (arxiv:cs, 2025-05-14). A novel sybil address identification method utilizing subgraph feature extraction and lightGBM, capturing temporal, amount, and network structure features, shows significant performance improvements in detecting sybil addresses in blockchain airdrops

Correlating Account on Ethereum Mixing Service via Domain-Invariant feature learning (arxiv:cs, 2025-05-15). StealthLink utilizes cross-task domain-invariant feature learning and a MixFusion module to improve mixing transaction tracing on Ethereum, achieving a 96.98% F1-score in limited data scenarios, enhancing blockchain forensics

Comparative Analysis of Blockchain Systems (arxiv:cs, 2025-05-13). This paper analyzes blockchain architectures, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Hyperledger Fabric, focusing on scalability, security, and key technologies like P2P protocols, asymmetric encryption, and consensus mechanisms, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses

Hybrid Monetary Ecosystems: Integrating Stablecoins and Fiat in the Future of Currency Systems (arxiv:econ, 2025-05-16). Stablecoins with over USD 200 billion market cap enhance hybrid monetary ecosystems, integrating fiat and private currencies while utilizing central bank reserves for stability, security, and programmability, as shown in the 2023 SVB-USDC case study

The Stablecoin Discount: Evidence of Tether's U.S. Treasury Bill Market Share in Lowering Yields (arxiv:q-fin, 2025-05-18). Tether's 1.6% share of U.S. Treasury bills reduces yields, with a 1% increase lowering 1-month yields by 3.8%, escalating to 6.3% above a 0.973% threshold, saving the U.S. government $15 billion annually