Crypto: 17th June 2025

• Crypto industry makes political push in New Jersey governor race (theintercept.com), with Stand With Crypto hosting a rally featuring candidates U.S. Rep. Josh Gottheimer and Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop both pledging support for crypto ahead of upcoming primaries.

• Liverpool emerges as UK's crypto capital (theguardian.com), with 13% of residents regularly investing in cryptocurrency and stocks according to an Openreach survey on online investment habits across British cities.

Feds: Russian Laundered Half a Billion Through Manhattan Crypto Firms (occrp.org, 2025-06-11). A Russian national laundered $530 million through U.S. banks and crypto exchanges using Tether, while five others pleaded guilty in a $36.9 million crypto investment scam involving shell companies and fraudulent platforms

Walmart and Amazon Explore Issuing Their Own Stablecoins, Good Idea? (mishtalk.com, 2025-06-13). Walmart and Amazon are considering issuing stablecoins to facilitate payments and reduce costs by bypassing traditional banking systems, influenced by the potential regulations of the GENIUS Act aimed at regulating the stablecoin market

A last mile solution for Bitcoin (markjgsmith.com, 2025-06-10). Bitcoin payments in Kenya are simplified through the Tando app, which connects Bitcoin to the mobile money system MPesa, allowing seamless transactions with local merchants using Lightning Network technology

Analyst Spotlight Tether (USDT) Overview (coinmetrics.io, 2025-06-10). Tether (USDT) enables efficient cross-border payments through fast, low-cost transactions, while its peg stability attracts institutional transactions, enhancing accessibility and liquidity across both centralized and decentralized platforms

What we learned reviewing one of the first DKLs23 libraries from Silence Laboratories (blog.trailofbits.com, 2025-06-10). Trail of Bits audited Silence Laboratories' Silent Shard DKLs23 library, revealing critical flaws and using tools like cargo-audit and Clippy to enhance security, documentation, and testing in threshold signature schemes

Creating a Tricked-Out Monero Server with TrueNAS (privacyguides.org, 2025-06-12). Set up a Monero server on TrueNAS, utilize Docker apps, configure storage, create Monero pools, use Arti for Tor connections, I2P configurations, secure clearnet connections via Nginx Proxy Manager, and perform wallet testing

Echidna tricks (justus.pw, 2025-06-12). Echidna is a fuzzing tool for Solidity smart contracts, facilitating the evaluation of security and testing via assertions and properties while providing extensive configuration options for testing on the Ethereum blockchain

Eureka! IBCv2 support in CosmWasm (medium.com/cosmwasm, 2025-06-12). CosmWasm introduces IBCv2 support with the release of cosmwasm-std v3.0.0-ibc2.0, allowing smart contracts to utilize improved inter-blockchain communication protocols

Detecting State Manipulation Vulnerabilities in Smart Contracts Using LLM and Static Analysis (arxiv:cs, 2025-06-10). PriceSleuth is a novel method utilizing Large Language Models and static analysis to proactively detect price manipulation attacks in DeFi smart contracts by analyzing price calculation logic and dependencies

Understanding the Issue Types in Open Source Blockchain-based Software Projects with the Transformer-based BERTopic (arxiv:cs, 2025-06-13). A study of 497,742 GitHub issues in blockchain projects using BERTopic identifies 49 issue topics, highlighting Wallet Management and UI Enhancement, with trends in resolution times and frequency post-2016

Blockchain and Edge Computing Nexus: A Large-scale Systematic Literature Review (arxiv:cs, 2025-06-10). This systematic literature review analyzes the interplay between blockchain and edge computing, revealing patterns that enhance privacy and security in mobile applications through nearly 1000 curated studies across various technological and design aspects

Epass: Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Asynchronous Payment on Blockchain (arxiv:cs, 2025-06-11). Epass introduces an efficient and privacy-preserving asynchronous payment scheme for BNPL on blockchain, using locally verifiable signatures and time-release encryption to enhance transaction privacy and reduce time overheads significantly

Intelligent System of Emergent Knowledge: A Coordination Fabric for Billions of Minds (arxiv:cs, 2025-06-11). ISEK is a decentralized network for AI-human collaboration, featuring a six-phase workflow, NFT-based identity management, and a native $ISEK token for micropayments, enabling emergent intelligence in a self-organizing cognitive ecosystem

Price Discovery in Cryptocurrency Markets (arxiv:q-fin, 2025-06-10). This study analyzes price discovery in Ethereum and Bitcoin markets using tools like Hasbrouck's Information Share and Hayashi-Yoshida estimator, revealing centralized exchanges lead in ETH price discovery, with implications for liquidity and arbitrage

On the Performance of Cloud-based ARM SVE for Zero-Knowledge Proving Systems (arxiv:cs, 2025-06-11). Zero-knowledge proofs on ARM SVE servers lag behind x86-64 counterparts, with AWS Graviton4 and GCP Axion performing 1.6X and 1.4X slower than AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon, respectively, due to lower vector size and clock frequency