Crypto: 16th September 2025

• Crypto exchange Gemini priced its IPO at $28 and raised $425M, implying a $3.3B valuation and signaling strong public-market demand for crypto infrastructure.

• SEON raised $80M to scale its AI-driven fraud prevention and AML compliance stack, offering rapid integration and 900+ data signals for exchanges and fintechs.

• Silent Push secured $10M to expand a preemptive threat intelligence platform focused on indicators of future attacks, useful for proactively defending web3 endpoints.

• AegisAI raised $13M to deploy autonomous agents that inspect and neutralize email-borne threats in real time, targeting phishing risks that frequently hit crypto teams.

• Hack The Box acquired LetsDefend to expand blue-team and SOC simulations, bolstering defender training pipelines relevant to exchange and protocol security.

• An ex-eBay cybersecurity veteran’s startup Miru raised $2.7M to build a unified investigations platform with data graphs and AI copilots for faster incident response.

• Wired outlines how VPNs can bypass age-verification regimes, cautioning on privacy/security trade-offs and recommending providers like Proton, Mullvad, and Windscribe.

• ‘Sovereign AI’ efforts still lean on U.S. and Chinese tech stacks for chips, cloud, and infra—highlighting continued dependencies relevant to ‘sovereign’ compute and data strategies.

From Moscow to Dubai: Garantex’s Crypto Network Survives Sanctions (occrp​.org). Sanctions evade: Garantex network morphs into Exved, MKAN Coin, and Grinex, using Telegram, Paysol, offshore intermediaries, and ruble-to-dollar schemes

Issue 92 – The scam of all scams (citationneeded​.news). Trump family profits from WLFI token and American Bitcoin, with debanking disputes, regulatory battles, and crypto industry scrutiny

Garantex, Russian Crypto Exchange Used to Evade Sanctions, Continues Operating Under New Names and Has Grown Into a Decentralized Network, Transparency International Russia Finds (istories​.media). Garantex rebrands into MKAN Coin, Grinex and Exved; TI-Russia links a global network evading sanctions and facilitating dual-use trade via Telegram and offshore intermediaries

Alternative Financial Systems and the Reshaping of Global Finance (rusi​.org). Explores why states build alternative financial systems (AFS) and how traditional finance can adapt using sanctions, CBDCs, stablecoins, CIPS, SPFS, hawala, gold, crypto, and concierge-style enablers

Thorchain founder exploited for $1.35 million (web3isgoinggreat​.com). Thorchain founder JP Thorbjornsen suffers wallet drain and $1.35M loss after a video-call scam linked to a friend’s Telegram account

You Can’t Get What You Don’t Ask For (nik​.art). Asking listing pages for crypto coins yielded faster exchange listings and complete portfolio tracking

Insider trading is bad and other quaint notions (observationalepidemiology​.blogspot​.com). Discussion of insider trading in NFTs, OpenSea homepage picks, and the legal-ethical implications under wire fraud vs securities law

Latest Scam/Spam (Coinbase) (artlung​.com). Phishing scam references Coinbase withdrawal codes and contact numbers, attribution to Joe Crawford, and Indieweb/social links

The MCP Maintainers Meet In New York (den​.dev). MCP Maintainers gather in New York to discuss governance, SEPs, statelessness, and onboarding for MCP across distributed teams

Privacy is a Contract (doc​.searls​.com). Privacy should be a contractual, machine-readable agreement between user and site, exemplified by MyTerms and IEEE P7012

Blockchain-enhanced electoral integrity: a robust model for secure digital voting systems in Oman [version 3; peer review: 2 approved, 1 approved with reservations, 1 not approved] (f1000research​.com). Blockchain-based digital voting model for Oman leveraging Ethereum, smart contracts, biometric authentication, and asynchronous/synchronous transactions to improve electoral integrity

Niko PLP created branch refactor in NextGraph/nextgraph-rs (git​.nextgraph​.org). Rust-based NextGraph project page announces refactor branch, project scope, and funding from NGI programs

Digital Credentials, Workforce, and AI (eliterate​.us). Digital wallets, Verifiable Credentials, Open Badges (OB3), CLRs, LER, and AI's impact on credential ecosystems

Fusaka $2,000,000 Audit Contest! (blog​.ethereum​.org). Fusaka audit contest co-sponsored by Gnosis and Lido,Sherlock platform, four-week window, multipliers for early findings, up to 2x and 1.5x

How Sui Move rethinks flash loan security (blog​.trailofbits​.com). Sui Move replaces callbacks with a compiler-enforced hot potato model and PTBs for secure flash loans

Shibarium bridge hit with $2.4 million flash loan attack (web3isgoinggreat​.com). Shibarium’s bridge exploited via flash loan, compromised validator keys, draining ~225 ETH and 92.6B SHIB totaling ~$2.4M

OSTIF Community Spotlight 001.2025: Introduction, David Korczynski and Adam Korczynski (ostif​.org). OSTIF spotlights ADA Logics founders David and Adam Korczynski, detailing their security audits, fuzzing focus, and OSS collaboration

I Know Who Clones Your Code: Interpretable Smart Contract Similarity Detection (arxiv:cs). SmartDetector: interpretable function-level similarity of smart contracts via statement-tree diffusion and cosine-guided hyperparameter search

SmartCoder-R1: Towards Secure and Explainable Smart Contract Generation with Security-Aware Group Relative Policy Optimization (arxiv:cs). SmartCoder-R1 uses CPT, L-CoT SFT, and S-GRPO to securely and explainably generate smart contracts with improved safety metrics

Bitcoin Cross-Chain Bridge: A Taxonomy and Its Promise in Artificial Intelligence of Things (arxiv:cs). Taxonomy of Bitcoin cross-chain bridges: naive token swaps, pegged-asset, arbitrary-message bridges; evaluates trust, latency, efficiency for AIoT uses

ExDoS: Expert-Guided Dual-Focus Cross-Modal Distillation for Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection (arxiv:cs). ExDoS transfers semantic knowledge from source code to bytecode via dual-attention graph networks and pattern-aligned cross-modal distillation for vulnerable smart contracts

Bootstrapping Liquidity in BTC-Denominated Prediction Markets (arxiv:q-fin). Bitcoin-denominated prediction markets; liquidity provisioning via cross-market making, DeFi redirection, and automated market making

I've got a big favor to ask - keeping Blaze running isn't expensive, but it does all add up, so I'm asking readers like you to help, if you can.
That's why I'm launching a Patreon page!. Nothing flashy, just a way for folks who find value in these newsletters to chip in a little each month. In return, you'll get:

• Real say in how Blaze evolves — vote on new topics, features, topic curation ideas
• First dibs on merch (details still cooking)
• That warm fuzzy feeling knowing you're supporting something that saves you time and keeps you plugged into great tech writing

If you are getting value from blaze, checking this out would mean the world. And if you can't contribute, no worries—the newsletters keep coming either way, and you can follow along on patreon for free.
Thanks for reading and being part of this nerdy corner of the internet. All the best - Alastair.