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DDoS attacks now a dominant means of waging political cyber-warfare

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are outpacing many traditional cyber threats and are no longer just a tool but a “dominant geopolitical weapon,” according to network security firm Netscout.

Global DDoS activity increased by 12.7% in the second half of 2024 compared to the first half, totaling almost 9 million attacks, according to the firm.

A DDoS attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal web traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of internet traffic.

The largest increases have been in Latin America and the Asia Pacific regions, with around 30% and 20% increases from the first half, respectively.

Netscout reported that there were a total of 7.9 million DDoS attacks in the first half of 2024, with a combined total of 16.8 million for the full year, up almost 30%

Elon Musk’s Neuralink seeks patients globally to try its brain chips

Elon Musk’s computer-chip brain implant company Neuralink is seeking patients all around the world to trial its device that allows one’s thoughts to control a computer.

Neuralink is looking for people with quadriplegia — those who are not able to use their arms or legs — to sign up for a clinical trial, it said in an April 2 post on X, the social media platform also owned by Musk.

As of January, Neuralink has said three patients have been implanted with a device. All are quadriplegic and are testing a small brain implant that tracks neural activity to control a computer or smartphone as part of a clinical trial called the Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface, or PRIME study.

Neuralink is one of several companies and academic institutions developing and testing so-called brain-computer interfaces, which vary from small wire-like implants as part

‘National emergency’ as Trump’s tariffs dent crypto prices

Crypto markets dipped after US President Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency and sweeping tariffs on all countries as part of his latest salvo in the ongoing trade war.

The Trump administration has hit all countries with a 10% tariff starting April 5, with some countries facing even larger rates, such as China facing a 34% tariff, the European Union 20%, and Japan 24%.

During an April 2 speech in the Rose Garden at the White House, Trump said the US is charging countries “approximately half of what they are and have been charging us.”

🚨 @POTUS signs an Executive Order instituting reciprocal tariffs on countries throughout the world.

It’s LIBERATION DAY in America! pic.twitter.com/p7UnfE617B

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) April 2, 2025

The crypto market briefly went up at the news of a 10% sweeping tariff, but once the

Former New York governor advised OKX over $505M federal probe: Report

Cryptocurrency exchange OKX reportedly hired former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to advise it over the federal probe that resulted in the firm pleading guilty to several violations and agreeing to pay $505 million in fines and penalties.

Cuomo, a New York-registered attorney, advised OKX on legal issues stemming from the probe sometime after August 2021 when he resigned as New York overnor, Bloomberg reported on April 2, citing people familiar with the matter.

“He spoke with company executives regularly and counseled them on how to respond to the criminal investigation,” Bloomberg said.

The Seychelles-based firm pled guilty to operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business in violation of US Anti-Money Laundering laws on Feb. 24 and agreed to pay $84 million worth of penalties while forfeiting $421 million worth of fees earned from mostly institutional clients.

The breaches occurred from

EY updates privacy L2 as nixed Tornado Cash sanctions ease fears

Big Four accounting firm EY, formerly Ernst & Young, has changed its enterprise-focused Ethereum layer-2 blockchain Nightfall to a zero-knowledge rollup design as it says corporate clients are more comfortable with privacy solutions with easing US sanctions.

EY said in an April 2 announcement that Nightfall’s new source code, “Nightfall_4,” simplifies the network’s architecture and offers near-instant transaction finality on Ethereum while making it more accessible to users than its previous optimistic rollup-based version.

EY’s global blockchain leader, Paul Brody, told Cointelegraph that switching to a ZK-rollup model “means instant finality, but it also makes operations simpler since you don’t need a challenger node to secure the network,” which verifies the correctness of transactions.

The move away from optimistic rollups means Nightfall users won’t need to challenge potentially incorrect transactions on Ethereum and wait out the challenging period, leading to faster transaction finality.

Trump imposes 10% tariff on all countries, reciprocal levies on trading partners

United States President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing reciprocal tariffs on trading partners and a 10% baseline tariff on all imports from all countries.

The reciprocal levies on will be approximately half of what trading partners charge for US imports, Trump said. For example, China currently has a tariff of 67% on US imports, so US reciprocal tariffs on Chinese goods will be 34%. Trump also announced a standard 25% tariff on all automobile imports.

Trump told the media that tariffs would return the country to economic prosperity seen in previous centuries:

“From 1789 to 1913, we were a tariff-backed nation. The United States was proportionately the wealthiest it has ever been. So wealthy, in fact, that in the 1880s, they established a commission to decide what they were going to do with the vast sums of money they were collecting.”

“Then, in 1913, for reasons unknown to mankind, they established the

US lawmakers press SEC for info about Trump family-backed crypto firm

Two Democratic lawmakers in the US Senate and House of Representatives have called on acting Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Mark Uyeda to preserve information regarding World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm backed by President Donald Trump’s family.

In an April 2 letter, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Maxine Waters — ranking members of the Senate Banking Committee and House Financial Services Committee, respectively — asked Uyeda to provide information to Congress based on Trump’s ties to World Liberty Financial (WLFI). The two lawmakers suggested the SEC may be being influenced by the firm, and “this conflict of interest may be interfering with its mission to protect investors and maintain fair and orderly markets.”

“The Trump family’s financial stake in World Liberty Financial represents an unprecedented conflict of interest with the potential to influence the Trump Administration’s oversight — or lack thereof — of the cryptocurrency

Curve Finance clocks $35B trading volume in Q1 2025

Curve Finance, a decentralized lending protocol and exchange, notched record-breaking trading volumes of nearly $35 billion in the first quarter of 2025, a spokesperson for the protocol told Cointelegraph.

Trading volumes increased more than 13% from the first quarter of 2024, largely due to a surge in transactions, from around 1.8 million to some 5.5 million in Q1 2025, Curve said.

The strong Q1 volumes come amid overall declines in the cryptocurrency market, with the total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies dropping by more than 20% in the year-to-date as of March 31, according to data from CoinGecko.

Curve’s total value locked (TVL) over time. Source: DefiLlama

Changing DeFi Landscape

Launched in 2020, Curve has taken numerous steps in the past year to keep pace with the changing decentralized finance (DeFi) landscape.

In June

Fidelity introduces retirement accounts with minimal-fee crypto investing

Fidelity, a financial services company with $5.9 trillion in assets under management, has introduced new retirement accounts that will allow Americans to invest in crypto nearly fee-free.

The three accounts — a tax-deferred traditional IRA and two Roth IRAs (one is a rollover) — permit the buying and selling of Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), and Litecoin (LTC). While there are no fees to open or maintain the accounts, Fidelity charges a 1% spread on the execution price of crypto buy and sell transactions.

The crypto IRAs are offered by Fidelity Digital Assets, a subsidiary of Fidelity that has traditionally offered institutional investors the opportunity to buy and sell crypto.

The broadening of its client base may be another signal of the changing crypto landscape in the United States, which has seen

Ethereum price may have bottomed, but pro traders show little interest in buying ETH

Ether (ETH) price has risen 6.4% from its March 30 $1,768 low but the altcoin has struggled to regain the $2,000 level. Some traders believe that the downturn is partially connected to the deflating memecoin market, which, while not exclusive to the Ethereum network, significantly reduced activity across the decentralized applications (DApps) ecosystem and broader crypto space.

Ether is currently 44% down year-to-date, and derivatives metrics indicate that traders are far from bullish and show little confidence in a strong recovery in the near term. Proof of this can be found in the premium on Ether futures relative to spot markets.

While the figure rose to 4% on April 2, up from 2% on March 31, it is still below the neutral 5% threshold. This data indicates that Ether investors remain far from turning bullish, despite the strengthening support at the $1,800 price level.

Ether 2-month futures annualized