Crypto Vesting

Hong Kong police arrested 12 people involved in a cross-border money laundering scheme that relied on crypto and over 500 stooge bank accounts to launder HK$118 million ($15 million), local news outlets reported.

The syndicate was dismantled on May 15, resulting in the arrest of nine men and three women in mainland China and Hong Kong.

The suspects allegedly recruited others to open bank accounts to receive proceeds from fraud cases, which were then converted into crypto at crypto exchange shops to launder the illicit funds, Hong Kong Commercial Daily reported on May 17.

The criminal organization rented a residential unit in the Hong Kong neighborhood of Mong Kok to plan and carry out its money laundering activities. Of the $15 million laundered, more than $1.2 million was linked to 58 reported fraud cases.

Caught in action

The bust followed police surveillance on May 15, when two recruits left

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Public internet infrastructure is the critical speed and performance constraint on high-throughput blockchain networks, according to Austin Federa, co-founder and CEO of DoubleZero, a project developing high-speed fiber optic communication rails for blockchains.

“The downside of the public internet is it was never built for high-performance systems. It was always built for this sort of relationship of one big server talking to one little server,” Federa told Cointelegraph in an interview at Consensus 2025. The executive explained:

“We have validators all around the world. Rotating leader schedules all the time. And then they switch from having to be massive consumers of data to extremely massive broadcasters of data. So that means that they need huge amounts of resources both on ingress and egress.”

The executive added that the constraint posed by public internet infrastructure is now the limiting factor in blockchain performance and not compute power or software development.

Austin Federa giving a presentation

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Moody’s credit rating agency downgraded the credit rating of the United States government from Aaa to Aa1, citing the rising national debt as the primary driver behind the reduction in creditworthiness.

According to the May 16 announcement from the rating agency, US lawmakers have failed to stem annual deficits or reduce spending over the years, leading to a growing national debt. The rating agency wrote:

“We do not believe that material multi-year reductions in mandatory spending and deficits will result from the current fiscal proposals under consideration. Over the next decade, we expect larger deficits as entitlement spending rises while government revenue remains broadly flat.”

The credit downgrade is only one degree out of the 21-notch rating scale used by the company to assess the credit health of an entity.

An overview of the US national debt. Source: <a data-ct-non-breakable="null" href="https://usdebtclock.org/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"

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Michael James, the head of institutional business development at Douro Labs — the company that developed the Pyth high-speed blockchain oracle network — told Cointelegraph that oracle networks like Pyth are disrupting the $50 billion financial data industry that provides critical price information to exchanges, brokerages, trading firms, and other institutional entities.

In an interview at Consensus 2025, the executive said that Pyth Network’s data pull model sets it apart from traditional pricing oracles, allowing customers to pay for data on demand, reducing costs for institutions reliant on real-time market data.

Differences between pull and push models in oracle systems. Source: Pyth Network

According to the executive, the financial data industry is currently monopolized by around eight major providers that continually raise prices on clients arbitrarily. James added:

“These data vendors have no competition in traditional finance, and so they have all the

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South Africa’s Garden Route, famed for its lush forests, expansive beaches and charming towns, has become a testbed for Bitcoin adoption.

From Mossel Bay to Witsand and Plettenberg Bay to Knysna, Bitcoin has become popular among shop owners and travelers alike for a multitude of reasons.

“We’re seeing the early signs of a parallel, permissionless economy emerging across an entire region,” James Caw, founder of SimplB — a local crypto asset provider — told Cointelegraph, “where small businesses benefit from faster, lower-cost digital payments and where people have more options to earn, send and receive sound money securely.”

For tourists, the benefits are immediate: no currency exchange hassles, no international card fees, and the ability to pay instantly and securely. For locals, Bitcoin (BTC) offers a hedge against inflation, protection from currency volatility and new economic opportunities.

Here’s a taste of what a Bitcoin-friendly trip along the Garden Route

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Opinion by: Merlin Egalite, co-founder at Morpho Labs

Fintechs in the front, decentralized finance (DeFi) in the back: the DeFi Mullet.

Today’s fintech companies offer excellent user experiences but are constrained by traditional financial infrastructure — siloed, slow, expensive and inflexible. Meanwhile, DeFi provides lightning-fast, cost-effective, interoperable infrastructure but lacks mainstream accessibility.

The solution? Combine fintech’s distribution and user experience with DeFi’s efficient back end.

The mullet is inevitable

Fintech companies heavily rely on traditional financial (TradFi) infrastructure that is siloed, slow to deploy and run, and costly to maintain. This inefficiency limits their control over costs and product offerings and has potential infrastructure risks. Fintechs have a strong incentive to transition to building on autonomous, credibly neutral public infrastructure.

The power of DeFi is evident in stablecoins. While traditional international wire transfers cost $30–$50 and take one to five business days, stablecoin transfers cost mere cents and settle in seconds. This revolutionary improvement in financial

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Bitcoin’s next explosive move could send the asset to $250,000 by the end of 2025, according to Scott Melker, a crypto analyst and host of The Wolf of All Streets podcast.

Speaking in a recent interview, Melker cited growing institutional interest and diminishing volatility as key factors that could drive the next leg up.

“250K this year, totally possible,” Melker said, adding that Bitcoin (BTC)’s volatility has declined significantly in recent years.

“It used to be about three times as volatile as the S&P. Now it’s less than two times.” He pointed to increased involvement from pension funds and ETF issuers as evidence of a more mature, stable market.

The shift, he argued, reflects a broader trend of institutional adoption. “The more institutional money, the more Wall Street money, the more long-term holders get involved, the less volatility there’s going to be,” Melker explained.

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The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has held discussions with Everstake, one of the largest non-custodial staking providers globally, to explore clearer regulatory definitions around staking in blockchain networks.

The meeting, which also involved the SEC’s Crypto Task Force, comes at a time when over $193 billion in digital assets are staked across major proof-of-stake (PoS) networks.

However, despite the massive scale of participation, staking remains in a legal gray zone in the US as regulators wrestle with its classification under existing securities law.

The previous SEC administration also took enforcement actions against major players such as Kraken, Coinbase, and Consensys due to their staking services. The agency, under pro-crypto President Donald Trump, has recently dismissed these enforcement actions.

During the meeting, Everstake told the SEC that non-custodial staking should not be classified as a securities transaction. The company said that users maintain full control over their digital

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A man from Wellington, the capital city of New Zealand, has been arrested in connection with an FBI-led investigation into a global cryptocurrency fraud operation that allegedly stole $450 million New Zealand dollars ($265 million).

According to New Zealand Police, the man is one of 13 individuals charged after authorities executed search warrants across Auckland, Wellington, and California over the past three days.

The charges stem from allegations that members of an organized criminal group manipulated seven victims to obtain large amounts of cryptocurrency, which was then laundered through multiple platforms between March and August 2024.

The US Department of Justice has indicted the man under federal law, including charges of racketeering, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering, per the announcement.

Source: New Zealond Police

Related: Germany seizes $38M in crypto from Bybit hack-linked eXch

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Panama City Mayor Mayer Mizrachi has hinted at establishing a city-level Bitcoin reserve in a cryptic post following his meeting with two of El Salvador’s Bitcoin policy leaders.

“Bitcoin Reserve,” Mizrachi wrote to X on May 16 after meeting El Salvador-based Bitcoiners Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert.

While Mizrachi didn’t share details about his discussions with Keiser and Herbert, the timing of the post came 11 days before the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas, where Mizrachi is scheduled to speak.

Source: Mayer Mizrachi

The creation of a Bitcoin reserve in Panama City would follow a recently approved measure permitting the use of crypto for public payments, including taxes, fines and municipal fees.

Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Tether (USDT) and

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