Cryptopolitan

Sarah Breeden, the Bank of England’s deputy governor for financial stability, has warned that autonomous AI systems pose a growing threat to financial markets, cybersecurity, and payment infrastructure, urging central banks worldwide to look into better regulations for the sector.
Speaking at the European Central Bank’s annual forum in Sintra, Portugal, Breeden explained that agentic AI is advancing faster than regulators anticipated. According to her remarks, in 2019 the length of software tasks that leading AI models could complete was doubling every seven months. However, by 2024, the doubling was happening every four months.
Breakthroughs in cyber vulnerability detection this spring suggest this pace may have accelerated.
“We were surprised this Spring, and we should be prepared for further technology surprises,” Breeden said at the June 30 event.
From content generation to autonomous action
Breeden emphasized three important phases of AI development, explaining that earlier in the decade, generative AI systems produced content only when prompted. By late 2024, models were trained to reason through multi-step problems. Now, agentic systems can plan and execute sequences of decisions purely on their own with zero human oversight.
When applied to finance, this trajectory points toward a system where AI agents can trade securities, process payments, and respond to cyber threats with limited human involvement. Breeden went ahead to describe a financial system that “operates more autonomously, at scale and speed,” with agents acting on behalf of consumers, merchants, and trading platforms.
Bank of England most concerned about cyber risks
Among several financial stability risks, Breeden singled out cybersecurity as the most critical issue. She cited the UK government’s AI Security Institute, which has identified a huge improvement in what agentic AI can do over the internet.
The same tools that help defenders find and patch vulnerabilities also give attackers the ability to discover and exploit them. Breeden warned that malicious use of these capabilities “materially increases the chance of attacks that could harm financial stability.”
Breeden’s remarks included a suggestion that autonomous trading tools may need built-in “kill switches” to prevent market shocks, which would represent a deviation from current set regulations.
Investment boom raises huge risks
Breeden mentioned another concern regarding the financing of these AI agents. The Bank’s Financial Policy Committee concluded in April that while large technology companies had initially funded the creation and maintenance of AI infrastructure from cash flow and equity, the use of debt financing was increasing rapidly and taking on new, complex forms.
This means that a sudden drop in AI-related asset valuations could now cause a massive ripple through credit markets. The Bank of England’s deputy governor said the committee judged that “the financial stability consequences of any fall in AI-related asset prices could well increase.”
A more in-depth assessment from the committee on this topic is expected on July 7.
Breeden also argued that central banks need to adapt to use AI themselves in overseeing these systems, and not only focus on managing the risks introduced by AI.



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The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday to listen to Apple’s appeal to a contempt ruling in its years-long antitrust battle with Epic Games, which could set the stage for a landmark decision on how courts judge suits against tech platforms.
The case revolves around the validity of a civil contempt ruling against a company for violating the “spirit” of a court order when the order’s text does not explicitly prohibit the conduct in question.
A seven year old dispute
Epic Games sued Apple in 2020 over App Store payment restrictions, arguing that the iPhone maker’s rules blocked developers from directing users to cheaper purchasing options outside the app. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers issued an injunction in 2021 ordering Apple to allow the external payment links.
Apple responded by creating a system that permitted outside links but charged developers commissions ranging from 12% up to 27% on resulting sales. Before the dispute, Apple had taken a 30% cut of App Store transactions, a rate it reduced to 15% for many smaller developers in 2020.
Epic accused the company of “malicious compliance” and asked the court to intervene. In April 2025, Gonzalez Rogers found Apple in contempt of the original order. An appeals court largely affirmed that finding in December, though it struck down a provision that would have barred Apple from charging any commission on purchases made through external links, according to Engadget.
What is the Supreme Court deciding on?
Apple filed a 34-page petition in May asking the Supreme Court justices to review two pertinent areas of this longstanding case. Firstly, Apple contends that a party cannot be punished for conduct that a court injunction never expressly prohibited. The company’s lawyers argued that the lower court penalized Apple for violating the order’s “spirit” rather than its explicit terms, a standard Apple says is unique to the Ninth Circuit, per AppleInsider.
Secondly, Apple questioned whether this injunction should apply to all U.S.-based developers or only to Epic. The Supreme Court declined to take up this second issue, Engadget reported, meaning the injunction still applies for all developers for now.
When announcing the case, the court framed the central question exactly as “whether a court may hold a party in civil contempt based on a violation of an injunction’s ‘spirit’ where the injunction is silent as to the conduct upon which contempt is based.”
What’s next for the appeal lawsuit
Court sittings are expected to begin when the Supreme Court’s new term starts in October, with a ruling likely by June 2027. In the meantime, the contempt finding remains in effect after Justice Elena Kagan denied Apple’s request to pause the ruling last month.
Both sides of the dispute sounded confident that the ruling would go their way. “This is an important question of law, and we are pleased the Supreme Court will hear our case,” an Apple spokesperson stated. Epic responded on X, saying that “We’re heading to the Supreme Court, where we’ll continue our fight against junk fees Apple charges on third-party payments.”
We’re heading to the Supreme Court where we’ll continue to fight against junk fees Apple charges on third-party payments. Lower courts have rightly found Apple’s fees to be illegal and anticompetitive and we’ll continue to defend free markets.https://t.co/oY8tBu49P6
— Epic Games Newsroom (@EpicNewsroom) June 30, 2026


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Anthropic has announced the release of Claude Science, a research environment that consolidates multiple scientific databases, tools, and visualization capabilities into a single platform for scientists and researchers.
Anthropic announced the product at its “The Briefing: AI for Science” event on June 30, where the company explained Claude Science was not a new AI model. The product runs on the Claude models already available to subscribers and will function as a workbench where researchers can assess scientific literature and run analyses without switching between resources.
Claude Science available in beta, is open to all Claude Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers, according to Anthropic’s announcement.
Claude Science a hub for research
A central AI assistant handles research tasks and connects to a list of over 60 scientific databases preconfigured for different research areas like genomics, proteomics, single-cell analysis, and cheminformatics, according to the statement. This central assistant can create sub-agents for specialized tasks and even delegate work to custom agents built by researchers for their own particular interests.
A separate reviewer agent will checks citations and calculations, and flag errors before results are put into a manuscript. This step will help to address the fact-checking and verification problem that could creep into AI-assisted papers; however, Anthropic cautioned that the checker still relies on the same underlying model, not an independent source for verification.
Every output produced by the workbench carries what Anthropic calls an “auditable history”. This entails every step that led to the output, including the code that produced a figure, the environment the code ran in, an easy-to-understand description of the methodology, and the full message log.
Researchers can fork a session at any point to compare two analytical approaches without losing the original thread of events.
Anthropic’s early adopters and partnerships
Jérôme Lecoq, a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute, built a multi-agent flow within the platform that helped with reading thousands of papers and extracting important claims and quantitative findings.
Stephen Francis’s group at the UCSF Brain Tumor Center used the tool to compress germline analysis of glioma into a fraction of the time previously used for the same analysis, TechCrunch reported.
Anthropic also named Novo Nordisk and the Allen Institute as customer case studies, and is offering up to $30,000 in credits for as many as 50 research projects. Applications for this grant will close July 15, 2026, and recipients will be announced by July 31, 2026.
Scientific AI sees development due to competition
Direct competitor to Anthropic, OpenAI, released GPT-Rosalind in April 2026, which was an AI model specifically tuned for biological reasoning but limited to qualified enterprise customers in the U.S. only after a safety review. Google DeepMind’s foundational science models, like AlphaFold and AlphaGenome, have been bundled together with more than 30 life science databases through its Gemini for Science platform.
Anthropic is looking at satisfying its already owned customers with inclusive subscription access alongside easy integration instead of creating a new or specialized model. The company has filed a confidential IPO with the SEC, and its moves to expand into vertical products like Claude Science fit a pattern of building more revenue streams ahead of its public listing, according to Yahoo Finance.
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Meituan claims it trained the 1.6 trillion parameter model on domestic Chinese hardware, avoiding Nvidia GPUs altogether. The company is the biggest platform in China for local services and food delivery.
The release lands as U.S. export controls keep reshaping how Chinese firms build large-scale AI. Meituan trained LongCat-2.0 on domestic ASIC superpods. The company frames the model as proof Chinese firms can hit frontier scale without Nvidia’s CUDA-based chips.
LongCat-2.0 runs on a sparse mixture-of-experts design
LongCat-2.0 uses a sparse mixture-of-experts architecture. DeepSeek and Mistral’s Mixtral use that same broad approach. Instead of simultaneously firing all 1.6 trillion parameters, an internal router selects a subset of specialized sub-models for each token. Compared to a dense model of the same size, that design keeps inference costs down.
The model ships with a one million token context window. Both DeepSeek-R1-0528 and OpenAI’s GPT-OSS have a maximum token value of 128,000. In the published benchmarks, Meituan compared LongCat-2.0 to Google’s, OpenAI’s, and Anthropic’s closed-source models. So far, those assertions have not been validated by impartial third-party assessments.
Meituan developed LongCat-2.0 to serve as the primary reasoning engine for AI agents and coding tools. The company pointed to code comprehension, repository-wide edits, and automated task execution as target use cases.
Bernstein pegs Nvidia at 40% of China’s AI chip market
An estimate from the equity research firm Bernstein for 2025 placed Nvidia’s share of the Chinese artificial intelligence chip market at ~40%. Huawei has a similar percentage. Bernstein predicted that Huawei would gain ground this year, causing Nvidia’s share to fall by 8 percentage points.
As for domestic ASIC clusters, Meituan claims to have trained and optimized LongCat-2.0. This means that the model doesn’t need Nvidia’s software stack and can instead run on hardware that is already present in China. Instead of disjointed third-party configurations, “superpods” implies fully integrated enterprise-grade hardware.
Neither consumer devices nor the majority of on-premises systems will be able to handle LongCat-2.0’s 1.6 trillion parameters. It resides in data centers, distributed across high-density inference clusters that use model parallelism.
Delivery of meals is Meituan’s claim to fame, not its development of frontier AI. By purchasing AI startup Light Year Beyond for $281 million in 2023, the Beijing company made its entry into the AI space. According to SiliconANGLE, it did not publicly announce its plans for internal model development until 2025.
MiniMax, another Chinese AI startup, drew backing from Alibaba and miHoYo. According to earlier reports from Cryptopolitan, these investors committed not to sell shares before the lock-up expiration on July 9.
MiniMax rolled out its own million-token-context model, M3, in early June 2026, per Cai Lian She as cited by Cryptopolitan. MiniMax has introduced prices that are significantly lower than the market leaders in the United States.
Independent testing will decide how seriously developers outside China take LongCat-2.0. Optimization for domestic chips may limit performance on Nvidia hardware, which still dominates data centers worldwide. The core reasoning architecture, according to Meituan, remains portable.
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The Norwegian industrial AI software company Cognite will be purchased by Schneider Electric. The $3.1 billion deal is Norway’s biggest software and AI exit to date.
Aker ASA and the remaining Cognite Holding B.V. shareholders decided to sell Schneider Electric all of their shares. The terms were revealed by Aker. The deal is one of the biggest industrial software transactions ever made in Europe. In capital-intensive sectors like energy, manufacturing, and infrastructure, the need for AI-driven tools continues to rise.
What Aker stands to gain
The Oslo industrial investment firm, called Aker, has been the main supporter of Cognite. Aker anticipates receiving about $1.48 billion in cash from the transaction. Settlement of an outstanding convertible loan falls under this category. The payout is equivalent to about NOK 14.7 billion at a USD/NOK exchange rate of 9.92.
The payout represents an increase of NOK 7.4 billion. In comparison to Aker’s reported net asset value at the end of Q1 2026, each share was worth about NOK 100. “This transaction clearly demonstrates the value created in Cognite and how Aker builds and realizes value through active, long-term ownership,” Aker stated when announcing the deal.
Schneider Electric has been actively seeking data-driven infrastructure. Cryptopolitan previously reported on the company’s $2.3 billion contracts with US data center operators Switch and Digital Realty. Those agreements primarily address power and cooling systems designed for AI workloads. Schneider had previously stated that the current infrastructure was not designed to handle the energy demands of AI.
Why Schneider wants Cognite
Schneider already offers physical systems, but Cognite’s software platform adds data management and industrial AI. Cognite specializes in contextualizing operational data for heavy industries. Schneider offers equipment for electrical distribution, automation, and energy management in the same sectors.
Buyers in the industrial sector are prepared to shell out a pretty penny for artificial intelligence software companies with a track record of success, as evidenced by the $3.1 billion price tag. This is especially true for companies in asset-heavy industries, where consumer tech lags behind the pace of digitization.
Customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals are still required for the transaction. No timetable for completion has been made public. Once the deal closes and the proceeds are deployed, investors following Aker on the Oslo Stock Exchange will keep an eye out for updated NAV guidance.
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The European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation decree will hit its set deadline on July 1, and crypto firms and exchanges without authorization will lose their capacity to serve EU clients. This change is causing a major migration of crypto companies toward the United Arab Emirates, with Dubai’s less stringent licensing regime offering a faster path to market.
Crypto legal experts are reportedly fielding multiple inquiries per week from companies and founders exploring the setup in the UAE. More than half of these inquiries are said to originate in Europe, with Spain, Italy, and Germany among the most common of the countries. Founders from Switzerland and the U.K., countries that sit outside MiCA’s jurisdiction, are also said to be reaching out.
MiCA is giving crypto exchanges a regulatory squeeze
MiCA is aimed at establishing a single licensing framework for crypto across the European Economic Area, a market of about 500 million people spanning the EU plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway. Crypto service providers have been working through a transition window to get required licenses; however, July 1 looms heavily.
OKX’s European CEO Erald Ghoos stated earlier that 80% of crypto companies would not survive MiCA and would be forced out of Europe.
The pressure is not felt only by small crypto providers, as even large exchanges are feeling this regulatory burden. Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange by trading volume, pulled its MiCA application in Greece last week and told EU users it would suspend certain services while it pursues authorization through another route. “Our ambitions in Europe remain the same, and we are confident we will secure a MiCA licence in the coming months,” the company said in a statement as previously reported by Cryptopolitan.
Binance’s rivals have moved quickly to secure disgruntled customers from this fallout. OKX and Coinbase, having already secured MiCA licenses, both announced deposit bonuses of up to 8% for new users the day after Binance’s withdrawal.
Why Dubai is attractive to crypto firms
Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) was created purely for cryptocurrency and digital asset oversight, while most European regulators also supervise banks and other traditional financial institutions. This specialization translates to a faster turnaround in processing times for new companies and their projects.
A UAE license also opens doors beyond Europe, providing access to markets across Asia and North Africa, with almost 4 billion in potential customers.
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Solana memecoin trading platform Pump.fun has removed agent mode for new token launches, following community requests.
Pump.fun announced the decision on Tuesday, saying the Tokenized Agent launch option is deprecated, effective immediately. Co-founder Alon Cohen said it’s the first step to “removing launch options that don’t add enough value to users.”
Last month I promised that we would start removing launch options that don’t add enough value to users.
Today, we began this process, and are continuing to take big steps towards a healthier ecosystem. 🧵 https://t.co/OnKOH3LRU9
— alon (@a1lon9) June 30, 2026
Cohen said the Tokenized Agents feature was introduced with the intention of bootstrapping on-chain agents with automated buyback and burn mechanics. However, it resulted in excessive griefing, confusion among traders, and “needless PVP.”
“Coins PVPing each other because of launch modes benefits no one. It slows down momentum for narratives and pushes people away from our ecosystem,” Cohen wrote on X.
The change applies to new token launches, according to Pump.fun. Existing coins that already enabled the agent mode feature will remain unaffected.
Cohen did say Pump.fun is still “super bullish” on the Tokenized Agents sector, adding there is a possibility the feature returns, but not as a launch option.
Community cites rare “W”
The Pump.fun community seems well receptive of the decision. Most of the reactions agree that removing the agent mode was a much-needed move.
Meanwhile, the news comes as Pump.fun activity heats up again, with the launch of a new token dubbed $ANSEM. The memecoin made the rounds on X after surging by 8500% over the last two days, reaching a $172M market cap.
The token is named after the popular Solana memecoin influencer Ansem, who reportedly holds 604M $ANSEM, representing more than 60% of the supply.
On Monday, Ansem had airdropped $6.7M in $ANSEM to 700+ wallets, with most of the recipients still holding their tokens.
UPDATE: 60% are STILL holding their $ANSEM airdrop
• 40% hold all
• 38% sold all
• 22% sold some https://t.co/3j2H0jtXvp pic.twitter.com/FgFlGfquCk
— Bubblemaps (@bubblemaps) June 30, 2026
Some traders argue that Pump.fun’s decision to deprecate the agent mode is only coming due to Ansem’s influence.
Another Pump.fun feature goes badly
Pump.fun has had to deal with extreme cases where its features are used for unintended reasons.
Cryptopolitan once reported that live streamers on Pump.fun staged a fake private jet crash to lure viewers and pique their interest in their memecoin. Following a series of similar stunts, Pump.fun eventually removed the live-streaming feature.
Earlier in June, Pump.fun launched a “Pay ANYONE to do ANYTHING” bounty marketplace called Pump Fun GO. Just a few hours after launch, a user posted a bounty worth 10,000 SOL (roughly $690,000) referencing suicide, Cryptopolitan reported.
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Empery Digital (NASDAQ: EMPD), the former electric vehicle maker turned Bitcoin treasury firm, is betting $65 million on AI infrastructure after months of shareholder revolt and forced BTC liquidations gutted its original crypto strategy.
It was seen in an SEC filing and confirmed in a press release by the Austin-based company that it will acquire a 25% stake in a private entity purchasing a Midwest industrial property for conversion into an AI data center.
The facility comes with around 150 megawatts (MW) of existing power capacity, with a recent load study showing it could scale to around 300 MW.
How did Empery move from Bitcoin losses to AI ambitions?
Empery rebranded from Volcon Inc. in mid-2025 and built a Bitcoin treasury that peaked above 4,000 BTC, which was purchased at an average cost north of $117,000 per coin. When Bitcoin fell below $70,000 earlier this year, the unrealized losses were more than 40%.
Shareholder Tice P. Brown, who held around 10% of the company, called for CEO Ryan Lane’s resignation and called for a full liquidation of the Bitcoin position.
The company went on to sell hundreds of BTC across multiple transactions to fund share buybacks and repay a $105 million margin loan.
By April, Empery had sold 370 BTC at around $66,632 each to retire its term loan and released about 1,800 coins previously locked as collateral. It currently has 2,914 BTC in its treasury, according to BitcoinTreasuries.net.
Empery has steadily sold its Bitcoin stash under board-level pressure. Source: BitcoinTreasuries.net
Alongside the AI data center deal announcement, Empery stated that it would discontinue its Bitcoin treasury dashboard, as the reported net asset value based on crypto holdings alone “no longer fully reflects the total NAV of the Company.”
What is the Empery AI infrastructure deal structure?
Empery’s $65 million buys a 25% interest in a newly formed entity that will own the converted data center. Hunt Properties, a Dallas-based real estate firm with more than $2.5 billion in completed projects since 1987, serves as the managing member through its subsidiary TexStack Infrastructure, holding the remaining 75%.
The SEC filing shows Empery made an initial capital contribution of $2.9 million, with the remaining $62.1 million due at closing, expected in the third quarter of 2026. The total property acquisition price is approximately $230 million, with a due diligence review period set to expire on July 29.
Hunt Properties has executed a non-binding letter of intent for a triple net lease with a compute provider serving what the company describes as “a global leader in AI computing hardware.” If finalized, total lease payments could reach $1 billion over the contract’s life, according to the press release. However, neither party named the tenant.
“This investment is a very unique opportunity to capitalize on the exploding demand for compute and power and partner with some of the best energy operators and investors in North America for the benefit of Empery Digital shareholders,” Lane said in the announcement.
Empery joins a crowded AI infrastructure race
Empery is joining an increasing list of Bitcoin miners who are pivoting into AI by repurposing their power assets.
A major reason behind this pivot is dwindling revenue from mining, with some miners seeing little to no profit from those operations.
Core Scientific signed a multibillion-dollar hosting deal with CoreWeave, while TeraWulf, Hut 8, Iren, and Cipher Mining have all announced AI-related capacity plans.
The sector may face funding challenges in the near future as asset manager VanEck estimates a near-term funding gap of roughly $50 billion in a recent report. VanEck added that long-term capital needs could reach $221 billion if current plans proceed. Only about 25% of leased AI and high-performance computing capacity has been delivered so far.
However, unlike the miners, Empery has no existing data center operations, no track record of power infrastructure management, and a balance sheet still carrying thousands of Bitcoin acquired well above current market prices.
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Nick Johnson, the founder and lead developer of ENS, just used about half of the protocol’s active voting power to stop an on-chain proposal to renew the ENS DAO Security Council, adding a new chapter to several weeks of a governance crisis that no one wants to see go any further.
The on-chain vote ended on June 30, 2026, after Johnson did not take part in the earlier off-chain Snapshot vote.
Lefteris Karapetsas, a longtime member of the Ethereum community, said the result was expected and called the DAO “dead.” He claimed that Johnson’s voting power protects a treasury worth about $500 million from outside oversight, according to a post on X.
Another proposal introduced the same day
Hours after the Security Council renewal failed, a draft for a new Security Council appeared on the ENS governance forum. The plan was written by katherine.eth, and suggested replacing the current council with eight members. It also proposed that canceling any timelocked proposal would need a 5 out of 8 supermajority, up from the current 4 out of 8, according to the ENS governance forum.
The official ENS DAO account on X confirmed the submission of the proposal, and said the new council would follow a public mandate. They also stated that nominations are open until July 3, and that there would also be a way to remove members who do not follow the rules.
The current Security Council has a unique power in DAO governance: it can cancel proposals even after they have passed a community vote and entered the timelock queue. While the new draft proposal suggests that this power should be used only to block “malicious, coercive, or exploitative governance attacks.” It also warns that the definition of such attacks has become increasingly unclear.
Treasury dynamics are worsening the conflict
The financial stakes are significant. According to DeFiLlama, the ENS DAO treasury has about $350 million in assets, or $88 million if you remove the ENS token itself. As of today, CoinMarketCap says the ENS token’s market cap is about $166 million, with the token trading at $4.07. This is more than a 95% drop from its peak of $85.69 in November 2021.
This gap, where treasury assets far exceed the circulating market cap, creates the incentive structure the Security Council was meant to address. In theory, a well-funded attacker could buy enough tokens on the open market to control governance votes and extract value from the treasury. This scenario is often referred to as an “RFV raid.”
Different opinions about the vote
AvsA, an active ENS community member, shared a different view on the governance forum. He said the earlier ENS Labs foundation proposal was not a governance attack and that blocking it with the Security Council would have been too much. Still, he warned that not renewing the Council creates a bigger risk.
“The DAO is a $130M treasury safeguarded by at best $20M worth of tokens,” AvsA wrote. He argued that if governance attacks are defined by “the legitimacy of the votes” instead of the proposal’s effect, it could let a wealthy buyer legally take over the protocol for profit.
New proposals despite internal conflict
The Security Council dispute is the second major governance clash at ENS in less than two weeks. On June 19, katherine.eth introduced a separate proposal to transfer operational control, grants, and treasury management to the ENS Foundation.
Some critics, including ENS constitution author Brantly Millegan, argued that this plan would concentrate power away from tokenholders.
Johnson supported that earlier proposal and intended to self-delegate his tokens in its favor, according to the same report.
Cryptopolitan previously reported that the restructuring was driven by delegate fatigue, limited accountability from grant recipients, and the DAO’s challenges in executing long-term capital strategy through token voting alone.
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Amazon Web Services is investing $1 billion in a new unit that will place thousands of AI engineers right inside enterprise teams.
The goal is to shrink agentic AI rollouts from months down to days.
What Forward Deployed Engineering actually builds
AWS Forward Deployed Engineering, or FDE, is the unit’s name. It matches the business, engineering, and security personnel of a customer with AWS engineers. Together, they use the customer’s data and governance guidelines to create production AI systems.
The program was announced by Francessca Vasquez, vice president of frontier AI engineering and services at AWS.
FDE skips the usual consulting playbook, with no assessments or slide decks of recommendations. Engineers build production systems alongside the customer’s own people, and the work centers on shared business outcomes rather than billable hours.
According to AWS, it wants clients to be independent after the engagement is over. Customer engineers begin by observing, progress to co-building, and ultimately manage systems independently. Documentation, runbooks, knowledge graphs, and personnel trained to function without AWS in the room are all left behind after every deployment.
At the technical core, a semantic layer is installed within the customer’s AWS account. It publishes a governed knowledge graph that AI agents can reason over, connects to enterprise data sources, and enhances metadata. Instead of locking in individuals who might leave, AWS wants domain expertise integrated into code and systems.
FDE teams already count the NFL, NBA, Allen Institute, Cox Automotive, Ricoh and Southwest Airlines among partners. NFL Fantasy AI, NFL IQ – those are fan-facing products that have come out of the partnership, according to NFL Chief Information Officer Gary Brantley.
Brantley stated, “Together, we created new fan-facing products like NFL Fantasy AI and NFL IQ that allow fans to interact with NFL data like never before. The engagement from fans and broadcasters was measurable from day one and was made possible by AWS’s delivery model.”
AWS says its engineers were able to get the NFL’s production systems back online within a few weeks.
AWS’s FDE builds on three years of AI deployment work
FDE did not appear out of thin air. According to Vasquez, AWS’s Generative AI Innovation Center has worked on thousands of customer AI projects over the past three years. The group assisted BMW in minimizing service interruptions for 23 million connected cars. It built an assistant for manufacturer Jabil on the factory floor. With Lyft, it reduced driver support resolution times by 87%.
For clients who desire more extensive AI capabilities across operations rather than just one-time use cases, FDE extends that model. AWS says it is investing in partner training and tools to support the program, and its partners will also contribute model expertise and industry knowledge.
The $1 billion pledge coincides with additional AWS infrastructure initiatives. According to Data Center Knowledge, the company launched its Graviton5-powered EC2 C9g and C9gd instances generally with a focus on distributed analytics workloads, high-performance computing, and AI orchestration. The compute layer that powers AI agents is managed by Graviton5.
AWS is deploying FDE to companies that have gone through the testing phase. The target list leans towards government, financial services and regulated industries, where security and governance regulations are impeding the uptake of AI.
It directed businesses interested in FDE to reach out to their AWS account teams.
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Binance has integrated Anchorage Digital’s Atlas platform into its triparty banking program in a move aiming to give its clients another option to trade on the exchange, while assets are kept in separately.
The arrangement lets eligible institutional and professional traders pledge collateral with Anchorage Digital, a federally chartered crypto bank supervised by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), while executing trades on Binance. It is the first time a crypto exchange has partnered with Anchorage’s Atlas platform.
Binance and Anchorage structure partnership
Under the triparty model, institutions will not pre-fund their Binance accounts directly, and will instead pledge collateral through Anchorage Digital and access Binance’s order books through the partnership. The collateral remains in Anchorage’s custody instead of Binance’s books.
Binance’s announcement listed several collateral types that can be pledged by eligible institutions. These include crypto assets, cash and all other equivalents to cash, yield-bearing USD accounts, and some select tokenized RWAs. The exchange named BlackRock’s BUIDL, Circle’s USYC, and Franklin Templeton’s iBENJI as examples of accepted tokenized money market funds, subject to eligibility requirements.
Why separate holdings from trading?
The FTX collapse in late 2022 exposed the potential drawbacks of having a single entity controlling both client assets and trading. Since then, large financial bodies have demanded a form of structural separation between where their money sits and where their trades happen, same as the asset holding and execution split that traditional finance has enforced for decades.
Binance first launched its triparty banking model in November 2023. The exchange has since increased the extent of the program by lowering entry thresholds and adding more banking partners, with Anchorage Digital being the latest addition to that network.
“Institutions need a crypto market structure that reflects the standards they already rely on in traditional finance,” Nathan McCauley, Anchorage Digital’s co-founder and CEO, said in the announcement.
Anchorage supported by regulatory bodies
Anchorage Digital is supported with a federal bank charter from the OCC, making it the first crypto-native firm to receive that designation. The company also launched its Coordinated Multiparty Settlement platform on June 1, 2026, which is aimed at building infrastructure specifically for institutional trading with assets held in Anchorage’s custody.
Catherine Chen, Binance’s head of VIP and institutional services, stated that the exchange was focused on building infrastructure to help professional traders with access to crypto services alongside the protections seen in traditional markets.
She described the Anchorage partnership as another pathway for eligible clients to reach Binance liquidity through a model “more familiar to traditional financial markets,” per the announcement.
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Strike now has permanent access to all 27 member states under the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, according to a statement by the firm earlier today, one day before the cutoff for firms that have not cleared the licensing hurdle.
Binance, on the other hand, is one of many exchanges that must now restrict their services across Europe after failing to obtain the same license.
Strike in, Binance out
Strike, a Bitcoin financial services company, has received full authorization to offer its Bitcoin services to millions of European customers across the continent under the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA). It got its approval through the Malta Financial Services Authority (MFSA).
Strike had been serving eligible European customers since April 2024 under national-level registrations, but the MiCA authorization grants access to all 27 EU member states with just one approval. Strike is one of the few firms that has completed the full MiCA authorization process so far.
Meanwhile, Binance applied for its MiCA license through Greece, and later withdrew its application after the regulators failed to approve it before the July 1 deadline. The company has stated that it will seek authorization through another member state.
French authorities are still investigating alleged money laundering offenses connected to Binance, which may have had an effect on the outcome of its licensing application. It does not help that former CEO Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to violating U.S. anti-money-laundering laws in 2023 and served four months in prison the following year.
Does Strike serve the same customers as Binance?
Strike offers Bitcoin-only services, including buying and selling, fee-free recurring purchases, and free on-chain withdrawals. It also provides private client services for high-net-worth individuals and business accounts for corporate treasury operations and payments.
Binance, on the other hand, is preparing to restrict its digital asset exchange services in France, Italy, Poland, and Spain starting July 1. New spot orders, deposits, and account registrations will stop for affected users. The exchange has assured customers that withdrawals will remain available and their assets remain safe.
Customers withdrew an estimated $400 million to $440 million in assets in the week following the Greece rejection, though this represented only about 0.3% of Binance’s tracked assets of $133.3 billion. The company has said it will pursue MiCA authorization in another member state.
Beyond its new EU license, Strike founder and CEO Jack Mallers recently announced a $2.1 billion credit facility for the company’s Bitcoin-backed lending business, which was developed in partnership with Tether.
Notably, Bitcoin-backed lending has outperformed every other product Strike has launched. Mallers estimated the total centralized-finance Bitcoin lending market at $20 billion to $30 billion against a $1.25 trillion asset class.
A separate proposal from Tether Investments would merge Strike with Twenty One Capital and Bitcoin miner Elektron Energy. Mallers said at the Bitcoin 2026 Conference in April that he supports the plan.
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Machi Big Brother just got rekt yet again with his total losses now exceeding $80 million.
A few hours ago, Machi was liquidated for $341K trading a leveraged ETH long position on Hyperliquid on Tuesday. The popular Bored Ape collector lost exactly 220 ETH.
Before then, Machi had closed two ETH long positions at a total loss of $155.7K.
Four days before today’s liquidation, Arkham reported that Machi had sold one of his roughly 150 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs and used the proceeds to add margin to his Hyperliquid account. At that point, he held a $1.6 million ETH long with only $67,000 in margin.
At the time of writing, Machi still has a 25x ETH long position open with a liquidation price of $1,543.81. The position is worth $1.376 million (880 ETH) and is already at a $23k loss, according to Hypurrscan.
Machi has suffered a long streak of losses this year trading leveraged perps, but keeps returning with more funds.
In January, Machi was liquidated five times in a single day during a broader market downturn, with cumulative losses at that point totaling $24.18 million. Five months later, his losses now total $80.43 million, according to Arkham.
Is Machi Big Brother running out of money?
With his losses piling up, the popular Bored Ape collector recently resorted to selling off some of his collections to prop up margin on his ETH long positions.
On June 28, Lookonchain reported that Machi sold 34 Bored Apes for 326 ETH ($514K) over the past month, incurring a loss of 399 ETH, worth $631K.
In one case, Machi sold Bored Ape #6057 for 7.65 ETH, incurring a 90% loss on the 76.84 ETH that he paid to purchase the NFT 4 years ago.
In May, he had posted about owning 182 Bored Apes.
182 Bored Apes pic.twitter.com/zcTnPZcLLK
— Machi Big Brother (@machibigbrother) May 29, 2026
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RaveDAO is expanding the utility of $RAVE through its integration with Bitget Wallet, bringing the token closer to live event experiences and supported payment scenarios.
With $RAVE now supported in Bitget Wallet, holders can access and manage their tokens through Bitget Wallet’s multi-token payment infrastructure. At launch, support is available for $RAVE on BNB Smart Chain. The integration also connects $RAVE to Bitget Wallet Card and QR payment, including tap-to-pay via Apple Pay and Google Pay, and scan-to-pay at supported merchants.
For RaveDAO, this marks another step toward a broader goal: making $RAVE more useful across the experiences, communities, and products that make up the ecosystem.
Bringing $RAVE Closer to the Live Event Journey
RaveDAO is built around live events, culture, music, and community participation.
As the ecosystem grows, the role of $RAVE is expanding beyond holding and trading. The token is becoming more closely connected to how people access events, receive rewards, participate in the community, and engage with future ecosystem services.
Areas currently being explored across the ecosystem include event ticket purchases, onsite food and beverage, VIP experiences, table bookings, travel-related bookings, rewards, access programs, and community activation incentives.
The Bitget Wallet integration is one step in that direction. By bringing $RAVE into Bitget Wallet’s multi-token payment infrastructure, card and QR payment experience, communities gain another way to connect the token with supported live events and offline spending scenarios.
Alvin Kan, COO of Bitget Wallet said “The best use case for crypto isn’t a trading screen — it’s the moments people actually live. Integrating $RAVE into Bitget Wallet’s payment infrastructure means holders can bring their tokens into the experiences they’re already part of. That’s what everyday finance looks like.”
What This Means for $RAVE Holders
The integration gives $RAVE holders another way to access and use their tokens through Bitget Wallet.
Bitget Wallet is designed as an everyday finance app for transfers, spending, asset management, and on-chain services. With $RAVE now supported, users can hold and manage $RAVE alongside other supported assets in the wallet, while connecting the token to Bitget Wallet’s broader payment infrastructure. Payment routing is handled by Bitget Wallet’s Onchain Payments Matrix, an infrastructure layer that connects tokens, networks, and payment rails across dozens of blockchains.
Bitget Wallet Card is available across 50+ markets and accepted at 150 million+ merchants globally on the Mastercard and Visa network. Linked to Apple Pay or Google Pay, the card enables a tap-to-pay experience for crypto-backed spending in offline settings, alongside QR payments where accepted. For RaveDAO’s live event ecosystem, this can support practical on-site spending moments such as merchandise, food and beverage, and other eligible offline purchases.
For $RAVE, this matters because utility should be tied to the way people actually participate in the ecosystem. RaveDAO’s community is built around live events, access, rewards, and shared cultural experiences. The Bitget Wallet integration adds another layer to that journey by making $RAVE easier to access, manage, and use across supported payment scenarios.
As more product integrations and ecosystem partnerships take shape, RaveDAO will continue expanding $RAVE utility across event-related use cases, rewards, access programs, and community initiatives.
About Bitget Wallet
Bitget Wallet is a self-custodial crypto wallet built for everyday finance. Since 2018, it has given 90M+ users worldwide an onchain account to save, pay, and invest in crypto, supporting 1M+ tokens across 130+ blockchains, 100+ fiat currencies, Visa/Mastercard crypto cards, and localized payment methods. Its security is backed by industry-standard key encryption, a real-time risk engine, independent audits, and a US$300M+ user protection fund. In 2022, Bitget Wallet raised a US$100M funding round led by Dragonfly. web3.bitget.com
About RaveDAO
RaveDAO is a global community uniting music, technology, and purpose. Since their first sold-out event at Dubai 2024, RaveDAO has expanded across Europe, the Middle East, North America, and Asia, bringing together more than 100,000 total attendees across its events.
The ecosystem has worked with internationally recognized artists including Vintage Culture, Don Diablo, Charlotte de Witte, MORTEN, Miss Monique, Eli Brown, Chris Avantgarde, Lilly Palmer, and Artbat, while building partnerships across the music, entertainment, and Web3 industries.
Beyond live events, RaveDAO channels community energy toward real-world impact. In 2025, proceeds from its events helped restore sight to more than 400 cataract patients in Nepal and fund over 150 meditation programs across the United States.

Following America’s Figure 03, Chinese robot maker AGIBOT has just completed a six-day livestream of its G2 humanoid robots working autonomously on an active tablet production line.
The robots operated inside Longcheer Technology’s electronics manufacturing facility in Nanchang. For the entire six days, they handled 64,828 individual tasks across quality inspections, defect sorting, and material transport for tablet production.
“By bringing multiple humanoid robots into a real production line and making the process visible over six consecutive days, we wanted to provide a more transparent answer to what embodied AI industrialization actually requires,” said Yao Maoqing, president of AGIBOT’s Embodied AI Business Unit.
AGIBOT’s G2 humanoid completes 64 hours of factory work
AGIBOT said Tuesday the fleet produced 17,625 finished tablet units, logging more than 64 hours of operation and a 99.99% task success rate.
Reports of successful humanoid deployments in factories are becoming quite too frequent. A few years ago, these robots could barely walk a few meters without stumbling or staggering.
For six consecutive days, AGIBOT G2 humanoid robots worked under real factory conditions, inside a live production workflow, alongside equipment and human operators.
The results:
📊 64 hours of operation
🤖 64,828 robot tasks completed
✅ 99.99% success rate
The… pic.twitter.com/lyUDhMFNr6
— AGIBOT (@AGIBOTofficial) June 29, 2026
In May, American humanoid maker Figure AI held a similar endurance test for its Figure 03 humanoid. The robot processed nearly 250,000 packages over 200 continuous hours without a hardware failure.
On top of this progress, manufacturers are starting to ship out these robots at scale.
AGIBOT claims 39% of global humanoid shipments
AGIBOT said its 15,000th robot rolled off its own production line and was delivered to Longcheer. It took the Chinese firm roughly a year to scale from 1,000 to 5,000 cumulative units, but only three months to go from 5,000 to 10,000.
The firm claims a 39% share of global shipments of humanoid robots, with China dominating the market. Last year, over 16,000 humanoid robots were deployed around the world, with China accounting for more than 80%.
The biggest vendor was AGIBOT, followed by Unitree, UBTECH, and Leju, as Cryptopolitan reported. The 39% share, which AGIBOT claims would make it the market leader if the figure holds up under independent verification.
In other news, Morgan Stanley expects China’s humanoid shipment to reach 50,000 this year. This was actually an upward review, as Cryptopolitan reported. The Wall Street giant initially predicted 14,000 at the start of the year, then doubled its outlook to 28,000, and recently, 50,000 units.
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The verdict has started to come in response to Strategy’s June 29 announcement of its five-part capital management framework, with Benchmark Equity Research doubling down on its Buy rating of the MSTR stock, along with a $570 price projection.
As of writing, the MSTR stock was trading at $92.68, up nearly 13% from $82.31 when markets closed on June 29. The price target implies that Benchmark sees the common stock of the leading Bitcoin treasury firm stringing together a 500%+ run.
The rally also extended to the STRC preferred stock, as it also followed MSTR in staging an over 12% rally since markets closed yesterday.
Saylor was also in a bullish mood early this morning, posting on X, “Stronger credit. Stronger equity. More Bitcoin,” as Strategy stocks returned into the green.
Are analysts bullish on Strategy now?
The impetus for the bullish call came after Strategy disclosed its “Digital Credit Capital Framework” in an SEC filing. As reported by Cryptopolitan, that package included a hike in STRC dividend payments to 12%, a discretionary $2 billion stock buyback program and board-level approval to sell up to $1.25 billion in Bitcoins from its 847,363 BTC treasury.
However, not everyone is riding the bull with Benchmark and Saylor.
Writing in response to the Bitcoin sale program that Strategy formalized in its SEC filing, CryptoQuant’s head of research Julio Moreno warned that selling Bitcoin or common stock to defend STRC could be no different than opening the proverbial Pandora’s Box.
Moreno predicted that any price level that Strategy picks to start to intervene will by default become the line that traders pick as the firm’s breaking point.
“The moment the market knows the price level Strategy is trying to defend, it becomes a target,” Moreno said. He continued by implying that Strategy could become overwhelmed by selling pressure at that level.
Moreno was the same CryptoQuant analyst who had recommended for Strategy to hit the brakes on buying Bitcoin and focus on rebuilding its cash reserves in earlier Cryptopolitan reports.
CryptoQuant’s warning came as Strategy faced roughly $2.8 billion in dividend bills over the next two years. The firm’s breathing space was also quickly disappearing, with coverage compressing from more than seven years to about 14 months during a six-month period when annual preferred dividend costs grew from $300 million to $1.2 billion.
Strategy is no longer bound to its own BTC purchases
Benchmark analyst Mark Palmer characterized Strategy’s capital framework as formal permission to put its capital machine into “reverse” during periods of market stress. So, instead of charging ahead into Bitcoin purchases no matter what, the firm can now repurchase common and preferred shares, turn its Bitcoin into cash to meet obligations, and take a break from issuing new common stock when shares slide below a sensible net asset value level.
“Strategy is now an active manager of both sides of its capital structure, an approach that we view as a significant positive for its shareholders,” Palmer wrote in a client note.
Palmer argued that the $1.25 billion Bitcoin sale authorization amounts to a “rounding error” against the company’s 847,363 BTC balance. Strategy previously sold just 32 Bitcoin in May, a transaction worth roughly $2.5 million that funded a preferred dividend payment. That sale broke executive chairman Michael Saylor’s long-standing pledge never to sell, Cryptopolitan reported.
How are markets reacting to the new-look Strategy?
Monday’s market reaction was swift. MSTR climbed 12.6% to $92.68, while STRC jumped roughly 10% to around $83.67, recovering a chunk of June’s losses, Google Finance data showed.
CEO Phong Le framed the shift as a transition from pure capital issuance to active capital structure management through both issuance and repurchases, Cryptopolitan reported.
Whether the framework delivers depends on Bitcoin recovering toward Strategy’s cost basis and whether the company exercises its new tools, or keeps them holstered as options that reassure the market without being used.
Investors will watch quarterly disclosures on Bitcoin sales, reserve balances, and repurchase activity in upcoming filings for signals on which direction Strategy steers from here.
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The operators of NanoBit, a phony cryptocurrency trading platform that the SEC claims was used to defraud investors through made-up relationships on WhatsApp, have been hit with fines exceeding $5 million by a federal court in New York.
According to a litigation release issued by the SEC on June 29, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York entered a default judgment against four entities and two individuals connected to the scheme on June 16.
The agency’s first enforcement action against “relationship investment scams” in cryptocurrency markets was brought in September 2024.
How the scheme worked
According to the SEC’s initial complaint, fraudsters pretended to be financial industry professionals in WhatsApp group chats between September 2023 and June 2024. They misled investors into believing that NanoBit’s affiliate, NanobitUS Securities, was registered as a broker-dealer with the SEC after gaining the trust of potential victims.
The platform advertised fraudulent initial coin offerings with inflated profits. The SEC claims that there was never any real trading on NanoBit. Rather, more than $2 million was wired overseas, and other cryptocurrency assets were taken straight from investors and transferred to bank accounts in Hong Kong.
Financial penalties are broken down across six defendants
According to the SEC’s filing, the court mandated that NanoBit Limited pay $532,649 in disgorgement, $81,957 in prejudgment interest, and a $1,182,251 civil penalty. Zhao Deli, Sweet Karma, and Radiant Horizons, the other three defendants, all got the same $1,182,251 fines.
Smaller but no less important orders were given to two people. Jiajie Liu owes a $50,000 fine, $9,485 in interest, and $60,603 in disgorgement. Hua Zhao was mandated to pay a $50,000 fine and return $4,500 in disgorgement along with $704 in interest.
Section 17(a) of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 prohibit all defendants from ever again violating antifraud provisions.
Part of a broader crackdown on social media investment scams
As Cryptopolitan reported in September 2024, the SEC filed the initial complaint in addition to a separate action against CoinW6, another fraudulent platform that lured victims with romantic relationships cultivated on Instagram and LinkedIn.
Different defendants, same playbook. Build trust through personal connection, then redirect funds into fictitious trading accounts.
Gurbir S. Grewal, the Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement at the time, stated, “Relationship investment scams are a growing risk to retail investors,” upon the initial announcement of the charges. “These schemes, especially in the cryptocurrency space, are becoming more common as fraudsters use social media to manipulate and rob investors by taking advantage of trust.”
Investors are advised by the SEC’s Office of Investor Education to use Investor.gov to confirm credentials and to avoid depending on information from social media group chats when making investment decisions.
With assistance from the Division of Enforcement’s Cyber and Emerging Technologies Unit, Todd Brody and Jeremy Brandt of the SEC’s New York Regional Office litigated the case.
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With nearly thirty security updates focused on WebKit and web-related technologies, Apple released iOS 26.5.2 on Sunday.
Updates with the same version number were released for both macOS and iPadOS.
No new features, just patches
There are no new features in the update. Apple’s release notes direct users to the company’s security content page, which lists specific vulnerability patches. WebKit, the browser engine that powers Safari and other third-party iOS browsers, is the focus of most of the fixes.
Although the public release of iOS 27 is still months away, Apple released a preview earlier in June. The company is using point releases to maintain its current software line in the interim.
According to 9to5Mac, iOS 26.6 is currently in beta testing, but it doesn’t seem to have many user-facing changes yet. Users of iPhones can install the update by going to Settings, then General, and finally Software Update.
Apple told Reuters it’s compressing the gap between announcing fixes and shipping them, because AI is speeding up how fast attackers can build exploits out of known flaws.
The company said there’s no evidence yet that any of the newly patched vulnerabilities have been exploited. The modification deviates from Apple’s custom of including security patches in complete OS releases.
Older iPads face a harder upgrade path
The update comes at a challenging time for Apple’s range of devices. According to Cryptopolitan, iPadOS 27 will not be available for five iPad models with A12 and A12X chips this fall. The iPad Air (3rd generation), iPad mini (5th generation), both 2018 iPad Pro sizes, and the 2020 iPad (8th generation) are among the 2018–2020 models impacted.
Apple continues to provide security updates for outdated operating systems. Owners of dropped hardware are not immediately exposed because iPadOS 18.7.9 arrived about a month ago, according to Cryptopolitan. However, users are unable to revert to a firmware version that might function better on their hardware due to the company’s policy of “unsigning” outdated firmware.
The cost of replacing those devices has increased since the previous quarter. On June 25, Apple increased the price of iPads; the base model went from $349 to $449, while the iPad Pro went from $999 to $1,199. Apple told CNBC that the construction of AI data centers led to an exceptional demand for memory and storage components, which caused costs to rise more quickly than the company had previously experienced.
In Q1 2026, smartphone DRAM prices increased by 50%, while NAND flash storage prices increased by more than 90%, according to Tarun Pathak, research director at Counterpoint Research.
Apple had previously overturned a similar decision regarding device support. Stage Manager on iPadOS 16 was first limited to M1 iPads in 2022, but following public criticism, Apple extended compatibility to the 2018 and 2020 iPad Pro models during the beta period.
About three weeks have passed since the iPadOS 27 beta was released, giving the company time to revise the cutoff list before the fall release.
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The cryptocurrency platform, Plusspay, has had its registration revoked by Chilean regulators after investigators tied the company to a laundering operation run by Venezuelan criminal organization Tren de Aragua.
With the registration canceled, Plusspay has been stripped of any ability to serve clients in the country. It is also expected to return all deposits to customers.
What happened to Plusspay?
Chile’s financial regulator, the Comisión para el Mercado Financiero (CMF), announced on June 26 that it was revoking the registration of Inversiones Plusservice SpA, the company behind the Plusspay crypto platform. The decision strips the firm of its ability to serve clients in the country and forces it to return any customer funds it is still holding.
Plusspay was a cryptocurrency platform that advertised itself as a regulated financial service in Chile. However, it only had a registration, not the full authorization needed to operate.
Cryptopolitan previously reported that the company accepted deposits in Chilean pesos and converted them into stablecoins, primarily Tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC). Investigators say Plusspay then routed these crypto funds to foreign wallets and bank accounts.
Prosecutors have connected more than $84 million in suspicious transactions to this network. The funds allegedly came from criminal activities linked to the Tren de Aragua gang, including extortion and drug trafficking.
The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) classified Tren de Aragua as a global criminal organization back in 2024.
The founder of the platform, Jose Manuel Rios Guaido, a 38-year-old Venezuelan national, is now on the run after an arrest warrant was issued by the Southern Metropolitan Regional Prosecutor’s Office.
Prosecutors say Rios Guaido used a network of shell companies with the “Bex” brand name, such as BexGroup SpA, BexDigital Services SpA, Bexpay Business Enterprises SpA, to hide the money flow through the Chilean banking system.
A related company with the same address was also found in Florida.
Rios Guaido co-founded the company in 2021 and officially launched the Plusspay platform in 2023 to offer crypto custody and brokerage services. Plusspay has been ordered to stop onboarding new users, but the company still has permission to return all deposits to users.
Can exchanges operate in Chile without being fully approved?
The CMF has clarified that under Chile’s Fintech Law, a company must register in the CMF’s fintech registry, and then get a separate authorization before it is allowed to actually operate.
Plusspay did register in early 2024, but it didn’t complete the second phase of approval before it began to advertise itself as CMF-regulated.
Unauthorized platforms reportedly routinely operate as though they hold full licenses, and the CMF lacks the legal authority to shut them down directly. It can flag violations to prosecutors and cancel registrations as it did with Plusspay, but it cannot unilaterally close a fintech.
The CMF is now reviewing all the companies in its fintech registry to confirm that they are in compliance with the requirements. Several companies besides Plusspay have already been flagged for failing to meet updated information requirements.
Under the Fintech Law, operating without proper authorization is a serious infraction, and doing so while committing fraud is an aggravating factor in criminal proceedings.
Cryptopolitan reported that weeks earlier, the Chilean police arrested nearly 20 people in a separate laundering ring that moved up to $88 million through bank accounts and crypto remittances. Prosecutor Héctor Barros called that operation “one of the largest money laundering cases we have seen in our country.”
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