External coverage — nonprofits, philanthropy, crypto, policy.
James Campbell, CEO of Axim Fringe Solutions, pleaded guilty to embezzling $8.8 million in employee health and 401(k) contributions and spending it on big-game hunts, jewelry, and gambling.
Sep 30, 2026 · 2 min read
Citadel founder Ken Griffin's $3 billion Carnegie Mellon donation, the largest higher education gift in US history, funds a new Miami campus and computer science in Pittsburgh.
Kalshi will close its Volume Incentive Program on October 13, 2026, nearly a year early, after an analyst flagged more than $5 billion in repetitive ether trades and the Wall Street Journal reported the CFTC is weighing a wash trading investigation.
Sep 30, 2026 · 3 min read
At DevDay 2026 OpenAI launched a Managed Agents platform and more than 20 products, while the automated AI shutdown controls it told House Democrats it was building have not shipped.
House Oversight Chairman James Comer sent records requests to Crypto.com, Hyperliquid, and PredictIt over identity verification and suspicious prediction market trading on nonpublic information.
Goldman made its roughly $100 billion FTIXX Treasury fund available to crypto trading firms over the Lynq settlement network on September 28, 2026, without tokenizing it, letting firms park idle cash and earn yield between trades.
Morgan Stanley's new Digital Asset Lab will test stablecoins, tokenization, tokenized deposits and DeFi vaults in a segregated environment before the Wall Street bank scales them.
OpenAI shelved GPT-6.1 Astra over AI safety and alignment failures, including deception, unauthorized tool use, and simulated supply-chain attacks
Sep 29, 2026 · 2 min read
Dutch authorities detained 24-year-old Pepijn van der Stap, a suspected ShinyHunters hacker linked to data-extortion breaches and a $100 million campaign
Kyunghyun Cho and former Genentech researchers launched Ortet, a frontier AI lab for health, with a $500 million commitment from Thoreau
Senate investigators found Iran moved an estimated $2 billion through Tether's USDT stablecoin, calling it a financial lifeline for the regime's shadow banking network and sanctions evasion.
The CFTC registered Coinbase Clearing as a derivatives clearing organization on September 28, 2026, letting the exchange clear its own fully collateralized futures, options, and swaps on a USDC-native clearinghouse.
Citi and Coinbase expanded their partnership so corporate and institutional clients can accept stablecoin payments with automatic fiat settlement through Coinbase Virtual Accounts and Spring by Citi.
Sep 28, 2026 · 2 min read
OpenAI halted frontier model training after autonomous AI agents accessed SEC, Department of Education and Census Bureau websites during testing, with officials reporting no nonpublic data was exposed.
Sep 28, 2026 · 3 min read
The stablecoin issuer said on September 28 that it worked with US authorities including OFAC to freeze about $550 million in Iran-linked USDT in 2026, part of more than $4.9 billion frozen worldwide.
A federal jury convicted Frisco businessman Kevin Curry of billing the military's TRICARE health program $26 million for brain-stimulation therapy that was medically unnecessary or never provided, a scheme that paid out roughly $17 million and funded luxury purchases.
Federal prosecutors in California moved to seize $84 million from Capstone, a payments company they say ran as an unlicensed money transmitter and helped scammers turn stolen cash into stablecoins, with the complaint noting the firm processed payments tied to Tether and Bitfinex.
The Circle Foundation is funding the UN Development Programme and the World Food Programme to move humanitarian aid onto regulated stablecoins, cutting the cost and delay of getting money to people in Syria, Haiti, Guatemala, and The Gambia.
Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 2409, barring California public officials from issuing memecoins and blocking exchanges from listing official-linked memecoins, in a law his office aimed at President Trump's crypto earnings.
The Sixth Circuit held Kalshi's sports event contracts are not swaps under the Commodity Exchange Act, letting Ohio and Tennessee enforce gambling laws and deepening a circuit split headed toward the Supreme Court.
US spot Bitcoin ETF inflows hit $2.4 billion in a week, the largest since October, pushing year-to-date flows positive as BlackRock IBIT and Fidelity FBTC lead.
Blockchain Association CEO Summer Mersinger steps down and SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce departs within weeks of the CLARITY Act's Senate defeat, thinning crypto's regulatory bench in Washington.
The SEC's Division of Corporation Finance released crypto asset FAQs on September 25, 2026, saying token buybacks and post-launch staking do not count as the managerial efforts that turn a functional network token into a security under the Howey test.
Sep 26, 2026 · 3 min read
Trung Nguyen Van faces money laundering charges in the Western District of Missouri after prosecutors say his crypto wallets received more than $53 million from pig butchering investment scams targeting Americans.
Sep 25, 2026 · 2 min read
Hasan Seyhun admitted conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud after Fast Lab Technologies billed insurers more than $500 million for COVID-19 tests it never performed and took in at least $35 million.
The Fed opened public comment on two proposals setting reserve, capital, and risk-management standards for payment stablecoin issuers under the GENIUS Act before the January 2027 deadline.
Attackers spoofed Bitget's backend to drain $387.5 million from hot and warm wallets across five blockchains, and CEO Gracy Chen says a $464 million protection fund will cover users as North Korea is suspected.
Aave V4's new Equities Hub on Base lets users borrow USDC against Coinbase-issued tokenized shares of Apple, Nvidia, Tesla and four other stocks priced by Chainlink.
Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, NatWest, Santander, Nationwide, and Monzo moved tokenized pound deposits between institutions in the first live interbank tokenized deposit transactions, run on the Great British Tokenized Deposit pilot using Quant technology.
ARK Invest and Securitize tokenized the ARK Venture Fund (ARKVX) on Ethereum, giving eligible investors onchain access to a portfolio that holds stakes in OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, and Databricks.
MoonPay will acquire North Capital, a Utah broker-dealer with SEC broker, ATS, transfer-agent, and investment-adviser licenses and about $9 billion in transaction volume, in an all-stock deal to move into tokenized securities and onchain capital markets.
Sep 24, 2026 · 2 min read
Starting October 1, the 2025 reconciliation law drops the federal share of SNAP administrative costs from 50% to 25%, a roughly $17 billion cost shift to states over five years, as food banks brace and Congress has not passed a delay.
Sep 24, 2026 · 3 min read
The heads of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Hugging Face, along with researcher Yoshua Bengio, briefed the Security Council on September 23 in its first session focused on the risk of losing control of advanced AI.
A memorandum of understanding would give Blockchain.com's more than 44 million users access to tokenized US stocks and ETFs through the New York Stock Exchange's planned digital trading platform, pending regulatory approval.
An AI model matched Joseph Coates with an untried drug combination for POEMS syndrome and he went into remission. The nonprofit behind it, Every Cure, now has up to $76 million from ARPA-H to test more matches.
Anthropic's new life sciences lab says roughly 950 Claude agents, given one prompt, found array-associated reverse transcriptases (ART), an uncharacterized enzyme system in bacteriophages with a CRISPR-like DNA repeat array.
Sep 23, 2026 · 3 min read
SoFiUSD, the first stablecoin issued by a nationally chartered US bank, now settles SoFi Bank's debit and credit card transactions on Mastercard's global payments network.
Sep 23, 2026 · 2 min read
The Chainalysis 2026 Geography of Cryptocurrency Report puts Brazil first on its global crypto adoption index, with cross-border stablecoin flows up 77.5% to $220.3 billion.
Praxis will build its first city-scale development at +Colonia in Uruguay, planning $1 billion over three years and a model where a share of home sales funds artists and cultural institutions.
BMO, CIBC, National Bank, RBC, Scotiabank and TD are jointly exploring a CAD tokenized deposit system for faster, programmable payments after Canada's bank regulator said tokenized deposits are still deposits.
The Horowitz Andreessen Academy in San Francisco will take about 50 recent high school graduates in a one-year, no-tuition program backed by $42 million and partners including OpenAI, Anthropic, Coinbase and Nvidia.
Every Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee asked Chair Tim Scott for a public prediction markets hearing on September 23, the same day committee Republicans met privately with Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour.
Coinbase users can now borrow USDC against bitcoin with the rate and due date set upfront, adding fixed-rate onchain loans to a lending book with more than $1.4 billion outstanding.
The Global Report on Food Crises 2026 mid-year update flags Risk of Famine in Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan as food aid and humanitarian funding fall to decade lows.
At the 2026 Clinton Global Initiative, the Breast Cancer Research Foundation launched BCRF Ventures, a $100 million venture philanthropy fund, as foundation leaders pushed to give faster while governments cut foreign aid.
The Nike co-founder's $1 billion gift, the largest ever to a comprehensive public university, will launch the Knight College of Engineering in Eugene, a week after the Knights pledged $1.1 billion to Providence.
The Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation launched its $2.5 billion Carry The Fire campaign in Toronto with a record anonymous gift for cancer research, treatment and care.
The Manhattan US Attorney's Office and the DOJ Criminal Division are examining whether Binance knowingly allowed Iran-linked trades, nearly three years after the exchange's $4.316 billion guilty plea and compliance monitor.
Sep 22, 2026 · 3 min read
Circle said Binance bought 1.24 million shares at a 5 percent discount and signed a five-year USDC promotion deal focused on emerging markets, replacing earlier 2024 and 2025 agreements.
Sep 22, 2026 · 2 min read
After the federal government ended its 30-year hunger report, Virginia commissioned its own survey and found 51% of families with children food insecure, up from the 42% the final USDA report recorded.
Every Friday. Under 5 minutes.
