Cryptomus was temporarily banned from trading in British Columbia in May. The CA$177 million fine smashes Canada's previous record for the largest penalty they've ever imposed. That honor previously went to KuCoin, another crypto exchange fined CA$20 million (US$14.3 million) in September.
Cryptomus fined $127 million for compliance failures
The Canadian cryptocurrency exchange Cryptomus has been fined CA$177 million (US$127 million) by the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) for failing to report more than 1,000 suspicious transactions linked to darknet markets, distribution of child sex abuse material, fraud, ransomware, and sanctions evasion. It additionally failed to report more than 7,500 transactions originating from Iran, and more than 1,500 high-value transactions.
Fortress Trust is insolvent
Nevada's Financial Institutions Division has issued a cease and desist order against Fortress Trust, stating that the firm is "on the verge of insolvency". The company admits it "failed to safeguard assets under its custody and is unable to meet all customer withdrawals". The company has only around $1.3 million in actual assets in custody, while it owes customers around $12.3 million.
In 2023, Fortress experienced a $15 million theft. Though the company originally announced it would be acquired by Ripple, which had agreed to cover the shortfall, the deal eventually fell through. It's not clear how — or if — the funds were ever restored.
Fortress's insolvency has strong parallels to that of Prime Trust, another trust company that shares a founder in Scott Purcell. NFID issued a cease and desist to Prime Trust in June 2023 after finding the company was insolvent; in bankruptcy proceedings, that company later blamed much of the insolvency on losing access to a hardware wallet that held customer assets.
- Order to cease and desist from violations of NRS 669, State of Nevada Department of Business and Industry Financial Institutions Division.
Paxos accidentally mints more than twice the global GDP in PayPal stablecoins
Paxos, the issuer of PayPal's PYUSD stablecoin, accidentally minted 300 trillion of the supposedly dollar-pegged token. For context, this is approximately 2.5x the global GDP, and around 125x the total number of US dollars actually in circulation.
Paxos later announced that the mint was an "internal technical error", and that they had burned the excess tokens.
While PayPal promises its customers that "Reserves are held 100% in US dollar deposits, US treasuries and cash equivalents – meaning that customer funds are available for 1:1 redemption with Paxos," there clearly isn't much in the way of safeguards to ensure that is always the case. As with most stablecoin issuers, Paxos merely issues self-reported and unreviewed portfolio reports, and monthly third-party attestations (not audits) of reserves.
Hyperliquid user loses $21 million to private key leak
An attacker apparently obtained access to a victim's private key, enabling them to drain $21 million in various crypto assets. The attacker quickly bridged the stolen funds to ETH, then bounced through various addresses in hopes of disguising their origin and making the funds more challenging to recover.
Some originally feared that the theft was enabled by an exploit on Hyperliquid itself, shortly after another Hyperliquid-based project was compromised, but the theft appears to have been a key leak rather than an exploit on the protocol.
Abracadabra loses more "Magic Internet Money" to third hack in two years
In their third major hack in two years, the Abracadabra defi lending project lost $1.8 million of their Magic Internet Money stablecoin. An attacker took advantage of a bug in the project smart contracts to borrow more than their provided collateral would normally allow. The attack was funded via Tornado Cash, and the exploiter then swapped the stolen tokens for ETH and laundered them back through Tornado.
The project disclosed the theft, describing the exploit as affecting "some deprecated contracts". They downplayed the theft, saying they'd bought back the stolen assets using treasury funds.
Abracadabra previously suffered a $13 million theft in March 2025, and a $6.5 million theft in January 2024.
Futureverse announces restructuring two years after raising $54 million
In 2023, there was no shortage of buzzy press coverage for Futureverse, which promised to build a metaverse and gaming-focused blockchain. They partnered with Ready Player One author Ernest Cline to build the "Readyverse". They partnered with the estate of Muhammad Ali to build an "AI-powered" boxing game (with NFTs!) They partnered with Rebook to build a "virtual sneaker design experience", where customers could design sneakers to equip to their Fortnite or Roblox characters. That year, the company had raised $54 million in a Series A round led by 10T Holdings and Ripple Labs. They made even more money from token sales to retail investors.
As recently as this year, Futureverse was earning spots on "most innovative company" lists. In April, they announced they'd be acquiring Candy Digital, an NFT company created by Mike Novogratz, Gary Vaynerchuk, and others (which itself had raised a $100 million series A in 2021, and another funding round in 2023). "NFTs will be back in a big way one of these days", wrote Axios, covering the sale in April 2025.
But now, Futureverse has announced they've "made the difficult decision to begin a restructuring of the business". Focusing only on the AI portion of their business, and conspicuously omitting any mention of blockchains, NFTs, or metaverses, the company says they "recognize that adjustments are needed to ensure the long-term sustainability of our vision."
Futureverse locked comments on the post, likely to try to dodge angry community members who accused the company of stealing from them or rug-pulling.
Hyperdrive lending protocol exploited for $782,000
Exploiters drained $782,000 in crypto assets from two markets on the Hyperdrive lending protocol, which is built on the Hyperliquid layer-1 blockchain. The attacker apparently took advantage of a security flaw in one of the project's smart contracts to drain the funds.
Hyperdrive paused all markets while investigating the vulnerability, and patched the bug. They also compensated those who had lost money in the exploit.
Hypervault rug pulls for $3.6 million
Only days after the Hypervault yield farming platform announced on Twitter that they'd surpassed $5 million in total value locked, the platform suddenly shut down its website and social media accounts. Simultaneously, the crypto security firm PeckShield observed an "abnormal withdrawal" of a large quantity of various crypto assets priced at around $3.6 million, which were swapped to 752 ETH (~$3.1 million) and laundered through Tornado Cash.
The project had attracted customers by advertising yields of 76–95%.
SBI Crypto likely suffers $21 million theft
Crypto sleuth zachxbt observed $21 million in "suspicious outflows" from SBI Crypto, a crypto mining subsidiary of the Japanese SBI Group. The money was quickly laundered through instant exchanges and Tornado Cash, in ways zachxbt observed were similar to tactics of North Korean crypto thieves.
SBI Crypto has not made any public statements addressing the apparent theft.
Griffin AI exploited for $3 million one day after launch
One day after Griffin AI launched its GAIN token on Binance Alpha, an attacker minted 5 billion fake GAIN tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, then exploited a cross-chain endpoint to trick the bridge to the Binance chain into recognizing them as the real thing. The attacker was only able to sell a small fraction of their tokens, but they made off with approximately $3 million as the token plunged in price. According to CEO Oliver Feldmeier, the exploit was enabled by "a misconfigured layer Zero (cross-chain messaging) set-up and compromised key".
Griffin AI promises to allow customers to "build, deploy, and scale autonomous AI agents for crypto finance". These are essentially AI-powered bots that perform various functions — some of Griffin's advertised examples include a "robo-adviser" to provide "tailored investment strategies", and bots to do arbitrage trading or manage staked assets.