Autor Cointelegraph By Brayden Lindrea

The US Treasury has sanctioned four Iranian crypto exchanges, including the country’s largest, Nobitex, marking the latest effort in its campaign called “Economic Fury” that aims to cut Iran off from the financial system.The Treasury said on Tuesday that it added crypto exchanges Wallex, Bitpin and Ramzinex to the Office of Foreign Assets Control’s sanction list, prohibiting US businesses and persons from providing services to those platforms.“While Iran’s economy is in free fall, the regime has chosen to co-opt digital asset technologies for its own corrupt agenda, including evading sanctions and transferring wealth out of the country,” said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.The Treasury’s efforts to cut financial networks from Iran are at the center of its “Economic Fury” campaign, which commenced on April 14, months into the Iran war that kicked off with joint US-Israeli strikes on the country in February.Source: Treasury DepartmentThe US has repeatedly struck Iran amid efforts to reach a ceasefire agreement and resolve a dispute over the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane that transits about one-fifth of the world’s oil.One of the top priorities for Treasury is to end Iran’s nuclear programme, Bessent said. “As promised, Treasury will continue to follow the money in support of Economic Fury, whether it is through the banking system or through digital assets, to prevent the regime from developing a nuclear weapon.”The latest sanctions come four days after Bessent revealed that the Treasury had seized nearly $1 billion in crypto from Iranian crypto exchanges and wallets since the Iran war began.Nobitex the centerpiece of Iran’s “digital dollar pipeline”The Treasury said Nobitex, Iran’s largest crypto exchange, has continued to facilitate payments for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other sanctioned entities.On Tuesday, blockchain forensics platform Chainalysis said that Nobitex is at the center of Iran’s “digital dollar pipeline,” and that it handles about 50% of the country’s crypto trading volume.Related: US Senate advances resolution to curb Trump’s Iran war powers The Treasury claimed that Nobitex has contributed to the repression of the Iranian people by facilitating state-linked surveillance of civilians. Nobitex’s CEO, Seyed Ali Khoee, and chairman Amir Hossein Rad were also added to OFAC’s sanction list.The Treasury said it has cut off “tens of billions of dollars” worth of funding channels from otherwise being accessible to the Iranian regime and its proxies.That includes action taken against alleged shadow bank networks, as well as foreign officials and companies seeking to support Iran’s oil trade and military activities.Magazine: Should users be allowed to bet on war and death in prediction markets?

TapTools, a Cardano-focused real-time analytics platform, has begun winding down after its fifth top-level executive departure, compounding leadership instability and making continued operations unsustainable. TapTools said in a post to X on Tuesday that it would begin winding down over the next two weeks, and noted the departure of its two co-founders, chief operating officer and chief technology officer earlier this year.“We worked hard to adapt,” TapTools said, adding that its backend developer had become its CTO as the platform shifted its focus toward shipping products more sustainably; however, they have since departed, and “the technical knowledge required to responsibly operate and maintain TapTools cannot be replaced overnight.”Source: TapToolsTapTools launched in 2022 and became one of the most widely used tools for Cardano users to track token prices, decentralized finance activity and discover new projects.The wind-down follows a similar move by Cardano-based nonfungible token marketplace, JPG.Store, which permanently shut down on May 23.TapTools’ closure comes three days after the Cardano Foundation said its annual conference was cancelled this year after its governance community shot down a revised proposal seeking to fund the event with treasury tokens.TapTools said the economics of running the platform were another key factor in its decision to wind down.“Infrastructure costs are real. Development costs are real. Support costs are real. Operating a platform that serves the ecosystem at scale is expensive.”Related: Cardano can now be used to pay at 137 Spar stores across Switzerland TapTools said it remains open to acquisition or external funding to sustain operations.Cardano creator expects more protocol wind-downsCardano creator Charles Hoskinson took some of the blame for TapTools’ wind-down, saying in a video shared to X that he expected a lot of protocols to collapse in the current bear market and that he came up with a plan to “bail out” struggling projects.“I came up with the plan of an index. It did not get executed,” Hoskinson said.Hoskinson added that Cardano’s governance community could have helped some of these projects, but opted not to.Magazine: Big Questions: Do we really only need 2–5 cryptocurrencies? 

Crypto asset manager Grayscale could launch its exchange-traded fund tied to the Hyperliquid token in the US as soon as this week after it amended a regulatory filing for the fund, an analyst says. Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart posted to X on Monday that the launch of Grayscale’s ETF was “likely imminent” and was “expecting the launch this week” after the company amended the fund’s filing for the sixth time to add its ticker and fee.Grayscale’s amended filing added that the ETF would trade under the ticker HYPG with a 0.29% management fee, which Seyffart noted “slightly undercuts” rival Hyperliquid (HYPE) ETFs from 21Shares and Bitwise that launched in mid-May.Source: James Seyffart21Shares ETF has a fee of 0.3%, while Bitwise charges 0.34%. Together, the ETFs have recorded nearly $140 million in net inflows since launch as investors looked to get exposure to HYPE,  the token for the layer 1 blockchain and perpetual futures platform, Hyperliquid.Hyperliquid has become one of the most popular trading platforms for crypto traders in recent months, with blockchain data showing that it now consistently facilitates over $170 billion in monthly trading volume across a broad range of asset classes.Grayscale’s HYPG is also seeking to follow 21Shares and Bitwise by staking HYPE to earn yield, an offering that asset managers have added to similar crypto ETFs to attract investors.Related: Hyperliquid launches prediction markets for real-world events The Hyperliquid ETFs have helped push HYPE to a new all-time high of $75.3 on Monday. Its market capitalization has risen to $16.7 billion as a result, making it the 10th largest cryptocurrency by market value.Grayscale’s potential launch comes as US-listed Bitcoin (BTC) ETFs have recorded net outflows over 10 consecutive trading days, bleeding nearly $3 billion.US Ether (ETH) ETFs are also on a 14-day net outflow streak, as investors are reducing positions faster than fresh capital is flowing into the market.Magazine: HYPE chases $100 target, ETH could dump below $1800: Market MovesCointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently.

Crypto lending protocol Radiant Capital says it will start closing down as it failed to establish a “viable path forward” after North Korea exploited it for $50 million in October 2024.Radiant’s decentralized autonomous organization said in a blog post on Monday that its inability to recover the stolen funds, secure new capital and maintain a runway to continue operating responsibly forced it to wind down.It added on X that contributors and community members had helped maintain the protocol under “increasingly difficult conditions,” but it was not enough to sustain the protocol “without recovery, capital, or growth.”Source: Radiant CapitalRadiant launched in 2022 and aimed to be a single platform to bring liquidity to several blockchains. It rapidly expanded in 2023, with its total value locked soaring to a high of $386.8 million in December 2023 even as value locked across the crypto market fell.North Korea’s Lazarus Group exploited Radiant in October 2024, and its TVL fell to $75 million before collapsing further to $5 million within the month after the hack, which it never recovered from.Radiant not fully shutting downRadiant said that instead of fully shutting down, it will transition into a “maintenance state,” where the protocol’s frontend will stay online, its smart contracts will remain accessible and users will be able to withdraw, repay, and manage their positions. However, its decentralized autonomous organization will no longer contribute to development, upgrades or expansions.Related: DxSale drained for $7.3M in BNB Chain liquidity exploit “Users are encouraged to actively manage risk and reduce exposure,” it said.Source: Radiant CapitalRadiant said it would continue recovery efforts stemming from the hack by keeping its remediation portal open and returning any recovered funds to affected users.The Radiant Capital (RDNT) token fell 4.2% after sharing that it was winding down. The token hit an all-time high of 58 cents in September 2022, but is now trading for a fraction of a cent.Magazine: AI-driven hacks could kill DeFi — unless projects act nowCointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently.

A pseudonymous white hat hacker has helped recover $2 million worth of Ether locked in a faulty initial coin offering (ICO) smart contract for almost a decade.In a post to X on Sunday, the white hat, known as “0xflorent,” said they helped recover about 1,003 Ether (ETH) from 48 investors who participated in the Hong Coin (HONG) ICO, a decentralized venture capital fund that never launched due to it failing to reach its funding goal.“The contract held all the investors’ ETH and was supposed to auto-refund them,” 0xflorent said. However, “a bug in the refund function quietly broke that, and the funds got stuck.” Data from Ethereum block explorer Etherscan shows that one HONG investor has already been refunded 96 ETH, now worth about $192,500, while 0.5 ETH was returned to another.Source: 0xflorent.ethHong Coin was first pitched in 2016, and a YouTube video at the time depicted the token as a community-run venture capital fund where members of the project’s decentralized autonomous organization would help decide which projects receive backing.The ICO started on Aug. 29, 2016, and ended about two months later on Oct. 28.Investors who sent ETH to the HONG smart contract were supposed to receive 250 million HONG tokens distributed across five stages, but it didn’t reach its funding goal, and investors were supposed to be refunded.0xflorent said they cooperated with the HONG creators, showing them how to extract the locked funds by taking advantage of a flawed admin function that reset token holders’ balances and triggered the refund mechanism. Related: Ethereum bull David Hoffman explains why he sold his ETH “The way out was an admin function with an integer overflow vulnerability,” they explained. “Calling it with a specific input resets a holder’s balance and unblocks the refund check.”On May 24, 0xflorent said they retrieved a combined 19.33 ETH worth about $40,600 from a failed ICO project in January 2018 and a Liquality Wallet user who had some funds trapped in a cross-chain transfer protocol.Magazine: Big Questions: Do we really only need 2–5 cryptocurrencies?