The Cyber Crime Coordination Center (I4C) in India sent Google at least three notices in August, naming at least 57 websites and databases in total that all run on Firebase. These sent notices claimed the links were being used as tools for spreading malware and pulling financial data off victims’ devices. Of these 57 websites and databases, seven were phishing pages built to closely resemble login screens of major Indian banks, including the State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, and Axis Bank.

India wary about rise of apps designed to steal from citizens

Officials in India also described the others as collection points for stolen information like credit card numbers and one-time passwords. According to an August 17 notice, scammers wrote Android malware camouflaged as real banking apps and went after cardholders specifically. The bait was regular financial temptation, including a new credit card, a reward to redeem, and a higher credit limit.

A victim who fell for the malware scam installed what looked like a bank’s app. Once on the phone, the software quietly forwarded data to a Firebase database controlled by the scammers. This gave the scammers a route into other apps on the device and, potentially, into the victim’s money. Officials in India also identified one scheme built around PM-KISAN, the federal program that pays small farmers directly.

Fake sites promised to help recipients claim their money and told them to download an app to collect these funds. That app also siphoned user data straight to the attackers. India had over 242 billion transactions occur via its real-time payments system from January 2026 to March 2026. This huge foundation gives fraudsters the chance to acquire a massive pool of targets within the country.

Firebase is used by millions of developers globally, as it is quite easily accessible. Criminals have also taken advantage of this, moving onto the platform from other free tools over the past year due to its free tier and database features. The Indian government’s standard response to such fraudulent schemes has simply been to track down the scam websites and disable them. However, the new steps point to a more expansive approach aimed at the infrastructure supporting the schemes.

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The measure was introduced on Thursday by Rep. Eom Tae-young of the People Power Party and nine others. It amends the Act on Reporting and Using Specified Financial Transaction Information by inserting a new provision, Article 15-4. According to the legislative tracking portal of South Korea, the bill was referred on August 21 to the political affairs committee of the National Assembly, which oversees the Financial Services Commission. The bill still has to go through committee review and a floor vote. Wording can change along the way, and bills filed by individual legislators often die unpassed when an Assembly term ends.

Lawmakers want FIU to take charge of these offences

Under the proposal, anyone could report a suspected violation directly to the FIU. The unit could then investigate the allegation, analyze it, file a complaint, request a criminal investigation, or pass the information to investigators. The FIU is part of the Financial Services Commission (FSC) and operates the registration regime that crypto firms serving Korean customers must join. As of June, it had 28 registered providers and said it had referred 40 suspected illegal operators to investigative authorities.

Between August 2022 and August 2025, the FIU referred 25 unregistered virtual asset service providers to police for investigation. But police suspended investigations or preliminary inquiries in 23 cases. Most of these firms and their people were said to be located overseas, making them difficult to access using the current process. Today, the FIU can flag a suspected unregistered operator, but has to lean on police and other agencies to pursue it.

The bill’s statement of reasons contends that reliance on inter-agency cooperation and formal investigation requests makes a fast response difficult. It warns that unregistered venues, which it calls “private coin exchange offices,” can be used for money laundering, illegal currency exchange, and illegal overseas remittance. South Korea’s Cabinet approved an amendment on August 11 that removes the 1 million won reporting threshold for crypto transfers.

Registration provisions became effective on August 20, and the full Travel Rule expansion will follow in February 2027, per a past Cryptopolitan report. The package also introduced a 200% debt-ratio cap on exchange operators and stricter vetting of shareholders. The FIU only permitted two new virtual asset service providers in 2025. That’s down from four the year before. According to previous coverage by Cryptopolitan, the average time it took to get approved went up from 11 months to 16 months. Suspicious transaction reports rose to 36,684 last year in South Korea, and about 90% of them were linked to illegal cross-border remittance arrangements.

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Mr. Wolfe, his 55-year-old friend and former colleague, was alleged to have traded about 2.2 million shares, making a profit of $18.5 million when the stock rose about 40% on the news. The purchases ran through the last two months of 2021 at a cost of at least $53 million, according to the complaint, filed as case 1:26-cv-07132 in the Southern District of New York. Infrastructure Investments Fund agreed to take South Jersey private at $36 a share in a deal valued at $8.1 billion. The two men spoke about a possible acquisition on several occasions, the SEC says, including at a nationally televised college basketball game they attended with their wives.

SEC claimed the suspects allegedly tried to hide their actions

Wolfe traded through eight entities the agency has named as relief defendants, among them Evergreen Capital, Evergreen Financial, Empire Property Management and GAW Holdings. Evergreen manages Wolfe family assets. He and Satsky both left Credit Suisse for Bank of America in 2012. The complaint alleges that the two individuals attempted to hide their actions, and it explains how the issue came to light.

After the announcement, a financial regulator prompted the bank to run an internal inquiry into trading in South Jersey shares. Bank of America terminated Satsky in March 2025. The U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan has been investigating the very same transaction for at least since the spring of last year, and still there have been no criminal charges filed. Satsky’s lawyer, Robert Anello, said his client “strongly denies the SEC’s allegations” and gave Wolfe no material nonpublic information about the company.

Reed Brodsky, Wolfe’s attorney, said his client emphatically denies the accusations and contends that the SEC ignored the testimony and evidence that showed Wolfe purchased the stock based on his “own independent investment thesis.” This case is one that the SEC, under Paul Atkins, has said it will continue to bring while retreating on other issues. As Cryptopolitan reported this month, the agency’s back-to-basics approach targets insider trading, market manipulation, fiduciary breaches and accounting fraud, and it recently built a Financial Reporting and Accounting Unit inside the Enforcement Division.

According to Cornerstone Research, enforcement actions were reduced by about 60 percent after the arrival of Atkins in office in April 2025, whereby the financial penalties for crypto enforcement were reduced to $142 million in 2025, less than 3 percent of the previous year’s total. The charges against Satsky and Wolfe fall under Section 10(b) of the Exchange Act and Rule 10b-5. The SEC seeks permanent injunctions, civil penalties and officer-and-director bars against both, disgorgement and prejudgment interest from Wolfe, and a conduct-based injunction against Satsky.

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Buterin had published Part I on June 29, and the second one, which is the diamond iO writeup, was published on July 28. In those publications, he touched on lattice-heavy constructions. With local mixing, Buterin said that it is “a totally different way of doing cryptography.” In his post, he wrote that local mixing has no elliptic curves, no prime factorization, and no lattices anywhere in the design. According to Buterin, the closest relative to local mixing is symmetric cryptography, which is the discipline behind everyday encryption and hashing.

Buterin details the process involved in local mixing

The local mixing process starts with a circuit made of logic gates such as XOR, AND, and NOT that goes through a pipeline that keeps the output identical while it scrubs away any trace of the internal logic. Buterin wrote that local mixing goes through the following original circuit, adding reversibility, hardening, gadgetization, mixing, and finally obfuscation. During mixing, junk gates are scattered through the circuit. The arrangement is then shuffled, and it swaps out small blocks for different gates that compute the same thing.

However, it is not enough on its own, and that is why the other steps are important, as they do most of the work. Reversibility comes first because it makes the rest possible. Buterin explains that a reversible gate can be rewritten as an arbitrary pile of other reversible gates with matching behavior. This is harder to do with an AND or an OR. Buterin still called local mixing a “wild and risky bet,” writing that it sits on “a graveyard of failed attempts at white-box cryptography.”

Meanwhile, he pointed out that the authors of local mixing say that more efforts, along with a willingness to accept higher overhead, could make the idea hold. One proposed shortcut is artificial intelligence, as it could compress the three decades of hash functions needed to mature into a span of a few years. However, it moves away from the lattice-based routes, where the trade-off was security assumptions. Buterin called obfuscation the “final boss of cryptography” in his June publication, and he called it “the final frontier of cryptography” in this latest publication.

He said the most rigorous constructions carry “literally galactic” runtimes, longer than the lifetime of the universe. A program can be turned into an encrypted version that still runs on ordinary inputs using obfuscation. Here, ordinary outputs are returned while hiding their code. When obfuscation is paired with a blockchain, it gets close to a “trustless trusted third party” that enables things like private, collusion-resistant voting with no M-of-N committee to trust.

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The company is willing to run to hit a 2030 production date while AI chip demand continues to outstrip supply. Samsung Electronics is asking its equipment suppliers for a SEMI certification, which is a standard industry safety check that equipment must pass before it can be shipped to another country. Suppliers typically start the certification process only after a factory’s specifications are finalized, but Samsung has told several of its tool suppliers to obtain this certification ahead of the launch of the planned second chip plant in Taylor, Texas, to save time for faster installation later.

Samsung wants to hit a 2030 production date

Concrete plans for the factory are expected to become clearer by the end of the year, with production expected by 2030. The first Taylor factory already has Tesla as a major customer. Tesla signed a foundry contract worth about 22.76 trillion Korean won ($14.09 billion) with Samsung last year. The contract revived the Taylor timeline, which had been delayed several times due to weak demand and a lack of customers.

The first factory is set to open this year and will start trial production as early as next month, focusing on 2-nanometer production. The second factory is yet to have a customer of its own. According to industry sources, the second factory’s timeline depends on whether Tesla expands its orders or a new large customer signs up. Samsung’s construction unit, Samsung E&A, is reportedly preparing to send dozens of staff to the Taylor site to support the work.

In an interview, the mayor of Taylor, Jim Buzan, said that Samsung “put in the piers and foundation” for the second plant while it was still building the first. The mayor said Samsung “preplanned it several years back,” and shared that he expects this head start to let Samsung move faster on the second factory than it did on the first. Samsung’s reported figures put its initial minimum Taylor investment at $17 billion, its biggest ever in the United States.

The company has owned the land for its Taylor chip site since 2021, and has it zoned for as many as 10 factories. Around 100 Samsung employees have already moved to Taylor, and the total number of newcomers is likely to reach several hundred once partner company staff arrive. Mayor Buzan said Samsung has not received any of the $4.745 billion in CHIPS and Science Act money awarded to it in 2024.

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Non-GAAP net income after removal of share-based pay, investment swings and one-off items still dropped 38% to 20.72 billion yuan ($3.05 billion), while adjusted EBITA fell 30% to 27.33 billion yuan ($4.03 billion). Alibaba’s capital expenditures for Q2 hit 67.68 billion yuan ($9.98 billion), a 75% jump from the same period a year earlier, money the company tied to AI infrastructure. The expenditure drained cash, as free cash flow swung to an outflow of 44.67 billion yuan ($6.58 billion), more than double the 18.82 billion yuan outflow a year earlier.

Alibaba records 75% rise in capital spending

The unit housing Alibaba’s model work, its Qwen consumer app and the QwenWork enterprise agent, its AI Labs and Applications segment, ran an adjusted EBITA loss of 13.86 billion yuan ($2.04 billion). This loss was only 3.22 billion yuan one year ago. Alibaba blamed the higher numbers on higher inference costs from the Qwen app and deeper investment in its AI stack. The AI Cloud and Compute Services segment lifted revenue by 45% to 48.44 billion yuan ($7.14 billion).

Alibaba credited this to an increased adoption of its AI products. Revenue from AI-related products specifically came in at 12.38 billion yuan ($1.82 billion), a 12th straight quarter of triple-digit growth over one year. Unlike the AI applications unit, cloud brought in significant revenue. Its adjusted EBITA rose 133% to 5.63 billion yuan ($830 million). “We delivered a strong quarter, driven by the improving commercialization of our full-stack AI capabilities,” Chief Executive Officer Eddie Wu said in a statement.

Alibaba’s retail engine split in two different directions, with the China Quick Commerce revenue climbing 45% to 53.30 billion yuan, while the larger China E-commerce business slipped 8% to 110.90 billion yuan. Its 88VIP membership tier grew by double digits to about 64 million members as of June 30.

Three months earlier, Alibaba posted adjusted net income of just 86 million yuan and its first operating loss since 2021, all caused by the same AI and quick-commerce bills. The company has told investors it aims to reach $100 billion in combined annual revenue from cloud and AI within five years. The scale of the spending in the just-completed quarter shows what this target will cost before it is achieved.

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Observers are now drawing parallels between this episode and the Bithumb customers who quickly withdrew tokens that were wrongfully sent to them after an employee error. The Singapore court granted an interim proprietary injunction on March 26 in the case listed on its eLitigation service as DVA and another v DVC [2026] SGHC(I) 4. International Judge David Goddard, who sat with High Court Justice Aidan Xu and International Judge Anthony Meagher, delivered the rulings. The claimants appear as DVA and DVB, the customer as DVC.

Singapore court suspends transfer amid dispute

The Singapore court documents did not name the crypto platform litigating the wrongful transfer case, only going as far as describing the claimant as one of the world’s largest digital-asset trading operations. But the judgment revealed that the customer has used the platform since around 2013, founded his own blockchain in 2016, and set up a cryptocurrency exchange of his own. Apparently, the unnamed exchange discontinued support for its specialized self-custody wallet product in April 2018.

However, users were not immediately cut off, as there was a period after the exchange wound down the service during which they could still use a third-party open-source tool to access wallets. As for how the wrongful transfer happened, the exchange’s systems continued to show that the customer named in the lawsuit still had 2,500 Bitcoin and 2,500 Bitcoin Cash in their specialized wallets when, in fact, they had already emptied those accounts in March 2020.

The first transfer, per court records, saw 2,500 BTC leave the wallet on March 2, 2020, landing in an account registered on a cryptocurrency exchange that the customer founded. The transfer of 2,500 BCH was initiated six days later. 250 of those coins went to Binance, ruling out the exchange as a potential claimant or defendant in this case. The problem with these withdrawals was that the platform’s internal ledger just never logged them. Hence, the exchange continued to send reminders to the customer to move their tokens for up to four years after the actual withdrawals.

A help offer from a relationship manager in June 2024 turned up an automated “remediation tool” in July that ended up with the exchange sending 2,500 BTC and 2,500 BCH of its own holdings to the customer in what appears to be a classic double-spend incident. The platform clawed back the 1,700 BTC and 2,500 BCH in the customer’s wallet when it caught the mistake on January 29 2025. The customer has resisted the refund request on the missing balance, insisting on their claim to the disputed tokens as part of a defense strategy that disagrees with the platform’s version of events.

The interim order bars the customer from selling, moving, or reducing the value of about 780 BTC and 816,773 USDC, along with any profits, interest, or assets derived from them. The court also ordered him to disclose where the disputed coins and their proceeds now sit, which matters because later transactions have made some of them hard to trace. The judges did not give the platform everything. They refused, for now, to let it use that disclosure to chase similar freezes in other countries, leaving it to apply again later if needed.

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During that period, BTC and ETH saw only $6.11 billion and $4.57 billion, respectively, according to Binance market data. This wasn’t a sudden move, actually. As of August 17, SNDK was the third-biggest perp on Binance, with a 24-hour trading volume of around $3.71 billion. As of then, the stock contract carried $1.73 billion in open interest, 1.86 times SPCX’s $928 million and 3.51 times SKHX’s $493 million.

SDNK flips BTC and ETH in trading volume

SDNK pushed to a high of $1,693 earlier today before settling at $1,641 at the time of writing. The price has risen over 35% from the $1,213 low in less than two weeks. It appears that interest in stock perpetuals is beginning to overshadow that in major altcoins, at least on Binance, based on trading volume. Of all the top 10 traded perpetual contracts on Binance in the last 24 hours, half were TradFi contracts.

Following SNDK are SKHYNIX with $2.48 billion in volume, KORU at $1.84 billion, SOXL at $1.82 billion, and SPCX at $1.35 billion, according to Binance market data at the time of writing. Binance began introducing tokenized stocks in June under the bStock program, which is now the second-largest issuer of tokenized stocks by market cap, per earlier reporting by Cryptopolitan.

On August 13, bStock recorded a market cap of up to $610.6 million, or 22.1% of the entire sector, surpassing xStocks at $601.2 million. Ondo Finance led with $951.8 million and a 34.4% share.

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Ripple (XRP) has announced that Jeonbuk Bank will run cross-border business remittances over Ripple Payments, making it the first regional lender in the country to adopt the service. Traditional transfers have to be routed between intermediary banks on the SWIFT network, and this process can make transactions take days to clear. However, Ripple offers a route that settles in seconds to minutes and runs around the clock. The service is aimed at the bank’s importers, exporters, IT startups and online content creators. Jeonbuk is Ripple’s third Korean partnership of 2026, following a tokenized government-bond trial with Kyobo Life Insurance and a custody and wallet deal with internet-only Kbank.

South Korea votes to cut off access to Polymarket

Despite these partnership announcements in South Korea, XRP slipped under $1 to 98 cents in Asian morning trading on Tuesday, its weakest level since November 2024 and the worst performer among major coins over the day and week. The decline might be due to RLUSD, Ripple’s dollar-pegged stablecoin, which now does much of the institutional settlement work. Tokenized real-world assets on the XRP Ledger are worth roughly $1.38 billion, and $845 million of that is RLUSD, representing more than three-fifths of the total value.

RLUSD’s circulating supply reached approximately 1.71 billion tokens, with a market capitalization of around $1.71 billion. Ripple minted another 10 million RLUSD on the XRP Ledger on August 17. Despite the drop in XRP’s price, traders are still leaning long, with futures open interest near $2.78 billion. On the same day that the Ripple deal advanced, the Korea Media and Communications Standards Commission, another regulator in South Korea, voted to block domestic access to Polymarket, stating that the platform facilitates gambling under the Criminal Act and the National Sports Promotion Act.

The commission explained that because payouts hinge on events users cannot control and winners take the entire pot, the design “fuels gambling psychology.” It also noted the fact that Polymarket sets the markets, runs the settlement rails, and collects trading fees. Polymarket argued it had removed Korean-language services and won-denominated payments and therefore fell outside Korean law, but the regulator rejected that, saying technical features cannot exempt a platform providing “a real illegal gambling environment to domestic users.”

Cryptopolitan has been tracking the situation since the Korean police opened the country’s first criminal investigation into local Polymarket bettors after heavy trading around the June 3 national election. The commission began deliberations on July 6 after referrals from the National Police Agency. Beyond South Korea, more than 30 countries, including Italy, Indonesia, and Argentina, have blocked or limited Polymarket.

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OpenAI is rolling out a new version of its flagship chatbot, ChatGPT, which will automatically place users aged 13 to 17 in the teen version. Users under 13 are barred from ChatGPT entirely. Even if teens try to trick the system by signing up with a fake birthdate, the system will consider signals such as the topics an account discusses, the hours it is active, and how long it has existed, in order to decide if a user is under 18 or not. Users who are still wrongly sorted can get their age verified through Persona, a third-party firm that reviews a government ID or a live selfie and deletes the upload within seven days.

OpenAI VP details benefits of new model to teenagers

Ann O’Leary, OpenAI’s vice president of global policy, said the goal is to stop exposing teens to material “they shouldn’t be exposed to.” Parents who link an account to a teen user can lock access to the chatbot at chosen times. They also receive alerts in limited high-risk cases, although OpenAI says the controls do not let them read a teen’s messages. OpenAI also said the teen ChatGPT version brings together its existing safety features rather than create new ones.

For instance, the age prediction feature has existed since the start of the year, while OpenAI’s parental controls and study mode were launched roughly a year ago. The company first revealed its plans for a teen tier in September 2025. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also made an official inquiry into OpenAI, Meta, Alphabet, xAI, Snap and Character.AI over how they protect minors around that period. The FTC specifically targeted “companion” chatbots following multiple tragic incidents, including the suicide of a 16-year-old who had interacted extensively with ChatGPT.

A 2025 study from Common Sense Media found more than 70% of U.S. teens have used AI chatbots for companionship, and half use AI companions regularly. A separate study found that ChatGPT would, when asked, tell 13-year-olds how to get drunk and high, hide an eating disorder, or draft a suicide note. Sam Altman has called emotional overreliance on the technology “a really common thing” among young people.

The teen experience will be available for eligible accounts on either free or paid personal plans. From August 18, the teen version will be available for eligible accounts with no restrictions for free accounts. The company is also planning a full rollout in Australia, expected by September 8.

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