A major U.S. financial institution with one of the world’s largest card networks unveiled a Crypto Partner Program designed to bring together more than 85 crypto-native firms, payments providers, and financial institutions to foster dialogue and collaboration as the space matures. Participants are expected to shape the design and direction of future products and services that marry the speed and programmability of digital assets with established card rails and global commerce flows. The program’s roster of initial partners reflects a broad industry collaboration aimed at advancing crypto product development.
Strike, a crypto payments company, received a BitLicense and a Money Transmitter License from the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS), enabling it to offer its products and services to residents and businesses in New York. This licensing milestone underscores the growing role of regulated crypto payments providers within U.S. financial markets.
In stablecoin developments, a leading European bank launched a euro-backed stablecoin on the Stellar network, chosen for its scalability, transaction speed, low costs, and asset tokenization capabilities. A major global insurer also demonstrated a stablecoin premium payment concept with a successful proof of concept using trusted U.S. dollar-backed stablecoins, signaling increasing interest in stablecoin-based insurance payments across global brokers.
The operator of a major U.S. national stock exchange announced a strategic relationship and investment in OKX to leverage its blockchain infrastructure and reach, alongside the exchange’s market technology and regulatory framework. The collaboration includes a board seat and broad cooperation to advance a shared vision of tokenization and cross-market interoperability.
Kraken announced a partnership with another major U.S. stock exchange to build an equities transformation gateway that connects tokenized equity markets with decentralized networks, enabling tokenized equities to move between permissioned institutional markets and permissionless DeFi ecosystems. Kraken’s xStocks framework will anchor this cross-market connectivity, and the initiative underscores the ongoing push to bridge traditional finance with tokenized assets. In Europe, a major bank issued a tokenized share class of a French-domiciled money market fund under a permissioned model to align with regulatory requirements and explore fund tokenization on public blockchain infrastructure. The tokenised shares are issued under a permissioned access model, whereby holdings and transfers are restricted to eligible and authorised participants, in line with applicable regulatory requirements.
The U.S. Department of the Treasury (Treasury) recently released its March 2026 report to Congress, titled “Innovative Technologies to Counter Illicit Finance Involving Digital Assets,” fulfilling a requirement of the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act. The report analyzes how innovative technologies are being used—or could be used—to counter illicit finance involving digital assets, and it outlines risk assessments, technological applications, regulatory gaps and recommended legislative actions. The report identifies several ongoing illicit finance risks associated with digital assets, including money laundering, sanctions evasion, ransomware, online fraud and cyber-enabled theft.
The report places particular emphasis on the vulnerabilities found in mixers, tumblers, decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms, self-hosted wallets and jurisdictional arbitrage, all of which are frequently exploited by criminal networks. The report acknowledges that crypto mixers can serve legitimate privacy purposes, such as shielding sensitive business payments or personal wealth on public blockchains. However, it also distinguishes between custodial and noncustodial mixers, noting that noncustodial mixers pose significantly higher AML risk due to lack of identifiable intermediaries.
The report notes that criminal groups—including North Korea-linked cyber actors responsible for major thefts—have used such services to break tracing links before moving funds across bridges or into stablecoins. The report outlines how regulated financial institutions are deploying tools such as artificial intelligence, digital identity systems, blockchain analytics and application programming interfaces to detect suspicious activity, noting both benefits and implementation challenges. The report highlights these tools as increasingly necessary to monitor high-volume blockchain transactions, flag illicit patterns and satisfy AML obligations. The report describes digital identity mechanisms that support customer verification and fraud prevention and notes blockchain analytics and other monitoring methods for their ability to trace transactions and support sanctions enforcement. However, the report notes that financial institutions have reported operational challenges and unclear regulatory expectations when adopting such technologies. The report concludes that existing AML/CFT rules do not adequately address digital asset activity, particularly in DeFi ecosystems.
To address this gap, the report proposes a series of legislative recommendations, including: Define which DeFi actors or entities should be subject to AML/CFT obligations based on their roles and associated risks. Consider creating digital-asset-specific financial institution categories under the Bank Secrecy Act and updating existing regulatory definitions to reflect new business models. Provide Treasury with authority to restrict or condition certain cross-border “transmittals of funds” not currently covered by correspondent banking rules. Create a digital-asset-specific “hold law” to give exchanges and platforms legal authority to temporarily freeze suspicious funds during investigations – filling a current legal gap where institutions detect illicit activity but lack clear authority to intervene before the assets move.
The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), along with other federal bank regulators, recently published a FAQ with “answers to frequently asked questions to clarify the capital treatment of tokenized securities.” According to an OCC press release, “The answers to the frequently asked questions clarify that an eligible tokenized security should generally receive the same capital treatment as the non-tokenized form of the security under the capital rule.” Separately, in a recent speech, the chairman of the U.S. agency that provides bank deposit insurance addressed stablecoins and the GENIUS Act, noting that the agency is planning to propose that payment stablecoins subject to the GENIUS Act are not eligible for deposit insurance.
According to the chairman’s remarks, “The GENIUS Act makes clear that payment stablecoins are not ‘subject to deposit insurance’ or guaranteed by the U.S. government.” The FBI arrested the 25-year-old son of an employee at a U.S. federal contractor. The 25-year-old allegedly stole more than $46 million in cryptocurrency from seizure wallets managed by the U.S. Marshals Service.
He was reportedly arrested on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin. The DOJ announced a civil forfeiture action to recover $3.4 million in cryptocurrency related to an online investment fraud scheme. The scammers “convinced the victims to invest in an exclusive Ethereum (ETH) investment opportunity that the unknown subjects claimed was backed by physical gold.” Chainalysis recently released its 2026 Crypto Crime Report, which examines illicit cryptocurrency activity in 2025.
According to the report, crypto crime reached a record high in 2025, driven primarily by a sharp rise in activity involving sanctioned entities and set against a broader increase in on-chain nation-state activity. The report identifies four key trends that defined crypto crime in 2025: (1) nation-state threats drove record volumes—including more than $2 billion stolen by DPRK-linked hackers—the use of Russia’s ruble-backed A7A5 token in large-scale sanctions evasion and continued on-chain activity by Iran’s proxy networks; (2) Chinese money laundering networks emerged as a dominant force in the illicit on-chain ecosystem, offering laundering-as-a-service and other criminal infrastructure supporting scams, North Korean hack proceeds, sanctions evasion and terrorist financing; (3) full-stack illicit infrastructure providers played an increasingly central role, including domain registrars, bulletproof hosting services and other technical infrastructure used to support malicious cyber activity by both illicit actors and nation-states; and (4) the intersection of cryptocurrency and violent crime continued to expand, including greater use of crypto in human trafficking operations and a rise in physical coercion attacks in which victims were forced to transfer assets.
Illicit cryptocurrency addresses received at least $154 billion in 2025, representing a 162 percent increase year over year. The year-over-year increase was driven primarily by a 694 percent increase in value received by sanctioned entities. Even if sanctions-related activity were excluded, 2025 would still represent a record year for crypto crime, as activity increased across most illicit categories. Stablecoins accounted for approximately 84 percent of all illicit transaction volume.
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