Nobody Cares: the Non-Fungible Thread

[Free]

Bitcoin is back in the news...

Feds Seize Record-Breaking $15 Billion in Bitcoin From Alleged Scam Empire (archive.today)

Over the last five years, criminals behind widespread romance and investment scams—often inelegantly referred to as “pig butchering”—have stolen tens of billions from people around the world. Now law enforcement has carried out one of its biggest operations yet against that sprawling scam industry, targeting the operators of several modern slavery scam compounds in Southeast Asia—where, as a whole, hundreds of thousands of human trafficking victims have been forced to run the fraud operations on behalf of criminal gangs.

On Tuesday, officials in the United States and United Kingdom took coordinated action against one giant Cambodian organization and its boss who has allegedly run a series of notorious scam centers in the country. The US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced it has issued financial sanctions against 146 “targets” linked to the newly designated Prince Group Transnational Criminal Organization. This action includes targeting individuals and shell companies linked to the alleged criminal enterprise. As part of the sweeping action also involving the FBI, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has also seized almost 130,000 bitcoin worth around $15 billion at the time of the announcement—the largest US cryptocurrency seizure to date.

 

[Free]

Look, I barely got what this shit was supposed to be about when it started. I certainly don't get it at all at this point.

The Ape Pivot Has Arrived

Would you like to fully immerse yourself in the digital world of the Bored Ape Yacht Club?

gizmodo.com

Time to dust off your apes everyone, because Otherside, the Bored Ape Yacht Club metaverse from Yuga Labs, is finally about to be released!

This string of words probably didn’t find much purchase in your brain, because if you’re not part of the Web3 world, the last time you were cognizant of Bored Ape-related news was likely October of 2022. That was around the time Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs had seemingly become toxic assets, and the Biden Administration was targeting parent company Yuga Labs with a probe into whether or not the Apes were unregistered securities.

In any case, that’s the popularity timeline a search for “bored apes” on Google Trends suggests—a spike in early 2022, a jagged drop-off, and a seemingly asymptotic decline to almost zero. And that’s where things sit today.

 

[Noodles]

The freshest indignity for the apes was just last week, when the Amazon Web Services crash reportedly disconnected all the Bored Ape Yacht Club images from marketplaces like OpenSea.

Thats so hilarious.

 

[Khamon]

Web3 <insert Mandark laugh track> oh my <insert Mandark laugh track> web. three. <insert Mandark laugh track | rinse & repeat>

 

[Free]

More crypto hacking news.

$120 Million Exploit Has Chilling Effect on Entire Crypto Ecosystem

The incident casts a dark shadow on the trustworthiness of defi protocols.

gizmodo.com

Balancer, which is a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol focused on automated market making (AMM), was exploited early Monday morning in an attack that may have led to $120 million or more in losses for its users.

The specific details of how the attack was pulled off are still unclear at this time. According to an early analysis published on the Blocksec Phalcon X account, the exploit was “highly sophisticated” and involved manipulating prices within the protocol that allowed the attacker to profit. On the other hand, Cyvers CEO Deddy Lavid told Bloomberg that the attacker may have been able to manipulate balances directly via an exploit involving the control mechanisms of the protocol.

 

[Free]

I like this dad.

 

[Free]

Bitcoin is finding out it lives over the cliff.

Bitcoin price outlook: $70,000 could be in play for BTC, say analysts

Despite hopes for a macro hedge, bitcoin continues to trade like the riskiest of risk assets in turmoil.

www.coindesk.com

Amid broad traditional market declines, crypto once again was the standout underperformer on Thursday.

Modest overnight declines in crypto turned into a major rout in the U.S. morning as the Nasdaq shed more than 2% and gold tumbled nearly 10% from an overnight record. But while both of those markets managed sizable afternoon bounces — the Nasdaq closing with a decline of just 0.7% and gold reclaiming the $5,400 per ounce level — bitcoin and the rest of crypto held not far from session lows. Bitcoin was trading just above $84,000 at press time. Losing almost 6% over the past 24 hours, bitcoin is on the brink of breaking below its two-month range, which could be a prelude to an even deeper pullback.

 

[Free]

The headline is a bit off: It's fallen below $64,000.

Bitcoin falls below $65,000 to wipe out ‘Trump rally’

Bitcoin sank below $65,000 on Thursday for the first time since 2024, wiping out all of the gains it had made since Donald Trump was elected to his second term as US president.

The world’s biggest cryptocurrency dropped 12 per cent to just below $64,000 as digital tokens were swept up in a sell-off in tech stocks. Bitcoin has lost more than a fourth of its dollar value this year.

“Sentiment has deteriorated sharply,” said Jasper De Maere, a strategist at trading firm Wintermute. “The crypto market still feels tired as we see little appetite from anyone to step in convincingly at these levels.”

 

[Casey Pelous]

The headline is a bit off: It's fallen below $64,000.

Bitcoin falls below $65,000 to wipe out ‘Trump rally’

These finance jackasses. "Oh, dear. Sentiment has deteriorated sharply," holding his teacup with pinky properly extended.

In English, "Everybody and their sister-in-law has lost a metric buttload of dough and this still isn't the bottom. FML!"

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Financial Times: Bitcoin is still about $70,000 too high (Evernote link because paywall).

But this is where it gets very awkward for cryptoland. Because Saylor is right — America does have the closest it will ever get to a “bitcoin president”, with vested family crypto interests to boot. And yet despite setting up a “strategic bitcoin reserve”, pardoning a load of convicted crypto criminals, allowing Americans to put crypto into their 401(k) pension accounts and claiming to have ended former president Joe Biden’s “war on crypto” in his first 200 days in office, Trump’s presence in the White House has not been able to hold back the tide of selling. If bitcoin can’t thrive in this environment, when can it?

We might not have quite reached bitcoin’s final “death spiral”; I don’t claim to know when that will happen. Trying to work out the end date of a speculative mania based purely on belief — or more specifically on belief in other people’s belief — is a difficult task, and bitcoin might still have a few more hurrahs to come (at the time of writing, it had rebounded to about $70,000).

 

[Free]

Cryptocurrency has discovered it's raison d'être: Human trafficking.

Crypto and Human Trafficking: 2026 Crypto Crime Report

Cryptocurrency flows to suspected human trafficking services surged 85% between 2024 and 2025, reaching a scale of hundreds of millions.

www.chainalysis.com

The intersection of cryptocurrency and suspected human trafficking intensified in 2025, with total transaction volume reaching hundreds of millions of dollars across identified services, an 85% year-over-year (YoY) increase. The dollar amounts significantly understate the human toll of these crimes, where the true cost is measured in lives impacted rather than money transferred.

This surge in cryptocurrency flows to suspected human trafficking services is not happening in isolation, but is closely aligned with the growth of Southeast Asia–based scam compounds, online casinos and gambling sites, and Chinese-language money laundering (CMLN) and guarantee networks operating largely via Telegram, all of which form a rapidly expanding local illicit ecosystem with global reach and impact. Unlike cash transactions that leave no trace, the transparency of blockchain technology provides unprecedented visibility into these operations, creating unique opportunities for detection and disruption that would be impossible with traditional payment methods.

 

[Free]

Still way overvalued.

Justin Bieber Once Paid $1.3M for a Bored Ape NFT, Now It’s Worth Just $12K

Justin Bieber faced a significant financial loss as the value of his Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT drastically declined.

www.benzinga.com

Pop sensation Justin Bieber faced a significant financial loss as the value of his Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT drastically declined. Bieber’s purchase of Bored Ape #3001 for 500 ETH, or approximately $1.3 million in January 2022, has now plummeted to an estimated $12,000, marking a stark 99% decrease in value.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

"Worth $155"

 

[Noodles]

"Worth $155"

Alexa, right click that image and get me $155."

 

[Free]

I'm starting to suspect that Zuckerberg has lost his marbles. Which could be a good thing for the rest of us. But it's more likely he's trying to figure out a way to gather all the marbles for himself.

Meta Gets Back into Crypto, Plans Stablecoin Integration Later This Year

Remember Meta's Libra Project, later renamed "Diem?" Well now Meta appears to be moving ahead with a stablecoin that is neither of those.

gizmodo.com

Meta is moving forward with stablecoin payments across its apps, according to a report from CoinDesk. The company has issued requests for proposals to third-party providers and aims to launch the feature in the second half of 2026, including a new wallet for handling dollar-pegged tokens on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Stripe looks like the top contender for the initial rollout, following its purchase of stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge and with its CEO Patrick Collison now on Meta’s board.