Europol confirmed the seizure in a press release, where it called Cryptomixer 'the platform of choice for cybercriminals seeking to launder illegal proceeds from a variety of criminal activities, such as drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, ransomware attacks, and payment card fraud.' Hackers and other criminals use laundering services such as Cryptomixer to obfuscate and hide the provenance of their cryptocurrency. By design, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are built on public blockchains that allow law enforcement, as well as blockchain intelligence firms such as Chainalysis and Elliptic, to follow the money over time. Authorities said they seized $25 million euros ($29 million) in Bitcoin, along with three servers, 12 terabytes of data, and the official domain cryptomixer.io, which now displays the customary law enforcement seizure splash page. According to Europol, the site 'facilitated the obfuscation of criminal funds for ransomware groups, underground economy forums and dark web markets,' and claimed its software 'blocked the traceability of funds on the blockchain.'...

On July 18, President Donald Trump signed into law the boastfully named GENIUS Act. If the law wreaks havoc on the financial system, as seems highly likely, that name will become a grim joke: What genius thought that letting the cryptocurrency industry write its own rules would be a good idea' The Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act purports to create a regulatory framework for a type of cryptocurrency called stablecoins. Despite their reassuring name, stablecoins'which promise a constant value relative to real-world currencies, usually the U.S. dollar'are by far the most dangerous form of cryptocurrency. Their danger lies in the way they are meant to be safe. Most people understand that cryptocurrencies are volatile and speculative. Bitcoin, ether, and other name-brand cryptocurrencies fluctuate in value day by day, year by year. Stablecoins are meant to do away with these fluctuations, yet they pose what may be a larger threat to the wider financial system. The GENIUS Act, like the Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation adopted by the European Union in 2023, offers safeguards that will likely enlarge the stablecoin market considerably. If'or when'the coins explode, the GENIUS Act more or less ensures that the U.S. government will have to bail out the stablecoin issuers and their holders on a scale of hundreds of billions of dollars....

Good morning & happy Friday! Today, all eyes are on OpenAI and its Master Plan to turn AI chatbot into the ultimate Everything App (how quietly launched group chats fit in perfectly here & what to expect next + bonus dives into OpenAI, Agentic Commerce & the ultimate LLM toolkit for AI innovation), and JPMorgan which just bridged Wall Street and blockchain with JPMD token launch on Base (what it's all about, why it matters & what it means for the future of FinTech + bonus deep dives into Coinbase & JPMorgan, and their latest financials). Let's just jump straight into the interesting stuff '' The BIG news '' $500 billion AI giant OpenAI just quietly launched group chats. At the core, this functionality within ChatGPT represents far more than just a collaborative feature - it marks a strategic inflection point in the company's pursuit of becoming the Western world's first true Everything App....

Then they worked their networks for warm intros ' both had previously worked at the popular crypto trading platform dYdX. Failing that, they made cold calls. And 140 of their dream angels wrote checks after hearing their pitch. The angels liked their idea of a super app that gives consumers access to every crypto asset ever (millions of them), available on any blockchain, with, they promise, no technical friction. The app also has a social component baked into it, where users can follow friends and leaders they respect to see their trades. While Fomo doesn't yet have every asset from every blockchain available, the founders said they are on track to be close to that goal in six months. And among the millions of assets they do offer today, users can trade everything from major coins like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana to meme coins and altcoins, they say. A month after Fomo's May launch, the founders added a feature that dramatically changed their company's trajectory: support for Apple Pay. This essentially let users download the app and quickly start trading....