Crypto markets and policy circles saw a dense wave of developments from Sept. 13 to Sept. 14, touching North Korea-linked cyber activity, political donation rules in the U.K., U.S. crypto legislation, AI regulation, token unlocks, and a fresh cross-chain exploit.
NBC says North Korea is using third-country IT workers to penetrate U.S. firms
NBC reported that North Korea has been recruiting remote IT workers from third countries including Iran and Lebanon to help it penetrate U.S. companies. These foreign workers are allegedly approached on LinkedIn and hired as part-time "interview assistants," receiving $500 a month in cryptocurrency. After they secure positions through job interviews, North Korean personnel are said to take over the actual work.
A warning issued in July by the U.S. government and several foreign agencies said North Korean IT workers take on contracts "for the purpose of remitting wages back to North Korean parent entities," while creating insider threats for companies, including data theft, cryptocurrency theft and the theft of sensitive information. Data cited in the report showed that North Korea state-linked hackers caused more than $2 billion in crypto losses in 2025, up 51% year over year.
U.K. Labour government pushes limits on major overseas political donations
The U.K. Labour government is advancing legislation to limit large political donations from wealthy overseas donors. The move follows combined donations of £72 million over two days to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK from two crypto billionaires, Christopher Harborne and BitMEX co-founder Ben Delo. The total exceeded what Labour and the Conservatives have raised this year.
Deputy Prime Minister and Housing Secretary Angela Rayner said the proposed law would cap annual donations from British citizens living abroad at £100,000. The cap would also apply to people who recently returned to the U.K. The government is also considering applying the rules retroactively, with non-compliant funds to be returned within 60 days. Reform UK said the donations are fully legal under current rules and that the donors asked for nothing in return.
Cathie Wood backs David Sacks on claims around AI doom narratives
ARK Invest founder Cathie Wood reposted comments on X from David Sacks, chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and said his view is that recent stories claiming "AI will destroy humanity" may have been deliberately orchestrated. According to the post, the remarks originated from a long-inactive X account belonging to an Anthropic employee who left the company after only six weeks, after which the content quickly moved into mainstream media coverage.
Sacks also pointed to parties involved in the episode and criticized the role played by The Wall Street Journal. Wood added that any technology can be used for harmful purposes. She also said people such as Elon Musk who continue to emphasize AI risk are playing a constructive role rather than taking part in a political conspiracy, writing that "half the battle in solving a problem, including AI, is understanding the problem."
LSK jumps, then a suspected Lisk CEO-linked address sends tokens to Binance
Lisk’s LSK token rose from about $0.2 to as high as $2.37, an roughly 11-fold move, with around $36 million in short liquidations during the surge. Ember said a wallet suspected to be linked to Lisk co-founder and CEO Max Kordek sent 3.3 million LSK to Binance after the rally, worth about $3.79 million.
The attribution was based on on-chain analysis showing that the sending address shared the same Binance deposit address as another wallet that had previously received gas from an address linked to Max Kordek. The ownership claim remains an on-chain inference and has not been confirmed by Lisk or by Kordek personally.
Large token unlocks are scheduled for next week
Token Unlocks data showed that several tokens, including ZRO, ARB and BR, are set for sizable unlocks next week:
- LayerZero (ZRO) will unlock about 25.71 million tokens at 7:00 p.m. Beijing time on Sept. 20, equal to about 4.22% of circulating supply and worth roughly $26 million.
- Arbitrum (ARB) will unlock about 92.65 million tokens at 9:00 p.m. Beijing time on Sept. 16, equal to about 1.59% of circulating supply and worth roughly $12.7 million.
- Bedrock (BR) will unlock about 40.63 million tokens at 8:00 a.m. Beijing time on Sept. 20, equal to about 18.68% of circulating supply and worth roughly $10.4 million.
- YZY (YZY) will unlock about 29.17 million tokens at 11:00 a.m. Beijing time on Sept. 15, equal to about 4.49% of circulating supply and worth roughly $8.4 million.
- Starknet (STRK) will unlock about 127 million tokens at 8:00 a.m. Beijing time on Sept. 15, equal to about 3.48% of circulating supply and worth roughly $3.6 million.
- Lista DAO (LISTA) will unlock about 33.44 million tokens at 5:00 p.m. Beijing time on Sept. 20, equal to about 5.18% of circulating supply and worth roughly $2.6 million.
- Sei (SEI) will unlock about 55.56 million tokens at 8:00 p.m. Beijing time on Sept. 15, equal to about 0.86% of circulating supply and worth roughly $2.5 million.
Eurosystem DLT settlement project Pontes is set to launch on Sept. 21
The Eurosystem’s distributed ledger technology settlement project Pontes is scheduled to go live on Sept. 21. Clearstream said it has taken part in end-to-end pre-launch testing covering system connectivity, settlement flows and operational readiness. Axiology is also moving through testing and certification, including scenarios for issuance, secondary trading, redemption and coupon payments.
Pontes is designed as an interoperability bridge linking multiple market DLT platforms to the Eurosystem’s TARGET services. It is intended to support wholesale transactions such as tokenized securities settled in central bank money. It also uses a mechanism called Hash-Link, described as similar to hash-based escrow, to enable synchronized settlement such as delivery versus payment. At launch, finality on the cash leg will be achieved once the relevant transfer is completed in the T2 system.
The European Central Bank has dropped the "pilot" label for the project. In remarks on Aug. 26, ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone described Pontes as an operational service and said it would initially charge only a one-time onboarding fee. Operating hours are to be expanded over time, with a plan to offer 24/7 service and multi-currency capability by mid-2028. The project stems from a two-track plan approved by the ECB Governing Council on July 1, 2025: Pontes in the short term and Appia, aimed at an integrated DLT capital market, in the longer term.
Jiang Zhuoer points to key BTC levels
Btc.top founder Jiang Zhuoer said on social media that BTC had fallen as expected and that $76,500 marked the lower boundary of an ascending channel as well as a key Fibonacci 23.6% support level. A break below that level, he said, could speed up the decline and test $75,500.
According to Jiang, if BTC stabilizes before $75,000, it could rebound to $80,000 and even $83,000 to $84,000. If that level is decisively lost, he said the price could pull back to $70,000 to $72,000. He described next week’s CLARITY vote and Federal Reserve news as key catalysts and said he is maintaining a neutral position of BTC shorts plus spot ETH.
Chainflip loses about 736,400 USDT in Tron attack
Cross-chain trading protocol Chainflip said it was attacked on Tron, with six unauthorized payouts leading to a loss of about 736,400 USDT. The network has been paused and is expected to resume no earlier than Monday.
According to the project, Chainflip on Tron relies on transaction memos to read swap instructions. The attacker appended their own memo to a transaction already signed by validators, which the system misread as a separate swap and refunded, causing the same deposit to be paid out twice. Chainflip said the rest of the funds are safe and affected users will be compensated.
Trump and House Democrats comment on AI policy
Asked whether the AI industry should slow down, U.S. President Donald Trump said, "Whoever wins artificial intelligence wins the future. We can put protections in place, but some of the voices are too negative."
House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said Democratic lawmakers will hold a caucus meeting Tuesday morning focused on AI-related legislative action. He called responding to the challenges posed by AI a "high priority" and said action is needed quickly. He also said Democrats are debating what regulatory and safety guardrails should look like in response to rapid industry development and potential risks.
Brazil central bank rules could push about 290 crypto exchanges out
Brazil’s central bank has imposed capital requirements for crypto exchanges that can reach 37.2 million reais, or about $7.2 million. Of the country’s 200 to 300 virtual asset service providers, only 10 to 25 are qualified to apply, and roughly 10 are expected to ultimately receive licenses. About 290 firms could exit the market.
Companies must file applications by Oct. 30. Those that do not apply will have to wind down operations within 30 days. Platforms including Bitnuvem and NovaDAX have already announced restructuring or the suspension of retail operations, though they did not attribute those decisions to the new rule.
Arthur Hayes says both AI debt endgames lead to money printing
BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes wrote that under an "AI safety first" framework, the U.S. government may eventually backstop AI infrastructure credit risk in one of two ways. One would be to directly assume the buyer role in the computing market now held by firms such as Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX. The other would be for the Federal Reserve to print money and support insurers holding AI-related debt if defaults emerge after a drop in compute demand and the disappearance of buyers.
In Hayes’ view, both routes amount to using newly created money to support AI infrastructure and the credit expansion tied to it.
Korean stocks open lower as Anthropic prepares for IPO
South Korea’s KOSPI opened down 3.14%. SK Hynix fell 5%, while Samsung Electronics dropped 3.6%.
Anthropic PBC has told a small number of shareholders that it expects to report adjusted operating profit this quarter, which would mark a second straight profitable quarter on that basis as it prepares to go public. The metric excludes certain unusual or one-off costs such as stock-based compensation. According to people familiar with the matter, the company’s gross margin exceeds 80% if revenue-sharing payments to partners such as Amazon and the cost of training AI models are excluded.
The Claude developer is preparing an initial public offering and is targeting a fundraising record that would match or exceed the $86.3 billion figure achieved by SpaceX earlier this year. One person familiar with the matter said the company has chosen Nasdaq for the listing.
More positioning around the CLARITY Act
Nate Geraci, president of The ETF Store, wrote on X that it would be good if the Clarity Act secures enough votes this week to move forward, but said it is not decisive. Under the Trump administration, he argued, the SEC and CFTC will use existing authority to advance the crypto industry regardless. He said the act would mainly serve as an added accelerator by giving people confidence that innovation will not be easily reversed. In his view, the future of crypto does not depend on the bill.
Separately, two people familiar with the matter said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer will convene a Democratic caucus meeting Sunday night to discuss the CLARITY Act ahead of a procedural vote planned for Tuesday. The outcome remains unclear. Roughly a dozen Democrats have spent months negotiating the bill, but three categories of issues are still unresolved, and it is uncertain whether they can be settled before the vote. Democrats want an ethics provision for government officials aimed at limiting President Donald Trump from profiting through his family’s crypto businesses. Republicans say Democrats should vote to advance the bill and continue negotiations during Senate floor consideration.
Vitalik says adversarial governance design may matter for AI safety
Vitalik Buterin wrote that an important use case for adversarial governance mechanism design may be AI safety. He compared two setups: one where a static algorithm acts as the principal and humans serve as the more capable agent, and another where humans plus a weaker LLM act as the principal and a stronger LLM serves as the agent. In both cases, a weaker principal is trying to obtain desirable outcomes from a stronger agent.
Buterin said materially better outcomes may be possible if collusion among agents can be effectively constrained, and that this idea may also apply to AI safety. Future AI constraints, he wrote, may look less like a technical sandbox and more like an institutional system containing rules, permissions, adjudication and record-keeping.
Loracle takes profit on shorts while Bonk Guy buys Arc ecosystem tokens
Loracle, the largest on-chain short holder in $PONS and $CASHCAT, is taking profit. The trader still holds short positions in 27.47 million $PONS worth $14.3 million and 35.95 million $CASHCAT worth $5.7 million, with unrealized profit reaching $5.7 million.
Trader Bonk Guy wrote that Arc ecosystem builders had contacted him repeatedly over the past few weeks to draw traders in during the chain’s early phase. He said he had not been optimistic about Arc Chain and believed this cycle’s on-chain activity would center on Robinhood, BNB Chain and Solana. His near-term view changed after learning that fomo would integrate within days of Arc’s launch. If fomo is integrated from the start, he said, there could be a significant short-term trading opportunity. He added that he does not believe Arc will replace those three chains. Bonk Guy said he has bought LONG, the main launchpad token on Arc, as well as the top three meme tokens by market cap on that platform. He cited the rarity of FOMO integrating immediately on a non-mainstream chain and Arc’s outreach to high-frequency traders.
AI watchlist: Anthropic, Nvidia and Trump comments
PANews AI Watch highlighted several AI developments from the past 24 hours. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an open letter calling for "pacing the frontier" and slowing AI development. He warned that agent swarms could take over the internet within six to 12 months. Elon Musk and Sam Altman both voiced support on X, while Google’s Demis Hassabis offered preliminary approval.
According to a report cited from Titanium Media Morning Brief, Nvidia is in talks to invest as much as $10 billion in Anthropic’s IPO project. The same item said token demand in China is rising sharply and could reach 1 quintillion units of consumption in 2026.
After Amodei’s letter, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Musk publicly supported the message, and Hassabis again signaled initial agreement. Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, however, said the AI industry is overreacting.