Crypto (Page 28)

Five people were arrested for allegedly dousing an influencer’s father in gasoline and forcing him into the trunk of a car in exchange for ransom payments in crypto. The attack, whose details first surfaced this week, occurred at the every end of 2024 near the French border with Switzerland. 

The arrests put a spotlight on the uptick of physical attacks on crypto holders, often known as “wrench attacks”, in France. Out of the 24 physical Bitcoin attacks this year, about two-thirds of them have occurred in France, according to a list compiled by Bitcoin owner Jameson Lopp. 

The target of the 2024 attack was the father of an unnamed Dubai-based influencer and crypto entrepreneur, according to DL News and French media publication France 3. Police did not say whether the influencer made the Bitcoin payments that the attackers demanded. 

Investigators made arrests across France, far from the original site of the crime. Among those detained was a 16 year-old at the time of the attack, and the oldest of the five suspects was 42. Prosecutors are planning on charging the alleged attackers with kidnapping, unlawful confinement, extortion, organized crime, and aggravated violence. 

Another notable example of a wrench attack in France occurred on January 25, when three men tortured a 74 year-old for 16 hours in order to get $3.5 million in crypto from his son. The alleged criminals abandoned their scheme after discovering that the victim’s son was in fact not a crypto trader. 

Every year, the number of physical coercion attacks on crypto holders goes up. There were 72 documented wrench attacks last year, a 75% increase from 2024, according to blockchain security auditor CertiK. Bitcoin owners can access their crypto holdings through a physical or digital key, and once money is transferred out of their accounts, the transaction is often irreversible. This feature of Bitcoin ownership makes people susceptible to physical attacks.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency industries spent big and lost often in this week’s Illinois primaries, an early setback for technology firms that are trying to reshape the midterm elections and establish themselves as power players in American politics.

The companies flooded the state’s Democratic primaries with millions of dollars to promote candidates they believed would have a light touch when it came to regulating technologies that have begun to upend how people do their jobs and manage their finances.

Using super PACs that are allowed to spend unlimited sums of money, they ran television advertising and distributed campaign fliers that only occasionally alluded to their industries. Instead, the messaging focused on promises to combat President Donald Trump’s administration and support liberal policies, a strategy used by other organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

But the coy strategy did not stop the AI and crypto industries’ interventions from becoming a lightning rod in the rowdy primaries in Illinois, where there was a rare glut of open seats that led to competitive races.

The crypto-backed political action committee Fairshake spent more than $10 million against Illinois Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton, who ultimately won the Democratic nomination to succeed Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.

Fairshake and Protect Progress, which is also tied to the crypto industry, spent millions more to unsuccessfully support Stratton’s main rivals, U.S. Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi and Robin Kelly, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission.

Neither Fairshake nor Protect Progress responded to requests for comment.

In Illinois’ U.S. House primaries, the tech-backed groups’ campaign spending had mixed results.

State Rep. La Shawn Ford, who had supported state legislation regulating the AI and crypto industries, won the Democratic primary to succeed U.S. Rep. Danny Davis. Fairshake spent nearly $2.5 million opposing Ford’s candidacy in a race that featured at least four other political groups spending against the progressive lawmaker or for his opponents.

Meanwhile, Cook County Commissioner Donna Miller prevailed in the Democratic primary to succeed Kelly after Fairshake spent more than $800,000 against state Rep. Robert Peters, another progressive who supported legislation to regulate the crypto industry.

That race also saw the AI-backed spending at loggerheads.

The AI-backed Think Big PAC invested more than $1 million to boost the candidacy of Jesse Jackson Jr., a former congressman who pleaded guilty in a fraud scandal in 2013. But Jackson also faced about $1 million in negative campaign spending from the Jobs and Democracy PAC, another AI-backed group.

Neither PAC responded to requests for comment.

Think Big is a subsidiary of Leading the Future, a political group that is funded by major Silicon Valley executives, including the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. Andreessen opposes federal regulations for AI and has been a staunch backer of the Republican president’s AI policies.

Jobs and Democracy PAC, by contrast, is funded by the AI company Anthropic, which favors some safety regulations on AI as the technology develops. Both PACs opposed progressive candidates who called for relatively heavy regulations on the technologies and higher taxes on wealthy Americans.

The late-stage infusions of cash into the Illinois races totaled almost $20 million across races and served as a declaration of both industries’ political ambitions, raising the stakes in primaries that were already hotly contested.

“Corporate money is being used to paint corporate-backed candidates as fearless progressives,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a political group that works to elect anti-corporate progressives.

“The question for the Democratic Party is whether we elect people who actually believe in these positions or will we elect milquetoast candidates who give lip service to these values but don’t back them in actual policy,” Green said.

Campaign finance experts and rank-and-file voters alike are still struggling with what to make of the technology industry’s political influence.

“They’re so new to the game that public opinion isn’t very well formed about them,” said Brian Gaines, a political science professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “You don’t get a clear signal for who is the progressive and who is the moderate on AI and crypto policies.”

“People are wary of the technology,” Gaines said, “but they don’t know what to think yet.”

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Maya Sweedler contributed to this report.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Polymarket, one of the two leading prediction market sites, built its platform on blockchain rails—a design that offers efficiency but that can also add a layer of unwanted complexity.  On Wednesday, the fast-growing company took a step that will help it tuck those blockchain elements further into the background: Polymarket announced it is acquiring Brahma, a startup that specializes in providing crypto and DeFi infrastructure for businesses and individuals managing digital assets. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. 

“Building reliable infrastructure across blockchain networks and traditional financial rails is hard—there are no shortcuts,” said Shayne Coplan, founder and CEO of Polymarket, in an email to Fortune. “The Brahma team has shown they can design, operate and scale complex products for sophisticated users.”

While Polymarket expects the acquisition will improve its user experience, the move also signals the company—which has quickly grown to a reported $20 billion valuation—is doubling down on its crypto roots. Polymarket has been using blockchain rails since its inception, whereas its main competitor Kalshi functions largely with fiat currency. 

One way that Brahma could help Polymarket is by bringing additional liquidity to smaller wagers. Larger event contracts, like those in sports or politics, easily bring lots of money into the pool. But smaller wagers focused on niche areas such as, for instance, the outcome of a bowling match in Spain, struggle to amass a sizable amount of liquidity. Brahma’s experience in DeFi, a decentralized field of crypto defined by rapid trading and users with a high capacity for risk, could help draw in additional capital to more thinly traded contracts.

Alessandro Tenconi, one of the co-founders of Brahma, said in an interview with Fortune that his startup could remove the friction for Polymarket users when it comes to creating a wallet, depositing and converting shares, and redeeming outcome tokens.  

Brahma, started in 2021 by Tenconi and his co-founders Akanshu Jain and Bapi Reddy Karri, has helped both businesses and individuals use DeFi at scale. The startup says that it has processed more than $1 billion in transactions. When it joins Polymarket, Brahma will wind down its projects with other companies and individuals. 

This is not the first time that Polymarket has sought to expand by hiring talent through an acquisition. In February, the prediction market platform acquired Dome, a Y Combinator backed startup, to bolster its developer tools. Polymarket also acquired a boutique executive search firm called Lunch in February.

Tenconi says that one night in September, at 1 AM, he got a Telegram message from someone saying that Coplan, the CEO of Polymarket, wanted to talk to him. Ten minutes later, the two were on a call. He says that Coplan was looking for people who could build fast, build quality, and who had the chops. “It was like builders talking to builders,” Tenconi said, about that first phone call. “The rest happened very naturally.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Coinbase’s 60-second spot, “Your Way Out,” drops viewers into a low-resolution video game world where everyone moves in a loop: commuting, working, spending. The protagonist is an NPC, a non-playable character, stuck inside a system he didn’t build and can’t control, until he strains against his preprogrammed slumped over state and breaks free. The environment shifts from pixelated game world to the full color of reality as he gains agency, set to Sammy Davis Jr.’s “I’ve Gotta Be Me.” The ad only reveals itself to be about Coinbase at the end, with a single tagline: “Your way out of their system.”

The ad is extraordinary for what it captures in the culture: an ever-gnawing desperation to escape what’s become known as the “permanent underclass.” The phrase, once niche Silicon Valley gallows humor, has become a genuine cultural fixation. As leaders of AI companies boast that their technology will replace most jobs within the next decade, people are worried they’ll be sorted into a category Karl Marx once called the lumpenproletariat: the lowest stratum of the industrial working class itself.

Only it’s 2026, and the word for it is the permanent underclass, a world with no upward mobility. Online, the term is lobbed at people who aren’t heeding AI’s headwinds, the kinds of FOMO-stoking posts that happen to work very well for selling. Which, of course, is what Coinbase is doing.

“Today, because of the maturity of Coinbase, we have a broader set of products that we think can offer true alternatives to an outdated system,” Catherine Ferdon, Coinbase’s CMO, said in a statement sent to Fortune.

The whole thing was shot using real actors and no CGI, Toby-Treyer Evans, the founder of the advertising agency that produced it, wrote in advertising trade site Muse by Clio. The game-world look was built in-camera, using suits with printed-on fabric details and pixelated set design made to look indistinguishable from a video game. Extras were trained to walk like game characters, Treyer- Evans wrote. It’s a genuine feat of filmmaking, and it isn’t Coinbase’s first. The company has built a reputation for splashy, viral big-event ads, including their memorable Super Bowl ad.

The ad’s central metaphor, the NPC, is a cultural artifact of that same corner of the internet. “Non-playable character” started as a gaming term, then by 2018 became a political meme to describe people who parrot talking points without thinking. Now, it’s Gen-Z’s default insult for anyone who appears to be on autopilot: going through the motions, lacking agency, playing by someone else’s rules. It sounds like the classic complaint the youth have always had about the status quo: “you’re the system, man!”

But this is different. These fears are shared by most Americans, and validated by the very people building the technology everyone’s afraid of. The noise around AI and its potential effects has grown so loud that you don’t need to be a 17-year-old dorm-room philosopher to conclude: a lot of people are about to lose control of their financial lives and not even realize it.

Coinbase’s answer, naturally, is to trade cryptocurrency. The pitch is compelling because it’s true that crypto has created real wealth for people bold enough, and lucky enough, to invest at the right time. The number of crypto millionaires globally hit nearly 242,000 last year, up 40% in twelve months, according to Henley & Partners. An entire subculture has formed around the shared belief that the traditional financial system was never going to let them in anyway. Those “crypto bros” are now perfectly positioned to capitalize on the broader anxiety about AI and displacement.

But for every crypto millionaire minted in the past two years, there are retail investors who lost their savings in the FTX collapse, got liquidated on leveraged bets they didn’t fully understand, or watched memecoins they bought on hype go to zero. FTX itself ran a Super Bowl ad in 2022—the same year as Coinbase’s famous ad—starring Larry David dismissing crypto as a fad. The company turned out to be a multibillion-dollar fraud. 

So even if the permanent underclass may or may not be coming, the ads for it are already here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Mastercard has finally pulled the trigger on a stablecoin acquisition. The payments giant on Tuesday morning announced a deal to acquire the London-based startup BVNK for up to $1.8 billion, with $300 million locked up in “contingent payments.” The deal is expected to close by year end, Jorn Lambert, Mastercard’s chief product officer, told Fortune. He declined to provide more details about the purchase of BVNK, which uses stablecoins to power customer transactions, cross-border payments, global treasuries, and other use cases.

The acquisition concludes an off-and-on negotiations process that saw the stablecoin firm court multiple buyers, including the U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase and Mastercard. Coinbase came close to buying the startup for around $2 billion before the two called off the deal around November. 

Mastercard’s yet-to-be-closed purchase of BVNK eclipses Stripe’s $1.1 billion deal for the startup Bridge in February 2025, making this the largest stablecoin acquisition yet for the crypto industry.

Mastercard’s stock jumped about 2.5% in pre-market trading. 

“This is really about getting the right tools to move after new addressable markets,” said Lambert.

Stablecoin rails

Mastercard’s push into stablecoins comes as the payments giant has fended off speculation over the past year that the rise of the digital tokens, or cryptocurrencies pegged to real-world assets like the U.S. dollar, may eat into its margins. 

Proponents of stablecoins say their use of blockchain-based payment rails reduces fees and allows users to transact more quickly. Investors have seen some validity to that argument. Mastercard saw its shares initially sag after the U.S. Senate passed in June the Genius Act, legislation that regulates stablecoins. President Donald Trump signed the bill into law one month later. 

Mastercard, however, has pushed back on any implications that stablecoins are a threat to its business. “I think most flows will begin and end in fiat,” Raj Seshadri, chief commercial payments officer at Mastercard, said on a July call with analysts.

Still, the incumbent payments network has made moves to keep pace with technological change. In addition to initially courting BVNK, Mastercard was also in talks with the crypto startup Zerohash for a purchase price of between $1.5 billion to $2 billion. That deal reportedly fell through. Lambert, Mastercard’s chief product officer, declined to delve into the payments network’s past ambitions of stablecoin acquisitions.

He also pushed back on the argument that stablecoins threatened Mastercard’s business model. “If you think about our current business, the card business, there’s no problem to be solved,” he said, adding that incorporating stablecoin rails positions Mastercard to more effectively make headway in the remittances market, among other areas.

For BVNK, founded in 2021, the $1.8 billion acquisition price is a large premium over its $750 million valuation in its Series B fundraising round in December 2024. “Needless to say, there’s a big smile on my face,” said BVNK cofounder Chris Harmse, in reference to Mastercard closing the deal to buy his company. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com