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Drift outlines a recovery plan for users after $295 million DPRK-linked exploit

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Drift outlines a recovery plan for users after $295 million DPRK-linked exploit

Drift Protocol announced Tuesday the implementation of a recovery plan for users affected by a $295 million exploit on April 1, which it attributed to the North Korea state-backed DPRK hacking group identified by forensic firm Mandiant.

The attack led the protocol to suspend trading and borrowing immediately after the exploit. Drift said “the majority of stolen assets remain traceable and contained with limited successful off-ramping by the attacker,” with about 130,259 ETH (roughly $31 million) concentrated across four monitored wallets.

Drift’s statement explains that the recovery framework centers on issuing a token representing verified user losses. “Each recovery token represents $1 of verified loss,” Drift said, adding that holders would be able to redeem based on the value of a recovery pool funded over time.

That pool starts with roughly $3.8 million in remaining protocol assets and is expected to grow through exchange revenue, up to $127.5 million in support from Tether tied to performance, and up to $20 million from partners, Drift said. The pool will accrue until it matches total losses of about $295.4 million, at which point tokens can be redeemed at full value, it added.

Drift also said some funds have already been frozen, including about $3.36 million in USDC, while additional assets remain delayed in cross-chain transfers. Legal efforts to seize and reissue funds are ongoing, it said. The protocol also launched a public bounty offering 10% of recovered assets.

Drift plans to relaunch in the second quarter as a “security-first” exchange with changes including new multisig controls, time-locked operations, key rotation and reduced product scope focused on perpetuals trading.

“The Drift team is taking considered measures to ensure that users are made whole,” the team said, adding that final decisions will be subject to governance votes.

Drift’s recovery plan announcement comes a week after Aave said it was spearheading a coordinated DeFi recovery effort to rescue Kelp DAO, the second largest DeFi exploit this year, which was also carried out by North Korean-backed hackers. The so-called Lazarus group drained nearly $280 million. In this case, Aave has been able to garner span donations, deposits, and credit lines from across the crypto space.

Anatoly Yakovenko says that major ‘Alpenglow’ upgrade could arrive next quarter,

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Anatoly Yakovenko says that major ‘Alpenglow’ upgrade could arrive next quarter,

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko said a major upgrade to the network, dubbed Alpenglow, is expected to arrive as soon as this year, potentially within the next quarter, marking what he described as a pivotal step in the blockchain’s technical evolution.

“So the Alpenglow release is basically due sometime this year, I think next quarter,” Yakovenko said during a fireside panel at Consensus Miami 2026. “That, to me, is this exciting step in the evolution of the protocol.”

In simple terms, Alpenglow is about making Solana faster, more predictable and more secure at its core. Blockchains like Solana rely on a network of computers to agree on the order of transactions. Today, that process can introduce delays or uncertainty depending on network conditions.

Alpenglow aims to tighten those guarantees. Yakovenko described a system where transaction confirmations approach the physical limits of how fast information can travel, essentially, near the “speed of light” around the globe. For users and developers, that means quicker finality (knowing a transaction is permanently settled) and a more reliable foundation for building applications.

He framed the release of Alpenglow as a transition from Solana’s early innovations to a more mature phase focused on guarantees around performance and reliability.

The upgrade builds on Solana’s original design, which emphasized high throughput, like the ability to handle large volumes of transactions, but shifts focus toward consistency and timing precision. That matters for financial applications, where milliseconds can affect trading, payments or other time-sensitive activity.

If successful, Alpenglow could strengthen Solana’s pitch as infrastructure for global-scale financial systems, where both speed and certainty are critical.

“That, to me, is this exciting step in the evolution of the protocol,” Yakovenko said.

Read more: Solana Set for Major Overhaul After 98% Votes to Approve Historic ‘Alpenglow’ Upgrade

Anthropic Teams With Wall Street Firms on AI Venture

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Anthropic Teams With Wall Street Firms on AI Venture

Anthropic is launching a new venture with financial services firms Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs to sell AI tools to businesses.

The new entity will operate as a standalone company, with Anthropic’s engineering and partnership teams embedded within its structure.

The venture is also backed by a group of asset managers including Apollo, Sequoia Capital and General Atlantic. As part of the deal, the partners will roll out Anthropic’s Claude AI models directly into businesses, beginning with companies within their respective portfolios.

Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s CFO, said the deal reflects growing demand for Claude across enterprise customers and is designed to support wider deployment and scaling.

“Our partnerships with the world’s leading systems integrators are central to how Claude reaches large enterprises,” he said in a blog post. “This new firm brings additional operating capability to the ecosystem, alongside capital from leading alternative asset managers.”

Related:Mistral Pioneers Sovereign AI in Europe

Jon Gray, president and COO of Blackstone, said in a press release: “We believe [the venture] can help address one of the most significant bottlenecks to enterprise AI adoption by expanding the number of highly skilled implementation partners.”

Key use cases are expected across sectors including healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, retail, real estate and infrastructure — aimed at bridging the current skills gap hindering AI systems’ scale up.

“This is a rare convergence: massive market need, the unmatched AI technical capability of Anthropic, and a consortium of investors with the reach to scale fast,” Patrick Healy, CEO at Hellman & Friedman, added. “The near-term value to our portfolio companies is substantial.”

The move is the latest in Anthropic’s efforts to pull ahead in the enterprise AI race, amid intensifying competition with rivals such as OpenAI.

By embedding Claude into a network of investor-owned companies, the AI model maker is solidifying its position amongst mid-market and enterprise customers.

Shortly after the details of Anthropic’s venture emerged, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI has launched its own joint venture focused on corporate AI adoption — The Deployment Company. The firm reportedly has backing from 19 investors, including TPG, Brookfield Asset Management, Advent and Bain Capital.

K Wave Abandons Bitcoin Treasury Plan, Shifts To AI Infrastructure Play With $485M War Chest

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K Wave Abandons Bitcoin Treasury Plan, Shifts To AI Infrastructure Play With $485M War Chest

K Wave Media is abandoning its high‑profile bitcoin treasury plan and recasting itself as an AI infrastructure company, backed by a potential war chest of up to $485 million and a cleaner balance sheet. 

The Nasdaq‑listed firm intends to shed its legacy media operations, erase roughly $48 million of debt and pursue a rebrand as Talivar Technologies as it chases stronger margins in data centers and GPU compute.

On Monday, K Wave said its board approved the sale of Play Co., its largest wholly owned subsidiary, back to the unit’s previous owner, a transaction expected to remove about $48 million in debt and related contingent liabilities if shareholders sign off at an annual meeting planned for early July. 

Management said the move will leave the company with “minimal remaining liabilities” and far greater flexibility to deploy capital into new lines of business.

That capital will come from an amended securities purchase agreement with Anson Funds, a structured equity financier that last year committed up to $500 million to support a bitcoin treasury strategy at the company. 

Under the revised deal, K Wave can now direct the remaining $485 million from future share sales under the facility into AI infrastructure, including data center build‑outs, GPU compute and rental operations, and acquisitions or partnerships across what it calls the AI infrastructure value chain.

Bitcoin to AI pivot

The pivot reverses a June 2025 plan that helped send K Wave’s stock soaring after the company said it would emulate corporate bitcoin treasuries using the Anson facility. Less than a year later, that narrative has given way to the market’s current obsession, with AI infrastructure contracts offering reported margins above 85% and multi‑year revenue visibility, compared with bitcoin miners’ production costs near $80,000 per coin in late 2025 and more volatile cash flows.

Public investors have punished the strategic U‑turn. K Wave shares dropped over 25% on Monday and extended losses in premarket trading Tuesday after the company detailed its amended capital plan and AI push. The stock reaction underscores skepticism toward yet another listed firm pivoting from a struggling core business into whatever theme capital markets reward.

Chief Executive Ted Kim framed the overhaul as a necessary reset that could turn K Wave into “a meaningful participant” in the AI build‑out now underway. 

The company says it will seek targeted acquisitions and partnerships that support vertical integration across AI infrastructure, aiming to lock in long‑term contracted revenues and structurally higher margins over time.

Rep. Steven Horsford pitches PARITY Act as ‘durable floor’ for crypto tax at Consensus Miami

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Rep. Steven Horsford pitches PARITY Act as ‘durable floor’ for crypto tax at Consensus Miami

Congressman Steven Horsford told CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference Tuesday that his bipartisan PARITY Act is an incremental path forward in a Congress where Senate market-structure negotiations have stalled.

“PARITY is designed to set a durable floor, not to be the last word,” he said, noting that existing problems need to be resolved “clearly within the tax code’s jurisdiction in order to have the protection for the consumer, small businesses, and those who are owners of these assets to define whether it gets treated as income or capital gains.”

The Nevada Democrat co-authored the PARITY Act discussion draft with Republican Representative Max Miller of Ohio in December, and revised it on March 26. He told moderator Yesha Yadav that he prefers a narrow approach over comprehensive alternatives, including Sen. Cynthia Lummis’s proposal. The risk of a comprehensive bill, Horsford said, is that “it pairs genuinely helpful provisions with definitional language that is so broad that it creates other problems.”

PARITY’s headline provisions include a stablecoin-payments cost-basis test, a five-year tax-deferral election on staking and mining rewards and an extension of wash-sale rules to digital assets. Horsford said that while retirement account access is absent in present drafts, he considers it “something that I personally want to see, because in order to close the wealth gap, we have to be able to help people plan for their retirement. Digital assets are a way to do that. I know that there is genuine bipartisan appetite for us to work on this, but rushing it and just putting language in a bill without getting it right creates these unintended consequences.”

On the broader policy climate, Horsford said that Senate negotiations to advance the CLARITY Act between Senators Thom Tillis and Angela Alsobrooks seem to be “on hold.” When asked whether bipartisan crypto legislation could pass before the November midterms, he declined to commit to a timeline.

“It’s less about a timeline and more about getting it right,” he said. “You can rush and pass a bill in Congress that has unintended consequences that you won’t be able to fix later.”

Forter on Preparing Merchants to Safely Engage with Agentic Commerce

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Forter on Preparing Merchants to Safely Engage with Agentic Commerce

At MPE 2026, Adam Davies, Director of AI at Forter, dives into how they are redefining fraud prevention and payment processing, turning what used to be a business drag into a driver for growth. Davies explains that when Forter launched 13 years ago, the main goal was to modernize fraud management by replacing outdated, static rules with automated, scalable technology.

Forter notes that those old systems often failed by declining valuable, trustworthy customers or, conversely, letting fraudulent ones through.

Davies highlights that Forter has expanded its focus significantly beyond just fraud management to include payment optimization. Today, Forter’s mission is to help merchants grow by transforming their fraud and payment systems from being a simple cost center into a powerful revenue optimization engine. According to Davies, while most industry players focus on minimizing chargebacks from fraudulent transactions, many overlook the substantial revenue loss caused by falsely declining good customers. 

Forter addresses this by accurately assessing the trustworthiness of every transaction, ensuring legitimate customers enjoy a frictionless, excellent buying experience that drives up merchant conversion rates. On the payment side, Davies details how Forter uses intelligent decision-making, for instance, choosing the right payment rail, network, or PSP, to boost approval rates and simultaneously reduce processing costs.

Looking ahead, Davies identifies agentic commerce as the major trend with real substance behind the buzzword and this new channel introduces complex security and engineering challenges. Davies emphasizes that Forter is heavily investing in solutions to equip merchants with the technology required to engage with this channel safely. By embedding their core capabilities around identity, trust, and payment optimization into this new infrastructure, Forter ensures that transactions originating from AI agents are secure while maintaining high conversion levels.

Finally, Davies speaks positively about the value of attending MPE and describes the event as a crucial meeting place where partners, vendors, and merchants connect to have real conversations. The primary benefit, Davies concludes, is the efficient networking opportunity, getting all the experts in one room to discuss merchant pain points, find synergies for future solutions, and explore new opportunities for partnership and client engagement. 

Kraken Partners With MoneyGram To Enable Crypto Cash-Outs At 500,000 Locations Worldwide

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Kraken Partners With MoneyGram To Enable Crypto Cash-Outs At 500,000 Locations Worldwide

Kraken will allow customers to convert cryptocurrency into cash at MoneyGram locations across more than 100 countries, addressing a longstanding gap in the digital asset ecosystem, according to an exclusive report from Fortune.

The partnership gives Kraken users access to nearly 500,000 physical locations worldwide, where they can exchange crypto holdings for local currency. The move targets a key friction point in crypto markets: while digital transfers settle with speed, converting assets into cash often involves multiple steps, limited banking access, or delays.

The initiative reflects rising demand for reliable cash access, driven in part by Kraken’s expanding presence in regions with unstable currencies. 

Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi told Fortune that demand for reliable cash access has grown alongside the exchange’s international user base, especially in regions with unstable currencies. In those markets, users often treat crypto platforms as alternatives to banks.

“They want to store in USD or USD equivalent,” Sethi said. “They want to get yield. They want to do payments. They want to move money back and forth.”

That usage pattern creates a need for dependable off-ramps into cash. Through the MoneyGram network, Kraken users can bridge digital balances with local currency pickup, paying a variable exchange fee tied to each transaction.

The deal also marks a strategic shift for MoneyGram, a legacy payments company that has worked to modernize its operations after losing ground to fintech firms and digital banks. The company has focused on integrating digital assets into its infrastructure as part of a broader effort to reposition its business.

MoneyGram is dabbling with crypto

MoneyGram has spent recent years building crypto infrastructure, including a noncustodial wallet and deeper integration of stablecoins into its payment flows. The company has positioned stablecoins as a backbone for cross-border transfers, aiming to reduce costs and settlement delays tied to traditional rails. A private equity acquisition in 2023 gave the firm room to pursue that transformation outside public markets.

For Kraken, the deal adds to a period of expansion as it prepares for a potential public listing. The exchange has broadened its product suite beyond spot crypto trading, acquiring futures platform NinjaTrader and derivatives venue Bitnomial. Those moves reflect a strategy to compete across asset classes while strengthening its appeal to both institutional and retail users.

Despite its institutional focus, Kraken’s growth in emerging markets has shaped product priorities. Access to cash remains critical in economies where banking infrastructure lacks reach or trust.

The tie-up with MoneyGram signals a convergence between crypto platforms and traditional financial networks, where physical locations still play a key role. It also highlights how adoption depends not only on digital innovation, but on practical access to money in everyday form.

Kraken has not disclosed a full timeline for global rollout or its IPO plans, though it filed draft registration documents in late 2025.

Drift Sets Out Token-Based Recovery Framework for $295M April Exploit

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Drift Sets Out Token-Based Recovery Framework for $295M April Exploit

The Solana-based perpetuals exchange will issue burn-on-redeem recovery tokens funded by exchange revenue, a $127.5M Tether commitment, and another $20M from partners.

Drift Protocol on Tuesday published its user recovery plan for the April 1 exploit, laying out a token-based framework backed by exchange revenue, a Tether-led capital commitment, and partner contributions, with the Solana perpetuals exchange targeting a Q2 2026 relaunch.

The blueprint follows the drain of Drift’s vaults that forensic firm Mandiant has now confirmed was the work of a DPRK-affiliated threat actor. Drift puts total user losses at $295.4 million.

Recovery Token Mechanics

Every affected wallet will receive transferable SPL tokens, separate from the DRIFT governance token, with each unit representing $1 of verified loss. The recovery pool will be seeded with the protocol’s roughly $3.8 million in remaining assets, converted to USDT, and then topped up through three streams: a quarterly cut of exchange revenue, up to $127.5 million from Tether’s earlier commitment, and up to $20 million from strategic partners.

Redemption opens once the pool exceeds $5 million, with the price set by total fund value divided by outstanding supply. Redemptions are burn-on-redeem and one-time only, meaning users who cash out before the pool reaches the full $295.4M forfeit any further claim. Unclaimed tokens at the end of the claim window are burned, lifting the redemption value for remaining holders.

User balances were snapshotted at 18:31:47 UTC on April 1, with oracle prices taken from 16:06:00 UTC, before the attack distorted markets. The roughly $20 million insurance fund, which was untouched, will be subject to a separate DAO vote on whether it pays out to depositors or rolls into the recovery pool.

Funds Status and Bounty

Roughly 130,259 ETH, worth around $293 million, remains concentrated in four attacker-controlled wallets that have been flagged across exchanges. Two Wormhole transfers covering 59.37 WBTC and 557.90 WETH have been delayed by the bridge’s Governor until late July, while 3.36M USDC has been frozen on Circle’s CCTP, a process the issuer was previously sued over for not acting faster on the day of the exploit. Drift, working with ZeroShadow and Mandiant, has also offered a 10% whitehat bounty in collaboration with Bybit.

Planned Relaunch

When Drift comes back online, it will be a leaner, perps-only venue settled in USDT rather than USDC. The protocol is removing the durable-nonce attack surface central to the April 1 breach, deploying a fresh program with rotated keys, and shutting down ancillary products, including Isolated Markets and Amplify. Mainnet deployment will require instruction-level audits, time-locked admin actions, and review under Solana’s STRIDE program.

This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.

Making Withholding Tax Recovery an Automated Reality

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Making Withholding Tax Recovery an Automated Reality

Ryan Ludden from Sprintax highlights the massive, untapped opportunity in cross-border tax recovery, proving his point right away by letting the data do the talking. He points out that research by Deloitte and McKinsey that suggested $15 billion in reclaimable cross-border withholding tax was left untouched in 2025, money that’s essentially sitting with tax authorities waiting for investors and global employee shareholders to claim it. The core problem is that claiming this money back is difficult as a study by the EU Commission showed that 70% of retail investors who had reclaimable tax left unclaimed. Why? Ludden summarizes the issue as the “four C’s”, the process is clunky, complex, confusing, and costly as the process is often a paper-based, manual and requires specific in-house knowledge, leading many to simply cut their losses.

Ludden then explains how Sprintax Dividends is changing this narrative by making withholding tax relief and reclaim accessible through a digital platform and shares a powerful real-life case study involving a well-known Swiss multinational that has a global base of employee shareholders. These investors were subject to a high 35% dividend withholding tax in Switzerland, and many didn’t even realize this amount was being deducted from their paycheck. To solve this, Sprintax first focused on awareness and launched a campaign complete with webinars, whitepapers, and videos. Once educated, investors were moved to Sprintax’s platform, which simplified the entire process. The technology guides the user to confirm their tax residency, calculates their eligibility in real-time, and uses OCR and AI to read digitally uploaded supporting documents.

This automation eliminates the need for the investor to manually complete complicated tax forms as Sprintax even handles the submission, sometimes using digitally signed power of attorneys to file the reclaim on the client’s behalf. A huge advantage is the use of a global payment provider, TransferMate, which allows them to bypass cross-border banking fees, ensuring the refund goes directly into the investor’s bank account quickly, whether they are in Ireland, the US, or elsewhere globally. For the multinational client, this solution unlocked significant value, providing real-time reporting that showed, country by country, exactly how much dividend withholding tax was flowing back into the pockets of their employee shareholders. This value is set to rise exponentially as more employees adopt the technology.

Ultimately, Ludden sees Sprintax’s mission for the next three to five years as becoming the industry standard for cross-border withholding tax recovery and relief. The goal isn’t just to simplify reclaims but to support the entire tax ecosystem as it undergoes digital transformation, helping organizations stay agile amid constantly changing tax rules. Most importantly, Sprintax wants to see a fundamental shift: supporting investors to get taxed at the correct rate up front, making the tedious reclaim process the rare exception rather than the disappointing norm.

Crypto’s value is from being outside regulatory apparatus, says Arthur Hayes

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Crypto’s value is from being outside regulatory apparatus, says Arthur Hayes

Miami, FL — Crypto doesn’t need regulation – something that charting the price of bitcoin over successive U.S. governments clearly shows, according to the provocative co-founder of BitMEX and CIO of Maelstrom, Arthur Hayes.

Hayes’ thesis is simple: fiat liquidity – precisely, the printing of more units of fiat money – is the only thing that affects bitcoin’s value proposition.

“If you want to talk about the price of Bitcoin and what’s the fair value, or what’s the future price, all that matters is how many units of fiat are there today,” Hayes told the audience at Consensus Miami 2026. “How many units of fiat will there be in the future, and what’s the pace of this fiat creation?”

While there’s a lot of talk about tradfi and regulators and crypto coming together and having this “bastard child,” the majority of people who attend conferences like Consensus want only to see the number go up, Hayes said. But they forget what has made the price of Bitcoin go from from zero to however many trillions of dollars that it’s worth today, he added, hammering his thesis home:

”The more money that is printed in the U.S. and around the world, the more value that bitcoin will have in fiat currencies,” said Hayes. “And it’s this liquidity part of the equation that really drives the price of bitcoin, and not anything to do with politics.”

Few executives in crypto maintain a social presence as lively, chaotic and strangely insightful as Hayes’. Behind the lapel-grabbing theatrics lies a track record that traders pay attention to. For instance, Hayes was early to the rise of several AI-adjacent tokens, a sector that dominated speculative flows throughout 2024 and 2025. He also championed Zcash (ZEC), which rallied more than 450% over the past year.

Looking back over the last few U.S. administrations, key factors can be picked out that greatly bolstered the value of bitcoin, Hayes said. This started with the bailing out of banks during the banking crisis and printing a lot more money, which sent bitcoin “off to the races.”

More recently, events like COVID, stimulus checks, Biden’s New Green Deal, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have driven up the value of bearer assets like bitcoin and gold.

“This is the value that bitcoin provides outside of the regulatory apparatus,” Hayes said. “It’s precisely the reason that it does not adhere to the regulatory regime that some of you wish to put it under with bills like the Clarity Act and other things.”

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