Transak secures Alabama license, expands US crypto services

News broke on May 15 that Coinbase was the target of a $20 million extortion attempt after cybercriminals recruited overseas support agents to leak user data for social engineering scams.While less than 1% of Coinbase’s active monthly users were reportedly affected, the expected remediation and reimbursement expenses range from $180 million to $400 million, as the exchange pledged to repay all phishing attack victims.Despite the attack on the world’s third-largest cryptocurrency exchange, investor sentiment remains optimistic, with the Fear & Greed Index remaining firmly in the “Greed” zone above 69, according to CoinMarketCap data.Fear & Greed Index, 30-day chart. Source: CoinMarketCapAdding to investor optimism, Coinbase saw over $1 billion worth of Bitcoin withdrawn on May 9, marking the highest net outflow recorded in 2025 so far, triggering analyst predictions of a supply-shock driven Bitcoin rally.Coinbase faces $400 million bill after insider phishing attackCoinbase was hit by a $20 million extortion attempt after cybercriminals recruited overseas support agents to leak user data, the company said on May 15.Coinbase said a group of external actors bribed and coordinated with several customer support contractors to access internal systems and steal limited user account data.“These insiders abused their access to customer support systems to steal the account data for a small subset of customers,” Coinbase said, adding that no passwords, private keys, funds or Coinbase Prime accounts were affected.Less than 1% of Coinbase’s monthly transacting users’ data was affected by the attack, the company said.Source: CoinbaseAfter stealing the data, the attackers attempted to extort $20 million worth of Bitcoin (BTC) from Coinbase in exchange for not disclosing the breach. Coinbase refused the demand.Instead, the company offered a $20 million reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for the scheme.Continue reading$1 billion Bitcoin exits Coinbase in a day as analysts warn of supply shockInstitutional demand for Bitcoin is growing, as Coinbase, the world’s third-largest cryptocurrency exchange, recorded its highest daily outflows of Bitcoin in 2025 on May 9.On May 9, Coinbase saw 9,739 Bitcoin, worth more than $1 billion, withdrawn from the exchange, the highest net outflow recorded in 2025, according to Bitwise head of European research André Dragosch.“Institutional appetite for Bitcoin is accelerating,” Dragosch added in a May 13 X post.Source: André DragoschThe outflow occurred as Bitcoin traded above $103,600 and just days after the White House announced a 90-day reduction in reciprocal tariffs between the US and China, easing market concerns and lifting broader investor sentiment.Joint statement on US-China meeting in Geneva. Source: The White HouseThe 90-day suspension of additional tariffs removed the risk of “sudden re-escalation,” which may help Bitcoin, altcoins and the wider stock market rally due to improved risk appetite, Nansen’s principal research analyst, Aurelie Barthere, told Cointelegraph.Continue readingDeFi lender Aave reaches $40 billion in value locked onchainAave, a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol, has reached a new record of funds onchain, according to data from DefiLlama.In an X post, Aave said it topped $40.3 billion in total value locked (TVL) on May 12. Onchain data reveals that Aave v3, the latest version of the protocol, has about $40 billion in TVL.Aave is a DeFi lending protocol that lets users borrow cryptocurrency by depositing other types of cryptocurrency as collateral. Meanwhile, lenders earn yield from borrowers. “With these milestones, Aave is proving its dominance in the Lending Space,” DeFi analyst Jonaso said in a May 12 X post. TVL represents the total value of cryptocurrency deposited into a protocol’s smart contracts. Aave v3’s TVL over time. Source: DefiLlamaContinue readingSEC delays Solana ETF as decisions for Polkadot, XRP loomThe US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) pushed back its decision on a proposed spot Solana exchange-traded fund (ETF), with the cryptocurrency industry now looking to the deadlines for the Polkadot and XRP-based ETFs in June.The SEC delayed its decision on listing Grayscale’s spot Solana (SOL) Trust ETF on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to October 2025, according to a May 13 filing by the securities regulator.Delay on Grayscale’s Solana ETF. Source: SECThe decision came the week after the SEC delayed its ruling on Canary Capital’s Litecoin (LTC) ETF, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst James Seyffart wrote in a May 5 X post.Source: James SeyffartSpot ETFs are key drivers of liquidity and institutional adoption for digital assets. For Bitcoin, the US spot Bitcoin ETFs accounted for an estimated 75% of new investment after launching, which helped BTC recapture the $50,000 mark in February 2024, a month after the ETFs debuted for trading.While a Solana ETF may generate only a fraction of the inflows of Bitcoin ETFs, it could increase Solana’s institutional adoption in the long term by offering investors a “regulated investment vehicle” that may still attract billions of dollars in capital, Ryan Lee, chief analyst at Bitget Research, told Cointelegraph.Continue readingStarknet hits “Stage 1” decentralization, tops ZK-rollups for value lockedEthereum layer-2 scaling platform Starknet has reached a decentralization milestone laid out by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and is now the largest zero-knowledge rollup-based network by total value locked.Starknet said in a news release shared with Cointelegraph that it has hit “Stage 1” decentralization, according to a framework Buterin laid out in 2022, which means the network operates with limited oversight or “training wheels.”Starknet added that the framework was the “gold standard onchain tool for analyzing Ethereum scaling solutions,” and said it achieved the milestone through changes such as creating a security council and censorship-avoidance mechanisms. While the system still allows intervention from a security council, it has implemented a fully functional validity proof system governed by smart contracts.Starknet is now the only layer-2 ZK-rollup network to have reached Stage 1 and has grown to be the largest ZK-rollup blockchain with a total value locked of $629 million, just ahead of ZKsync’s $610 million, according to L2beat. Starknet is the fifth-largest layer-2 network by value locked, with the top four all Optimistic rollup-based, having reached Stage 1 decentralization using fraud proofs. Continue readingDeFi market overviewAccording to data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView, most of the 100 largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization ended the week in the green.Solana-based memecoin Dogwifhat (WIF) rose over 43% as the week’s biggest gainer, followed by decentralized exchange Raydium’s (RAY) token, up nearly 19% over the past week.Total value locked in DeFi. Source: DefiLlamaThanks for reading our summary of this week’s most impactful DeFi developments. Join us next Friday for more stories, insights and education regarding this dynamically advancing space.

The stalling of key stablecoin legislation in the United States Senate was a minor setback, and the bill will pass in the coming weeks, said Cody Carbone, CEO of Digital Chamber, a Washington, DC,-based blockchain trade association and advocacy group.Speaking to Cointelegraph at Consensus 2025, Carbone argued it is in the best interests of the US to pass comprehensive stablecoin regulations to protect US dollar hegemony in global markets, which has bipartisan appeal and support. Carbone said:”These things never move as quickly as we want them to move, but it’s stablecoin legislation. This Congress has already moved more expeditiously than we ever could have imagined. So, yes, it’s a bump in the road, but I think very, very shortly, we will have another vote.”The Guiding and Establishing National Innovation in U.S. Stablecoins of 2025, or GENIUS Act, is seen as a critical piece of legislation. Failing to pass comprehensive regulatory reform before the midterm elections in 2026 could mean a reversal in the positive regulatory environment and a downturn in the crypto markets.”Negotiations have continued, and so I am still very optimistic,” Carbone said. “This bill is going to pass the Senate in the next few weeks.”The GENIUS Act of 2025. Source: US SenateRelated: What are the next steps for the US stablecoin bill?Partisan politics and Trump’s involvement in crypto blamed for bill failureThe act failed to pass a procedural vote in the Senate on May 8 after several Democratic lawmakers withdrew support for the bill, citing US President Donald Trump’s involvement in crypto as a potential cause for ethics concerns and the primary driver for backpedaling support for the bill at the last minute.Coinbase chief legal officer Paul Grewal likewise said that Trump’s crypto ties complicate the regulatory process, as lawmakers continue to scrutinize his activities in the memecoin market, decentralized finance, and the non-fungible token (NFT) sector.Republican Senator Tim Scott fired back against the concerns voiced by Democratic policymakers, attributing the failure to partisan politics and an attempt by Democrats to prevent Trump from achieving the administration’s digital asset goals.The latest version of the bill removes references to the Trump family and could pass the Senate by the end of May, some industry executives say.Magazine: Crypto wanted to overthrow banks, now it’s becoming them in stablecoin fight

Opinion by: Megan Knab, CEO, Franklin PayrollThere are few historical examples of such a massive about-face for an industry, from banks debanking crypto businesses to now embracing stablecoins. If you talk to most crypto startup founders or companies with crypto on the balance sheet, they will all have war stories about finding, applying for and maintaining bank accounts. Over the past three years, over half of debanking complaints have been lodged against four American banks — Bank of America, JPMorgan, Wells Fargo and Citibank. Now, as the policies that discriminated against the crypto industry, like “Operation Chokepoint 2.0” and the recision of controversial accounting rule SAB 121, have been repealed, a new openness to blockchain technology from the finance sector is possible. It is imperative that the banking industry stop shunning crypto and start — at least understanding it — to stay competitive. How stablecoins are deployed will separate the banking winners and losers. From debanking to stablecoins Of course, stablecoins are not a new concept. For years, large institutions like JPMorgan and Santander have experimented with stablecoins and blockchains. Those experiments were around small functions like internal treasury reconciliation and interbank settlement. Much of this was also on private blockchains created by those banks. Implementing digital dollars on private chains, however, misses out on the core innovation of stablecoins.While the use case of stablecoins for international remittances is clear, we are just scratching the surface of the power of stablecoins on public networks. For example, stablecoins eradicate unauthorized payment disputes and enable far faster pay cycles. Payroll payments are also complex. Payday is a web of thousands of automated clearing houses, wires, comma-separated values and PDFs. The programmability of stablecoins enables companies to create efficiency among all these data structures, processing times, reconciliations and paycheck reporting. Many smaller banks are just now waking up to the opportunity to incorporate permissionless, public network stablecoins into their workflows. Similar to how many businesses started to investigate how AI might change their businesses with the 2022 release of ChatGPT, so too are banks needing to look at how stablecoins will upend money movement. Recently, Custodia Bank issued its own stablecoin, Avit, on Ethereum. Custodia’s users can access quick, cheap banking services that are hard to beat. This is an excellent example of implementation for other financial institutions to follow.Stablecoin adoption is increasing as the tech keeps improvingActive stablecoin wallets increased from 19.6 million in February 2024 to over 30 million in February 2025, according to Artemis and Dune. US President Donald Trump hopes to have stablecoin legislation on his desk by August 2025. Wyoming already did so in late March 2025.Recent: Mastercard links with Circle, Paxos for merchant stablecoin paymentsStablecoin infrastructure has improved significantly, and there is increased confidence in the security of stablecoins. 91% of the supply of stablecoins is fiat-backed, and only 8.5% are backed by collateralized crypto assets. Riskier algorithmic stablecoins have gone out of vogue.Incremental changes also make it easier for non-crypto businesses to use stablecoins. There are now simple solutions for many of the original UX problems with stablecoins.Additionally, more assets are moving onchain. Using stablecoins on public networks like Ethereum, payment companies will be better prepared to serve the future financial system. It’s not just stablecoins that are updating the financial system, either. Earlier this year, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said on Squawk Box he wants the SEC to “rapidly approve the tokenization of bonds and stocks.”For banks looking for a competitive advantage in a world of powerful fintechs, shifting interest rates and lower consumer savings, using the power of stablecoins to improve their products and their internal operations might be the most powerful decision they make. Opinion by: Megan Knab, CEO, Franklin Payroll.This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.