Do Kwon Converted Millions in Illicit Funds to BTC, Robinhood to Pay $10.2M in Penalties, Mt Gox Creditors Repayment Window Now Open

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Legal news

• South Korean prosecutors identified $314.2 million in illicit assets associated with Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon and his associates, out of which $69 million is directly linked to Kwon. He, however, converted most of the illicit funds into Bitcoin using overseas crypto exchanges, KBS reported, so the assets tied to him are not recoverable or under South Korean jurisdiction.
• Major US online trading platform Robinhood “will pay up to $10.2 million in penalties for operational and technical failures that harmed main street investors,” the USA, California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation (DFPI) announced. The DFPI joined the multi-state settlement that followed a North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA) investigation into the platform outages in March 2020.
• The deadline for Mt Gox creditors to provide their repayment information has passed, opening the window for repayments to be made, according to an April 7 letter from the exchange Trustee. The Trustee will carry out the necessary preparations to make the repayments, coordinating with several financial institutions, including crypto exchanges, which will receive and distribute the payments to creditors. “In light of this, it is expected to take some time before the repayment is commenced,” it said.

Politics news

• A candidate for Thailand’s prime minister position, Srettha Thavisin, promised every citizen 10,000 Thai Baht ($300) in digital currency if his party forms a government following a general election in May. According to the Bangkok Post, the real estate mogul promised a basic-income style economic stimulus package via “digital currency” should the Pheu Thai party win the election.

DeFi news

• ZkSync, a ZK-Rollup Layer 2 scaling solution developed by Matter Labs, said that it found “an elegant solution” to unlock the frozen contract, referring to the ETH 921 stuck in a smart contract used by a team called Gemholic on its Era network, after this team reached out for support. “It will require minimal changes in the gas metering of the protocol, but will allow for full recovery of the funds,” said ZkSync, adding that the funds are safe.

Security news

• Crypto security firm CertiK found that malicious actors drained $320,332,058 of value from Web3 protocols in the first quarter of this year. Per its FY23 Q1 Hack3d report, this represents over a third of the $950 million lost in Q4 last year, and a quarter of $1.3 billion lost in Q1 2022. The $197m-heavy Euler Finance exploit alone represented over 60% of the value stolen in Q1 2023.
• A new report by the United States Treasury Department “explores how illicit actors are abusing what is commonly referred to as decentralized finance (DeFi) services as well as vulnerabilities unique to DeFi services.” It found that bad actors – including ransomware cybercriminals, thieves, scammers, and North Korean hackers – are using DeFi services in the process of transferring and laundering the illicit proceeds, exploiting vulnerabilities in the US and foreign AML/CFT regulatory, supervisory, and enforcement regimes, as well as the technology underpinning DeFi services. “In particular, this assessment finds that the most significant current illicit finance risk in this domain is from DeFi services that are not compliant with existing AML/CFT obligations,” it said.

Mining news

• Crypto-mining firm Foundry, owned by embattled conglomerate Digital Currency Group, is going to start charging users a fee for its Bitcoin mining services. Per Bloomberg, Foundry USA will begin levying a pool fee on members between April 19 and April 22, saying that it will be implementing tiered fees, according to a notice it circulated to clients on April 6. The pricing tiers for each quarter will be based on the previous quarter’s average hashrate, it said.