Cryptocurrency and Blockchain

South Korea's Cabinet approved amendments Tuesday that eliminate the 1 million won ($700) threshold for its Travel Rule, requiring crypto service providers to report sender and recipient information on all transfers between registered platforms regardless of size. The rule exists because users were circumventing the old threshold by splitting transactions—one case cited by the Financial Intelligence Unit involved a user making 216 withdrawals of less than 1 million won each after depositing 200 million won. The amendments also tighten anti-money laundering requirements for transfers to overseas exchanges and personal wallets, prohibiting transactions with high-risk counterparties and requiring platforms to monitor suspicious activity on transfers worth at least 10 million won involving foreign exchanges. Registered crypto service providers must meet new financial health, staffing, and infrastructure standards; existing providers get an additional year to comply with some requirements, while the expanded Travel Rule takes effect six months after the decree is promulgated. The changes target a gap authorities say has been exploited: suspected money laundering involving overseas exchanges and personal wallets has increased as existing rules left those transfers largely unmonitored.

BTCPay Server is offering a bounty of up to 3 BTC—roughly $190,000—to anyone with information leading to the recovery of bitcoin stolen from merchants in a server exploit last week, according to coindesk.com. Attackers exploited a vulnerability to obtain credentials for LND, the most widely used Lightning node software, and drained connected wallets. Hardware-wallet maker Foundation and bitcoin publication Citadel21 both reported losses; neither BTCPay nor the victims have disclosed a total. The bounty is structured as 10% of recovered funds split among informants based on the usefulness of their information and the size of their losses. BTCPay is also compensating the researchers who found the flaw—developer Craig Raw and the Bitcoin Red Team—with 0.21 BTC each. The company has enlisted exchanges, blockchain analytics firms, and law enforcement to trace the stolen funds and is urging merchants to report losses to local police and to keep most holdings in cold storage rather than in hot wallets. The vulnerability was discovered by the Bitcoin Red Team, a volunteer effort that began using AI to scan bitcoin codebases for bugs this month and has filed thousands of findings across hundreds of projects.

Decta, a London-based payments platform, will use stablecoins to settle its own treasury transfers across the 32 countries where it operates, according to cointelegraph.com. The company will convert its fiat holdings into USDC via OpenPayd, a regulated financial infrastructure provider, to move funds between its banking relationships and internal entities near-instantly rather than waiting for traditional banking cut-off times and multi-day settlement windows. This is not a customer-facing product—Decta's clients will not see stablecoins in their payment flows. Instead, the arrangement lets Decta's own operations move money faster and cheaper across its regulated entities. OpenPayd, which secured authorization under the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation in June, handles the fiat-to-stablecoin conversion through its over-the-counter capabilities. The move signals that stablecoins are entering the back-office plumbing of traditional fintech firms, not just crypto exchanges. Decta has also explored issuing its own euro-pegged stablecoin under MiCA, subject to regulatory approval.