It’s All About Crypto Blog
AI vs Bitcoin: Why Laos Probably Won’t Choose Mining
Five months ago, Reuters reported that Laos was considering cutting off electricity supplies to cryptocurrency miners in the first quarter of 2026. The end of that quarter is now approaching - and today an optimistic tweet by Vivek Sen began circulating online, claiming that Laos has announced plans to mine Bitcoin in order to pay down its debt. Unfortunately, it is...
A Simple Way to Avoid AML Problems in Bitcoin
This article continues the discussion started in "AML Terrorism: The Dark Side of Transaction Monitoring". In that piece I examined how commercial AML systems work, why their methodologies are opaque, and how their "terror" affects ordinary users. Here I will not repeat those arguments but instead develop one specific idea that has recently turned into a daily operational...
Did USDC Really Overtake USDT in Transaction Volume?
Can you believe that USDC has surpassed USDT in annual transaction volume? That claim started circulating in the media yesterday. The source was said to be the Japanese investment bank Mizuho Financial Group. But none of the articles actually linked to the original source. Today I spent quite a while trying to track it down, and it looks like most of the references...
When DeFi Complexity Costs Millions: The AAVE Slippage Incident
Today's AAVE incident is yet another reminder of how complex DeFi protocols still are - complex enough to cause enormous losses. Here is what happened. Through the Aave interface, a user attempted to buy AAVE tokens worth more than 50 million USDT. The system warned them about extremely high slippage, but the user accepted the risk, executed the trade, and ended up receiving only...
Fewer Developers, Fewer Changes: Is Crypto Finally Maturing?
Today, CoinDesk published a summary of some interesting statistics compiled by Artemis Analytics: developer activity in cryptocurrency projects has dropped by 75% over the past year. The data refers to the number of weekly code change proposals submitted to blockchain-related repositories on GitHub. A year ago there were about 850,000 of them; now there are roughly 210,000. The number of...
Georgia's Stablecoin Regulation: Great for Users, Hard for Issuers
President of the National Bank of Georgia has approved a new regulation governing the issuance of stablecoins in Georgian jurisdiction. One provision in this regulation appears likely to distinguish stablecoins issued by Georgian companies from most stablecoins issued elsewhere. Holders will have the right to redeem them at face value at any time. The rule even sets a...
Humans Leave Crypto Mining. AI Walks In
An AI agent launched by a research group affiliated with Alibaba unexpectedly started mining cryptocurrency. The system had access to GPU resources and, on its own initiative, redirected those resources to crypto mining - apparently without notifying the researchers. Unfortunately, the researchers did not disclose in their paper which cryptocurrency the AI agent chose to mine. It would be...
A Trojan Horse in the Treasury's Report on Crypto Mixers
The United States Department of the Treasury noted in its recent report to Congress that cryptocurrency mixers can have legitimate use cases. What counts as legitimate is fairly obvious. Strictly speaking, any use is legitimate unless it is explicitly prohibited by law - and that includes the overwhelming majority of ways ordinary users actually employ mixers...
Everything Looks Right - But the Transaction Fails. Part II
In the first part of this article, I described a case where the swapping service rabbit.io tried to send a small amount of SOL to a client, but the transaction kept being rejected - even though, according to all the known rules of the Solana blockchain, everything seemed perfectly valid. That first part of the article also covered situations where...
Kazakhstan's $350M Crypto Plan and the Nature of Crypto
Yesterday, two senior executives of the National Bank of Kazakhstan said the central bank had created a $350 million reserve to invest in crypto. Their quotations are published by Reuters. I admire the way Kazakh officials phrase things when they talk about cryptocurrencies. Just a couple of months ago, Kazakhstan adopted a new banking law that, in my...
