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Nearly 58% of Argentinians said they don’t trust President Javier Milei following his involvement in the $4.6 billion Libra crypto scandal, according to a recent poll. 

“More than a month after the crypto fraud scandal broke out, how much do you trust Milei today?” polling platform Zuban Córdoba asked 1,600 respondents in its recently released March survey, to which 57.6% replied that they disapprove of him, while 36% said Milei still has their trust.

The remaining 6.4% said they weren’t sure, the report stated.

Percentage of trust that Argentines have in Milei after the Libra scandal. Source: Zuban Córdoba

This was the first time the question was asked within a Zuban Córdoba poll. However, several other metrics, such as Milei’s image and the national management approval rating, have plummeted considerably in recent months.

Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon said the state’s proposed stablecoin might be ready to launch by July, with the Wyoming Stable Token Commission announcing interoperability protocol LayerZero as a partner for the token launch.

Speaking at the DC Blockchain Summit on March 26, Gordon praised the speed and efficiency of the Wyoming state government in embracing blockchain technology. Anthony Apollo, the executive director of the Wyoming Stable Token Commission, also confirmed:

"The Stable Token Commission has formally engaged LayerZero as our token development and distribution partner, and we have stable tokens — Wyoming stable tokens — on several test networks."

Wyoming, which is represented by pro-crypto Senator Cynthia Lummis, has been planning a state-issued stablecoin for years and has a history of embracing innovation in digital assets.

Governor Mark Gordon of Wyoming speaking at the 2025 DC Blockchain Summit. Source: Sei

Related: Yield-bearing stablecoins could kill banking — US Senator Gillibrand

US Securities and Exchange Commissioner (SEC) Hester Peirce offered a few suggestions for longer-lasting changes in crypto regulation between administrations with potentially different views.  

Speaking at the DC Blockchain Summit on March 26, Peirce, who heads the SEC’s crypto task force, said she expected that the commission could create more “durability” for digital asset regulations through rulemaking at the agency and legislation in Congress. Such rulemaking and laws would be in contrast to guidance issued by the agency, such as a recent statement suggesting that memecoins do not qualify as securities. 

“I hope people won’t be sitting around thinking about the Howey test,” said Peirce, referring to a method to determine whether an asset is a security. “Your lawyers have to think about these things, I’m not saying that they’ll not be relevant, but it shouldn’t be the kind of thing that is driving what you decide to build. I want there to be enough clarity on the question of what falls in our jurisdiction and then, if it does, how you can move forward.”

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce speaking at the DC Blockchain Summit on March 26. Source: Rumble

Peirce’s remarks came as the SEC has dropped several investigations or enforcement actions against major crypto firms, including Coinbase, Ripple, Kraken and Immutable. Some see the commission’s change in policy under acting chair Mark Uyeda as an attempt by US President Donald Trump to have the agency drop cases against firms that supported his 2024 campaign.

GameStop shares jumped nearly 12% on March 26 after the company announced plans to purchase Bitcoin (BTC).

The company plans to finance the purchase through debt financing. After markets closed on March 26, GameStop announced a $1.3 billion convertible notes offering.

The convertible senior notes — debt that can later be converted into equity — will be used for general corporate purposes, including acquiring Bitcoin, according to a company statement.

“GameStop expects to use the net proceeds from the offering for general corporate purposes, including the acquisition of Bitcoin in a manner consistent with GameStop’s Investment Policy,” it said.

The company revealed on March 25 plans to use a portion of its corporate cash or future debt to buy digital assets, including Bitcoin and US-dollar-pegged stablecoins. GameStop’s cash reserves stood at $4.77 billion on Feb. 1 compared to $921.7 million one year earlier.

Gracy Chen, CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Bitget, criticized Hyperliquid’s handling of a March 26 incident on its perpetual exchange, saying it put the network at risk of becoming “FTX 2.0.”

On March 26, Hyperliquid, a blockchain network specializing in trading, said it delisted perpetual futures contracts for the JELLY token and would reimburse users after identifying “evidence of suspicious market activity” tied to the instruments. 

The decision, which was reached by consensus among Hyperliquid’s relatively small number of validators, flagged existing concerns about the popular network’s perceived centralization.

“Despite presenting itself as an innovative decentralized exchange with a bold vision, Hyperliquid operates more like an offshore [centralized exchange],” Chen said, after saying “Hyperliquid may be on track to become FTX 2.0.”

FTX was a cryptocurrency exchange run by Sam Bankman-Fried, who was convicted of fraud in the US after FTX’s abrupt collapse in 2022. 

Despite strong institutional demand, Bitcoin (BTC) has struggled to reclaim the $100,000 level for the past 50 days, leading investors to question the reasons behind the bearishness despite a seemingly positive environment. 

This price weakness is particularly intriguing given the US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve executive order issued by President Donald Trump on March 6, which allows BTC acquisitions as long as they follow “budget-neutral” strategies.

Bitcoin fails to keep up with gold’s returns despite positive news flow

On March 26, GameStop Corporation (GME), the North American video game and consumer electronics retailer, announced plans to allocate a portion of its corporate reserves to Bitcoin. The company, which was on the verge of bankruptcy in 2021, successfully capitalized on a historic short squeeze and managed to secure an impressive $4.77 billion in cash and equivalents by February 2025.

Largest corporate Bitcoin holdings. Source: BitcoinTreasuries.NET

A growing number of US-based and international companies have followed Michael Saylor’s Strategy (MSTR) playbook, including the Japanese firm Metaplanet, which recently appointed Eric Trump, son of US President Donald Trump, to its newly established strategic board of advisers. Similarly, the mining conglomerate MARA Holdings (MARA) adopted a Bitcoin treasury policy to “retain all BTC” and increase its exposure through debt offerings.

Stablecoin issuers should be restricted from providing yield-bearing opportunities to protect the legacy banking system, which issues home mortgages and small business loans, US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said at a summit in Washington, DC.

Speaking at the 2025 DC Blockchain Summit on March 26, the Democratic senator from New York praised her state for having some of the most robust financial regulations in the world, and said they should be adopted by all financial services sectors.

According to Gillibrand, these regulations need to be applied to stablecoin issuers, whether they are regulated at the state or federal levels, to ensure compliance with existing laws and to protect consumer safety. Gillibrand then turned her attention to protecting the banking industry:

"Do you want a stablecoin issuer to be able to issue interest, probably not, because if they are issuing interest, there is no reason to put your money in a local bank. If there is no reason to put your money in a local bank, who is going to give you a mortgage?

“If there is no deposit, small banks cannot do that anymore; it will collapse the financial services system that people rely on for their businesses and mortgages,” Gillibrand continued.

Senator Gillibrand speaking at a panel during the DC Blockchain Summit. Source: DC Blockchain Summit

Update (March 26 at 8:48 PM UTC): This article has been updated to include commentary from Benchmark stock analyst Mark Palmer.

Bitcoin (BTC) mining stocks are down after tech giant Microsoft reportedly scrapped plans to invest in new artificial intelligence data centers in the US and Europe, citing a potential oversupply, according to a report by Bloomberg and data from Google Finance.

Shares of crypto miners Bitfarms, CleanSpark, Core Scientific, Hut 8, Marathon Digital and Riot dropped between 4% and 12% in tandem with the news, the data showed.

The stock price retrenchments highlight cryptocurrency miners’ increased dependence on business from artificial intelligence models after the Bitcoin network’s April 2024 “halving” cut into mining revenues.

According to Benchmark stock analyst Mark Palmer, investors already anticipated Microsoft’s data center cuts.

Ether (ETH) price reclaimed the $2,000 support on March 24 but remains 18% below the $2,500 level seen three weeks ago. Data shows Ether has underperformed the altcoin market by 14% over the past 30 days, leading traders to question whether the altcoin can regain bullish momentum and which factors might drive a trend reversal.

Ether/USD (left) vs. total altcoin capitalization, USD (right). Source: TradingView / Cointelegraph

Ether appears well-positioned to attract institutional demand and significantly reduce the FUD that has limited its upside potential. Critics have long argued that the Ethereum ecosystem lags behind competitors in overall user experience and still offers limited base-layer scalability, which has negatively impacted network fees and transaction efficiency. 

Will the Ethereum Pectra upgrade impact ETH price?

Many of the Ethereum network’s challenges are expected to be addressed in the upcoming Pectra network upgrade, scheduled for late April or early June. Among the proposed changes is a doubling of the data that can be included in each block, which should help lower fees for rollups and privacy-focused mechanisms. Additionally, the cost of call data will increase, encouraging developers to adopt blobs—a more efficient method for data storage.

Another notable improvement in the upcoming upgrade is the introduction of smart accounts, which allow wallets to function like smart contracts during transactions. This enables gas fee sponsorship, passkey authentication, and batch transactions. Additionally, several other enhancements focus on optimizing staking deposits and withdrawals, providing greater flexibility, and extending block history for smart contracts that rely on past data.

Interactive Brokers, a global brokerage that recorded $9.3 billion in revenue for 2024, is expanding its altcoin offerings to include four new tokens.

According to a March 26 announcement, the platform has added Solana (SOL), Cardano (ADA), XRP (XRP), and Dogecoin (DOGE) for trading. The four coins have a combined market capitalization of $267.2 billion at this writing.

The additions double Interactive’s crypto offerings to traders. Since 2021, it has enabled trading in Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) pairs.

Both trading and custody services will be provided through Paxos Trust Company or Zero Hash LLC. Zero Hash said in a press release that as of June 2024, it had processed $20 billion in transactions across 200 countries.

Financial firms have been expanding crypto token offerings. On March 25, Nubank announced the addition of ADA, Near Protocol (NEAR), Cosmos (ATOM), and Algorand (ALGO) to its over 100 million clients in Latin America. US exchange Kraken has been steadily adding memecoins for a number of months, while Binance introduced a way for community members to vote on the listing and delisting of tokens.

Amidst an increasingly competitive crypto market, Interactive Brokers is promising low transaction fees — 0.12% to 0.18% per transaction value with a minimum of $1.75 per trade. The brokerage still faces competition from exchanges that offer “pro” platforms with similar charges.

XRP (XRP) price continues to underperform the broader crypto market this week, even though multiple altcoins turned green as Bitcoin (BTC) rallied to $88,800.

XRP 1-day chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView

The altcoin is down 4.7% over the past seven days, putting a pause to the 11% rally seen on March 19, when the Ripple’s SEC “lawsuit ending” news made headlines. XRP trading volumes have also dropped from around $4 billion to $2.6 billion, i.e., a 35% dip over the past week.

XRP price peers over a steep cliff

In a recent X post, veteran trader Peter Brandt said the presence of a “textbook” head-and-shoulders pattern (H&S) could drop XRP price as low as $1.07.

XRP head-and-shoulders pattern by Peter Brandt. Source: X.com

Several sectors of decentralized finance are poised for growth in 2025, including special-purpose decentralized exchanges (DEXs), stablecoins, and tokenized assets, according to Curve Finance founder Michael Egorov.

Growth in decentralized exchanges will be driven by new purpose-tailored platforms, such as exchanges for stablecoins pegged to different underlying fiat currencies, thus solving the foreign exchange problem in stable tokens, Egorov said in an interview with Cointelegraph. The Curve founder added:

"Exchanges between stablecoins of different denominations like the Euro, US dollar, and others are not yet properly solved. How to provide liquidity without losing money, but while earning a lot of money, is kind of an open question that I think will be solved soon."

The number of centralized and decentralized stablecoin offerings will also grow as financial institutions and blockchain developers create new alternatives, Egorov said.

However, the regulatory landscape must catch up with the pace of innovation in the DeFi sector, and financial regulators are still using laws designed for the legacy system established in the 20th century, he said.

DEX volume surged to new heights in the first several months of 2025. Source: DeFiLlama

Bitcoin (BTC) bulls have maintained the pressure and are attempting to push the price above the $90,000 resistance. A positive sign in favor of the bulls is that the US spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds have witnessed net inflows for eight successive trading days, according to SoSoValue data. That indicates institutional investors are gradually buying again.

In another positive, a Bitcoin whale bought 2,400 Bitcoin — worth over $200 million — on March 24 to increase the total holding to more than 15,000 BTC, blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence said in a post on X.

Crypto market data daily view. Source: Coin360

However, a Bitcoin rally may not be easy as bulls are expected to encounter solid selling near $90,000. Alphractal CEO Joao Wedson highlighted in a post on X that whales had closed long positions and initiated short positions on Bitcoin at $88,000. He added that history says the whales are right.

Could Bitcoin break above the stiff overhead resistance, pulling altcoins higher, or is it time for a short-term correction? Let’s analyze the charts of the top 10 cryptocurrencies to find out.

Crypto and blockchain-focused venture capital is unfazed by recent market volatility and is using the opportunity to uncover hidden gems in an industry that’s only “one decade into a 30-year paradigm shift,” according to Hoolie Tejwani, the head of VC firm Coinbase Ventures. 

Coinbase Ventures will “continue to invest steadily through market conditions” because it sees the “big picture,” Tejwani told Cointelegraph in an interview.

“What we’re seeing as investors is an exponential technology change curve that is transforming the way people interact, how value flows, and how economies are run. And it’s being shaped by the people who are building on crypto infrastructure,” said Tejwani.

Coinbase Ventures’ portfolio of investments includes Arbitrum, Dune, EigenLayer, Etherscan, OpenSea, Optimism and Uniswap, among others. Its mandate is to invest in project founders who share the namesake crypto exchange’s vision of creating more economic freedom through blockchain and Web3 applications.

The company is especially “bullish on stablecoins,” thanks in part to recent crypto-friendly moves in the US Congress and by President Donald Trump, Tejwani said. 

Dogecoin (DOGE) price has rallied 18% over the past three days, and it is currently the best-performing crypto among the top 30 by market capitalization over the past week.

Data also shows DOGE producing its highest weekly returns of 2025, a feat not seen since the final week of 2024.

Dogecoin weekly chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView

7% of DOGE supply is clustered around $0.20

According to the onchain data from Glassnode, DOGE’s unrealized price distribution (URPD) shows 7% of the DOGE supply is concentrated at $0.20.

URPD is a metric that reflects the price at which coins were last moved, and it allows investors to identify resistance and support zones based on token clusters.

Tigran Gambaryan, a Binance executive who was held in Nigeria for eight months in 2024 on tax and money laundering charges, provided additional details about his experience and what led to his release.

Speaking at the DC Blockchain Summit on March 26, Gambaryan, the head of financial crime compliance at Binance said the Nigerian government had held him hostage, suggesting the criminal charges were a pretext to “get something” from Binance. Gambaryan said he saw signs suggesting he could be released “around a month” before he was returned to the US.

“It was around the time the [United Nations] General Assembly in 2024 happened is when that pressure really ramped up against the Nigerian government, and it realized that I was more of a liability,” said Gambaryan. “Before that, they kinda saw me as an asset they could use to get their billions out of Binance.”

Tigran Gambaryan speaking at the DC Blockchain Summit on March 26. Source: Rumble

Since his return to the US in October 2024, Gambaryan has made few public statements concerning his detention and release. The Binance executive’s family and reports from Nigeria suggested that his health deteriorated after he was initially placed into custody in February that year, including issues from pneumonia, malaria, and a herniated disc.

Hyperliquid is delisting perpetual futures tied to the JELLY token after identifying “evidence of suspicious market activity” involving the trading instruments, the blockchain network said. 

The Hyper Foundation, Hyperliquid’s ecosystem nonprofit, will reimburse most affected users for any losses related to the incident, Hyperliquid said in a March 26 post on the X platform.

“All users apart from flagged addresses will be made whole from the Hyper Foundation,” Hyperliquid said. “This will be done automatically in the coming days based on onchain data.” 

Hyerliquid added that the perpetuals exchange’s primary liquidity pool, HLP, has clocked a positive net income of around $700,000 in the past 24 hours. 

This incident is the latest to highlight Hyperliquid’s growing pains as it becomes Web3’s most popular platform for leveraged perpetual trading. 

Celo, the blockchain network launched in 2020, has officially transitioned from a layer-1 chain to an Ethereum layer-2 protocol.

Celo announced the successful transition in a March 26 X post, stating that “Celo is officially an Ethereum layer 2” protocol. In the thread, the organization claimed the new protocol features one-second blocks, sub-cent transaction costs, and Tether’s USDt (USDT) and USDC (USDC) as gas.

Celo first proposed this transition in the summer of 2023, and it is now completed after block production on the old layer-1 platform halted and continued on the new network. The new platform is based on the OP technology stack and an optimistic rollups implementation.

Source: Celo

Related: Vitalik Buterin endorses Celo for beating Tron in stablecoin addresses

Opinion by: Paul Delio, chief business officer at CARV

Market movements come and go, naturally taking up a lot of crypto oxygen, but something far more remarkable has been happening beneath the surface in recent cycles. The past few years have generally been great for new tokens, and with their launches come significant opportunities for wealth creation, such as airdrops.

I recently sat down with Animoca Brands co-founder and executive chairman Yat Siu at Consensus Hong Kong. He mentioned a figure that instantly cured any market anxiety: $49 billion worth of airdrops were distributed directly to Web3 communities from 2021 to 2024. “I can’t think of a larger private wealth generation event than that,” Siu noted.

He’s entirely correct. Airdrops get users in at the ground floor and reward them for early support in ways traditional markets simply can’t or don’t. We can all share in one of the most significant wealth redistributions in recent history through this unique mechanism. 

While current sentiment might make some think twice, there’s still great user and network value building in the background. Bear markets are temporary, but airdrops — and the ownership and community models they enable in crypto — are forever.

Bitso Business, an arm of the Mexican crypto exchange Bitso, will launch a Mexican peso-pegged stablecoin on the Ethereum layer-2 network Arbitrum.

The stablecoin, MXNB, will be issued and managed by Bitso’s newly established subsidiary Juno and will be fully fiat-backed by Mexican pesos on a one-to-one basis, Bitso Business said in a March 26 statement.

Bitso Business’ head of stablecoins, Ben Reid, said a primary use case for MXNB could be to promote foreign investment and trade in Latin American economies by providing a more “efficient way” to do business compared to traditional finance infrastructure.

“Global companies face significant monetary challenges when it comes to serving customers in new markets and conducting cross-border payments, including high intermediary costs and inefficient transaction times,” he said.

Juno will operate independently from Bitso to manage the stablecoin and will conduct regular audits of its reserves, providing public attestation reports on the token’s website.

World Liberty Financial (WLFI), the Trump family’s crypto project, is planning to release a stablecoin, raising concern over the US president’s exposure to the digital asset industry.

The project released a memecoin immediately prior to President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the price of which skyrocketed and crashed soon after, causing many to accuse WLFI of a pump-and-dump scheme. 

WLFI has also made multimillion-dollar purchases of crypto tokens immediately prior to important crypto-related events the president has attended or announcements influencing the industry. WLFI purchased $20 million of various tokens ahead of the March 7 White House Crypto Summit. 

As World Liberty Financial’s portfolio grows and regulator oversight disappears from the crypto industry, observers and legal scholars are becoming increasingly concerned over conflicts of interest within the Trump administration. 

Son Eric Trump pumps his father’s memecoin ahead of the inauguration. Source: Eric Trump

Update March 26, 2:36 pm UTC: This article has been updated to include quotes from Brickken CEO Edwin Mata.

BlackRock’s Ethereum-native tokenized money market fund has more than tripled in value over the past three weeks, nearing the $2 billion mark amid rising demand for safe-haven digital assets.

BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) saw an over three-fold increase over the past three weeks, from $615 million to $1.87 billion, according to Token Terminal data shared by Leon Waidmann, head of research at Onchain Foundation, a Web3 intelligence platform.

BlackRock BUIDL capital deployed by chain. Source: Token Terminal, Leon Waidmann

“BUIDL fund TVL exploded from $615M → $1.87B in just 3 weeks. The tokenization wave is hitting faster than most realize,” the researcher wrote in a March 26 X post.

Key takeaways

Exit liquidity traps occur when new investors unknowingly provide liquidity for insiders to cash out, leaving them with devalued assets.​

FOMO drives impulsive trades, often leading to costly mistakes and becoming exit liquidity for early movers.

Beware of projects with exaggerated claims, low liquidity, anonymous teams or sudden price surges.

Investing in high-market-cap coins, avoiding hype-driven projects and using reputable exchanges reduce the risk.

Are you concerned about having bought a cryptocurrency only to later realize that your investment facilitated someone else’s profitable exit? This scenario is called an exit liquidity trap, a deceptive market dynamic where unsuspecting traders provide liquidity for insiders or seasoned investors to offload their holdings at inflated prices.

Bitcoin (BTC) saw the return of US selling pressure at the March 26 Wall Street open as analysis eyed a “key shift in market structure.”

BTC/USD 1-hour chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView

Bitcoin sees classic US dip as dollar gains

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed BTC/USD heading below $87,000.

The pair had enjoyed support through the day’s Asia trading session, but the start of US hours triggered a familiar downward reversal.

Bitcoin copied US stocks’ lack of momentum, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite Index both heading lower at the open.

Crypto community members are growing more optimistic about an XRP exchange-traded fund (ETF) approval following the resolution of a multi-year legal battle between Ripple and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). 

On March 19, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse announced the case had concluded. In an X post, the Ripple executive said the SEC will drop its appeal against Ripple, ending the $1.3 billion unregistered securities suit that started in December 2020. 

Following the development, Nate Geraci, president of the advisory firm ETF Store, said on X that the approval of an XRP (XRP) ETF is next. Geraci said it was “obvious” that it’s only a “matter of time” before the SEC approves an XRP ETF. 

The executive predicted that asset managers like BlackRock and Fidelity would be involved in offering the asset. 

Polymarket punters give 86% odds to XRP ETF approval in 2025

Aside from Geraci, users on the crypto betting platform Polymarket also expect approval for an XRP ETF in 2025. On March 26, Polymarket gave an 86% chance that an XRP-based ETF product would be approved this year. 

Prominent US-based angel investor Jason Calacanis poked fun at GameStop’s decision to invest in Bitcoin.

In a March 26 X post, Calacanis suggested that buying Bitcoin (BTC) was a solution well-suited for public companies that do not have a suitable business model:

“If you’re a public company that can’t figure out a business model, buy Bitcoin! This might actually be great advice if [Strategy co-founder Michael Saylor] is gonna buy $1T in Bitcoin.”

Still, Tomas Fanta, principal at crypto investment firm Heartcore, told Cointelegraph that there are tangible long-term benefits to holding Bitcoin on a corporate balance sheet. Among those he listed were long-term price appreciation and theoretically lower correlation to equity markets over time.

“I do disagree with the view, though, that failing companies should be using Bitcoin as the last-ditch strategy,” Fanta said.

Related: GameStop hints at future Bitcoin purchases following board approval

Canadian YouTube alternative Rumble announced the launch of its wallet with support for Tether’s USDT stablecoin.

In a March 26 X post, Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski said Rumble Wallet will be used for content creator monetization. He promised it would work better than most advertisers and that it would use Tether’s USDt (USDT). Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino showed his appreciation for the initiative, referring to it as “A wallet for the people” in an X post.

Related: Tether seeks Big Four firm for its first full financial audit — Report

A flurry of investments

The announcement follows Tether investing $775 million in Rumble in late 2024. Ardoino wrote at the time that the company “deeply believes in the fundamental values of freedom of speech and financial freedom.”

Source: Paolo Ardoino

Polymarket, the world’s largest decentralized prediction market, is under fire after a controversial outcome raised concerns over potential governance manipulation in a high-stakes political bet.

A betting market on the platform asked whether US President Donald Trump would accept a rare earth mineral deal with Ukraine before April. Despite no such event occurring, the market was settled as “Yes,” triggering a backlash from users and industry observers.

This may point to a “governance attack” in which a whale from the UMA Protocol “used his voting power to manipulate the oracle, allowing the market to settle false results and successfully profit,” according to crypto threat researcher Vladimir S.

“The tycoon cast 5 million tokens through three accounts, accounting for 25% of the total votes. Polymarket is committed to preventing this from happening again,” he wrote in a March 26 X post.

Source: Vladimir S.

Google Play implemented access restrictions to 17 unregistered overseas crypto exchanges catering to local users in South Korea at the request of the country’s regulators. 

On March 21, the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) of the South Korean Financial Services Commission (FSC) said it was considering sanctions against operators that did not report to the relevant authorities.

Authorities require virtual asset service providers (VASPs) to report to regulators under the country’s Specified Financial Information Act. 

At the time, the FIU said it was coordinating with the Korea Communications Standards Commission (KCSC), the regulator in charge of the internet, on how they could block access to the exchanges. 

By March 26, the FSC published a list of 22 unregistered platforms, highlighting 17 that had been blocked from the Google Play store. The move restricts new downloads and updates for affected apps, effectively limiting user access.