Worldcoin shows bullish momentum with MACD turning positive. WLD price prediction targets $0.58-$0.62 range within 3-4 weeks based on technical breakout patterns.
WLD Price Prediction Summary
• WLD short-term target (1 week): $0.56 (+5.7%)
• Worldcoin medium-term forecast (1 month): $0.58-$0.62 range
• Key level to break for bullish continuation: $0.59 (immediate resistance)
• Critical support if bearish: $0.47 (strong support level)
Recent Worldcoin Price Predictions from Analysts
The latest WLD price prediction data from major exchanges shows remarkable consensus around modest upside potential. MEXC’s conservative forecast targets $0.4962, while Bitget projects $0.5009 and Coinbase sets a longer-term Worldcoin forecast at $0.52. These predictions, however, appear overly cautious given current technical momentum.
The analyst consensus suggests 5% annual growth assumptions, which may underestimate WLD’s near-term potential. Current price action at $0.53 has already exceeded Coinbase’s long-term target, indicating these predictions may need upward revision. The convergence of these forecasts around $0.50 creates a psychological support floor for any potential pullbacks.
WLD Technical Analysis: Setting Up for Breakout
Worldcoin technical analysis reveals a compelling setup for continued upside. The MACD histogram at 0.0086 signals the first bullish momentum shift in recent sessions, while the RSI at 49.46 provides ample room for further gains without reaching overbought conditions.
The Bollinger Bands positioning is particularly noteworthy, with WLD trading at 0.79 relative position between the bands. This suggests strong momentum within the upper half of the trading range, with the upper band at $0.55 serving as the next immediate target. The 7-day and 12-day moving averages have converged at $0.51, creating a strong support base below current levels.
Volume confirmation at $16.2 million on Binance spot indicates genuine buying interest supporting the 7.75% daily gain. The Stochastic indicators show %K at 86.96, suggesting short-term overbought conditions that may lead to brief consolidation before the next leg higher.
Worldcoin Price Targets: Bull and Bear Scenarios
Bullish Case for WLD
The primary WLD price target sits at $0.59, representing the immediate resistance level that needs to break for trend continuation. A clean break above this level opens the door to $0.62-$0.65, where the 50-day moving average at $0.58 will provide initial resistance before clearing toward stronger resistance at $0.75.
Technical confluence supports this bullish Worldcoin forecast. The positive MACD crossover, combined with price trading above the 20-day EMA at $0.53, establishes a foundation for higher prices. The daily ATR of $0.03 suggests normal volatility, allowing for measured upward movement without excessive whipsaws.
Bearish Risk for Worldcoin
Downside risks emerge if WLD fails to hold the $0.52 pivot point. A break below this level would target the immediate support at $0.47, coinciding with the strong support zone and near the 52-week low of $0.48. This represents a 11.3% downside risk from current levels.
The bearish scenario would be confirmed by MACD rolling over into negative territory and RSI breaking below 45. Volume expansion on any downward moves would increase the probability of testing the lower Bollinger Band at $0.46.
Should You Buy WLD Now? Entry Strategy
Current levels present a reasonable buy or sell WLD decision point for traders with proper risk management. The optimal entry strategy involves scaling into positions between $0.52-$0.53, using the pivot point and current EMA 26 as support reference.
Stop-loss placement should be positioned at $0.49, approximately 7.5% below current levels and below the key $0.50 psychological support. This provides adequate protection while allowing normal price fluctuations. Position sizing should remain moderate given the 72% distance from 52-week highs, indicating WLD remains in a longer-term recovery phase.
For conservative investors, waiting for a successful break above $0.59 immediate resistance would provide confirmation of the bullish thesis before entering positions.
WLD Price Prediction Conclusion
The WLD price prediction for the next 3-4 weeks targets the $0.58-$0.62 range with medium-high confidence. Technical momentum is building with MACD turning positive and price action breaking above key moving averages. The Worldcoin forecast is supported by volume confirmation and healthy RSI positioning.
Key indicators to monitor include the MACD maintaining positive territory, successful break above $0.59 resistance, and sustained trading above the $0.52 pivot point. Failure to hold $0.50 would invalidate the bullish prediction and suggest deeper correction toward $0.47 support.
The timeline for this prediction centers on January 2026, with initial targets potentially reached within 7-10 trading days if momentum sustains. Traders should monitor daily volume for confirmation and be prepared to adjust position sizing based on volatility expansion measured by the ATR indicator.
Onchain analytics firm Nansen ranked Solana, BNB Chain, Base, Tron and NEAR Protocol as the busiest blockchains in 2025.
Solana led the pack with 23.01 billion transactions, while BNB Chain followed with 3.89 billion. Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 Base handled 3.29 billion for third, as Tron trailed with 3.22 billion and NEAR came in fifth with 1.89 billion.
Even as 2025 was marked by institutional adoption, retail-focused use cases continued to dominate transaction volumes, particularly on blockchains with low fees and high throughput.
Top five blockchains by activity in 2025. Source: Nansen
Solana’s DEX boom and memecoin craze
Solana’s dominance came on the back of a trading boom that pushed it to the top of decentralized exchange (DEX) rankings in early 2025.
CoinGecko reported that Solana DEX trading dominated 40% of the industry’s market share by recording $293.7 billion in the first quarter of 2025. It was driven in part by a memecoin frenzy around celebrity and political tokens like $TRUMP, a Solana-based token launched on Jan. 18 tied to US President Donald Trump.
DefiLlama data showed that Solana remained among the top chains by DEX volume throughout the year, with monthly volumes around or above the $100 billion mark.
Base ranked third by 2025 transaction count as it leveraged direct distribution from Coinbase’s user base. A 2026 outlook by Messari researcher AJC said that Base’s protocol revenue grew by about 30 times in 2025, capturing 62% of total L2 revenue. The same research noted that Base’s ecosystem now spans DEXs, AI‑linked apps and prediction platforms.
Tron’s 3.22 billion transactions reflected its role as a backbone for the stablecoin economy. In June 2025, TRON DAO said that more than half of circulating USDt (USDT) is issued on its blockchain. Its stablecoin supply grew about 40% year‑to‑date with daily transfer volumes in the tens of billions of dollars.
NEAR Protocol rounded out the top five, with 1.89 billion transactions in 2025 according to Nansen’s ranking.
NEAR reported about 46 million users in May, placing it alongside Solana and Tron in activity metrics. Beyond numbers, a key part of NEAR’s 2025 story was its role in the privacy narrative via Zcash (ZEC), whose comeback was driven in part by the Electric Coin Company’s Zashi wallet integrating with NEAR’s Intents system. It allowed users to move in and out of ZEC’s shielded pool without going through centralized exchanges.
This integration helped push Zcash’s shielded supply to record levels and drove a spike in activity on NEAR Intents, including a day with over $17 million in Zcash-related volume.
XAU/USD was being held in check by $4,400 after becoming the winning major asset of 2025.
“Gold (+64%) was the best performing major asset in 2025 while Bitcoin (-6%) was the worst. Something we haven’t seen before in any calendar year (the inverse of 2013),” Charlie Bilello, chief market strategist at wealth manager Creative Planning, noted.
This week, Cointelegraph included Bitcoin’s relationship with gold and silver in four key charts to watch next.
Analysis argued that BTC’s relative underperformance was not a sign of a new bear market, but the “calm before the storm,” based on historical patterns.
This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision. While we strive to provide accurate and timely information, Cointelegraph does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of any information in this article. This article may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Cointelegraph will not be liable for any loss or damage arising from your reliance on this information.
This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision. While we strive to provide accurate and timely information, Cointelegraph does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of any information in this article. This article may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Cointelegraph will not be liable for any loss or damage arising from your reliance on this information.
Solana appears poised to expand from its memecoin-focused, retail-dominant network this year, after posting record real-world asset tokenization activity in December.
Data from RWA.xyz shows the value of tokenized RWAs on Solana increased nearly 10% over the last month to a record-high $873.3 million, while the number of Solana RWA token holders rose over 18.4% to 126,236 over the same timeframe.
The majority of these RWAs back US Treasuries, such as the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund and the Ondo US Dollar Yield, which boast market caps of $255.4 million and $175.8 million, respectively.
New tokenized stocks like Tesla xStock and Nvidia xStock are also rising, at $48.3 million and $17.6 million, respectively, while institutional funds are also being tokenized on Solana.
Solana is poised to become the third blockchain to exceed $1 billion in tokenized RWAs, behind Ethereum at $12.3 billion and BNB Chain, which recently passed $2 billion.
SOL will set a new high in 2026 if one thing happens: Bitwise
If it passes, Bitwise expects crypto tokenization will take off, with Solana being one of the biggest winners from that upward trend: “We’re bullish on Ethereum and Solana. Really bullish. Primarily because we think stablecoins and tokenization are megatrends, and Ethereum and Solana are likely to be the biggest beneficiaries of that growth.”
SOL has some catching up to do on BTC, ETH
Solana (SOL) enters 2026 at a significantly lower price than it began 2025, trading around $125 versus roughly $190 this time last year.
SOL is also over 57% off the $293.3 all-time high it set on Jan. 19, 2025, while Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) set their all-time highs more recently — October and August — and are currently trading much closer to those prices.
ETFs, institutional payments also spurring SOL momentum
Solana’s legitimacy in the institutional space strengthened in late October when the US Securities and Exchange Commission approved the first lot of now six spot Solana exchange-traded funds.
Those Solana products have combined for $765 million in inflows, Farside Investors data shows.
Also in October, international remittance giant Western Union chose Solana to build its stablecoin settlements platform on for its more than 150 million customers, spread across over 200 countries and territories. It is expected to roll out in the first half of 2026.
Solana’s onchain metrics look solid
Solana is leading all blockchains in app revenue, proving it can generate high income even when memecoin activity slows.
Over the past 30 days, it raked in over $110 million, far ahead of second-place Hyperliquid at $61.1 million and nearly double Ethereum’s $47.2 million, DeFiLlama data shows.
Blockchains by app revenue over the last 30 days. Source: DeFiLlama
Covered calls gained traction as cash-and-carry returns collapsed, but data shows they are not structurally suppressing Bitcoin’s price.
Stable put-to-call ratios and rising put demand suggest hedging and yield strategies coexist with bullish positioning.
As Bitcoin (BTC) price entered a downtrend in November, traders began forming theories about why institutional inflows and corporate accumulation failed to sustain price levels above $110,000.
One explanation frequently cited is the rising demand for Bitcoin options, particularly those linked to the BlackRock iShares spot Bitcoin (IBIT) exchange-traded fund.
IBIT options open interest. Source: OptionCharts.io
The aggregate Bitcoin options open interest climbed to $49 billion in December 2025 from $39 billion in December 2024, putting the covered call strategy under closer scrutiny.
Critics argue that by “renting out” their upside for a fee, large investors have unintentionally created a ceiling that prevents Bitcoin from entering its next parabolic phase. To understand this argument, it helps to view a covered call as a trade-off between price appreciation and steady income.
In a covered call strategy, an investor who already owns Bitcoin sells a call (buy) option to another party. This gives the buyer the right to purchase that Bitcoin at a fixed price, such as $100,000 by a specified date. In return, the seller receives an upfront cash payment, similar to earning interest on a bond.
This options strategy differs from fixed income products because the seller continues to hold a volatile asset, even though their potential upside is capped. If Bitcoin rallies to $120,000, the seller must sell at $100,000, effectively missing the additional gains.
Traders argue that this dynamic suppresses price action because professional dealers who purchase these options often sell Bitcoin in the spot market to hedge their exposure, creating a persistent “sell wall” around popular strike prices.
Options-based yield replaced the collapsed cash and carry trade
This shift toward options-based yield is a direct response to the collapse of the cash and carry trade, which involves selling BTC futures while holding an equivalent position in the spot market.
For much of late 2024, traders captured a steady 10% to 15% premium. By February 2025, however, that premium had fallen below 10%, and by November it struggled to remain above 5%.
In search of higher returns, funds rotated into covered calls, which offered more attractive annualized yields of 12% to 18%. This transition is evident in IBIT options, where open interest jumped to $40 billion from $12 billion in late 2024. Even so, the put-to-call ratio has stayed stable below 60%.
If widespread “suppressive” call selling were truly the dominant force, this ratio would likely have collapsed as the market became saturated with call sellers. Instead, the balance implies that for every yield-focused seller, there is still a buyer positioning for a breakout.
The put-to-call ratio suggests that while some participants are selling upside call options, a much larger group is purchasing put (sell) instruments as protection against a potential price decline.
The recent defensive stance is reflected in the skew metric. While IBIT put options traded at a 2% discount in late 2024, they now trade at a 5% premium. At the same time, implied volatility, the market’s measure of expected turbulence, declined to 45% or lower from May onward, down from 57% in late 2024.
Lower volatility reduces the premiums earned by sellers, meaning the incentive to deploy this so-called “suppressive” strategy has actually weakened, even as total open interest has increased.
Arguing that covered calls are holding prices down makes little sense when the sellers of those call options stand to benefit most if prices rise toward their target levels. Rather than acting as a constraint, the options market has become the primary venue where Bitcoin’s volatility is being monetized for yield.
This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as, legal, tax, investment, financial, or other 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. While we strive to provide accurate and timely information, Cointelegraph does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of any information in this article. This article may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Cointelegraph will not be liable for any loss or damage arising from your reliance on this information.
This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision. While we strive to provide accurate and timely information, Cointelegraph does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of any information in this article. This article may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Cointelegraph will not be liable for any loss or damage arising from your reliance on this information.
Crypto privacy entered the spotlight in 2025 as new technology clashed with regulators, a trend that is set to intensify in 2026 with developers pushing the envelope and legal battles approaching a conclusion.
In its early days, Bitcoin (BTC) was often viewed as an anonymous payment tool despite its transparency. Since then, the introduction of onchain analytics and surveillance has made it increasingly apparent that transparent blockchains are far from private.
This led to an arms race between pro-privacy developers, onchain surveillance organizations and regulators, culminating in high-profile legal cases. The developers of the decentralized Ether (ETH) mixer Tornado Cash are fighting over whether software development constitutes a financial service, and those behind the Bitcoin non-custodial mixer Samourai Wallet were recently sentenced to prison by a US court.
Despite this, privacy-focused development picked up this year. Industry experts suggest that while the privacy tool stack remained largely unchanged in 2025, those tools are expected to evolve in 2026 thanks to a new generation of “pragmatic privacy,” ensuring privacy and compliance with sanctions.
How we sleepwalked into traceable money
Payment processors being able to clearly determine the parties, products and services involved in transactions allows for censorship. This is far from a theoretical danger, with leading PC game distributor Steam and competitor Itch.io purging adult content in 2025 following pressure from payment processors. Before that, the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks was cut off by payment providers, despite the US Treasury stating in 2011 that it could not be sanctioned.
WikiLeaks turned to Bitcoin, cementing it as uncensorable money. Bitcoin was born from the same cypherpunk circles that saw the circulation of Timothy May’s — an engineer influential to Bitcoin development and co-founder of the cypherpunk mailing list — “Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.”
The document described encrypted exchanges that ensured total anonymity, freedom of speech and the freedom to trade, dating back to 1988. Most of the spotlight in crypto nowadays is on institutional adoption, regulatory breakthroughs and financial speculation, but the crypto community never stopped building for digital rights and privacy.
One can think of crypto privacy as operating in three layers. At the protocol layer, layer 2s (L2s) and privacy coins like Monero (XMR) use encryption, shielded pools and custom transaction formats to hide who’s paying whom and how much.
At the user layer, privacy depends on user prowess: wallet choice, address reuse, device fingerprints, network habits (VPN/Tor), privacy tools and general operational security (OpSec).
At the perimeter layer, fiat on- and off-ramps, such as crypto exchanges, banks, stablecoin issuers, and analytics firms that connect blockchain activity to real identities, can strip away protocol privacy earned on other layers.
Nathaniel Fried, the co-founder and CEO of 0xBow — the company behind Ethereum-based onchain privacy tool Privacy Pools — told Cointelegraph that the perimeter layer, and mostly fiat on- and off-ramps are a major privacy chokepoint. For compliance, such platforms test deposits using blockchain analytics services, which often exclude funds from most privacy-preserving services, he said.
Zachary Williamson, the co-founder and CEO of privacy-focused decentralized blockchain Aztec, told Cointelegraph that much of privacy protection should be handled for users. “It is not reasonable to expect users to have an advanced understanding of what information they are or aren’t broadcasting,” he said, adding that “this must be handled safely and automatically by the application layer.“
The new privacy tech stack
As explained above, acquiring privacy as a crypto user requires an approach that covers the protocol, user and perimeter layers. Williamson also recognized Privacy Pools as the only notable change in privacy tool availability in 2025.
The Privacy Pools user interface for the USDC (USDC) pool. Source: Privacy Pools
He said that the team “has been doing excellent work designing safer ways of transacting privately.” Williamson chose anoncoin Zcash (ZEC) as his recommendation for the protocol layer until Aztec’s mainnet launch.
Privacy Pools, as recommended by Fried, are a shared pool where users deposit and later withdraw with a zero-knowledge proof that their funds originated from a “clean” subset of deposits. This allows for anonymity while proving sanction compliance.
Still, correct use is essential and keeping the assets in the pool for some time helps ensure stronger anonymity. Fried pointed out that withdrawing back to the depositing address does not improve one’s privacy, and provided another example of bad usage:
“Sometimes we also see a very specific deposit amount come in eg. 0.2439 ETH and then see an immediate withdrawal of 0.02439, which definitely casts strong suspicions, but isn’t 100% necessarily the same user.”
Williamson and Fried both recommended Nym for network anonymity. Nym is a decentralized mixnet that chops traffic into fixed-size, layered-encrypted packets and routes them through multiple nodes with random delays and cover traffic, aiming to defeat global traffic analysis rather than just hide the IP address.
A Nym representative told Cointelegraph that “while a centralized VPN might protect your IP address and connection from outside parties, you’re simply placing your trust in the VPN provider, who can see both.”
Their system instead aims to prevent any part of the network from linking the user’s IP address to their assigned external address. “There’s no need to trust Nym, because Nym never knows,“ they said.
Compared to a standard VPN, it offers much stronger metadata privacy and less reliance on a single company. Still, it’s slower and less mature than a well-established traditional VPN, with critical issues being uncovered as recently as 2024. The Nym spokesperson highlighted that the issues were discovered during a security audit and resolved, while another audit is coming in 2026.
Williamson’s recommended communication tool was Signal — a journalist favorite that stores almost no user data and was revealed in March to have been used by senior US national security officials to plan strikes on the Houthis.
For documents, Fried recommends Fileverse: a decentralized, privacy-first end-to-end-encrypted alternative to Google Workspace and Notion that lets you collaborate on documents, spreadsheets and files onchain using decentralized storage and wallet-based access control. It was also recently praised by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
Developing truly decentralized, trustless and private systems that no one can control is generally significantly harder than building centralized equivalents. Still, regulatory pressure, rather than technical difficulty, is likely the top current obstacle to the development of crypto privacy.
On Nov. 19, the co-founders of the Bitcoin non-custodial wallet and mixer Samourai Wallet, Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill, were sentenced to four and five years in prison, respectively. They were found guilty of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business and facilitating transactions involving proceeds from criminal activity.
The sentence came despite Samourai never having control over the assets. Prosecutors argued that coordinating the transactions constituted a money transmission service despite lacking control over the funds.
Other instances highlighted that prosecutors tend to use any form of control to attribute responsibility. In 2023, prosecutors argued that developers of previously-sanctioned Ethereum-based decentralized crypto mixer Tornado Cash “chose not to implement Know Your Customer or Anti-Money Laundering programs as required by law” for money transmitting businesses.
In October, Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Storm asked decentralized finance developers, “How can you be so sure you won’t be charged by the [Department of Justice] as a money service business for building a non-custodial protocol?” He said prosecutors could claim that any service should have been developed as a custodial service, since he was prosecuted for failing to implement centralized control measures.
Eric Hill, former head of legal at decentralized finance protocol Lido and current counsel of Ethereum privacy protocol Railgun, told Cointelegraph that in order to avoid prosecution, projects should build on open-source technologies in a non-custodial, decentralized fashion “that does not meet definitions of financial services.”
Hill suggested avoiding the implementation of central control, holding administrators for protocol updates, profiting from transactions, and promoting to sanctioned entities and users. The service should be offered as a public good, he said:
“Total decentralization and lack of control by the builder are essential design choices.”
Niko Demchuk, the head of legal at crypto forensics firm AMLBot, told Cointelegraph that a non-custodial wallet would “generally not be categorized as a money transmitter simply because the tool allows users to conduct transactions without the tool itself taking custody of funds.” Still, he said it is not as clear-cut:
“Recent cases indicate that non-custodial services may also be subject to inquiry if they facilitate anonymized fund transfers with some relation to interstate or foreign commerce.”
Crypto lawyer Cal Evans told Cointelegraph that “a decentralized body or group, regardless of the governance protocol or how it is built, needs to structure itself properly.”
“The level of decentralization required to protect builders from criminal liability depends on the amount of functional control an individual has over operations,” Demchuk added.
Proposing pragmatic privacy
A crypto privacy trend that emerged in response to the regulatory pressure and is expected to increase in 2026 is the anonymization of assets while proving sanction compliance. “The realistic future of privacy is a pragmatic one,” 0xBow’s Fried said.
“Privacy developers need to take the concerns governments have around privacy seriously and publicly demonstrate they’re abiding by the relevant laws and regulations,” he said. Still, Fried highlighted that “the collection of users’ personal data” is “the line we’re not willing to cross.”
Williamson said he also believes in the vision Privacy Pools is building toward, noting that Aztec is moving in a similar direction. “I think it is essential to enable applications that users can use with the confidence that their participation does not help bad actors,” he said.
Aztec is a network that is moving closer to mainnet deployment, which is shaping up to be one of the most decentralized Ethereum L2s and very likely the most private. Much like Privacy Pools, the network follows a pragmatic privacy design principle.
Aztec plans to offer privacy-by-default while also providing private sanctions checks via anonymous proofs and selective disclosure features for users who want to undergo audits.
Crypto privacy entered the spotlight in 2025 as new technology clashed with regulators, a trend that is set to intensify in 2026 with developers pushing the envelope and legal battles approaching a conclusion.
In its early days, Bitcoin (BTC) was often viewed as an anonymous payment tool despite its transparency. Since then, the introduction of onchain analytics and surveillance has made it increasingly apparent that transparent blockchains are far from private.
This led to an arms race between pro-privacy developers, onchain surveillance organizations and regulators, culminating in high-profile legal cases. The developers of the decentralized Ether (ETH) mixer Tornado Cash are fighting over whether software development constitutes a financial service, and those behind the Bitcoin non-custodial mixer Samourai Wallet were recently sentenced to prison by a US court.
Despite this, privacy-focused development picked up this year. Industry experts suggest that while the privacy tool stack remained largely unchanged in 2025, those tools are expected to evolve in 2026 thanks to a new generation of “pragmatic privacy,” ensuring privacy and compliance with sanctions.
How we sleepwalked into traceable money
Payment processors being able to clearly determine the parties, products and services involved in transactions allows for censorship. This is far from a theoretical danger, with leading PC game distributor Steam and competitor Itch.io purging adult content in 2025 following pressure from payment processors. Before that, the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks was cut off by payment providers, despite the US Treasury stating in 2011 that it could not be sanctioned.
WikiLeaks turned to Bitcoin, cementing it as uncensorable money. Bitcoin was born from the same cypherpunk circles that saw the circulation of Timothy May’s — an engineer influential to Bitcoin development and co-founder of the cypherpunk mailing list — “Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.”
The document described encrypted exchanges that ensured total anonymity, freedom of speech and the freedom to trade, dating back to 1988. Most of the spotlight in crypto nowadays is on institutional adoption, regulatory breakthroughs and financial speculation, but the crypto community never stopped building for digital rights and privacy.
One can think of crypto privacy as operating in three layers. At the protocol layer, layer 2s (L2s) and privacy coins like Monero (XMR) use encryption, shielded pools and custom transaction formats to hide who’s paying whom and how much.
At the user layer, privacy depends on user prowess: wallet choice, address reuse, device fingerprints, network habits (VPN/Tor), privacy tools and general operational security (OpSec).
At the perimeter layer, fiat on- and off-ramps, such as crypto exchanges, banks, stablecoin issuers, and analytics firms that connect blockchain activity to real identities, can strip away protocol privacy earned on other layers.
Nathaniel Fried, the co-founder and CEO of 0xBow — the company behind Ethereum-based onchain privacy tool Privacy Pools — told Cointelegraph that the perimeter layer, and mostly fiat on- and off-ramps are a major privacy chokepoint. For compliance, such platforms test deposits using blockchain analytics services, which often exclude funds from most privacy-preserving services, he said.
Zachary Williamson, the co-founder and CEO of privacy-focused decentralized blockchain Aztec, told Cointelegraph that much of privacy protection should be handled for users. “It is not reasonable to expect users to have an advanced understanding of what information they are or aren’t broadcasting,” he said, adding that “this must be handled safely and automatically by the application layer.“
The new privacy tech stack
As explained above, acquiring privacy as a crypto user requires an approach that covers the protocol, user and perimeter layers. Williamson also recognized Privacy Pools as the only notable change in privacy tool availability in 2025.
The Privacy Pools user interface for the USDC (USDC) pool. Source: Privacy Pools
He said that the team “has been doing excellent work designing safer ways of transacting privately.” Williamson chose anoncoin Zcash (ZEC) as his recommendation for the protocol layer until Aztec’s mainnet launch.
Privacy Pools, as recommended by Fried, are a shared pool where users deposit and later withdraw with a zero-knowledge proof that their funds originated from a “clean” subset of deposits. This allows for anonymity while proving sanction compliance.
Still, correct use is essential and keeping the assets in the pool for some time helps ensure stronger anonymity. Fried pointed out that withdrawing back to the depositing address does not improve one’s privacy, and provided another example of bad usage:
“Sometimes we also see a very specific deposit amount come in eg. 0.2439 ETH and then see an immediate withdrawal of 0.02439, which definitely casts strong suspicions, but isn’t 100% necessarily the same user.”
Williamson and Fried both recommended Nym for network anonymity. Nym is a decentralized mixnet that chops traffic into fixed-size, layered-encrypted packets and routes them through multiple nodes with random delays and cover traffic, aiming to defeat global traffic analysis rather than just hide the IP address.
A Nym representative told Cointelegraph that “while a centralized VPN might protect your IP address and connection from outside parties, you’re simply placing your trust in the VPN provider, who can see both.”
Their system instead aims to prevent any part of the network from linking the user’s IP address to their assigned external address. “There’s no need to trust Nym, because Nym never knows,“ they said.
Compared to a standard VPN, it offers much stronger metadata privacy and less reliance on a single company. Still, it’s slower and less mature than a well-established traditional VPN, with critical issues being uncovered as recently as 2024. The Nym spokesperson highlighted that the issues were discovered during a security audit and resolved, while another audit is coming in 2026.
Williamson’s recommended communication tool was Signal — a journalist favorite that stores almost no user data and was revealed in March to have been used by senior US national security officials to plan strikes on the Houthis.
For documents, Fried recommends Fileverse: a decentralized, privacy-first end-to-end-encrypted alternative to Google Workspace and Notion that lets you collaborate on documents, spreadsheets and files onchain using decentralized storage and wallet-based access control. It was also recently praised by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
Developing truly decentralized, trustless and private systems that no one can control is generally significantly harder than building centralized equivalents. Still, regulatory pressure, rather than technical difficulty, is likely the top current obstacle to the development of crypto privacy.
On Nov. 19, the co-founders of the Bitcoin non-custodial wallet and mixer Samourai Wallet, Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill, were sentenced to four and five years in prison, respectively. They were found guilty of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business and facilitating transactions involving proceeds from criminal activity.
The sentence came despite Samourai never having control over the assets. Prosecutors argued that coordinating the transactions constituted a money transmission service despite lacking control over the funds.
Other instances highlighted that prosecutors tend to use any form of control to attribute responsibility. In 2023, prosecutors argued that developers of previously-sanctioned Ethereum-based decentralized crypto mixer Tornado Cash “chose not to implement Know Your Customer or Anti-Money Laundering programs as required by law” for money transmitting businesses.
In October, Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Storm asked decentralized finance developers, “How can you be so sure you won’t be charged by the [Department of Justice] as a money service business for building a non-custodial protocol?” He said prosecutors could claim that any service should have been developed as a custodial service, since he was prosecuted for failing to implement centralized control measures.
Eric Hill, former head of legal at decentralized finance protocol Lido and current counsel of Ethereum privacy protocol Railgun, told Cointelegraph that in order to avoid prosecution, projects should build on open-source technologies in a non-custodial, decentralized fashion “that does not meet definitions of financial services.”
Hill suggested avoiding the implementation of central control, holding administrators for protocol updates, profiting from transactions, and promoting to sanctioned entities and users. The service should be offered as a public good, he said:
“Total decentralization and lack of control by the builder are essential design choices.”
Niko Demchuk, the head of legal at crypto forensics firm AMLBot, told Cointelegraph that a non-custodial wallet would “generally not be categorized as a money transmitter simply because the tool allows users to conduct transactions without the tool itself taking custody of funds.” Still, he said it is not as clear-cut:
“Recent cases indicate that non-custodial services may also be subject to inquiry if they facilitate anonymized fund transfers with some relation to interstate or foreign commerce.”
Crypto lawyer Cal Evans told Cointelegraph that “a decentralized body or group, regardless of the governance protocol or how it is built, needs to structure itself properly.”
“The level of decentralization required to protect builders from criminal liability depends on the amount of functional control an individual has over operations,” Demchuk added.
Proposing pragmatic privacy
A crypto privacy trend that emerged in response to the regulatory pressure and is expected to increase in 2026 is the anonymization of assets while proving sanction compliance. “The realistic future of privacy is a pragmatic one,” 0xBow’s Fried said.
“Privacy developers need to take the concerns governments have around privacy seriously and publicly demonstrate they’re abiding by the relevant laws and regulations,” he said. Still, Fried highlighted that “the collection of users’ personal data” is “the line we’re not willing to cross.”
Williamson said he also believes in the vision Privacy Pools is building toward, noting that Aztec is moving in a similar direction. “I think it is essential to enable applications that users can use with the confidence that their participation does not help bad actors,” he said.
Aztec is a network that is moving closer to mainnet deployment, which is shaping up to be one of the most decentralized Ethereum L2s and very likely the most private. Much like Privacy Pools, the network follows a pragmatic privacy design principle.
Aztec plans to offer privacy-by-default while also providing private sanctions checks via anonymous proofs and selective disclosure features for users who want to undergo audits.
Crypto privacy entered the spotlight in 2025 as new technology clashed with regulators, a trend that is set to intensify in 2026 with developers pushing the envelope and legal battles approaching a conclusion.
In its early days, Bitcoin (BTC) was often viewed as an anonymous payment tool despite its transparency. Since then, the introduction of onchain analytics and surveillance has made it increasingly apparent that transparent blockchains are far from private.
This led to an arms race between pro-privacy developers, onchain surveillance organizations and regulators, culminating in high-profile legal cases. The developers of the decentralized Ether (ETH) mixer Tornado Cash are fighting over whether software development constitutes a financial service, and those behind the Bitcoin non-custodial mixer Samourai Wallet were recently sentenced to prison by a US court.
Despite this, privacy-focused development picked up this year. Industry experts suggest that while the privacy tool stack remained largely unchanged in 2025, those tools are expected to evolve in 2026 thanks to a new generation of “pragmatic privacy,” ensuring privacy and compliance with sanctions.
How we sleepwalked into traceable money
Payment processors being able to clearly determine the parties, products and services involved in transactions allows for censorship. This is far from a theoretical danger, with leading PC game distributor Steam and competitor Itch.io purging adult content in 2025 following pressure from payment processors. Before that, the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks was cut off by payment providers, despite the US Treasury stating in 2011 that it could not be sanctioned.
WikiLeaks turned to Bitcoin, cementing it as uncensorable money. Bitcoin was born from the same cypherpunk circles that saw the circulation of Timothy May’s — an engineer influential to Bitcoin development and co-founder of the cypherpunk mailing list — “Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.”
The document described encrypted exchanges that ensured total anonymity, freedom of speech and the freedom to trade, dating back to 1988. Most of the spotlight in crypto nowadays is on institutional adoption, regulatory breakthroughs and financial speculation, but the crypto community never stopped building for digital rights and privacy.
One can think of crypto privacy as operating in three layers. At the protocol layer, layer 2s (L2s) and privacy coins like Monero (XMR) use encryption, shielded pools and custom transaction formats to hide who’s paying whom and how much.
At the user layer, privacy depends on user prowess: wallet choice, address reuse, device fingerprints, network habits (VPN/Tor), privacy tools and general operational security (OpSec).
At the perimeter layer, fiat on- and off-ramps, such as crypto exchanges, banks, stablecoin issuers, and analytics firms that connect blockchain activity to real identities, can strip away protocol privacy earned on other layers.
Nathaniel Fried, the co-founder and CEO of 0xBow — the company behind Ethereum-based onchain privacy tool Privacy Pools — told Cointelegraph that the perimeter layer, and mostly fiat on- and off-ramps are a major privacy chokepoint. For compliance, such platforms test deposits using blockchain analytics services, which often exclude funds from most privacy-preserving services, he said.
Zachary Williamson, the co-founder and CEO of privacy-focused decentralized blockchain Aztec, told Cointelegraph that much of privacy protection should be handled for users. “It is not reasonable to expect users to have an advanced understanding of what information they are or aren’t broadcasting,” he said, adding that “this must be handled safely and automatically by the application layer.“
The new privacy tech stack
As explained above, acquiring privacy as a crypto user requires an approach that covers the protocol, user and perimeter layers. Williamson also recognized Privacy Pools as the only notable change in privacy tool availability in 2025.
The Privacy Pools user interface for the USDC (USDC) pool. Source: Privacy Pools
He said that the team “has been doing excellent work designing safer ways of transacting privately.” Williamson chose anoncoin Zcash (ZEC) as his recommendation for the protocol layer until Aztec’s mainnet launch.
Privacy Pools, as recommended by Fried, are a shared pool where users deposit and later withdraw with a zero-knowledge proof that their funds originated from a “clean” subset of deposits. This allows for anonymity while proving sanction compliance.
Still, correct use is essential and keeping the assets in the pool for some time helps ensure stronger anonymity. Fried pointed out that withdrawing back to the depositing address does not improve one’s privacy, and provided another example of bad usage:
“Sometimes we also see a very specific deposit amount come in eg. 0.2439 ETH and then see an immediate withdrawal of 0.02439, which definitely casts strong suspicions, but isn’t 100% necessarily the same user.”
Williamson and Fried both recommended Nym for network anonymity. Nym is a decentralized mixnet that chops traffic into fixed-size, layered-encrypted packets and routes them through multiple nodes with random delays and cover traffic, aiming to defeat global traffic analysis rather than just hide the IP address.
A Nym representative told Cointelegraph that “while a centralized VPN might protect your IP address and connection from outside parties, you’re simply placing your trust in the VPN provider, who can see both.”
Their system instead aims to prevent any part of the network from linking the user’s IP address to their assigned external address. “There’s no need to trust Nym, because Nym never knows,“ they said.
Compared to a standard VPN, it offers much stronger metadata privacy and less reliance on a single company. Still, it’s slower and less mature than a well-established traditional VPN, with critical issues being uncovered as recently as 2024. The Nym spokesperson highlighted that the issues were discovered during a security audit and resolved, while another audit is coming in 2026.
Williamson’s recommended communication tool was Signal — a journalist favorite that stores almost no user data and was revealed in March to have been used by senior US national security officials to plan strikes on the Houthis.
For documents, Fried recommends Fileverse: a decentralized, privacy-first end-to-end-encrypted alternative to Google Workspace and Notion that lets you collaborate on documents, spreadsheets and files onchain using decentralized storage and wallet-based access control. It was also recently praised by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
Developing truly decentralized, trustless and private systems that no one can control is generally significantly harder than building centralized equivalents. Still, regulatory pressure, rather than technical difficulty, is likely the top current obstacle to the development of crypto privacy.
On Nov. 19, the co-founders of the Bitcoin non-custodial wallet and mixer Samourai Wallet, Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill, were sentenced to four and five years in prison, respectively. They were found guilty of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business and facilitating transactions involving proceeds from criminal activity.
The sentence came despite Samourai never having control over the assets. Prosecutors argued that coordinating the transactions constituted a money transmission service despite lacking control over the funds.
Other instances highlighted that prosecutors tend to use any form of control to attribute responsibility. In 2023, prosecutors argued that developers of previously-sanctioned Ethereum-based decentralized crypto mixer Tornado Cash “chose not to implement Know Your Customer or Anti-Money Laundering programs as required by law” for money transmitting businesses.
In October, Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Storm asked decentralized finance developers, “How can you be so sure you won’t be charged by the [Department of Justice] as a money service business for building a non-custodial protocol?” He said prosecutors could claim that any service should have been developed as a custodial service, since he was prosecuted for failing to implement centralized control measures.
Eric Hill, former head of legal at decentralized finance protocol Lido and current counsel of Ethereum privacy protocol Railgun, told Cointelegraph that in order to avoid prosecution, projects should build on open-source technologies in a non-custodial, decentralized fashion “that does not meet definitions of financial services.”
Hill suggested avoiding the implementation of central control, holding administrators for protocol updates, profiting from transactions, and promoting to sanctioned entities and users. The service should be offered as a public good, he said:
“Total decentralization and lack of control by the builder are essential design choices.”
Niko Demchuk, the head of legal at crypto forensics firm AMLBot, told Cointelegraph that a non-custodial wallet would “generally not be categorized as a money transmitter simply because the tool allows users to conduct transactions without the tool itself taking custody of funds.” Still, he said it is not as clear-cut:
“Recent cases indicate that non-custodial services may also be subject to inquiry if they facilitate anonymized fund transfers with some relation to interstate or foreign commerce.”
Crypto lawyer Cal Evans told Cointelegraph that “a decentralized body or group, regardless of the governance protocol or how it is built, needs to structure itself properly.”
“The level of decentralization required to protect builders from criminal liability depends on the amount of functional control an individual has over operations,” Demchuk added.
Proposing pragmatic privacy
A crypto privacy trend that emerged in response to the regulatory pressure and is expected to increase in 2026 is the anonymization of assets while proving sanction compliance. “The realistic future of privacy is a pragmatic one,” 0xBow’s Fried said.
“Privacy developers need to take the concerns governments have around privacy seriously and publicly demonstrate they’re abiding by the relevant laws and regulations,” he said. Still, Fried highlighted that “the collection of users’ personal data” is “the line we’re not willing to cross.”
Williamson said he also believes in the vision Privacy Pools is building toward, noting that Aztec is moving in a similar direction. “I think it is essential to enable applications that users can use with the confidence that their participation does not help bad actors,” he said.
Aztec is a network that is moving closer to mainnet deployment, which is shaping up to be one of the most decentralized Ethereum L2s and very likely the most private. Much like Privacy Pools, the network follows a pragmatic privacy design principle.
Aztec plans to offer privacy-by-default while also providing private sanctions checks via anonymous proofs and selective disclosure features for users who want to undergo audits.
JPMorgan tokenized a money market fund and launched it on the Ethereum mainnet.
The fund holds US Treasurys and Treasury-backed repos, with daily dividend reinvestment.
Public Ethereum places MONY alongside stablecoins, tokenized treasuries and existing onchain liquidity.
Now the focus shifts to collateral use, secondary transfers and whether other major banks follow.
JPMorgan Asset Management has placed a very traditional product on the Ethereum blockchain: a tokenized money market fund called the My OnChain Net Yield Fund (MONY).
It launched on Dec. 15, 2025, and runs on the bank’s Kinexys Digital Assets platform. Investors access the fund through Morgan Money, with ownership interests issued as blockchain tokens delivered directly to their onchain addresses.
This is significant because money market funds are a common vehicle institutions use to park short-term cash. They are built for liquidity and steady yield and are typically backed by plain-vanilla assets.
MONY fits that profile exactly. It invests in US Treasurys and Treasury-collateralized repos, offers daily dividend reinvestment and allows qualified investors to subscribe and redeem using cash or stablecoins. JPMorgan has also said it is seeding the fund internally before opening it more broadly.
The decision to use Ethereum as the settlement layer makes the launch even more notable.
Did you know? A Treasury-collateralized repo is essentially a short-term, secured loan. One party provides cash, the other posts US Treasurys as collateral, and both agree to reverse the trade later at a slightly higher price. The difference between the two prices represents the interest.
So, what exactly has JPMorgan launched?
MONY is a money market fund delivered onchain. Investors purchase fund interests backed by a conservative cash portfolio of US Treasury securities and repurchase agreements fully collateralized by Treasurys, with ownership represented as a token sent to the investor’s Ethereum address.
The setup runs through two JPMorgan systems:
Morgan Money is the interface where qualified investors subscribe, redeem and manage positions.
Kinexys Digital Assets is the tokenization layer that issues and administers the onchain representation of those fund interests.
The idea is that tokenization can improve transparency, support peer-to-peer transfers and open the door to using these positions as collateral in blockchain-based markets.
On the product side, MONY keeps the mechanics familiar, with daily dividend reinvestment and subscriptions and redemptions handled through Morgan Money using cash or stablecoins.
Why “public Ethereum” is so interesting
JPMorgan wants to plug into onchain systems that counterparties already use, including stablecoins for settlement, custody and reporting workflows, analytics, compliance tooling and distribution pipes.
Ethereum also sits where crypto’s cash activity is concentrated. RWA.xyz estimates stablecoins at roughly $299 billion, forming the liquidity base that tokenized funds repeatedly interact with for settlement and cash management.
On the cash-like asset side, tokenized Treasurys total $8.96 billion. A money market-style product sits adjacent here because it sits alongside the assets and behaviors investors already use to park funds, move liquidity and post collateral.
Then there is reach. RWA.xyz’s network table shows Ethereum holding about two-thirds of the total tokenized RWA value.
For a regulated product that needs to move between approved counterparties, that concentration matters.
Did you know? “Public Ethereum” refers to the Ethereum mainnet, the open network anyone can use. People often say “Ethereum” to mean the same thing, but adding “public” makes it explicit that this is not a private, permissioned, bank-run Ethereum-style network.
When cash yield goes onchain
MONY’s portfolio remains conservative, holding US Treasurys and Treasury-collateralized repos with daily dividend reinvestment, while ownership is represented as a token at an investor’s blockchain address. Once yield-bearing cash sits onchain, it can begin to integrate into other workflows.
1) 24/7 treasury operations
Positions can sit alongside stablecoin balances and other tokenized assets, with subscriptions and redemptions routed through Morgan Money and the token layer handled by Kinexys Digital Assets. For institutions that already run parts of their cash and settlement flow onchain, this creates a much tighter loop.
2) Collateral mobility
JPMorgan highlights the potential for broader collateral usage, alongside transparency and peer-to-peer transferability. Collateral is where time and cost tend to accumulate through eligibility checks, handoffs, settlement timing and transfer controls. A tokenized money market fund share gives approved parties a simpler way to pass value, settle faster and enforce who can hold it through onchain rules.
3) The cash leg for tokenized markets
Tokenized securities, funds and real-world assets (RWAs) still need a place to park liquidity between trades and settlements. A yield-bearing cash product on Ethereum fits naturally into that role as onchain markets continue to scale.
The competitive landscape
MONY enters a lane that is already crowded with serious players.
BlackRock’s BUIDL launched in 2024 as a tokenized fund on Ethereum, with recent updates leaning into features institutions actually use, including daily dividends, 24/7 peer-to-peer transfers, broader network coverage and moves toward collateral integrations.
Franklin Templeton has been advancing the same idea with its onchain money market fund, where BENJI tokens represent shares in FOBXX.
Then there is the market infrastructure layer. BNY Mellon and Goldman Sachs have been discussing record-tokenization approaches aimed at making existing money market fund shares easier to move through institutional workflows.
The market appears to be in the midst of a buildout phase, with tokenized cash products, improved transfer infrastructure and clearer paths into collateral usage.
McKinsey’s base case estimates tokenized financial assets at around $2 trillion by 2030, excluding crypto and stablecoins.
Meanwhile, Calastone estimates more than $24 billion in tokenized assets under management as of June 2025, with money market and Treasury bond funds making up a meaningful share.
Practicality and impact
MONY brings a regulated cash product onto public Ethereum, with access remaining tightly gated. It is offered as a Rule 506(c) private placement for qualified investors, with distribution running through Morgan Money. Eligibility checks sit at the center of the product, and the investor base remains narrowly defined.
That structure shapes how the token can move. A tokenized fund share can embed transfer rules, compliance gates and operational controls that determine who is allowed to hold it, who can receive it and how redemption works in different scenarios. JPMorgan’s risk disclosures around the product and blockchain usage point to an institutional-grade rollout designed around control and auditability.
The Ethereum mainnet is the launch venue, and usage patterns can shift with economics. Mainnet fees and operational overhead influence how often assets move and can steer decisions on scaling paths over time, including potential activity on layer 2s as volumes grow.
It is worth watching how this evolves as the product’s real-world cadence emerges.
Did you know? Rule 506(c) is a US securities exemption that allows an issuer to publicly market a private offering, provided all buyers are accredited investors and the issuer verifies that status.
What now?
Three signals will show how far this goes.
First, whether MONY tokens begin to appear as usable collateral within broader onchain workflows, such as repo-style arrangements, secured borrowing, hedging and prime-brokerage-style rails, aligning with JPMorgan’s emphasis on “broader collateral usage.”
Second, whether other global systemically important banks (GSIBs) follow JPMorgan onto public chains. If peers replicate the settlement-layer choice, it will signal that public infrastructure is becoming a leading venue for tokenized cash products.
Third, whether stablecoin settlement, including USDC (USDC) in reported coverage, expands beyond subscriptions and redemptions into secondary transfers and deeper integrations. That is the point where distribution begins to resemble market infrastructure rather than a wrapped fund product.
If MONY is accepted as collateral and begins to move through secondary transfers, not just subscriptions and redemptions, it becomes part of the settlement cycle rather than a boxed-up money market fund.
If other GSIBs launch similar cash products on the Ethereum mainnet, that would indicate a potential default venue if the trend continues for tokenized cash.
This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision. While we strive to provide accurate and timely information, Cointelegraph does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of any information in this article. This article may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Cointelegraph will not be liable for any loss or damage arising from your reliance on this information.
A recently divorced Bitcoin investor lost his entire retirement fund, one full Bitcoin, to an AI-powered romance scam orchestrated by a sophisticated criminal using deepfakes.
Pig butchering scams are relationship-based frauds that rely on emotional manipulation and AI-generated deepfakes to build trust before extracting maximum financial value from victims.
The scammer used AI to create synthetic portraits and conduct real-time deepfake video calls, making the fabricated relationship virtually indistinguishable from reality.
Once cryptocurrency is transferred via a blockchain, recovery is nearly impossible. Unlike bank transfers, there are no chargebacks, reversals or consumer protections available to victims.
When a recently divorced Bitcoin (BTC) investor finally reached the milestone of owning one full Bitcoin, he believed his financial future was secure. Within days, however, an elaborate scheme orchestrated by a sophisticated scammer using AI stripped away his entire retirement savings and left him devastated.
His story, shared by Bitcoin security adviser Terence Michael, offers a critical lesson in how emotional manipulation, combined with modern AI technologies, has weaponized traditional scams to target cryptocurrency holders.
Understanding the pig-butchering framework
Before examining the specifics of this case, it is essential to understand what security experts call “pig butchering” scams. Unlike traditional cryptocurrency hacks that target wallets directly, these schemes are relationship-based frauds that rely entirely on psychological manipulation. The term, borrowed from the agricultural practice of fattening an animal before slaughter, describes how scammers gradually build trust and emotional connection with their victims before extracting maximum value.
The fundamental difference is critical. Victims willingly send their funds, believing they are making sound investments or supporting someone they love. This consent-based manipulation makes these schemes extraordinarily difficult for fraud detection systems to identify, as the transactions themselves appear legitimate on the surface.
According to a report by Cyvers, a blockchain security platform, the average grooming period for victims lasts between one and two weeks in roughly one-third of cases, while approximately 10% of victims endure grooming periods spanning one to three months. This extended timeline underscores the sophistication of these operations. Scammers understand that patience and consistency build credibility far more effectively than rushing the process.
How the scam unfolded: The AI advantage
In this case, the scammer employed a sophisticated, multi-layered approach that leveraged AI. The victim was first approached through an unsolicited message from someone claiming to be an attractive female trader.
The scammer offered to help double the investor’s Bitcoin holdings, a promise designed to appeal to both greed and the desire for financial security, particularly for someone navigating a recent divorce.
What made this scheme exponentially more powerful than traditional romance scams was the integration of AI technology. Rather than relying on stolen photos or crude image editing, the scammer used AI to generate entirely synthetic portraits that appeared convincingly realistic. These AI-generated identities are nearly indistinguishable from real people to the untrained eye.
During video calls, the scammer employed even more sophisticated technology. Live deepfake video generation overlaid a fabricated face onto the scammer’s actual body in real time. Advanced systems can now maintain lip-sync accuracy across different lighting conditions, creating the illusion of a genuine human connection so convincing that even skeptical viewers struggle to detect the deception.
The emotional dimension cannot be overstated. The scammer professed romantic feelings, discussed future plans and constructed an elaborate narrative of a woman who appeared to care deeply about the investor’s financial well-being. The victim was even convinced to purchase a plane ticket to meet in person, deepening the psychological investment. This personal connection proved far more persuasive than any technical security measure.
Vulnerability and life circumstances
The specific targeting of a recently divorced individual was not random. It was calculated predation. Divorce creates acute vulnerability, including emotional isolation, diminished self-esteem and a psychological void that scammers are trained to exploit. Scammers actively recruit victims who fit specific profiles, such as older individuals, recent divorcees, widows, widowers and those expressing loneliness online.
This case highlights a critical blind spot in modern fraud prevention. Traditional banking fraud detection systems are designed to flag unusual transactions, not to recognize psychological coercion. The victim’s Bitcoin transfers appeared completely normal to automated systems, consisting of regular amounts over time rather than a single large withdrawal. This gradual escalation is deliberately designed to bypass algorithmic detection.
The scale of the problem
In 2024, pig butchering scams cost victims $5.5 billion across roughly 200,000 individual cases, averaging $27,500 per victim, according to Chainalysis. The company has also classified these scams as a national security concern. Romance scam losses exceeded $1.34 billion in 2024 and 2025, with the Federal Trade Commission reporting that 40% of online daters have been targeted by romance scams.
AI has made these schemes exponentially more scalable. Listed below are several ways to protect yourself from these scams:
Verify identity through multiple channels: Request live video calls rather than accepting pre-recorded messages. Look for unnatural eye movement, inconsistent blinking and warped edges where the face meets the neck, which are common deepfake indicators.
Be skeptical of rapid relationship progression: Genuine relationships develop gradually. Declarations of love within days, especially when paired with investment opportunities, should trigger immediate suspicion.
Consult trusted advisers before moving funds: Reaching out to security professionals or financial advisers before transferring cryptocurrency can provide a rational perspective when judgment may be compromised.
Recognize that legitimate traders do not date clients: Professional investment advisers maintain clear ethical boundaries. Someone offering both romance and investment opportunities should be treated as a serious red flag.
Understand irreversibility: Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies offer no consumer protections, such as chargebacks or reversals. Once funds are transferred, recovery is typically impossible.
Vigilance over vulnerability
The investor’s loss, a full Bitcoin, represents not merely a financial setback but a profound emotional trauma that extends far beyond monetary terms. Beyond the devastating financial impact, he faced the psychological shock of discovering that the romantic relationship was entirely fabricated, the emotional intimacy false, the future plans imaginary and his trust completely violated by a criminal operating across multiple time zones.
His story serves as a cautionary narrative for cryptocurrency holders. Technical security is only one layer of protection. Personal vigilance, skepticism toward unsolicited contact, emotional awareness and consultation with trusted advisers form an equally critical defense perimeter.
As AI makes deception increasingly sophisticated, human judgment, informed and grounded in healthy skepticism, remains the most powerful safeguard against scams designed to exploit deep human needs for connection and security. The lesson is not to distrust online relationships entirely, but to recognize that the convergence of romantic interest and financial opportunity demands extraordinary caution before any funds change hands.
This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision. While we strive to provide accurate and timely information, Cointelegraph does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of any information in this article. This article may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Cointelegraph will not be liable for any loss or damage arising from your reliance on this information.
