Crypto entrepreneurs and their families in France will receive enhanced security measures amid a recent rise in crypto-related kidnappings in the country, Politico reported.

According to the May 16 report, the measures include priority access to police emergency lines, home security assessments, and safety briefings from French law enforcement to ensure best practices are being followed.

France’s Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau introduced the security measures as part of a broader effort to counter the recent wave of attacks.

“These repeated kidnappings of professionals in the crypto sector will be fought with specific tools, both immediate and short-term, to prevent, dissuade and hinder in order to protect the industry.”

Law enforcement officers will also undergo “anti-crypto asset laundering training,” Retailleau noted.

Retailleau met with several local leaders from the crypto industry to discuss the measures following three crypto-related kidnapping incidents in recent months.

Two kidnappings and a failed attempt in France this year

The latest incident occurred on May 13, when assailants attempted to abduct the daughter and grandson of Pierre Noizat, CEO of the French crypto platform Paymium. Fortunately, they managed to fend off the attack, which occurred in broad daylight. 

The assailants tried to force the pair into a waiting van, but Noizat’s daughter managed to take one of the guns off an assailant and throw it away, local police said.

En plein Paris, un homme a été violenté par des individus cagoulés, habillés tout en noir. Ils tentaient de l’enlever. Un homme a surgi, extincteur à la main, pour les faire fuir. →https://t.co/P0qV6PR40v pic.twitter.com/9f4r2Gi7ho

— Le Figaro (@Le_Figaro) May 13, 2025

On May 3, Paris police freed the father of a crypto entrepreneur who was held for several days in connection with a 7 million euros ($7.8 million) kidnapping plot.

Related: SEC hacker sentenced to 14 months in prison

In January, the co-founder of crypto hardware wallet provider Ledger, David Balland, was abducted from his home in central France during the early hours of Jan. 21. He was held captive until a police operation on the night of Jan. 22 secured his release.

Retailleau said earlier this week that he believes the incidents were likely connected.

There have been over 150 crypto-related robbery or kidnapping incidents since 2014, with 23 of those incidents occurring in 2025 alone, according to a GitHub database maintained by Bitcoin cypherpunk Jameson Lopp.

Lopp noted many of these criminals typically identify future victims through social media posts, public conversations, meetups, and conferences.

He strongly advises against peer-to-peer trades — particularly with people you don’t trust — flaunting wealth on social media and wearing crypto-branded clothing.

Magazine: Binance Wallet ‘killing’ MetaMask and airdrops, Chinese RWA tokens

Crypto entrepreneurs and their families in France will receive enhanced security measures amid a recent rise in crypto-related kidnappings in the country, Politico reported.

According to the May 16 report, the measures include priority access to police emergency lines, home security assessments, and safety briefings from French law enforcement to ensure best practices are being followed.

France’s Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau introduced the security measures as part of a broader effort to counter the recent wave of attacks.

“These repeated kidnappings of professionals in the crypto sector will be fought with specific tools, both immediate and short-term, to prevent, dissuade and hinder in order to protect the industry.”

Law enforcement officers will also undergo “anti-crypto asset laundering training,” Retailleau noted.

Retailleau met with several local leaders from the crypto industry to discuss the measures following three crypto-related kidnapping incidents in recent months.

Two kidnappings and a failed attempt in France this year

The latest incident occurred on May 13, when assailants attempted to abduct the daughter and grandson of Pierre Noizat, CEO of the French crypto platform Paymium. Fortunately, they managed to fend off the attack, which occurred in broad daylight. 

The assailants tried to force the pair into a waiting van, but Noizat’s daughter managed to take one of the guns off an assailant and throw it away, local police said.

En plein Paris, un homme a été violenté par des individus cagoulés, habillés tout en noir. Ils tentaient de l’enlever. Un homme a surgi, extincteur à la main, pour les faire fuir. →https://t.co/P0qV6PR40v pic.twitter.com/9f4r2Gi7ho

— Le Figaro (@Le_Figaro) May 13, 2025

On May 3, Paris police freed the father of a crypto entrepreneur who was held for several days in connection with a 7 million euros ($7.8 million) kidnapping plot.

Related: SEC hacker sentenced to 14 months in prison

In January, the co-founder of crypto hardware wallet provider Ledger, David Balland, was abducted from his home in central France during the early hours of Jan. 21. He was held captive until a police operation on the night of Jan. 22 secured his release.

Retailleau said earlier this week that he believes the incidents were likely connected.

There have been over 150 crypto-related robbery or kidnapping incidents since 2014, with 23 of those incidents occurring in 2025 alone, according to a GitHub database maintained by Bitcoin cypherpunk Jameson Lopp.

Lopp noted many of these criminals typically identify future victims through social media posts, public conversations, meetups, and conferences.

He strongly advises against peer-to-peer trades — particularly with people you don’t trust — flaunting wealth on social media and wearing crypto-branded clothing.

Magazine: Binance Wallet ‘killing’ MetaMask and airdrops, Chinese RWA tokens

Crypto entrepreneurs and their families in France will receive enhanced security measures amid a recent rise in crypto-related kidnappings in the country, Politico reported.

According to the May 16 report, the measures include priority access to police emergency lines, home security assessments, and safety briefings from French law enforcement to ensure best practices are being followed.

France’s Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau introduced the security measures as part of a broader effort to counter the recent wave of attacks.

“These repeated kidnappings of professionals in the crypto sector will be fought with specific tools, both immediate and short-term, to prevent, dissuade and hinder in order to protect the industry.”

Law enforcement officers will also undergo “anti-crypto asset laundering training,” Retailleau noted.

Retailleau met with several local leaders from the crypto industry to discuss the measures following three crypto-related kidnapping incidents in recent months.

Two kidnappings and a failed attempt in France this year

The latest incident occurred on May 13, when assailants attempted to abduct the daughter and grandson of Pierre Noizat, CEO of the French crypto platform Paymium. Fortunately, they managed to fend off the attack, which occurred in broad daylight. 

The assailants tried to force the pair into a waiting van, but Noizat’s daughter managed to take one of the guns off an assailant and throw it away, local police said.

En plein Paris, un homme a été violenté par des individus cagoulés, habillés tout en noir. Ils tentaient de l’enlever. Un homme a surgi, extincteur à la main, pour les faire fuir. →https://t.co/P0qV6PR40v pic.twitter.com/9f4r2Gi7ho

— Le Figaro (@Le_Figaro) May 13, 2025

On May 3, Paris police freed the father of a crypto entrepreneur who was held for several days in connection with a 7 million euros ($7.8 million) kidnapping plot.

Related: SEC hacker sentenced to 14 months in prison

In January, the co-founder of crypto hardware wallet provider Ledger, David Balland, was abducted from his home in central France during the early hours of Jan. 21. He was held captive until a police operation on the night of Jan. 22 secured his release.

Retailleau said earlier this week that he believes the incidents were likely connected.

There have been over 150 crypto-related robbery or kidnapping incidents since 2014, with 23 of those incidents occurring in 2025 alone, according to a GitHub database maintained by Bitcoin cypherpunk Jameson Lopp.

Lopp noted many of these criminals typically identify future victims through social media posts, public conversations, meetups, and conferences.

He strongly advises against peer-to-peer trades — particularly with people you don’t trust — flaunting wealth on social media and wearing crypto-branded clothing.

Magazine: Binance Wallet ‘killing’ MetaMask and airdrops, Chinese RWA tokens

Tokenization could open new opportunities for retail investors to access traditionally restricted asset classes, according to Johann Kerbrat, senior vice president and general manager of Robinhood Crypto, who called it “very important for financial inclusion.”

Speaking at the Consensus 2025 event in Toronto, Kerbrat said that some real-world assets, such as real estate and private equity, are available only to up to 10% of the US population. “You need to be an accredited investor to invest in private equity right now,” he said.

“How many people can afford a house or an apartment in New York?” he elaborated. “But you can get a piece of it with fractionalization, through tokenization. And so we think it makes it a lot easier to be exchanged, a lot more accessible for everybody.”

Robinhood’s Johann Kerbrat at Consensus 2025. Source: Cointelegraph

Robinhood has been one of a handful of investment firms or brokerages that have explored RWA tokenization in recent months. Others include BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Apollo, and VanEck.

RWA tokenization is often touted as a means to enhance financial accessibility, with most tokenized funds currently concentrated on the private credit and US treasury markets. According to RWA.xyz on May 16, the total market capitalization of onchain RWA is $22.5 billion across just 101,457 asset holders. On average, each holder owns $221,867 in onchain assets.

Related: MultiBank, MAG, Mavryk ink world’s largest $3B RWA tokenization deal

Stablecoin evolution will create more ‘specialized’ tokens

Kerbrat also touched on stablecoins, which have emerged as a key crypto use case this cycle. “You will see 100 stablecoins,” he predicted.

Kerbrat expects a rise in stablecoins that are “more specialized in a specific market.” According to DefiLlama, dollar-pegged stablecoins dominate the stablecoin sector. The two largest, Tether’s USDt (USDT) and Circle’s USDC (USDC), account for $211.8 billion or 87.1% of the $243.3 billion stablecoin market cap.

“If you’re trying to move funds from the US to Singapore, maybe you will use a specific stablecoin,” he said. “The shift is going to go from just stablecoin to platforms that are managing all these stablecoins.”

Tether’s USDT has seen its market share surge over the past few years. Source: DefiLlama

Fireblocks policy chief Dea Markova recently told Cointelegraph that there is a growing demand for non-dollar-pegged stablecoins. In April, the Italian finance minister warned that dollar-pegged stablecoins represent a greater risk than US President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

Magazine: Ethereum is destroying the competition in the $16.1T TradFi tokenization race

The Filecoin Foundation and Lockheed Martin Space have successfully transmitted data in space using a version of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) on a satellite orbiting Earth, Marta Belcher, president of the Filecoin Foundation, told Cointelegraph. 

Filecoin and Lockheed Martin adapted the system for use in space and successfully tested it, Belcher said during the Consensus 2025 conference in Toronto.

The IPFS enhances privacy and security compared to traditional web protocols, such as HTTP, by identifying data based on its content rather than its location. This has additional benefits for data transmission in space, Belcher said.

“The architecture is well-suited to space because it reduces delays, compensates for data corruption caused by radiation, and enables cryptographic verification to ensure data has not been tampered with,” she said.

The foundation is a nonprofit governing the decentralized cloud storage protocol Filecoin (FIL), which uses the IPFS web protocol to store data. Lockheed Martin is one of the world’s largest aerospace companies.

Source: Filecoin FoundationDecentralized storage benefits

“There’s a multi-second delay from the Moon and a multi-minute delay from Mars,” Belcher said.

“With IPFS, you look for a content ID and retrieve the data from wherever is closest — your own device, a nearby satellite, or a lunar station.”

Additionally, the IPFS uses a distributed architecture to store multiple copies of data across a global network, reducing reliance on centralized data centers.

These multiple copies of data improve reliability in environments where hardware is prone to degradation, helping to ensure the integrity of sensitive materials such as satellite images, according to Belcher.

Interest in decentralized archival storage is growing among media companies, and the Foundation is also exploring potential military applications of this technology, Belcher said.

“It could be really powerful for media in general to have that deep archive and also the ability to have your records everywhere all over the world when needed,” she said.

The FIL token is a utility token that can be used within the Filecoin ecosystem. It has a total market capitalization of approximately $1.8 billion as of May 16, according to Cointelegraph data.

Magazine: X Hall of Flame: Bitcoin will ‘start ripping’ as Trump’s polls improve — Felix Hartmann 

At least one partner at Sequoia Capital was reportedly impacted by the recent data breach among Coinbase users, suggesting that data from others at the venture capital firm may also have been compromised.

According to a May 16 Bloomberg report, Sequoia Capital Managing Partner Roelof Botha’s personal information available through his Coinbase account was stolen after a group of cybercriminals bribed the exchange’s support agents for access to user data. Though Botha had not publicly disclosed his net worth, estimates suggested he had hundreds of millions of dollars in assets.

Coinbase disclosed the data breach in a May 15 blog post, saying that some of its users had been targeted with social engineering attacks after the criminals had access to their personal account information. The company said the group attempted to extort $20 million in exchange for not disclosing the breach, which Coinbase rebuffed.

Though the extent of the breach was still unknown, another Bloomberg report suggested that the same type of attacks targeted users at Kraken and Binance. Cointelegraph reached out to representatives from both exchanges but had not received responses at the time of publication.

Related: Bitcoin breaks out while Coinbase breaks down: Finance Redefined

Coinbase’s chief security officer, Philip Martin, reportedly said the contracted customer service agents at the center of the controversy were based in India and had been fired following the breach. The exchange also filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), estimating that they planned to pay between $180 million and $400 million in remediation and reimbursement to affected users.

The exchange’s stock (COIN) fell more than 7% following the reports of the data breach and phishing attacks, to $244. At the time of publication, the price of COIN shares was $264.24.

Coinbase CEO in DC to advocate for crypto bills

Amid the reports related to the data breach, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong was in Washington, DC, to support crypto-related legislation being considered in Congress. Lawmakers in the Senate are expected to vote on a stablecoin bill in a matter of days, and those in the House of Representatives are considering a draft digital asset market structure bill.

Magazine: Bitcoin eyes ‘crazy numbers,’ JD Vance set for Bitcoin talk: Hodler’s Digest, May 4 – 10

At least one partner at Sequoia Capital was reportedly impacted by the recent data breach among Coinbase users, suggesting that data from others at the venture capital firm may also have been compromised.

According to a May 16 Bloomberg report, Sequoia Capital Managing Partner Roelof Botha’s personal information available through his Coinbase account was stolen after a group of cybercriminals bribed the exchange’s support agents for access to user data. Though Botha had not publicly disclosed his net worth, estimates suggested he had hundreds of millions of dollars in assets.

Coinbase disclosed the data breach in a May 15 blog post, saying that some of its users had been targeted with social engineering attacks after the criminals had access to their personal account information. The company said the group attempted to extort $20 million in exchange for not disclosing the breach, which Coinbase rebuffed.

Though the extent of the breach was still unknown, another Bloomberg report suggested that the same type of attacks targeted users at Kraken and Binance. Cointelegraph reached out to representatives from both exchanges but had not received any response at the time of publication.

This is a developing story, and further information will be added as it becomes available.

At least one partner at Sequoia Capital was reportedly impacted by the recent data breach among Coinbase users, suggesting that data from others at the venture capital firm may also have been compromised.

According to a May 16 Bloomberg report, Sequoia Capital Managing Partner Roelof Botha’s personal information available through his Coinbase account was stolen after a group of cybercriminals bribed the exchange’s support agents for access to user data. Though Botha had not publicly disclosed his net worth, estimates suggested he had hundreds of millions of dollars in assets.

Coinbase disclosed the data breach in a May 15 blog post, saying that some of its users had been targeted with social engineering attacks after the criminals had access to their personal account information. The company said the group attempted to extort $20 million in exchange for not disclosing the breach, which Coinbase rebuffed.

Though the extent of the breach was still unknown, another Bloomberg report suggested that the same type of attacks targeted users at Kraken and Binance. Cointelegraph reached out to representatives from both exchanges but had not received any response at the time of publication.

This is a developing story, and further information will be added as it becomes available.

Solv Protocol has launched a yield-bearing Bitcoin token on the Avalanche blockchain, giving institutional investors more exposure to yield opportunities backed by real-world assets, or RWAs.

On May 16, the protocol unveiled SolvBTC.AVAX, a token that connects Bitcoin (BTC) to real-world assets like US Treasurys and private credit offered by BlackRock and Hamilton Lane. 

The new token was developed through a seven-way partnership involving Solv, Avalanche, Balancer, Elixir, Euler, Re7 Labs, and LFJ, the company said. 

Solv Protocol founder Ryan Chow said the token is a way to link Bitcoin to “real-world economic cycles” in uncorrelated assets such as US government bonds and private credit, as opposed to BTC’s typical boom-and-bust four-year cycle.

The token uses a multi-protocol strategy to generate yield involving Elixir’s deUSD stablecoin, Treasurys provided by BlackRock and Hamilton Lane via Elixir, and incorporated on the lending platform Euler to increase RWA exposure.

“The yield is received in BTC format,” a Solv Protocol spokesperson told Cointelegraph

Elixir deUSD is a synthetic dollar with nearly $220 million in market capitalization. Source: RWA.xyz

Solv is a Bitcoin-centric staking platform that offers yield strategies across various blockchains and decentralized finance applications. The protocol commands more than $2.3 billion in total value locked, according to industry data. 

Solv Protocol’s TVL. Source: DefiLlama

Related: Bitcoin supply crunch boosts confidence in $200K target for 2025 — Bitwise CIO

The race to offer Bitcoin yield intensifies

Demand for Bitcoin yield solutions has grown amid the recent wave of institutional adoption of digital assets.

Earlier this month, crypto exchange Coinbase launched the Bitcoin Yield Fund, which aims to offer annual returns of between 4% and 8% on BTC holdings. 

The yield will be earned through a cash-and-carry strategy, which involves purchasing BTC in the spot market and selling a corresponding futures contract, Coinbase said.

CoinShares analyst Satish Patel predicted the growing interest in Bitcoin yield in December, noting that more investors now see BTC “not only as a store of value but also as a means to generate yields.”

While there are many ways to generate Bitcoin yield, such as leveraging derivatives or yield farming, Michael Saylor’s Strategy introduced its own “BTC Yield” metric to measure the performance of its investment strategy.

Strategy’s BTC Yield, which measures how much additional Bitcoin it’s acquiring relative to its outstanding shares, is currently 15.5% year-to-date, according to the company. 

Magazine: Metric signals $250K Bitcoin is ‘best case,’ SOL, HYPE tipped for gains: Trade Secrets

Galaxy Digital shares began trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange May 16, completing a years-long process that CEO Mike Novogratz called unfair and infuriating, CNBC reported.

The crypto and infrastructure company, which is also listed in Canada, opened trading at $23.50 in its Nasdaq debut.

Trading began on the same day Galaxy disclosed that it is working with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to tokenize its shares. According to Bloomberg, the tokens representing Galaxy Digital’s shares could be used in decentralized finance applications, like borrowing or lending.

Galaxy is among several crypto companies looking to access the US markets under a friendlier regulatory regime in the country. Companies that are also exploring or working on a US listing include Metaplanet, Circle, Kraken, and Gemini. Trading platform eToro completed a listing on May 14.

The company has $7 billion in assets on its platform, according to its website. It suffered a loss of $295 million in the first quarter of 2025.

Galaxy Digital’s last two quarters. Source: Galaxy Digital

Real-world asset (RWA) tokenization is gaining traction in crypto, though it still represents a small share of the market. Data from RWA.xyz shows the sector’s market cap at $22.5 billion — a fraction of both global real-world asset values and major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC). However, it’s growing fast, with a 111.8% increase over the past year.

One rising trend is tokenizing securities, essentially turning assets like stocks and treasury bonds into tradable tokens on the blockchain. Robinhood is considering building a blockchain that would allow retail investors in Europe to trade tokenized US securities like stocks. Galaxy Digital has plans to tokenize everything from stocks and fixed income to ETFs.

At the SEC’s crypto roundtable on May 12, Chair Paul Atkins compared the tokenization of assets to the music industry moving from analog to digital, which, according to Atkins, greatly benefited the American economy.

The closer relationships that US President Donald Trump has developed with the industry have sparked new enthusiasm for crypto activity in the country. In addition to the flurry of companies preparing for a US public listing, some other crypto companies have announced their reentry into the local market.

Magazine: X Hall of Flame: Bitcoin will ‘start ripping’ as Trump’s polls improve — Felix Hartmann