Today in Crypto: Binance Recovers Stolen $450,000

India’s Enforcement Directorate, which works to investigate financial crimes, announced on Friday (August 12) that it has frozen assets worth around 3.7 billion rupees ($46.4 million) from crypto exchange Vauld.

In its statement, the directorate said authorities are investigating wallets held by Flipvolt, the legal entity of Vauld in India, as it allegedly has “proceeds of crime stemming from predatory lending practices” that were later transferred abroad.

Vauld, which is backed by billionaire Peter Thiel, filed for bankruptcy protection in July.

Meanwhile, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said in a chirping Friday that the exchange has frozen or recovered $450,000 stolen from decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Curve.Finance earlier this week.

CoinDesk wrote that hackers had stolen nearly $570,000 from Curve.Finance, and the developers said they later identified and fixed the problem. Curve.Finance is a major DeFi player due to its CRV token reward emission, which is a major source of revenue for other protocols.

In other news, the US Treasury Department has targeted Tornado Cash, which allows users to break the traceability of their activity on the Ethereum blockchain, the Financial Times wrote on Sunday (Aug 14).

The United States has alleged that Tornado Cash has been used to launder more than $7 billion, including about $500 million from state-backed North Korean hackers. Tornado Cash’s services allow customers to deposit crypto using one address, mix funds into a single pool of all users’ funds, and make the funds untraceable.

Furthermore, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of the Ethereum network, has said that the blockchain’s “Merge” is likely to happen on September 15.

The update is likely to happen after a final testnet called Goerli takes place, according to a Seeking Alpha report. The hope with “the Merge” is that it will cut down on the ether’s environmental impact and increase network security.

Additionally, bitcoin was briefly above $25,000 for the first time since mid-June, with momentum spurred by decent inflation data as well as news of “the Merge.”

Bitcoin rose 2.2% as of Sunday (August 14), hitting $25,031 – its highest level since June 13. Bloomberg reported that ether also rose around 2% to hit $2,030.50, supported by Buterin’s announcement.

Finally, Cryptoslate reported on Sunday that Binance now has the most bitcoin on exchanges, swapping places with crypto exchange Coinbase.

There were more than 2.6 million bitcoins on exchanges at the start of the year, and the number has now fallen below 2.4 million. This has appeared to show a “long-term bullish holding trend” as bitcoin was removed from exchanges. Binance’s amount started to increase in May, although Coinbase continued to fall at the time.

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