US prosecutors have frozen more than $1.2bn in digital assets and seized the cloud infrastructure behind a North Korean deepfake fraud, in one of the largest coordinated strikes yet against North Korea's crypto theft operations. The US Department of Justice said on 12 November 2026 that the action hit two separate Pyongyang schemes: a social engineering operation the FBI has named "FaceStealer," which has drained more than $400m from crypto holders in 18 months, and the laund

As of this week, the European retail wallet nobody wanted five years ago is challenging Visa, Swift is quietly building its own ledger with 17 banks on standby, and Bottomline just pushed the first production USDC payment across a corporate treasury hub. The B2B stablecoin era isn't coming, it's running on invoices right now. For anyone who still thinks payments is a boring utility, the past week should have felt like someone rewiring the plumbing while the house was on fire.

Microsoft has started to unpick its dependence on rented AI compute, and the neocloud sector is feeling the strain. The company is winding down a 2023 contract to lease capacity from Oracle and reviewing the wider web of deals through which it has committed more than $80 billion to specialist providers, according to reporting by Bloomberg. For shareholders in CoreWeave and Nebius Group, the Microsoft neocloud pullback turns one lost contract into a broader question: how durab

Regulators are experimenting with quantum machine learning to hunt fraudsters, AI labs are carving up the banking enterprise market, and the stablecoin supply just posted its sharpest contraction since 2022. Welcome to the week technology stopped being adjacent to finance and became the point of it. If you blinked this week, you missed roughly a decade of financial technology compression. The UK's top conduct regulator formally entered the quantum era. Anthropic and OpenAI sq

BNY has named Figment as a validator provider for staking on its Digital Asset Custody platform, giving the world's largest custodian bank a second route into a service it first opened to institutions through Galaxy in August 2026. For eligible clients, the practical effect is straightforward: they can now stake supported digital assets held at BNY without moving those assets out of custody, using Figment's infrastructure alongside the servicing workflows they already run thr

Charles Schwab is opening client brokerage accounts to the AI assistants people already use. The firm has launched an official Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that lets clients connect their own large language model, starting with Anthropic's Claude, to their Schwab account. Once authorised, the model can pull market data and research, analyse position performance, summarise a portfolio, set alerts and, on thinkorswim-enabled accounts, prepare, place and manage trades. Ev