Show description: The government will introduce a bill this week to bring digital asset firms under financial services law and shift oversight from anti-money-laundering registration to Financial Conduct Authority supervision by October 2027. Lawmakers plan to finalize detailed rules by the end of 2026 and to run consultations through 2026 on trading venues, custody, stablecoin payments and related topics. The Financial Conduct Authority, working with HM Treasury, will extend governance, consumer protection, market conduct and operational resilience requirements that currently apply to banks, broker-dealers and payment firms to crypto exchanges, dealers and agents. The new framework will require formal authorization routes, fit and proper assessments for senior managers, prudential and conduct rulebooks, client asset protections, trade surveillance, incident reporting, and ongoing supervisory engagement. Custody providers will face segregation and reconciliation duties and market conduct rules will cover disclosures, order handling, conflicts of interest and pricing obligations. The Bank of England and the FCA will coordinate on stablecoin issuance and payment use while the Bank of England’s review will assess systemic risks, interoperability with payment systems, reserve composition and possible limits on certain wholesale uses or holdings. Supervision will include proactive supervisory cycles, thematic reviews and enforcement powers for market abuse, conduct failures and consumer redress, and regulators will be able to mandate skilled person reviews or other remediation. Firms should prepare gap assessments, authorization roadmaps, custody and reconciliation reviews, enhanced trade surveillance and incident reporting capabilities, and engagement with consultations; global firms should map the UK regime against other jurisdictions to identify licensing overlaps and gaps. 

Source: https://web3businessnews.com/policy/uk-crypto-regulation-2027-deadline/

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Show description: Texas executed a $5 million purchase of the BlackRock iShares spot Bitcoin ETF as the first tranche of a $10 million allocation authorized under Senate Bill 21, which created a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve administered by the Comptroller's office. Acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock described the ETF position as a temporary placeholder while procurement proceeds for a dedicated crypto custody contract. The state routed dollars through a regulated ETF vehicle that holds bitcoin on behalf of shareholders and the Comptroller's office said this approach facilitates execution, audit, and monthly reporting during the pilot phase and allows time to design custody standards, insurance, segregation of duties, and valuation and audit rules for a direct-hold program. The $5 million position sits against an approximately $28 billion rainy day fund and a biennial budget of about $338 billion. Supporters framed the program as a tool to strengthen the state balance sheet and to attract mining operations and other crypto capital, citing Texas's power, land, and grid-flex programs. Industry groups welcomed the move as a magnet for investment and jobs. Critics said placing the reserve outside the state treasury reduces legislative oversight and could limit real-time visibility into trades, holdings, and performance and noted that the ETF does not remove price volatility risks. The Comptroller's office has issued requests for information and will run a procurement for a custody vendor with procurement milestones that include published custody standards, segregation of duties, insurance and recovery plans, valuation methodologies, and a defined reporting cadence. About $5 million of the original appropriation remains unspent and decisions on follow-on purchases will hinge on the custody competition outcome, agreed governance procedures, and market conditions. Key near-term items include legislative hearings and public reporting that clarify governance and performance disclosure, the custody award for details on custody architecture and counterparty risk limits, any further allocations from the remaining appropriation, and market reactions during reporting cycles. The central operational tests are selecting a custodian, publishing investment and reporting policies, and demonstrating transparency for lawmakers and market participants. 

Source: https://web3businessnews.com/crypto/texas-bitcoin-reserve-5m-etf/

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Spotify launched Prompted Playlists, a beta feature that uses artificial intelligence to create playlists based on user prompts and listening history. The feature, initially available in New Zealand, allows users to specify playlist details and set automatic refreshes with new songs. Spotify also updated its AI DJ to accept voice prompts and continues to expand user control over content, aligning with similar trends in digital platforms such as Instagram. The development highlights a broader industry movement toward increased personalization and user-driven algorithms.

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Show description: Federal authorities seized the domain tickmilleas.com after identifying it as a front for a pig butchering crypto fraud that simulated deposits, staged trades, displayed fabricated balances, delayed withdrawals with invented fees or identity checks, and routed victim funds to operator-controlled wallets and off-platform channels. Investigators in San Diego reported more than 400 victims and about $90 million in losses in fiscal year 2024 and linked the domain to the Tai Chang compound in Kyaukhat, Myanmar, whose associated entities were designated as specially designated nationals by the U.S. Treasury. The seizure was coordinated with the Department of Justice Scam Center Strike Force, which combines U.S. Attorney’s Offices, the DOJ Criminal Division, the FBI, and the U.S. Secret Service and coordinates with State, Treasury/OFAC, and Commerce to sequence domain seizures, sanctions, and cross-border cooperation. Government agencies worked with industry to identify connected infrastructure and accounts; Meta removed roughly 2,000 accounts linked to the operation; DOJ and partner agencies reported more than $401 million in cryptocurrency seized and forfeited from related schemes to date, and in October 2025 the government announced the seizure of about 127,000 bitcoin connected to forced labor scam compounds. Guidance issued to founders, product teams, and exchange operators included expanding detection to off-platform signals, monitoring for shifts from public outreach to private chats, tracking referral traffic from messaging URLs, flagging spikes in new accounts tied to specific domains, mapping and monitoring SDN designations and seized domains, enhancing transaction monitoring to detect mismatches between user-facing activity and on-chain flows, implementing response playbooks for rapid transaction holds and outreach, surfacing warnings when users follow external links, offering pause and reporting mechanisms, and building direct reporting routes to law enforcement and internal trust teams. Victims were advised to file complaints with the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center at ic3.gov and to include transaction details, screenshots, wallet addresses, and communication records; the U.S. Secret Service reported handling thousands of crypto fraud victims and offering assistance with exchange coordination. Authorities signaled an expectation of continued domain seizures, account takedowns, and expanded sanctions designations as the Strike Force scales. 

Source: https://theweb3.news/crypto/fbi-seizes-tickmilleas-scam-site/

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Texas purchased $5 million of BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) on November 20, 2025, as the first U.S. state-level bitcoin allocation. The purchase opens the Texas Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, a program established by the state legislature in June 2025 and seeded with a $10 million appropriation. The law names the Texas Treasury Safekeeping Trust Company as program manager and requires cold storage with a qualified third-party custodian, annual transparency reports, and independent audits. Officials described the $5 million ETF purchase as an interim placeholder while a competitive procurement to select a custody provider proceeds. The custody request for proposals emphasizes security architecture, SOC audit coverage, incident response, and public-sector reporting. The trade executed when market quotes were near $87,000 per bitcoin and the ETF exposure represents roughly half of the program’s initial appropriation. Officials intend to migrate the ETF exposure into direct cold storage once a custodian is selected and wallet controls and audit processes pass independent review. The statute establishes risk limits, reporting checkpoints, and review cycles, and near-term milestones include awarding a custody contract, publishing operating policies with documented key management and incident-response procedures, transitioning holdings from ETF to cold storage with documented audit procedures including on-chain verification where applicable, and deciding how to deploy the remaining $5 million and whether to seek expanded legislative authorization. 

Source: https://theweb3.news/policy/texas-first-state-buy-bitcoin/

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Show description: Tether’s USDT has a market capitalization above $100 billion and functions as a primary settlement and trading rail across exchanges and chains. The issuer converts reserve yields from short-term U.S. Treasuries and similar instruments into profits. An ICIJ investigation traced at least $1.4 billion in USDT through a single wallet cluster tied to scams, hacks, and human trafficking. Chainalysis reported $2.17 billion was stolen from crypto services in 2025, with a share of proceeds laundered through USDT due to its liquidity and low slippage. Tether’s contract-level controls allow the company to blacklist addresses and freeze tokens when it receives validated legal requests or urgent notifications. In 2023 Tether worked with OKX to freeze 225 million USDT linked to a trafficking network, in 2025 freezes covered 326 wallets controlling about 435 million USDT tied to suspected fraud and laundering, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police credited Tether’s response in the recovery of 460,000 USDT for a fraud victim. Many detections originate with third-party analytics vendors, exchanges, or law enforcement tips rather than Tether’s internal systems, and criminal actors move funds across chains, use nested wallets, or route through less-monitored venues. Market participants and policymakers are considering measures that include expanding on-chain screening of high-risk clusters, automating triage for urgent freezes, standardizing law enforcement intake via public APIs and service levels, publishing transparency reports on freeze volumes and response times while protecting investigative details, tightening KYC and enhanced due diligence for large counterparties and programmatic minters, and coordinating shared risk lists and faster incident response windows with major exchanges. Signals to watch include periodic disclosures of reserve composition and profit metrics, a public metric for average freeze response time, and extension of controls to Layer 2 networks and sidechains. Investors, exchanges, and DeFi protocols should model freeze risk, jurisdictional exposure, and counterparty hygiene, adjust liquidity assumptions for potential larger or faster freezes and narrower counterparty pools, and anticipate shifts in preferred settlement rails and demand for alternative stablecoins or collateralized solutions. Tether has executed freezes and law enforcement cooperation to remove illicit flows from markets, and market actors are planning deeper analytics integration, standardized law enforcement workflows, and clearer disclosures on freeze activity and referral sources to prevent further abuse. 

Source: https://theweb3.news/crypto/tether-profits-crime-controls/

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Show description: Vanguard will permit client trading of select third-party, regulated crypto exchange-traded funds and mutual funds on its platform effective December 3, 2025. The eligible products cited include bitcoin, ether, and solana ETFs. The move reverses a prior Vanguard prohibition on crypto fund trading and affects roughly 50 million clients across retail, advisor, and institutional channels. Vanguard said it will not launch a proprietary crypto fund or offer direct token custody. The firm implemented system upgrades for fund eligibility checks, order routing, trade surveillance, prospectus delivery, tax reporting, and broker controls to integrate these products into existing brokerage workflows. Vanguard stated the change operates under existing securities and fund rules and that issuer transparency, fee disclosure, and operational readiness will govern offerings. Advisors and plan sponsors can allocate crypto exposure within existing models and custodial reporting, subject to plan rules and due diligence. Vanguard manages about $11 trillion in client assets and announced the change under CEO Salim Ramji. 

Source: https://theweb3.news/crypto/vanguard-crypto-etf-access/

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The UK will require UK-registered crypto exchanges and platforms to collect verified identities and full transaction records for UK-resident users starting January 1, 2026, and to submit the first filings to HM Revenue & Customs covering the 2026 reporting period in 2027. The domestic rules implement the OECD Cryptoasset Reporting Framework (CARF) and extend reporting to cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, tokenised assets, non-fungible tokens, and DeFi tokens that meet CARF definitions. Platforms must capture verified legal name, address, date of birth, tax residency and, where available, National Insurance numbers or UK tax reference numbers, and must report transaction-level fields including asset type, quantity, fair value at time of transaction, relevant dates, and nature of activity (buys, sells, swaps, transfers, staking, and similar events). HM Treasury projects approximately £325 million in additional receipts over five years from improved compliance, and HMRC will use platform data for risk scoring, case selection, targeted compliance letters, cross-checks against Self Assessment returns, and identification of non-filers and historic reporting gaps. Individuals who underreport or fail to file may face penalties following data matches, and platforms that fail to comply can face penalties up to £300 per affected customer plus additional sanctions for persistent failures. HM Treasury and HMRC expect platforms to implement identity verification, data capture, cost-basis tracking, reconciliation, extraction pipelines, validation, and testing in 2025 to meet 2026 data capture and 2027 reporting requirements, and HMRC plans to publish staged technical guidance, schema clarifications, and operational timelines. 

Source: https://theweb3.news/policy/uk-crypto-reporting-rules-2026/

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