Cryptocurrency exchange eXch announced it will cease operations on May 1 after reports alleged the firm was used to launder funds from a Bybit hack.

In an April 17 notice, eXch said the majority of people in its management team voted to “cease and retreat” in response to the allegations that North Korea’s Lazarus Group used the exchange to launder roughly $35 million of the funds stolen in a $1.4 billion exploit on Bybit. The exchange said it was the subject of “an active transatlantic operation” aimed at shutting it down and potentially pursuing charges.

“Even though we have been able to operate despite some failed attempts to shut down our infrastructure (attempts that have also been confirmed to be part of this operation), we don’t see any point in operating in a hostile environment where we are the target of SIGINT [Signals Intelligence] simply because some people misinterpret our goals,” said eXch.

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The exchange initially denied reports from crypto sleuths suggesting that it had laundered digital assets for the Lazarus Group, but admitted to processing an “insignificant portion of funds” from the February hack. Individuals from eXch’s management team emphasized its focus on user privacy in announcing the shutdown, claiming that some exchanges “abus[e] customers with nonsensical policies” in their attempts to fight money laundering.

The biggest hack in crypto history

The Bybit hack, one of the largest in the history of the crypto industry, resulted in more than $5 billion in withdrawals from users, including the stolen funds. CEO Ben Zhou said on Feb. 22 that the exchange had the means to “cover the loss” if the funds were not recovered. However, the firm later announced it would shutter some of its Web3 services and close its non-fungible token marketplace.

As of April 10, Bybit had regained its market share achieved before the hack: roughly 7%. The exchange paid more than $2 million to bounty hunters providing information that could be used to freeze some of the funds traceable to other platforms, which was estimated to be roughly 89% of the $1.4 billion as of March 20.

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OpenAI was reportedly in talks to buy Anysphere, the company that produces the Cursor AI coding assistant, before entering into talks with rival company WindSurf.

According to CNBC, OpenAI approached Anysphere in 2024 and again in 2025, but talks stalled both times. Failing to arrive at a deal led OpenAI to look elsewhere for potential acquisitions.

Sources familiar with the deal also say OpenAI is prepared to pay $3 billion to purchase WindSurf, which would make it the company’s largest corporate acquisition to date.

An example of OpenAI’s ChatGPT producing computer code through simple text prompts. Source: ChatGPT

OpenAI’s attempted acquisition of an AI coding assistant company follows the release of DeepSeek R1 in January 2025, which shattered long-held assumptions about artificial intelligence.

DeepSeek was reportedly trained at a fraction of the cost of leading AI models while delivering comparable performance — challenging the belief that scaling requires massive computing power, rattling financial markets, and raising questions about the billions spent by US AI giants.

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OpenAI inches toward profitability but cheaper competitors still a challenge

OpenAI expects to triple its revenue in 2025 to approximately $12.7 billion by selling paid subscriptions for its leading AI models to individuals and businesses.

The company surpassed 1 million premium business subscribers in September 2024. However, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the AI giant might not be profitable until 2029.

According to Altman, OpenAI needs revenues of approximately $125 billion to turn a profit on its capital-intensive business.

In February 2025, Altman said that AI development costs were dropping dramatically. “The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months,” the CEO wrote in a Feb. 9 blog post.

Despite this, high costs and centralization issues continue to plague large-scale corporate AI developers, who must compete with more nimble open-source counterparts.

Dr. Ala Shaabana — co-founder of the OpenTensor Foundation — recently told Cointelegraph that the release of DeepSeek solidified open-source AI as a serious contender against centralized AI systems.

Shaabana added that the lower cost of open-source systems proves that AI does not need billions of dollars to scale or achieve high-performance benchmarks.

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Ethena Labs, the developer of the USDe synthetic dollar (USDe), and financial technology company Securitize, released a preliminary roadmap for their upcoming Converge network, a high-throughput blockchain focused on real-world assets and decentralized finance (DeFi).

According to the announcement, a testnet will be live in the coming weeks, with a mainnet launch later in 2025.

Converge will feature a 100 milliseconds (ms) native block time, with plans to reduce block times to 50ms by Q4 2025. The developers also plan to achieve at least one gigagas of potential throughput during 2025. Gigagas is a measure of billions of gas units processed by a blockchain network in one second.

Ethena and Securitize are launching the network to support permissioned real-world tokenized applications and permissionless DeFi applications as the line between traditional and decentralized finance continues to blur.

Converge 1-year performance targets. Source: Converge

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Traditional finance converging with the crypto world

Traditional financial institutions are increasingly using decentralized finance protocols and interacting with tokenized real-world assets like stablecoins and tokenized bonds.

The merging of TradFi and DeFi has drawn mixed reactions from the crypto community, with some saying it was inevitable that the two worlds came together, and others warning of institutional capture.

In a Jan. 21 interview, Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson told Bloomberg that US President Donald Trump would integrate crypto and traditional finance by establishing clear regulations.

“We need to have some sort of regulatory clarity so that you could bring these together because, fundamentally, it will drive out costs, and there is great innovation that the technology enables,” Johnson said.

Shibtoshi, the founder of the SilentSwap privacy-preserving trading platform, recently told Cointelegraph that some institutions are currently hesitant to adopt decentralized finance solutions.

The DeFi founder said that a lack of privacy, legal liability issues, and unclear regulations have stymied institutional adoption, but added that the tools to address these concerns already exist.

“Institutions have realized the benefits of a securely decentralized system. As early as 2021, reports said nearly one in three institutional investors in crypto were already using DeFi,” Shibtoshi told Cointelegraph.

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