Not even Donald Trump’s bombastic declarations were enough to change the trajectory of bitcoin, considered even by non-experts to be a wild deer halfway between an online scam and the most predictable financial bubble in the world. And perhaps it couldn’t have gone any other way. As the president promised to make the United States “the cryptocurrency capital of the world” and his family built its own cryptocurrency empire with World Liberty Financial and American Bitcoin, the market seemed to be convinced that politics could transform a volatile asset into a stable system. Then came the collapse below ninety-five thousand dollars, in mid-November, which burned more than a trillion in capitalization and brought everyone back to the ground. The idea that an entire ecosystem could suddenly become safe and regulated was already fragile as the euphoria mounted, and now that the air has suddenly escaped, what the rush had hidden re-emerges: an infrastructure still permeable to illicit money, underpinned by weak controls and incapable of truly distinguishing between legitimate finance and criminal networks.
According to a vast international journalistic investigation, coordinated by the New York Times together with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and dozens of newspapers around the world, at least 28 billion dollars linked to illicit activities have passed through the main online platforms (exchanges) in the last two years where cryptocurrencies are bought, sold and exchanged, also converting them into dollars or euros. North Korean hackers, transnational fraudsters and Cambodian criminal groups have used the same channels through which billions of legitimate transactions flow every day.
Binance is the most important gateway to this opaque network. It is the platform with the highest trading volumes in the world and the partner chosen by the Trump family for their crypto project, with a $2 billion deal signed last May with World Liberty Financial. Between 2024 and 2025, over 400 million dollars arrived on Binance linked to Huione Group, a Cambodian conglomerate that the US Treasury considers a fundamental cog in cyberthefts and investment scams that affect thousands of savers.
According to experts who followed the flows, the timing and path of these movements were anomalous enough to immediately trigger internal alarms. But it doesn’t mean that the platforms will intervene quickly. Blocking a suspicious account means giving up commissions and trading volumes. And since the Trump administration dismantled the Justice Department task force that investigated exchanges, asking prosecutors to focus only on criminal organizations and not on intermediaries, it has become even easier to let things go.
The result is that scams continue to thrive. Cryptocurrency fraud stole $5.8 billion from investors in 2024 alone, according to federal data. The cases analyzed by the investigation show the same pattern: savers convinced they are relying on financial advisors, identities stolen to open accounts, funds ending up on exchanges such as Binance and OKX through a series of wallets that are difficult to trace to those responsible.
Alongside these fragilities there is another circuit that almost completely escapes control, but which the New York Times reports: the crypto to cash desks, hidden counters in shops, offices or backrooms from Hong Kong to Dubai. They work like this: you send cryptocurrency to an address communicated via chat and, a few minutes later, you receive cash, often without any type of identity verification. In 2024 in Hong Kong alone these branches managed at least 2.5 billion dollars. More than half a billion of funds flowing through Binance, OKX and Bybit regularly end up on these services. The anonymity and speed make them an ideal means of hiding the source of the money.
That these cracks are emerging again now is no coincidence. Since the beginning of October the market has fallen sharply: in addition to the collapse of Bitcoin, there is that of Ether which has reached the lows of recent weeks. Exchange traded funds saw outflows of around 870 million in a single day. Long-term investors sold 815,000 Bitcoins in a month, and liquidity, already weak after the collapse at the beginning of October, was further reduced. With the Federal Reserve more cautious on rate cuts, the flight from risk has become faster.
The bubble that has collapsed is not just about prices. It’s about the idea, nurtured for months, that the sector could become as stable and reliable as regulated markets. Technical vulnerabilities and criminal infiltration into exchange platforms are making it increasingly clear to investors that these structures are not simply an operational risk, but a direct threat to the stability of the entire ecosystem.
