AI Linked to 67% of Cyberattack Bans, Coinbase Freezes $3M, Mastercard Adds Stablecoins

Crypto News

A fresh study examining account bans for policy violations reveals that artificial intelligence is now deeply embedded in cybercrime workflows. Of 832 accounts reviewed by Anthropic between March 2025 and March 2026, 560 — or roughly 67% — leveraged generative models to prepare cyberattacks, including malware drafting and reconnaissance against DeFi protocols. The share of accounts rated medium risk or higher climbed from 33% in the first half of the period to 56% in the second, signaling sharp escalation. Researchers also flagged a 6.5% subset using AI for lateral movement after initial compromise, a tactic previously confined to elite operators rather than low-skill actors.

Coinbase froze more than $3 million in digital assets linked to Southeast Asian fraud syndicates during a coordinated US Department of Justice operation dubbed Disruption Week. The Scam Center Strike Force partnered with the FBI, Secret Service, and private firms including Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and analytics provider TRM Labs to dismantle the infrastructure feeding cyber-enabled investment scams. Together, participants neutralized more than 1.4 million social media and email accounts, while Thai authorities arrested seven suspects and opened fresh cases. The action builds on an April sweep that restrained over $700 million in scam-linked funds, underscoring how blockchain forensics increasingly anchors international fraud enforcement.

Stablecoin depegs are a familiar feature of crypto bear markets, and Apyx's apxUSD briefly slipped to 93 cents Wednesday as broader prices retreated. The token is backed primarily by preferred equity from digital asset treasury firms — notably Strategy's STRC shares, which carry a $100 par value — alongside short-term Treasuries and cash equivalents. Apyx insisted the wobble was the expected behavior of a stablecoin backed by preferred equity rather than cash deposits, noting STRC has dipped below par four times since August and each episode mean-reverted. Yield routes through sister token apyUSD, which captures preferred-share dividends for holders who lock apxUSD.

Bitcoin's slide back under $63,000 set the tone across the broader market and pressured collateral assets sitting behind newer dollar-pegged products. The leading cryptocurrency shed value rapidly over the prior 24 hours, dragging risk appetite lower and amplifying scrutiny of stablecoins relying on equity-backed reserves. The pullback comes against a backdrop of rising on-chain hack losses — April recorded $629.7 million stolen, the heaviest tally since February 2025 — and growing concern that AI-augmented attackers can exploit smart contract weaknesses at scale. The convergence of price weakness and security stress has revived comparisons with classic late-cycle drawdowns.

Global payroll provider Deel launched DLUSD, a custom dollar-backed stablecoin, opening dollar earnings to 1.5 million contractors across 150 countries without requiring a US bank account. The rollout began in Argentina, where the peso shed 20–40% of its dollar value over the past year and 85% of Deel's local contractors had requested dollar-denominated pay in 2025. The product stitches together Stripe's stablecoin issuance bridge, Privy wallet infrastructure, and the payments-focused Layer 1 Tempo for settlement, making Deel the first enterprise to deploy all three in a single workflow. Contractors see only a dollar balance, never the underlying rails.

Mastercard expanded settlement capabilities across its global network to include stablecoins, adding support for USDC, Ripple's RLUSD, Paxos-issued PYUSD, USDG, USDP, and SoFi's SoFiUSD across eight chains including Ethereum, Solana, Base, and XRPL. The move enables intraday, weekend, and holiday settlement for partners — a direct answer to banking-hours gridlock that historically freezes liquidity. Raj Dhamodharan, the firm's blockchain executive, framed the next phase of stablecoin adoption around real-world settlement utility, where timing and liquidity carry the most weight. The expansion lands one day before Deel's DLUSD launch, compressing two major institutional stablecoin milestones into a single week.

Taken together, the week's news lines up under one arc: stablecoins and AI are simultaneously reshaping financial plumbing and the threat landscape that surrounds it. As traditional payment giants wire dollar tokens into core settlement and global payroll, regulators and exchanges are escalating coordinated takedowns of crypto-laundered fraud, while researchers warn that generative models are turning low-skilled actors into capable attackers. Pegged-asset stress and Bitcoin's softer tape only sharpen the contrast between maturing infrastructure and an unresolved security perimeter. The dominant narrative this cycle is institutional integration colliding with industrialized cybercrime — and a regulatory response now chasing both fronts at once.