Korea Crypto Tax Petition Advances, MEV Bot Loses $7.5M, MSUSD Token Crashes 85%

Crypto News

Power Integrations stepped up its push into AI data center power delivery, unveiling an ultra-slim auxiliary power supply reference design optimized for Nvidia’s Kyber architecture. Built for 800V DC systems, the PowiGaN-based InnoMux-2 design trims power distribution board space and component count by roughly 30% while reaching up to 90% efficiency. The company also introduced its TOPSwitchGaN IC family, extending flyback topology to 440W at up to 92% efficiency. The company’s investor-relations disclosure put first-quarter revenue at $108.3 million, up 5% sequentially and 3% year over year, driven by a 23% jump in industrial sales, with second-quarter guidance set as high as $120 million.

Chinese artificial-intelligence firm Xiao-I lost the first-instance ruling in its long-running patent dispute with Apple over the Siri voice assistant. The Shanghai High People’s Court rejected Xiao-I’s claim that Siri infringed its chatbot-system patent and found that specific iPhone models fell outside the patent’s protection scope. The court also declined Apple’s request for roughly 2 million yuan in litigation-cost recovery. Crucially, the patent’s validity remains intact: China’s Supreme People’s Court affirmed it on March 31 in a final, non-appealable decision. Xiao-I called the ruling deeply flawed and said it will appeal to the Supreme People’s Court within the statutory deadline.

In South Korea, a national petition calling for the abolition of crypto-asset taxation gathered 58,571 signatures, clearing the threshold to advance toward parliamentary review. Under the National Assembly Act, the petition becomes eligible for deliberation at the first committee meeting held 30 days after referral. The stakes are concrete: current income-tax law classifies gains from transferring or lending digital assets as other income starting January 1 next year. Earnings above 2.5 million won would face a combined 22% rate, comprising 20% other-income tax plus 2% local income tax. The outcome will shape how domestic altcoin traders are taxed for years.

Trader sentiment toward individual tokens diverged sharply on Korean exchanges, where Meteora topped a greed ranking with a reading of 97, the highest tier of the local fear-and-greed scale. The token changed hands around 247 won, up 1.65% on the day, with intraday swings between 239 and 261 won and turnover near 23.9 billion won. Aerodrome Finance followed at 88, Axie Infinity at 87, Jupiter at 82 and The Sandbox at 72. At the opposite end, AlphaQuark registered 13. Meteora, an AMM on Solana, drew concentrated short-term flows even as broader market sentiment stayed cautious.

Separately, Xiao-I confirmed it had regained compliance with Nasdaq’s continued-listing standards, resolving minimum bid-price and market-value shortfalls flagged in December 2025 as of April 23 and May 29 respectively. Its American depositary shares will keep trading on the Nasdaq Global Market. As part of a price-stabilization strategy, the firm restructured its ADS ratio from three ordinary shares per ADS to 60, producing the effect of a 20-to-1 reverse split. Citibank, acting as depositary, will automatically convert every 20 existing ADSs into one new ADS, with fractional shares sold and paid out in cash. The company cautioned the move does not guarantee a proportional price rise.

DeFi infrastructure absorbed fresh shocks. An Ethereum MEV bot known as jaredfromsubway lost about $7.5 million after an attacker-controlled contract tricked its automated execution system into granting token approvals, then drained WETH, USDC and USDT; on-chain analysis stressed it was an abuse of automation logic, not a smart-contract flaw or phishing. Such AI trading bot exploits underscore growing automation risk. Elsewhere, the MSUSD token briefly plunged 85% after a reserve-verification partner ended its attestation contract, though the issuer said assets remain fully collateralized and over $8 million in USDC was deployed. Tether co-founder Reeve Collins also unveiled STBL, a decentralized protocol splitting payment and yield into separate tokens to challenge existing algorithmic stablecoin designs.

These threads — AI hardware momentum, cross-border patent and listing battles, Korea’s tax fight and a string of DeFi failures — trace a market navigating risk on multiple fronts. COINOTAG’s aggregate data frames the caution: our Fear & Greed Index sits at 23, firmly in Extreme Fear, while Bitcoin dominance has climbed to 70.0% and total crypto market capitalization holds near $1.84 trillion. Capital is consolidating into Bitcoin even as on-chain incidents like the $7.5 million MEV exploit and the 85% MSUSD collapse erode confidence in automated and stablecoin systems. In a defensive bear market tape, regulatory clarity and verifiable reserves increasingly separate resilient projects from fragile ones.