Taiwan Probes $1.27B Tether Fraud as AI Token Calls Hit 44.6T, SpaceX IPO Tops $2.1T

Crypto News

Taiwanese prosecutors in Shilin have advanced one of the island’s largest crypto-linked fraud cases, with the lead suspect released on NT$20 million bail under an eight-month travel ban, restricted residence and electronic monitoring. The Shilin District Prosecutors Office indicted 14 people last August over a scheme that allegedly funneled more than NT$2.3 billion through laundering channels and defrauded over 1,500 victims of roughly NT$1.275 billion. The operation marketed itself as the only regulator-authorized exchange, then steered victims into buying the stablecoin Tether before converting funds to dollars sent offshore and shuffling holdings between designated cold wallets to sever the money trail.

Global usage of large AI models reached fresh records last week, with token call volume across the leading routing platform hitting 44.6 trillion between June 8 and 14, a 23.5% weekly jump and the eighth straight increase. Chinese models captured 18.42 trillion tokens, up 29.8% and nearly 40% of the global total, extending their lead over US counterparts to a seventh consecutive week. DeepSeek-V4-Flash held first place at 4.41 trillion tokens, MiniMax M3 surged 73% to second at 4.32 trillion, and Tencent’s Hy3 Preview ranked third. Aggressive API pricing, often 50% to 80% cheaper, keeps driving developer migration, much as low-cost AI trading bot tooling reshaped crypto markets.

The same routing platform formally launched its Fusion API on June 13, letting developers dispatch a single prompt to several models in parallel before a judge model synthesizes the strongest answer. On Perplexity’s DRACO deep-research benchmark, Fusion scored 69%, edging past Claude Fable 5’s 65.3%, while a budget panel of Gemini 3 Flash, Kimi K2.6 and DeepSeek V4 Pro landed within one point at 64.7% for roughly half the cost. Notably, running Opus 4.8 against itself and fusing the outputs reached 65.5%, well above the 58.8% single-model score, underscoring that the synthesis step alone adds measurable value for complex multi-source research tasks.

New Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh heads into his first policy meeting on June 17 with communication reform, not rate moves, as his opening priority. Sworn in on May 22 as the eleventh Fed chair, Warsh faces limited room on rates as internal debate has shifted from how much to cut toward whether to hike, with Iran-driven energy prices and sticky inflation complicating the picture. Symbolic changes could land fast: trimming statement language, halving the frequency of press conferences, and simplifying or scrapping the quarterly dot plot. His thesis is that over-explanation raises the odds of misreading, a sharp break from decades of transparency-first guidance.

SpaceX has set out an aggressive orbital AI roadmap following its public listing, which carries a valuation approaching $2.1 trillion. Elon Musk said the company aims to deploy 1GW of AI compute in space by the end of 2027, scaling to 100GW by 2030. Its first-generation AI1 satellite will carry Nvidia GB300 server racks, with each rack drawing roughly 135kW; hitting the 1GW annual target implies building around 7,400 GB300 cabinets a year. Next-generation laser links already support 1Tbps per orbital plane, pointing to a high-bandwidth, low-latency compute mesh stitched together across satellites in orbit.

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration formally confirmed on June 11 that El Niño has taken shape in the equatorial Pacific, with a 63% probability of escalating into a Super El Niño this winter, potentially the strongest since records began in 1950. The Niño-3.4 index sits at +0.7°C, past the +0.5°C threshold, while the Niño-1+2 region near South America has spiked to +2.1°C. Only three super events have occurred since 1950, and the 1997-98 episode caused roughly 23,000 deaths and over $45 billion in damage. Analysts flag agricultural, energy and insurance markets as the most exposed transmission channels.

These threads share one undercurrent: capital and risk are concentrating fast, whether in compute, fraud rails or climate exposure. COINOTAG’s aggregate market data frames the crypto backdrop, with the Fear and Greed Index pinned at 20, deep in Extreme Fear, Bitcoin dominance elevated at 70.3% and total market capitalization near $1.88 trillion as Bitcoin trades around $66,000. Tether’s role in the Taiwan laundering case underscores why on-chain transparency matters even as a bear market mood pushes capital toward majors and away from altcoin risk. With AI compute spending, geopolitical friction and climate shocks all compounding, the path back toward an all-time high looks contingent on macro stabilization rather than sentiment alone.