The Merkle
Latest Stories
A $25.6M Deepfake Fraud Triggered the EU’s Boldest AI Law Yet
A finance employee at engineering firm Arup once sat through an entire video call with AI-generated deepfakes of his company's CFO and colleagues, watched their faces move, heard their voices, and authorized a $25.6 million transfer. None of it was real and the fraud only unraveled after the money was already gone.Cases like Arup's prove that AI regulation i…
5 Signs Users Missed in the AscendEX Collapse (Crypto Exchange Red Flags To Watch)
I've read enough shutdown notices, like the recent one from AscendEX, to recognize the shape of a collapsing exchange before I finish the first paragraph. They arrive dressed as routine compliance updates, citing "regulatory considerations" or "market conditions," but by the time you reach the part where they can't guarantee your withdrawal, the platform has…
Bitkey, Ledger, Trezor, And Jade Reports Safe From $38 Million Coldcard Disaster
I think it says something when an entire industry of competing hardware wallet makers, including Ledger, companies that rarely coordinate on anything publicly, all rush to say the exact same thing within hours of each other: not us, not our devices, not our problem. That's exactly what happened today. Bitkey, Ledger, Trezor, Jade, and Tangem all moved quickl…
Arbitrum Tops Solana with 11.3M Stablecoin Holders
Everyone's been glued to Arbitrum competitors like Solana and their meme coin charts, as well as Base's retail app growth, and it's easy to see why those make for flashier headlines. But a quieter number just flipped in Arbitrum's favor, and the more I dug into it, the more I think it matters more than either of those stories.Arbitrum has pulled ahead of Sol…
Blockaid Flags $8.2M Exploit On Pro Token - H1 Report Indicates Nobody's Safe From Attacks
If you're holding Pro token right now, you already know the feeling: refreshing the chart, refreshing X, waiting for the team to say literally anything. Somewhere on Ethereum, an exploiter is sitting on roughly $8.2 million in USDT while the project behind the drained token stays completely silent. It's a scene that's become almost routine in 2026, a year th…
Beyond Search Engine and App Store Scams: 3 Practical Ways to Shield Your Crypto From SparkKitty and Fake Apps
I've written about crypto theft enough times to develop a kind of professional numbness to the dollar figures. This story broke through that numbness anyway, not because of the amount stolen, but because of how avoidable every single piece of it turns out to be once you actually look at the details. Three separate crypto theft vectors surfaced within days of…