DL News had a busy year — digging through court filings, chasing investigations, talking to the industry’s colourful personalities and reporting out the stories behind the hype.
Picking favourites was difficult, but we’ve pulled together a shortlist of the pieces we think best captured 2025.
Read on!
Ledger co-founder kidnapped and freed in France — here’s everything we know
This was one of the year’s most disturbing developments: Ben Weiss and Liam Kelly tracked the violent kidnapping of Ledger co-founder David Balland and his wife — and the dramatic rescue effort that followed.
Monero-only hacker IntelBroker caught after accepting Bitcoin from FBII reported on a “told ya so” story favourite of privacy activists: a suspect who allegedly insisted on privacy coin Monero slipped once and took $250 in Bitcoin from an undercover FBI agent, which led to his arrest. Bitcoin is too transparent!
Russian man foiled trying to steal Bitcoin with airsoft grenades
Tim Alper’s report about a bizarre robbery attempt reads like a scene from an early Guy Ritchie movie. Basically, a man went into a crypto exchange and tried to steal digital assets by detonating airsoft grenades. It went as well for him as you can imagine.
Roman Storm prosecutors attack privacy ‘distraction’ in closing arguments
Aleks Gilbert reported from Roman Storm’s trial in New York: Prosecutors told jurors that “privacy” was a cover story — a “distraction” from what they cast as a business built to launder dirty money. They argued Tornado Cash cleaned at least $1 billion, mocked the idea that the founders were powerless, and called decentralisation “the big lie.”
Judges grill SBF defence in high-stakes appeal hearing
Disgraced FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s appeal hit a three-judge panel — and his lawyer, Alexandra Shapiro, got a rough ride, reported Aleks. She argued the trial was fundamentally unfair because Judge Lewis Kaplan blocked key parts of the story: SBF’s belief customers would be repaid. “The defence was cut off at the knees by the judge’s rulings,” Shapiro said.
Binance’s head-spinning response to $81bn penalty deepens clash with Nigeria: a timelineEd Robinson and Osato Avan-Nomayo mapped the Binance-Nigeria standoff as it escalated from detentions and an escape into a sprawling legal brawl. The latest twist was pure procedural combat as Binance asked a court to toss an $81bn penalty on the grounds that prosecutors served notice to the wrong email address. In the previous year, Osato previously broke news on Binance’s mounting court troubles in Nigeria.
Paxful fined $7.5m for letting ‘purveyors of prostitution’ and criminals use Bitcoin platform
Mathew di Salvo reported on how Paxful was used by criminals — including money launders and “purveyors of prostitution,” as the US Treasury put it. Paxful was also accused of having facilitated transactions with ties to North Korea.
Inside the Trump family’s $16bn crypto empire
Ben and Tim Craig mapped the Trump family’s sprawling crypto footprint — then followed the political blowback and the regulatory stakes as Washington grappled with alleged conflicts of interests, scrutiny and the people positioned to shape enforcement.
How Trump’s trade war is hurting Bitcoin miners: ‘It’s literally chaos every day’
Pedro Solimano tracked how Trump’s trade-war spilled over into Bitcoin mining. There, profitability — closely linked to hashprice — slid to about $40, a level miners treated as a nightmare scenario. That’s terrible for decentralisation because it risks fewer and bigger miners, with more concentrated hashpower.
Why crypto is going to miss Gary Gensler
Gary Gensler hardly made any friends among the cryptorati. His tenure as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission was marred by Gensler’s hard-hitting crypto crackdown. Yet, Ed argued that the industry would miss him in this thought-provoking story.
16,000 Ethereum believers ignore the price and Wall Street’s takeoverPedro dropped into Devconnect in Buenos Aires, where the Ethereum community packed talks and more than 200 side events. The blockchain’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin drew near-religious attention, and the obsession wasn’t “number go up” or, rather, down — it was the roadmap, especially privacy and zero-knowledge tech, which dominated the conversation.
Nigel Farage became the star of the crypto conference. Not everyone’s happyEric Johansson reported from crypto conference Zebu Live in London, where Nigel Farage told the crowd he’ll make London a crypto hotbed “when I’m in Number 10,” promising a regulatory framework to bring digital assets “in from the cold in London.” Like Trump, Farage is apparently betting on the crypto industry’s help to make him prime minister.
Hawk Tuah memecoin is a hot — and worrisome — topic on Capitol Hill, says lobbyist
Liam captured the moment memecoin mania stopped being an internet sideshow and started warping the policy conversation in Washington — with lawmakers and lobbyists watching the casino spill into legislation.
Traders cry foul as Milei memecoin reveals ‘rigged’ game for insiders
Tim Craig and Aleks unpacked a scandal that put memecoin plumbing on display — front-running, insider edges, and the characters “bold” enough to explain it all on YouTube.
Bitcoin buying SPC venture Twenty One lists 76 risks. Here are some big ones
Trista Kelley inked one of our first big stories about digital asset treasuries. While later stories would focus on Strategy copycats who struggle to stay more valuable than their underlying assets, Twenty One came with its own list of unique risks.
‘Premium era is over’ as all but one Bitcoin treasury firms fail to beat S&P 500
Hardly a year after the Bitcoin treasury craze kicked off, many Michael Saylor copycats have found themselves under pressure. Many of them are now worth less than their underlying assets, which put their very future into question. Case in point, only the French DAT The Blockchain Group managed to outperform the S&P 500 this year, Pedro reported in early December.
Gavin Wood’s Polkadot revamp features a stablecoin, belt-tightening, and a ‘womb room’
Liam captured peak Gavin Wood: part balance-sheet triage, part performance art. Wood told a Berlin crowd Polkadot’s annual security spend sits around $500m, then pitched a plan to cut it to a little over $100m by paying validators fixed costs… in cash.
Why Cardano’s Charles Hoskinson isn’t miffed by White House snub: ‘I don’t need to make a deal with Trump’
Liam also profiled Charles Hoskinson in the weeks following Trump’s White House crypto summit, which saw high-profile crypto executives like Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong and Strategy’s Michael Saylor invitations. Hoskinson, however, seemed to shrug off the snub of not being invited.
