Today in Crypto: Binance Recovers $450K Stolen From Curve.Finance; Buterin Estimates Sept. 15 for Ethereum Merge

India’s Enforcement Directorate, which works on probing financial crimes, announced Friday (Aug. 12) that it has frozen assets worth around 3.7 billion rupees ($46.4 million) from crypto exchange Vauld.

In its statement, the Directorate said authorities are looking into wallets held by Flipvolt, the legal entity for Vauld in India, as it reportedly has “proceeds of crime derived from predatory lending practices” which were transferred abroad later.

Vauld, which is backed by billionaire Peter Thiel, filed for bankruptcy protection in July.

Meanwhile, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said in a tweet Friday that the exchange has frozen or recovered $450,000 stolen from decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Curve.Finance earlier in the week.

CoinDesk wrote that hackers had stolen almost $570,000 from Curve.Finance, and the developers said they identified and fixed the problem later. Curve.Finance is a big DeFi player because of its CRV token rewards emissions, which are a big income source for other protocols.

In other news, the U.S. Treasury has targeted Tornado Cash, which lets users break the traceability of their activity on the Ethereum blockchain, the Financial Times wrote Sunday (Aug. 14).

The U.S. has alleged that Tornado Cash has been used to launder more than $7 billion, including around $500 million from state-backed North Korean hackers. Tornado Cash’s services let customers deposit crypto using one address, mixing funds into a single pool with all users’ funds and making the funds untraceable.

Furthermore, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of the Ethereum network, has said the blockchain’s “Merge” will likely happen on Sept. 15.

The update is likely to happen after a last testnet called Goerli has taken place, per a Seeking Alpha report. The hope with “the Merge” is that it will cut down on ether’s environmental impact and boost its network security.

In addition, bitcoin was briefly above $25,000 for the first time since mid-June, with momentum spurred from decent inflation data as well as news of “the Merge.”

Bitcoin rose 2.2% as of Sunday (Aug. 14), hitting $25,031 – the highest level since June 13. Bloomberg reported that ether also gained around 2% and hit $2,030.50, buoyed by Buterin’s announcement.

Finally, Cryptoslate reported Sunday that Binance now has the most bitcoin sitting on exchanges, swapping places with crypto exchange Coinbase.

There were more than 2.6 million bitcoin on exchanges at the start of the year, and that number has now fallen below 2.4 million. This has seemed to show a “long-term bullish holding tendency” as bitcoin was removed from exchanges. Binance’s amount began to spike in May, though Coinbase’s continued to fall at that time.

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