Here’s what happened in crypto today
Today in crypto, Ripple reportedly made a $5 billion bid to acquire Circle, an elderly US citizen was targeted in a $330 million Bitcoin social engineering scam, and a court ruled that Tornado Cash cannot be sanctioned again.
Ripple $4B-$5B bid to purchase Circle rejected — Report
Blockchain payments firm Ripple has reportedly bid up to $5 billion in an effort to acquire stablecoin issuer Circle, but the offer was rejected.
According to an April 30 Bloomberg report, Ripple put in a bid of $4 billion to $5 billion as part of an attempted takeover of Circle, which was rejected as being too low. Ripple hasn’t considered whether to make another bid to purchase the stablecoin issuer.
The reported acquisition attempt came less than 30 days after Circle applied for an initial public offering (IPO) in the US. Cointelegraph reached out to representatives of Circle and Ripple for comment, but had not received a response from either at the time of publication.
Ripple reportedly had an $11 billion valuation in 2024, an estimate CEO Brad Garlinghouse called “outdated” as of January. The blockchain company purchased prime broker Hidden Road for roughly $1.2 billion in April, claiming the move would help scale activity for XRP and XRP Ledger.
$330 million Bitcoin social engineering theft victim is elderly US citizen
An elderly US individual is reportedly the victim of a devastating $330 million Bitcoin heist, now ranked as the fifth-largest crypto hack in history.
The attacker used advanced social engineering tactics to gain access to the victim’s wallet, onchain investigator ZachXBT said in an April 30 update on X.
The hack took place on April 28, 2025, when ZachXBT flagged a suspicious transfer involving 3,520 Bitcoin (BTC), valued at $330.7 million.
Following the transfer, the stolen stash was quickly laundered through over six instant exchanges and swapped into privacy-focused cryptocurrency Monero (XMR).
Onchain data shows that the victim had held over 3,000 BTC since 2017, with no prior history of large-scale transactions.
Once stolen, the attacker wasted no time laundering the Bitcoin using a peel chain method — a common obfuscation technique in which large sums are broken into smaller, harder-to-trace chunks.
“$330M in BTC was received in two transactions, then immediately distributed via peel chains,” Yehor Rudytsia, onchain researcher at Hacken, explained to Cointelegraph.
“Funds started to flow into multiple instant exchanges / mixers with small amounts, then mixers were distributing funds across multiple new wallets. The biggest funnelling chain is now consists of 40+ wallets.”
OFAC can’t restore Tornado Cash sanctions: Judge
The US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control can’t reimpose sanctions against the crypto mixing service Tornado Cash, Austin federal court judge Robert Pitman has said in an April 28 judgment.
He added OFAC’s sanctions on Tornado Cash were unlawful and that the agency was “permanently enjoined from enforcing” any further sanctions.
OFAC added Tornado Cash to its Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (SDN) list in August 2022, accusing the protocol of helping launder crypto stolen by the North Korean hacking collective, the Lazarus Group.
Tornado Cash users led by Joseph Van Loon then sued the Treasury, arguing the sanctions were “not in accordance with law.”
The agency dropped the platform from the sanctions list on March 21 and argued that the matter was “moot” after a court ruled in favor of Tornado Cash in January. It also argued last month that there was no need for a final court judgment in the lawsuit.
SEC punts decisions on XRP, DOGE ETFs
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has postponed deciding on whether to greenlight two proposed cryptocurrency exchange-traded funds (ETFs) holding Dogecoin and XRP, filings show.
The US regulator has delayed its deadline for ruling on the proposed ETF listings until June, according to two filings reviewed by Cointelegraph.
The filings were responses to March requests from US exchanges NYSE Arca and Cboe BZX Exchange to list Bitwise’s Dogecoin (DOGE) ETF and Franklin Templeton’s XRP (XRP) ETF, respectively. They came on the same day that Nasdaq, another US exchange, asked for permission to list a 21Shares Dogecoin ETF.
Dogecoin is the world’s most heavily traded memecoin, with a market capitalization of around $26 billion as of April 29, according to data from CoinGecko. XRP is the native token of the XRP Ledger blockchain network. It has a market capitalization of approximately $133 billion, CoinGecko data shows.
