Today in crypto, Iconic Satoshi Nakamoto statue recovered after theft, TradFi giants made 345 blockchain investments between 2020–2024, with G-SIBs leading 100+ deals across tokenization, custody and payments. Meanwhile, Arkham Intelligence claims to have retroactively uncovered the biggest crypto hack in history.
Iconic Satoshi Nakamoto statue recovered after theft
The iconic statue of Satoshi Nakamoto that was displayed in Parco Ciani, a municipal park in Lugano, Switzerland, was recovered on Saturday after the statue went missing.
Municipal workers found the statue broken into multiple pieces, thrown in the waters of Lake Lugano and on the surrounding lakeshore.
“You can steal our symbol, but you will never be able to steal our souls,” Satoshigallery, the art collective that installed the Satoshi statue, wrote in an X post.
The iconic work of art by the Italian artist and Bitcoin advocate Valentina Picozzi is viewed as a symbol of the Bitcoin community and the global movement to adopt a neutral monetary protocol that separates money from central banks and government authorities.
Citigroup, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs lead TradFi’s blockchain charge: Ripple
Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Japan’s SBI Group have emerged as the most active players in traditional finance backing blockchain startups, according to a new report by Ripple in partnership with CB Insights and the UK Centre for Blockchain Technologies.
Between 2020 and 2024, global banks participated in 345 investments in blockchain companies, most of them in early-stage funding rounds, per the report. Citigroup and Goldman Sachs led the pack with 18 deals each, while JP Morgan and Mitsubishi UFJ followed closely with 15 investments.
Mega-rounds, deals worth $100 million or more, were a key focus. Banks contributed to 33 such rounds during the four-year window, pouring capital into firms focused on trading infrastructure, tokenization, custody, and payment solutions.
Notable examples include CloudWalk in Brazil, which raised over $750 million across two rounds backed by Banco Itaú and others. Likewise, Solaris in Germany secured over $100 million from SBI Group and later became a majority acquisition target.
Arkham Intelligence says it retroactively uncovered the biggest crypto heist in history
Blockchain analytics platform Arkham Intelligence claims to have retroactively discovered a $3.5 billion hack of a Chinese Bitcoin (BTC) mining pool dating back to 2020.
LuBian, a mining pool operator that emerged in May 2020, was hacked on December 28, 2020, and suffered the loss of 127,426 Bitcoin, valued at about $14.5 billion using current market prices, according to Arkham.
The mining pool was able to save 11,886 BTC by moving the funds to different addresses, which it still holds.
The blockchain intelligence platform said that the hack is suspected to have occurred through a brute-force attack, which revealed private keys that were generated by an algorithm and were insecure.