According to a report by Bloomberg News Wednesday (April 1), the incident on the Solana blockchain was flagged by cybersecurity and data analytics firms and acknowledged by Drift itself in a post on X.

“Drift Protocol is experiencing an active attack,” the post said. “Deposits and withdrawals have been suspended. We are coordinating with multiple security firms, bridges, and exchanges to contain the incident. This is not an April Fools joke.” 

The amount of cryptocurrencies involved, as determined by blockchain data analysts, could make this one of the biggest hacks in crypto’s history, the Bloomberg report added, noting that some of the stolen crypto was converted into Circle’s USDC stablecoin.

The hacker likely exploited a new market on Drift that lets users borrow other cryptocurrencies against an illiquid token called CVT, the report said, citing Xuxian Jiang, a researcher at blockchain security company PeckShield.

The incident follows a year in which cryptocurrency thefts rose to $3.4 billion for the first nine months of the year, according to blockchain data platform Chainalysis. Almost half of that figure came from one incident, the record $1.5 billion compromise of the Bybit crypto exchange.

In related news, PYMNTS wrote earlier this week about Chainalysis’ launch of blockchain intelligence agents created for fraud prevention. 

This offering “shows that the industry’s response to AI-driven crypto fraud and bot attacks is one that, inevitably, must be symmetrical,” that report said.

“Agentic blockchain defenses are not innovation for efficiency’s sake. They are defensive escalation,” PYMNTS wrote. 

“If bad actors can use artificial intelligence to accelerate activity, enforcement and compliance must use AI to compress detection and response times, meaning tasks that once took days should now take minutes, and investigations that required specialists must be executable by broader teams.”

Among the defining challenges of crypto, the report added, is that it is “transparent but not easily interpretable.” Transactions are public, though it takes specialized tools and expertise to understand them.

“If realized, the agentic approach being launched by Chainalysis could mark a significant redistribution of analytical power,” the report continued.

“Compliance officers, executives, and even non-technical stakeholders could access insights previously reserved for trained investigators. Reports that once took hours could be generated on demand. Alerts could be enriched, triaged and in some cases resolved automatically.”

EDX Markets Holding Company Files OCC Charter Application for Crypto Trust Bank

The application was made public on Wednesday, April 1, and first reported on by Bloomberg. It requests full fiduciary powers under 12 U.S.C. § 92a and authorization to provide digital asset custody, asset management, and settlement services exclusively for institutional clients. The proposed main office is located at 200 W. Madison, Suite 1450, Chicago, IL 60606.

EDX Markets launched in June 2023 as an institutional-only cryptocurrency exchange. Its founding backers include Citadel Securities, Fidelity Digital Assets, Charles Schwab, Virtu Financial, Paradigm, Sequoia Capital, Hudson River Trading, and Miami International Holdings.

The platform operates on a non-custodial model, meaning it does not hold client assets during trading, a structure that mirrors how traditional finance (TradFi) firms separate custody from execution. The proposed trust bank would not change that separation. EDX Trust would handle custody, asset management, and settlement. Order matching and trading would remain with its affiliate, EDX Markets LLC.

If approved, EDX Trust would offer fiduciary custody of digital assets, cash, and stablecoins, using sub-custodian banks to manage private keys and reduce single points of failure. The bank would also manage custodied cash and stablecoins by investing them in highly liquid assets, targeting returns near the federal funds rate, along with permissible staking and yield-generating activity.

Settlement services would include riskless principal trading and end-of-day net settlement for clients operating on the EDX Markets platform or in over-the-counter (OTC) venues. The bank would not conduct proprietary trading.

The proposed board includes five members, among them independents with banking and risk backgrounds from First Business Financial, UBS, and Charles Schwab. Management draws from executives who have worked at Cboe Digital, the Options Clearing Corporation, Coinbase, and Kraken.

CEO José Antonio Acuña-Rohter, who previously led ErisX and Cboe Digital, is heading the effort. The bank would have no physical branches and no retail services. All operations would run electronically through APIs and a graphical interface.

The OCC added the application to its public list of pending digital asset licensing applications on March 26. No decision timeline has been announced.

The filing joins a growing list of crypto and fintech firms seeking national trust bank charters since late 2025. In December 2025, the OCC granted conditional approvals to five crypto-related institutions, including de novo charters for Ripple National Trust Bank and First National Digital Currency Bank, along with conversions for Bitgo, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Paxos. Early 2026 saw additional approvals for Crypto.com and Stripe’s Bridge unit.

Pending applications as of April 1 include Revolut Bank US, Zerohash National Trust Bank, Morgan Stanley Digital Trust, Coinbase National Trust Company, and World Liberty Trust Company, which has ties to the Trump family.

A new OCC final rule, effective April 1, 2026, clarifies that national trust banks may engage in operations of a trust company and activities related to non-fiduciary digital asset custody on a case-by-case basis. The rule removes one layer of legal ambiguity that had slowed institutional adoption.

A federal charter allows a firm to operate nationwide under a single regulatory framework, bypassing most state-by-state licensing requirements. For institutions that require regulated custody before allocating to digital assets, that distinction carries weight.

Like the others in line, the OCC will review the EDX Trust application for safety and soundness, capital adequacy, and compliance. The application includes a large volume of confidential exhibits, including the business plan and financial projections, for which EDX has requested FOIA protection.

FAQ 🔎

• What is EDX Markets applying for? EDX Markets Holding Company filed an application with the OCC on March 25, 2026, to charter EDX Trust, National Association, as a de novo national trust bank in Chicago focused on institutional digital asset custody and settlement.
• Who backs EDX Markets? Key investors include Citadel Securities, Fidelity Digital Assets, Charles Schwab, Virtu Financial, Paradigm, Sequoia Capital, and Hudson River Trading.
• What services would EDX Trust offer? The proposed bank would provide fiduciary custody of digital assets and stablecoins, asset management, and settlement services exclusively for institutional clients via electronic channels.
• Has the OCC approved the EDX Trust application? No decision has been announced; the OCC listed the application as pending on March 26, 2026, and will review it for safety, soundness, and compliance.

Google researchers have sounded the alarm over the growing threat that future quantum computers pose to the security systems protecting Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies, saying that the crypto industry needs to start preparing now. In a blog post and accompanying white paper published this week, Google’s research team warned that the computing power required to break the encryption safeguarding crypto wallets and transactions may be significantly lower than experts had previously believed. Google, however, clarified that while no such machine is capable of doing this exists today, the threat is real as future quantum computers may.“Google has led the responsible transition to post-quantum cryptography since 2016. In a new whitepaper, we show that future quantum computers may break the elliptic curve cryptography that protects cryptocurrency and other systems with fewer qubits and gates than previously realized. We want to raise awareness on this issue and are providing the cryptocurrency community with recommendations to improve security and stability before this is possible, including transitioning blockchains to post-quantum cryptography (PQC), which is resistant to quantum attacks,” the company said in a blog post.

What exactly is the risk

At the heart of the concern is a type of encryption called elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC), which is considered to be the mathematical backbone used to secure most crypto transactions. According to Google’s latest research, a future quantum computer could crack a key part of this system, known as ECDLP-256, using roughly 20 times less hardware than earlier estimates had assumed.Consider ECC as a digital lock that is so powerful that it needs much resources to crack it open. Quantum Computing offers a way to crack things that are not been possible with the current systems, like accelerating drug discovery, advancing material science (batteries). Similarly, quantum computers can provide an easy way to break crypto security with lower resources than previously thought.

What it means for crypto holders

Should crypto holders panic? Not yet but Google says they should pay attention. Google is clear that Bitcoin and Ethereum are not suddenly vulnerable, and the researchers framed their paper as a warning, giving the industry time to respond. Still, the researchers struck a cautious tone, noting that the window to act is “increasingly narrow” and that the pace of technological progress means developers, exchanges, and wallet providers need to move faster.Google is also pointing to a newer form of security called post-quantum cryptography (PQC) – encryption systems specifically designed to hold up against the power of quantum machines.“We urge all vulnerable cryptocurrency communities to join the migration to PQC without delay,” the researchers wrote. They also added the the US government has also been apprised of this.“To share this research responsibly, we engaged with the U.S. government and developed a new method to describe these vulnerabilities via a zero-knowledge proof, so they can be verified without providing a roadmap for bad actors. We urge other research teams to do the same to keep people safe. We look forward to continuing our work across the industry following our 2029 timeline alongside others working on responsible approaches, like Coinbase, the Stanford Institute for Blockchain Research, and the Ethereum Foundation,” Google added.