Today in crypto, Coinbase Ventures topped the ranks of crypto investors for the first half of the year. Thailand’s central bank is working with the country’s security regulator to audit high-volume stablecoin and cash transactions in a gray money crackdown and Pakistan’s virtual assets regulator called for continued dialogue on the treatment of digital assets after meeting an Islamic scholar who backed a ruling against purchases made with crypto.
Coinbase Ventures, the corporate venture capital (VC) arm of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, led the ranks of crypto-focused VC’s with 30 deals in the first half of 2026.
Runner-up Animoca Brands completed 19 investments while Silicon Valley VC a16z logged 18 deals and stablecoin giant Tether completed 15, according to data aggregator CryptoRank.
In the past 12 months Coinbase Ventures completed a peer-best 75 deals, followed by Animoca Brands with 40, YZi Labs (previously Binance Labs) with 39, GSR with 31 and a16z with 30.
Those VC deals defy a bear market that saw the total amount raised by cryptocurrency companies fall to $1.4 billion in June, down 63% decline from $3.8 billion in April.
Deal counts also fell in June, to 61 fundraising rounds, down from 89 rounds in May. Still, last month showed a slight recovery compared to April, when crypto VC funding hit a two-year low of $698 million across 71 total fundraising rounds.
Top active investors and top categories by funding deals. Source: CryptoRank
Bank of Thailand targets USDT and cash flows in gray money crackdown
Thailand’s central bank is stepping up stablecoin surveillance as part of a wider effort to crack down on money laundering, illicit finance and “gray money” in the country.
The Bank of Thailand is working with the Kingdom’s Securities and Exchange Commission to audit high-volume stablecoin transactions, with a focus on USDt (USDT), cash transactions and currency exchanges, to identify and stop illicit financial flows.
“The measures we are implementing are not short-term fixes; they require the continuous deployment of multiple parallel strategies,” Bank of Thailand Governor Vitai Ratanakorn said, according to local media outlet The Nation on Saturday.
Thailand is targeting the “gray economy,” which largely consists of cash that may have come from suspicious origins, such as scam call centers that have proliferated in the region. While there are no reliable figures for the gray economy, scam losses were 115 billion THB ($3.4 billion) in 2025, with around 173 million scam calls and texts recorded.
Stablecoins have become a popular method of transferring large amounts due to near-instant cross-border settlement.
Pakistan crypto chief seeks dialogue after scholar rules against crypto payments
Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (PVARA) chairman Bilal bin Saqib has called for continued dialogue on the treatment of digital assets under Islamic law after meeting prominent scholar Mufti Taqi Usmani, who backed a ruling against purchases made with crypto.
In a Saturday post, Saqib said the discussion covered blockchain technology, digital assets, stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), as well as the need to protect Pakistanis from fraud, exploitation and financial harm.
Saqib said the different categories of digital assets merit “careful technical assessment alongside rigorous Shariah examination, rather than being viewed through a single lens.”
The exchange highlights tension between Pakistan’s push to build a regulated crypto market and religious objections that could shape public acceptance. Religious views could carry significant weight in Pakistan, where about 231.7 million people, or 96.35% of the population, identified as Muslim in the 2023 census.