Iranians are turning to Bitcoin (BTC) mining due to economic difficulties caused by sanctions by the United States, international affairs think tank Atlantic Council reported Dec. 17. Despite the recent crash in crypto markets and fluctuations in the national rial currency caused by recently reinforced U.S. sanctions, Iranian people are still reportedly managing to gain profits from mining Bitcoin. As reported by Atlantic Council, 26-year-old Iranian Ali Hosseini and his cousin Pedram Ghasemi bought a Bitcoin mining device, an Antminer S9, two months ago for $526, when the top cryptocurrency was trading around $6,500. Despite the U.S. dollar reportedly soaring …

Crimean authorities are considering creating a blockchain-cluster that would support investment platforms allowing foreign investors to work in sanctioned countries anonymously, major state-operated Russian news agency TASS reported Nov. 16. Previously this week, the Permanent Representative of the Republic of Crimea under the President of the Russian Federation, Georgy Muradov, had already revealed the Crimean government’s potential plans to create a separate blockchain-cluster in the region for venture capitalists funds. Today, Roman Kulachenko, the President of the Crimean Republican Association of Blockchain Technologies Investment, said that a new international education center for working with blockchain technologies as a way of …

The U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) is calling on cryptocurrency exchanges to monitor Iranian use of crypto to evade sanctions. The agency requested this in an advisory issued Thursday, Oct. 11. The call comes as part of a wider directive warning of the “systemic” Anti-Money Laundering/Combating the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) risks Iranian activity poses to the global financial system. According to FinCEN, as of 2013 Iranian use of cryptocurrency includes “at least $3.8 million worth of bitcoin-denominated transactions per year.” Conceding that the use of crypto in the country is “comparatively small,” the document warns that crypto represents …

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is seeking sanctions against the individuals behind the allegedly fraudulent Initial Coin Offering (ICO) known as PlexCoin, Finance Feeds reports September 26. The SEC has been involved in ongoing court proceedings against the owners of the associated firm PlexCorps — Dominic Lacroix and Sabrina Paradis-Royer — at the New York Eastern District Court since December 2017. The SEC’s initial complaint had charged the pair with violating securities law in respect to PlexCorps’ PlexCoin ICO in August 2017. The complaint had accused Lacroix — whom it called “a recidivist securities law violator in Canada” …