Crypto is increasingly becoming a tool for crime.

For American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Stephanie Hughes.

Cryptocurrency is being used more frequently in illegal transactions.

About $158 billion was used in illicit crypto activity last year, an all-time high.

That's according to a new report from the startup TRM Labs.

This comes as the overall crypto ecosystem is growing.

And it should be said legitimate uses of crypto are growing at a faster rate than

illegitimate ones. I talked about all this with Airy Redboard, one of the authors of the new

report. As the ecosystem grows, we're seeing lawful actors really, really leverage crypto infrastructure,

the growths of cryptocurrency exchanges, financial institutions getting more involved in the space.

We're finally seeing the use of stable coins for payments at scale.

So I think what we've done is we've seen crypto infrastructure grow, but we're also seeing

illicit actors take advantage of crypto infrastructure.

So for example, the largest driver of illicit activity in 2025 was a Russia-related stable coin called

A7A5. That was the largest driver of sanctions activity, but also one of the largest

drivers of overall illicit activity. And that's very much infrastructure, right? That's a nation-state

actor developing a stable coin, cryptocurrency, to evade sanctions at scale we've

seen you know activity in places like venezuela where the state is involved in this activity we've

seen north korea continue to attack cryptocurrency exchanges and steal billions of dollars of funds so

i would say we're seeing this move towards taking advantage of crypto infrastructure,

which is something that's really helped drive illicit activity.

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