The U.S. government is active on the blockchain again, and Ethereum just broke a transaction record.

The U.S. government is moving coins from the BitFenex hack. While it's tied to 2016 hacker,

Ilya Lichtenstein, just sent about $606,000 of Bitcoin to Coinbase Prime, according to Arkham data. Transfers to

exchanges often hint at selling pressure, but these coins have a court-mandated destination,

and it's not the Treasury. Federal proceedings earlier this year ordered the seized Bitcoin

to be returned in-kind to Bitvinx, which plans to use it to redeem recovery right tokens and

burn its Leo token.

Lichtenstein originally stole Bitcoin worth $8.9 billion today.

CFTC Chairman Mike Sealyke told Congress, the agency is leaning on AI to cover its workload,

even as its staff keeps shrinking.

About a quarter of CFTC employees have left since 2025 under the Trump administration's federal cuts.

CILA said tools like Microsoft co-pilot are now built into surveillance and investigations and insisted the agency is running more efficiently and effectively.

But the CFTC is about to take on more work.

The Clarity Act would make it the central regulator for non-security crypto, and it's already

policing a predictions market sector that ballooned from millions to billions. And Ethereum processed

over 200 million transactions on its base layer in Q1. This is the first time it crossed that

threshold in a single quarter. That's a 43% jump from Q4 last year and a full recovery from

the activity lows of

2023. The boom is being driven by layer 2s like base and arbitram, plus a record $180 billion

in stable coins that now sit on Ethereum. Ether is still down, however, over 50% from last

August high. Get more updates on CoinDesk.com.