Overview
- The Arkham blockchain data reported Monday shows wallets linked to the U.S.‑sanctioned Lazarus Group sold more than $30 million in bitcoin on Hyperliquid over a three‑week period.
- Analysts say the sellers converted proceeds into ether and solana and then routed the assets to centralized exchanges including Kraken, LBank, and KuCoin, though public records do not identify who controls the receiving accounts.
- Researchers previously flagged the same wallet cluster in 2024 and tied it to roughly $61 million in stolen funds, giving the new movements added weight for investigators and compliance teams.
- Bloomberg and other outlets report that Payward, Kraken’s parent, is in advanced talks to offer a subset of Hyperliquid perpetuals to U.S. traders through its regulated Bitnomial business, a plan that reporters describe as unconfirmed and subject to CFTC approval.
- Hyperliquid’s HyperCore design and HIP‑3 deployer model produce massive on‑chain volume—DefiLlama shows about $5.19 trillion cumulative perpetual trading—and that scale plus deployer opacity creates real enforcement and sanctions‑screening challenges for exchanges and regulators.