"Japan Securities Clearing Corporation testing blockchain-based government bonds." Apr 21, 2026

Bitcoin is down slightly at $76,471 Eth is down slightly at $2,321 XRP is down slightly at $1.43 Japan Securities Clearing Corporation testing Japanese government bonds as blockchain-based collateral Arbitrum’s Security Council freezes Kelp DAO funds Scammers targeting tankers Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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  It's 8 a.m. Eastern, April 21st, and this is your daily crypto report. Bitcoin is down slightly at $76,471. ETH is down slightly at $2,321. XRP is down slightly at $1.43.

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  Well, Japan Securities Clearing Corporation, the clearinghouse owned by Japan Exchange Group, has launched a proof of concept with Mizuho, Nomura, and digital asset to test using Japanese government bonds as blockchain-based collateral by integrating existing systems across institutions on Canton Network. The trial is focused on whether JGBs can be transferred and managed on-chain in real time while still meeting Japanese financial and exchange law requirements, and it will also explore cross-border use cases involving clearinghouses, institutional investors, and other market participants. The project sits within Japan's broader Financial Services Agency Payment Innovation Project and reflects growing pressure to modernize collateral infrastructure as other markets move in the same direction, including the United States, where DTCC is piloting

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  blockchain-based representations of treasury securities, and South Korea, where both Ripple and the government are involved in separate tokenized government bond and blockchain payment experiments. Well, Arbitrum Security Council has frozen over 30,000 ETH worth about $71 million tied to the Kelp DAO exploit, moving the funds into an intermediary-frozen wallet on Arbitrum One and saying they can only be moved again through further Arbitrum governance action. Arbitrum said the move was made with input from law enforcement regarding the exploiter's identity and did not affect other users' apps or overall chain state. The freeze follows the weekend attack on Kelp DAO's Layer Zero-powered cross-chain bridge and comes as preliminary findings from Layer Zero pointed to North Korea's Lazarus Group as the likely culprit. Well, more on that exploit.

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  Kelp DAO is pushing back on Layer Zero's attempt to pin the $292 million exploit on its one-of-one setup, saying that configuration was the documented default for new OFT deployments and was explicitly confirmed as appropriate during its expansion to Layer Zero. Even though Layer Zero had argued the setup created a single point of failure that let attackers likely linked to North Korea's Lazarus group poison RPC nodes, force acceptance of a fake cross-chain message, and finalize the exploit on April 18th, Kelp said it moved quickly to pause contracts and blacklist attacker-linked wallets. But the bigger problem now is fallout. And in the wider DeFi ecosystem, Ave's new incident report lays out two possible bad debt outcomes depending on how Kelp handles loss allocation.

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  In a chain-wide loss-sharing scenario, a 15% depeg in the affected token would create about $123 million in bad debt. While in a scenario where losses are isolated to Layer 2 chains, a 74% haircut would produce roughly $230 million in bad debt across markets like Mantle, Arbitrum, and Base. Ave said its $54 million WETH umbrella could act as an initial backstop in the first case, though not the second, and added that the DAO still has a strong balance sheet with $181 million in assets plus support commitments from ecosystem participants if losses have to be absorbed. And finally, scammers are reportedly targeting shipping companies with fake demands for Bitcoin or USDT clearance fees

• 5:29Speaker 00

  to let vessels pass through the Strait of Hormuz with maritime risk firm Marisk, warning that unknown actors are impersonating Iranian authorities and telling firms to submit documents so a crypto transit fee can be set. The scheme is hitting amid a broader shipping crisis with hundreds of ships and around 20,000 seafarers stranded in the Gulf as the strait remains snarled by overlapping US and Iranian restrictions, disrupting a route that normally handles about 1/5 of global oil and liquefied natural gas flows. Marisk said at least one vessel hit by gunfire from Iranian boats may have been caught up in the fraud, and the scam also follows reports that Iran has floated real tolls of as much as $2 million per tanker or about $1 per barrel, with crypto payments including Bitcoin reportedly on the table.

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  That's all for us today. Visit us at DailyCryptoReport.io and listen to us everywhere else you podcast under Daily Crypto Report.

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