Invitation-Only Forum Draws Hundreds of Investigators

The FBI is deepening its cooperation with the cryptocurrency industry as digital assets become increasingly linked to fraud, cybercrime, terrorism financing and state-backed operations — a shift that has drawn private-sector blockchain specialists more directly into law enforcement work.

The bureau's invitation-only Virtual Asset Technical Exchange, formerly known as the Virtual Currency Symposium, held its ninth annual edition in San Antonio this month, according to CoinDesk. The event brought together several hundred FBI investigators, international law enforcement officials, compliance specialists and blockchain-forensics firms. Nine consecutive editions make the exchange one of the longest-running formal venues where U.S. investigators and crypto-industry specialists compare methods, reflecting how public-private cooperation on digital-asset tracing has become a standing feature of federal crypto enforcement.

About 50 Private-Sector Participants

Private-sector participation was capped at roughly 50 vendors and partners, including blockchain-analytics providers Chainalysis and TRM Labs, whose tools are used by more than 600 government agencies and institutions to investigate crypto activity. Firms of this kind now sit at the center of modern financial investigations, translating raw blockchain data into investigative trails for agencies without in-house crypto units. The chief executive of Predicate also presented at the exchange, speaking on stablecoin compliance and the GENIUS Act, the U.S. federal stablecoin legislation signed into law in July 2025 that created a federal regulatory framework for payment stablecoins — a development that has made stablecoin compliance a shared reference point for compliance teams and investigators alike.

Scams, Terrorism Financing and North Korean Hack on the Agenda

Discussions covered crypto scams, terrorist financing, cartel activity, human trafficking, ransomware and North Korean cyber operations. Participants examined methods for tracing illicit funds and for sharing intelligence between law enforcement agencies and the private sector.

The FBI established its Virtual Assets Unit in 2022 to centralize cryptocurrency expertise across the bureau's criminal and cyber divisions — the internal counterpart to the external partnerships on display at the exchange.

Rising Crypto Crime Losses Frame the Gathering

The forum comes as crypto-related crime generates growing losses. The FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report — the annual release of the bureau's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) — recorded 181,565 cryptocurrency-related complaints and more than $11.3 billion in reported losses. Cryptocurrency investment fraud alone accounted for more than $7.2 billion of that total, a scale that has turned consumer-facing scams into a shared concern for regulators, platforms and law enforcement.

North Korean activity was also discussed at the exchange, including the April exploit of Solana-based decentralized exchange Drift, in which more than $270 million was stolen. U.S. authorities have long treated North Korean crypto theft as a national-security matter rather than an ordinary financial crime, a framing reflected in its placement alongside terrorism financing and ransomware on the agenda.

The gathering underscores the increasingly important role that crypto companies and blockchain analytics firms play in helping law enforcement trace illicit funds, identify attackers and recover stolen assets. With the exchange now an annual fixture and the IC3 report published each year, both serve as recurring, checkable markers of how cooperation between investigators and the crypto industry — and the scale of reported crypto crime — develop over time.