Crypto entrepreneurs and their families in France will receive enhanced security measures amid a recent rise in crypto-related kidnappings in the country, Politico reported.

According to the May 16 report, the measures include priority access to police emergency lines, home security assessments, and safety briefings from French law enforcement to ensure best practices are being followed.

France’s Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau introduced the security measures as part of a broader effort to counter the recent wave of attacks.

“These repeated kidnappings of professionals in the crypto sector will be fought with specific tools, both immediate and short-term, to prevent, dissuade and hinder in order to protect the industry.”

Law enforcement officers will also undergo “anti-crypto asset laundering training,” Retailleau noted.

Retailleau met with several local leaders from the crypto industry to discuss the measures following three crypto-related kidnapping incidents in recent months.

Two kidnappings and a failed attempt in France this year

The latest incident occurred on May 13, when assailants attempted to abduct the daughter and grandson of Pierre Noizat, CEO of the French crypto platform Paymium. Fortunately, they managed to fend off the attack, which occurred in broad daylight. 

The assailants tried to force the pair into a waiting van, but Noizat’s daughter managed to take one of the guns off an assailant and throw it away, local police said.

En plein Paris, un homme a été violenté par des individus cagoulés, habillés tout en noir. Ils tentaient de l’enlever. Un homme a surgi, extincteur à la main, pour les faire fuir. →https://t.co/P0qV6PR40v pic.twitter.com/9f4r2Gi7ho

— Le Figaro (@Le_Figaro) May 13, 2025

On May 3, Paris police freed the father of a crypto entrepreneur who was held for several days in connection with a 7 million euros ($7.8 million) kidnapping plot.

Related: SEC hacker sentenced to 14 months in prison

In January, the co-founder of crypto hardware wallet provider Ledger, David Balland, was abducted from his home in central France during the early hours of Jan. 21. He was held captive until a police operation on the night of Jan. 22 secured his release.

Retailleau said earlier this week that he believes the incidents were likely connected.

There have been over 150 crypto-related robbery or kidnapping incidents since 2014, with 23 of those incidents occurring in 2025 alone, according to a GitHub database maintained by Bitcoin cypherpunk Jameson Lopp.

Lopp noted many of these criminals typically identify future victims through social media posts, public conversations, meetups, and conferences.

He strongly advises against peer-to-peer trades — particularly with people you don’t trust — flaunting wealth on social media and wearing crypto-branded clothing.

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Tokenization could open new opportunities for retail investors to access traditionally restricted asset classes, according to Johann Kerbrat, senior vice president and general manager of Robinhood Crypto, who called it “very important for financial inclusion.”

Speaking at the Consensus 2025 event in Toronto, Kerbrat said that some real-world assets, such as real estate and private equity, are available only to up to 10% of the US population. “You need to be an accredited investor to invest in private equity right now,” he said.

“How many people can afford a house or an apartment in New York?” he elaborated. “But you can get a piece of it with fractionalization, through tokenization. And so we think it makes it a lot easier to be exchanged, a lot more accessible for everybody.”

Robinhood’s Johann Kerbrat at Consensus 2025. Source: Cointelegraph

Robinhood has been one of a handful of investment firms or brokerages that have explored RWA tokenization in recent months. Others include BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Apollo, and VanEck.

RWA tokenization is often touted as a means to enhance financial accessibility, with most tokenized funds currently concentrated on the private credit and US treasury markets. According to RWA.xyz on May 16, the total market capitalization of onchain RWA is $22.5 billion across just 101,457 asset holders. On average, each holder owns $221,867 in onchain assets.

Related: MultiBank, MAG, Mavryk ink world’s largest $3B RWA tokenization deal

Stablecoin evolution will create more ‘specialized’ tokens

Kerbrat also touched on stablecoins, which have emerged as a key crypto use case this cycle. “You will see 100 stablecoins,” he predicted.

Kerbrat expects a rise in stablecoins that are “more specialized in a specific market.” According to DefiLlama, dollar-pegged stablecoins dominate the stablecoin sector. The two largest, Tether’s USDt (USDT) and Circle’s USDC (USDC), account for $211.8 billion or 87.1% of the $243.3 billion stablecoin market cap.

“If you’re trying to move funds from the US to Singapore, maybe you will use a specific stablecoin,” he said. “The shift is going to go from just stablecoin to platforms that are managing all these stablecoins.”

Tether’s USDT has seen its market share surge over the past few years. Source: DefiLlama

Fireblocks policy chief Dea Markova recently told Cointelegraph that there is a growing demand for non-dollar-pegged stablecoins. In April, the Italian finance minister warned that dollar-pegged stablecoins represent a greater risk than US President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

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The Filecoin Foundation and Lockheed Martin Space have successfully transmitted data in space using a version of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) on a satellite orbiting Earth, Marta Belcher, president of the Filecoin Foundation, told Cointelegraph. 

Filecoin and Lockheed Martin adapted the system for use in space and successfully tested it, Belcher said during the Consensus 2025 conference in Toronto.

The IPFS enhances privacy and security compared to traditional web protocols, such as HTTP, by identifying data based on its content rather than its location. This has additional benefits for data transmission in space, Belcher said.

“The architecture is well-suited to space because it reduces delays, compensates for data corruption caused by radiation, and enables cryptographic verification to ensure data has not been tampered with,” she said.

The foundation is a nonprofit governing the decentralized cloud storage protocol Filecoin (FIL), which uses the IPFS web protocol to store data. Lockheed Martin is one of the world’s largest aerospace companies.

Source: Filecoin Foundation

Decentralized storage benefits

“There’s a multi-second delay from the Moon and a multi-minute delay from Mars,” Belcher said.

“With IPFS, you look for a content ID and retrieve the data from wherever is closest — your own device, a nearby satellite, or a lunar station.”

Additionally, the IPFS uses a distributed architecture to store multiple copies of data across a global network, reducing reliance on centralized data centers.

These multiple copies of data improve reliability in environments where hardware is prone to degradation, helping to ensure the integrity of sensitive materials such as satellite images, according to Belcher.

Interest in decentralized archival storage is growing among media companies, and the Foundation is also exploring potential military applications of this technology, Belcher said.

“It could be really powerful for media in general to have that deep archive and also the ability to have your records everywhere all over the world when needed,” she said.

The FIL token is a utility token that can be used within the Filecoin ecosystem. It has a total market capitalization of approximately $1.8 billion as of May 16, according to Cointelegraph data.

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