Senator Cynthia Lummis is pointing to Sections 303 and 305 of the CLARITY Act as she pushes for a Senate floor vote before the August recess. The two provisions would let the Treasury designate foreign jurisdictions as money laundering concerns and let exchanges hold suspicious transactions for up to 180 days. North Korea-linked hackers took about $643 million of the $972 million stolen from crypto in the first half of 2026.
Cynthia Lummis, one of the CLARITY Act's lead sponsors, took to X to press for a Senate floor vote before lawmakers leave for August recess. The Wyoming Republican pointed to the bill's anti-money laundering provisions as the answer to the illicit-finance gaps North Korea's Lazarus Group has exploited, an argument she has repeated since defending the legislation from Senator Elizabeth Warren earlier this month.
She wrote of Section 305: "Sec. 305 lets exchanges stop illicit funds before they reach North Korea."
What Sections 303, 305 and 201 would do
Section 303 gives the Treasury new special-measure authority to designate foreign jurisdictions or financial institutions as a "primary money laundering concern" specifically for digital asset activity. Once a jurisdiction is designated, covered exchanges and stablecoin issuers must prohibit or restrict fund transfers involving it, extending a tool regulators have long used against correspondent banks into crypto for the first time.
At the transaction level, Section 305 lets exchange operators and stablecoin issuers place a 30-day hold on any transaction they have reason to believe involves illicit activity, extendable to 180 days in total if law enforcement submits a formal written request. Firms that act in good faith get a safe harbor from civil liability, while existing suspicious activity report obligations stay in place.
Lummis has paired both sections with Section 201, which extends Bank Secrecy Act anti-money laundering requirements to digital asset firms for the first time, part of what she calls more than 16 illicit-finance safeguards built into the bill.
Lazarus Group's 2026 haul
North Korea-linked hackers were responsible for roughly two-thirds of all crypto hacking losses worldwide in the first half of 2026, about $643 million of the $972 million stolen across a record 207 incidents.
April brought the single largest hits, when the Lazarus Group drained Solana-based Drift Protocol of $285 million and then compromised the Layerzero bridge connecting DeFi platform KelpDAO to Ethereum for another $292 million.
Those losses build on a pattern researchers have tracked for years, with DPRK-linked actors stealing a record $2.02 billion in 2025, a 51% jump from the year before, pushing the group's cumulative haul since 2019 to $6.75 billion. The single largest exploit remains the February 2025 attack on Bybit, where Lazarus-linked hackers made off with roughly $1.5 billion in ethereum.
From protocol exploits to executives
The group has also shifted tactics this year, moving beyond bridge and protocol exploits toward direct targeting of crypto executives. Bitcoin.com News tracked a Lazarus-linked campaign dubbed Mach-O Man in April, which uses fake meeting invitations and a social-engineering technique called ClickFix to trick fintech and crypto staff into pasting malicious commands into their own Mac terminals, giving hackers a foothold before any onchain theft even begins.
Source: Bitcoin News
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