India ordered GitHub to pull Jack Dorsey's BitChat repositories within three hours. Binance revealed it phishes its own employees every month. South Korean crypto trading volume dropped 89% i
India ordered GitHub to pull Jack Dorsey's BitChat repositories within three hours. Binance revealed it phishes its own employees every month. South Korean crypto trading volume dropped 89% in a year. These three stories, all from Cointelegraph's Asia Express roundup, show how governments, exchanges, and traders are reacting to a fast-changing crypto landscape across Asia.
India's Takedown Order Targets Code, Not Content
On July 23, 2026, India's Cyber Crime Coordination Centre ordered GitHub to disable three BitChat repositories. The deadline was three hours. The notice landed at 11:16 p.m., under Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act and Rule 3(1)(d) of the 2021 IT Rules.
BitChat is Jack Dorsey's open-source messaging app, released in July 2025. It uses Bluetooth mesh networking to relay encrypted messages between nearby phones. No internet, no server, no phone number required.
The government said BitChat lets people evade lawful surveillance during shutdowns. That is largely true. It is also the reason the app has spread across protest zones and disaster areas worldwide.
The order came during weeks of student protests in New Delhi over exam irregularities. Authorities had suspended mobile internet around the Jantar Mantar protest site five times since July 17, most recently for eight hours before the GitHub notice went out. Students used BitChat to stay in contact once their phones lost signal.
Dorsey posted the notice on X on July 24, writing that the government does not like technologies like BitChat and wants it removed. That post is how the public learned the order existed at all. India had not published it.
The Internet Freedom Foundation called the order unconstitutional and authoritarian. It argued the government used an intermediary-liability clause meant for illegal content, not the formal website-blocking process that includes judicial review. IFF pointed to Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India, a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that requires proportionality in internet restrictions. A three-hour deadline issued near midnight, it said, leaves no room for legal challenge.
IFF also made a practical point. Deleting a GitHub repository does not remove BitChat from phones that already have it installed. The Bluetooth mesh keeps working without any central server to shut down. What the takedown actually limits is public access to the source code, and the ability of new users to find and verify it.
More than 3,000 forks of the BitChat repositories existed before the order, so copies remain available through other channels. The app also stayed listed on Google Play and the Apple App Store as of late July. GitHub had not confirmed compliance days after the deadline passed, and reports conflicted on whether the repositories were actually taken down.
This is not the first government uneasy about BitChat. The app gained users during unrest or blackouts in Nepal, Uganda, Madagascar, Jamaica, and Iran. Each case followed the same pattern: authorities restrict the internet, and people turn to a tool that does not need it.
Amnesty International separately criticized India's use of National Security Act powers against the Jantar Mantar protesters, warning that administrative detention without standard safeguards threatens rights to peaceful assembly and free expression.
Binance Runs Monthly Phishing Drills on Its Own Employees
Binance chief security officer Jimmy Su told Cointelegraph the exchange has run simulated phishing attacks against its own staff for four years. An internal red team, the ethical hacking unit tasked with finding weaknesses before attackers do, sends the fake attacks monthly.
Employees who fail repeatedly get remediation training. Su said repeat failures can eventually cost someone their job.
The logic is simple. Crypto exchanges hold large sums and move fast, so a single employee clicking the wrong link can open a door for attackers. Testing staff regularly is one way to close that door before it matters.
The approach lines up with wider industry data. AMLBot estimated in February that social engineering drove 65% of crypto security incidents in 2025. That includes phishing, impersonation, and manipulation tactics aimed at humans rather than code. Binance's internal drills target that exact weakness.
The tradeoff is obvious too. Constant testing can wear on employee trust and morale, and firing staff over failed simulations is a harsh policy some workers may resent. But given how often social engineering causes real losses, the exchange is treating human error as a security gap worth closing directly.
South Korean Crypto Volume Falls 89% as Traders Move to Stocks
Combined daily trading volume across South Korea's five major exchanges, Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone, Korbit, and Gopax, fell to about $305 million in July 2026. A year earlier, the same five platforms averaged $2.82 billion a day.
Over the same period, the KOSPI stock index more than doubled. Retail money that once flowed into won-based crypto trading appears to have shifted toward equities instead.
The shift matters because South Korea has long been one of the most active retail crypto markets in the world. A drop this large points to a real change in where local traders are putting their money, not just a slow month.
Other Korean developments moved in parallel. Korbit is reportedly rebranding as Digital X after joining Mirae Asset Group. KB Kookmin Bank plans a blockchain-based cross-border payment service using JPMorgan's Kinexys network, launching in August. Regulators pulled 29 unlicensed exchange apps, including those tied to OKX, Bybit, and MEXC, from the Google Play store. North Korea reportedly arrested former state hackers accused of laundering funds stolen from two domestic banks.
What This Means for Bitcoin Watchers
None of these stories moves Bitcoin's price directly, but together they describe the environment Bitcoin operates in across Asia. Governments are testing how far they can reach into decentralized tools. Exchanges are hardening their own defenses against the most common attack vector in the industry. And retail capital in one of the region's biggest markets is rotating out of crypto trading entirely, at least for now.
Bitcoin itself traded near $64,400 at publication time, with ETF outflows continuing and the price struggling to hold above $65,000.
