Good morning. One crypto exchange has become key to Iran’s ability to use cryptocurrency to evade far-reaching U.S. economic sanctions.

CoinEx, an 8-year-old exchange founded by a Chinese engineer, has played a growing role in connecting Iran’s crypto operations to the wider world, blockchain data shows. Since 2019, wallets with an identifiable link to Iran have moved more than $3.84 billion through CoinEx, according to blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs.

• Washington headaches: The ability of Iranians to use CoinEx highlights the difficulty the U.S. faces enforcing sanctions against the Islamic Republic. The country has publicly embraced cryptocurrency, and the industry provides a range of sometimes obscure platforms operating largely outside the reach of the U.S. that connect Iran’s domestic economy to the global crypto ecosystem.
   
• Deal in the works? The U.S. is currently negotiating a peace-deal with Iran that could include significantly easing its economic restrictions on Iran. It had previously threatened to extend sanctions against foreign financial institutions that support Iran’s activities.
   
• Screening efforts: CoinEx, which is now based in the African island of Seychelles, maintains a transaction monitoring system, screens for high-risk users and this month began taking steps to distance itself from the Iranian market, including by blocking new users with Iranian IP addresses, CoinEx founder Haipo Yang said.

U.S. bans Polestar, Chinese-owned EV maker, from selling cars in the U.S.

Polestar, the majority-Chinese-owned electric-car brand that spun out of Volvo, will exit the U.S. market after the Commerce Department banned the company from selling new cars in the country.

The decision represents the first major casualty of a U.S. rule to ban Chinese software in new vehicles that connect to the internet, a move aimed at preventing cameras and GPS tracking in cars from being exploited by foreign adversaries.

Top DOJ official tells staff he wants to avoid antitrust trials.

A top Justice Department official has told antitrust enforcers he prefers they stop taking cases to trial and instead seek to settle them, according to people familiar with the matter.

Some lawyers at the department interpreted the comments from Stanley Woodward, the department’s third-ranking official, as a directive to resolve any litigation against companies and avoid future litigation, some of the people said.

• Startup UpDoc has secured Food and Drug Administration clearance for AI that interacts with patients and adjusts medication doses, another step toward propelling the technology into everyday medicine.
   
• Coca-Cola asked a federal appeals court Thursday to overturn a U.S. Tax Court decision that put the company on the hook for more than $20 billion in taxes and interest, contending that the Internal Revenue Service engaged in an unfair and retroactive bait-and-switch in how it calculated Coke’s foreign profits.
   
• Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr said Thursday that ABC is running a “campaign of misinformation” about the regulatory agency’s inquiry into the network’s daytime talk show “The View.”
   
• European Union officials opened an antitrust probe into Sanofi to assess whether the French drugmaker’s marketing campaign for a flu vaccine breached competition rules.
   
• The internal watchdog of the World Bank’s private-investment arm found that Cambodian microfinance lenders harmed impoverished borrowers by pressuring them to keep paying back loans they couldn’t afford.

Iran attacks cargo ship, testing Trump’s deal to reopen strait.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps attacked a Singapore-flagged cargo ship Thursday in the Strait of Hormuz, according to two senior U.S. officials, testing the deal signed last week by the U.S. and Iran to end the fighting and reopen the vital shipping lane.

A one-way attack drone maneuvered to the west side of the ship before it struck the vessel, according to one of the officials, an indication that the attack was deliberate. The attack damaged the ship’s bridge but left no casualties, according to U.K. Maritime Trade Operations.

• How Iran Devastated an American Naval Base—and Caused a U.S. Recalculation

The EU is cutting tariffs on the U.S. Now comes the next fight.

The European Union on Thursday followed through on a central plank of its trade deal with President Trump after months of internal wrangling. Another economic battle with Washington looms even larger.

The EU’s member countries on Thursday approved sweeping tariff cuts for many U.S. imports, marking the last formal vote in a multistep process whose pace had frustrated American officials. The tariff cuts were among several commitments the EU made last year in exchange for a U.S. pledge to cap most levies on the bloc at 15%.

Now the EU must tackle an even thornier challenge: addressing U.S. complaints that its regulations are hurting American companies’ access to its 27-country market.

• The U.S. Army is leasing land on bases across the country to companies that will build and operate critical mineral processing plants, military officials said Thursday, the latest push by the Trump administration to establish a domestic supply chain of the crucial materials.
   
• China is preparing new legal tools for striking back against economic pressure from abroad, raising risks for foreign businesses operating in the world’s second-largest economy.
   
• The Middle East helium supply shock didn’t hit chip makers. They were one step ahead thanks to a diverse network of suppliers that allowed their plants globally to keep operating at pace, backed by extensive helium storage caverns and on-site inventories.

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• The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed President Trump to take away legal protections from hundreds of thousands of immigrants who until now had been permitted to stay in the U.S. for humanitarian reasons.
   
• New York Fed President John Williams said the current stance of monetary policy is well positioned to restore inflation back to the Federal Reserve’s 2% goal, while acknowledging risks to its dual mandate remain.
   
• Forget work. Passive income is the new American dream.

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