A man suspected of helping kidnap and torture an Italian cryptocurrency investor in a Manhattan townhouse has surrendered to New York City police.

William Duplessie turned himself in Tuesday after what officials described as days of negotiations with authorities, the New York Times reports.

He is the third suspect in an alleged plot to extract the keys to a bitcoin wallet belonging to Michael Valentino Teofrasto Carturan, a crypto fund associate who said he was held captive and abused for nearly three weeks.

The ordeal began on May 6, when Carturan arrived at a 17-room townhouse on Prince Street in Manhattan’s NoLiTa neighborhood. He was set to reconnect with former fund partner John Woeltz, who, along with another associate Beatrice Folchi, allegedly ambushed him.

Police say the group attempted to force Carturan to surrender access to his crypto holdings, reportedly worth millions, through physical threats and psychological abuse.

According to law enforcement, Carturan was assaulted, suspended from the top floor of the five-story building, and held at gunpoint. He managed to escape and alert authorities nearly three weeks later.

The New York City Police Department case has drawn attention for its brutality and connection to a growing trend of physical attacks on crypto users.

In France, the daughter and grandson of Paymium CEO Pierre Noizat were recently targeted in a failed kidnapping attempt captured on video. Earlier in the same city, a crypto millionaire’s father was abducted and had a finger severed before being rescued.

Another incident saw David Balland, co-founder of hardware wallet maker Ledger, and his wife kidnapped from their home. Authorities later rescued the couple and seized the ransom payment.

While Folchi has since been released and her prosecution deferred, Woeltz is scheduled to appear in court on Wednesday. Both Woeltz and Duplessie face kidnapping, assault and illegal gun possession charges.

An attorney representing Woeltz didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

LAS VEGAS, Nevada — Steak n’ Shake has only been accepting bitcoin payments for two weeks, but the American fast food chain’s COO Dan Edwards said it’s already been a “win” for both the company and its customers.

Speaking at Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Edwards said that bitcoin payments have been faster and cheaper than traditional credit card payments.

“When customers choose to pay in bitcoin instead of credit cards, we are saving about 50% in our processing fees,” Edwards said. “This means that bitcoin is a win for the customer, it’s a win for us as a merchant, and it’s a win for the bitcoin community.”

Edwards said that on May 16, the day Steak n’ Shake began accepting bitcoin payments, one in every 500 bitcoin transactions globally happened at Steak n’ Shake.

“Accepting bitcoin allows us to meet our customers where our customers are,” Edwards said. “We were seeking to provide our customers with another viable option by which to pay for our products. We understand that allowing customers to pay with bitcoin alongside cash and credit cards, puts bitcoin on par with those methods, those other globally accepted payment methods.”

Edwards added that you can buy more than just a burger and beef tallow fries with your bitcoin at Steak n’ Shake – the company is also allowing would-be franchisees to purchase their franchises with bitcoin.

Riding the success of bitcoin payments, Edwards said the company is looking for other ways it can embrace technology to bring its food into the future — including robo-taxis, cyber-chefs, and drones.

LAS VEGAS, Nevada — Marathon Digital Holdings (MARA) CEO Fred Thiel has an idea for how U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration can make good on its promises to build out a strategic bitcoin reserve: start mining.

Speaking on a panel at Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Thiel said that the U.S. government has many potential ways to generate bitcoin to fill the strategic bitcoin reserve that would adhere to the “budget-neutral” acquisition strategy laid out in Trump’s March executive order, including using excess hydroenergy to mine bitcoin domestically.

Though it’s been nearly three months since Trump authorized the establishment of a strategic bitcoin reserve, it remains unclear exactly how — and when — the government will take steps to actually begin filling it, a source of evident frustration among a number of speakers at the conference.

“I think it’s critical,” Thiel said of acquiring bitcoin for the reserve. “The U.S. making a statement that we’re going to have a strategic reserve is an empty statement unless you start putting stuff into it.”

At this point, the reserve is supposed to hold all of the bitcoin that has been sized by the government in civil and criminal forfeitures — estimated to be approximately 200,000 bitcoins. But many in the industry and government, including Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), think that getting the government’s existing stockpile of bitcoin into a strategic reserve is merely a first step, to be followed by bigger, more meaningful acquisitions.

In March, Lummis re-introduced legislation — the so-called BITCOIN Act of 2025 — aimed at codifying Trump’s plans for a strategic bitcoin reserve. Under Lummis’ plan, after getting all of the forfeited bitcoin into the reserve, the U.S. government would spend the next two to five years converting a portion of its gold certificates into bitcoin.

“We have enough assets in under performing assets that we can get five percent of the world’s bitcoin without spending a single dime,” Lummis said.

However, Lummis acknowledged that it’s unlikely that any real movement on the BITCOIN Act — or, more broadly, taking any significant steps to fill the strategic reserve with anything other than forfeited assets — will come before Congress works its way through stablecoin and market structure legislation.

“It’s going to be a heavier lift than I thought because so many people don’t understand bitcoin,” Lummis said.