North Korea recruits hackers from age 11, pays up to 30% of stolen proceeds: Reuters

The detail that stands out is the incentive structure: a cut of stolen proceeds in hard currency, plus Pyongyang housing and foreign-currency rewards for top performers. That turns state-sponsored cybercrime into a career ladder with material payoffs, which helps explain the scale South Korea's NIS attributes to the program. For crypto and RWA markets, the relevance is the laundering pipeline such personnel feed into, not the training itself. Whether attribution and sanctions efforts can keep pace with a pipeline this institutionalized is the open question.