Starknet's privacy framework could redefine DeFi privacy standards, balancing user confidentiality with regulatory transparency.

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Cardano's partnership with Blockforce enhances supply chain transparency, potentially setting a precedent for compliance in global trade regulations.

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Netanyahu's budget delay may exacerbate IDF readiness issues, impacting Israel's strategic stability amid regional tensions and fragile ceasefires.

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Liverpool's potential deal with Turkish Airlines highlights the growing influence of state-backed sponsorships in European football's financial landscape.

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Bitcoin's vulnerability to macroeconomic shifts highlights the broader risks for non-yielding assets amid global financial volatility.

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Bitcoin Magazine

Liquid Gets 3,400 BTC Back After On-Chain Talks; White Hats Keep 598.5 BTC

The “White hat” party that withdrew nearly 4,000 bitcoin from the Liquid Network federation wallet on Sunday returned 3,400 BTC to the wallet on Monday. About 598 BTC, or 15% of the consolidated pile, stayed at the same holder address as an implied bounty fee worth 48 million dollars.

The return transaction (bc49a46d), confirmed at 16:09 UTC on September 7. It returned exactly 3,400 BTC to the labeled Liquid peg script address and sent the 598.5 BTC change back to the “White hat” hacker address as change. 

The transfer followed a day of messages written into Bitcoin blocks. The White hats first published transaction on chain with a message in the OP_RETURN arbitrary data field “contact us on chain”; the message came from the address holding the 4000 BTC taken from the Liquid Network. 

A Blockstream-linked address answered with “Please contact security@blockstream.com”. Later notes from that sender carried Electrum-encrypted payloads and PGP signatures that can be verified against Blockstream’s published security key.

In block 965869, the White hats asked in the clear text whether sending “most” back to the federation script was acceptable. The 1,000-sat output on that transaction was only a message carrier. 

Soon after, the White hats wrote “Please fix the bug first. The chain is under risk at latest commit right now. Make sure every node is patched. Then we will transfer the money back safely after confirming the fix.” followed by an encrypted blurb of text to Blockstream’s PGP key. 

In the same block, a clear-signed reply from the Blockstream sender said “Yes, thank you.” Hours later, the same Blockstream posted another clear-text note: “Bridge nodes are patched, safe to return the funds”. 

Minutes after the 3,400 BTC landed. The white hats sent back 85% of the funds, keeping 15% as an implied finder’s fee. The choice was celebrated by some on X as ‘better than keeping 100%’ while others were a bit shocked at the amount. While 15% might sound reasonable, the total sum is so large that it nears $50 million at today’s prices. Blockstream was clearly not happy about the finder’s fee, as four encrypted messages followed onchain a few hours later, likely after the main fires had been put out at the office and the lawyers had a chance to have a say in the matter. An hour later, one more encrypted message was posted from Blockstream.

The White hats replied with two encrypted messages. Blockstream replied once an hour later. Then the White hats published a simple yet meaningful “ ” sad face emoji. This emoji does a lot of work. It suggests that negotiations did not go well over reducing the size of the bounty. Blockstream wizards are clearly ‘big mad’ about the size of that finder’s fee. What exactly was said in those encrypted messages is not known and Blockstream has made no public statements on the matter. But we can only assume the saga is not over.

The full chat can be easily followed on this vibe-coded site (by yours truly). A couple of other researchers are keeping tabs on the conversation and on-chain data, such as Sjors’s GitHub gist and Alex Thorn from Galaxy Research. 

Liquid’s Sunday statement is still the network’s last official account post: purported whitehats withdrew about 4,000 BTC through the SideSwap peg-out path, the PAK itself was not compromised, other issued assets were unaffected, and the sidechain was paused. Liquid and Blockstream had not posted a new statement on the 3,400 BTC return as of this writing. SideSwap had said the L-BTC in the original peg-out “came from an Elements bug.” 

This post Liquid Gets 3,400 BTC Back After On-Chain Talks; White Hats Keep 598.5 BTC first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

Bitcoin Magazine

Alleged White-Hat Hackers Withdraw 4,000 bitcoin from Blockstream’s Liquid Network Federation Reserves

The Liquid Network said Sunday that purported white-hat hackers withdrew about 4,000 bitcoin, worth about $320 million, from the federation wallet that backs L-BTC. Bridge nodes were disabled, and the sidechain was paused. Other issued assets, including USDT, DePix and RWAs, were unaffected, the official account said on X.

The Liquid Network is a federated sidechain of Bitcoin, founded by Adam Back’s Blockstream. The Liquid chain issues a variety of assets such as LBTC, which it backs with BTC on the Bitcoin main chain, held in a large multisig of 15 corporate and known members. 11 of the 15 members need to sign a valid multi-signature transaction to move coins from the treasury. Before the hack, the treasury held over 4200 BTC; after the hack, Blockstream’s proof of reserves page reports a little over 207 BTC left. 

The hackers withdrew 4,019.4 BTC from the reserve address in a peg-out transaction using the SideSwap Peg-out Authorization Key. SideWap is a bridge exchange and a member of the Liquid Federation. While details on the mechanism of the hack are not confirmed yet, it appears an inflation bug on the LBTC side chain was exploited by the hackers to create over 4,000 LBTC that did not exist before, and cash them out for on-chain bitcoin from the federation. Because the transaction appeared as valid, given the consensus bug, the federation members’ HSM security servers signed the BTC withdrawal transaction, worth roughly 320 million at the time. 

The hacker moved the funds to an address ending in 6gyqjlte, from which they quickly signed a new transaction with a message on the OP_RETURN arbitrary data field saying “we are whitehats. contact us on chain.” Those coins were still at that address at the time of writing.

A small mainnet transaction to the hacker address followed by an OP_RETURN saying “Please contact security@blockstream.com”, presumably from a Blockstream public address, though that remains unconfirmed. A later OP_RETURN spend from the hacker address carried “Please contact us on Signal @m671aw.70”, however, this may be spam and does not share a link to the address with the stolen funds.

In response to the breach, exchanges were told to pause L-BTC deposits and withdrawals. Bridge nodes on the Liquid Network have been paused, limiting access to the side chain, which continues to produce blocks. 

JAN3 CEO Samson Mow said Aqua’s Liquid features were affected and that on-chain bitcoin still worked. Other wallets in the industry that use the Liquid Network are expected to be affected. Users holding LBTC now effectively have their savings at risk, since the underlying BTC is currently not redeemable. Given the private nature of the Liquid chain, user onchain analytics are scarce and not much public information is known about how much LBTC is held by retail users versus corporations of Blockstream itself. Nevertheless, should the funds not be returned, it would be a heavy blow to the Liquid Network’s user base.

Users of LBTC don’t have many options but to wait for conversations with the hackers to resolve. Given the size of the hack, it would be difficult for the hackers to get away with stealing all that bitcoin, though perhaps not impossible. What may happen is that the hackers ask for a finder’s fee and return the majority of the funds. 

This post Alleged White-Hat Hackers Withdraw 4,000 bitcoin from Blockstream’s Liquid Network Federation Reserves first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

Bitcoin Magazine

Hargreaves Lansdown Reverses Course, Rolls Out Bitcoin Trading 

British financial services firm Hargreaves Lansdown is letting retail investors buy bitcoin — nearly one year after it said the cryptocurrency was “not an asset class.” 

The Bristol, UK-based investment firm’s website said it was offering bitcoin and other crypto exchange-traded notes to investors. ETNs are investment funds which trade on stock exchanges and track the prices of digital assets. 

It comes after the firm, which manages nearly £173 billion (over $233 billion) in assets, last year warned customers about buying bitcoin. 

“While longer-term returns of Bitcoin have been positive, Bitcoin has experienced several periods of extreme losses and is a highly volatile investment — much riskier than stocks or bonds,” the firm said at the time. 

“The HL Investment view is that Bitcoin is not an asset class, and we do not think cryptocurrency has characteristics that mean it should be included in portfolios for growth or income and shouldn’t be relied upon to help clients meet their financial goals.” 

Now, a number of ETNs tracking the price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are available. The firm warns users that “crypto ETNs are considered high-risk and may be volatile.”

U.S. regulator the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2024 approved bitcoin exchange-traded funds for investors after a decade of saying no to the products. 

The funds had the most successful debut in the history of ETFs as investors previously unable to buy exposure to the asset class rushed in to buy the products. 

Run by top asset managers and banks like BlackRock, Fidelity, and Morgan Stanley, the investment vehicles now collectively manage over $100 billion in assets. 

This post Hargreaves Lansdown Reverses Course, Rolls Out Bitcoin Trading  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Trezor Breach Worse Than Reported: Another 67,000 US Customers Exposed

Hardware wallet manufacturer Trezor has said that a data breach first announced last month is worse than originally reported. 

The Prague, Czech Republic-based company said Friday that an additional 67,000 U.S. customers had their names, emails, phone numbers, shipping addresses and order numbers leaked. The leaked data came from orders made between November 2019 and August 2021, according to Trezor. 

Trezor first announced in August that data from 11,742 customers from the U.S., UK, Sweden, Colombia, Brazil, Italy, and Portugal had been exposed — with names, emails, phone numbers and shipping addresses leaked. 

Another 1,947 customers just had their names, cities and emails exposed in the breach. 

In Friday’s announcement, Trezor said that its third-party fulfillment partner, ShipMonk, had falsely reassured the company about deleting customer data. 

In a statement to Bitcoin Magazine, a Trezor spokesperson said: “We had no reason to expect it: throughout our entire relationship with ShipMonk we repeatedly requested and received written assurance confirming the deletion of that data, in line with our contract, our data policy and our past communications.”

“It should not have existed to be exposed,” the statement added.

ShipMonk did not immediately responded to Bitcoin Magazine’s questions. 

Trezor first announced in August that the data had been leaked because ShipMonk experienced “unauthorized access to their systems containing customer data.” 

The company added that it had directly emailed all customers involved in the breach. Trezor’s parent company, SatoshiLabs, told Bitcoin Magazine last month that it was investigating the incident. 

Trezor is one of the most popular Bitcoin hardware wallet solutions, and also has support for storing other cryptocurrencies. 

Bitcoiners’ personal data has been targeted by cybercriminals in the past: back in 2020, an unauthorized party accessed popular hardware manufacturer Ledger’s e-commerce and marketing database, leaking over 1 million email addresses and the personal contact data of nearly 10,000 customers. 

At the start of this year, customers reported receiving emails from Global-e, Ledger’s payment partner, that a data breach at its cloud systems leaked sensitive customer data. 

This piece has been updated to include additional commentary from Trezor.

This post Trezor Breach Worse Than Reported: Another 67,000 US Customers Exposed first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

El Salvador Isn’t Buying Bitcoin With Public Money, Says IMF 

El Salvador has not used public funds to accumulate bitcoin since the International Monetary Fund’s last review of its loan program, the fund said Thursday. 

In a report Thursday, the body said that the Central American country had instead received bitcoin from private donations, citing documentation from the government. It added that “no further Bitcoin accumulation beyond the documented donations is expected.”

El Salvador made headlines in 2021 when it became the first country in the world to make bitcoin legal tender. Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele in 2022 said the country would buy one bitcoin per day but it was never clear where the money was coming from — or if he was actually buying at all. 

“Documentation has been provided verifying that Bitcoin accumulation since the first review reflects private donations and that no public resources were used,” the IMF release said. 

“Understandings were also reached on steps to modernize the legal, regulatory, and supervisory framework for digital assets and to further strengthen the governance and risk-management arrangements for public-sector crypto-asset holdings. Going forward, no further bitcoin accumulation beyond the documented donations is expected.”

The report added that public participation in the government-sponsored bitcoin wallet has been largely wound down, with majority ownership and operational control handed to a private operator. 

El Salvador in 2021 debuted a state-sponsored wallet called Chivo for its citizens as part of its plan to increase bitcoin adoption in the country. 

“IMF staff thank the Salvadoran authorities for the constructive discussions and excellent collaboration,” the report added. 

The IMF El Salvador entered a $1.4 billion loan agreement at the end of December but the fund asked for the country to scale back certain aspects of its bitcoin strategy. 

Institutions like the World Bank and the IMF have long criticized President Bukele’s Bitcoin law, which also asked businesses to accept the cryptocurrency if they had the technological means to do so. 

President Bukele in 2024 admitted that Salvadorans weren’t using the cryptocurrency to buy things as expected, but always boasted that the government was still stacking sats. 

Since launching a crime crackdown to tackle the country’s notorious crime gangs, murder rates in El Salvador have plunged. The country was once the most dangerous place in the Americas but President Bukele is now trying to turn it into a tech hub. 

Crypto companies like Tether have since relocated to its capital, San Salvador. 

This post El Salvador Isn’t Buying Bitcoin With Public Money, Says IMF  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Hunter Biden is about to test whether his criticism of political profiteering through crypto applies to his own business ventures.

According to The Wall Street Journal, former President Joe Biden's son plans to launch a memecoin called LAPTOP on Sept. 9, turning one of the most politically charged episodes of his father’s 2020 election campaign into a speculative crypto asset. The token will debut on Coinbase’s Base network with a supply of 1 billion units.

Following the report, Hunter Biden promoted the LAPTOP ticker on X with a video compilation revisiting the laptop controversy.

The project puts Biden’s political notoriety at the center of the trade. Its name references the laptop he left at a Delaware repair shop in 2019, whose contents became a major controversy ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

Founders, including Biden, have been allocated 30% of LAPTOP’s supply, with those tokens locked for six months before vesting over the following two years.

Another 20% is reserved for two rounds of airdrops, including distributions to Biden’s Substack subscribers and wallets that lost money holding President Donald Trump’s TRUMP memecoin. Up to another 30% is linked to a series of political, cultural, and crypto outcomes that could result in tokens being permanently removed from circulation.

Those conditions include Democrats winning the 2028 presidential election, Bitcoin reaching another record high, and LAPTOP surpassing TRUMP’s valuation. If specified prediction-market outcomes are met, the corresponding tokens are slated to be burned; otherwise they can be directed to charity.

The structure makes LAPTOP an unusually direct attempt to financialize Biden’s political identity just months after he accused the Trump family of exploiting crypto for personal gain.

Biden’s criticism of Trump now faces its own test

Biden has never presented himself as an opponent of digital assets. His criticism has instead focused on the intersection of crypto, political power and private enrichment under Trump.

In August, Biden attacked World Liberty Financial, the crypto company co-founded by Trump and his sons, calling it “corruption at a scale we’ve never seen.” After laying out allegations against the company, he concluded that the “crypto industry deserves better.”

Months earlier, Biden said the Trump family had “corrupted it, almost completely,” while arguing that Democrats should become more receptive to blockchain technology.

That distinction is significant because Biden has simultaneously emerged as an enthusiastic supporter of crypto.

During a May interview with conservative commentator Candace Owens, he said there was “incredible promise in cryptocurrency,” described himself as “kind of like a crypto person,” and said he believed in the ideas underpinning Bitcoin.

He even foreshadowed LAPTOP, saying he believed in memecoins and wanted to create something around a community in the future.

LAPTOP now provides a real-world test of where Biden draws the line.

Like TRUMP, the project draws much of its potential value from the public profile of the person associated with it. Political allegiance and controversy become part of the token’s appeal, while insiders receive a substantial portion of the supply.

The project goes further by weaving partisan outcomes directly into its token economics. A Democratic presidential victory can reduce LAPTOP’s supply, while overtaking Trump’s token represents another potential burn event. The planned airdrop to investors underwater on TRUMP also explicitly seeks to pull Trump memecoin traders into Biden’s rival political asset.

That creates an uncomfortable parallel with the crypto commercialization Biden has spent months attacking.

One distinction separates Biden from Trump

However, a significant difference separates the two situations: Hunter Biden holds no government position.

Trump is president while maintaining a financial interest in businesses operating in an industry whose regulatory environment his administration can shape. His administration appoints financial regulators, influences crypto legislation, and has pursued policies broadly favorable to digital assets.

Trump reported more than $1.4 billion in income from his family’s crypto ventures in 2025, including almost $800 million received by his companies from World Liberty Financial and about $635 million tied to his memecoin.

The White House has rejected allegations that those businesses create improper conflicts, while Trump has said he does not involve himself in managing his finances.

Biden has no comparable ability to influence federal crypto policy, giving him a basis to argue that LAPTOP does not create the kind of conflict he sees in Trump’s businesses.

Yet the launch narrows another distinction.

Biden’s criticism has repeatedly centered on politicians and their families using prominence generated through public life to accumulate private wealth. His own history was itself the subject of years of Republican investigations over whether business relationships benefited from his father’s political position.

With LAPTOP, Biden is openly turning that same political identity into an investable asset.

The founding team’s 30% allocation means its members could benefit directly if attention surrounding Biden translates into demand for the token once their holdings begin unlocking. The project’s political burn mechanics, TRUMP-related airdrop, and name leave little separation between the asset and the controversies that made Biden famous.

LAPTOP therefore creates a harder question for Biden than whether he believes in crypto. He has already made clear that he does.

The question is how far someone can monetize a famous political name through crypto before reaching the territory Biden himself has spent months condemning.

The post Hunter Biden’s new “LAPTOP” memecoin targets traders who lost money on TRUMP appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Poland’s failed crypto vote has left domestic firms unable to seek licenses while EU-authorized rivals continue entering the market.

The Sejm failed Sept. 4 to override President Karol Nawrocki’s veto of legislation needed to implement parts of the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) Regulation, prolonging a licensing gap more than two months after Poland’s transition period expired.

Lawmakers recorded 241 votes to re-enact the bill, 198 against and three abstentions, falling short of the threshold required to overcome the June 11 veto.

Without the legislation, Poland has yet to designate the domestic authority needed to process ordinary MiCA applications. The Polish Financial Supervision Authority’s office has said authorization proceedings cannot begin until that designation is made by law.

That leaves firms seeking a Polish license stuck even as competitors authorized elsewhere in the bloc retain a route into the same market.

EU licenses offer a way around Poland’s blockage

MiCA allows an authorized crypto-asset service provider to operate across member states through its home regulator.

A firm can notify that regulator of the countries and services it intends to cover and begin cross-border activity once it has transmitted the information, or after the applicable waiting period. Polish regulators have confirmed that route remains available.

The advantage became more significant after July 1, when the maximum MiCA transition period expired.

Companies can no longer rely on Poland’s previous virtual-currency activity register to continue operating.

The Katowice Tax Administration Chamber said an entry on that register no longer provides authorization, while Polish regulators maintain that domestic legislation or an administrative decision cannot extend the transition.

That effectively closes the old route before Poland has opened the new one.

The distinction follows the entity providing the service rather than the nationality of its owners. A Polish crypto group could still reach domestic customers through an affiliate that has obtained the necessary MiCA authorization elsewhere in the EU and completed the cross-border notification process.

A company relying only on its old Polish registration cannot.

That creates an incentive for firms unwilling to wait on Warsaw to seek authorization in another member state where the MiCA licensing machinery is already operating.

For applicants that remain in Poland, the next opening depends on lawmakers passing legislation that designates a competent authority. Until then, their quickest route back to Polish customers may run through another European capital.

The post Poland’s crypto licensing deadlock is handing foreign EU firms an advantage appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Tether-backed Orionx is shutting down with customer withdrawals frozen after more than $7 million left its custody.

The Chilean crypto exchange said a forensic audit found that customer assets had been transferred to wallets outside its control, prompting it to begin a permanent closure and suspend withdrawals while it determines how much it can return.

The failure comes less than a year after Tether invested in Orionx in June 2025, following an earlier investment by affiliated exchange Bitfinex in 2023. Tether’s backing had been intended to support Orionx’s expansion across Latin America.

Customers now face a less certain outcome. Chile’s Comisión para el Mercado Financiero said it cannot oversee Orionx’s wind-down or order the exchange to return customer assets, leaving users dependent on the company’s restitution process or potential court action.

Orionx said it froze withdrawals to prevent customers who move first from recovering assets at the expense of those who remain. Its closure tracker is still at the first of five stages, with account reconciliation and approval of a restitution plan required before funds are returned. No repayment date has been disclosed.

Customers face recovery without a regulatory backstop

The CMF’s limited role stems from Orionx’s regulatory status.

The agency rejected the exchange’s registration and authorization application on June 19, ending a transitional arrangement that had allowed it to operate while the application was being reviewed.

From then on, Orionx was restricted to winding down existing business rather than taking on new regulated activity.

The regulator said Orionx was neither registered nor authorized under Chile’s Fintech Act and had failed to demonstrate that it had secured the collateral required of approved providers.

That means the CMF can point customers toward Orionx and the courts, but cannot compel repayment itself.

Orionx has said its priority is to return as much customer property as possible “as quickly and fairly” as circumstances allow. It also notified prosecutors about the transfers and filed a criminal complaint dated Sept. 2 against former executives. Those allegations have not established responsibility for the missing assets.

The more immediate issue for customers is how large the recoverable pool actually is.

Orionx still has to reconcile individual balances, determine available assets, and approve a distribution plan before restitution begins. The exchange’s own tracker shows those stages remain ahead.

The post Tether-backed crypto exchange freezes withdrawals after $7 million leaves custody appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Harmony is proposing to shut down the blockchain it controversially restored through a rollback less than three weeks ago.

The Sept. 6 plan would end Harmony’s independent network, move ONE to Ethereum, and preserve the token through a snapshot and airdrop, reversing the project’s position from Aug. 17, when it rejected migration as too disruptive.

Instead, Harmony chose to roll back the chain after an Aug. 11 exploit that allowed attackers to reuse cross-shard receipts and mint tokens without corresponding debits elsewhere.

The project initially reported 4 billion ONE created in the attack. Its broader reconstruction later put unauthorized issuance at roughly 3.01 trillion ONE across six forged transactions.

Harmony completed the rollback on Aug. 21, discarding more than 109,000 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions from the affected shard-0 archive, and said the network was operating normally.

This represents the second major attack the blockchain network has suffered in recent years.

In June 2022, Harmony’s Horizon bridge was drained of nearly $100 million in an attack the FBI later attributed to North Korea’s Lazarus Group.

The exploit marked a major setback for the network and was followed by a prolonged decline in ONE, which eventually traded about 99% below its peak. Data from CryptoSlate showed ONE trading at $0.0007122 as of press time, with a market value near $10.75 million.

As a result of these attacks, the network now wants to retire its services altogether.

“The threats posed by state actors and AI agents are too great,” Harmony said in the new proposal.

The migration Harmony rejected is back on the table

Under the new proposal, Harmony would take a snapshot at the chain’s final block and distribute new ONE tokens to the same wallet addresses on Ethereum.

Delegated stakes and unclaimed rewards would move into individual governor vaults, while token supply and emissions would remain unchanged.

However, the blockchain itself cannot move.

Smart contracts, liquidity pools, and multisig safes will not migrate automatically, prompting Harmony to urge users to exit smart contracts before Sept. 10. Validators may also begin shutting down from 7 a.m. Pacific Time that day.

A proposed $1.37 million compensation pool would pay governors and delegators over four quarters, subject to shutdown and service conditions.

The plan would also repurpose future ONE emissions toward Harmony’s AI-video initiative, further separating the token’s future from the chain it was originally designed to secure.

That leaves the rollback looking less like a permanent recovery and more like a temporary bridge to shutdown.

Harmony spent August rejecting migration, rewriting chain history and restoring operations to preserve the network. By September, it was proposing the migration it had set aside and preparing to abandon the infrastructure anyway.

The proposal remains non-binding, and Harmony has not yet disclosed the final block or airdrop date.

The post A seven-year-old blockchain is permanently abandoning its own network to seek refuge on Ethereum appeared first on CryptoSlate.

UBS's new forecast of two Federal Reserve rate hikes this year extends Bitcoin's potential macro headwind through December. The issue reaches beyond September's decision: investors may have to weigh the cost of holding a non-yielding asset against interest-bearing alternatives through the end of 2026.

Reuters reported Sept. 7 that UBS Global Wealth Management now expects increases of 25 basis points, or a quarter of a percentage point, in both September and December. It had previously expected no policy change this year. UBS cited strong August labor data, hawkish Fed communication and inflation risks from supply bottlenecks.

Markets are already moving toward that view. Futures price in a roughly 58% chance of a quarter-point hike at the Sept. 15–16 meeting, up from 52% before the jobs report.

For Bitcoin, the risk is that higher rate expectations keep Treasury yields supported, preserve the appeal of dollar assets and make investors less willing to take risk.

Strong jobs give inflation more weight

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that employers added 162,000 jobs in August and unemployment held at 4.1%. Hiring exceeded the average monthly gain of 31,000 over the preceding 12 months.

But the strength was uneven. Food services and drinking places added 59,000 jobs, while local government education added 42,000. Information employment fell by 23,000.

Even so, labor-market resilience changes the Fed's policy tradeoff. A deteriorating jobs market can increase pressure to ease. When hiring holds up, policymakers have more room to focus on inflation and maintain restrictive conditions.

Governor Christopher Waller described that balance in Sept. 3 remarks, before the jobs release. He said continued progress on inflation could justify holding rates steady, while hot August inflation could make him consider a hike.

The jobs report therefore strengthens the labor side of the argument for tighter policy, leaving inflation as the next major variable for September.

UBS's forecast also extends the possible tightening horizon beyond the next meeting. Markets respond not only to the next Fed decision but to the expected path of rates across several meetings.

The Fed's explanation of monetary transmission describes how policy expectations influence longer-term interest rates, asset prices and exchange rates. Financing conditions can tighten before policymakers deliver an increase.

Applied to UBS's outlook, the risk for Bitcoin is that those conditions remain restrictive through year-end. Higher expected US rates can keep yields elevated and make dollar-denominated interest-bearing assets more attractive.

The December call also raises the stakes of the September meeting. Investors will be assessing both the immediate decision and what the Fed says about conditions that could warrant another increase.

How that pressure can reach Bitcoin

Bitcoin pays no contractual interest. When investors can earn more from relatively safe interest-bearing assets, holding it carries a higher opportunity cost. That can raise the threshold for taking price risk even when an investor's longer-term view of Bitcoin has not changed.

Higher borrowing costs provide another channel. More expensive financing can make leveraged positions harder to maintain, while tighter financial conditions can reduce investors' willingness to deploy fresh capital into risk assets.

Historical research supports taking this seriously. A 2023 IMF working paper found that Fed tightening reduced a common crypto price factor through weaker risk-taking. That historical relationship helps explain Bitcoin's exposure to monetary conditions, while leaving the size of any response in 2026 uncertain.

For scale, Bitcoin traded around $79,375 according to CryptoSlate data around 14:02 UTC on Sept. 7.

CryptoSlate's Sept. 5 analysis of the jobs report examined the immediate pressure and the coming inflation test. UBS adds a longer horizon: its December call raises the possibility that restrictive conditions persist through year-end.

Bitcoin's response depends on both expectations and demand. If investors have already priced in higher rates, confirmation may carry less surprise, while crypto-specific demand could offset some of the macro pressure.

The next scheduled test is August CPI on Sept. 11, ahead of the Sept. 15–16 FOMC meeting. Cooler inflation would fit Waller's stated condition for supporting a hold. A hotter reading would strengthen the argument that price pressures require more restraint while employment remains resilient.

The Fed's communications blackout began Sept. 5 and runs through Sept. 17, limiting new policy commentary before the meeting. Inflation data are therefore the immediate signal; the committee's decision and projections will provide the next major indication of how firmly policymakers see a need for further restraint.

Beyond September, the December meeting is scheduled for Dec. 8–9. UBS expects another hike then, but the inflation and employment picture could change substantially before that decision.

For Bitcoin, the key question is whether incoming inflation data push expected rates higher and whether yields and broader financial conditions follow. Cooler inflation or a less hawkish Fed assessment could ease the pressure. Persistent inflation would give UBS's two-hike outlook more weight, leaving Bitcoin to contend with a less supportive macro backdrop.

The post Strong jobs just triggered a hawkish UBS reversal that could pressure Bitcoin through December appeared first on CryptoSlate.

If someone has your password and your second factor, only one question still decides whether your balance leaves the exchange: is the attacker's destination address already in your account, or do they have to enter it first? This is exactly where the withdrawal whitelist comes in. It is a list of approved destination addresses, and while it is active, withdrawals go solely to addresses on that list. Everything else is refused, even with the correct password.

September 2026 has made this question very practical. On September 7, Bloomberg reported the outflow of around $320 million from a Liquid Network wallet, in which, according to the operator, roughly 4,000 of 4,200 bitcoin were moved. TRM Labs puts the damage from the wave of attacks on Coldcard devices at $116 million. Neither case was an account takeover at an exchange, but both have the same effect on reader behaviour: many are shifting balances between exchanges and their own wallets these days, and every one of those movements runs through precisely the withdrawal path at issue here.

Withdrawal whitelist: what the function blocks and what it leaves open

Definition in one sentence: a withdrawal whitelist is an address book in the exchange account that permits withdrawals only to recipient addresses approved beforehand.

The protection works against two very different attacks. The first is account takeover: anyone who can log in can, without a whitelist, immediately enter an address of their own and withdraw. The second is the swapped address, for instance through malware that replaces the contents of the clipboard, or through a prepared address taken from the transaction history. How this second trick works and how to spot a slipped-in address is set out at length in our article on checking recipient addresses.

The whitelist leaves open everything that happens within the approved addresses. Anyone who gets you to enter and approve their address yourself bypasses the protection entirely. That is the usual course of support fraud over the phone, and it is the reason a whitelist is a barrier against strangers and not against deception.

Why two-factor sign-in does not secure the withdrawal

Two-factor sign-in and a withdrawal whitelist solve different problems. The second factor decides who gets in. The whitelist decides where something goes out. If the second factor falls, for example because it runs by SMS and the phone number has been taken over, the withdrawal path is open immediately without a whitelist. Why SMS is the weakest variant here, we took apart in our overview of two-factor methods at crypto exchanges.

The German Federal Office for Information Security recommends two-factor authentication as basic protection for accounts involving money. That recommendation remains correct. But it describes only the front door. For an exchange account you additionally need a rule for the exit, and that is precisely what is missing from most default settings: among providers that offer a whitelist at all, it is in practice always voluntary and switched off by default.

A second point is often overlooked. The whitelist also protects you from yourself. An address checked and saved once does not have to be copied afresh out of an app for every withdrawal, which removes the occasion on which a wrong address gets into the form in the first place. Anyone withdrawing regularly to the same hardware wallet reduces the number of risky moments to a single one, namely the first. Which devices come into question and how they differ is set out in the hardware wallet comparison.

The time lock in the exchange account: why the waiting period is the real protection

A whitelist on its own has a weak spot every attacker knows: it can be changed. Whoever is sitting in the account enters a new address and waits for confirmation. That is why providers who are serious about it tie the address list to a delay. New or altered entries take effect only after a fixed period, and that period runs regardless of whether the attacker is still in the account.

The effect is simple to describe. An attacker who wants to withdraw at once fails against the clock. An attacker who waits risks the notification about the change reaching you before the period expires. That does presuppose, though, that you actually receive that notification, meaning that the address on file is current and the mail account itself is well protected.

Kraken's global settings lock: what the help page actually promises

The most thoroughly documented of the providers examined is Kraken. The function is called Global Settings Lock there, GSL for short. According to the description on the help page on preventing unwanted withdrawals, last updated on March 23, 2026, the lock prevents changes to the account and hides sensitive account information.

You set the waiting period yourself

When switching it on you determine how long unlocking takes without a master key. Kraken describes this waiting period in the instructions as a mandatory entry during setup. The decisive sentence in the documentation is that support cannot help remove the lock when the unlock period lies between one and thirty days. That is unusually plainly put and the actual core of the function: the lock works against the provider as well, and thus against the route attackers take in support fraud.

With the lock active, no new address can be entered

The instructions for adding a new withdrawal address carry the note that no withdrawal address can be added while the global settings lock is active. That closes the chain: withdrawals go to entered addresses, and nothing can be entered while the lock stands. Every newly added address has to be confirmed via a link in an email in any case.

Even without the lock, a short holding period applies

Independently of the global settings lock, Kraken describes a delay after a password change: for anyone who changes their password and has set up neither two-factor sign-in nor a master key, withdrawals to new addresses are held back for 24 hours. Addresses already entered are not affected. That is exactly the pattern that makes a whitelist so valuable: the trouble hits the new destinations, while the familiar route to your own wallet keeps working.

Master key: the spare key that lifts the waiting period again

The lock comes with a counterpart that the documentation names openly. The master key can switch off the global settings lock at any time. Kraken writes expressly that this convenient option comes with an increased security risk should the master key be compromised. And there is an order of operations you only get wrong once: once the lock is active, no master key can be created any more.

From this follows a decision nobody takes off your hands. With a master key you stay able to act if you change your mind, and your protection is only as good as the safekeeping of that key. Without one the lock is harder, and you have to sit out the period you set yourself if it comes to it, even as the rightful account holder. A long period is therefore no pure gain, it is a trade: more protection against strangers, less freedom of movement for you.

In practice this means: choose the period by the amount you leave on the exchange, and not by feel. Anyone who keeps only trading balance there and withdraws regularly to the same wallet gets by with a short period. Anyone leaving larger holdings on the account should first check whether those holdings need to be there at all.

The survey: 13 providers, 23 pages, three explicit statements

This evaluation was carried out by cryptoticker.io itself on September 8, 2026. The method in one sentence: for thirteen providers with a German-language presence, the publicly reachable security and help pages were retrieved with an ordinary browser identifier, the HTTP status code was noted and the visible text without HTML scaffolding was searched for any mention of a whitelist, an allowlist or an address book for withdrawals.

Examined were 23 pages from 13 providers: Kraken, Binance, Coinbase, Bitpanda, Bitvavo, BISON, OKX, Bybit, Bitget, Crypto.com, KuCoin, Bitstamp and Nexo. Evaluable in terms of the method were four provider pages. Three of them name the function explicitly, one does not. Nine providers could not be examined by this procedure.

Crypto.com and Nexo: what the readable security pages say

The security page of Crypto.com carries the sentence that approving external addresses via an email confirmation is mandatory. It is the only finding in the survey that describes a whitelist not as an option but as a requirement. The same page also names passkeys, hardware security modules and FIDO2 as sign-in methods.

Nexo lists an address whitelist as a point of its own on its security page and describes it as managing your own crypto addresses for error-free transfers. The emphasis there is recognisably on the typo and not on the attacker. The page additionally names an anti-phishing code for the authenticity of messages and an automatic check of every withdrawal.

The security page of Bitpanda was likewise reachable, but its visible text contains no statement on a withdrawal whitelist. That is a finding about the page and not a statement about the function: from a missing sentence on a marketing page it does not follow that the setting is absent from the account.

For Binance, the relevant help page on the whitelist for withdrawal addresses is publicly available, but it could not be retrieved by machine in the test: the response came back without content. Via web search the content is confirmed, namely that with the function activated no withdrawals are possible to addresses that are not on the list. We therefore list this as a confirmed indication and not as a measurement of our own.

Nine provider pages could not be examined: what this evaluation does not show

Honesty about the gaps is part of the survey. At Coinbase and Bitvavo the help pages answered with a defence against automated retrieval, visible as status code 403. At OKX the addresses checked led nowhere. Bybit, KuCoin, Bitget and Bitstamp did return a successful status code, but their content is loaded only later in the browser, so the retrieved document holds no evaluable text. The security address checked at BISON did not exist.

From this follows a clear limit to the statement. What was measured is what a provider documents publicly and machine-readably, not which settings actually exist inside a logged-in account. Several of the providers that could not be examined very probably do offer address approval. Anyone wanting to know for certain finds the answer in one place no survey from outside can reach: in the security settings of their own account.

The distribution is striking all the same. Of thirteen large providers, at four it is possible to read up at all on how the withdrawal path is secured, and at only one is the lock described in enough detail that you know what you are letting yourself in for before switching it on. For a function that in an emergency decides over the entire account balance, that is thin.

Switching on the whitelist: the order that does not lock you out

Depending on the provider the settings are called address book, address whitelist, allowlist or withdrawal addresses, and they nearly always sit in the security area of the account, not in the withdrawal form. The order matters more than the label, because two of the steps are hard to make up later.

1. First enter the receiving address of your own wallet and test it with a minimal amount, while nothing is locked yet.
2. Then check whether the provider offers a master key or a comparable emergency function, and set it up before the lock becomes active.
3. Only after that arm the whitelist and, where available, set the waiting period for changes.
4. Finally check the email address on file, because confirmation and warning both run through it.
5. If your provider runs several networks for the same coin, enter and label each address separately.

What you see in the withdrawal form afterwards

After switching it on, the free input field for the address disappears at most providers and is replaced by a selection list. That visible difference is precisely your check: if you can still type in a foreign address and use it straight away, the whitelist is not active, whatever the settings say.

Withdrawing this week: the sequence from request to confirmation

September brings many readers a concrete occasion to move balances. When an exchange discontinues trading in a coin, a longer withdrawal window often remains, and experience from recent weeks shows that many holders react only shortly before it closes. Which deadlines are currently running we keep in our continuously checked deadline overview.

For the sequence this means: set up the whitelist before you are under time pressure. A newly entered address needs a confirmation by email, and where a waiting period applies, it comes on top. Anyone entering an address for the first time on the last day of a deadline is working against the very delay that is supposed to protect them.

And if something does flow out, speed counts. Lock the account, secure the records from the activity log and document the destination address before you change anything. How to proceed afterwards and what a police report achieves in practice, we described in a separate article on what to do after a crypto theft.

Setting up a withdrawal whitelist: what to take away

1. Open your account's security settings today and see whether address approval exists. It is publicly documented at only four of thirteen providers examined; in the account itself you see it in two minutes. If your provider offers none, that is an argument for your next switch, and the selection is in the crypto exchange comparison.
2. Enter your own wallet address, test it and only then lock. A minimal amount up front costs fees in the cent range and rules out the most expensive mistake. Which device is suitable is set out in the hardware wallet comparison.
3. Choose the waiting period deliberately and create the master key beforehand. Anyone holding larger balances on an exchange should additionally check whether the provider is supervised at all; the starting point for that is our list of regulated crypto exchanges.

A closing note, because it often gets lost in the discussion about security functions: every one of these locks works only on balances held at a provider. What sits in your own wallet is protected by no whitelist; different rules apply there. Protecting the withdrawal path is therefore no substitute for the decision about how much stays on an exchange at all.

(As of September 8, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

When customer holdings are stolen from a crypto exchange, the exchange as a rule does not make good the loss, and no state body steps in either. That is the short answer, and it appears in those or similar words in the providers' own public documents. On September 8, 2026 we retrieved the security, legal and protection-fund pages of twelve providers that address customers in Germany with German-language sites, and looked at what is actually promised there. For seven of them a solid statement could be evaluated. Exactly one provider names a fund of its own with a figure attached. Not a single one promises a private account reimbursement for stolen coins.

The occasion is recent. In the first week of September 2026, around $322 million flowed out of crypto systems according to a count by The Crypto Times, of which roughly $320 million came from the Liquid Network peg-out alone, reported by Bloomberg on September 7. We described the incident the same day in our report on the Liquid Network peg-out. The second half of the question stayed open there, and it is the subject here: who actually pays when your balance is hit?

Who reimburses stolen coins? The legal position in three sentences

Germany has two statutory safety nets for money held at a financial company. Deposit guarantee is the statutory claim to have your bank balance replaced up to a fixed amount if the bank fails. Investor compensation is the counterpart for securities business: it applies when an investment firm can no longer hand over securities or funds from such business.

Both nets are tied to a precondition that crypto-assets usually do not meet. On its consumer page on deposit guarantee and investor compensation, BaFin writes on the question of whether these systems cover crypto-assets: “As a rule, no. In particular, the assets known as cryptocurrencies, which became popular recently, are mostly not protected. Protection applies only if the crypto-asset counts as a security or if it involves fund units investing in crypto-assets.” The consumer association Verbraucherzentrale puts the same point more briefly in its risk overview: crypto investments have no deposit guarantee.

The difference between failure and theft

Even where a net applies, it covers a different case from the one at issue here. Deposit guarantee and investor compensation are built for the failure of the company, meaning insolvency or an officially established inability to pay. A theft at a provider that stays open afterwards and remains solvent does not trigger these nets at all. How the insolvency case differs from this, and what segregation of your coins means there, we took apart on August 18, 2026 in our article on segregation at an insolvent crypto exchange.

Deposit guarantee and the 100,000 euros: what the amount really covers

The figure almost everyone knows appears on the same BaFin page: the statutory compensation claim for deposits amounts to a maximum of 100,000 euros per customer and per bank, regardless of the number of accounts. With a joint account each holder has a claim of their own, so with two holders the amount doubles to 200,000 euros.

The decisive word is deposits. What is meant is a balance in a currency such as the euro in an account at a CRR credit institution. Bitcoin, ether and the rest of your portfolio are not deposits in this sense, which is why the holdings you keep on a trading platform do not count towards this pot. If you want to know how the price of the largest of these assets is currently moving, our Bitcoin price prediction keeps it continuously updated; for the compensation question, however, the size of the holding makes no difference. It is unprotected either way.

The survey: twelve provider sites, seven evaluable statements

This evaluation was carried out by cryptoticker.io itself on September 8, 2026. The method in one sentence: for twelve providers with a German-language presence we retrieved the publicly reachable security, legal or protection-fund page over HTTP, noted the response code and searched the visible text on it for any mention of compensation, insurance or a protection fund for customer holdings.

Objects examined: twelve provider sites, seventeen pages retrieved in total. The result was evaluable for seven providers. For five it was not, for reasons that have nothing to do with the content of the pages. We set that part out openly further below, because a survey that conceals its gaps is no survey.

What we counted and what we did not

Only what stands on the page itself was counted. A statement in the promotional text of a comparison portal or in an interview does not count here, because it does not bind the provider and cannot be looked up. Nor did we count details of technical security. Cold storage, two-factor sign-in and penetration tests say something about how likely a loss is, and nothing about who bears it if it happens anyway.

Kraken writes it out itself: “No Insurance” in the legal disclosures

The clearest statement in the whole survey comes from Kraken, and it does not sit in the small print of a footnote but as a paragraph of its own in the exchange's Legal Disclosures. It reads: “No Insurance. Digital assets and Kraken accounts are not covered by insurance against losses.” The paragraph then states expressly that the US systems FDIC and SIPC do not apply either, and that there is no comparable protection.

The security page of the same exchange carries the second half of the same thought: for many products and countries the customer may not be protected by state compensation or supervisory systems. One can read that as uncomfortable candour. For the question this article asks, it is the most usable answer in the entire field, because it is unambiguous and can be quoted.

Trust arrangement and cold storage at Bitpanda: segregation is no substitute

On its German security page, Bitpanda describes two things that are frequently confused. First, crypto holdings are said to lie in cold storage, meaning stores without a permanent network connection, whose contents are checked externally at intervals. Second, Bitpanda states that it holds its customers' crypto assets as a trustee on the basis of a legally binding trust agreement; the customer remains the beneficial owner, and there is a legally binding separation between the company's own assets and customer holdings.

This separation is valuable, but it answers a different question. It ensures that your coins do not fall into the estate in an insolvency. Against theft it does not help: what flows out of a separately kept holding is gone just as surely as from a commingled one. The term insurance also appears on the page, though there in connection with Bitpanda Custody, the safekeeping offer for institutional clients. For a private trading account, no promise follows from it.

BISON and the 100,000 euros: the protection applies to the euro balance

On the site of BISON, the trading platform from the Börse Stuttgart group, the familiar figure stands right beside the crypto offering: the euro balance is said to be kept by Solaris SE and at Deutsche Bank, and up to 100,000 euros per investor and bank are protected by German law.

The sentence is correct, and it is meant exactly as narrowly as it stands. What is protected is the euro balance at the partner bank. The crypto-assets displayed on the same interface are not covered by that sentence. Anyone who reads the 100,000 euros in passing and applies it to their entire portfolio has miscalculated on precisely the part at issue here. This mix-up is the most common error we met in this survey. It arises from the proximity of two pieces of information on one screen, not from any incorrect statement by the provider.

Protection fund at Bitget, proof of reserves at OKX: two promises that are not the same

Bitget runs a German-language page on a protection fund of its own and puts it there at $300 million; the page notes that users can file a claim through this fund in the event of a loss. It is the only figure named in the entire survey. A fund of this kind is a voluntary undertaking by the company and not a legal entitlement: how an individual case is decided does not emerge from the page, and it is not a state-supervised compensation system.

OKX takes a different route. The provider's German-language page describes a one-to-one reserve for all holdings in platform accounts and publishes regular reports on it; at the time of retrieval the 46th of these reports was shown, with $22.96 billion in primary holdings. Proof of reserves is the demonstration that a custodian actually holds its customers' assets. It answers the coverage question, not the liability question. How to recompute such a proof yourself, we showed step by step on August 18, 2026 in our guide to proof of reserves.

Crypto.com and the FDIC line: why US deposit insurance is of no use here

The security page of Crypto.com carries a paragraph that is often quoted in comparisons as a protection promise, and that on close reading says the opposite. Fiat balances are said to be held in accounts at regulated custodian banks; for customers resident in the United States, dollar balances are passed on to partner banks that are members of the FDIC. The qualification follows immediately: FDIC protection applies only if the member bank concerned fails, and it protects the funds neither against a failure of Crypto.com nor against the risk of theft or fraud.

For an account in Germany the paragraph is therefore doubly without effect. It concerns persons resident in the US, it concerns fiat balances only, and it expressly excludes the theft case. Anyone who takes such a line as cover for their crypto holdings is reading a promise that is not there.

Naming custodians is not the same as being liable

On its security page, Nexo lists by name the custodians it works with, among them a Munich company licensed as a custodian for digital assets under MiCAR and supervised by BaFin, plus a further custodian for the US business. That is a useful disclosure, because it makes it verifiable who holds the keys. It is not a statement about who replaces a loss, and the page does not claim otherwise.

Five provider pages could not be examined: what this survey does not show

For five of the twelve providers we could evaluate no statement on the survey date. At Bitvavo and Coinbase the servers answered the automated retrieval with code 403 and delivered no page content; in a browser both pages are normally reachable for readers. At Bitstamp and Bybit the server did answer with code 200, but returned virtually no evaluable text, because the content is loaded only later in the browser. A security page at Trade Republic did not exist under the address checked and answered with code 404.

Expressly, nothing follows from this about the security of these providers. All that follows is that we could not capture their promises that day with the same method as those of the other seven. For Bitvavo, German-language comparison portals report a voluntary account guarantee of up to 100,000 euros that is said to include crypto-assets as well. We list this as an unconfirmed indication and not as a finding, because we could not read the statement on a page of the provider itself on September 8.

The result in one line

Of seven evaluable providers, exactly one names a protection fund of its own with a figure. Two point to protective mechanisms that cover a different case from theft, namely separation from own assets and cover for the euro balance at a partner bank. One cites a deposit guarantee that does not apply to German customers. One demonstrates coverage without assuming liability. One names its custodians. And one states in bare words that there is no insurance.

What to check at your own provider in ten minutes

The survey above is a snapshot of seven providers. Yours may not be among them, and terms change. The check can be carried out yourself in a few minutes, though, and it works the same way at every provider.

Open the legal documents, not the security page. The security page is marketing and describes measures; the liability question sits in the terms of use, in the risk warnings or in a document called legal disclosures or risk disclosure. Search there for the words insurance, compensation and liability. If you find none of these terms in connection with your holdings, that is already the answer.

Then check what any figure named actually refers to. If a sum such as 100,000 euros appears on the page, read the sentence before and after it in full and establish whether it speaks of deposits, of euro balances or of crypto-assets. If a bank name appears there, the protection applies to the account at that bank and not to your portfolio. If you are minded to switch provider anyway, a look at our overview of the best regulated crypto exchanges helps, because an authorisation under MiCA brings no compensation with it, but it does bring duties to segregate customer holdings and to report.

The part only you can handle

The most solid protection against a theft at a custodian is to leave no more there than necessary. Holdings you are not trading belong in a wallet whose keys you hold yourself; which devices come into question and how they differ is set out in our hardware wallet comparison. That shifts the risk, it does not remove it: if you lose the key or let it out of your hands, there is all the less any body to compensate you. And if something does go missing, filing a criminal complaint is the first step, as we described on August 21, 2026 in our guide to reporting a crypto theft.

Compensation after crypto theft: what to take away

1. Expect no statutory compensation. On crypto-assets and deposit guarantee, BaFin says “as a rule, no”, and the providers examined do not contradict it. If you want to use a platform at all, choose it deliberately by authorisation and duties, for instance via our overview of the best regulated crypto exchanges.
2. Read the legal documents rather than the security page. Search for insurance, compensation and liability, and check for every figure named whether it applies to the euro balance or to the coins. If comparing several providers interests you, the terms are gathered under best crypto exchanges.
3. Move what you are not trading into your own custody. What is not held at a third party cannot flow out there either. Suitable devices and their differences are set out in the hardware wallet comparison; responsibility for the key then rests entirely with you.

(As of September 8, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

The final say over your USDT does not rest with your wallet. It rests with the owner role of the contract that issues the token. On the chain that holds a little more than half of all Tether dollars, that role sits with a single multisig address where two out of three signatures are enough. This is not conjecture or a second-hand report: it is written openly on the blockchain, anyone can read it, and this article shows you how to do so yourself in five minutes.

The occasion is a review by the security firm Hacken dated September 4, 2026, which gave Tether a cybersecurity score of 3.3 out of 10. At almost the same time, the ratings outfit Bluechip raised its company grade from D to C. Both verdicts are correct, because they measure different things. Anyone who reads only one of them ends up with a skewed picture.

Who can control USDT: the owner role of the token contract

A stablecoin such as USDT is not a network of its own. It is a program that runs on someone else's network. That program is called a smart contract, or contract for short: deposited code that keeps balances and enforces rules without anyone having to intervene by hand. The contract maintains a table recording which address holds how many units.

Within this contract there is one privileged role, the owner. The owner role is the address permitted to call functions that are closed to everyone else. Whoever holds it decides the rules under which the token works for all holders, and not the fate of individual wallets.

On Tron, the network with the largest USDT balance, the contract at address TR7NHqjeKQxGTCi8q8ZY4pL8otSzgjLj6t answers the owner() query with an address that is itself a contract. Its name on the network is MultiSigWallet. For context on how the Tron balance has developed in recent months, see our Tron price prediction.

What a 2-of-3 multisig is, and why the threshold decides everything

A multisig, short for multi-signature wallet, is an address that acts only once a set minimum number of deposited keys have signed the same instruction. Two numbers describe it completely: how many keys exist in total, and how many of them have to come together. That second number is the threshold.

We queried both numbers directly on the network on September 8, 2026 at 00:36 UTC, via the public node api.trongrid.io. The getOwners() query on the owner address returns three addresses. The required() query returns the value 2. That confirms the finding independently: two out of three.

The threshold is the real lever. At three of three, an attacker would need every key at once, and a single lost key would lock the role forever. At two of three, the contract stays operable if one key goes missing, and it is already takeable once two come together. Security and operability pull in opposite directions here, and the threshold sets where the compromise falls.

The order of magnitude behind this can be measured directly as well. The totalSupply() query on the same contract returned 94,268,087,064 USDT at that moment. Hacken cited 91.3 billion in its report four days earlier. Depending on the cut-off date, then, somewhere between a good 91 and a good 94 billion USDT sit on this one chain. Global circulation stood at roughly 183.4 billion USDT on September 8, 2026 at 00:33 UTC, according to CoinGecko. The Tron share therefore comes to about 51 percent.

What key control cannot do: the boundary to your own wallet

This is where the most common misunderstanding lies, and it is worth separating cleanly. The owner role of the contract has no access to your private keys. It cannot open your wallet, read your recovery phrase or touch your bitcoin and other tokens. Your balance in any other currency is likewise untouched, whether you keep it on an exchange or in self-custody with a hardware wallet.

What the role can do concerns the bookkeeping of the token itself. That includes entering an address on a blacklist, with the consequence that its USDT balance can no longer be moved. It includes creating new units. And it includes deleting already blocked balances from the table. The point at which this happens lies in the contract, not in your wallet file.

In practice: self-custody reliably protects you against the failure of an exchange, but it does not protect you against a block at contract level. Those are two separate risks, and they need two separate answers.

How to check the owner role of the USDT contract yourself in five minutes

You need no specialist knowledge and no software for this, only a block explorer. A block explorer is a website that makes the contents of a blockchain readable; for Tron, Tronscan is the most widely used. Four steps are enough.

1. Open the USDT contract TR7NHqjeKQxGTCi8q8ZY4pL8otSzgjLj6t in the explorer. The tab for the contract code holds a list of queryable functions.
2. Call owner(). The answer is an address. In our query it read TBPxhVAsuzoFnKyXtc1o2UySEydPHgATto.
3. Open that address. The explorer shows whether it is an ordinary account or a contract. Here it is a contract carrying the deposited name MultiSigWallet.
4. On this contract, call getOwners() and required(). The first query lists the deposited key addresses, the second gives the threshold.

This check costs nothing, requires no wallet connection and leaves no trace. It also works for other tokens: every contract carrying a blocking function has a role somewhere that is allowed to trigger it. The question is always the same, namely who holds that role and under which threshold.

Which functions the owner role unlocks in the TetherToken contract

The contract carries the internal name TetherToken and publishes its interface openly. The description we retrieved on September 8, 2026 includes, among others, these functions reserved for the owner role:

• addBlackList and removeBlackList: places an address on the blacklist or takes it off again.
• destroyBlackFunds: destroys the balance of an address that has already been blocked.
• issue and redeem: creates new units or withdraws existing ones.
• transferOwnership: hands the owner role on to another address.
• pause and unpause: halts transfers across the entire contract or releases them again.
• deprecate: declares the contract superseded and redirects to a successor.

Alongside these sits the isBlackListed query, which anyone can call without special rights. We described step by step how to check your own address with it on September 6, 2026, in our guide to stablecoin address blocking. The present article answers the question that comes before it: who is allowed to trigger a block at all.

Blocking functions are no design flaw. They exist because an issuer holding balances in real dollars has to be able to respond to orders from authorities. The part open to scrutiny is therefore not whether such a function exists, but how firmly access to it is secured.

Timelock and revocation window: the two building blocks missing here

A timelock is a rule in the contract that places a fixed waiting period between an instruction and its execution. Whoever initiates a change has to wait, and the change is publicly visible during that time. A revocation window is the matching second half: the option to stop an initiated change while the waiting period is still running.

Together the two turn a silent process into an observable one. Large protocols therefore often set deadlines of 24 to 72 hours between decision and effect. Hacken records in its report that the owner role of the USDT contract on Tron has neither. A takeover would take effect immediately.

What matters is how far this finding reaches. It says how quickly a change would take effect if it came. It says nothing about whether it will come. Hacken states explicitly that it found no indication of compromised keys and no security incident.

Which chain your USDT sits on, and why that shifts the control question

USDT does not exist a single time. On every network where the token is offered, there is a contract of its own. Tron, Ethereum and a series of further chains each run their own contracts with their own balances and their own owner roles. A USDT on Tron and a USDT on Ethereum are economically the same claim, but technically two different entries in two different ledgers.

For you this has three practical consequences. First, the control structure that concerns you hangs on the chain your balance actually sits on, and not on a general statement about Tether. Second, you have to know which chain that is before you can check anything; on an exchange the information appears in the withdrawal dialogue, on your own wallet in the network name of the address. Third, a transfer to the wrong chain is the most common way to lose USDT permanently, and it happens without any involvement of an issuer.

Anyone switching between chains regularly should therefore treat the network selection as seriously as the address itself. With providers under European supervision, the selection is usually narrower and thus less prone to error.

Hacken 3.3 and Bluechip C: why two scores measure two different things

Two assessments stood side by side on the same day, and they appear to point in opposite directions. Hacken awarded a cybersecurity score of 3.3 out of 10. Bluechip raised its company grade from D to C, supported by a KPMG review under which reserves exceeded liabilities by 6.8 billion US dollars as of December 31, 2025.

These two verdicts do not contradict each other, because they answer different questions. Bluechip asks whether there is enough backing behind every token issued. Hacken asks how firmly access is secured to the program that keeps those tokens. A fully backed currency can hang on a thin key architecture, and an exemplary secured architecture says nothing about backing.

What the KPMG review covers in detail, which cut-off date it carries and why an audit opinion is no substitute for authorisation, we broke down on August 16, 2026 in our analysis of the Tether audit by KPMG. Tether also publishes its reserve figures on an ongoing basis on its own transparency page. The security finding and the upgrade side by side are documented in the report by CoinDesk of September 4, 2026.

Exchange balances and the custody chain: who actually holds for you when it matters

If your USDT sits on an exchange, a second layer is added on top of the contract layer. The address recorded in the contract then belongs to the exchange, not to you. You hold a claim against the house, and the house holds the entry on the chain. A block at contract level in this case hits the exchange's pooled address first, and reaches you only through the house rules.

That is no argument against exchanges, but it is a reason to know the difference. Under self-custody your own address stands in the ledger, with all the consequences that follow in both directions: nobody can freeze your balance in the name of a third party, and nobody can help you if you lose your keys. On an exchange it works the other way round.

A third case is often overlooked. Some providers do not hold assets themselves and pass them on to a specialist custodian. Another company then sits between you and the entry on the chain. If you want to know how many links your custody chain has, the answer is in the terms of use under headings such as custody, safekeeping or sub-custodian.

What MiCA changes about the control question, and what stays open

The European regulation on markets in crypto-assets, MiCA for short, addresses stablecoins at the level of the issuer. It governs who may issue an asset-referenced token in the EU, how reserves are held and audited, and under which conditions a holder can demand redemption. The regulatory grip therefore falls on the company and its balance sheet.

The key architecture of a contract on a public blockchain is covered only indirectly by this. A supervisory authority can set requirements for the operational organisation of an authorised issuer; it cannot write a rule into a contract already running on someone else's network. For you, the control question therefore remains one you check at the contract yourself, regardless of how the issuer is classified under supervisory law.

Which stablecoins remain regularly tradable in the EU after the transition periods end, and what a forced conversion can trigger for tax purposes, is set out in our analysis of August 16, 2026. The order matters: first establish where your balance sits, then who steers the contract, and only after that the supervisory classification.

A structural finding, not an incident: what does not follow from this situation

Finally, the classification this topic most often lacks. Hacken describes a construction, not an attack. According to the firm there is no indication that keys have gone astray, and no security incident. Anyone deriving an immediate danger to their own balance from this goes beyond the source.

Nor does any recommendation to act follow from it in either direction. This article does not tell you to hold USDT, and it does not tell you to move out. It tells you which questions can be checked and how you answer them: which chain your balance sits on, who holds the owner role of the corresponding contract, under which threshold it stands, and whether a waiting period sits in between.

That is the real strength of a public blockchain on this point. The control structure is a matter of querying rather than of trust. The structure lies open, anyone can read it, and it does not change because somebody writes something else about it.

USDT key control: what to take away

1. Establish the chain first. Check in your wallet or in your exchange's withdrawal dialogue which network your USDT actually sits on. Without that information you are checking the wrong control structure. If you find that several providers are involved, our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges gives you an overview of where the balances lie.
2. Check the owner role yourself. Call owner() on the token contract in the block explorer, open the address returned and read getOwners() and required() there. It takes five minutes and settles the question for good. For the part that then lies in your hands, securing your own keys, the hardware wallet comparison helps with the selection.
3. Keep the two risks apart. The failure of a custodian and a block at contract level are different things and need different answers. If you want to keep track of balances across several chains and providers, our overview of portfolio trackers and tax tools has the right instruments.

(As of September 8, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

The signature period for German parliamentary petition 201716 closes on September 15, 2026. What ends on that day is the option to sign the petition online. Nothing more. It is not a tax deadline, not a selling date and not a cut-off by which you would have to change anything about your holdings in Bitcoin or other crypto assets. Anyone who has read the headlines about the end of the holding period over the past few weeks can easily mix up two completely different dates. This article separates them.

The petition carrying ID number 201716 is titled “Preservation of the tax holding period for private disposals of crypto assets” and dates from May 30, 2026. The submission asks that the one-year holding period under Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act (EStG) remain in place and that crypto assets continue to be classified as “other assets”. When the official petition page was retrieved on September 7, 2026, the counter stood at 43,361 online signatures, the status at “in signature collection”, the field “quorum reached” at “yes” and the remaining time at eight days. The petition’s discussion forum held 107 threads at that point.

What Really Ends on September 15, 2026 for Petition 201716

A signature period is the window in which a published petition can be supported electronically on the Petitions Committee platform and debated in the forum. Once it expires, precisely what item 10 of the guideline on handling public petitions describes takes place: the petition is closed to further signatures and to discussion contributions, and it is then processed under the general procedural principles for petitions.

For you as an investor, that means three things. The signature button disappears. The forum stops accepting new posts. And the actual parliamentary procedure only begins afterwards. The day changes nothing about the tax situation, because a petition is not a law and does not set one in motion.

Six Weeks of Signature Time, and a Timeline That Ends at 01:00 UTC

Item 8 of the same guideline sets the length: the signature period runs for six weeks. The clock starts when the petition is published, not on the day it is submitted. In the case of 201716, three and a half months lie between the submission on May 30 and the deadline on September 15, which makes many readers pause. The explanation sits in the parameters the petition page stores for its progress chart: the timeline of the signature count begins on August 4, 2026 at 01:00 UTC and ends on September 15, 2026 at 01:00 UTC. That is exactly 42 days, precisely the six weeks set out in the guideline. The petition was therefore published in early August, and the months before that were taken up by the preliminary review.

One practical point follows from those parameters, and nobody in the German-language coverage has spelled it out so far. In September, 01:00 UTC corresponds to 03:00 Central European Summer Time. Anyone who notes September 15 as the date and then sits down to sign in the evening may find the door already shut. So do not rely on the stated end date; sign by September 14 at the latest. A day of buffer costs nothing and is the only protection against a deadline whose exact time the committee states nowhere in plain words.

Quorum Reached: What 30,000 Signatures Trigger in the Petition Procedure

The quorum is the number of endorsements at which a public petition reaches an additional stage of treatment. Since July 1, 2024 it has stood at 30,000 signatures; before that it was 50,000. In the same move, the Petitions Committee extended the signature period from four weeks to six. Petition 201716 has cleared that threshold by more than 44 percent with 43,361 endorsements, and it did so within the running deadline. That is what counts.

The Petitions Committee service page states the legal consequence as follows: if a petition has reached the quorum of 30,000 endorsements within the signature period, the petitioner is as a rule invited to a public committee hearing. The reference points to item 8.4.4 of the procedural principles. “As a rule” is administrative language and means: normally, but not necessarily. Item 11 of the guideline says explicitly that the committee decides in the course of the parliamentary review whether a public deliberation or a hearing of petitioners is to be held.

No date for such a session could be found while researching this article, and that is normal: it is scheduled only once the signature period has closed and the committee has prepared the case. If you read anywhere that the hearing has already been scheduled, ask for the source.

How the Procedure Continues After the Signature Period

Once the deadline passes, 201716 moves into the regular review procedure of the Petitions Committee. The sequence is laid down in the procedural principles and runs in several stages: as a rule the committee obtains a statement from the competent federal ministry, here the Federal Ministry of Finance. A pair of rapporteurs from two parliamentary groups assesses the case. The committee then adopts a recommendation for a decision, meaning a proposal to the plenary on how to deal with the request. The Bundestag plenary votes on it, and the petitioner receives a reasoned notice.

Item 12 of the guideline records that the public is informed online about the outcome of the petition procedure. Completed petitions appear in a dedicated section of the platform for that purpose. When 201716 will reach that stage cannot be predicted with any seriousness. Petition procedures on questions of tax policy principle often drag on for months, because the ministerial statement has to be awaited and the committee runs many cases in parallel.

What the Number of Supporters Achieves in the Procedure, and What It Does Not

The Bundestag answers that question in its own help text with remarkable sobriety: the number of endorsements does not, in principle, affect the parliamentary review of a petition. The right to petition under Article 17 of the Basic Law belongs to every single person, and a submission without a single co-signature is examined by the same standards as one with 43,000. What the high number does achieve is the public hearing and the political visibility. No binding effect on the legislature arises from it. Anyone who reads the petition as a referendum on the holding period overestimates the instrument.

Do I Have to Sell Bitcoin Before September 15?

No. There is currently no cut-off date by which a private investor would have to have sold in order to secure the tax exemption after one year of holding. September 15 is a signature deadline in a petition procedure and has no point of contact with income tax law. The mix-up is nevertheless easy to make, because both topics have appeared in the same headlines since the summer and some of those headlines talk about a “tax shock”.

A second reason for the error: a cabinet decision sounds final. It is not. How the path from announcement to applicable law actually runs is set out further down in this article. Our earlier assessment of the situation in August helps here, placing the cabinet decision of July 6, 2026 and the petition side by side: Germany’s crypto holding period faces abolition.

The One-Year Holding Period Under Section 23 EStG: What the Law Says Today

The holding period is the span between the acquisition and the disposal of an asset within which a gain is taxable. Section 23 (1) sentence 1 no. 2 of the Income Tax Act covers “disposals of other assets where the period between acquisition and disposal is no more than one year”. According to the tax administration and the case law, crypto assets fall under those “other assets”. Anyone who holds for longer than a year and then sells does not generate a taxable private disposal transaction from that sale.

That wording stands unchanged in the statutory text on September 7, 2026, as a retrieval of the official version at gesetze-im-internet.de shows. This is the most reliable sentence in the whole article: as long as an amendment has not been promulgated as law, the printed text applies. Government bills, key-issues papers and budget accompanying documents change nothing about that.

The 1,000 Euro Exemption Threshold and the FIFO Rule

Two details often decide more in practice than the period itself. First the exemption threshold: under Section 23 (3) sentence 5 EStG, gains remain tax free if the total gain from private disposal transactions in the calendar year came to less than 1,000 euros. Threshold means that at 1,000 euros and above the full amount becomes taxable, not only the excess. An allowance would work differently.

Second, the allocation of the units sold. If you have bought the same cryptocurrency several times at different points in time, it has to be established which units you are selling. In practice the calculation mostly follows the “first in, first out” principle, FIFO for short: the units acquired first count as the ones disposed of first. For foreign currency amounts, Section 23 (1) sentence 1 no. 2 sentence 3 EStG even prescribes that order explicitly. If you buy across several exchanges and wallets, you need a clean data basis for it. That is exactly where the common tax and tracking tools come in, and we also cover their export functions in our crypto exchange comparison.

The Ten-Year Period for Staking and Lending: Why It Does Not Apply to Crypto Assets

The law contains an extension that unsettles many investors. Section 23 (1) sentence 1 no. 2 sentence 4 EStG provides that the period increases to ten years if income is generated from the use of the asset as a source of income in at least one calendar year. Applied to crypto assets, that would be the case as soon as somebody lends coins or puts them into staking.

The tax administration has explicitly rejected precisely that application. The Federal Ministry of Finance circular on individual questions of the income tax treatment of crypto assets, dated March 6, 2025, states that for virtual currencies the extension of the disposal period under Section 23 (1) sentence 1 no. 2 sentence 4 EStG does not apply. So staking or lending does not cost you the one-year period for the coins involved. The ongoing yields from staking and lending are unaffected by this and are recorded as other income; that is a separate matter from the holding period.

What a Cabinet Decision Is, and Why It Is Not Yet Tax Law

A cabinet decision is the federal government agreeing on a bill it intends to introduce into the parliamentary procedure. What follows is the first reading in the Bundestag, deliberation in the specialist committees, frequently an expert hearing, second and third readings, the passage through the Bundesrat and finally the execution and promulgation in the Federal Law Gazette. Only with promulgation and the date of entry into force named in it does the project become applicable law. Along that path, bills are regularly amended, split, postponed or dropped.

Reporting on the crypto holding period is currently inconsistent, and you should know that before taking any headline at face value. Some outlets reported the abolition over the summer as a done deal, others demonstrated that it does not appear in the ongoing tax legislative procedure at all. Our own analysis of the government bill for the 2027 Income Tax Reform Act, published on September 7, 2026 under the title “The crypto holding period stays”, concluded that crypto assets are not regulated in it. That assessment is our own and does not replace independent confirmation. The only reliable authority remains the statutory text, and today it carries the one-year period.

Grandfathering for Existing Holdings: The Open Question the Petition Does Not Settle Either

Grandfathering means, in tax law, that a new rule spares investments already held and applies only to those acquired later. In earlier reforms of this kind that was not a given. When the legislature introduced the flat-rate withholding tax in 2009, securities in private assets acquired before the cut-off date were exempted from the new taxation of price gains. Whether a reform of crypto taxation would proceed similarly is open; the petition calls for the rule to be preserved as a whole and says nothing about a transitional solution.

What follows from that is a stance, not an action. Anyone who has documented their acquisition data cleanly can respond to any conceivable transitional arrangement. Anyone who has not is at a disadvantage even under the friendliest variant, because they cannot prove their own holding period. In tax matters the burden of proof lies with the taxpayer.

Documenting Acquisition Data and Transaction History

This preparation is worthwhile regardless of how the petition turns out and whether a reform arrives. What you need for each acquisition is the date, the time, the quantity, the price in euros and the counter currency, plus the fees and the platform. For transfers between your own wallets, the transaction identifiers are added, so that a transfer is not later misread as a sale.

In practical terms: export the complete transaction history from every exchange you use and store it outside the platform. Exchanges switch off trading pairs, change export formats or disappear entirely; the history is then gone, in case of doubt. It becomes particularly laborious with running savings plans, because there every single instalment starts its own holding period and therefore creates its own record.

Signing Petition 201716: Account, Postal Route and Deadline

Signing runs through a free user account on the Petitions Committee platform. If you do not want to create an account, you can also support a petition by post; for that the committee requires the exact designation of the petition with its ID number and subject. The postal route also has to arrive within the signature period, which makes it a tight affair eight days before the deadline.

Three points that are frequently overlooked: a signature is not an anonymous one, but requires registration with name and address; on request, only a standardised pseudonym and the date are published. A signature already given can be withdrawn. And participation in the forum is separate from signing; a discussion post alone does not count as an endorsement.

Common Misconceptions About the Holding Period and the Petition

“After September 15 the holding period is gone.” Wrong. The signature period ends on that day, nothing else. The one-year period stands in the law afterwards just as it did before.

“43,000 signatures force the Bundestag into a decision.” Wrong. The signatures normally lead to a public hearing of the petitioner. No substantive binding effect arises, and the Bundestag has its own help text saying exactly that.

“If I have staked, the ten-year period applies to me.” Wrong, at least under the current administrative view. The Federal Ministry of Finance circular of March 6, 2025 does not apply the extension to crypto assets.

“Below 1,000 euros in gains I do not have to declare anything at all.” Careful. The exemption threshold makes the gain tax free but does not automatically release you from the duty to declare, and it applies to all private disposal transactions in a year taken together, not per coin.

This overview does not replace tax advice. For the treatment of a specific case, particularly with foreign accounts, commercial trading or larger amounts, a tax adviser should be brought in.

The Crypto Holding Period and Petition 201716: What to Take Away

1. Keep the two dates apart. September 15, 2026 is the signature deadline for the petition, not a tax cut-off. If you want to sign, do it by September 14 at the latest, because the timeline stored on the petition page already ends at 01:00 UTC on September 15. What actually applies in tax terms today is set out along the concrete calculation steps in our comparison of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers.
2. Secure your acquisition data before you sell anything. Pull the complete transaction history from every platform you use and store it externally. Which trading venues deliver usable exports and tax reports is set out in the exchange comparison.
3. Decide on custody separately from the tax question. A long holding period and an exchange that switches off trading pairs are a poor match. If you intend to hold for years, review the options in the hardware wallet comparison and keep the acquisition records all the same.

Sources: The figures and quotations on the procedure come from the official petition page of the German Bundestag on Petition 201716 (retrieved on September 7, 2026) and from the guideline for the handling of public petitions. The statutory wording follows the official version of Section 23 EStG at gesetze-im-internet.de, and the statement on the ten-year period follows the Federal Ministry of Finance circular on individual questions of the income tax treatment of crypto assets dated March 6, 2025.

(As of September 7, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

When you try to move your balance off a crypto exchange and it does not work, it is rarely because the whole exchange is down. Far more often a single coin is affected: deposits and withdrawals for one network are paused while trading, login and the app carry on as usual. That is exactly why you notice nothing until you are in a hurry.

We counted how often this actually happens. Between August 1 and September 7, 2026, nine public status pages run by trading venues and wallet providers reported 136 incidents between them. 63 of those, or 46.3 percent, involved deposits or withdrawals. Fourteen of these suspensions were still open on September 7 at 15:50 UTC, the oldest since August 10.

This analysis was compiled by cryptoticker.io itself on September 7, 2026.

136 incidents in 38 days: what nine crypto exchange status pages reported in August

A status page is a provider's public fault list: the company itself records which part of its service is not working, since when and how badly. Almost every large trading venue runs one, and almost all of them also publish it as a machine-readable interface. It is barely read all the same, because it only becomes interesting once something is stuck.

This is how the 136 incidents were distributed across the measurement window:

• Coinbase: 38 incidents, 1 of them still open, 22 related to deposits or withdrawals
• Kraken: 36 incidents, 5 of them still open, 25 related to deposits or withdrawals
• Bitvavo: 20 incidents, 4 of them still open, 6 related to deposits or withdrawals
• Ledger: 19 incidents, all closed, none related to deposits or withdrawals
• Gemini: 9 incidents, 1 of them still open, 5 related to deposits or withdrawals
• Crypto.com: 6 incidents, 3 of them still open, 3 related to deposits or withdrawals
• Bitstamp: 4 incidents, all closed
• Bitpanda: 3 incidents, all closed, none related to deposits or withdrawals
• Blockchain.com: 1 incident, closed

These figures are explicitly not a reliability ranking. They measure first how thoroughly a house documents its own problems, and only then how many it has. How to tell the two apart is covered further down.

How we counted: method, time window and the limits of the measurement

The method in one sentence: on September 7, 2026 we called the public incident interface of nine status pages, restricted all entries to the window from August 1, 2026 to September 7, 2026, 15:50 UTC, and counted the number, severity, run time and deposit or withdrawal impact for each provider.

Objects checked: nine status pages carrying 136 incidents between them inside the window. The pages retrieved were those of Kraken, Coinbase, Bitpanda, Bitvavo, Bitstamp, Crypto.com, Gemini, Blockchain.com and Ledger, each with HTTP 200.

The time window is no accident. The interface returns at most 50 incidents per page, and at the two busiest houses that list only reaches back to July 26 and July 18 respectively. A longer window would have delivered truncated figures for Kraken and Coinbase and complete ones for Bitpanda. August 1 is the earliest cut-off date on which all nine pages are covered without gaps.

What we could not check belongs to the survey as well: Binance serves no readable status page at the address we tested (HTTP 404), OKX, Bitfinex and MetaMask were unreachable from the measurement environment, Trezor redirects. For Bison and Trade Republic no public status page could be found at the addresses we checked. The analysis therefore says nothing about these providers, good or bad.

Also not covered: scheduled maintenance windows. The interface lists them separately from incidents, and announced maintenance is a different matter from an unplanned suspension.

Almost every second incident hits deposits and withdrawals, not trading

The most important finding of the count is the distribution. 63 of the 136 incidents involved deposits or withdrawals, the moving of balances. For trading itself the number was markedly lower. That inverts the widespread assumption that an exchange problem is above all a problem for traders.

For you as a holder, the withdrawal side is the more critical one. If trading is stuck, you miss a price. If the withdrawal is stuck, you cannot reach your balance at all, for as long as the provider needs. Among the incidents analysed that was often more than an afternoon: 14 closed suspensions inside the window ran longer than 72 hours.

The cause usually lies outside the exchange. If a blockchain jams after a hard fork, if a network is halted or if there are signs of an attack, a trading venue freezes deposits and withdrawals for exactly that network and lets everything else run. From the provider's point of view that is the right call; in practical terms it works on you like a lockout.

Fourteen withdrawal suspensions are still running: which coins are not leaving the exchange right now

On September 7, 2026 at 15:50 UTC, 14 of the analysed incidents were still listed as unresolved. The longest of them, by run time from the start of the entry:

1. RVN at Bitvavo, deposits and withdrawals suspended since August 10, according to the entry because of a security incident. Run time around 669 hours, a good 27 days. The only open case rated at the severity "major".
2. ONE at Bitvavo, entry standing since August 12 in connection with a security incident at Harmony. Around 635 hours.
3. ONE, ORAI and RAVEN at Crypto.com, deposits and withdrawals suspended since August 12. Around 632 hours.
4. Toncoin at Gemini, deposits, withdrawals and trading unavailable since August 17. Around 497 hours. Anyone holding TON there has been unable to reach the position for three weeks.
5. Memecore (M) at Kraken, deposits disabled since August 19. Around 463 hours.
6. NES at Bitvavo and at Kraken, in each case since August 24, around 337 hours.
7. TON staking at Crypto.com, since August 26, around 297 hours.
8. Cronos (CRO) at Kraken, disruptions to deposits and withdrawals since August 30, around 192 hours.

Shorter open entries come on top of that: Monad (MON) at Kraken since September 2, a collective notice about delays on selected networks at Kraken since September 4, halted trading for Core (CORE) at Bitvavo since September 4, a restricted derivatives display at Coinbase since September 3 and a collective deposit suspension covering several assets at Crypto.com dated September 7.

The list is a snapshot and ages quickly. Its value lies in the order of magnitude rather than in the individual names: at every point in the measurement window a double-digit number of deposit and withdrawal routes was closed somewhere, and the run times were measured in weeks.

Why a high incident count at Kraken and Coinbase does not make them the worse exchange

Coinbase and Kraken lead the count with 38 and 36 entries, Bitpanda stands at three. Concluding from that that Bitpanda runs twelve times more stably would be a measurement error. Both houses at the top maintain a very fine-grained status page with several hundred individually monitored components, and they record every delay on a single network there. Whoever records less looks better in this statistic.

What carries meaning is therefore the type of entry rather than the volume. At Kraken, 32 of the 36 entries were rated "minor" and four "none", the two lowest levels. At Coinbase, 22 entries were "none" and 16 "minor". Bitstamp reported only four incidents in the same period, two of them at the highest severity "critical" and two at "major". Four severe disruptions can hit you harder than 38 documented trifles.

So if you are picking an exchange for reliability, the raw incident count helps you little. Three other questions are more useful: does the provider run a public status page at all, does it record uncomfortable cases there too, and how long do its entries stay open? Our crypto exchange comparison places fees, product range and regulation in context; the status page is the addition that tells you how a house communicates when something breaks.

What "none", "minor", "major" and "critical" mean on a status page

The four levels are an industry standard and are assigned by the provider itself. "none" marks pure information without noticeable restriction, "minor" a limited disruption of individual functions, "major" a substantial impairment and "critical" an outage of the core service. The rating is self-reported and not an audited metric. An entry filed as "none" can still hit you hard if it happens to affect exactly the coin you want to move. At Crypto.com all six entries in the measurement window ran under "none", among them a staking disruption lasting around 314 hours.

When a withdrawal suspension and a migration deadline collide: the Harmony case

In practical terms the most dangerous finding of the count is an overlap. At Crypto.com, deposits and withdrawals for ONE have been suspended since August 12; at Bitvavo an entry about a security incident at Harmony has stood since the same day. At the same time a deadline is running for ONE holders: as we reported on September 7, 2026, Harmony is shutting down its mainnet, and the details are in our piece Harmony is shutting down its mainnet.

For you that means a deadline keeps running even while the route to your balance is closed. No migration plan waits for a trading venue to reopen its withdrawals. Anyone relying on handling the swap shortly before the end has no buffer for a suspension that nobody announced.

The same constellation threatens with every migration under way. For ICX, for instance, we described two deadlines ahead of the shutdown of the ICON blockchain on August 17, 2026; at Bitvavo an entry about a security incident at Icon additionally ran between August 27 and the start of September. When a suspension and a cut-off date overlap, you lose more than time: you lose the option.

What a status page does not show: the blind spots of the measurement

A status page is self-reporting, and it has systematic gaps. First, it shows only what the provider records. Second, it says nothing about the cause: whether a suspension goes back to a problem on the blockchain, to an order from a supervisory authority or to an internal decision is rarely stated there. Third, it says nothing about the solvency of the house. A provider can keep an immaculate status page and still get into difficulty.

For Bitpanda with three entries, Blockchain.com with one and Bitstamp with four, the same caveat therefore applies as for the leaders, only in the other direction: the low number can speak for a quiet house or for a coarse-grained status page. That cannot be decided from the number alone, and we make no such claim.

At Ledger, the only wallet manufacturer in the selection, the picture looks different from the trading venues: 19 entries, 14 of them at "major" and two at "critical", but none related to deposits or withdrawals. The entries almost all concern the connection to individual blockchains inside the application. The longest ran around 22 hours. With a hardware wallet that affects you differently than at an exchange, because your keys stay in your possession the entire time.

Check the status page before you sell: the three signals that matter

From the count a short check routine can be derived that protects you from the most expensive surprise: the sale that cannot be paid out.

First signal, the component. On the status page, look for the name of your coin or its network, and not for the name of the exchange. The relevant notice is almost never headed "exchange disrupted"; it carries a ticker in the title.

Second signal, the start date. An entry from this morning is usually settled within hours. An entry that has stood open for three weeks will still be open tomorrow. In our count the median run time of the open cases was over a week.

Third signal, the direction. Check whether the entry names deposits, withdrawals or both. For you the withdrawal almost always counts. A blocked deposit costs you an entry point, a blocked withdrawal costs you access.

If you do not want to run this check every time, there is a more sensible way to shift the problem: a balance you are not actively trading sits in self-custody, out of reach of anyone else's withdrawal suspensions. Which devices come into question for that and what sets them apart is covered in our hardware wallet comparison further down. The price is that you carry responsibility for the keys yourself.

Why you subscribe to the status page instead of visiting it

All nine pages checked offer notification by email or RSS, in most cases per component as well. That is the real benefit: you learn about a suspension when it starts, and not in the moment you want to sell. For assets with a swap deadline running, such a subscription is the cheapest insurance available in this field.

Security incident, network problem or maintenance: how to gauge how long a suspension lasts

The count shows a pattern in the run times. Entries describing a technical delay were as a rule settled within hours to a few days; the longest closed delay of this kind ran around 146 hours at Kraken. Entries citing a security incident on the blockchain as the trigger ran considerably longer. The longest closed case in this category stood open at Bitvavo for around 598 hours, just under 25 days.

The explanation suggests itself: a delay ends when the technology works again. A security-driven suspension ends only once somebody has judged whether the chain can be trusted again, and that judgement often does not sit with the trading venue at all. If you read the words security incident in an entry, count on weeks and not on days.

One limitation belongs with this: the observation rests on 38 days and nine pages. It is a pattern inside this window and no robust rule spanning years. We will re-check it in coming analyses.

Checking crypto exchange status pages: what to take away

1. Check your provider's status page before every planned withdrawal, and specifically for the ticker of your coin. Whether your provider runs a public and maintained status page at all is a selection criterion in itself; which houses are licensed and supervised in the EU is shown in our overview of regulated crypto exchanges.
2. Move holdings you are not actively trading off the exchange before you need them. A withdrawal suspension only hits a balance that is still sitting with the provider. Suitable devices and their differences are in the hardware wallet comparison.
3. Handle swap and migration deadlines with a buffer, not on the last day. When a suspension and a cut-off date coincide, the cut-off date wins. If you want to move your balance to another trading venue anyway, the alternatives and their fees are in the crypto exchange comparison.

(As of September 7, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

The raw data for this analysis comes from the providers' public status pages, such as the Kraken status page and the Bitvavo status page. Both pages are freely accessible and can be re-checked at any time.

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• The del-desiran candidate failed to meet its primary endpoint in the Phase III HARBOR trial for myotonic dystrophy type 1.
• The Swiss pharmaceutical company has now faced three clinical trial disappointments within a seven-day period, including pelacarsen’s failure and a rap-cel trial suspension following three patient fatalities.
• Jefferies analyst Michael Leuchten maintained a “hold” position while cautioning that growth objectives appear increasingly difficult to achieve without additional mergers and acquisitions.
• Despite setbacks, Novartis reaffirmed its 2025-2030 revenue growth forecast of 5-6% compound annual growth rate.

Novartis experienced a devastating blow on Tuesday following the collapse of its del-desiran clinical trial, with shares plummeting over 12% to approximately $112.56, marking the stock’s weakest performance since early January.

Novartis AG, NVS

The experimental treatment, officially designated as delpacibart etedesiran, failed to achieve its primary endpoint in the Phase III HARBOR clinical study targeting myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1), a degenerative neuromuscular condition currently lacking approved therapeutic options. The 54-week study involving 150 participants demonstrated no statistically significant enhancement in video hand opening time when measured against a placebo group.

According to Novartis, the trial showed signals of activity in secondary and exploratory measurements, and the company intends to consult with regulatory authorities to chart the future course for the del-desiran development program.

This unsuccessful trial represents the third disappointment for Novartis shareholders within a single week. Earlier, the pharmaceutical giant announced that its pelacarsen candidate failed to demonstrate a reduction in cardiovascular event risk during late-stage testing. Seven days prior, Novartis halted eight clinical studies of its investigational cell therapy rap-cel following three patient fatalities.

Analyst Raises Red Flags Over Growth Trajectory

Michael Leuchten, an analyst at Jefferies who kept his “hold” recommendation with a CHF110 price objective, indicated the challenges “extend beyond this single trial failure.” He emphasized that Novartis invested $12 billion to acquire Avidity Biosciences in the previous year, with del-desiran alone accounting for approximately one-third of anticipated peak revenue from that transaction.

Leuchten cautioned that the firm’s growth ambitions exceeding 5% post-2030 will probably be viewed as unattainable without additional acquisitions, which he characterized as “once again uncertain.”

He noted that the del-desiran disappointment also undermines confidence in del-brax, another Avidity pipeline candidate targeting facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy. Phase III results for del-brax aren’t anticipated until 2028.

Novartis shares currently trade at over 16 times projected 2027 earnings, compared with a sector median below 13 times. Leuchten stated that this valuation premium is now “increasingly difficult to justify” and referenced AstraZeneca as a comparable example, which re-rated to 14 times following its own clinical setbacks.

Pipeline Highlights Remain Despite Recent Struggles

The company’s development pipeline hasn’t completely unraveled. The third Avidity candidate, del-zota for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, recently secured FDA Priority Review status and remains on track.

Novartis also announced encouraging late-stage outcomes last week for remibrutinib, an investigational therapy for relapsing multiple sclerosis, demonstrating a clinically significant delay in disability advancement.

The pharmaceutical company upheld its five-year revenue CAGR projection of 5-6% spanning 2025 through 2030, with Chief Medical Officer Shreeram Aradhye noting that setbacks constitute “an inherent element of scientific advancement.”

Del-zota has secured Orphan Drug, Fast Track, and Breakthrough Therapy designations from the FDA, along with Orphan Medicinal Product status in the European Union.

Novartis announced plans to engage with the FDA regarding del-brax after observing encouraging early-stage biomarker results from the Phase I/II investigation.

The post Novartis (NVS) Stock Plunges 12% as Del-Desiran Trial Flops in Brutal Week appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• XRP open interest fell 14%, from $558 million to $478 million, after $14.2 million in two-way liquidations.
• Funding rates slipped to -0.002, ending a 14-session streak of positive funding.
• Binance reserves held near 2.6176 billion XRP even as deposit addresses dropped 91%.
• XRPL’s recorded asset value climbed from $99 million in Q1 2025 to $4.26 billion in Q2 2026, with RLUSD transfers up 925% year-over-year.
• Analyst Dark Defender says XRP’s chart is repeating patterns seen before the 2014 and 2017 rallies, ahead of a Senate vote on the CLARITY Act.

XRP saw a leverage reset this week. Traders on both sides of the market got liquidated within 48 hours.

Open interest fell 14%, from $558 million to $478 million. Leverage on the token dropped from 0.203 to 0.182.

The reset came after $14.2 million in two-way liquidations. Both long and short positions were affected.

Funding rates also slipped, moving to -0.002. That ended a 14-session streak of positive funding.

Despite the shakeout, exchange supply did not rise. Binance reserves stayed near 2.6176 billion XRP.

Deposit addresses sending XRP to Binance dropped 91%. Holders did not rush to move coins onto the exchange.

XRPL Asset Growth Continues

While leverage cooled, activity on the XRP Ledger kept growing. Recorded asset value rose from $99 million in Q1 2025 to $4.26 billion in Q2 2026.

Every quarter added to that total. Evernorth’s Q2 report also showed trading volume up 68% year-over-year, even as it eased from Q1 levels.

Real-world assets on XRPL are mostly represented through registry-style instruments. This points to institutional custody rather than assets moving freely between users.

RLUSD stablecoin activity moved differently. Transferred value on RLUSD rose 925% year-over-year, alongside more holders and trust-line openings.

Analyst Points to Historical Chart Pattern

Crypto analyst Dark Defender posted a weekly XRP chart on X. The chart showed price sitting above several long-term exponential moving averages.

Dark Defender wrote that XRP is repeating “2017 and 2014 Exponential Moving Average Jumping Patterns,” regardless of what happens with the CLARITY Act. The chart labeled a further move higher as “The Frog Leap,” with a target near $18.23.

That level would mark roughly a 1201% increase from current prices. The analyst said the target for an all-time high is closer than many expect.

The CLARITY Act cloture vote is scheduled for September 15 in the Senate. The bill needs 60 votes to advance, and Republicans hold 53 seats.

Former federal prosecutor Mariotti said the bill has lost momentum, calling the CLARITY Act “dead.” Sen. Cynthia Lummis said delay would push market structure legislation to 2030.

Separately, $22 billion in U.S. Treasury buybacks is expected in the coming weeks, a factor some traders are watching alongside the vote.

The post XRP (XRP) Price: Open Interest Falls 14% After $14.2M Liquidation Flush appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Novartis experiences its steepest single-day decline in company history, plummeting more than 10% following consecutive failures in drug trials
• Europe’s STOXX 600 index declined 0.6% amid mounting concerns over oil prices approaching the $100 threshold
• Brent crude futures climbed approximately 2% following Iranian warnings of potential strikes on Gulf region energy facilities
• European banking sector shares retreated 1.3% as recession fears mount across the eurozone
• Market participants anticipate a 25 basis point interest rate increase from the European Central Bank this Thursday

European equity markets experienced a downturn on Tuesday, pressured by escalating oil prices that intensified inflation anxieties, while Novartis endured a catastrophic trading session.

The benchmark STOXX 600 index across Europe retreated 0.6% to approximately 646 points during morning trading hours. Major indices including Germany’s DAX, France’s CAC 40, and Britain’s FTSE 100 all registered losses ranging from 0.4% to 0.6%.

Novartis Suffers Historic Decline Following Consecutive Trial Setbacks

Novartis emerged as the STOXX 600’s most significant decliner, shedding more than 10% of its value. The Basel-based pharmaceutical company disclosed that del-desiran, its advanced-stage candidate for treating myotonic dystrophy, did not achieve its primary clinical endpoint.

This disappointing announcement followed closely on the heels of Monday’s revelation that pelacarsen, the company’s investigational cholesterol therapy, had similarly fallen short in late-phase clinical testing. The dual disappointments within 48 hours triggered a mass exodus among shareholders.

Stone-X senior market analyst Fiona Cincotta observed that despite these recent setbacks, Novartis had accumulated substantial year-to-date gains prior to this week’s developments.

Meanwhile, Sandoz advanced 4.5% following the Swiss pharmaceutical manufacturer’s announcement of ambitious growth targets, projecting net sales to increase by more than 100% over the 2025-2035 period.

Poste Italiane enhanced its acquisition proposal for Telecom Italia. The announcement lifted Telecom Italia shares by 2.5%, while Poste Italiane remained unchanged.

Crude Prices Surge Toward $100 Amid Escalating Middle Eastern Geopolitical Risks

Brent crude futures hovered around $98.50 per barrel following Iranian declarations threatening retaliatory strikes against Gulf energy infrastructure, including American oil and natural gas installations, should attacks occur. The energy sector bucked the broader market trend, gaining 0.6% despite widespread declines elsewhere.

Elevated crude prices are amplifying inflationary pressures throughout Europe and worldwide. Fixed-income markets experienced significant selling activity last week, prompting expectations that central banks will maintain elevated interest rates for an extended period.

Financial market participants broadly anticipate the European Central Bank will implement a 25 basis point rate increase during Thursday’s policy meeting.

Attention is also focused on forthcoming U.S. inflation statistics scheduled for release later this week. This data follows unexpectedly robust American employment figures, which have strengthened expectations for an additional Federal Reserve rate hike this month.

European banking sector equities declined 1.3%. Market observers note that financial institutions typically serve as early indicators of economic deceleration concerns, with rising energy costs amplifying recession anxieties within the eurozone.

The euro maintained stability near $1.16. United Kingdom 10-year government bond yields increased 2 basis points to 5.19%, while Germany’s equivalent maturity yield advanced to 3.39%.

Germany announced a trade balance surplus totaling €21.27 billion, whereas France’s trade deficit expanded to €6.7 billion during July.

The downward pressure on European financial markets follows a subdued Monday trading session, when American exchanges remained closed in observance of the Labor Day holiday.

The post European Markets Tumble as Brent Crude Approaches $100 Mark appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• Chinese automaker BYD aims to export over 2.5 million electric vehicles internationally by 2027
• Company has increased its 2026 international sales forecast to 1.9-2 million units from a prior 1.5 million estimate
• International revenue surpassed China domestic sales during the first six months of 2026
• New Hungarian manufacturing facility expected to start operations late 2026 to circumvent European Union tariffs
• Domestic market share goal set at 25% of China’s auto market, compared to July’s 18% figure

Chinese electric vehicle powerhouse BYD has announced plans to export more than 2.5 million vehicles globally in 2027, representing nearly double its upgraded 2026 projection of 1.9 to 2 million units. This revised 2026 forecast marks a significant increase from the company’s original target of 1.5 million overseas shipments, as disclosed in a Deutsche Bank research note following a September 7 investor presentation.

These figures underscore the remarkable pace of BYD’s international expansion. The automaker shipped a mere 45,000 vehicles internationally in 2022. By August 2026, overseas shipments had surged to record heights, representing 43% of the company’s total monthly deliveries—more than doubling year-over-year.

A significant milestone occurred in the first half of 2026 when international revenue exceeded domestic Chinese sales for the first time in company history. This geographic revenue shift has helped BYD’s bottom line recover from an extended profitability downturn caused by aggressive pricing competition in China’s automotive sector, which has compressed profit margins industry-wide.

Local Production Strategy to Combat Import Duties

Company leadership indicated that international profit margins currently sit around 20,000 yuan (approximately $2,980) per vehicle sold abroad, even accounting for foreign exchange fluctuations. Management anticipates maintaining these profitability levels in the near future, though continued sales volume expansion will be partially balanced by investments in dealer network expansion and overseas production capacity increases.

BYD’s European manufacturing facility in Hungary is scheduled to commence vehicle assembly operations between November and December of this year. Domestic European production will enable the automaker to avoid the European Union’s roughly 27% import duty on battery electric vehicles and Brazil’s substantial 34% tariff on imported cars. According to Citi analysts, this tariff avoidance strategy could save over 40,000 yuan ($5,961) per vehicle—savings management believes will counterbalance initial production ramp-up expenses.

Company executives acknowledged that limited shipping capacity constrained export volumes during early 2026. To resolve this bottleneck, BYD is expanding its dedicated automotive carrier vessel fleet and establishing additional international production facilities. Leadership also indicated the company is evaluating potential manufacturing locations beyond the Hungarian operation.

Infrastructure Investment and China Market Ambitions

On the domestic front, BYD has established an ambitious goal to capture 25% of China’s total automotive market. The company’s share of the Chinese market reached 18% in July, up substantially from just 8% at the beginning of 2026.

The electric vehicle manufacturer also intends to deploy 90,000 fast-charging stations by 2028. The rollout plan calls for 20,000 charging points by year-end 2026, followed by an additional 30,000 throughout 2027, and another 40,000 in 2028, according to Deutsche Bank’s research coverage.

BYD has been aggressively pursuing market share across Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Australia by offering competitively priced electric vehicles. The company reported an 18% increase in total vehicle sales during August.

Both Deutsche Bank and Citi referenced management commentary provided during the September 7 investor briefing in their research notes. BYD did not provide immediate comment when contacted regarding these announced targets.

The post BYD (BYDDY) Stock: Chinese EV Leader Eyes 2.5M Export Goal for 2027 appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• An attacker manipulated TONIC’s price to borrow $120.4 million across nine Tectonic markets.
• Validators halted the Cronos network at block 90,907,150 after spotting irregular activity. 
• Cronos restored chain state to block 90,896,188, reversing $111.2 million in affected funds. 
• About $9.19 million left Cronos before the halt and remains outside the restoration’s reach. 

Cronos confirmed that an attacker manipulated collateral values on the Tectonic lending protocol on August 30, borrowing roughly $120.4 million through nine markets.

Validators halted the network within hours to protect user funds. Chain state was later restored to block 90,896,188, reversing about $111.2 million while $9.19 million had already left the ecosystem before the halt.

How the Tectonic Exploit Unfolded

The attacker began deploying contracts at 12:38 UTC, pushing the price of TONIC upward against thin liquidity on decentralized exchanges.

This price manipulation inflated the value of collateral held within Tectonic’s lending markets. At 12:49 UTC, a single transaction used that inflated collateral to borrow approximately $120.4 million across nine separate markets.

The Cronos team identified irregular on-chain activity around 13:25 UTC, as liquidity began exiting the ecosystem through various channels.

Validators moved to halt network operations at 14:32:47 UTC, at block 90,907,150, aiming to limit further outflows while the situation was assessed.

By the time the halt took effect, most of the borrowed funds remained traceable within the network. Cronos reported that around 92 percent of the affected value had not yet left the chain when block production stopped. Only $9.19 million, about 7.6 percent of the total, had already been transferred out before validators acted.

Cronos Network posted an update confirming the sequence of events on its official account, noting the halt was taken to safeguard remaining balances.

Cronos said validators halted the network at 14:32 UTC to protect remaining user funds, and the chain was restored to block 90,896,188 after validator consensus later that day.

Restoration Process and Next Steps for Cronos

Restoring the chain required discarding 10,961 blocks, representing one hour and 54 minutes of settled transaction history.

Every transaction within that window was reversed, regardless of whether it was connected to the exploit itself. Open positions on live applications were repriced once trading resumed under the restored state.

Executing the rollback demanded coordinated consensus across the validator set, with every participant running a patched build from an identical starting point.

The team described working through the night across several rounds of coordination before block production could safely resume. Blocks resumed at 23:49:01 UTC, returning balances to their pre-exploit condition.

Cronos said blocks and transactions from the discarded fork no longer resolve on public explorers, though archive node snapshots remain available for independent verification. The chain explorer, indexers, subgraphs, and public RPC endpoints have since returned to full operation.

Looking forward, Cronos stated no action is required from users, since balances were already returned to their prior state. The team is now working with exchanges, bridges, and other platforms to complete reconciliation.

Cronos also warned users to rely only on official channels and to treat unsolicited recovery messages as scams, while it reviews collateral risk practices and monitoring across the ecosystem.

The post Cronos Reverses $111M After Tectonic Exploit Triggers Network Halt appeared first on Blockonomi.

Bitcoin’s price was rejected at $80,000 once again yesterday morning, and the subsequent correction has taken it south by over two grand.

Some of the larger-cap alts, such as HYPE, ZEC, XMR, and LINK, have posted substantial daily losses, while BNB has reclaimed the $750 level.

BTC Down to $78K

The primary cryptocurrency spent the previous weekend trading sideways between $77,000 and $79,000 after that Friday’s rejection at $81,500. It tried to break out on Monday, but it was halted and driven south first to $77,200 and then to $76,400 as the week progressed.

The bulls finally stepped up on Thursday. At first, they helped BTC halt the freefall. Then came the major leg up. In a matter of hours, bitcoin skyrocketed by several grand and surged to a new three-month high of almost $82,500.

However, the same rejection scenario repeated and worsened after the stronger-than-expected US jobs report on Friday. BTC first dipped to $81,300 before the bears drove it south to under $78,800 after the report went live. Nevertheless, it rebounded over the weekend and jumped past $80,400 on Monday morning.

The bears reemerged once again, driving the cryptocurrency south by over $2,000 in the following days. BTC dipped to $78,200 earlier today, and now sits inches above that level. Its market cap has dipped to $1.570 trillion, while its dominance over the altcoins is down to 58.8% on CMC.

XRP Below $1.40

Ethereum is below $2,500 once again after failing at that level on Sunday and Monday. XRP has also slipped below a key support level, currently struggling at $1.39. In contrast, SOL has remained above $100 even after a 1.7% daily decline. BNB has reclaimed $750 after a minor increase.

More profound losses come from the likes of ZEC, XMR, LINK, and HYPE. All of those were on a roll lately and have given up a minor portion of their gains. TAO is down by 6% daily, while DOT has spiked by more than 8%.

PONS has finally retreated after its mind-blowing rally, down by over 10% daily. On the other hand, AERO and PIEVERSE are up by 16% and 14%, respectively.

The cumulative market cap of all crypto assets has declined by around 1% to $2.670 trillion on CMC.

The post XRP Dips Below Crucial Support, BTC Slides Toward $78K: Market Watch appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin is trading near $78,000 after failing to hold above the $82,500 resistance zone, leaving $83,000 as the level analyst Crypto Patel says must be reclaimed to change its bearish higher-timeframe structure.

A rejection could put $68,000, $62,000, and eventually $50,000 back on the table, although Patel also sees a path toward $300,000 if Bitcoin’s four-year cycle pattern repeats.

Bitcoin Faces Another Test Around $83K

In a September 8 post on X, Crypto Patel said Bitcoin had been rejected from $82,500, a resistance area he had identified in an earlier analysis on September 7. The market watcher’s broader view remains bearish while BTC trades below $83,000, with a strong daily close above that level needed to invalidate the setup.

Bitcoin’s recent recovery began around $57,800, but the move has run into resistance between $79,000 and $83,000. Patel described this area as a bearish order block, where sellers could attempt to regain control.

A daily close above $83,000 followed by a successful retest would open the way towards $89,000 to $91,000 and then potentially $97,000 to $100,000, based on Patel’s September 7 analysis. However, failure at resistance would leave $65,000 to $50,000 as relevant downside levels.

The latest CoinGecko data puts BTC at around $78,000, down 1.4% in 24 hours and barely moving across seven days. The token is still up 21% over 30 days, although it remains nearly 38% below its October 6, 2025, all-time high.

Short-term price action has also left room for another pullback, with Patel earlier pointing out that Bitcoin’s weekly Supertrend had turned green for the first time since November 2025, placing major support around $62,000 to $65,000. But despite the broader bullish reading, the analyst expects at least a 20% retracement before another major move higher.

As CryptoPotato reported earlier in the week, the OG cryptocurrency had been testing the $82,000 area after US spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded their second-biggest daily inflow of the year, with options traders relatively calm ahead of US inflation data and the Federal Reserve meeting, with 18-day implied volatility around 37% to 38%.

Analyst Sees $300K Possibility If Cycle Repeats

In another analysis, the crypto researcher took a very different view of Bitcoin’s longer-term prospects. His monthly chart pointed to cycle tops around 2013, 2017, 2021, and 2025, with roughly 1,420 to 1,450 days separating each peak.

Following those highs, Bitcoin experienced deep drawdowns before entering accumulation phases, and the chart places the current market near $79,000 inside the latest accumulation zone after the 2025 peak.

If that historical rhythm continues, Patel projects a potential next major target above $300,000, with the chart placing a new all-time high around August 2029. But the forecast depends entirely on the cycle pattern repeating, rather than on a confirmed technical signal.

The post Bitcoin Must Reclaim This Level Soon or Risk Slide Toward $50K: Analyst appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin Layer 2 solution Liquid Network has recovered 3,400 BTC from the roughly 4,000 BTC withdrawn during Sunday’s security incident, according to Samson Mow’s latest update.

The supposed white-hat hackers had previously told the Adam Back-led company that the funds would be returned after the network issue was fixed. In their message, they warned that the chain remained at risk and urged Blockstream to patch every node before they would safely transfer the Bitcoin back.

Network Still Paused

The funds were returned after Blockstream confirmed that the affected bridge nodes had been patched. Around 598 BTC remains outstanding, and Blockstream is still engaging with the parties who claimed to be white-hat hackers.

The development follows Liquid’s disclosure that around $320 million worth of BTC had been withdrawn from its Federation wallet. The funds were moved using the SideSwap PAK, while the Peg-out Authorization Key itself had not been compromised. Exchanges subsequently paused or prepared to pause LBTC deposits and withdrawals, while Liquid disabled its bridge nodes and effectively halted the sidechain.

The network remains paused as Blockstream and Federation members carry out further fixes and security improvements, work to resolve a chain split, and prepare for a safe restart. Liquid wallets and services remain affected. Mow also said users should not send Bitcoin to Liquid peg-in addresses until the network confirms it has restarted.

“Following the recent incident affecting the Liquid Network and the movement of funds, Blockstream, as Liquid’s technical provider, and the Liquid Federation have been working diligently to resolve the ongoing situation and ensure the return of assets. Updated software has been deployed as the Federation members prepare the network for a coordinated restart. Our teams remain focused on further hardening the network.”

Community Reactions

Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet questioned whether the remaining BTC could be part of a negotiated reward agreed through an encrypted contract signed on-chain. If that is the case, the exec argued that the situation would look more like extortion than conventional white-hat hacking.

Meanwhile, Isabel Foxen Duke, host of the Bitcoin Rails podcast, also criticized the actions of the white-hat hackers. In a post, she described the situation as “insanely illegal/unethical” and added that they could still face serious consequences if they were identified and caught.

Another market commentator described the Liquid incident as “the most embarrassing moment in Bitcoin’s modern history.”

The post Liquid Gets 3,400 BTC Back – but What About the 598 Bitcoin Still Missing? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Ethereum is targeting a quantum-resistant Layer 1 by December 2029, with the Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol cluster laying out a multi-fork plan as Hegotá enters its scoping phase.

Post-quantum security sits alongside privacy, faster finality, state management and zkEVM development, while the next upgrade faces strict limits on additional scope.

Ethereum Sets 2029 Deadline for Quantum Resistance

In a post published on September 8, the Ethereum Foundation said roughly 60 researchers, engineers, and domain experts across all nine Protocol teams contributed to a unified assessment of 62 EIPs proposed for Hegotá.

Their work produced 397 grades before contested proposals were discussed collectively.

For Ethereum’s core developers, the main target is quantum resistance across the execution, consensus, and data layers by December 2029. That deadline matches migration targets set by Google, Cloudflare and Microsoft, although the timing of “Q-day,” when quantum computers could threaten current cryptography, remains uncertain.

Planning assumptions are deliberately aggressive. The Foundation said Ethereum should prepare for Q-day as early as 2030, while acknowledging that credible estimates generally place it later and that it may never arrive. But December 2029 will remain “non-negotiable” until at least January 2027, when progress in quantum computing will be reassessed with outside experts.

Under the current roadmap, Glamsterdam is expected in December 2026, while full post-quantum readiness sits at L*, five forks later. Reaching that target would require an average fork cadence of 7.2 months. A minimum viable post-quantum milestone at J* could instead be reached with a 12-month cadence.

For that contingency, MV-PQ would keep Ethereum operating through Q-day with reduced guarantees. Researchers are still working out exactly what those guarantees would be. Full resistance across execution, consensus, and data remains the December 2029 objective.

Hegotá itself is not the quantum-resistant fork. Instead, it is the upgrade that determines whether the subsequent quantum-security work can arrive on schedule.

Two proposals sit at the top of the Hegotá list. One is FOCIL, which targets transaction inclusion by allowing validators to impose requirements on builders, while the other, Frame Transactions, gives account abstraction and a path towards replacing vulnerable secp256k1 keys.

Hegotá Scope Puts Security Ahead of Broader Changes

Only two of the 62 proposals received an S grade, meaning they “must ship.” Fifteen earned A grades and are expected to ship, while eight landed in B and seven in C. Twenty-eight proposals were declined, with another two left pending until mainnet evidence becomes available.

Beyond FOCIL, there is “little appetite” for additional consensus-layer scope unless a proposal directly supports post-quantum readiness. Limited testing and engineering capacity are major considerations as developers prepare Hegotá and the forks that follow.

Quantum risk has been getting attention throughout the year, with Vitalik Buterin sharing a roadmap in February that showed plans to replace vulnerable consensus-layer BLS signatures and introduce account abstraction through EIP-8141.

But rather than treating quantum resistance as a single upgrade, Ethereum’s latest plan spreads work across several forks, with developments made alongside changes involving privacy, state management, fast finality and mandatory execution proofs.

Next steps include a Reddit AMA scheduled for September 16 at 2 p.m. UTC, where the Protocol cluster plans to discuss its priorities, the Hegotá tier list, and questions from the Ethereum community.

The post Ethereum Aims for Quantum-Safe L1 by 2029 as Hegotá Upgrade Takes Form appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Hunter Biden, son of former President Joe Biden, will launch a meme coin called LAPTOP on Coinbase’s Base network on September 9, naming it after the laptop tied to a 2020 election controversy and reserving a fifth of the supply for wallets that lost money on Donald Trump’s TRUMP coin.

The Wall Street Journal first reported the plan on Monday morning. Biden confirmed it on his verified X account about four minutes later, posting the $LAPTOP ticker and the September 9 date next to a 31-second Fox News clip about the laptop.

$LAPTOP

September 9 pic.twitter.com/QokgWLNxgL

— Hunter Biden (@HunterBiden) September 7, 2026

250,900 Views Within an Hour

According to the Journal, the token carries a 1 billion supply. The founding team, which includes Biden, takes 30%, locked for six months and then released over about two years. Another 20% is split across two airdrop rounds covering wallets underwater on TRUMP, Biden’s Substack subscribers, and a mailing list run by video journalist Andrew Callaghan.

A further 20% is set aside for liquidity, exchanges and legal costs, and up to 30% is earmarked for burns tied to milestones such as a new Bitcoin (BTC) record high, LAPTOP’s market cap overtaking TRUMP’s, or a Democratic win in the 2028 election.

The official contract does not go live until Wednesday, but that does not stop trading. Within about an hour of the Journal’s report, more than a dozen counterfeit LAPTOP tokens appeared on chains including Solana, BNB Chain, and TON, changing hands for roughly $6.9 million combined. None carried an official contract address because none had been published.

Coinbase’s Base network drew more than 500 scam tokens in its first weeks after its 2023 launch, according to Solidus Labs. Blockchain investigator ZachXBT has separately traced hijacked celebrity and brand accounts that promoted fake tokens and moved $3.5 million to anonymous wallets.

TRUMP launched on Solana on January 18, 2025, crashed more than 50% within hours when Melania Trump released her own token, and traded near $2.28 on Monday against a January 2025 peak of $73.43, according to CoinGecko.

The Laptop Behind the Token

The laptop is real. Biden left it at a repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware, in 2019, and the New York Post published its contents in October 2020, weeks before the presidential election. An FBI agent later testified at his 2024 federal trial that the device’s serial number matched Apple’s records.

Biden has disputed that account, saying the files were taken from his cloud storage. The token is set to go live on Base on September 9.

Hunter Biden’s LAPTOP meme coin has already spawned counterfeit tokens ahead of its September 9 launch on Base. The project will reserve 20% of its supply for airdrops, including wallets that lost money on TRUMP.

The post Hunter Biden Is Launching a LAPTOP Meme Coin – and TRUMP Losers Are Getting an Airdrop appeared first on CryptoPotato.