Continued uncertainty over the Strait of Hormuz negotiations heightens geopolitical tensions and market volatility, impacting global trade dynamics.

The post Trump: No agreement reached on Strait of Hormuz amid US-Iran tensions appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Iran's move could destabilize regional security, impact global oil markets, and diminish U.S. influence in a key maritime corridor.

The post Iran proposes control of Strait of Hormuz, challenging US maritime dominance appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Market volatility highlights the need for diversified portfolios as geopolitical shifts and sector-specific performances influence investor confidence.

The post Dow Jones Industrial Average posts first decline in 6 sessions as Wall Street takes a breather appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

AI data centers' power issues could reshape tech investments, as operational costs rise and Bitcoin miners pivot to AI hosting for better returns.

The post AI data centers face billions in costs as power volatility wrecks critical equipment appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The surge in LYTE's trading volume highlights growing investor confidence in AI infrastructure, signaling a shift towards niche tech sectors.

The post Roundhill’s photonics ETF LYTE pulls $72M in first-day volume as Wall Street’s AI hardware bet intensifies appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Breez Announces Glow, an Open Source Bitcoin to Stablecoins Progressive Web App

Developed by Breez in partnership with Bitcoin Spark, the Glow app lets users send stablecoins from their Bitcoin balance, while empowering developers to build better user experiences without having to worry about the difficult parts of building on top of Bitcoin. Breez’s SDK takes care of asset exchange in the background while supporting lightning payments through its Spark integration. 

“Glow is a Bitcoin app for everyone,” said the company in a press release shared with Bitcoin Magazine. Users can access the app on both Apple and Android app stores. Glow re-invents the Bitcoin wallet experience, deviating from the seed phrase backup flow that many wallets attempt to introduce users to. Instead, Glow leverages the Passkey standard engineered and now encouraged by the Silicon Valley giants, which makes passwords and, in this case, pass phrases a thing of the past. Despite the change, Glow promises self-custody and cryptographic control over funds to its users, in an auditable software package. 

As an MIT-licensed, free and open source progressive web app (PWA), Glow is built so that developers can look under the hood, take it apart, and implement features as they see fit, leveraging the Breez API and SDK. Besides the Passkey login, Glow has full support for native Lightning payments, sending and receiving with customizable Lightning addresses that look like emails, such as BM@breez.tips. First deployed to a Bitcoiner user base, Glow can currently send USDT and USDC across most networks and blockchains through their partnership with Flashnet, drawing value from the user’s Bitcoin balance. 

Glow comes integrated with a couple of onramps from the start as well. Users can onboard to bitcoin instantly via Cash App and MoonPay which the SDK connects to via their API. Sats arrive in seconds. The app also has contacts integration, letting users save their friends’ lightning addresses as a contact, hiding away ugly public keys and lightning invoices and delivering a more familiar and mainstream payments app experience. 

Users can also avoid bitcoin’s volatility by swapping their BTC holdings to USD value at will and, according to the press release, they earn sats as they do. Glow’s stablecoin is USDB; the B stands for Bitcoin, a stablecoin issued by Brale Inc which is licensed as an MSB across over 45 states, and claims to be compliant with GENIUS Act standards: “Regulated & fully backed Issued by Brale, a U.S. regulated entity, and 100% backed by T-bills, cash, and cash equivalents”. There appears to be no way to verify Brale’s compliance with the GENIUS Act right now as the regulations are still being implemented and do not take effect until 2027.

What is remarkable about USDB is that it is a Bitcoin native stablecoin, deployed through the Spark protocol, which is compatible with the Lightning Network, essentially unlocking the stablecoin across Bitcoin rails. USDB holders earn up to 6% APY delivered from Flashnet DEFI exchange’s profits, according to a Spark announcement earlier this year. 

Breez believes this combination of partnerships and technologies means that “Bitcoin has finally crossed a threshold.” The UX unlocked by Glow is now fully available to developers as a software development kit, something unimaginable by traditional finance. 

This post Breez Announces Glow, an Open Source Bitcoin to Stablecoins Progressive Web App first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

Bitcoin Magazine

Senate Whip Barrasso Becomes Latest Lawmaker to Support Crypto Clarity Act, But Time May Be Running Out 

Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso is the latest lawmaker to call for action on the crypto Clarity Act, though recent developments show work on the bill may be slowing. 

Speaking to the Senate Thursday, Barrasso reminded lawmakers that the U.S. passed the first major digital asset bill last year, the Genius Act, and the same bipartisan work was necessary for the Clarity Act. 

Lawmakers are rushing to get a vote on the Clarity Act before a five-week recess this week. Some Republicans have criticized Democrats for dragging their feet with the bill and deliberately being pernickety. 

“It’s time for the Senate to build on [the Genius Act] by passing the Clarity Act,” Barrosso said.  

Bipartisan work has gone into putting the bill together, and on Wednesday, Senator Thom Tillis reportedly said that the White House was reviewing the latest amendments to the bill. 

But on Thursday, Punchbowl News Senior Reporter Brendan Pendersen posted on X that Tillis had said he hadn’t yet heard back from the White House, despite optimism this week and Senate Majority Leader John Thune previously telling reporters that they were hoping for a vote before the break. 

Lawmakers have other proposed bills to vote on ahead of their recess and the Clarity Act seems to have been pushed back. 

The bill, which would set in stone digital asset regulation in the U.S., was passed last year by the House of Representatives. It has since become a much fatter text, according to Senator Cynthia Lummis, thanks to Democrats who wanted more added to the draft. 

Since July, a new text with changes regarding ethics has been circulating among lawmakers. It banned government officials and their families from issuing or promoting crypto — something Democrats had previously bemoaned. 

But it hasn’t been enough, according to some lawmakers, and a group of Democrats wrote a letter in July saying the bill fell short. 

Other than concerns around ethics, the Clarity Act has been in a deadlock this year after the banking lobby raised concerns over stablecoin yield paid by crypto companies to their customers, clashing with companies like Coinbase. 

Some Republicans are still sure a vote will pass this week, with Senate Banking Committeeman Tim Scott telling Fox Business that the Clarity Act is “something we should have, the first vote before we leave without any question.” 

Senator Lummis added on Wednesday that a vote would happen — and that lawmakers would stay a day or two extra later. 

This post Senate Whip Barrasso Becomes Latest Lawmaker to Support Crypto Clarity Act, But Time May Be Running Out  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

The End of the Closed-Source Era Is at Hand: Obscurity Was Never Security

Over the last few days, people who were trying to do everything right lost their Bitcoin. They bought a respected hardware signer, generated a seed offline using that device, and trusted the device to do the one thing a signer exists to do: produce a number no one else can guess. The Coldcard did not. A preprocessor guard that checked the wrong thing had quietly routed seed generation to a weak software PRNG (pseudorandom number generator), MicroPython’s Yasmarang, instead of the hardware entropy source. On some models the effective entropy collapsed to around 40 bits. The flaw shipped in March 2021 and sat in publicly readable firmware for more than five years. Attackers swept 500 addresses before anyone understood why; within days Galaxy Research’s tally reached 4,585 addresses and nearly $90 million; the attack is ongoing as of the date of this article.

Coinkite’s working assumption, with wide agreement on X, is that someone used AI to comb the publicly available firmware to find the bug. Whether or not that’s how this attacker found it, the next one will. While an AI-assisted audit was run weeks before the theft, it found nothing (potentially due to the capabilities of the model, potentially due to the specific construction of the search). Since the attack started, researchers have shown several frontier models locating the same flaw in minutes from a single prompt. The code sat open to human review for five years and no human caught it.

Coinkite had moved its firmware from a free-software license to source-available terms, MIT with a Commons Clause, after Foundation Devices used the code in a competing product. You could read the source but not build a business on it. It changed nothing. The bug lived in code a machine could read regardless of what the license permitted; it entered the tree, in fact, in the very rewrite that stripped out the last of the GPL code. The license change didn’t increase protection; it merely changed the economics of finding the bug.

In the age of highly skilled AI, everything that is distributed is readable, or soon will be. Strip a binary of its symbols, run it through a decompiler, and out comes the pseudo-C that greets anyone who has opened Ghidra: nameless variables, flattened control flow, functions labeled FUN_00401a20. Unreadable to most people. That high barrier to human understanding was the entire security premium of “closed source.”

A compiled program has no choice but to tell the truth. Code that stays encrypted cannot run. At the moment of execution the processor must receive the actual instructions, so whatever the program does, it hands the machine a complete and exact account of how to do it. The information is all there in the machine code. Obfuscation does not, and cannot, remove it.

If reading a binary sounds too hard for a machine to master soon, weigh it against what machines are already doing to problems far harder. Reading a binary is analysis: every fact you need is in front of you, and the work is extraction. Mathematical invention is another order of difficulty, because it demands an object no one has ever seen. At 02:19 UTC on July 20th, Levent Alpöge, a mathematician working with Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5, posted a counterexample to Keller’s Jacobian conjecture, a problem open since 1939 and hard enough to sit on Stephen Smale’s list of challenges for the twenty-first century. Generations had tried it. The disproof is three polynomials in three variables. Lean verified it within hours, and it is short enough for anyone to confirm in a computer-algebra system in about a minute.

The Jacobian fell in an afternoon, while the questioner was apparently watching the final match of the FIFA World Cup. In May an OpenAI model toppled the Erdős unit-distance conjecture, a question open since 1946; in late July a 30-year-old graph-theory conjecture fell to four prompts; between them came the Jacobian disproof and a run of other results that had stood for decades.

Set that pace beside the modest task of reading machine code already sitting out there on the Internet. Today’s models handle source and decompiler output better than raw bytes, so a fully closed binary keeps a thin margin. That margin is a cost speedbump, and it is eroding at the speed you are watching everywhere else. Betting security on how long it lasts means betting against a clock that is only speeding up.

The same capability that finds your entropy bug reads your proprietary method. This is the quieter casualty, and it impacts companies that never thought of themselves as exposed to open-source anything. Trade secrecy in shipped software was always just obscurity in a suit. The law has said so for as long as trade-secret law has existed: reverse engineering a product you lawfully possess is fair play, and therefore a secret survives only while that reverse engineering stays expensive. When the cost of extraction falls to a subscription and a prompt, the secret embodied in the code you hand your customers stops being one. Your clever algorithm, your undocumented format, your edge in the binary: legible to anyone who cares to look, on a timeline increasingly measured in minutes.

None of this necessarily makes open source safe. Heartbleed hid in the most widely deployed TLS library on earth for two years, because visibility without funded attention finds nothing. The xz backdoor showed that the open contribution model is itself an attack surface, one a patient adversary can walk through with a friendly face and two years of good commits. While openness once was a shield, it is no longer. What it does buy is reviewers who are permitted to look, builds which can be independently reproduced and verified, an exit when a vendor dies or turns, and acknowledgment that this all will happen whether you like it or not.

Now we must assume every line shipped will be read by someone who wishes harm, because it will be. The defender holds one structural advantage the attacker never will: time. You can turn the same frontier models on your own code before release, in the space between commit and ship, while the attacker waits for a binary that does not yet exist. Make your builds reproducible, so it ties back to the source and the source can be checked. Design to fail closed, and keep the trusted core small enough that one bug cannot take everything. For the specific business of holding Bitcoin, learn the lesson Coldcard is teaching in real time: own the entropy you cannot afford to have guessed, keep the secure element minimal and behind a published interface, and spread your keys across independent implementations, so that no single device, and no single vendor’s mistake, is the whole of your exposure.

For Bitcoin the stakes are unforgiving in a way they are not elsewhere, since mere knowledge of the private keys grants possession. The entropy bug has left permanent scars. Patching the generator does nothing for the seeds it already produced; a weak keyspace stays sweepable forever, and disclosure hands the attacker the recipe. We have watched this before. The Milk Sad vulnerability in the libbitcoin explorer tool, bx, seeded private keys from a 32-bit value, and attackers were draining the wallets it produced before the flaw was ever made public. Attackers keep their own schedule, invited or not. For money that cannot be clawed back, “findable eventually” is a synonym for “gone eventually.”

Bitcoin never trusted obscurity. The protocol is open, its rules checkable by anyone, its security resting not on secrets but on mathematics and incentives that hold in full view. The hardware and software we build around it deserve the same standard, because the alternative is no longer on the table. The choice was never open or closed. It was disciplined or exposed.

The broader lesson of this Coldcard situation is that having closed source software is like having a seed generated by a broken Coldcard; it looks good but it’s fundamentally built on sand. Everyone can read the code — the only question left is whether you acknowledge that fact, or you and your users learn it the way Coldcard’s users did, one drained address at a time.

This is a guest post by Colin Crossman, who is a content producer at Fedi. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

This post The End of the Closed-Source Era Is at Hand: Obscurity Was Never Security first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Colin Crossman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Breez Drops New Bitcoin App Which Doubles As Wallet and Developer Toolkit

Bitcoin software provider Breez has released a new app it says will serve both everyday users and developers. 

The product, dubbed Glow, is supposed to be an easy way to make Lightning transactions easier for everyday users, while also doubling as an open-source blueprint — a way to see exactly how easy it is to implement Bitcoin features using the SDK’s API — for builders. 

Breez claims the app will help developers exploring Bitcoin see what’s possible by packaging in the features that are essential for any Bitcoin app to compete in its category.

Being open-source, developers can open up Glow’s codebase and see exactly how each of those features — such as passkey login, Lightning addresses or stablecoin transfers — work and use them for their own app, rather than building it from scratch. 

For example, a developer building a social app doesn’t need to figure out how Lightning address or contacts should work — they can look at Glow’s code, see the API calls it makes, and replicate that in their own product with minimal effort. 

Developers can fork Glow, rebrand it, and ship it as their own, according to Breez. 

Because developers building on the SDK never take custody of user funds, Breez notes the regulatory footprint stays minimal — letting teams focus on product rather than compliance overhead.

The Glow app release comes after Breez announced it was working with Turnkey last month, a deal letting developers add non-custodial Bitcoin to apps running wallets from their own servers — solving a custody problem that has kept many of the largest consumer platforms from integrating Bitcoin at all.

According to the companies, keys now stay out of reach of the app’s servers, Breez, and Turnkey. The company’s backend holds a credential that defines what actions it can take, while authority to move funds rests with the user.

The deal positions some of the world’s largest consumer apps to add non-custodial Bitcoin without rebuilding their backend architecture or taking custody of user funds.

This post Breez Drops New Bitcoin App Which Doubles As Wallet and Developer Toolkit first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin ETF Inflows Surge Following $130M Coldcard Hack 

Investors are throwing cash at spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds following the massive Coldcard hack. 

Major U.S. funds managed by BlackRock, Fidelity, Grayscale, Morgan Stanley and others have received a total of $626 million in fresh cash following news of the hack on Friday, according to data from Farside Investors. 

Hackers last week started millions in Bitcoin from Coldcard wallets after discovering a vulnerability in the product’s software. Some estimates put the amount of Bitcoin lost now at over $130 million. 

Writing on X Thursday, Bloomberg Intelligence’s senior ETF analyst, Eric Balchunas, said the flows might not be related to the hack, but investors would be making a good move to allow fund managers to look after their Bitcoin. 

“Who are you gonna trust to not screw up the security of your Bitcoin (or get it back if some scumbag does mess with it): a 5-man boutique in Canada or this guy and his 25,000-employee, $15T by-the-book empire?” wrote Balchunas, posting a picture of BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s face, and criticizing Coldcard’s parent company Coinkite’s small team. 

He added: “TradFi doesn’t seem so lame now after all does it?”

BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) has received most of the new investment from the ETF investors. 

The Wall Street titan’s ETF was approved by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 2024 and had the most successful launch in the history of ETFs. 

Investors previously put off from buying Bitcoin due to the complexities of cold storage and private keys can now buy shares that trade on stock exchanges that track the price of Bitcoin. 

The ETFs — managed by other top Wall Street fund managers — currently manage a total of $77.8 billion in assets, according to Coinglass data. 

A firmware flaw in the popular Coldcard hardware wallets — tracing back to a 2021 build issue that skipped the device’s dedicated randomness chip — let an attacker guess weak private keys.

Millions of dollars in Bitcoin has been drained on a daily basis since the attack, and cautious investors have been moving their coins to other storage solutions — including exchanges.

This post Bitcoin ETF Inflows Surge Following $130M Coldcard Hack  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Hyperscale Data expects revenue to reach as much as $350 million in 2027, although the AI expansion consuming its Bitcoin holdings may contribute less than one-sixth of the total.

In a statement this week, the company said that this projected revenue would triple the roughly $102 million generated in 2025. Its Adjusted EBITDA is projected at $60 million to $80 million for the year.

Instead, the firm added that most of its revenue for the impending year would come from lending, digital assets and portfolio companies.

Executive Chairman Milton “Todd” Ault III said the forecast reflects the combined contribution of Hyperscale’s three operating platforms. He said:

“We have spent years assembling operating businesses, financial capabilities, technology platforms and strategic assets that we believe can produce substantial revenue and operating cash flow. Our preliminary guidance of $300 million to $350 million in revenue and $60 million to $80 million in Adjusted EBITDA reflects management’s current expectations regarding the combined earnings power of these three operating platforms.”

Bitcoin bankrolls Hyperscale’s revenue engine

A breakdown of the forecast shows that Hyperscale’s heavily promoted AI transformation will remain the smallest of its three revenue platforms in 2027.

Management expects the Michigan data center, AI infrastructure and robotics businesses to generate $40 million to $50 million next year. That would represent about 11% to 17% of the company’s projected $300 million to $350 million revenue.

Despite that limited near-term contribution, Hyperscale is directing much of its recent Bitcoin capital toward the AI business.

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The company sold 150.5 BTC for approximately $9.6 million during the week ended Aug. 2, reducing its holdings to 958.5352 BTC worth about $60.8 million. It also borrowed roughly $30 million against part of the treasury through Morpho at a variable interest rate of approximately 4.9%.

During the firm's earnings call, Ault said Hyperscale sold the Bitcoin because “the data center is so important.”

Chief Financial Officer Ken Cragun described the Morpho facility as a relatively inexpensive source of financial flexibility, while management said Bitcoin produced by the company’s remaining mining operations could be deposited into the protocol to support the loan.

The capital is helping convert Hyperscale’s Michigan Bitcoin-mining site into an AI data center. Management estimates that developing the first 20 megawatts of critical capacity will require between $100 million and $120 million.

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The first 10 megawatts are expected to begin operating before the end of 2026, followed by another 10 megawatts in the first quarter of 2027. Because the capacity will come online in stages, it will not contribute revenue for this entire year.

Chief Executive William Horne therefore described 2027 as a “transition year.” Hyperscale expects data center revenue to rise to between $110 million and $120 million in 2028 as another 32 megawatts of capacity become operational.

Meanwhile, the longer-term economics are considerably larger than the initial 2027 contribution.

Hyperscale’s agreement with a California-based neocloud provider covers 20 megawatts for an initial 10-year term and includes two five-year extension options. The contract could generate more than $1.2 billion if the customer remains for the full 20 years.

Horne said the agreement would produce average annual revenue of approximately $50 million, including contractual price increases, against an initial investment equal to about 10% of its potential value.

The customer also has the option to expand from 20 megawatts to 52 megawatts. Exercising that capacity and remaining for the maximum term could lift the total contract value above $3 billion.

Hyperscale is therefore exchanging near-term Bitcoin liquidity for a longer-duration AI payoff.

Lending and portfolio companies carry the 2027 forecast

While AI represents Hyperscale’s longer-term growth bet, lending, digital assets and established portfolio businesses are expected to generate most of its revenue in 2027.

Management projects $100 million to $150 million from lending, financial services and digital assets. Portfolio companies are expected to contribute another $150 million to $200 million, making the businesses operated through Ault Capital Group the principal drivers of Hyperscale’s $350 million target.

Ault Lending generates revenue by originating private-credit and structured-finance transactions. It can also bring participation partners into larger deals, allowing the company to collect fees and interest without supplying all the required capital itself.

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The transactions may include convertible notes, warrants and other protections that provide additional upside beyond ordinary interest income.

Ault said the operation requires relatively few employees and can produce margins approaching 85% before capital and staffing costs. Cragun also noted that a growing pipeline and the addition of more participation partners should make revenue larger and more consistent, although the results can still vary significantly between periods.

Meanwhile, Hyperscale’s digital-asset strategy extends beyond its Bitcoin treasury.

The firm's projected revenue includes those from initiatives at Ault Markets, blockchain infrastructure, trading and liquidity services, tokenized lending, and other real-world asset initiatives.

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Management said the blockchain operation had already generated millions of dollars in revenue and approximately $3.5 million of margin during the first half of 2026.

The company expects that contribution to expand through tokenization, trading activity and partnerships with financial-technology companies. Ault said:

“If you want to compare Ault Markets and what we're doing internationally, I would compare it to Hyperliquid, sort of a Hyperliquid lighter model, but also the tokenization of real-world assets. This is going to be a huge driver for us with our relationship with Universal DeFi. “

Lastly, its portfolio companies provide a more predictable foundation beneath those higher-margin but more volatile financial businesses.

The holdings span crane and equipment rental, defense electronics, hotels and power electronics. Ault said the crane operation generates just under $50 million of annual revenue and between $10 million and $12 million of EBITDA without requiring further capital from Hyperscale.

The defense-electronics business generates roughly $40 million in annual revenue. Management has also replaced executives, restructured debt and reduced costs at several other holdings as it shifts its focus from acquiring companies to improving cash flow from the assets it already owns.

Cragun described the portfolio as a stable revenue base that can offset fluctuations in Bitcoin, lending and investment returns.

Ultimately, those businesses explain how Hyperscale can target as much as $350 million in 2027 revenue while AI contributes less than 17% of the total.

The post Hyperscale sells Bitcoin for AI business set to deliver less than 20% of 2027 revenue appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Binance-affiliated entities filed a Hong Kong petition against RedotPay's founders, alleging the payment startup used its partnership with Binance to divert more than 470,000 Binance Card customers into its own competing stablecoin card.

As Bloomberg News reported, Binance claims $472.8 million in losses, built on an estimated $925 lifetime value per customer, and says RedotPay received roughly $304 million in user funds routed through Binance Pay.

RedotPay denies the allegations and says the case will not affect its daily operations.

RedotPay says it now serves more than 8 million users and processes roughly $14 billion in annualized payment volume, a scale that reportedly has the company considering an IPO at a valuation above $4 billion.

Binance alleges that scale came partly from customers RedotPay was never supposed to have.
The value of a stablecoin product lies in whatever app the customer opens every day to spend, top up, or check a balance.

That app captures conversion fees, card-spending revenue, merchant data, and the chance to sell the customer something else later.

Binance claims that RedotPay used a funding rail meant for one purpose to build a direct relationship with those same customers.

Every stablecoin partnership carries the same tension

Coinbase shows the same structure playing out without a lawsuit attached. Circle pays Coinbase for USDC distribution and shares reserve economics based on how much USDC sits within Coinbase's products, according to Circle's own public filings.

Coinbase remains USDC's largest distribution partner and also backs Open USD, a rival stablecoin model built with Visa, Mastercard and more than 140 other companies. The model splits reserve income among the businesses driving adoption.

Circle needs Coinbase to reach users, and Coinbase gains negotiating power by making stablecoins compete for space inside its own app.

Visa and Stripe show the same dynamic without any conflicts yet. Visa's cards give Stripe-owned Bridge the merchant reach it needs to let apps like Phantom and MetaMask spend stablecoin balances, while Bridge gives Visa a route into wallet-native crypto spending.

Both companies continue to expand beyond that arrangement.

Stripe now offers stablecoin wallets, card issuing, and its own token infrastructure through Bridge and Privy.

Visa introduced its own platform for minting, moving, and settling stablecoins in July. Visa says it already backs more than 130 stablecoin-linked card programs across more than 50 countries and expects that number to roughly double this year.

Bridge-enabled Visa cards are already live in 18 countries, with plans to reach more than 100 by year-end.

Mastercard agreed to acquire stablecoin infrastructure firm BVNK for up to $1.8 billion, buying the plumbing that determines how stablecoin payments are issued, converted, and settled.

Mastercard's own crypto partner program includes Binance, Coinbase-linked wallet providers, Circle, PayPal, MetaMask and dozens of other firms, many of which compete directly with each other.

Owning BVNK gives Mastercard a stake in the infrastructure sitting underneath all of them.

A similar fight is opening between stablecoin issuers and the platforms that distribute their tokens. Open USD is built to solve this on the issuer's side by splitting nearly all of its reserve income with the businesses that drive adoption.

That model squeezes any issuer whose distributors currently take a smaller cut. The conflict usually shows up in quieter ways: a wallet making one stablecoin the default, an exchange waiving fees for a preferred token, or a card rewarding whichever stablecoin its partner favors.

Phantom and MetaMask can now connect a stablecoin balance directly to a Visa card via infrastructure like Bridge, allowing users to spend without routing funds back through a centralized exchange.

The exchange may still supply stablecoins or liquidity behind the scenes, but the wallet captures the balance, spending data, rewards, and daily engagement that previously belonged to the exchange.

How the fight over the customer plays out

The stakes are concrete for the people using these products. A top-up route that worked yesterday can stop working if a partnership ends, and rewards can tilt toward whichever stablecoin a company wants to promote.

Cards can be migrated to a new issuer with little warning, and support can fragment across a wallet, a card issuer, and an exchange, each blaming the others when something breaks.

The tokens themselves stay transferable on-chain, but the experience of using them depends on private commercial deals between companies that compete with each other as often as they cooperate.

The bull case is that this competition makes the products better for their users. Apps are starting to disclose which partner operates the wallet, card, or settlement layer beneath their brand.

Balances become portable across providers, funding routes multiply, and companies compete on price and reliability to keep customers.

The bear case is that customer capture becomes the business model. Companies keep using partner rails to acquire users, then quietly build their own card, wallet, or stablecoin to keep them.

Funding routes disappear with little notice, rewards get restructured to box users into a single provider, and disputes like Binance's against RedotPay become a routine cost of doing business.

Stablecoins made the dollar portable across borders, and now stablecoin cards are making the customer just as portable between companies.

The post How a crypto startup quietly siphoned 470,000 Binance users to build a $4 billion card empire appeared first on CryptoSlate.

BNY's Digital Asset Custody platform plans to provide institutional crypto staking support through Galaxy's infrastructure, the two firms said Aug. 4.

BNY touches roughly 20% of the world's investable assets, with $62.6 trillion in assets under custody and administration as of June 30.

Galaxy is one of three validator firms approved to stake Ethereum for BlackRock's iShares Staked Ethereum Trust (ETHB). The prospectus says the fund can stake 70% to 95% of its holdings under normal conditions.

Two of Wall Street's largest names now route institutional crypto staking through the same infrastructure provider. Galaxy also runs staking for Solana and other proof-of-stake networks, extending that overlap across multiple chains.

How institutional crypto staking separates ownership from control

ETHB owns the ETH and collects the crypto staking rewards, and its custodian holds the private keys and controls withdrawals.

Galaxy and the other approved validators hold the validator keys and perform the validation work, but the prospectus is explicit that they never gain the keys needed to move the trust's staked ETH themselves.

That structure is safer than handing tokens to a validator, but the shareholder who owns the economic exposure still has no say in how the validator behaves once it is running.

The investor supplies the economic stake and collects the yield, while the product sponsor, an ETF issuer or a bank, decides staking allocation and disclosure, and the custodian holds keys and controls withdrawal authority.

The crypto staking provider runs the validator itself, and its choices of cloud infrastructure, client software, and compliance policy also become the network's exposure.

Validators receive no token-weighted votes on Ethereum improvement proposals, but their power still lies in block production, transaction inclusion, and finality.

Ethereum's documentation says that validators controlling more than 33% of staked ETH can prevent the chain from finalizing blocks if they go offline or attest incorrectly. A share above 66% can finalize a preferred version of the chain outright.

Exchanges, bridges, and DeFi protocols all lean on finality to decide when a transaction is safe to treat as settled.

Solana labels the smallest group that can control roughly 33% of delegated stake a superminority. Nakaflow reporting put the Nakamoto coefficient at 10 as of Aug. 5, the minimum number of validators needed to reach that share.

A coordinated failure within such a small group can stop the network from voting on new blocks in real time.

The Invesco Galaxy Solana ETF filing lists Coinbase Custody as the crypto staking provider and node operator for the fund's SOL, with BNY Mellon acting as administrator.

Why total supply is the wrong number to watch

The important number is the share of active stake a provider controls, a very different figure from its share of total token supply.

About 33% of ETH's total supply is currently staked, meaning that routing roughly 11% of all ETH through a single provider would already put that provider near the one-third threshold for currently staked ETH.

Solana's staking ratio is much higher, at around 68% of supply, so reaching that same one-third share of active stake there would require about 22.7% of total SOL supply.

Figment's report for the second quarter puts its Ethereum validators at 6.26% of all staked ETH and its Solana validators at 6.96% of all staked SOL. Both numbers show how much active stake a single mid-size institutional operator can already carry.

The custodian controls the withdrawal route and private keys, so its failure or compromise can freeze customer funds even when the validator behaves correctly.

ETHB's prospectus warns that slashing, inactivity penalties, and correlated penalties across many validators can cause losses that the trust may never recover from, particularly if those validators share one staking provider.

Many institutional validators may end up using the same client software, cloud region, or key management vendor. When that happens, a single bug or outage can spread across every validator that shares the same setup.

The prospectus cites Ethereum's May 2023 finality disruption as an example of how quickly that can happen.

A single staking provider running validators for several banks and funds can apply one sanctions or transaction-filtering policy across all of them, producing a coordinated inclusion policy without anyone formally colluding to create one.

How dangerous institutional crypto staking can be

BNY's institutional crypto staking service still needs regulatory approval before it exists, while Galaxy is only one of three approved validators inside ETHB. Institutional staking can also improve operational discipline compared with token holders running validators on their own hardware.

The more dangerous version needs no bad actor at all, just ordinary institutional habits. Banks favor approved vendors, funds minimize operational risk by choosing the same infrastructure, and custody products simplify customer choice until validator selection and voting rights quietly disappear.

Ethereum's own community is already arguing about a version of this problem. EIP-8361 would burn a larger share of validator rewards as the staking ratio rises, aiming to reduce the incentive to keep piling ETH into staking.

Its authors cite custodial concentration as one of their reasons for proposing it.

A 2025 paper on Ethereum's staking market found that solo stakers respond to changes in rewards more than centralized exchanges or liquid-staking providers do.

Cutting issuance could push smaller, independent validators out first, leaving the remaining stake even more concentrated among the institutions the proposal is trying to rein in.

How this could still go either way

The bull case has disclosure catching up before concentration does. Products start publishing which validators hold their customers' stakes, cap how much of a single provider's book comes from any one client, and diversify the clients, clouds, and compliance policies underlying them.

Wall Street adds real stake to Ethereum and Solana without creating a single operational chokepoint, and staking products get safer as a result.

The bear case has yield-chasing outrunning disclosure. Staking becomes a default checkbox inside custody accounts and ETFs, and investors never see which validator holds their stake.

A handful of approved providers end up running a large share of active validators across several major networks at once. Product brands keep multiplying while the operators underneath them keep consolidating.

Investors who assumed five institutional brands meant five independent risks discover they were exposed to the same two or three operators the entire time.

The next fight blockchains will have to endure will be over who operates the stake behind them.

The post BNY and BlackRock funnel billions through one infrastructure provider, exposing the fragile illusion of crypto diversification appeared first on CryptoSlate.

sFOX says execution through crypto dark pools rose from negligible volume in April to 15% of monthly volume by June. Separately, the firm's July 30 report puts OTC-desk routing at 77.7% of institutional volume moving through the platform, versus 18.4% landing on public exchanges. May's dark-pool volume alone came to $147 million.

Diana Pires of sFOX told CryptoSlate that the change is structural, comparing it with the repositioning that equities and foreign exchange markets went through years ago.

Why institutions use crypto dark pools

Large trades leave a trail when they sit on one public order book. Other traders can read the pattern, front-run the execution, or push the price against it before the order fills.

Pires pointed to firms like Jane Street and Citadel as examples of participants motivated to remain unreadable. Once a pattern becomes recognizable, the market starts trading against it.

That is why crypto trading volume started routing through crypto dark pools, OTC desks and platforms that spread a single order across over a dozen venues at once.

sFOX alone connects to more than 40 exchanges and OTC desks, and its institutional clients route through 14 to 19 of them in a typical month.

OTC desks handle large orders themselves and break them into smaller pieces before routing them onward, so a single trade does not swing the market.

Pires described this as the entire premise of crypto dark pools: the desk absorbs size privately, then lets it reach exchanges in pieces so small that the book barely moves. She expects this to contribute to deeper order books and tighter spreads once flow lands on public venues.

A public order book that once reflected most of the market's real activity now shows a smaller slice of it. A quiet exchange does not mean institutions are inactive. A large buyer can accumulate for weeks without ever posting a visible bid, and a large seller can unwind a position without a sell wall ever appearing.

The whale-watching edge is going away on purpose

Bitcoin and crypto traders once had an edge over other markets, with full visibility into exchange deposits, order walls, and oversized on-chain positions that anyone could closely monitor.

Pires noted that dark pools remove that edge by design. Platforms, OTC desks, and brokers can see the underlying flow, which is protected by regulation and client agreements, but retail investors are not meant to see whether an institution is buying or selling.

The easy price gaps are closing too. Buying on one exchange and selling at a higher price on another once worked because information moved slower than money. Pires said that gap gets thinner every year as prime brokers and aggregators scan dozens of venues at once and route around it before retail ever sees the difference.

She expects crypto trading to end up looking like equities, where individual investors do not access exchanges directly but route through a broker that shops around for prices across venues on their behalf.

Retail accounts rarely reach the volume needed to qualify for an exchange's lowest fee tier, whereas a broker aggregating institutional-sized flow already does. Pires expects that gap to pull ordinary traders toward brokers, without regulation forcing the move the way it does in equities.

Which side of the trade wins

The bull case has aggregators and prime venues routing retail orders the way they already route institutional ones. Spreads tighten, slippage drops, and fewer single whale orders blow through a thin book.

The trading edge that leaves public exchanges moves elsewhere. On-chain and DeFi venues keep large positions visible, so traders chasing volatility still have somewhere to go, while the regulated, compliant side of the market grows calmer.

The bear case for crypto dark pools is that visibility disappears faster than the promised execution gains show up for ordinary account sizes. Retail and the “dolphin tier investors” lose their read on institutional direction.

Tighter spreads and better routing stay concentrated in accounts large enough to reach prime brokers and aggregators. Public exchanges keep thinning out as a signal, and the traders who relied on watching them will be the first to notice.

A few habits adjust to that reality either way: treating a single exchange's volume as a partial signal of the broader market, comparing total execution cost across venues before trusting a single exchange's posted fee, and leaning on limit orders when a book looks thin enough that a market order could move it.

A quiet order book can still hide real institutional activity.

The crypto market is maturing into something better to trade and harder to read. Retail gets fewer whale-driven shocks, but it also loses most of the whales worth watching.

The post How institutional dark pools quietly ate 15% of crypto volume and killed the retail whale-watching edge appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bitdeer secured a $4.7 billion AI lease but must complete a $500 million build before the contract starts generating revenue.

On Aug. 4, the Bitcoin miner announced that its Tydal Data Center subsidiary signed a 16-year agreement to provide Volta with 121 megawatts of computing capacity at its Norway campus.

Volta will install Nvidia chips across four data halls, while Dell Technologies will provide the computing systems. Bitdeer described the end customer as a leading AI laboratory, although media reports have identified it as Anthropic.

The agreement marks a major step in Bitdeer’s expansion beyond Bitcoin mining and into AI infrastructure, where long-term leases can offer steadier revenue than crypto production.

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Under the deal, Bitdeer expects average annual revenue of about $2.4 million for each megawatt delivered. That works out to approximately $290 million a year across the full project, with payments increasing 3% annually.

The $4.7 billion headline represents payments scheduled over the full 16-year term rather than revenue Bitdeer can immediately recognize. Volta can also end the agreement without paying a fee after 10 years.

An eight-year extension could increase the total contract value to approximately $8 billion.

Bitdeer targets first delivery by Dec. 31

Bitdeer plans to open the facility in two equal phases. The first half is scheduled to begin operating on Dec. 31, 2026, while the remaining capacity is targeted for March 31, 2027.

Reaching those deadlines will require approximately $500 million of additional spending, or about $4 million for each megawatt of computing capacity.

Bitdeer said it intends to raise new debt to support construction at Tydal and its broader AI expansion. The company has hired financial institutions to lead the financing and expects the eventual loan to provide more capital than the Norway project requires.

However, Bitdeer did not say the financing had closed or disclose how much debt it plans to raise.

The company will retain full ownership of the Tydal campus and did not issue shares or warrants as part of the Volta agreement. This allows Bitdeer to pursue the project without immediately diluting existing shareholders.

Meanwhile, Volta’s payment obligations are also expected to be supported by approximately $1.3 billion of letters of credit arranged by JPMorgan affiliates and another major financial institution.

Related Reading

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Jun 17, 2026 · Gino Matos

Those guarantees remain subject to customary conditions. Bitdeer can terminate the agreement if Volta fails to meet milestones connected to the credit support.

Ultimately, the new AI lease gives Bitdeer a potential multibillion-dollar revenue stream outside Bitcoin mining. Its immediate test is whether it can complete the financing and deliver the first half of the project by Dec. 31.

The post Bitdeer lands $4.7 billion AI lease tied to Anthropic but must deliver by year end appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Nikita Bier announced on Wednesday that he is stepping down as X's head of product. After a little more than a year, in his own words: "time to pass the torch and demote myself to my natural state: a poster." He stays on as an adviser.

Crypto circles have been treating his exit as a turning point since yesterday. That overstates it — Bier was not the crypto lead at X. The timing is interesting all the same, for one concrete reason: he leaves a few weeks after X launched its payments product, and the question of whether cryptocurrencies will ever arrive there remains unanswered.

What Bier actually built at X

Bier took over product in July 2025. Across roughly 400 days, around 30 new products shipped under his responsibility, and practically every major part of the platform was reworked: the timeline feed, the Android app, new-user onboarding, the notification system, chat and direct messages. TechCrunch has the detail.

His responsibilities are being split rather than refilled: design, core product engineering and mobile engineering go to three different leads. For a company standing up a financial service, that is a notable choice — payment products tend to depend on one hand holding the whole thing together.

The crypto connection: two points, both documented

The first is Smart Cashtags, announced in January 2026. Cashtags have been X's shorthand for tickers for years — a dollar sign in front of a symbol. The smart version was meant to turn that into a financial toolkit. That feature is still described in reporting as the most likely entry point through which cryptocurrencies could reach the platform.

The second point is less flattering. Also in January, X changed its algorithm, and the consequences hit the platform's crypto corners harder than most: shifted reach, a noticeable rise in automated accounts, and a discussion culture that got worse for many users. Anyone following on-chain debate in real time follows it mostly on X — so the complaints were loud.

X Money is running — without crypto

At the end of July, X rolled out its payments product in the US, initially by invitation for Premium and Premium+ subscribers. Two years of groundwork sit behind it, including money transmitter licences across most US jurisdictions. What it does:

The figures and terms are documented at crypto.news. Six percent on balances is an aggressive offer, and it shows what this is about first: gathering deposits, not selling bitcoin.

That is the real finding of the week. Elon Musk has talked about crypto for years and says he holds bitcoin, ether and dogecoin — and the payments product of his own platform launches with Visa and interest. Not with a wallet.

Why that makes sense

A payments product needs licences, and licences come more easily without crypto. In the US, X acquired money transmitter licences state by state. Any crypto capability would have extended that process and brought additional supervisors into it. Launching without them is not a rejection; it is the order every payment provider chooses.

The US Senate wrote to Musk in April about the planned launch and asked questions about oversight — a preview of how closely this will be watched once digital assets are added.

For European users it is further away still

X Money exists only in the US so far. An EU launch would require an e-money licence and, once cryptocurrencies were involved, a MiCA authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider on top. Neither is known to have been applied for.

For a sense of how long that takes: Coinbase received its MiCA licence via Luxembourg in June 2026, after a process that ran for months. The last MiCA transition period expired on 1 July 2026 — since then that authorisation decides who may offer crypto services in Europe at all. Binance withdrew its application in June and is winding down its EU business accordingly.

So anyone waiting to buy bitcoin through X in Europe is waiting on two approvals, neither of which is in progress. Realistically, that is not a 2026 story.

What to take away

A product chief leaving is not, by itself, news that moves a portfolio. What it makes visible is:

• The platform where the crypto debate happens is building a bank — without crypto. That is a more realistic signal about the coming months than any announcement.
• Smart Cashtags remain the thing to watch. If cryptocurrencies come to X, they will likely come there, and likely no earlier than late 2026.
• A feed is not a broker. Buying crypto requires an authorised platform — and those exist today, with names and supervisors.

The concrete step, if you were considering it anyway: check whether your exchange is still permitted to operate under regulation in Europe after 1 July. Since this summer that is no longer a formality but the dividing line between providers who stay and providers who leave. The overview is in our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges. If you buy regularly rather than speculate, the terms are in our guide to buying bitcoin.

And the lesson that outlasts this personnel change: reach does not replace a licence. X built the two separately — first the users, then, slowly and laboriously, the permission. That the crypto capability sits at the end of that sequence rather than the start says more about the maturity of this industry than any announcement on the platform itself.

(As of 6 August 2026. This article is not investment advice. Details of X Money products and terms refer to the US market at the time of publication.)

Transparency note: This article was produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence and reviewed by our editorial team before publication. All figures and claims were checked against the primary sources linked in the text. The feature image was generated with AI.

The crypto market is barely moving today. Bitcoin trades at $64,387.44, up 0.13% over 24 hours, and most of the top ten is drifting within a percent of flat. Look at the year to date column, though, and the calm on the surface starts to look like exhaustion rather than stability.

Crypto Price Today: Where do the majors stand right now?

Ethereum is the strongest of the large caps today with a 1.73% gain to $1,906. It is also the worst performer of the majors on the year, down 35.76%.

Which coins are actually working this year?

Three names, and only three. Hyperliquid is up 126.58% year to date at $55.13, the single best performer on the board by a wide margin, despite giving back 3.39% today. TRON is up 15.26%, and UNUS SED LEO is up 1.90%.

That is the entire list of winners. Everything else in the top ten by market cap is down between 26% and 46% since January.

The HYPE story is the one worth understanding, because it is not a meme rotation. Institutional attention has shifted toward projects where token economics are transparent and where value visibly accrues back to the token rather than to an off-chain entity. Hyperliquid has been repeatedly cited as the clearest example of that model working. When capital is scarce and risk appetite is thin, it concentrates in the few assets that can answer the question of where the revenue goes.

Why is the damage so uneven?

The spread between Bitcoin at -26% and Dogecoin at -46% is not random. It maps almost exactly to how much of each asset's price depends on narrative versus flow.

Bitcoin has an institutional bid underneath it. US spot ETFs have been buying through the first week of August, with several hundred million dollars of net inflows across consecutive sessions and BlackRock's IBIT taking the overwhelming majority. That is a structural buyer who shows up regardless of sentiment.

XRP at -43.22%, Solana at -41.21% and Dogecoin at -45.96% have no equivalent. They depend on retail risk appetite, and retail has largely left. The capital that would have chased them in a normal cycle went to AI equities instead, a rotation that has been running all year.

What about Zcash Price?

Zcash is the oddity on the board. It is down just 3.82% year to date, by far the best relative performance among the older assets, and it added 3.79% over the past week even after shedding 4.95% today. At $492.92 it has held value while almost every peer from its era has been cut in half.

Privacy assets have quietly outperformed through this drawdown. It is a small sector and moves are exaggerated by thin liquidity, so treat the daily swings accordingly.

Crypto Future Price: What should traders watch next?

Bitcoin's behavior around $64,000 is the reference point for everything else. It has slipped 0.81% over the week while ETF money was flowing in, which means spot demand is currently absorbing supply rather than driving price higher. That is a holding pattern, not a breakout.

If Bitcoin loses the low $63,000s, the altcoins with no institutional bid will take the larger percentage hit, as they have all year. If it clears $65,000 on continued inflows, the assets most likely to follow are the ones already showing relative strength on the week: BNB, Zcash and Hyperliquid.

Until then, this is a market where the yearly numbers matter far more than the daily ones.

Since 1 July 2026, any platform serving customers in the EU needs a granted MiCA authorisation. An application in progress no longer counts. Anyone who wants to know which firms actually cleared that bar does not have to take a press release on trust: the European Securities and Markets Authority publishes the register of authorised providers as an open file, no login required.

We downloaded that file and worked through all of it. The register is dated 4 August 2026 and was pulled on 6 August. What comes out of it matches the industry's self-description only in part. The most striking finding sits further down and reads: of 329 authorisations, exactly 21 permit the operation of a trading platform.

What the register actually says

At the cut-off date the register holds 329 authorisations, spread across 322 legal entities with their own LEI code and 26 states of the European Economic Area. The gap between the two figures comes down to companies appearing more than once, typically where an authorisation was later extended.

The raw data is available as a CSV. Anyone who wants to redo the arithmetic will find it here: CASPS.csv in the ESMA register. The folder in the path reads 2024-12, but the contents are kept current. The authority's own MiCA overview page is here.

Germany accounts for one authorisation in five

The geographic spread is far more lopsided than the public debate about Malta and Cyprus would suggest. With 72 authorisations Germany leads the field, more than twice as many as second-placed France with 35. The Netherlands follow with 29, Cyprus with 27 and Malta with 22.

Why Germany leads

Together those five countries account for 185 of the 329 authorisations, or 56 per cent. The remaining 21 states share what is left. The German lead has a cause that has little to do with crypto, though: a large share of the domestic authorisations sits with banks, savings-bank networks and investment firms that offer crypto trading as an add-on to an existing business. Of the 72 German authorisations only two permit the operation of a trading platform, and 56 apply to the German market alone.

Germany does not lead because an unusual number of trading venues sprang up here. It leads because the established financial sector filed as a bloc.

The finding that matters most: authorised rarely means exchange

MiCA defines ten separate services, each authorised individually. An authorisation is therefore not a blanket seal but a list of permitted activities. We counted how often each of those ten activities appears in the register.

Custody of crypto-assets is the most common at 221 mentions, followed by transfer services at 206 and exchange for euros or other currencies at 184. At the bottom sits the service most people have in mind when they say "crypto exchange": operating a trading platform appears 21 times. That is 6.4 per cent of all authorisations.

What the difference means in practice

A trading platform under the regulation brings together the orders of different clients in an order book. You trade against other users; the operator only provides the venue. The far more common service, "exchange of crypto-assets for funds", works differently: there the provider is your counterparty. It quotes you a price and you take it or leave it.

Both are legal, both are regulated, and for many retail investors the broker model is in fact more convenient. The pricing simply works differently. In the register 170 providers may exchange against funds without running a trading platform. With them the margin sits in the spread, the gap between the buying and the selling quote, and that is rarely disclosed as clearly as a percentage fee.

Confusing the two models means comparing costs that are not comparable. That is precisely why our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges lists the legal entity and the actual trading costs separately for every provider.

Only half of them use the EU passport

MiCA's central promise is the European passport: an authorisation from one member state is valid across the single market. A provider authorised in Ireland may operate in Spain, Poland and Finland without a further procedure. In practice this is used far less often than expected.

The distribution splits into two camps with almost nothing in between. 125 authorisations cover exactly one country. 150 cover 25 countries or more, most of them 29 or 30. The middle is missing: only 49 providers sit somewhere between two and 24 countries.

Two very different business models sit behind that. One group are regional institutions, often banks, serving an existing client base with no interest in going abroad. The other are platforms that think in European terms from the outset and treat the passport as the actual reason for applying. For consumers this matters, because a provider holding a single national authorisation may not serve you if you live elsewhere.

The June peak and what followed

Plot the authorisations by month and a pattern emerges that supervisors know from other regulatory projects.

For a year and a half monthly authorisations moved in the low double digits. December 2025 brought a first spike to 44. Then, in June 2026, the last month before the deadline, 76 authorisations were granted, more than in the preceding five months combined. July brought 31, August three up to the register date.

The effect has an uncomfortable side. Firms that made it through in June often filed late. Supervisors had little time, and the review period of up to four months that MiCA allows for a complete file is likely to have been used to the limit in many cases.

For others the deadline became the exit. In July 2026 AscendEX, BitMEX and BitMart announced they would give up their EU business or close entirely. At BitMart trading ends on 26 August 2026 and the platform shuts on 31 January 2027. AscendEX ceased operations on 1 July, with withdrawals available only on a limited basis. Anyone still holding balances there should arrange to move them rather than wait for an extension.

The brand is not the legal entity

The most useful point in the register is also the easiest to miss. MiCA protection does not attach to a brand. It attaches to the specific legal person that received the authorisation, and that entity is almost never named after the app on your phone.

Kraken appears in the register as Payward Global Solutions Limited and Payward Europe Solutions Limited, both in Ireland. Crypto.com is listed as Foris DAX MT Limited in Malta. Behind Coinbase sits Coinbase Luxembourg S.A., behind the European Bybit entity Bybit EU GmbH in Austria. Bitpanda holds three authorisations: in Austria, in Germany and through BP23 CA Limited in Malta.

The one-minute check

Look in the terms and conditions or the legal notice to see which company you are actually contracting with. That is the name to search for in the register, not the brand. If the contracting party is based outside the EEA, MiCA protection does not apply, even where a sister company holds an EU authorisation.

What we noticed while working through the data

A word on data quality, because it explains why figures circulating about this register diverge. The field listing the authorised services is not filled in consistently. Most supervisors prefix the service letter, as in b. operation of a trading platform. In 20 of the 329 entries that letter is missing altogether, mostly in Cypriot and Estonian authorisations. Search for the letter alone and those entries drop out of the count, among them one trading platform.

At one German institution the letters are shifted by a position, so the text and the label no longer agree. One provider is entered twice with an identical record, and two French companies share the same LEI code. We therefore identified the services from the descriptive text and cross-checked the result against the letter-based method. The analysis script is on file with the newsroom.

None of this is a charge against ESMA, which consolidates what national authorities report. It is a reminder that any number drawn from this register should travel with the method that produced it.

Why we curate at all

A register answers the question of who may operate legally. It does not answer where it makes sense to trade. A Latvian payment provider with a single national authorisation and a pan-European trading venue are worlds apart, yet both sit in the same register and both may legitimately advertise as "MiCA licensed".

That is why we think a curated selection earns its place. Our comparison of MiCA-regulated crypto exchanges states for each provider the legal entity and the date of authorisation, each checked against the register. For a broader view there is the general exchange comparison; and anyone holding for the long run is independent of any platform's licence with a hardware wallet anyway.

What to take away

1. Check the legal entity, not the brand. Find out from the terms which company you are contracting with, then search that name in the ESMA register. It takes a minute and it is the only evidence that holds.
2. Establish whether you trade on a venue or against the provider. Only 21 authorisations cover the operation of a trading platform. Under the more common broker model the cost sits in the spread rather than in a stated fee. Our comparison of regulated exchanges reports both separately.
3. Move balances off platforms leaving the EU market. AscendEX, BitMEX and BitMart have announced their withdrawal. At BitMart trading ends on 26 August 2026. Waiting means negotiating later under time pressure.

Disclosure: some of the providers named in our comparison work with us through partner programmes. This has no bearing on the analysis of the ESMA register — every figure in this article comes from the official file and can be reproduced from it. Whether a provider is a partner changes nothing about its licence status.

This article is not investment advice and not a recommendation to buy or sell crypto-assets. Crypto-assets are highly volatile and a total loss is possible. Analysis as of 6 August 2026; ESMA register as of 4 August 2026.

Institutional money is stepping back into $Bitcoin at a pace the market has not seen in weeks. US-listed spot Bitcoin ETFs took in $244.4 million on Wednesday, capping three straight inflow days worth a combined $626 million according to SoSoValue data. It is a notable shift for a product category that spent most of the summer bleeding.

How much did the ETFs actually buy?

The run started on Monday and built through the week. Tuesday's session brought $211.5 million in net inflows, with IBIT capturing $170.3 million, FBTC $19.6 million, ARKB $9.2 million, BITB $8.7 million and MSBT $3.7 million. Wednesday was the largest single day of the week.

The concentration is the real story. BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust took $479 million of the three-day total, lifting its cumulative net inflows to almost $61 billion. Every other issuer is fighting over the remainder.

Why is this happening now?

Two things lined up. Risk appetite improved across traditional markets at the start of the month, with equity indices grinding back toward record territory and crude oil easing after geopolitical tension around Iran cooled off. Bitcoin tends to trade with that tape.

The second driver is regulatory. Franklin Templeton has argued that federal crypto rules could open bank liquidity to the asset class for the first time, a structural change that would matter far more than any single week of flows.

Price followed the money. Bitcoin briefly pushed above $64,920 on Wednesday and traded near $64,744 shortly after, up roughly 0.7 percent on the day.

Is the ETF complex actually healthy?

This is where the picture gets more complicated, and it is worth being honest about it.

The US spot Bitcoin ETF market holds $77.6 billion in net assets and has taken in $51.5 billion in cumulative net inflows since launch. That is a serious footprint. But the growth is lopsided. IBIT accounts for $60.5 billion of total inflows, Fidelity's FBTC roughly $9.95 billion, while Grayscale's GBTC has shed $27.47 billion.

The squeeze on smaller issuers has now produced its first casualty. Hashdex is closing its Bitcoin ETF (DEFI), the smallest US spot product by net assets, with a final trading day of Aug. 17 before it sells its remaining Bitcoin and returns cash to shareholders. It is the first closure of its kind in the US.

Part of the drag is competition for attention. K33 Research's Vetle Lunde noted in June that much of the market sees the opportunity cost of holding BTC as too high while AI-linked assets rally, with BlackRock's iShares Future AI & Tech ETF up 39 percent through July against a roughly 36 percent decline in the broader crypto market.

What does the sentiment data say?

Not what you would expect from a three-day buying streak. The Crypto Fear & Greed Index sat at 25, firmly in Extreme Fear, and slipped from 27 the day before.

That gap between institutional flows and retail sentiment is the thing to watch. Historically, ETF accumulation into fearful conditions has been a constructive setup, because it means supply is being absorbed by holders who are not reacting to daily price swings. It is not a guarantee of anything, but it is a different market structure than a leveraged retail bid.

What comes next?

The near-term question is whether the streak survives the rest of the week and whether inflows broaden beyond BlackRock. A three-day run led almost entirely by one fund is a narrower signal than the headline number suggests.

For traders, the levels are straightforward. Bitcoin needs to hold the $63,000 to $64,000 zone to keep the structure intact, and a clean break above $65,000 would confirm that ETF demand is doing more than absorbing supply. Fail there and the Extreme Fear reading starts looking like the more accurate gauge.

Within eight days in July, two decentralised perpetuals exchanges on Arbitrum were emptied: Ostium on 15 July, AFX Trade on 22 July. Together the attackers took roughly $42 million.

In both cases the entry point was not a smart contract but a private key held by people. That is where the industry's central marketing promise starts to crack. "Decentralised" has meant: nobody can take your money because nobody holds it. With many providers it actually means the deposit sits behind a bridge whose signing keys are kept on servers users know nothing about.

The two cases in detail

Ostium, 15 July

At the Arbitrum perp DEX Ostium, the private key of a price oracle was compromised. That allowed fake, future-dated price reports to be signed and fed through the protocol's own PriceUpKeep infrastructure. The attacker opened a position at a fabricated bitcoin price of $5,000 and closed it at the actual price of around $60,000. The difference came out of the liquidity providers' vault: $18 million to $23.75 million, depending on the assessment. Trading was suspended.

One detail from the bug bounty programme stands out: the exact component the attack ran through was explicitly excluded from it. Security researchers therefore had no incentive to look there. Security firm Halborn has reconstructed the attack step by step.

AFX Trade, 22 July

A week later it was AFX Trade, also on Arbitrum. The attacker gained control of the validator signing keys for the USDC custody bridge the protocol operates itself, through which cross-chain withdrawals are authorised. $24.15 million USDC left the platform. The funds were moved to Ethereum and swapped into roughly 12,467 ETH; the platform's total value locked was effectively empty afterwards.

AFX offered the attacker 30 percent of the sum as a so-called white hat bounty — about $7.2 million — in exchange for returning the rest. No return has been confirmed. Bridge operations were suspended, the infrastructure rebuilt and credentials rotated. On 3 August the project announced a goodwill plan for those affected. Our report on the incident: AFX Trade hack — Arbitrum perp DEX loses $24M as bridge keys are compromised.

The shared pattern

Both attacks follow the same logic. Trading itself runs on-chain, verifiable and without a custodian. At two points, though, the chain has to leave the blockchain:

• At the price. A perpetual needs an external quote. Whoever holds the oracle key determines what the protocol treats as reality.
• At the money. Deposits from other chains arrive over a bridge. Whoever holds its signing keys can withdraw.

Both are off-chain keys held by a small group. Neither the smart contract audit nor the decentralisation of the order book says anything about them. A perp DEX ends up as decentralised as its key management, and for many providers that is simply a company with servers.

For context: DeFi has already lost more than $840 million to hacks in 2026. The two July cases are not outliers in that series.

The segment is shrinking anyway

That is a decline of more than 50 percent across five consecutive months, with no meaningful counter-move. The market has also reshuffled: Hyperliquid held around 71 percent of on-chain perp volume in May 2025 and now sits near a third. The reason is less migration than the division of a smaller overall market — Aster with incentive programmes, Lighter with a zero-fee model.

For users that means thinner order books, higher slippage and rising liquidation risk. There is also a side effect that is harder to see: providers under cost pressure economise, and security architecture is where economising stays unnoticed the longest.

Who is behind it?

A regulated exchange states in its imprint who is liable. A perp DEX, in case of doubt, offers a Discord handle. That is not an accusation but part of the design. It has a consequence that rarely features in the marketing: if the keys sit with people, then the question of who those people are is a security question.

Seven points can be clarified before your first deposit, and they say more than an audit certificate:

1. Who holds the bridge keys? A single signer, a multisig or a distributed validator set? How many signatures does a withdrawal require, and who signs?
2. Where does the price come from? A single oracle with one key is a single point of failure; several independent feeds with sanity checks are not.
3. What is excluded from the bug bounty scope? Ostium showed that the exclusions are the most interesting passage of the programme.
4. Is there an insurance fund, and is it visible on-chain? A commitment in a blog post is not a fund.
5. Who is behind the project? Anonymous teams are not automatically dishonest, but they are not accountable either. That is worth knowing before depositing.
6. How was communication handled in past incidents? Was there a technical post-mortem with a timeline, or only an announcement without figures?
7. Where are users directed after an incident? If the same channels that promoted a platform then funnel users to one particular centralised exchange, that is an advertising relationship and belongs disclosed as one.

Our own position

Screenshots and claims about links between the AFX orbit and particular centralised exchanges are circulating in German-language groups. We could not verify that material independently and therefore name no names. A screenshot is not evidence, and a suspicion you cannot test does not belong in a headline. Anyone with material that holds up can contact our newsroom.

What we can say from our own experience: we also assess trading platforms by how they respond to editorial enquiries. With Phemex that experience has repeatedly been unsatisfactory, which is why the exchange appears in none of our recommendations. That is an assessment of our own dealings and not an allegation of misconduct towards users.

What to take away

The most uncomfortable conclusion of this summer is one the scene voices reluctantly: regulated, centralised exchanges have an argument again.

Not because they are technically superior, but because they offer something an anonymous perp DEX structurally cannot — an address you can serve papers to, a supervisor, a balance sheet, and somebody who is liable when keys go missing. Since the last MiCA transition period expired on 1 July 2026, it is also possible in Europe to look up who holds the relevant authorisation.

This is explicitly not an invitation to leave funds on an exchange permanently; "not your keys, not your coins" still holds. It is an invitation to price convenience honestly. At a regulated exchange you pay in fees and KYC. At an anonymous perp DEX you pay with the risk that a validator key changes hands on an ordinary Tuesday morning.

Three steps follow from that:

1. Separate your holdings. Trading margin sits on the platform, nothing more. The rest belongs in your own custody. The AFX users who parked capital there have been waiting since 22 July for a goodwill plan. Which hardware wallet fits is covered in our hardware wallet comparison.
2. Run the seven questions before your next deposit. It takes a few minutes. If you cannot answer them, you already have your answer. Providers side by side — fees, liquidity, key architecture, incident history — are in our perp DEX comparison.
3. At least do the maths on the regulated route. If you do not need leverage, a regulated exchange costs a few basis points more and gives you a counterparty. In a market with halved volume, that is rarely the worse deal.

The question worth asking from here is less "is this decentralised?" than "who holds the keys, and what happens when that person has a bad day?". Decentralisation is not a property a logo promises but one that can be counted.

(As of 5 August 2026. This article is not investment advice and not a recommendation of any individual trading platform. Loss figures follow the analyses available at the time of publication and may change.)

Transparency note: This article was produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence and reviewed by our editorial team before publication. All figures and claims were checked against the primary sources linked in the text.

The company says a configuration error by an outside testing partner gave one of its Muse Spark models internet access during a cybersecurity evaluation.

Democratic lawmakers say wildfire event contracts create risks of arson, insider trading, and disaster profiteering as they urge federal regulators to step in.

The new law creates a licensed, central bank-supervised market for trading digital assets, yet crypto remains barred from everyday payments.

The presentation at the annual Black Hat conference sheds new light on how OpenAI's models collaborated to launch the Hugging Face breach.

On-chain data shows big holders quietly buying XRP near $1, yet the daily chart is still trapped below a death cross.

A well-known German Bitcoin developer has revealed that fears over self-custody security kept him from buying more BTC.

Learn how hidden malware steals keys and how to save your Dogecoin (DOGE) this August 2026.

XRP sees first outflow in multiple weeks as its price continues to plunge deeper, causing both retail and institutional investors to exercise caution.

The ProShares Ultra XRP ETF (UXRP) has lost more than 94% of its value since launching in July 2025.

As a $116 million Coldcard flaw shatters self-custody trust, Bitcoin ETFs absorb $620 million in Wall Street inflows.

TLDR

• MiNK Therapeutics stock moves after Phase 2 pneumonia trial update.
• agenT-797 shows early gains in oxygenation and infection control.
• Data presented at 2026 Military Health System Research Symposium event.
• Patients treated in Ukraine show no major adverse events reported.
• MiNK Therapeutics advances off-the-shelf iNKT therapy for lung injury.

INKT shares traded at $11.48 after the company released new clinical updates. The stock reflected a $0.22 decline, or 1.88%, during Thursday’s session. MiNK Therapeutics announced initial results from its Phase 2 study evaluating agenT-797 in severe hypoxemic pneumonia.

MiNK Therapeutics, Inc., INKT

Trial Data Reveals Early Clinical Progress

MiNK Therapeutics presented the findings at the 2026 Military Health System Research Symposium, and Dr. Terese Hammond led the presentation. Researchers from First Lviv Territorial Medical Union in Ukraine co-authored the data alongside MiNK Therapeutics. Severe lung injury carries high mortality, and no approved therapy currently reduces it effectively.

Multidrug-resistant infections often worsen outcomes in conflict zones, so traditional antibiotics frequently fail. agenT-797 aims to restore barrier immunity and limit inflammatory lung damage in these settings. Patients treated with agenT-797 remained alive through Day 28, and their hemodynamics improved noticeably.

Oxygenation levels rose alongside mental status improvements among the treated group. Microbiological testing confirmed control of baseline infections in these critically ill patients. Blood and lung fluid analyses also showed reduced inflammatory markers following treatment with agenT-797.

Physician and Executive Commentary Highlight Results

Dr. Hammond stated that patients entered the study facing severe respiratory failure and substantial medical risk. She noted encouraging improvements in oxygenation, infection control, and markers tied to inflammation reduction. The biological changes also aligned with earlier findings MiNK Therapeutics presented at ASGCT and ATS conferences.

Jennifer Buell, President and CEO of MiNK Therapeutics, emphasized the trial’s rapid execution timeline. She said the team activated the randomized trial and dosed the first patient within days of approval. Buell added that Day 28 observations followed weeks later, despite the active conflict environment surrounding the site.

Buell highlighted the value of an off-the-shelf therapy that skips patient-specific manufacturing steps. She noted the treatment avoids HLA matching and lymphodepletion, unlike many competing cell therapies. MiNK Therapeutics said it remains focused on supporting medical readiness for service members and critically ill patients.

Company Background Supports Pipeline Direction

MiNK Therapeutics develops allogeneic invariant natural killer T-cell therapies for cancer and immune-related disorders. The company positions agenT-797 as a scalable option for austere and resource-limited medical environments. No major serious adverse events tied to agenT-797 emerged among the initial treated patients.

MiNK Therapeutics continues advancing this program following the Phase 2 update. The company plans further data disclosures as enrollment and treatment progress across sites. MiNK Therapeutics remains focused on expanding its iNKT-cell platform across additional disease indications going forward.

The post MiNK Therapeutics, Inc. (INKT) Stock: Climbs on Encouraging Phase 2 Data for agenT-797 in Severe Pneumonia appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• HTZ revenue rose 10% as record RPD and pricing lifted second-quarter performance.
• Hertz posted stronger EBITDA while liquidity remained near the $1 billion mark.
• HTZ advanced transformation as pricing gains offset recall-related challenges.
• Hertz reported record RPD, stronger utilization, and improved operating spreads.
• Hertz strengthened commercial momentum while expanding its long-term mobility platform.

Hertz Global Holdings, Inc. stock traded at $1.7350, up 11.22%, after the company reported stronger second-quarter operating results. Revenue increased to $2.4 billion, reflecting a 10% year-over-year gain. The results highlighted stronger pricing, improving utilization, and continued progress across its transformation strategy.

Hertz Global Holdings, Inc., HTZ

Commercial performance drives stronger revenue growth

Hertz generated its strongest second-quarter Revenue per Day, excluding the pandemic-driven peak recorded during 2022. Revenue per Day increased 9%, while Revenue per Unit climbed 8% from the previous year. Strong pricing and disciplined airport fleet management supported those improvements throughout the quarter.

The company also reported total utilization of 79%, representing an increase of 80 basis points year over year. Utilization reached 81% after excluding vehicles affected by elevated recalls. better fleet efficiency supported higher revenue generation despite operational challenges.

Adjusted Corporate EBITDA reached $81 million during the quarter. That result improved by $63 million from the same period last year and exceeded the company’s revised guidance. GAAP net income totaled $64 million, while adjusted net loss reached $47 million because of ongoing transformation-related factors.

Fleet strategy offsets operational headwinds

Hertz reported Net Depreciation per Unit per Month of $302, matching its revised guidance for the quarter. Management expects the full-year figure to remain at or below $300. The company also operates its youngest U.S. fleet in twelve years, with 94% consisting of 2025 and 2026 model vehicles.

Adjusted Direct Operating Expense per Day increased 4% compared with the prior year. Higher revenue-related variable costs and sale leaseback expenses contributed to the increase. Normalized operating expenses improved about 2% after adjusting for recalls and related operational impacts.

Recall activity remained a major challenge during the quarter because affected vehicles increased nearly 300% year over year. Around 15,000 vehicles remained unavailable on average because of those recalls. Even so, the spread between Revenue per Day and operating expense improved 17%, marking the third consecutive quarterly increase.

Liquidity strengthens as transformation expands

Hertz ended the quarter with approximately $984 million in available liquidity, matching previous guidance. The company also completed a $350 million exchangeable first lien notes offering during June. An additional $30 million issuance followed in July, pushing pro forma liquidity above $1 billion.

The broader transformation strategy continues expanding beyond the traditional rental business. Hertz strengthened its franchise network while improving used vehicle retail operations through Hertz Car Sales. Those efforts aim to improve long-term profitability and expand commercial opportunities across multiple business segments.

The mobility business also recorded measurable progress through operating affiliate Oro Mobility. Drivers completed more than six million miles across four active markets. In addition, Oro expects to launch its first autonomous vehicle fleet partnership later this year through Uber’s robotaxi program using Lucid vehicles equipped with Nuro autonomous technology.

Hertz remains one of the world’s largest vehicle rental companies, operating Hertz, Dollar, Thrifty, and Firefly brands across approximately 160 countries. The company continues investing in fleet quality, commercial execution, and mobility services while improving financial performance. Strong revenue growth, improving operating metrics, and expanding platform initiatives reinforced its transformation progress during the second quarter.

The post Hertz Holdings, Inc. (HTZ) Stock: Revenue Surges on Record RPD While Liquidity Nears $1 Billion appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Ondas stock fell 1.07% to $8.77 despite DZYNE securing a major $6M AFRL award.
• AFRL funding will advance DZYNE’s autonomous Long-Range Grasshopper system.
• The platform targets long-range resupply missions in contested environments.
• Ondas Sentinel will develop navigation, endurance, and payload capabilities.
• The DZYNE acquisition expands Ondas’ autonomous defense technology portfolio.

Ondas (ONDS) shares fell 1.07% to $8.77 after retreating from an intraday high above $9.10. The decline followed news of a major defense contract for its recently acquired DZYNE Technologies unit. AFRL awarded DZYNE more than $6 million to advance an autonomous aerial logistics system.

Ondas Holdings Inc., ONDS

AFRL Contract Expands Ondas Defense Operations

The Air Force Research Laboratory awarded the contract to support the Long-Range Grasshopper development program. The system provides autonomous and runway-independent aerial delivery across long distances. It targets logistics missions in remote, contested, and infrastructure-limited operating areas.

DZYNE will conduct the contract work through Ondas Sentinel, the company’s dedicated United States defense division. Ondas formed the division after completing its acquisition of DZYNE Technologies. The transaction expanded Ondas into autonomous logistics, precision strike, surveillance, and counter-drone systems.

The award extends several years of development work between AFRL and DZYNE’s engineering teams. Previous flight tests assessed autonomous deployment, jet-engine activation, long-range navigation, and accurate payload delivery. The new funding will move the platform closer toward broader military deployment.

Long-Range Grasshopper Targets Contested Logistics

The Long-Range Grasshopper supports the Air Force’s Agile Combat Employment strategy. That strategy requires distributed forces to operate from smaller locations with limited support infrastructure. Autonomous delivery systems can supply those forces without exposing large crewed aircraft to threats.

The contract will fund extended flight range, longer endurance, and modular payload integration. Development will also improve autonomous navigation where GPS signals remain weak, blocked, or unavailable. Engineers will strengthen system reliability and simplify production for larger deployment volumes.

The platform builds on DZYNE’s existing Grasshopper glider design. That system can deliver payloads weighing up to 500 pounds into difficult operating areas. Its established architecture gives Ondas a tested foundation for the jet-powered long-range version.

Ondas Builds Broader Autonomous Defense Portfolio

Ondas recently acquired DZYNE to strengthen its position in autonomous defense technology. The acquisition added systems covering intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, aerial security, and autonomous mission support. It also expanded the company’s access to United States defense programs and customers.

Ondas Sentinel now combines DZYNE’s platforms with Ondas’ existing defense technologies. The division focuses on autonomous systems for air operations, logistics, security, and threat response. This structure allows Ondas to coordinate development and production across several military applications.

The Long-Range Grasshopper joins LEAP, ULTRA, and several counter-unmanned aircraft systems within the portfolio. AFRL’s contract gives Ondas additional funding to advance low-cost and scalable aerial logistics. However, Ondas stock still recorded a slight decline during Thursday’s trading session.

The post Ondas Inc. (ONDS) Stock: Slips as AFRL Awards DZYNE $6M Defense Contract appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Nuburu shares drop 3.48% despite Italy clearing the Tekne acquisition deal.
• Italy approves Nuburu Defense’s planned 70% controlling interest in Tekne deal.
• The deal now advances toward funding, governance, and final closing steps next.
• Tekne adds defense manufacturing, electronic warfare, and military mobility.
• Nuburu’s $38 million offering supports the acquisition and integration work.

Nuburu (BURU) shares fell 3.48% to $0.0600 after retreating from intraday highs near $0.068. Italy approved Nuburu Defense’s proposed purchase of a 70% controlling stake in Tekne. The decision removes the transaction’s main government hurdle and shifts attention toward funding, governance, and final closing steps.

Nuburu, Inc., BURU

Italian Approval Clears Major Deal Hurdle

The Italian Government granted approval under its Golden Power framework for businesses serving strategic national sectors. The review covered defense, security, ownership controls, sensitive technologies, and the proposed transfer of majority control. Nuburu submitted the formal notification on June 5 after signing the investment agreement on May 26.

The agreement gives the parties 30 calendar days to complete closing actions after confirming the approval condition. Nuburu must still complete corporate resolutions, capital steps, share transfers, governance appointments, and required documentation. The company must also follow every commitment and condition included within the Italian authorization.

After closing, Nuburu expects to control Tekne and consolidate its results under United States accounting rules. The company would also record the remaining 30% stake as a non-controlling interest. However, final accounting treatment will depend on a completed acquisition assessment.

Tekne Adds Defense Scale and Existing Operations

Tekne operates established engineering and manufacturing sites in Ortona, Poggiofiorito, and Guastalla. The company employs about 180 people and develops military vehicles, electronic warfare systems, communications, and security platforms. Its capabilities also cover counter-drone applications, tactical systems, defense mobility, and civil emergency solutions.

Tekne holds a signed order portfolio with about $108.7 million in normalized residual value. Management materials support that figure, although delivery changes, validation, and possible cancellations could affect the final amount. Nuburu also cited a five-year production plan valued near $648 million through 2030.

The plan aims to preserve Italian production, strategic knowledge, jobs, technology controls, and defense-related intellectual property. Nuburu plans to combine Tekne’s manufacturing base with photonics, software, and deployable production capabilities. The combined platform would target defense and security programs across Italy, Europe, and NATO markets.

Funding Supports Closing and Integration Work

Nuburu has already provided Tekne with about $23.7 million through shareholder loans. The agreement allows part of that financing to convert during the planned capital increase. Final amounts will depend on closing calculations, reconciliation, and the transaction’s euro-denominated terms.

The broader transaction uses a pre-money valuation equal to about $59.7 million at the stated exchange rate. Nuburu plans a capital increase worth about $34.1 million and a separate $6 million share purchase. Those steps would raise its ownership from an existing 2.9% stake to 70%.

Nuburu also completed a $38 million public offering during July to support its defense expansion. It then repaid about $16.75 million in principal obligations tied to earlier financing and acquisition notes. The remaining proceeds will support Tekne, working capital, transaction costs, and near-term integration requirements.

The post Nuburu (BURU) Stock: Drops as Tekne Deal Advances After Italian Approval appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• AT&T shares advance following announcement of Ericsson collaboration for 600 MHz spectrum deployment

• Low-band radio equipment designed to enhance indoor penetration and extend rural service

• Network upgrades with Ericsson infrastructure show improved speeds and reduced call failures

• Implementation of 8RX uplink capabilities enhances low-band network efficiency

• Wireless infrastructure modernization program exceeds 60% completion milestone

Shares of AT&T (T) climbed 2.11% to reach $23.55 during late-morning trading sessions following the telecommunications company’s announcement of a significant infrastructure partnership with Ericsson. This collaboration centers on implementing recently obtained 600 MHz spectrum throughout AT&T’s wireless infrastructure nationwide. The strategic initiative targets enhanced coverage quality, increased data speeds, superior call dependability, and expanded network capacity serving both metropolitan and rural communities.

AT&T Inc., T

Strategic Partnership Accelerates Low-Band Spectrum Implementation

AT&T has chosen Ericsson as the supplier for dual-band radio equipment supporting the upcoming 600 MHz network expansion. This technology enables more effective utilization of low-band spectrum resources at current tower infrastructure locations. Moreover, this implementation strategy will broaden signal coverage while enhancing indoor connectivity in traditionally challenging service zones.

The telecommunications provider obtained 600 MHz spectrum assets from EchoStar to bolster its low-frequency wireless portfolio. These lower-frequency bands demonstrate superior propagation characteristics compared to higher frequencies, penetrating buildings and obstacles more effectively. Consequently, this spectrum allocation strengthens service quality within residential properties, commercial buildings, transportation corridors, and geographically isolated areas.

The Ericsson radio systems will incorporate advanced 8RX uplink capabilities throughout AT&T’s low-band infrastructure. This enhancement optimizes communication pathways from mobile devices to nearby cell towers. Subsequently, customers should experience improved network responsiveness during file uploads, voice communications, and time-sensitive mobile applications.

Infrastructure Upgrades Yield Measurable Performance Improvements

AT&T reports surpassing the 60% completion threshold for its comprehensive wireless network modernization initiative. Previously deployed Ericsson technology has generated quantifiable enhancements throughout designated coverage regions. Certain markets have witnessed average data transmission speeds increase by 100% following installation of contemporary radio systems.

Voice service quality metrics have similarly advanced, with dropped and blocked call incidents decreasing by 10%. Areas featuring modernized infrastructure experienced reductions in slow data performance events reaching up to 70%. These improvements provide subscribers with enhanced service stability during peak usage times and resource-intensive mobile activities.

The telecommunications company has additionally implemented standardized equipment configurations at tower-top installations across numerous cellular sites. This optimization effort may decrease uplink interference by approximately 80% at enhanced locations. Therefore, the network infrastructure can accommodate increased traffic volumes while preserving robust and reliable connections.

Open RAN Framework Enables Scalable Network Evolution

This recent partnership expands upon the existing Open RAN cooperation between AT&T and Ericsson. The Open RAN architecture provides telecommunications operators with enhanced adaptability in equipment selection and network management processes. AT&T intends to leverage this methodology while scaling capacity and streamlining subsequent infrastructure enhancements.

The ongoing modernization campaign positions AT&T to address escalating requirements from sophisticated digital applications. Mobile subscribers increasingly depend on wireless networks for multimedia production, cloud computing access, and real-time interactive communications. Accordingly, AT&T requires expanded capacity, minimized interference, and accelerated network responsiveness throughout additional geographic territories.

AT&T has incorporated anticipated infrastructure investment within its second-quarter 2026 financial projections and capital expenditure framework. The organization will disclose specific deployment schedules and service launch dates in future communications. Meanwhile, the Ericsson collaboration establishes a defined roadmap for AT&T’s upcoming network expansion initiatives.

The post AT&T (T) Stock Climbs on Ericsson Partnership for 600 MHz Network Upgrade appeared first on Blockonomi.

PEPE recorded a net exchange outflow of 4.54 trillion tokens in a single day, which was the meme coin’s largest daily outflow from exchanges since November 14, 2024.

Fewer tokens on exchanges mean less immediate selling pressure.

Exchange Exodus

According to the latest findings by Santiment, PEPE has traded mostly sideways over the past two months. Recent market commentary has focused on meme coin rotation, weak funding, and support level testing instead of any major project-specific catalyst.

The analytics firm explained that when a relatively quiet meme coin sees tokens leave exchanges while trader interest remains muted, bullish holders may view it as supply moving into stronger hands before attention returns.

Additionally, PEPE continues to rank among Ethereum’s largest meme coins by holder count, according to data cited by BSCN. 571,613 wallet addresses currently hold the token. It trails just behind Shiba Inu, which happens to be the largest meme coin on Ethereum by holder count. In fact, SHIB is held by 1,678,653 unique wallet addresses.

Institutional interest has also emerged. Canary Capital filed a Form S-1 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to launch a spot ETF linked to the asset in April. The proposed fund, called the Canary PEPE ETF, would track the token’s live market price. The filing stated,

“PEPE has no identified blockchain-based utility beyond its branding and association with meme culture, and its market value is primarily driven by cultural relevance and online community sentiment. There is no assurance that interest in or demand for PEPE will continue to grow or be sustained.”

Some market watchers see more upside ahead. Crypto analyst Rafaela Rigo, for instance, projected that the asset could deliver a 3x to 5x return in the next bull cycle. The trader marked a target near $0.0000143, which represents a gain of about 400% from the current level of $0.0000028.

Liquidity Trap

Meme coins, meanwhile, continue to divide opinion across the crypto market. Last month, veteran crypto trader Ogle warned that these assets with limited liquidity can unravel within minutes if just a handful of large holders decide to sell.

Citing the recent price action in CASHCAT, Ogle said many traders often mistake unrealized gains for locked-in profits. He added that thin liquidity, concentrated ownership, and leveraged trading can quickly turn sharp rallies into steep declines, particularly after perpetual futures listings amplify volatility and trigger liquidations.

The post PEPE Supply on Exchanges Just Took a Massive Hit – What’s Next? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange will conduct a major scheduled upgrade on Saturday that will pause certain trading activities.

The second major statement from the firm outlined the delisting of numerous trading pairs, one even against BTC.

An Upgrade and Delistings

Binance revealed that it will temporarily halt US stock trading on the platform on August 8 due to a scheduled system upgrade carried out by a partner broker. The process is set to be completed in approximately three hours, and during this period, users will not be able to access such services.

The company has the habit of briefly pausing operations to support certain improvements. Not long ago, it performed wallet maintenance for the Tron Network, making TRX deposits and withdrawals unavailable for about an hour. It also supported a Zcash hard fork, temporarily suspending ZEC deposits and withdrawals.

Binance also regularly checks all listed spot trading pairs available on its platform and scraps those that no longer meet important criteria like adequate liquidity and volume. Based on its latest analysis, it will delist QNT/BTC, RPL/USDC, SIGN/BNB, and SKL/USDC on August 7.

“The delisting of a spot trading pair does not affect the availability of the tokens on Binance Spot. Users can still trade the spot trading pair’s base and quote assets on other trading pair(s) that are available on Binance,” it clarified.

The Previous Announcement

The aforementioned disclosure did not cause a significant decline in the involved cryptocurrencies, which is rather normal, as such a reaction is usually witnessed in the event of a total delisting. Being the leading crypto exchange, withdrawing support from Binance leads to reduced availability, thinner liquidity, and reputational damage.

Earlier this month, Binance said goodbye to Across Protocol (ACX), Hashflow (HFT), PIVX (PIVX), Vulcan Forged PYR (PYR), Vanar (VANRY), and Viction (VIC), and their prices headed south by double digits.

Prior to that, the company terminated all services with Alchemix (ALCX), Ardor (ARDR), NFPrompt Token (NFP), and Marlin (POND), triggering a similar collapse for the affected tokens.

The post Binance Pauses Services and Delists Several Crypto Pairs: Who Is Affected? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Crypto analyst Ali Martinez said on August 6 that Ethereum’s recent move above a major MVRV pricing level could open the way toward a $3,000 target.

The market watcher’s view is based on historical on-chain patterns that have previously appeared before major ETH recoveries, though resistance levels remain ahead.

Ethereum Reclaims MVRV Level as Analysts Watch $3K Target

“ETHEREUM IS HEADING TO $3,000,” Martinez announced in a post on X.

He said the asset turned bullish after breaking above its 0.8 MVRV Pricing Band near $1,800 and explained that this level has historically acted as a point where ETH goes from weakness into recovery phases.

The move followed an earlier July 6 post from the analyst, where he had identified $1,800 as the level Ethereum needed to clear. At the time, ETH was testing that area as resistance, with a successful daily close above it expected to increase the chances of a move toward its Realized Price.

In his August 6 post, Martinez confirmed that the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency had since reclaimed the MVRV as support. According to him, similar recoveries over the last six years have often led Ethereum toward, or above, its Realized Price, which currently sits near $2,300.

He also pointed to an MVRV Momentum golden cross that formed after ETH’s recovery, with previous signals of this type being followed by rallies of 50%, 166%, 74%, and 113%. The metric compares Ethereum holder profitability with its 160-day moving average and is used by analysts to track shifts between selling periods and recovery phases.

The asset was trading around $1,900 at the time of writing after rising 1.6% in the last 24 hours. It has gained almost 7% over the last 30 days but remains down more than 47% over the last year. ETH reached an all-time high near $4,950 in August 2025 and is still around 62% below that level.

According to Martinez, the $3,000 area is the next major target if buying pressure continues. The analyst pointed to on-chain transaction data showing more than 10 million ETH previously changed hands around that price, making it a major resistance zone.

Market Watches Ethereum’s Breakout Attempt

Other traders have also focused on Ethereum’s recovery, with trader Ted Pillows saying it could move toward $2,000 if it holds the $1,800 region following an 18.5% jump in July, adding that the fact that there was spot buying activity was a positive sign.

Michaël van de Poppe also said holding $1,800 could lead to a move above $2,000 and then toward $2,300.

Some traders believe a stronger ETH move could improve sentiment across the wider market, possibly affecting the next phase for altcoins, although that depends on whether Ethereum can continue breaking through resistance levels.

For now, Martinez’s $3,000 forecast relies on ETH maintaining its MVRV breakout and continuing the pattern seen in previous cycles. According to him, the next areas traders should be watching are around $1,980 to $2,080, followed by the $2,773 region he had mentioned in a previous update.

The post Analyst Forecasts Ethereum Rally to $3K After Key On-Chain Breakout appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin has extended its recovery from recent lows and is now testing an important resistance region. While short-term momentum has improved, the asset is approaching an area that could determine whether the current rebound evolves into a larger breakout or another rejection within the broader consolidation.

Bitcoin Price Analysis: The Daily Chart

On the daily timeframe, Bitcoin continues to trade within its well-defined consolidation range. The recent rebound has carried the price back toward the major resistance zone at $66.2K to $66.8K, while the broader support remains at $57.8K to $60.2K.

Although buyers have regained short-term momentum, BTC is still trading beneath the declining 100-day and 200-day moving averages, which continue to reinforce the broader bearish structure. The descending long-term trendline also remains intact, adding further confluence around the overhead resistance.

For now, the market continues to favor range-bound conditions. A confirmed breakout above the $66.2K to $66.8K resistance would be the first signal that buyers are regaining control and could pave the way toward the next resistance around $72K to $74K. Until then, the current move appears to be another recovery leg inside the broader consolidation.

BTC/USDT 4-Hour Chart

The 4-hour chart shows that buyers have staged a strong recovery from the $61.8K to $62.3K demand zone, pushing Bitcoin back into the immediate resistance area around $64.8K to $65.4K.

This resistance has already rejected the price several times over the past two weeks, making it the key short-term barrier. A successful breakout above the $64.8K to $65.4K region would likely open the door for another rally toward the daily resistance around $66.2K to $66.8K.

However, failure to overcome this supply zone could trigger another rejection back toward the buyers’ defense at $61.8K-$62.3K, keeping BTC trapped within its broader consolidation range.

Sentiment Analysis

The latest two-week liquidation heatmap highlights a significant concentration of short liquidation liquidity above the current price, particularly around the $66K region. As Bitcoin continues pressing higher, this cluster becomes an attractive magnet for price, increasing the probability of an upward liquidity sweep.

If buyers manage to push through the nearby resistance, the liquidation of overleveraged short positions could trigger a short squeeze, accelerating bullish momentum toward higher resistance levels.

While a liquidation cluster also exists below the current market, it primarily reflects aggressive long positioning. For now, the more considerable and more attractive liquidity target remains overhead, favoring an upside sweep if buyers can maintain control.

The post Bitcoin Price Analysis: BTC Battles Key $65K Barrier as Short Liquidation Cluster Builds appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Ripple’s cross-border token has fallen by 65% over the past year, while Pi Network’s PI and Cardano’s native cryptocurrency have crashed by around 73% over the same period. This has happened amid a prolonged bear market that has caused the entire market to bleed heavily.

Yet, many analysts believe that a new bull run may begin in the coming months, while the four-year cycle supports their theories. On that note, we asked three of the most popular AI-powered chatbots whether XRP, PI, or ADA will perform best when everything starts booming again.

XRP’s Chances

According to Perplexity, Ripple’s cryptocurrency has the cleanest risk-adjusted setup to outperform during the next bull run. The chatbot claimed the asset is quite trending among institutional investors and noted that it is perhaps the most popular among the trio.

“XRP is favored to deliver the most consistent, risk-adjusted gains among the three, with a realistic path to new cycle highs if ETF and payments narratives stay hot,” it added.

Perplexity also reminded that Ripple’s legal battle with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has long been resolved, and that the absence of regulatory uncertainty can only benefit XRP during a potential market uptrend.

Additionally, it highlighted the company’s global expansion, major investments, and strategic partnerships inked over the past several months that have solidified its presence in the financial and crypto sectors. One of the biggest acquisitions came in April 2025 when Ripple purchased the prime broker Hidden Road for $1.25 billion.

Examples of its broader international growth include the collaboration with the South Korean KBank, which plans to use Ripple’s network and infrastructure, as well as the entity’s ability to secure a MiCA license and continue its operations in the European Union.

ADA’s Potential

ChatGPT agreed with Perplexity that XRP has the strongest institutional foundation. It noted that it is the largest cryptocurrency of the three with deeper liquidity but at the same time argued that it might find it difficult to achieve larger returns than ADA in a future bull run.

OpenAI’s platform claimed that Cardano’s token could be the best overall bet after noting that a huge chunk of the total supply is already in circulation, which makes the risk of dilution less than with XRP and PI.

It predicted that in an “extreme euphoria” case, ADA could skyrocket to as high as $5. It is important to mention that the asset has enjoyed a solid revival over the past week, with its price rising by roughly 17%. Its positive performance comes on the back of whale accumulation and renewed interest from traders, while many analysts think a much more substantial upswing could be on the way.

PI: The Moonshot Bet

Google’s Gemini claimed that XRP and ADA both have chances to rally hard during the next bull run, yet it set its attention on Pi Network’s cryptocurrency.

It said the controversial project has one of the largest community bases in the crypto world, adding that it has the potential to experience a whopping 100x explosion should it solve its ecosystem issues and get listed by the leading exchanges.

Recall that Binance hinted at such a move last year but has not yet done so. Coinbase, Bybit, and many other well-known names also prefer to stay away from PI at the moment.

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