The shift to invisible watermarks increases reliance on detection tech, impacting content verification and regulatory compliance globally.

The post Google now lets users toggle off visible watermarks from AI-generated content appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Norway's Pension Fund's increased investment in Strategy Inc. highlights a strategic shift towards indirect crypto exposure, bypassing direct crypto holdings.

The post Norway’s Pension Fund increases stake in Strategy by 50% to $370M appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Alibaba's open-sourcing of Qwen3.8-27B could democratize AI development, fostering innovation and reducing reliance on cloud services.

The post Alibaba releases open weights for Qwen3.8-27B multimodal model appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Anthropic's potential $2T IPO could reshape the AI industry landscape, intensifying competition and influencing strategic investments globally.

The post Anthropic IPO could exceed $2T, rival OpenAI with Cami Clark advising appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The dismissal underscores the legal protection of political speech in tech disputes, impacting how companies navigate national security claims.

The post Judge dismisses YMTC lawsuit against Micron over false claims appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Israeli Bank Leumi to Debut Bitcoin Trading With Galaxy Digital

Israel’s biggest bank, Bank Leumi, will become the first lender in the country to offer customers Bitcoin trading, according to a Friday announcement. 

The lender will work with Galaxy Digital to provide the service, which will become available to customers early next year, the announcement said.  

Bank Leumi first announced plans to debut crypto trading in 2022 but shelved the initiative. The latest project will use GalaxyOne Institutional, Galaxy’s institutional platform for banks, asset managers and other institutions for trading and other services, to debut the service. 

“We believe that digital assets are gradually becoming an integral part of the global financial system, and it is our role to enable customers to benefit from this development within a reliable, secure, and regulated banking framework,” Bank Leumi’s Head of Strategy, Maya Ravia, said in a statement. 

The statement added that customers will also be able to trade other cryptocurrencies on top of Bitcoin. Leumi’s mobile banking app, PEPPER, will also provide the service. 

“The future of finance will run on open, programmable rails, and we believe the banks that move first will define the era that follows,” Galaxy Israel CEO Lior Lamesh said. 

“We are building one platform for trading and custody, with institutional-grade security at its core, and the onchain rails beneath it, through Galaxy Infrastructure and GalaxyOne Institutional, for banks around the world.”

According to Chainalysis, crypto adoption in Israel has been steadily growing over the years, with geopolitical headwinds including the war in Gaza and Iran, leading Israelis to digital assets as a “safe-haven.”

This post Israeli Bank Leumi to Debut Bitcoin Trading With Galaxy Digital first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

What the CLARITY Act Actually Does for Bitcoin

In July 2025, House Republicans staged a coordinated three-bill blitz they called ‘Crypto Week;, advancing the GENIUS, CLARITY, and the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act in the same five day stretch. The GENIUS Act was signed into law within 24 hours, creating a regulatory framework for dollar-backed stablecoins. However, the other two bills weren’t so lucky. The Anti-CBDC Surveillance State passed the House by an extremely narrow margin, and got stuck in Senate purgatory without a floor vote in place for over a year.

Following the House’s bipartisan passage of the CLARITY Act, the bill landed in the Senate Banking Committee where it sat for nearly a year. When the bill finally emerged out of committee, its cover page included the phrase “Strike out all after the enacting clause and insert the part printed in italic.”

Translation: 100% of the bill had been rewritten.

If you pull up the bill on Congress’ website today, you can see that the first 256 pages (the entire House-passed bill) are struck through, line by line, top to bottom. Then, starting on page 257, the Senate’s new version of the bill begins. (This is still the official text on file; a further-updated draft has circulated since, but hasn’t been formally filed as an amendment.)

Given how much the bill has changed shape, it’s worth taking a step back and assessing how the CLARITY Act, in its post-June 1st form, actually affects Bitcoin, and if it can truly “act as the catalyst for the next bull run” as I see so often on X today.

What the bill does do for Bitcoin

Self-custody becomes a legally protected right

Section 605, the ‘Keep Your Coins Act’, prohibits federal regulators from restricting or impairing a person’s ability to self-custody for any lawful purpose. Self-custody currently has no statutory backing, and providing direct legislation creates a defense against future tyrannical powers requiring custodial intermediaries. 

While people often dismiss this threat as ‘fear mongering’ and ‘doomerism’, this type of overreach does have recent historical precedent. In 2020, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin directed FinCEN to propose a rule targeting “unhosted wallets”. It would have required exchanges to collect names and home addresses for anyone moving more than $3,000/day into their private wallet, and file reports to FinCEN for anything over $10,000/day. Although the rule ultimately lost momentum, it remained on the books and un-withdrawn for almost four years. During that period, any Treasury Secretary could have revived and finalized it without any new legislation.

This is the exact scenario Section 605 is written to prevent from happening again.

Bitcoin developers, node operators, and non-custodial wallet makers get explicit immunity from money-transmitter liability

Section 604, Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, says a “non-controlling” developer or provider can’t be classified as a money transmitting business for doing that. Prime examples are Samourai Wallet and Tornado Cash. Both were open-source, non-custodial projects whose developers were criminally prosecuted under the theory that publishing the code made them unlicensed money transmitters. Samourai’s founders pleaded guilty in April 2026, and Tornado Cash’s Roman Storm was convicted on the same charge in August 2025.

Section 604 does not undo either case, but it does draw a line so the next open-source developer doesn’t have to find out where it is in federal court.

Bitcoin gets a statutory green light at the banking level

Section 401, the “Permissibility of Digital Asset Activities”, is the only section of the CLARITY Act that is “bullish” for Bitcoin’s price, by my estimations. This section would finally let banks, brokerages, and institutions treat Bitcoin like a real asset class, pulling in a wave of new capital.

The section lets financial holding companies, national banks, state banks, and credit unions custody digital assets, lend against them as collateral, operate nodes, provide brokerage and clearing services, and act as a market maker or dealer, all without needing extra prior approval beyond what banking law already requires. This section uses the term “digital asset,” which is broadly defined through the already-enacted GENIUS Act. Unlike “digital commodity” or “ancillary asset” elsewhere in the bill, Bitcoin clearly and unambiguously qualifies here. 

The addressable market this opens up is enormous. US commercial banks alone hold $25.7 trillion in total assets, nearly 20 times Bitcoin’s entire $1.3 trillion market cap. Custody giants like State Street and Northern Trust each sit on custody books that individually dwarf the whole Bitcoin market several times over. None of that capital needs to move far, or take much risk, to move the price of an asset this size. It just needs a legal, statutory door like Section 401 to walk through.

What the bill doesn’t do for Bitcoin

Bitcoin’s commodity status doesn’t get locked into federal law (at least not yet)

As it currently stands, Bitcoin is treated as a commodity because the CFTC says so and courts have agreed in the course of enforcement cases. However, that is precedent, not statute. There is no framework in place preventing future regulators from not viewing it that way.

The House-passed version of the CLARITY Act would have closed that gap. That language was struck out entirely when the Senate rewrote the bill on June 1, and for weeks, nothing replaced it.

The July 22 draft of the CLARITY Act merges in the Senate Agriculture Committee’s CFTC framework, which does add the missing definition. But that draft isn’t law or a filed amendment yet.

It doesn’t ban a Fed CBDC

The House-passed version of the bill had a section called the “Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act”, which prohibited the federal reserve from issuing a retail CBDC. This section was part of the 256 pages struck by the Senate Banking Committee, and the current form of the bill offers no operative section on the matter.

Even if it passes, rules won’t actually exist for a while.

This is where the “CLARITY Act supercycle incoming” narrative falls flat. A signed bill doesn’t come with a functioning regulator attached. The CFTC would need to build one almost completely from scratch.

The GENIUS Act, signed last year, missed its entire one-year rulemaking deadline. Zero final rules, across six federal agencies, as of mid-2026. CLARITY would hand the CFTC the biggest new mandate in the bill, and the CFTC currently has a single sitting commissioner and staff headcount has dropped 21% in one year.

So, is CLARITY a Bitcoin bill?

Honestly? No.

CLARITY is bullish for crypto broadly, and only narrowly bullish for Bitcoin specifically. The vast majority of the bill exists to give altcoins a way out of securities law limbo, which is a problem that Bitcoin does not acutely possess.

Though, “not the main point” is not the same as “it doesn’t matter”. The bill provides specific pro-Bitcoin language that’s worth supporting on its own terms.

Ultimately, whether the bill passes or falls into legislative oblivion, Bitcoin’s core principles remain the same: a decentralized protocol governed by mathematical certainty, and the world’s first digital commodity, with a market cap north of $1.3 trillion.

Bitcoin will never live or die on Capitol Hill.

This is a guest post by Isaiah Austin. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

This post What the CLARITY Act Actually Does for Bitcoin first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Isaiah Austin.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin’s Bear Cycle Looks Familiar — And That Might Be the Bullish Case

Bitcoin has fallen from a record high of roughly $126,080 in October to trade recently in the low-$60,000s — a decline of nearly 50% that has rattled sentiment. But it may just be business as usual. 

According to a Thursday report from asset manager VanEck, Bitcoin’s current slump tracks the asset’s historical four-year halving cycle, in which mining rewards are periodically cut in half, tightening new supply and often preceding a bear phase. The firm framed this downturn as a recurring feature of Bitcoin’s market structure rather than a break from it.

VanEck’s GEO framework — which tracks Global Liquidity, Ecosystem Leverage, and On-Chain Activity — currently shows two of three signals reading neutral, with ecosystem leverage in constructive territory. The firm says that combination points to early signs of a bottom forming, and that it may be time to begin scaling into positions.

Separate research from blockchain analytics firm CryptoQuant points in a similar direction. The firm’s analysts highlighted on-chain data showing that long-term Bitcoin holders — typically the market’s steadiest, most loss-tolerant cohort — are now sitting on deeper unrealized losses than the market overall, based on adjusted Net Unrealized Profit/Loss (NUPL) data. 

Analyst MorenoDV noted this week that this exact dynamic, long-term holders hurting more than average, has shown up at every prior major cycle bottom.

Still, CryptoQuant urged caution against declaring a bottom prematurely. In past cycles, that same long-term-holder metric fell to much deeper negative extremes before a true low was reached. 

Current readings haven’t gotten there yet, meaning the biggest cryptocurrency could still face one more sharp capitulation move — unless stronger institutional demand and a more resilient holder base allow this cycle to bottom out with less damage than previous ones.

Taken together, the two reports suggest a market that looks stressed by historical standards, but not yet at the extremes that have marked past cycle floors.

This post Bitcoin’s Bear Cycle Looks Familiar — And That Might Be the Bullish Case first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

White House to Host Crypto Industry Execs Next Week: Report

Crypto and prediction market bigwigs are set to gather at the White House next week, according to a Thursday report from POLITICO. 

The report, citing people with knowledge of the matter, said the industry officials would meet one day before the Commodity Futures Trading Commission holds a meeting for its new Innovation Advisory Committee. The committee will feature a panel of experts also from the crypto, prediction market and traditional finance spheres. 

Despite the long-awaited crypto Clarity Act being delayed, regulators are moving ahead with pro-crypto initiatives. 

POLITICO’s report did not mention if President Trump would attend the event. 

Last week, pro-crypto lawmakers were hoping the Clarity Act passed before Congress departed for August recess. After a delay, a vote will now go ahead in September.

Lawmakers started mulling over a new draft of the bill, which was passed by the House of Representatives last year, in July. The text tackled the issue of ethics, banning government officials from promoting or making money from crypto.  

President Trump campaigned on a ticket to help the America become the crypto capital of the world, and received backing from major players in the space. 

Since taking office, the president has signed a number of pro-crypto measures, including a March 2025 executive order directing the creation of a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.

Regulators have also scrapped a number of high-profile lawsuits against crypto companies, and made a push to watchdog the industry in a more helpful way.

This post White House to Host Crypto Industry Execs Next Week: Report first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Tether Finally Completes Independent Audit of Reserves With KPMG

Stablecoin giant Tether has announced that KPMG U.S. completed the first independent audit of its reserves after years of struggling to get a Big Four accounting firm to do so.

The San Salvador-based company, which issues the largest stablecoin in existence, USDT, said the audit was “the largest inaugural financial audit in history.”

Tether for years was criticized for being coy about its reserves and not having an independent audit of what it holds behind its flagship token. Tether said over the years that it was eager to work with a Big Four firm for an audit. 

“For years, some detractors said an audit of Tether could not be completed,” Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said in a statement. 

“They said the Company refused to subject itself to the most rigorous scrutiny. We have once again proven them wrong. Completing our financial statement audit sets a new standard for the industry and reflects the leadership we’ve brought to this market from the start.”

Tether did not mention its Bitcoin holdings in its statement, nor did it immediately respond to questions from Bitcoin Magazine. 

But it said that KPMG “physically counted and inspected every individual gold bar held by Tether, verifying the existence and identifying information of each bar rather than relying solely on reports from custodians or counterparties.”

Tether added that all assets and statements were subject to “independent substantive testing and verification.”

The company has in recent years upped its gold buys, holds more U.S. treasuries than some countries and has nearly $60 billion in Bitcoin in its reserves, according to data from Arkham Intelligence. 

“Tether has evolved from a disruptive stablecoin issuer into one of the most financially significant and operationally sophisticated private companies in the world,” continued Ardoino.

“This audit demonstrates that our financial infrastructure and governance have evolved alongside that responsibility.”

Tether’s USDT product has a market cap of over $183 billion, making it the third biggest cryptocurrency in existence.

This post Tether Finally Completes Independent Audit of Reserves With KPMG first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Gemini’s second-quarter revenue rose as its credit-card business expanded. But the core exchange shrank, while operating costs and losses remained above last year’s levels after a restructuring that cut about 200 jobs.

The company generated $45.5 million in total revenue, up from $33.3 million a year earlier, according to its Aug. 13 quarterly filing. Exchange revenue, however, fell 38% to $12.5 million from $20.2 million.

The decline was steeper in activity. Spot matched trading volume on Gemini’s platform fell to $3.8 billion from $11.3 billion, a drop of about 66%. Newer products carried more of the top line while the exchange generated less.

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Jun 6, 2026 · Oluwapelumi Adejumo

Costs shifted, but the exchange stayed weak

In February, Gemini approved a restructuring that included winding down operations in the UK, the European Union, other European jurisdictions, and Australia. The plan covered up to 200 employees, or about 25% of its workforce at the time. It preserved operations in the US and Singapore.

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Some cost progress was visible, although the filing does not isolate it as realized restructuring savings. Employee compensation, benefits and personnel costs, excluding stock compensation and restructuring, fell 20% year over year to $27.9 million. Compared with the first quarter, operating expenses improved about 15% and operating loss improved about 18%.

The annual comparison remained weaker. Total operating expenses rose 24% to $122.4 million, and operating loss widened to $76.9 million from $65.4 million. The reset reduced parts of the cost base without restoring consolidated operating performance to last year’s level.

The loss measures also moved in different directions. GAAP net loss fell to $107.7 million from $133.2 million. Adjusted EBITDA loss widened to $74.0 million from $51.9 million. Gemini primarily attributed the adjusted EBITDA deterioration to market-related losses on bitcoin it received through a May private placement. The quarter’s reconciliation showed no restructuring charge. That means the wider adjusted EBITDA loss should not be attributed to the job cuts.

Card growth lifted revenue but added costs

Credit-card revenue rose to $16.2 million from $4.9 million, driving most of Gemini’s $12.2 million increase in total revenue. The company also disclosed $8.7 million in combined card rewards and promotional and referral incentives. It also reported a $16.1 million credit-loss provision affected by an identified identity-fraud cohort.

Those consolidated disclosures are not a complete card profit-and-loss statement and do not establish a definitive margin. They do show that the new revenue carried material costs. Total transaction losses across Gemini climbed to $20.1 million from $3.6 million.

Prediction markets contributed $524,000 after launching in December 2025. The early contribution was too small to change the quarter’s economics. One quarter does not establish the product’s long-term potential.

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Jul 2, 2026 · Oluwapelumi Adejumo

The restructuring produced visible cost progress, but it had not materially repaired Gemini’s core exchange or year-over-year operating performance in the second quarter.

The post Latest Gemini earnings expose crypto’s new exchange reality – more total revenue, less crypto trading appeared first on CryptoSlate.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission canceled the open meeting scheduled for Friday morning, delaying the first public look at a possible crypto fundraising regime.

The agency's Aug. 13 cancellation notice gave no reason or replacement date. The agenda called for commissioners to consider issuing a proposal for a tailored offering regime covering certain investment contracts involving crypto assets.

An affirmative vote would only have opened a rulemaking process. Adoption, an effective date and an issuer's ability to rely on any final exemption would have required later steps. Current law remains unchanged; the cancellation instead delays proposal text that could have revealed eligibility standards, disclosure duties and resale conditions.

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Aug 11, 2026 · Liam 'Akiba' Wright

That leaves issuers with greater clarity about when a token is separate from an investment contract, but no new crypto fundraising route for development. The available launch paths remain the existing registration and exemption framework.

What the March interpretation changes for crypto fundraising

The SEC's March interpretation separates a crypto asset from the transaction in which it is sold. A crypto asset that is not itself a security can still be offered as part of an investment contract when buyers invest in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits from an issuer's essential managerial efforts. The SEC's press release highlighted that asset-and-transaction distinction.

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The relationship can change as a project develops. Once an issuer completes the essential work it promised, or buyers can no longer reasonably expect those efforts, the token can separate from the associated investment contract. The interpretation says obligations arising from the original investment-contract transaction survive that later separation: the original offer and sale still had to be registered or conducted under an available exemption.

The interpretation therefore resolves a classification question while leaving capital formation under the existing Securities Act framework. It encourages clear public disclosure of issuer promises and milestones that matter to the investment-contract analysis, yet it creates neither a fundraising exemption nor a standardized disclosure document for token launches.

A separate policy lane came from SEC Chair Paul Atkins. In March, he outlined personal ideas for startup, fundraising and investment-contract safe harbors, including a fundraising limit of “say $75 million” in 12 months. His remarks expressly presented the framework as his own thinking. The figure remains an illustration rather than an approved Commission ceiling, and the SEC's rulemaking index showed no published Regulation Crypto proposal as of Aug. 14.

For a development-stage issuer, that distinction reaches the timing of the raise. Buyers funding promised software, network growth or management activity can be purchasing an investment contract even when the transferable unit is a non-security crypto asset. Compliance attaches to the launch transaction when capital is raised. The possibility that the token will later trade separately cannot replace registration or an exemption for that original transaction.

The launch routes available now

Issuers whose token sales create investment contracts can still raise capital. The route determines who may buy, whether the offering can be marketed publicly, how much can be raised and which disclosures or intermediaries are required.

The SEC's offering-pathways guidance and exempt-offerings overview show the practical split. Rules 506(b) and 506(c) support private or accredited-investor capital without an offering cap, while Regulation Crowdfunding and Regulation A provide forms of broader access with dollar ceilings and added process. Rule 504 serves smaller raises. Regulation S separately covers qualifying offers and sales outside the United States.

Token projects can also face crypto-specific disclosure work within those general routes. A nonbinding Division of Corporation Finance staff statement says the relevant topics depend on the facts and materiality. They can include development milestones and funding needs, holder rights and transfer restrictions, token supply, technical and cybersecurity risks, financial statements, and code exhibits when code memorializes holder rights.

The practical dividing line is the fundraising transaction. A sale that falls outside an investment contract may avoid Securities Act registration for that transaction. A team financing unfinished work through promises of essential managerial effort must use a registered or exempt offering at launch, even if the token later separates from the investment contract.

Congress's proposed alternative

Congress has placed a tailored crypto fundraising route into legislative text, though issuers cannot use it today. The Senate Banking Committee released H.R. 3633 text ahead of markup and advanced the measure 15-9 in May. The official GovInfo record identifies it as reported in the Senate rather than enacted.

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Jul 14, 2026 · Oluwapelumi Adejumo

Senator Cynthia Lummis released updated text in July that would direct the SEC to create Regulation Crypto. For qualifying investment-contract transactions involving ancillary assets, the draft proposes an exemption for the greater of $50 million per calendar year for up to four years or 10% of outstanding ancillary-asset value, subject to a $200 million aggregate cap. It also proposes initial disclosures and a notice of reliance at least 30 days before the first covered offer.

Those mechanics belong to proposed legislation, separate from Atkins's illustrative $75 million concept and from any future SEC proposal. They would become relevant only after enactment and the rulemaking required by the bill.

For now, March guidance helps determine when a token is separate from an investment contract. Crypto fundraising for promised development work still runs through existing offering rules. The next agency signal would be a new meeting date or a published proposal on the SEC's meeting page or rulemaking index. Until then, investor eligibility, intermediary requirements, disclosure costs and resale conditions continue to shape which token launches can proceed.

The post SEC cancels crypto fundraising meeting, leaving token issuers with no new path to fund development appeared first on CryptoSlate.

UBS Group’s Aug. 13 regulatory filing showed that shares underlying its reported call options on BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) climbed to 1.95 million during the second quarter, while its reported non-option share position increased 11.94%.

The Form 13F filing, which the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission accepted on Aug. 13, covered positions reported as of June 30. Across five non-option IBIT rows, UBS listed 407,890 shares, up from 364,371 across comparable rows at March 31. The increase was 43,519 shares.

However, the call line changed far more. UBS had reported calls covering 80,000 underlying shares at March 31, then 1.95 million at June 30. That was an increase of 1.87 million underlying-share equivalents, or 2,337.5%, leaving the quarter-end amount at more than 24 times its March level.

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Form 13F presents option quantities as the shares underlying the contracts. These quantities are distinct from the non-option share rows, and the form does not report exercise status.

By contrast, the put line moved in the other direction. Shares underlying reported IBIT puts declined from 303,300 at March 31 to 143,300 at June 30, a 52.75% decrease.

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What the reported values mean

The second-quarter table assigned $64.9 million of underlying market value to the call row and $4.8 million to the put row, compared with $13.6 million across the five non-option share rows.

Under the SEC’s Form 13F instructions, options are reported using the underlying security’s share amount and quarter-end value. The form does not report the premium, strike, expiry, or profit and loss. The $64.9 million call figure therefore describes underlying market value rather than the amount paid for the options or a delta-adjusted measure of economic exposure.

Even so, the disclosure leaves the account beneficiaries and purpose of the positions unresolved. SEC guidance says Form 13F covers securities under an institutional manager’s investment discretion and can aggregate positions across related managers and account types.

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Any selection among client mandates, hedging, market making or directional trading would be speculative. The same limitation applies to classifying the positions as part of UBS’s corporate treasury.

The positions were dated June 30, more than six weeks before the filing became public. Subsequent changes fall outside the disclosure.

UBS’s reported non-option IBIT shares rose modestly, while its call line expanded by more than 24 times. The filing establishes that the disclosed instrument mix changed sharply. Account beneficiaries and trade purpose remain unresolved.

The post Bitcoin ETF calls surge 24-fold as puts fall 52.75%, reaching 1.95M IBIT underlying shares appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Securitize, a platform that issues and services tokenized securities, expanded the activity flowing through its system in the second quarter, but Securitize's revenue did not reflect that scale.

Average tokenized assets under management reached $4.3 billion, up 16% from a year earlier, while aggregate transaction volume climbed 147% to $5.3 billion, according to the company's second-quarter results. Securitize's revenue nevertheless fell 5% to $14.4 million, and the company reported a $21.7 million net loss.

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Securitize's revenue lagged platform growth

Securitize defines transaction volume as investments, redemptions, dividends and cross-chain asset movements. The increase was driven mainly by subscription and redemption activity in BlackRock's BUIDL and BUIDL-I funds, along with a $250 million subscription to the Securitize Tokenized AAA CLO Fund, according to the company's management discussion. The measure captures platform activity, a broader category than recognized revenue.

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Tokenization revenue fell 12% to $7.8 million, which management attributed primarily to fewer completed on-chain integrations. Asset-servicing revenue rose 3% to $6.6 million, but the roughly $200,000 increase was not enough to offset the decline in tokenization revenue.

A sequential comparison also shows that higher platform activity did not ensure higher quarterly sales. In the first quarter, Securitize generated $19.5 million of revenue and positive adjusted EBITDA of $800,000 on lower average AUM of $3.2 billion and lower transaction volume of $1.9 billion.

Operating costs and expenses then jumped 56% year over year to $24.1 million. Selling, general and administrative expenses rose by $4.7 million, reflecting higher professional, consulting, accounting and public-company readiness costs. Compensation and benefits increased by $2.5 million as Securitize added staff, including employees connected to its MG Stover fund-administration acquisition. The expected credit-loss provision rose by another $1.2 million after a specific customer receivable was written off.

Those costs pushed the operating loss to $9.7 million from about $200,000 a year earlier. Adjusted EBITDA, a company-defined non-GAAP measure, swung from a $1.8 million profit to a $5.5 million loss. The reversal shows that the deterioration extended beyond the liability remeasurements that affected the headline net loss.

The $21.7 million GAAP loss included a net $11.7 million adverse fair-value movement, according to the company's reconciliation. A $29.3 million option-liability loss and a $4.3 million loss on simple agreements for future equity were partly offset by a $21.8 million derivative-liability gain. These non-cash remeasurements were excluded from adjusted EBITDA.

The balance sheet changed materially after the quarter ended. Securitize had $33.6 million in cash on June 30, one day before completing its business combination with Cantor Equity Partners II. An unaudited pro forma balance sheet, which illustrates the transaction as if it had closed on June 30 rather than reporting a separately measured July cash balance, showed $352.6 million of combined cash and no borrowings after convertible notes and related instruments converted into equity. The same pro forma statement still showed $118.5 million of total liabilities, including earnout liabilities and interest payable.

The next test is whether Securitize can convert rising platform use into more integration and asset-servicing revenue while keeping its expanded public-company cost base from outpacing sales.

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The post Tokenized transactions surge to $5.3 billion but generate just $14M as costs soar by 56% appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Ethereum's post-quantum migration could create a problem for regulated banks years before any quantum computer poses a real threat to validator keys.

Thomas Brunner, Sygnum Bank's Head of Custody and Staking, thinks differently about quantum risk in crypto than most people do.

Ethereum's Post-Quantum team says layer-1 upgrades could be completed by 2029, though it stresses there is no fixed date and the roadmap can still shift. The plan starts with a post-quantum validator-key registry before eventually replacing today's BLS validator signatures with hash-based alternatives such as leanXMSS.

Ethereum shows why bank backups become the danger

BLS is the signature scheme that Ethereum validators use today, and it carries no state to manage, allowing a validator to sign as many times as needed. leanXMSS is built from a structure of one-time keys, and signing twice with the same index hands an attacker the material needed to forge a signature.

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Coinbase, Solana, Polkadot, and Bitcoin all moved on PQ planning, but wallet UX and aggregation may decide the winner.

Jan 27, 2026 · Gino Matos

NIST's SP 800-208 standard requires stateful hash-based signing to occur within a hardware module, bars the export of private key material, and expects the private key to exist in one instance.

Brunner said that the standard is blunt about the consequences and lacks a backup copy, which directly conflicts with how banks normally build resilience.

Backup, replication, hot standby, failover, and disaster recovery all either duplicate the signing environment or roll it backward in time. Restoring from an old snapshot reuses the index, and failing over to a standby that has been advancing its own counter does as well.

NIST is already working on a future revision that would allow controlled key export with mitigations, which would ease the non-export rule creating this conflict, but that update does not exist yet.

The multi-year runway banks need

Brunner said a full cryptographic inventory, mapping every place a key lives and what depends on it, typically takes six months to a year on its own, before a bank touches anything.

Banks sign inside hardware security modules, and Brunner said the bank cannot move faster than its vendors ship and certify post-quantum support with reliable state handling, a validation cycle it does not control.

Key ceremonies and dual-control procedures then need to be redesigned, followed by internal risk approval, external audit and, where relevant, supervisory review. Put those steps in series, and the arithmetic alone produces a multi-year timeline.

A bank beginning its inventory in 2027 would be roughly on time for a 2029 target.

Regulators are already flagging the planning gap

Switzerland's FINMA surveyed 60 financial institutions on quantum computing risk between November 2025 and January 2026 and found most understood the danger but lacked a clear migration roadmap.

The regulator's July report found that 72% of institutions had neither planned nor implemented measures for quantum-safe encryption, and only 8% had a specific roadmap.

FINMA's findings describe a broader planning gap across traditional finance, one Brunner said is the cheapest part of the problem to close because a roadmap alone would fix it.

Ethereum's proposed validator-key registry would cap the number of post-quantum keys the network processes per slot, with researchers currently using 16 registrations per slot as a representative parameter to spread the transition over weeks or months.

Ethereum Research has warned that a last-minute rush to register could overload the queue and leave validators unable to sign once BLS is deprecated, threatening finality itself.

Brunner's point about the queue is that a bank arriving late registers alongside every other latecomer and cannot control where it lands in line. Being early is the only way a bank can gain any real influence over its place in that queue.

What breaks first

Brunner's sequence for how a bank runs into trouble starts with the audit itself. If the signature scheme underneath a bank's custody process moves to something new but its documented controls have not been redesigned and retested, the attestation no longer describes what the bank is doing. Auditors rely on that description holding.

A validator that cannot produce signatures accepted under the prevailing consensus rules stops performing its duties, and any resulting penalties are borne directly by client positions.

Brunner said a bank that cannot describe and evidence a compliant custody process should not keep onboarding client assets into it. Cryptographic compromise, the scenario most people picture first, arrives last in his sequence.

Ethereum can show how the transition could go from here

The bull case has hardware vendors shipping state-aware signing modules in time, with monotonic counters and atomic state updates giving auditors a clean pattern to test against.

NIST's anticipated revision to its export rules gives banks a safer way to build redundancy without duplicating usable key material, and Ethereum's registry incentives keep registration spread out as intended. Banks that started their inventories in 2027 clear internal and external review with room to spare.

The bear case has a bank starting its inventory in 2028 or later, discovering validator keys embedded across vendor stacks, staking providers, and disaster-recovery procedures it cannot fully map in time.

Auditors issue a qualified finding once they realize that the documented controls no longer align with how keys are handled, and that new staked-ETH onboarding slows or stops. The bank still has to join Ethereum's registration queue behind everyone else who waited too.

Reaching an ordinary audit day without being able to prove control of validator keys is enough to fail Ethereum's quantum transition, with or without a working quantum computer anywhere in sight.

The post Ethereum’s post-quantum roadmap puts banks on a 2027 deadline nobody is talking about appeared first on CryptoSlate.

BNB trades at 611.93 US dollars on 11 August 2026, 53.2 per cent below the twelve-month high of 1,307.76 dollars from 9 October 2025 and 12.1 per cent above the twelve-month low of 545.86 dollars from 1 July 2026. The coin has recovered from its summer low without coming near the levels of last autumn. The question here is a narrow one: what does the current price say about an entry today, and what would have to happen for that reading to be wrong?

The price data used here was collected by cryptoticker.io on 11 August 2026 from the public market data interface of CoinGecko. We use daily closing prices over the past 365 days and calculate the moving averages and the relative strength index ourselves, applying the standard formulas (RSI after Wilder, 14 periods). One caveat belongs in the open: the volume series contains nine implausible daily values between 2 and 10 April 2026, orders of magnitude above the normal level. Those nine days were excluded from every twelve-month volume comparison below; the seven-day and thirty-day windows fall outside that period and are unaffected.

BNB price analysis: where the BNB price stands right now

Three marks frame the current BNB price. The first is the twelve-month low at 545.86 dollars, reached on 1 July 2026 and not tested since. The second is the 50-day exponential moving average at 586.82 dollars, which the price reclaimed during the July recovery and has held. The third is the 200-day exponential moving average at 661.04 dollars, 7.4 per cent above the current price, which has capped every recovery attempt this year.

That puts BNB in the zone between the short-term and the long-term average, the least conclusive part of any chart, because both camps can point to something. Buyers have the weeks spent above the 50-day line. Sellers have the 200-day line, which still runs above the price and still slopes downward. Over 30 days BNB has gained 6.7 per cent, over 90 days it has lost 8.9 per cent, and over the full year it is down 26.6 per cent. The recovery is real and it is small relative to what came before it.

With a market capitalisation of about 81.5 billion dollars and a circulating supply of roughly 133.2 million BNB, derived from capitalisation and price on the same day, BNB remains one of the largest assets in the market. Size changes what a recovery has to look like: a coin of this weight does not double on order flow alone. Our BNB price prediction tracks the marks that follow from here.

Is the BNB downtrend broken or only interrupted?

A downtrend ends when the price sets a higher low and then takes out the previous high. BNB has completed the first half of that and not the second. The low from 1 July at 545.86 dollars has held. What is missing is a daily close above the 200-day average at 661.04 dollars that survives more than a few sessions.

The distinction decides the entry question. If the trend is only interrupted, the current zone is a pause inside a movement that continues downward, and a purchase here is a purchase into a counter-trend rally. If the trend is broken, the same zone is the base of the next move and the 200-day line becomes a target rather than a ceiling. From the chart alone both readings stay open, though the evidence leans slightly towards the second: the price is holding a higher low, but on thin volume, and thin volume is the weaker form of support.

From our point of view the most plausible interpretation is a base that forms slowly and may fail more than once before it holds. That is an assessment rather than a fact, and it is testable: several daily closes below 545.86 dollars would mean the higher low did not hold.

What RSI and moving averages mean for a BNB entry

The relative strength index over 14 days stands at 66.7, in the upper third of the range and close to the threshold of 70 that is conventionally read as overbought. It is the most awkward number for anyone considering an entry today, because it says the recent move has already used up part of the short-term momentum. Buying into an RSI near 70 means buying after the easy part of a recovery.

The two averages tell the longer story. The price sits 4.3 per cent above the 50-day line and 7.4 per cent below the 200-day line, so the short-term trend has turned while the long-term trend has not. That constellation resolves in one of two ways: either the price works through the 200-day line and the long-term average follows, or the short-term average rolls over and joins the longer one. Nothing in the current data settles which applies here.

For an entry this is a question of timing rather than conviction. An RSI at 66.7 argues against buying the full position at once, and it says nothing about whether BNB is worth owning at all.

What trading volume reveals about demand for BNB

Volume gives the least comfort in this picture. Over the past seven days BNB traded an average of 586 million dollars per day against 555 million over 30 days, an increase of 5.6 per cent. Measured against the cleaned twelve-month median of 976 million dollars per day, current volume runs around 40 per cent lower.

That reading is uncomfortable for a bullish case. The July recovery happened because sellers stepped back, not because buyers arrived in force. The two produce the same line on a chart and very different foundations underneath it. A price that rises on falling volume gives back its gains more readily, because less capital is committed at the higher level.

It is also the cleanest early indicator to watch. If volume moves back towards the twelve-month median while the price holds above the 50-day average, the recovery gains a foundation it currently lacks. If the price approaches the 200-day line on volume like today's, a failed test is the likelier outcome.

Structural factors that speak for BNB beyond the chart

Three structural points sit apart from the chart. The first is supply: BNB's circulating supply stands at roughly 133.2 million tokens and has been reduced over years through a documented burn mechanism, which distinguishes it from assets with open-ended issuance. Shrinking supply does not create demand, but it removes a headwind that weighs on inflationary coins.

The second is usage. BNB is the fee token of BNB Chain, so demand is tied to activity on that chain rather than to sentiment alone. The technical basis is public in the BNB Smart Chain documentation, and the mechanism through which validators secure the network is set out in the staking overview.

The third is regulation, and it cuts both ways. BNB's utility is closely tied to one exchange group and one chain, which makes it more sensitive to regulatory change than a broadly distributed asset. In the European Union the framework for crypto asset services is set by the European Securities and Markets Authority, whose published material at ESMA is the primary source for what applies to providers here. For holders the practical consequence is that access conditions can change without the chart moving first.

What speaks for buying BNB at current prices

Three points make the constructive case, stated precisely rather than generously.

First, the price is holding above the 50-day average. After a year in which BNB lost 26.6 per cent, the short-term trend has turned upward and stayed there through several weeks of trading. That is the minimum precondition for any recovery, and it is currently met.

Second, the distance to the twelve-month high is large. At 53.2 per cent below the October 2025 peak, a buyer today pays roughly half of what a buyer paid ten months ago for the same asset with the same supply mechanism. Whether that is cheap depends on what the network is worth; the discount to recent history is a fact rather than a view.

Third, the structural coupling described above is intact. BNB's demand comes from an operating network with fee revenue and staking rather than from expectations alone. Among large-cap assets that trait is less common than the capitalisation table suggests.

What speaks against buying BNB at current prices

Three points make the case against, and today they carry more weight than the constructive ones.

First, volume. At around 40 per cent below the cleaned twelve-month median, the recovery lacks participation, and a move that few are trading reverses cheaply.

Second, the RSI at 66.7. Short-term momentum has largely been spent, so an entry here buys into the later part of a move and raises the probability of an immediate drawdown even if the longer-term reading proves right.

Third, the 200-day average at 661.04 dollars still runs above the price and still falls. Every recovery attempt this year has stopped at or below that line, so until a close above it holds, the burden of proof stays with the buyers.

How to buy BNB at current prices: costs, custody and providers

Three things determine what an entry actually costs. The first is the trading fee, which varies between providers by more than most buyers assume on small positions. The second is the spread, often the larger cost at retail order sizes and rarely advertised. The third is withdrawal: whether the provider lets you move BNB to your own wallet, and what that transfer costs.

For the venues themselves, our crypto exchange comparison sets fees and features side by side, and the overview of regulated exchanges is the more relevant one if supervision within the EU is your priority. Individual venues are assessed in our Binance review, the Kraken review and the Bitpanda review.

Custody is the decision most buyers postpone. Coins left on an exchange stay under that provider's control, which is convenient and carries counterparty risk; coins in your own wallet remove that risk and hand you full responsibility for the keys. Our hardware wallet comparison covers the devices for the second route.

Is BNB a good buy at current prices, short term and long term

Short term, the data argues for patience rather than purchase. The RSI at 66.7 sits near the overbought threshold, volume runs 40 per cent below the twelve-month median, and the 200-day average at 661.04 dollars remains untested from below. A buyer entering today pays for a recovery the market has not confirmed with participation. As a defined condition rather than a general view: a daily close above 661.04 dollars on volume near the twelve-month median would change the short-term picture.

Long term, the assessment is more open and does not depend on the chart. It depends on whether BNB Chain keeps generating activity, whether the burn mechanism continues to reduce supply, and whether regulatory conditions in the major markets stay workable for the exchange group the token is tied to. If those three hold, the current level looks reasonable in retrospect; if one fails, the chart will not have warned you in time.

None of this is a recommendation to buy or to stay out. It describes the conditions under which the reading above stands and those under which it fails. Our assumption of a slowly forming base is refuted by several daily closes below 545.86 dollars and confirmed by a sustained close above the 200-day average on volume that has returned.

What to take away from this BNB analysis

1. BNB has reclaimed its 50-day average but remains 7.4 per cent below the 200-day line, so the short-term trend has turned while the long-term trend has not. The marks that follow are tracked in our BNB price prediction.
2. Volume is the weak point: around 40 per cent below the cleaned twelve-month median, the recovery rests on absent sellers rather than arriving buyers. If you buy anyway, the venue determines the cost, which our crypto exchange comparison sets out.
3. An RSI of 66.7 argues against entering the full position at once. For anything held beyond the next move, custody deserves its own decision, covered in our hardware wallet comparison.

Disclosure: Some of the providers mentioned in this article work with us through partner programmes. This has no influence on the price analysis or on our assessment of the chart situation; the price data comes from a public market data source and can be verified there.

(As of 11 August 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices, fees and conditions change; check them with the provider before every purchase. Crypto assets are subject to high price volatility, and a total loss is possible.)

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.

Cardano trades at 0.1846 US dollars. That is 80.8 percent below the twelve-month high of 0.9631 dollars from 18 August 2025, and 28.5 percent above the twelve-month low of 0.1436 dollars set on 29 June 2026. The market capitalisation stands at roughly 6.9 billion dollars. Anyone looking at ADA today is looking at an asset that has lost three quarters of its value over a year and has since stabilised. Which leads to the question this article addresses: is Cardano a good buy at current prices?

The figures in this article were collected by cryptoticker.io on 11 August 2026 from the public market data interface operated by CoinGecko. From 365 daily closing prices we calculated the 50-day and 200-day exponential moving averages, the 14-day relative strength index, the twelve-month high and low, the changes over 30, 90 and 365 days and the average daily trading volume, using standard formulas. Any reader can reproduce these numbers from the same source.

Cardano price analysis: where ADA stands and which levels matter

Three levels frame the picture. The twelve-month low at 0.1436 dollars, reached on 29 June 2026, now sits 28.5 percent below the market, so buyers have already paid up meaningfully from the panic level. The 50-day exponential moving average at 0.1801 dollars has flipped: it capped the price for most of the spring, and ADA now trades 2.5 percent above it, a cushion thin enough to fall inside a single ordinary trading day.

The third level is the 200-day exponential moving average at 0.2712 dollars, some 31.9 percent overhead. That gap is the most important number for anyone weighing an entry: closing it means a 47 percent advance, and until it closes the longer-term trend cannot be described as anything other than negative.

Over shorter windows the picture is more constructive than the annual figure implies. ADA has gained 14.0 percent over 30 days, while it is down 30.3 percent over 90 days and 76.1 percent over 365 days. The sequence matters more than any single figure: the deepest damage came earlier, and the most recent month has run against the direction of the year. Our rolling view on these levels is set out in the Cardano price prediction.

Is the Cardano downtrend broken or merely interrupted?

A downtrend is broken when a market stops making lower lows and reclaims the averages that defined the decline. Cardano has done the first and half of the second.

The lower-low sequence stopped on 29 June 2026 at 0.1436 dollars, and the price has held above that mark since. That is a change of behaviour rather than a change of trend, because markets stop falling long before they start rising.

On the averages the evidence is split. Reclaiming the 50-day line at 0.1801 dollars matters for a position lasting weeks, while the 200-day average at 0.2712 dollars has not been challenged. In our view this is most plausibly read as a base-building phase rather than a reversal, though such phases fail regularly and are only identified with certainty in hindsight. The 90-day change of minus 30.3 percent underlines the point: a market down 30 percent over a quarter and up 14 percent over a month is still net lower.

What RSI and moving averages mean for a Cardano entry

The 14-day relative strength index sits at 53.2. Below 30 is conventionally oversold, above 70 overbought, and the zone between 45 and 55 neutral. Cardano is in the middle of that neutral band.

For an entry decision this is more informative than it first appears. An RSI of 53 after a 76 percent annual decline indicates that selling pressure has genuinely eased, and equally that there is no oversold signal to buy into. Investors who wait for extremes find nothing actionable in either direction.

The relationship between the averages adds a constraint. For it to normalise, the 50-day line must rise for months, and it can only rise if the price stays above it. This is the mechanical reason why a recovery in an asset like Cardano tends to be slow even when it works.

What Cardano trading volume reveals about demand

Average daily trading volume over the past seven days was 352 million dollars, against 323 million dollars over thirty days. The seven-day figure is 9.0 percent higher, so participation has picked up modestly as the price has risen.

The comparison against the full year matters more. Median daily volume over 365 days was 406 million dollars, which places current activity roughly 13 percent below that median. The recovery of the past month has taken place on lighter turnover than the year's typical day.

This is the most cautionary data point in the analysis. Rising prices on falling volume are the classic signature of a market where sellers have stepped back rather than one where buyers have stepped in. The gain of the past 30 days appears to have been achieved largely through the absence of supply, and such an advance is fragile when supply returns.

The counter-argument deserves weight. Volume across the crypto market has been subdued through the summer of 2026, so a coin trading 13 percent below its own annual median is no outlier. We regard this as a reason for caution about the durability of the move rather than evidence that it is artificial.

Structural factors that speak for Cardano: supply, usage and regulation

The first is supply mechanics. Cardano has a hard cap of 45 billion ADA, of which roughly 36 billion circulate. New issuance comes from a reserve paying out at a declining rate, so the annual rate of supply expansion falls over time. For a long-term holder this differs materially from an asset with uncapped issuance, because the dilution that has to be outrun shrinks year after year.

The second is staking. ADA can be delegated to a stake pool without transferring custody and without a lock-up period, a design documented on the project's own stake pool delegation page. Delegation stays liquid, so delegated coins are not removed from the market, but the arrangement correlates with a holder base oriented towards longer holding periods. Protocol documentation is maintained at docs.cardano.org.

The third is the European regulatory environment. Under the Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation, which the European Securities and Markets Authority documents in its MiCA activities section, an established asset such as ADA can be offered by licensed European providers under a harmonised rulebook. That does not make ADA a better investment on its merits, but it does mean the risk of an abrupt delisting for regulatory reasons is lower than for assets whose classification remains contested.

What none of these factors provide is a mechanism that translates directly into price. They describe the conditions under which demand could express itself; they do not create the demand.

Three arguments for buying Cardano at current prices

The price has stopped falling, and it has been more than a month. The twelve-month low was set on 29 June 2026 and has held, and ADA has since added 28.5 percent and moved back above its 50-day average. In a market that had been making new lows repeatedly, six weeks without one is worth registering.

The 200-day average defines a visible upside reference. At 0.2712 dollars it sits 47 percent above the current price. This is not a forecast. It is the level at which the long-term trend would cease to be negative, which makes it the natural reference for anyone sizing a position.

Structural characteristics support a long holding period. Capped supply, a declining issuance schedule and availability through regulated European venues mean a multi-year position does not depend on continuous positive news. Investors comparing venues on fees and jurisdiction will find the criteria in our crypto exchange comparison.

Three arguments against buying Cardano at current prices

Volume does not confirm the recovery. Turnover runs 13 percent below the annual median. The advance of the past 30 days has been carried by the withdrawal of sellers rather than an influx of buyers, and a move built on absent supply reverses as soon as supply reappears.

The distance to the long-term trend is substantial. Closing the 31.9 percent gap to the 200-day average requires a 47 percent advance. Until then, every rally in Cardano is a counter-trend move by definition.

The technical picture offers no edge. An RSI of 53.2 is neutral. There is no oversold reading to exploit and no momentum to follow. An investor buying here is expressing a view about Cardano's future rather than acting on a signal the market is providing, and that distinction matters for position sizing.

How to buy Cardano at current prices: costs, custody and providers

Trading costs. Spot fees at European exchanges typically fall between 0.1 and 1.5 percent per trade depending on venue and order type, and the spread on ADA adds to that. Our reviews set out the fee structures, for example in the Kraken review and the Bitpanda review. Fees change, so verify them with the provider before you trade.

Regulatory standing. For investors in the European Economic Area, a provider authorised under the European framework simplifies tax documentation and the question of what happens if a venue runs into difficulty. Our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges covers which venues hold which permissions.

Custody. ADA held at an exchange is a claim against that exchange; ADA in a wallet you control is not. For a position intended to last years, self-custody removes counterparty risk at the cost of managing a seed phrase properly, a trade-off examined in our hardware wallet comparison. Delegating to a stake pool does not require giving up custody, so self-custody and staking are not mutually exclusive.

Since the analysis above identifies no timing signal, an investor treating the case for Cardano as a multi-year one has little reason to establish the whole position in one transaction.

So is Cardano a good buy at current prices?

Over the short term, measured in weeks to a few months, the data does not support a decisive position. RSI at 53.2 is neutral, the cushion above the 50-day average is within ordinary daily volatility, and volume runs below the annual median. From our perspective this is a phase in which patience costs little, since nothing in the configuration suggests an opportunity that disappears within days.

Over the long term, measured in years, the case rests on different considerations. At 80.8 percent below the twelve-month high, an investor buys an asset already repriced severely rather than one priced for optimism, and the capped supply works in favour of a long holder. This remains plausible but unproven, and it depends on adoption that has not yet shown up in the price.

The conditions under which this reading would be falsified can be stated precisely. The base-building assumption fails if Cardano closes below the twelve-month low of 0.1436 dollars for several consecutive days, particularly on rising volume, because that would re-establish the sequence of lower lows that stopped in June. It is confirmed if ADA holds above the 50-day average at 0.1801 dollars while daily volume returns above the annual median of 406 million dollars, since that combination indicates buyers entering rather than sellers merely pausing.

Neither scenario is a recommendation, and this article does not offer one. What the data supports is a description of the conditions and of the levels at which the current interpretation would have to be abandoned.

What to take away on Cardano

1. Cardano has reclaimed its 50-day average at 0.1801 dollars but remains 31.9 percent below the 200-day average. The trend is interrupted rather than reversed, and the levels that would change that are tracked in our Cardano price prediction.
2. The recovery of the past 30 days ran on volume 13 percent below the annual median. Confirmation requires turnover above 406 million dollars a day, and venues differ widely in what that costs you, as our crypto exchange comparison shows.
3. For a position meant to last years, custody matters as much as the entry price, a trade-off set out in our hardware wallet comparison.

Disclosure: Some of the providers mentioned in this article work with us through partner programmes. This has no influence on the price analysis or on the assessment of the chart situation; the price data comes from a public market data source and can be verified there.

(As of 11 August 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices, fees and terms change; check them with the provider before every purchase. Crypto assets are subject to high price volatility, and a total loss is possible.)

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.

What happened in crypto news today?

The single biggest story in crypto news today is what did not happen. The SEC was scheduled to meet this morning to propose Reg Crypto, its first purpose built rulemaking for digital assets, and it cancelled the session at the last minute with no replacement date.

The agency told reporters the meeting was being moved to a later date because of an unforeseen scheduling issue. The timing raised eyebrows because the meeting had been on the calendar since Monday and was widely read as the SEC stepping in to fill the vacuum left by the Senate failing to move the CLARITY Act before recess.

That matters more than a routine calendar shuffle. Reg Crypto was expected to open a limited path for issuing crypto securities without triggering full registration, and SEC Chairman Paul Atkins had positioned it as a centrepiece of his digital asset plan. The cancellation delays the start of rulemaking rather than killing the policy, but it also means issuers still have no idea what eligibility standards, disclosure rules or restrictions any exemption would carry.

Meanwhile the policy centre of gravity is shifting toward the executive branch. The White House is convening a crypto and prediction market roundtable on 19 August, one day before the CFTC holds its first Innovation Advisory Committee session on 20 August under the title "Crypto's Regulatory Evolution: From Uncertainty to Clarity." That CFTC meeting is advisory, so it produces recommendations rather than binding rules, and its agenda covers digital assets, autonomous AI agents and prediction markets.

For anyone tracking the legislative track, the Senate's next procedural test on the CLARITY Act is expected in September, with an ethics provision and banking industry opposition to stablecoin yield provisions still unresolved. The cloture motion formally ripens on 15 September.

What do crypto price updates show right now?

The honest answer is very little movement, which is itself the story. Total crypto market cap sits at roughly 2.18 trillion dollars, essentially flat on the day, while 24 hour volume has dropped more than 10 percent to about 48.17 billion dollars and Bitcoin dominance holds near 58.45 percent.

Here are the crypto price updates across the top of the market:

Two things stand out. Almost the entire top of the market is red over 24 hours, but the moves are tiny, mostly under one percent. And the year to date column is brutal: Bitcoin is down more than 28 percent in 2026 and Ethereum is down almost 37 percent, with XRP the worst of the majors at minus 45 percent. Bitcoin is now trading at roughly half its October high near 126,000 dollars.

The compression is deliberate rather than accidental. Bitcoin implied volatility recently fell to its lowest reading since late May, down from highs near 60 percent in early June. A market that refuses to react to bad headlines is usually storing energy for a move, though direction is not guaranteed.

Why are privacy coins still the only real bid?

Look at the year to date column again. $Monero is up 6.30 percent in 2026 and $Zcash is down only 6.93 percent, in a year where Ethereum lost more than a third of its value. Relative to the majors, that is enormous outperformance.

Privacy assets have effectively decoupled from the broader market, with roughly 28 percent of Zcash supply now sitting in shielded addresses and more than a third of all transactions touching that private layer, which points to structural demand rather than pure speculation. Analysts frame the shift as privacy moving from ideology to utility as surveillance on public blockchains expands.

There is also a visible leveraged bet in play. A new wallet deposited about 3.56 million USDC to Hyperliquid and opened a 4x long on roughly 36,000 XMR worth about 14.33 million dollars, with take profit targets between 475 and 516 dollars. That is the kind of positioning that amplifies moves in both directions, and privacy coin liquidity is thin enough for it to matter.

The obvious risk is regulatory. Privacy coins remain the sector most exposed to a delisting wave from licensed European platforms as tighter rules phase in, so the outperformance carries a tail risk the majors do not have.

Is Hyperliquid the standout of the year?

Hyperliquid is up 122.77 percent year to date, making it the only large cap that has genuinely worked in 2026. The driver is mechanical rather than narrative: the protocol runs a continuous buyback funded by trading fees, and regulated products have added a second layer of demand.

That distinction is worth internalising. In a year where token narratives have repeatedly failed, the assets holding up are the ones with a structural, cash flow linked bid or a genuine use case, not the ones with the best marketing.

What is happening with Bitcoin ETF flows and Strategy?

Institutional demand has gone from steady to erratic. Recent sessions delivered 101.7 million dollars of net inflows, then a 144.6 million dollar outflow, then a small 7.8 million dollar inflow, then another 61.1 million dollar withdrawal, leaving flows negative across the stretch and breaking the accumulation pattern from the first week of August.

That matters because ETF flows have become the dominant price mechanism. Citi has estimated that spot Bitcoin ETF flows explain roughly 45 percent of weekly BTC price moves and remain the best available gauge of investor adoption.

On the corporate treasury side, the pressure is now visible in the numbers. CryptoQuant estimates Strategy has realised more than 102 million dollars of losses on its 2026 Bitcoin sales, still holds roughly 840,000 BTC, and is carrying around 10.6 billion dollars of unrealised losses because Bitcoin has spent most of the year below its blended cost basis near 75,400 dollars per coin. Its most recent disclosed sale covered 1,690 Bitcoin for 108.6 million dollars at an average near 64,262 dollars, with preferred stock dividend obligations having nearly quadrupled to 1.2 billion dollars a year.

The largest corporate buyer of the last cycle has become a periodic seller. That is a structural change in the supply picture, not a headline.

A Bitcoin savings plan takes the timing question off your hands. You buy a fixed amount every month, whether the price is rising or falling. Tax law grants you no such convenience: twelve instalments a year become twelve separate acquisitions, each with its own date, its own price and its own clock.

For you as an investor, that has one consequence. Whether a later sale stays tax-free is decided at the level of the individual tranche and the order in which the tax authorities treat those tranches as sold, never at the level of your total holding. Sell after three years of a savings plan and you do not hold one uniform stock of Bitcoin; you hold 36 acquisitions with 36 deadlines. This article sorts out the mechanics: holding period, exemption limit, order of disposal, valuation and record-keeping, each with its source.

Why a Bitcoin savings plan consists of many separate purchases for tax purposes

A savings plan is technically a standing order to buy: the exchange executes an order on a fixed date and credits you with the fraction of a Bitcoin you have acquired. For tax purposes, each of those executions is an acquisition within the meaning of German income tax law, with its own point in time, its own acquisition cost and its own holding period.

The savings plan therefore differs from a one-off purchase only in the number of events. Invest €6,000 in a single trade and you have one deadline to watch. Invest €250 a month for 24 months and you have 24 of them. Which providers in Germany offer automated instalments at all, and at what cost, is set out in our comparison of Bitcoin savings plans. The tax mechanics behind them are identical at every provider.

The one-year holding period under Section 23 EStG runs separately for every instalment

Gains from selling privately held crypto assets are private disposal transactions. The governing provision is Section 23(1) sentence 1 no. 2 of the German Income Tax Act: disposals of other assets are taxable where the period between acquisition and disposal is no more than one year. Where more than a year passes between purchase and sale, the gain falls outside taxation.

For a savings plan, this amounts to a rolling exemption. The March 2025 instalment is out of the period from March 2026, the April 2025 instalment from April 2026. If you sell part of your holding in May 2026, one and the same sale can contain tax-free and taxable portions at once.

What “other assets” means under Section 23 EStG

That crypto assets fall under this provision has been settled at the highest judicial level and is more than administrative opinion. In its judgment of February 14, 2023 (case no. IX R 3/22), the Federal Fiscal Court held that crypto assets are other assets within the meaning of the provision; the Federal Ministry of Finance cites the judgment at margin no. 53 of its circular. In practice: no flat-rate withholding tax, no saver’s allowance, and instead your personal income tax rate on gains realised inside the one-year window.

The €1,000 exemption limit: why one euro more makes the entire gain taxable

Section 23(3) sentence 5 EStG is precise: gains remain tax-free where the total gain from private disposal transactions in the calendar year came to less than €1,000. This is an exemption limit rather than a tax-free allowance. At €999 of gain you pay nothing; at exactly €1,000 the full amount becomes taxable.

Two details are regularly overlooked with savings plans. The limit applies to all private disposal transactions of a calendar year taken together, so gold sales inside the one-year window count as well. And the figure that is tested is the total gain, never gross turnover: losses from other deadline-bound sales in the same year reduce the tax base before the limit is applied.

Order of disposal: individual identification, FIFO and the average-cost method

When you sell out of a holding built from many instalments, it has to be clear which tranche counts as disposed of. The Federal Ministry of Finance circular of March 6, 2025 on individual questions of the income tax treatment of certain crypto assets settles this at margin no. 61, in three steps.

The starting point is individual identification: where the specific unit can be allocated individually, that unit counts as sold. Where this is not possible, the crypto assets of a given trading designation acquired first are deemed disposed of for the purposes of the holding period, and the average-cost method applies to the valuation. As a simplification, you may assume that the units acquired first were sold first, that is first in, first out.

In practice this means the order of purchase is unavoidable for the deadline, while for valuation you have a choice between the average-cost method and FIFO. On a savings plan that has been running for years, that choice quickly amounts to a three-figure sum, because the early instalments were executed at prices far removed from the later ones.

Wallet-by-wallet treatment: why the spread of your purchases across wallets counts

The order is not formed across your entire holding. Margin no. 61 makes clear that a wallet-by-wallet view applies. Within a wallet, the chosen method has to be retained until all crypto assets of that trading designation there have been sold in full; only after a subsequent new acquisition may you switch. If you later move holdings to your own wallet in portions, document those transfers. Without a record of which tranche went where, individual identification drops out as an option.

The ten-year period for currency tokens: why lending does not tie up your savings plan holdings for longer

Section 23(1) sentence 1 no. 2 sentence 4 EStG extends the period to ten years where income is generated from an asset in at least one calendar year. For a long time it was open whether staking or lending would therefore burst the one-year window for Bitcoin. Margin no. 63 of the circular answers this unambiguously: for currency or payment tokens, that extension does not apply.

The income itself is untouched by this. The circular allocates lending income to other income under Section 22 no. 3 EStG at margin no. 65, and the crypto assets received for it count as acquired at the moment they accrue. A fresh one-year period therefore starts for the income.

Daily price and price source: how you may value a monthly instalment

A savings plan instalment is rarely executed at a round price. Margin no. 91 therefore permits you to apply a daily price determined according to documented rules instead of the market price at the moment of execution, provided a consistent valuation is ensured. The daily average price, a fixed time of day and the daily closing price are all admissible.

Consistency is missing, according to the same margin number, where you draw on different sources or different points in time for acquisition costs and disposal proceeds. Settle on one price source and one time of day, and hold to both for the entire term.

Record-keeping duties: what the tax office expects after five years of a savings plan

Part III of the circular deals for the first time in detail with filing, cooperation and record-keeping duties. Margin no. 89 gets specific: where crypto assets are bought or sold through the centralised trading platforms of a foreign operator, this triggers an extended duty to cooperate under Section 90(2) of the Fiscal Code. That expressly includes retrieving transaction statements regularly and in full.

The sentence that matters most to savings plan investors comes at the end of the same margin number: missing records and data losses, for instance through the insolvency of a platform, are borne by the taxpayer. Margin no. 29a adds that retrieval is limited in time at some providers. Anyone who runs 60 instalments over five years and goes looking for the documents only at the point of sale carries that risk alone.

Tax reports and portfolio trackers: what they deliver and where their limit lies

Margin no. 29b of the circular describes the tax reports of private-sector providers with remarkable sobriety. Such reports resemble the tax certificates issued by banks on the surface, but they are built on wallet information and transaction statements that the taxpayer supplies. Their completeness therefore depends materially on the underlying data, and the results can be adjusted manually.

A report therefore carries none of the authority of a tax certificate. It is a calculation aid resting on your own data. For a savings plan with many small tranches it remains the most sensible tool nonetheless, because it carries the holding period forward for each individual tranche. A look at the comparison of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers pays off above all on the question of whether the tool maps wallet-by-wallet methods and method retention cleanly at all.

Fees, spread and selling costs: what reduces the taxable gain

Under Section 23(3) sentence 1 EStG, the gain is the difference between the disposal proceeds on one side and the acquisition costs plus income-related expenses on the other. Order fees on a savings plan execution increase the acquisition costs; transaction fees on disposal are to be taken into account as income-related expenses under margin no. 59.

With percentage-based fees, this adds up over the years to an amount that noticeably reduces the taxable gain. The condition is that the fee per execution is evident from your records. At providers who price their margin into the spread, the cost is already contained in the execution price and therefore in the acquisition costs.

Loss offsetting: why savings plan losses only run against private disposal transactions

Section 23(3) sentence 7 EStG limits the offset: losses may be set off only up to the amount of the gain you realised from private disposal transactions in the same calendar year, and a deduction under Section 10d EStG is excluded. Sentence 8 allows a carry-back to the immediately preceding year and a carry-forward to future years, in each case again only within the same category of income.

A loss from a savings plan sale cannot be offset against your salary or against gains on shares. One further point matters: a loss after the one-year period has run is irrelevant for tax, because the transaction is no longer taxable. If you want to close out a position at a loss, you need to know which tranches are still inside the window.

The 2026 holding period debate: what savings plan investors should factor in now

The one-year period is politically contested. On August 9, 2026, CryptoTicker summarised the state of the discussion around abolishing the holding period and the associated Bundestag petition, in the article Germany’s crypto holding period faces abolition. What governs your tax return until further notice is the statutory text, and that still contains the one-year period unchanged. Any change presupposes an amendment to the Income Tax Act.

When a new rule would take effect, and whether existing holdings would be protected, is open and cannot be responsibly anticipated. The only thing you can steer today is your documentation. Anyone who keeps acquisition dates, price source and wallet allocation in good order will cope with any conceivable transitional rule.

What to take away

1. Keep a tranche list from the very first instalment. Date, amount, quantity, execution price, fee and wallet all belong in it. Which providers run savings plans with traceable statements is shown in the savings plan comparison.
2. Fix the valuation method once per wallet and stick to it. Average cost or FIFO, one price source, one time of day. A tool that maps wallet-by-wallet methods is in the comparison of crypto tax tools.
3. Retrieve your transaction statements every year and archive them yourself. The extended duty to cooperate applies at foreign platforms, and data losses are borne by you. Which trading venues are regulated is set out in the comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.

(As of August 11, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy. This text is no substitute for individual tax advice.)

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.

Elon Musk is putting up a semiconductor plant in Texas that, on the published plans, would be larger than anything the chip industry has ever announced for a single site. The project is called Terafab, it is going up in Grimes County north-west of Houston, and since August 6, 2026 it has an official first phase with a number attached to it: $16.8 billion.

To a crypto investor that reads at first like news from someone else's industry. The impression is misleading. If you buy mining hardware, hold shares in listed miners or keep AI tokens in your portfolio, you depend on the same scarce resource as Terafab does: manufacturing capacity on the most advanced process nodes. This article separates what is documented from what is still open, and shows where the project reaches into your portfolio.

Terafab: what SpaceX and Tesla are actually building in Grimes County

SpaceX and Tesla presented the first phase formally on August 6, 2026. The Grimes County site sits around 90 miles north-west of Houston and belongs to SpaceX; Governor Greg Abbott confirmed the investment the same day. At least 3,000 people are meant to work there, 60 to 80 percent of them from Grimes County and neighbouring Brazos County.

The scale is the real talking point. Tom's Hardware puts the manufacturing space of the finished campus at more than 100 million square feet, or roughly 9.3 million square metres. For comparison, Samsung's entire Pyeongtaek campus comes to around 31.1 million square feet. The wording the companies chose matters here: they speak of manufacturing space rather than cleanroom space, and those two figures lie far apart.

The plant is meant to produce AI inference processors for Tesla's Optimus robot and the Cybercab robotaxi, along with high-performance chips for the orbital data centres SpaceX has planned. Terafab is laid out as a captive plant for the Musk companies' own needs, not as a foundry for third parties. Its precursor is a smaller research fab on the north campus of Giga Texas.

The crypto connection: why wafer capacity at the leading node touches your holdings

Semiconductor capacity on the most advanced process nodes is a finite resource that gets reallocated every year. That is also where the chips sit that physically carry the crypto market: the ASIC compute engines used to mine Bitcoin come off the same contract fabs as graphics and AI accelerators. When another deep-pocketed buyer joins that queue, lead times and prices shift for everyone else in it.

Two concrete points of contact follow from this, and one trap. The procurement side is concrete, because ASICs that cost more or arrive later weigh on mining profitability and, over the medium term, on the hash rate. The equity side is concrete, because many listed miners are converting sites to AI hosting and their business model now hangs on the availability of accelerators. The trap sits with the tokens: AI tokens react to headlines about AI infrastructure even though no payment flow runs between a Texas factory and a protocol token.

That mixture of real supply chain and pure narrative is what makes the subject treacherous. Something similar played out around the financial plans for Musk's platform X, where a widely expected crypto feature ended up as a conventional banking product. Our analysis of the banking launch at X without crypto sets that out.

From 20 to 55 to 16.8 billion: why the figures for phase one diverge

The cost figures for Terafab have moved several times in a matter of months, and in different directions. Techtimes traces the sequence: around $20 billion at the announcement in March 2026, then $25 billion, then $55 billion in a filing from May, and finally $16.8 billion as the first phase in August. The magazine puts the gap between the May and the August figure at roughly $38 billion.

For a serious reading of them, what matters is that these numbers can draw different boundaries. A capital markets prospectus, a state press release and a construction announcement do not necessarily describe the same scope, and which boundary sits behind each sum is not disclosed publicly. The internal split between Tesla and SpaceX is unknown as well.

More informative than any single sum are the risk warnings SpaceX itself wrote into its S-1 prospectus of May 2026, according to Techtimes. Terafab is described there as a general framework for future development, with no financial terms, no arrangement on intellectual property and no binding commitments. The filing reportedly states in as many words that neither Tesla nor Intel is obliged to remain part of the project, and that there is no assurance the goals will be reached within the expected timeframe. Language of that kind is standard in prospectuses, but it does set the frame in which you should read every Terafab headline.

Intel 14A: Terafab rests on a manufacturing process that still has to deliver

On the figures Tom's Hardware assembles, the first phase of Terafab is meant to run on Intel's 14A manufacturing process. That is a remarkable commitment, because Intel has trailed TSMC in the foundry business for years, and 14A is the process with which the company intends to close that gap.

The other side of it stands in the prospectus: there is reportedly no obligation on Intel to stay in the project. Between the announcement and running volume production, then, sit several technical and contractual switches that could still fall either way.

What a process node actually tells you

The label 14A is a name for a process generation with certain transistor densities rather than a physical measurement. For the crypto world, one property counts above all: the more advanced the node, the more compute per watt. That ratio decides whether a mining rig still earns a contribution margin after two years.

One terawatt of compute per year: what that target says about the chip market

SpaceX and Tesla justify a plant of their own by pointing to their own demand. On their projection, the group's combined requirement will exceed one terawatt of compute per year and thus run well beyond today's global supply. When that point will arrive, the companies have left open.

Two things can be derived from this. First, the figure is a company demand forecast and not an audited market number; it justifies the investment rather than evidencing it. Second, it describes a squeeze that exists without Terafab as well: SpaceX, Tesla and xAI already claim a substantial share of available foundry capacity. And at the leading node, that is where the makers of mining hardware buy too.

Vertical integration: logic, memory, packaging and test under one roof

The technically most interesting part of the plan is its layout. Chip production is normally spread across continents: logic chips come out of one plant, memory out of another running different process technology, with packaging and test at specialist service providers. Terafab is meant to bring all of those steps together on a single campus.

The calculation behind it is speed. Running logic, memory, packaging and test side by side shortens the production cycle and allows yield improvements to be tested through faster. The price for it is a concentration risk at one location, plus a capital requirement that on Tom's Hardware's assessment will run well beyond the stated $16.8 billion for the full build-out.

Bitcoin ASICs and the race for capacity at the leading manufacturing node

For the Bitcoin market the chain is short. The makers of mining ASICs design their chips themselves and have them produced at contract fabs, usually on advanced nodes, because that is where energy efficiency per terahash comes from. Measured against AI accelerators, the order volumes of these vendors are small, and small customers get worse terms and later delivery dates in a tight market.

The effect shows up in the network with a lag. Late deliveries slow the build-out of hash rate, which in the short term even works in favour of existing miners, because difficulty climbs more slowly. More expensive hardware, on the other hand, worsens the payback on new rigs. If you are weighing up mining or valuing miner shares, delivery time and price per terahash are the metrics through which a factory project in Texas eventually becomes visible. Where you trade the underlying coins and at what fees is worth settling beforehand through a comparison of crypto exchanges.

AI tokens such as Bittensor, Render and Fetch: keeping narrative and payment flows apart

Every time a large piece of news about AI infrastructure appears, the prices of AI tokens pick up. Protocols such as Bittensor, Render or Fetch organise decentralised compute and rendering capacity and issue tokens for it. Between a factory that makes inference chips for Musk's robots and satellites and the demand for such networks, however, there is no economic connection. The price reaction feeds on the narrative.

That distinction is the core of any valuation. With every AI token, ask for verifiable quantities: how much compute is billed through the network, who pays for it, does that demand grow independently of headlines, and how many tokens enter circulation through issuance over the same period? While those questions stay open, you are trading a story. How the segment can be looked at in a structured way is something our editorial team wrote up in May 2026 in an overview on building an AI token portfolio.

Miners converting to AI data centres, and what that means for hash rate and mining stocks

The most solid crypto link sits with the listed miners. Several of them have begun to switch parts of their sites from Bitcoin mining to hosting for AI and high-performance computing. The reason is commercially obvious: the real raw material of these companies is a permitted grid connection and cheap power, and for the same megawatt hour AI customers on long-term contracts pay more than the Bitcoin market does with its halving cycles.

For you as an investor, that changes the nature of these shares. A miner drawing a growing share of its revenue from data centre contracts is less and less a leveraged mirror of the Bitcoin price and more and more an infrastructure operator with construction, schedule and counterparty risk. If you hold such stocks as a Bitcoin substitute, read the revenue split in the quarterly report before you rely on a presumed correlation.

What matters for investors: time horizon, concentration risk and the tax question

In the semiconductor industry, several years pass between a construction announcement and the first chips sold from a large plant. Civil works are due to begin within months, according to Techtimes; volume production is not mentioned. Anyone taking a position today because a factory has been announced is buying an expectation with a very long lead time.

On top of that comes a concentration risk that is easily overlooked in Musk-related themes. If you hold Tesla shares, a bundle of AI tokens and stakes in miners converting to AI hosting, you are sitting on the same bet in three positions. And tax applies when you sell. In Germany, gains on crypto assets held privately fall under the rules for private disposal transactions, where the holding period and exemption thresholds decide whether tax is due. If you rebalance actively, you are better off documenting as you go than reconstructing it from exchange exports in the spring.

What to take away from this

1. Separate the supply chain from the story. Terafab touches your holdings through chip capacity and hardware prices, not through a payment flow to a token. Secure the holdings you intend to keep for the long run along the lines set out in our hardware wallet comparison.
2. Evidence the metrics before you buy. With AI tokens, billed compute and the issuance schedule are what count; with miners, it is the revenue split between mining and hosting. The tools for that are in our overview of analytics platforms.
3. Keep the tax file running alongside your trading. Rebalancing across several exchanges without ongoing records means losing track of holding periods. A tax tool or portfolio tracker takes that off your hands.

(As of August 10, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

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.

Bitcoin miner Hyperscale sold most of its Bitcoin but said it plans to rebuild its holdings through mining and future purchases.

Malware planted during a bogus coding assessment harvested a session token, bypassing multi-factor authentication to reach a code repository.

The country's first strategy of its kind also brings stricter due diligence for firms dealing with overseas crypto companies.

It seems Tether passed, putting an end to the longest-running open criticism of the leading stablecoin company.

No replacement date has been set for the meeting, which was cancelled due to an “unforeseen scheduling issue.”

Israel's largest bank has integrated cryptocurrencies into its services, becoming the first bank to offer digital asset services in the country.

Ripple's new $50 million stablecoin mint pushes RLUSD supply on Ethereum blockchain close to a record parity with XRP Ledger.

Ross Gerber, a longtime Bitcoin investor and prominent Tesla bull, has turned sharply against Strategy co-founder Michael Saylor.

Next Stellar protocol upgrade aims to boost smart contracts and network scalability.

Binance drops BNB smart chain support for specific altcoin token.

Key Highlights

• AMD shares increased approximately 1% during Friday’s premarket session following the announcement of a $5 billion bond issuance for AI infrastructure
• This represents the chipmaker’s most substantial bond offering to date, eclipsing the $1.5 billion raised just months earlier in March 2025
• The company projects server revenue will surge over 80% during the second half of 2026, with at least 70% growth anticipated for 2027
• Major tech players OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic have each pledged 1 gigawatt of AMD computing capacity
• Helios AI rack shipments are scheduled to commence in September, with significant revenue acceleration expected in the fourth quarter

Shares of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) gained approximately 1% during Friday’s premarket session, trading at $485.50, following the chipmaker’s disclosure of plans to secure as much as $5 billion through a bond issuance earmarked for artificial intelligence and data center expansion initiatives.

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., AMD

The proposed capital raise comprises a four-tranche investment-grade bond structure featuring maturity dates spanning three to ten years. Ultimate offering size will be determined by market appetite. Funds raised will support general corporate activities, potentially including existing debt refinancing.

Should the offering reach its full capacity, it would mark AMD’s most significant dollar-denominated bond transaction in company history. The chipmaker’s previous investment-grade issuance secured $1.5 billion during March 2025.

Broader market sentiment supported AMD’s gains, with Nasdaq futures climbing 0.27% and S&P 500 futures advancing 0.10% concurrent with the premarket movement. July’s Consumer Price Index registered at 3.4%, as moderating inflation figures bolstered investor confidence.

The semiconductor company recently delivered robust quarterly financial results that exceeded both revenue and profit forecasts. Nevertheless, shares experienced a pullback following the earnings release, partially attributed to Elon Musk’s public endorsement of Nvidia processors for SpaceX infrastructure.

Ambitious Revenue Projections

During its Technology Leadership Forum 2026, AMD unveiled ambitious expansion objectives. The semiconductor manufacturer forecasts server revenue will escalate by more than 80% throughout the latter half of 2026, with growth exceeding 70% projected for 2027.

The company’s comprehensive data center segment, encompassing artificial intelligence solutions, is anticipated to expand well beyond 100% during the coming year.

AMD estimates the server CPU marketplace will reach a valuation of $220 billion by decade’s end. The chipmaker is pursuing a revenue share exceeding 50% within that segment.

Company leadership anticipates agentic computing will constitute approximately two-thirds of this market opportunity. Agentic AI systems demand greater CPU processing capabilities, a domain where AMD maintains competitive strength complementing its GPU portfolio.

AMD’s preliminary 2027 server revenue projections already exceed the total addressable server market from 2025 by roughly 20%.

Product Launches and Strategic Partnerships

The semiconductor manufacturer intends to initiate component shipments for its Helios AI rack systems in September. Management anticipates a revenue acceleration during the fourth quarter, with further momentum building into the first quarter.

Both OpenAI and Meta have secured commitments for 1 gigawatt each of AMD computing infrastructure. Anthropic has committed to 1 gigawatt with aspirations to expand toward 2 gigawatts.

Additional deployments are expected through Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and various cloud service providers.

Financial analysts maintain predominantly optimistic outlooks on AMD. The company’s Helios processor architecture is widely expected to generate substantial returns beginning in Q4, with executive leadership asserting performance advantages over Nvidia’s current product lineup.

AMD stock concluded trading with a marginal 0.02% increase on August 13, 2026, before adding another 0.43% during premarket activity on August 14.

The post AMD (AMD) Stock Gains Momentum With Record $5B Bond Offering for AI Infrastructure appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Upland reports $49.1M Q2 revenue as divestitures continue reducing annual sales.
• Non-GAAP net income rises 18% to $6.6M while GAAP loss widens on impairment.
• Upland adds 81 new customers and expands relationships with 200 existing clients.
• Free cash flow nearly doubles to $5.3M as quarter-end cash reaches $31 million.
• Full-year guidance targets up to $196.1M in revenue with a 27% EBITDA margin.

Upland Software stock traded at $5.90, down 3.28%, after the company reported mixed second-quarter results and stronger cash generation. Second-quarter revenue reached $49.1 million, while non-GAAP net income increased and free cash flow nearly doubled from last year. Upland also added 81 customers as management continued focusing the business on knowledge management, content, and enterprise software.

Upland entered 2026 after divesting several non-strategic assets during 2025, which reduced its continuing revenue base. The company now centers its strategy on enterprise knowledge, content, and data products with stronger AI-related positioning. This transition places customer expansion, margins, and cash generation at the center of its operating reset.

Upland Software, Inc., UPLD

Revenue Declines While Adjusted Profitability Improves

Upland generated $49.1 million in total revenue during Q2 2026, down 8% from $53.4 million one year earlier. Subscription and support revenue fell 9% to $46.2 million, mainly because 2025 divestitures reduced the comparable revenue base. Still, reported revenue exceeded the midpoint of management’s previous quarterly guidance and maintained a substantial recurring subscription contribution.

GAAP net loss widened to $35.3 million from $13.0 million during the same quarter of 2025. A non-cash goodwill impairment recorded in June drove much of that increase and weighed heavily on reported GAAP earnings. Non-GAAP net income increased 18% to $6.6 million from $5.6 million, showing stronger adjusted profitability.

Adjusted EBITDA reached $12.8 million, compared with $13.6 million during the second quarter of 2025. The adjusted EBITDA margin improved to 26% from 25%, despite the year-over-year decline in total reported revenue. That margin result supported Upland’s effort to concentrate resources around software products offering stronger growth and operating leverage.

Customer Wins Support Upland Software Strategy

Upland added 81 new customers during the quarter, including seven accounts classified as major customers. The company also expanded relationships with 200 existing customers, and 19 of those deals qualified as major expansions. Those additions gave Upland a broader commercial base as it continued reshaping its portfolio following last year’s divestitures.

The company’s knowledge management products also received external industry recognition during the quarter. Upland RightAnswers appeared in Forrester’s second-quarter knowledge management landscape, while several products earned recognition in G2 reports. Upland Panviva, RightAnswers, BA Insight, and InterFAX featured across categories tied to knowledge management and enterprise software workflows.

Upland continues positioning enterprise knowledge and content as central parts of its product strategy. Its software aims to organize company information and make that information usable across employees, workflows, and automated systems. More than 1,100 enterprise customers use Upland products, giving the company an established base for further product expansion.

Cash Flow Strengthens as Guidance Points Lower

Operating cash flow increased to $5.4 million from $3.3 million in the prior-year quarter. Free cash flow reached $5.3 million, nearly doubling from $2.7 million, while quarter-end cash stood at $31.0 million. The stronger cash generation provided a financial counterweight to the larger GAAP loss and continuing revenue contraction.

For Q3 2026, Upland expects total revenue between $45.7 million and $48.7 million. Adjusted EBITDA should range from $11.9 million to $13.4 million, with a 27% margin at the midpoint. Management expects midpoint revenue to decline 7% annually, mainly because completed divestitures continue affecting year-over-year comparisons.

For full-year 2026, Upland forecasts total revenue between $190.1 million and $196.1 million. Adjusted EBITDA should reach $49.8 million to $52.8 million, with the midpoint representing a 12% annual decline. Upland now faces the task of pairing customer growth and cash generation with steadier revenue and continued margin discipline.

The post Upland Software, Inc. (UPLD) Stock: AI Focus Drives Customer Wins and Margin Strength appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Highlights

• CRWD reached a record peak of $227.21, with current trading near $225.53
• Annual performance shows 110.82% increase, significantly exceeding S&P 500 returns
• Strong fundamentals include 23% revenue expansion and 75% gross margins
• Quarterly results scheduled for August 26 with projected 26% EPS growth
• Analyst community elevates price objectives to $230 from Citizens and Stifel

On August 14, 2026, CrowdStrike shares touched a record level of $227.21. As of August 13, the cybersecurity company’s stock was changing hands near $225.53, marking a 1.69% daily advance that outperformed the S&P 500’s 0.65% uptick.

CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc., CRWD

Over the trailing year, shares have surged 110.82%. This performance dramatically exceeds the Computer and Technology sector’s modest 0.81% appreciation during the identical timeframe.

Looking at recent momentum, CRWD advanced 7.26% in the most recent 30-day period. During this same window, the S&P 500 posted a 2.38% increase.

The company commands a market capitalization of $229.65 billion. Fundamental metrics show revenue expanding at 23% with gross profit margins reaching 75%, both factors contributing to sustained investor enthusiasm.

From a valuation perspective, shares trade at a forward P/E multiple of 179.88. This represents a significant premium compared to the industry benchmark of 47.24. The PEG ratio stands at 6.49, well above the Security sector norm of 2.73.

InvestingPro analysis suggests the shares may be trading above Fair Value calculations. Nevertheless, this hasn’t dampened bullish sentiment.

Upcoming Quarterly Report

Market attention now shifts to August 26, when CrowdStrike unveils its quarterly financial results. The Street anticipates earnings per share of $0.29, representing a 26.09% increase versus the year-ago period.

Revenue projections for the quarter stand at $1.44 billion, reflecting 23.19% year-over-year growth. Looking at full-year expectations, analysts forecast EPS of $1.23 alongside revenue of $5.94 billion, marking increases of 32.26% and 23.49% respectively.

Zacks Investment Research assigns CRWD a #3 (Hold) rating. The consensus EPS forecast has experienced a modest 0.11% downward revision during the past 30 days.

Wall Street Outlook and Strategic Initiatives

Citizens and Stifel have both upgraded their price objectives to $230. Citizens maintains its Market Outperform stance, highlighting the company’s dominant position in endpoint security. Stifel emphasized AI-powered expansion potential and long-term projections following European investor conferences.

Goldman Sachs researchers have projected substantial growth in AI-focused security expenditures by 2027, a market dynamic that positions CRWD favorably.

In corporate developments, CrowdStrike revealed intentions to purchase XM Cyber’s intellectual property assets, encompassing over 45 patents and proprietary code. This transaction excludes existing revenue streams or customer relationships.

Additionally, CrowdStrike established a strategic alliance with Cerebras Systems aimed at enhancing AI-based threat detection and incident response. Cerebras will deploy the CrowdStrike Falcon platform across its security infrastructure.

The Security industry presently holds a Zacks Industry Rank of 25, positioning it within the top 11% of all monitored sectors.

The post CrowdStrike (CRWD) Stock Reaches Record Peak Before Upcoming Earnings Report appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Highlights

• AAPL shares climb 0.47% to reach $306.69 following Houston facility announcement
• Company launches 20,000-square-foot Advanced Manufacturing Center in Texas
• Mac mini production scheduled to commence at Houston site in coming months
• Free advanced manufacturing training program launched for U.S. small businesses
• Initiative reinforces Apple’s $600 billion domestic investment pledge

Shares of Apple (AAPL) posted gains on Friday following news of the company’s manufacturing expansion in Houston. The stock climbed 0.47% to close at $306.69, briefly touching the $307 threshold during intraday trading. This development represents another milestone in Apple’s strategy to enhance its domestic manufacturing capabilities and strengthen its technological production infrastructure within the United States.

Apple Inc., AAPL

Houston Facility Launches as Advanced Manufacturing Hub

Apple has inaugurated its Advanced Manufacturing Center within a Houston facility that currently produces and distributes the company’s cutting-edge artificial intelligence server infrastructure. Spanning 20,000 square feet, this new center will deliver complimentary manufacturing education to small and medium enterprises throughout the country. The location is also slated to begin Mac mini computer production during the latter half of this year.

The facility provides participating enterprises with access to state-of-the-art equipment, hands-on laboratory environments, and manufacturing methodologies utilized throughout Apple’s global operations. Educational programming encompasses final product assembly, printed circuit board manufacturing, automation technologies, quality assurance protocols, and machine learning-enhanced production processes. Apple’s engineering team will collaborate with businesses to diagnose production challenges and optimize manufacturing workflows through practical, hands-on training sessions.

Companies enrolled in the program can utilize industrial-grade equipment and evaluate production techniques within an authentic manufacturing setting at the Houston location. The inaugural cohort of participating businesses received instruction in advanced automation systems, machine learning-powered quality control mechanisms, laser etching technologies, and hands-on product assembly techniques. Apple has announced plans to broaden the program’s reach and eventually extend similar manufacturing education opportunities to students at local colleges and universities.

Texas Center Reinforces Domestic Manufacturing Vision

The Houston location builds upon Apple’s Manufacturing Academy, which launched in Detroit in August 2025 to serve American enterprises. That initiative has already provided support to nearly 1,000 companies seeking to enhance their manufacturing capabilities and integrate artificial intelligence into their operations. Its digital curriculum also delivers training modules covering automation systems, production quality standards, machine learning applications, and professional skills development for enrolled businesses.

Apple has systematically expanded its domestic manufacturing initiatives since declaring a $600 billion United States investment pledge last year. The technology leader and its manufacturing collaborators have allocated resources toward custom silicon development, advanced component production, protective glass manufacturing, and other domestic production ventures. Notably, Apple successfully dispatched its inaugural advanced AI servers from the Houston facility less than twelve months after designating the site as a production location.

The Houston facility’s launch garnered support from federal, state, county, and municipal representatives who attended the ceremonial opening. Government officials connected the project to manufacturing skills development, regional employment opportunities, small-business expansion, and Houston’s emerging prominence in advanced technology manufacturing. This undertaking also reinforces Apple’s comprehensive strategy to align domestic production investments with workforce education and manufacturing sector development.

Mac Mini Manufacturing Broadens Facility’s Production Scope

Apple’s decision to incorporate Mac mini manufacturing into the Houston facility later this year extends operations beyond advanced AI server production. This strategic addition elevates the location’s importance within Apple’s domestic manufacturing ecosystem and bolsters its hardware production strategy on American soil. The move also creates synergies between commercial manufacturing activities and the educational programs housed within the Advanced Manufacturing Center.

The company has committed hundreds of millions of dollars to the Houston operation over the past nine months. Apple established the production facility, initiated manufacturing operations, and delivered advanced server systems while simultaneously preparing additional manufacturing capacity at the site. This integrated operation combines product manufacturing, technical education, automation training, and business development initiatives within a single Houston manufacturing complex.

Apple continues advancing its American Manufacturing Program through partnerships with domestic suppliers, advanced component development, workforce training initiatives, and expanded production capacity. The Houston center now introduces structured educational opportunities for businesses seeking hands-on experience with contemporary manufacturing equipment and production systems. Its launch strengthens Apple’s commitment to domestic manufacturing while simultaneously elevating Houston’s significance within the company’s American production infrastructure.

The post Apple (AAPL) Stock Climbs as Company Unveils Houston Manufacturing Hub appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Micron shares advanced 1.2% to $961.51 during Friday’s early session, extending a month-long rally of 12%.
• KeyBanc analysts predict DRAM pricing will increase 15%-20% during Q3, while NAND flash prices could surge 30%-40%.
• New Street Research raised its rating on MU to buy with a $1,250 target, arguing the memory sector faces a fundamental transformation beyond traditional cycles.
• New Street’s model suggests Micron could accumulate more than $600 billion in cash reserves and produce $150 billion in yearly free cash flow by decade’s end.
• UBS’s Timothy Arcuri established a $1,625 target price, while consensus Wall Street targets average $1,549.

Shares of Micron Technology climbed to $961.51 during Friday morning trade, posting a 1.2% advance as bullish analyst commentary converged with expectations for sustained memory pricing strength.

Micron Technology, Inc., MU

This latest uptick builds upon a robust 12% monthly advance, although shares continue trading beneath the late June high exceeding $1,200. Year-to-date, Micron’s valuation has more than tripled.

Momentum received additional support from Sandisk’s optimistic long-range projections announced earlier in the week. The announcement reignited investor enthusiasm across the broader memory sector, with SK Hynix ADRs advancing 1.4% during premarket hours.

KeyBanc provided concrete projections underpinning the positive sentiment. The research firm anticipates DRAM pricing will climb between 15% and 20% in Q3 compared to the previous quarter, with an additional 15% increase expected in Q4. For NAND flash memory, forecasts call for a 30% to 40% jump in Q3, followed by another 15% rise in Q4.

New Street Elevates Rating to Buy

New Street Research initiated coverage with a buy rating Friday morning, establishing a $1,250 price objective. The firm’s thesis centers on the notion that current memory market dynamics represent a departure from historical patterns.

Analysts highlighted that Micron’s equity value has multiplied more than tenfold from April 2025 lows, while production value as measured through cost of goods sold increased approximately 25%. This divergence, according to the firm, signals a fundamental transformation rather than conventional cyclical behavior.

New Street launched an analytical series in July examining whether memory markets have undergone structural evolution. Friday’s upgrade represents the culmination of that research.

The firm’s 2030 projections envision Micron maintaining over $600 billion in cash holdings while generating north of $150 billion in annual free cash flow. These figures represent peak-cycle estimates.

AI Applications Reshaping Demand Dynamics

Even during a hypothetical downturn following 2030, New Street’s models anticipate a significantly gentler correction than previous cycles, with only $18 billion in free cash flow consumption at the bottom and more than $100 billion generated annually throughout a four-year decline.

The research outfit projects memory demand expansion of 15% per year beyond 2030, exceeding the 10% historical average observed over the preceding two decades. Artificial intelligence applications are forecast to represent two-thirds of total demand composition.

Regarding valuation methodology, New Street contended that high-bandwidth memory warrants superior multiples compared to conventional commodity DRAM due to reduced cyclicality. This framework, analysts stated, supports a $2 trillion to $3 trillion market capitalization for Micron by 2030.

UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri announced a $1,625 price objective earlier this week, calculated using 11 times his projected 2029 earnings estimate. Arcuri acknowledged the target incorporates assumptions of a moderate memory downturn by that timeframe.

Currently, the stock carries a forward price-to-earnings multiple of 6.3 times, positioned below most semiconductor industry peers. According to FactSet data, the consensus Wall Street price target for Micron stands at $1,549.

The post Micron (MU) Stock Eyes $1,625 Target as Analysts Turn Bullish on Memory Chip Rally appeared first on Blockonomi.

The cryptocurrency market is another sea of red today (August 14), with Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Cardano (ADA), and many more posting losses.

However, Cronos (CRO) has defied the ongoing pullback, and some analysts believe its price could pump even higher if it clears key levels.

Turbulent Days

The last several days have been quite eventful for CRO, which experienced severe volatility. Earlier this month, Trump Media (the entity behind Truth Social) withdrew its intentions to ink an ETF deal with Crypto.com and backed off its plans to accumulate $6.4 billion in CRO.

The token reacted negatively to the news, tumbling to around $0.046, its lowest level in the past three years. It spent the next few days trading below $0.05 before bulls finally reclaimed that mark (albeit briefly) earlier today. As of this writing, CRO trades at around $0.048 (per CoinGecko), representing a 5% daily increase.

The most likely catalyst for the resurgence appears to be Ryan Wyatt’s announcement. The CEO of Cronos App revealed that next month the platform “goes global to everyone” on iOS and Android. He said that users can access sports, stocks, crypto, and perps, and that they are “just getting started.”

“More to share in the future: plans for CRO, sharing future feature rollouts, a desktop version of Cronos, and more,” he added.

Analyst Crypto With Gopal claimed that the price has formed a double bottom after retesting the $0.046 support zone twice, with buyers defending that zone and building a potential reversal base.

“The key confirmation is a breakout above $0.050 resistance. A confirmed breakout could open the way toward the chart’s $0.055 target. Market sentiment: Bullish setup – $0.050 breakout is the trigger,” he concluded.

Maintain Realistic Expectations

Wyatt’s disclosure has indeed triggered a clear price increase in CRO, yet it is unlikely to cause a sustainable rally. The excitement may soon fade, and sellers could retake the helm, while the persistent bear market isn’t helping either.

Another negative factor is CRO’s Relative Strength Index (RSI), which has risen to around 74. This suggests the asset has entered overbought territory and could be gearing up for a short-term pullback. The technical analysis tool ranges from 0 to 100 where anything below 30 is usually viewed as a buying opportunity.

The post Cronos (CRO) Rises 5% Daily Following Major Ecosystem News: Details appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin is testing a critical support area after failing to break above the descending resistance structure that has capped the price for months. With BTC trading around $62.7K, the market is approaching a key decision point, while the elevated Exchange Whale Ratio adds a potentially bearish on-chain signal to the technical picture.

Bitcoin Price Analysis: The Daily Chart

The daily chart shows that Bitcoin remains within a broader corrective structure. After recovering from the June low near $58K, BTC established a series of higher lows and climbed toward the $66K resistance zone. However, the recovery has so far failed to produce a decisive breakout, and price has recently turned lower.

The most important resistance is currently around $66K-$67K, where the descending trendline, the horizontal supply zone, and the broader moving-average structure converge. A daily close above this area would represent a meaningful improvement in market structure and could open the way toward the $72K-$74K zone. Beyond that, the $80K-$82K region remains a major higher-timeframe resistance area.

On the downside, BTC is approaching the $60K support zone once again. This area will most likely attract buyers and is therefore important for maintaining the recent recovery structure. A decisive daily breakdown of this zone would increase the probability of a move below the $58K low and toward the next major support visible on the chart around $55K.

Momentum is also not particularly encouraging at the moment. The daily RSI is around the mid-40s and has turned lower, indicating that bullish momentum has weakened without yet reaching deeply oversold conditions. Meanwhile, BTC remains below the major moving averages, which continue to slope downward. As a result, the broader daily structure remains cautious to bearish until the $66K-$67K area is reclaimed.

BTC/USDT 4-Hour Chart

The 4-hour chart provides a more immediate picture of the current setup. BTC has been trading inside a contracting structure, with a descending upper trendline and a gradually rising lower boundary. The price is now pressing toward the lower end of this formation near $62K.

The immediate support zone is around $61.5K-$62K. The price is aggressively moving toward this area today, while the 4-hour RSI has also fallen to the low 30s, showing that short-term momentum has become weak and is approaching oversold territory. This leaves room for a relief bounce if buyers defend the support zone, although the RSI alone is not enough to confirm a reversal.

A rebound from the current area could initially target $65K high ,where the upper boundary of the triangle pattern is also located. This area is followed by the critical $66K-$67K resistance zone. Therefore, the market would first need to break the pattern to the upside before any short-term rally could materialize.

Conversely, a clean 4-hour breakdown below $61.5K-$62K area would invalidate the immediate bullish structure and likely expose the $58K-$60K demand zone. Therefore, the current region is particularly important, as a successful defense could preserve the consolidation or even lead to a rally, while a breakdown would signal another leg lower, which could be disastrous for Bitcoin holders and the crypto market as a whole.

On-Chain Analysis

The Exchange Whale Ratio measures the share of exchange inflows represented by the largest whale transactions. In the chart, the 30-day moving average of this metric has climbed sharply and is currently just below 0.32, close to the highest levels visible over the displayed period.

The elevated reading is notable because it comes while Bitcoin is trading near $62K and struggling to regain its major technical resistance levels. A high whale ratio means that whales account for a relatively large portion of coins entering exchanges, which can indicate increased potential selling pressure if those coins are subsequently sold.

The divergence between the elevated whale activity and weak BTC price action therefore represents a cautionary signal. It does not guarantee an immediate sell-off, but it suggests that the current support test should be treated carefully. If the Exchange Whale Ratio remains elevated while BTC loses the $62K zone, the on-chain and technical signals would increasingly point toward further downside, as it would indicate that the decline is driven by whale supply.

The post Bitcoin Price Analysis: Is $60K Back in Play After BTC’s Latest Rejection? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The end of the week is here, which means that we will take a look at what happened in the past seven days, from the good, the bad, and the ugly price movements.

Let’s begin from this time last Friday when bitcoin was actually fighting for the $65,000 level despite the latest setback in the CLARITY Act saga and the lack of an actual deal between the US and Iran, although such was promised by the POTUS. The weekend was significantly less eventful, as BTC failed to make a move but remained sideways at around $65,000.

The actual breakout attempt came on Monday morning, but it was quickly halted at $65,400 again. The subsequent leg down drove the asset to $63,800. After another rebound to $64,400, the bears stepped up again and pushed it south to $63,200. The same pattern repeated on Tuesday and Wednesday as BTC was stopped at $64,400 and slipped back down to its starting point despite the rather positive CPI data for July.

It kept charting lower highs, and the latest rebound attempt was stopped even before the previous ones. Bitcoin tapped $64,000 yesterday, but the rejection drove it to under $63,000 almost immediately. Although it rebounded slightly, the bears are back in control now, driving it to a 10-day low of $62,500 as of press time.

Its weekly losses are close to 4% now. Its market capitalization has slumped to $1.255 trillion on CG, while its dominance over the alts has taken a major hit and is down to 56.1%. This is because several alts are actually in the green weekly, such as SOL, BNB, TRX, XMR, CC, and LINK.

ETH is down by a more modest 2.8%, while XRP slipped below $1.00 earlier this week for the first time in 21 months and is now fighting to reclaim that psychological support.

Market Data

Market Cap: $2.245T | 24H Vol: $47B | BTC Dominance: 56.1%

BTC: $62,550 (-3.5%) | ETH: $1,865 (-2.8%) | XRP: $1.00 (-3.2%)

This Week’s Crypto Headlines You Can’t Miss

Strategy Dumps Another 1,690 BTC in Ongoing Bitcoin Sell-Off. As the title of the Market Update suggests, Strategy continues to offload some of its BTC holdings. In the latest selling spree, the largest corporate holder of any cryptocurrency disposed of another 1,690 BTC for $108.6 million. The good news is that CEO Phong Le has reassured that the firm plans to resume its bitcoin purchases by the end of the year.

Only 90 Bitcoin Wallets Hold 10K+ BTC: And That Number Just Hit a 6-Month High. The number of large BTC wallets is increasing, which indicates a potential bullish trend amid cooling institutional demand. Such addresses hit a six-month high, as 90 hold over 10,000 units.

Ripple’s (XRP) Summer Slump Isn’t Stopping Large Wallets From Growing. The same trend is observed within the broader Ripple ecosystem, as the number of large wallets has increased by 32 over the past three months. This comes despite the asset’s massive price slide that drove it to a 21-month low earlier this week.

Trezor Provider ShipMonk Breach Exposed Order Data for 13,689 Hardware Wallet Customers. Trezor confirmed that a data breach at its logistics partner, ShipMonk, which stores its products and ships orders to customers, has exposed personal information and increased phishing attack risks for almost 13,000 customers.

Tether Clears First Full Audit as KPMG Issues Unqualified Opinion on 2025 Statements. For the first time in its long history, the company behind the largest stablecoin received an unqualified audit opinion from KPMG for all of its financial holdings. The Big 4 member verified Tether’s gold reserves through physical inspection.

‘Crypto Is Dead’ Talk Is Rising; Could Peak Fear Be a Contrarian Signal? Amid the ongoing price collapse of BTC and countless alts, the online chatter about the industry’s demise has been on the rise. Analysts, though, suggested that this could be a contrarian signal as large investors are accumulating ahead of a potential market recovery.

Charts

This week, we have a chart analysis of Ethereum, Ripple, Cardano, Binance Coin, and Hyperliquid – click here for the complete price analysis.

The post Bitcoin Hits 10-Day Low Despite Positive CPI Data as Strategy Keeps Selling: Weekly Crypto Recap appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Ripple’s cross-border token once again dipped to the $1 psychological level, infusing a fresh dose of panic across its community.

Despite its major price downfall, whales continue to accumulate tokens, positioning themselves for the next potential uptrend.

More Purchases

Earlier this week, XRP dipped below $1 for the first time since 2024. The bulls recovered some of the losses shortly after and pushed it above that zone. The past 24 hours delivered another red wave, with the asset again fighting to hold that critical level and is actually down nearly 70% over the last year.

The move south seems to be of no concern to large investors, who even see the current conditions as the perfect moment to snap up more tokens. Analyst Ali Martinez revealed that whales acquired 72 million XRP (worth roughly $72 million as of press time) within the past day alone.

“I wonder what they know that we don’t… Are they preparing for a bull rally,” he asked.

It is a common theory that whales’ behavior differs significantly from that of retail investors. Big participants rarely jump on the bandwagon without doing proper research, and some speculate they might have inside information that the rest of the market lacks. As such, they can influence smaller players to follow suit, while the potential wave of fresh capital might benefit the asset’s price.

The whales’ accumulation over the past 24 hours isn’t an isolated case. Just a few days ago, Martinez disclosed that they have scooped up more than 380 million XRP in one week.

Another positive factor is the overall increase in the number of addresses holding at least 1 million coins, which, according to Santiment, has risen by 32 over the last three months.

The Bearish Perspective

In addition to outlining the whales’ activity, Martinez has recently issued a major price warning. In early August, he claimed that “everything comes down to $1.06 for XRP,” suggesting that holding the line could trigger a rally to as high as $1.64, whereas plunging under might result in a violent crash to $0.62. As mentioned above, the token’s valuation has plummeted below the depicted level, and we have yet to see whether a more substantial collapse will follow.

Meanwhile, CryptoQuant recently outlined that XRP’s selling pressure has intensified to its highest level since May on Binance after the Taker Buy/Sell ratio fell to 0.86.

“A reading below 1 indicates that the volume of sell orders executed by traders exceeds the volume of buy orders, reflecting clear selling pressure from traders executing trades directly,” the entity explained.

The post 72,000,000 XRP in 24 Hours: Do Ripple Whales Know Something We Don’t? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

[PRESS RELEASE – Amsterdam, Netherlands, August 14th, 2026]

USDT remains the dominant stablecoin by business transaction volume on NOWPayments, but new platform data shows USDC gaining momentum fast. In H1 2026, USDC transaction count increased by 209.02% year-over-year, and transaction volume rose by 101.63%, while USDT transaction activity declined over the same period.

The result is an increasingly differentiated stablecoin landscape: USDT continues to offer the scale and liquidity businesses rely on globally, while USDC is emerging as a growing alternative, particularly for companies navigating regulated European infrastructure.

Stablecoins are no longer used only to accept crypto payments. Businesses are increasingly relying on USDT and USDC to move money throughout their daily operations, from affiliate commissions and supplier settlements to marketplace payouts, payroll, treasury transfers, and customer withdrawals. As more companies build these workflows around digital assets, stablecoins are becoming an important part of business infrastructure rather than simply another payment option.

Drawing on USDT and USDC transaction activity across the NOWPayments platform between 2025 and 2026, this report examines how business stablecoin usage is evolving and the blockchain networks supporting that activity.

*Unless otherwise stated, all figures refer to USDT and USDC transaction activity processed through the NOWPayments platform.

Stablecoins Are Becoming Business Infrastructure

For many businesses, accepting a crypto payment is only the first step. Once funds are received, they still need to move through the business. Suppliers need to be paid, affiliates receive commissions, marketplace sellers withdraw earnings, employees collect salaries, and finance teams transfer working capital between accounts.

Instead of converting every incoming payment into fiat, many businesses now keep part of their operating funds in stablecoins and use them directly for day-to-day settlements.

Common operational use cases include:

• Affiliate and referral commissions
• Supplier and contractor payments
• Marketplace seller withdrawals
• Payroll for distributed teams
• Creator and influencer payouts
• Treasury transfers

For many businesses, stablecoins now support both incoming payments and outgoing transfers within the same operational workflow.

Business Stablecoin Adoption: USDT and USDC

The data reveals a clear divergence between scale and momentum. USDT remains the dominant stablecoin by transaction volume, while USDC is growing significantly faster from a smaller base.

USDT Still Leads Business Stablecoin Volume

USDT continues to account for the largest share of business stablecoin transaction activity, particularly by transaction volume.

USDT’s lead remains substantial, even as its transaction activity declined year over year. In H1 2026, USDT transaction count declined 1.55% compared with H1 2025, while transaction volume fell 14.99%. Even so, USDT accounted for 66.92% of stablecoin transaction volume on NOWPayments in H1 2026. Its substantially higher share of transaction volume than transaction count (41.32%) suggests that USDT continues to play a particularly important role in higher-value business transfers.

USDC Gains Momentum Fast

USDC is becoming an increasingly important part of business stablecoin adoption.

USDC remains much smaller than USDT by overall transaction share, but it is showing substantially stronger growth. In H1 2026, USDC transaction count increased 209.02% year over year, while transaction volume rose 101.63% year over year.

Its share of stablecoin transaction count also increased from 2.88% in 2025 to 4.94% in 2026, while its share of transaction volume rose from 5.52% to 8.95%. While NOWPayments data does not explain individual business decisions, the increase in both USDC transaction activity and transaction share indicates that USDC is gaining ground alongside USDT on the platform.

Network Choice Adds Another Layer to Stablecoin Strategy

Stablecoin choice is only part of the infrastructure decision. Businesses also select networks based on transaction costs, settlement speed, recipient compatibility, and ecosystem support.

Businesses using NOWPayments can process stablecoin transactions across multiple blockchain networks, including:

USDT

• TRON
• Ethereum
• BNB Smart Chain
• Polygon

USDC

• Ethereum
• Base
• Polygon
• Arbitrum

Two Stablecoins, Two Business Advantages

The divergence between USDT and USDC is not only about transaction growth. The two assets increasingly offer businesses different advantages: USDT combines global scale and liquidity, while USDC has a clearer position within Europe’s MiCA-regulated environment.

USDT and USDC Under MiCA

For global operations, USDT’s liquidity and broad ecosystem support remain significant advantages. For businesses focused on Europe, USDC’s regulatory positioning can make it easier to integrate with regulated crypto infrastructure. For companies operating across both environments, supporting both assets can provide greater flexibility.

Businesses looking for a detailed legal analysis can explore NOWPayments’ analysis of USDC under MiCA and comparison of USDT and USDC under MiCA, which examine the regulatory framework and its practical implications for payment and payout infrastructure.

MiCA does not prohibit businesses or individuals from holding or transferring USDT. However, regulated exchanges, custodians, payment providers, and other crypto asset service providers may apply restrictions based on their own compliance obligations.

What the Findings Mean

NOWPayments data points to a stablecoin market defined by two different strengths. USDT remains the scale leader, accounting for 66.92% of stablecoin transaction volume in H1 2026. USDC remains much smaller, but its 209.02% growth in transaction count and 101.63% growth in transaction volume show significantly stronger momentum.

For businesses, the emerging picture is less about choosing a winner and more about choosing the right infrastructure for the market: USDT for global liquidity and established transaction scale and USDC for growing adoption and a clearer regulatory position in Europe.

“For many businesses, the question is no longer necessarily USDT or USDC. Supporting both can provide more flexibility across markets, partners, and operational requirements,” said Kate Lifshits, CBDO of NOWPayments.

About NOWPayments

NOWPayments is a crypto business ecosystem designed to help companies accept payments, automate mass payouts, manage stablecoin treasury, and scale global digital asset operations through a single infrastructure. Supporting 350+ cryptocurrencies, 30+ stablecoins, flexible settlement options, and enterprise-grade APIs, the platform helps businesses build scalable global payment operations. With 99% of payments completed in under one minute, near-instant email payouts, enterprise automation, and 24/7 operational support, NOWPayments provides the infrastructure businesses need to monetize, move, and manage digital assets at scale.

The post USDT Still Leads Stablecoin Volume as USDC Gains Momentum, NOWPayments Data Shows appeared first on CryptoPotato.