The attack intensifies regional tensions, raising market concerns about potential Russian advances and impacting geopolitical stability.

The post Russian missile strike on Kyiv kills one, injures three appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

FIFA's retreat highlights the tension between centralized governance and the growing influence of private investment in global sports.

The post FIFA backs down from $20B investment plan amid criticism from confederations appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

DeepSeek's success highlights the potential for cost-effective AI models to disrupt traditional markets, boosting decentralized compute networks.

The post DeepSeek-V4-Flash-High cracks top 7 in Frontend Code Arena, and it costs almost nothing to run appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Increased U.S. pressure on Iran may hinder diplomatic progress, affecting market expectations for future U.S.-Iran agreements.

The post Trump administration outlines military, financial measures against Tehran appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Israel's stance against Palestinian statehood may hinder international recognition efforts, affecting geopolitical dynamics and market perceptions.

The post Israel’s UN ambassador rules out Palestinian state post-October 7 events appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Coldcard Bitcoin Thief Likely Used Top Blockchain Services Provider: Report

Since over $70 million in Bitcoin was stolen yesterday by an attack that exploited a fault in the Coldcard’s system, it has been reported that the thief used a top blockchain services provider for help. 

Writing on X Friday, engineer at payments company Block, Clay Garrett, said that the provider — who he did not name at the request of the services provider — had been contacted after finding blockchain movements matched the “suspected workflow” of the attacker. 

“During our investigation of the Coldcard drain yesterday, we identified an unusual pattern in the sweeps,” Garrett said. 

“That pattern led us to a hypothesis that has since been confirmed: the operator used a paid account at a well-known blockchain-services provider to query the source addresses and perform other related activity during the sweeps,” Garrett continued, adding that the authorities had been notified. 

Galaxy Digital’s research arm also wrote on X that the thief had an unusual pattern of moving the coins. 

“The pattern tells us these were all the same attacker — it does not capture the attack itself, which looks the same as if a coin owner chose to move coins,” the company said, adding that Bitcoiners should move funds out of single-signature Coldcard addresses and into secure custody.

After over $35 million in Bitcoin was drained from wallets on Thursday, Coinkite said that a firmware bug in Coldcard Mk3 devices — starting with version 4.0.1 in March 2021 — caused seed generation to fall back to a weak software Pseudorandom Number Generator instead of the hardware true random number generator. 

This allowed private keys for many single-signature wallets (especially those created without dice rolls or a strong BIP-39 passphrase) predictable enough for attackers to brute-force.

Later on Friday, Coinkite admitted all of its models were vulnerable following more thefts. Over $70 million has so far been swiped and engineers have warned that more Bitcoin addresses could be at risk. 

The company makes a number of Bitcoin products, including cold storage hardware wallets.

This post Coldcard Bitcoin Thief Likely Used Top Blockchain Services Provider: Report first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Younger Democrats Understand Clarity Act And Bill Should Pass, Says Coinbase’s Chief Policy Officer

The Clarity Act will likely get through despite some — older — Democrats holding it back, according to Coinbase’s Chief Policy Officer, Faryar Shirzad. 

Speaking on The Hill’s morning Rising show Friday, Shirzad said that crypto was “maybe the most bipartisan issue in Washington.” 

He added that while some lawmakers were holding back the long-awaited legislation, younger Democrats got it. 

“A lot of the opposition is generational — so it is Democrats who oppose it — but I think younger members who understand the technology, understand that money is transforming how we should engage financially, how we need to adapt, and so it’s really a generational shift,” he said. 

“I think we’ll be on the winning end of that because right now there are about 67 million Americans who own crypto,” Shirzad added. “We’ve got ethics nailed down, we’ve got nominations nailed down, we’ve got a bipartisan bill on the substance, we should be good to go.”

Lawmakers are currently mulling over the latest draft of the Clarity Act, which aims to set in stone digital asset regulation. The latest draft bans officials and their families from issuing or promoting crypto. 

A new draft started circulating this month, banning officials and their families from issuing or promoting crypto — something opposition lawmakers previously had issue with. 

But some Democrats are still unhappy with the bill in its current form. A group of Democrats last week said in a statement that the bill in its current form falls short. 

The bill has been in a deadlock this year, partially because banking chiefs raised concerns over stablecoin yield and ethics concerns. 

Banking lobbyists have said that if crypto exchanges pay attractive yields to customers, banks could lose their deposit base. 

Shirzad previously said in an interview that the bill was an “extraordinarily bipartisan” piece of work. 

If approved, the bill would set in stone crypto regulation in the world’s largest economy.

This post Younger Democrats Understand Clarity Act And Bill Should Pass, Says Coinbase’s Chief Policy Officer first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Coinkite Releases Fixed Firmware After Coldcard Bug; AI Likely Involved In The Breach

Over a thousand bitcoins are believed to have been stolen so far in a hack that started to be discussed on social media in the afternoon of July 30th. Coinkite, one of the most reputable hardware wallet manufacturers, was revealed to have a critical bug in the way it generated secure private keys for its Bitcoin hardware wallets. Industry experts believe AI was used in the breach.

Coldcard MK3 devices with firmware version 4.0.1 (March 2021) through 4.1.9 are the worst affected. 12- or 24-word seeds generated by the device that did not include user-generated dice rolls or a BIP 39 extra passphrase are vulnerable. 

Users who fit this category, who have bitcoins in an MK3 Coldcard and did not use the dice roll feature for extra entropy or the extra passphrase, should consider themselves at risk and move their coins as soon as possible from the wallets. Bitcoin Magazine technical writer Shinobi has published a guide on the topic, and Coinkite has also published a guide and advisory. 

The vulnerability was a specific line of code in the firmware, a low-level software codebase that controls the hardware. This firmware appears to be upgradable. The Coinkite advisory was updated this morning, advising users to upgrade device firmware for all three chips, MK3, MK4 and MK5 devices, including the Coldcard Q:

“Updated July 31, 2026 at 9:33 a.m. EDT: Fixed firmware is now available. Mk4 and Mk5 users must update to version 5.6.0 or later. Q users must update to version 1.5.0Q or later. For Mk3, update to version 4.2.0 or later.”

Coinkite also explained in their advisory that updating the firmware does not mean that the private and public keys generated by the vulnerable firmware before it are now secure; those keys remain vulnerable as they were effectively created with a weak password. After the firmware is updated, a new wallet needs to be created, and the funds need to be sent onchain to the new addresses to secure the funds. Coinkite wrote:

“Updating the firmware does not change or repair an existing seed. If your seed was generated before the fixed firmware version for your model, follow the migration guidance below unless the independent dice-entropy exception applies to you.”

Some Multisignature Wallets May Be At Risk

Peter Todd, Core contributor and cybersecurity engineer, today addressed specific edge cases for multi-signature wallets that use a threshold of Coldcards to secure funds. “Example case: you have a 2-of-3, with 2 Cold Cards, and a 3rd uncompromised device. If you move your funds, the moment your script is revealed for the first time – previously hidden behind the address hash – the attacker now knows enough to use the compromised 2 cold card keys to steal your funds.”

The transaction that reveals the multisig script might be unconfirmed, giving hackers enough time to create a competing transaction with a higher fee. Fortunately, such cases have a solution: the MARA mining pool can help in this case with their private mempool mining service, Slipstream; “because they promise to keep your transaction – and thus pubkeys – secret until they’re already in a block. Dramatically reducing the ability of the attacker to steal the funds,” said Todd. He added that “If you’ve already reused addresses, this isn’t relevant, and you should just try to move your funds ASAP. But if you haven’t, MARA may be able to help.”

Beyond The Immediate Crisis

NVK, one of the co-founders of Coldcard, published a long post on X with an initial analysis beyond the basic security steps needed to secure funds. In it, he wrote that the company is “committed to working with affected users who want to pursue a police report, insurance claim, or their own investigation”, including “a written incident summary specific to your loss and any transaction data we can share”. 

Beyond the immediate crisis, NVK pointed to a broader tech shift as the hacking capabilities of AI begin to change previous cybersecurity dynamics and expectations. In the blog post he wrote: 

“To every other developer: we believe this is a sober reality of the new AI paradigm. AI-assisted code review can now find latent bugs at a speed that is outpacing even the industry’s most seasoned experts. If your firmware is open-source or has ever been public, assume it’s already being read by attackers and defenders alike.”

The hack and over 70 million dollars in estimated stolen funds in the past 24 hours are an effective bounty paid to hackers who are now likely auditing every wallet codebase available for vulnerabilities. While the Bitcoin and broader crypto industry has generally operated under the assumption that hackers will test their code, the development of AI models optimized for cybersecurity accelerates these processes. 

Industry experts gathered in a long X Spaces public call last night, discussing the topic for many hours. Beyond the immediate recommendations and answering questions to Bitcoin users throughout the long Spaces, analysis of what is likely to follow in the coming weeks was also discussed. Other wallet providers are likely to get probed, and especially open source projects which generate private key material will be tested. 

The X Spaces was not recorded, likely to preserve the privacy of everyone in the call; however, initial sentiment suggests companies will need to be auditing their code with the latest frontier models, as a matter of survival. The latest cybersecurity-oriented AI models by Anthropic, OpenAI, Moonshot’s Kimi K3 and others are already available to the public. Many companies in the Bitcoin industry already use these to test the integrity of the code, but some might not be, and the race to find vulnerabilities in wallet-facing code will certainly continue, especially in the following weeks.

Ultimately, today we grieve lost coins, and a state of introspection and careful review occurs. Beyond this now historic hack will be an open source self-custody industry and infrastructure that is likely to be orders of magnitude more secure, with very hard lessons learned. After all, every hacker with an AI agent is likely testing defenses now. 

Multi-vendor, Multi-key Wallets and Covenants

Future high sovereignty wallets, be it at the retail or corporate level, are likely to not depend on any single vendor. Multisignature wallets, when well done, can distribute vulnerability risks across different code bases, teams and hardware. 

User-generated entropy was also a major theme in the X Spaces discussed earlier, with dice roll-generated entropy brought up regularly as a solution. Coldcards, as well as other hardware wallets like Foundation Devices, guide users on how to add their own entropy properly; many dice need to be rolled, ideally north of a hundred individual rolls. Once done, however, dice rolls represent a non-software source of randomness for wallets that also separates users from the edge-case risks in software- or hardware-generated entropy.

Covenants a popular soft fork among a certain niche in the Bitcoin industry have also started to be brought up as further step to strengthen the self-custody industry. This upgrade to the Bitcoin consensus which might be hard fought if achieved at all, could give users important smart contract capabilities, such a wallet that can only send to a white list of addresses, something not possible in Bitcoin script today. 

This post Coinkite Releases Fixed Firmware After Coldcard Bug; AI Likely Involved In The Breach first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

Bitcoin Magazine

US Closes in on Iran’s Strait of Hormuz Bitcoin Insurance Policy, Sanctions Companies

Iran has been dodging sanctions by accepting pay in Bitcoin from ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, according to a Friday announcement from the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

The OFAC sanctioned the companies tied to the Iranian regime accused of doing so. Ships have barely been passing through the strategic Strait of Hormuz, where a fifth of the world’s oil passes through, since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran in February. 

In the statement, OFAC said that Hormuz Safe, developed by Iran’s Ministry of Economy, “accepts payment in Bitcoin and other digital assets” so it can bypass sanctions. 

“With its economy in freefall and inflation in the triple digits, the regime is desperate for cash,” Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent said in a statement. 

“The United States will not allow Iran to hold global commerce hostage or use international shipping to finance the IRGC’s terrorism, aggression, and repression.” 

The OFAC statement added that two firms — the Persian Gulf Marine Insurance Company (PGMIC) and HormuzSafe Marine Services Authority (“Hormuz Safe”) — accused of running an IRGC-backed scheme forcing commercial vessels to buy mandatory “insurance” to transit the Strait of Hormuz.                       

Bloomberg first reported in May that Iran had started a Bitcoin-backed insurance service for Iranian shipping companies.

The U.S. earlier this month announced that it had frozen crypto linked to the Iranian regime, mostly in the form of the Tether stablecoin. 

Stablecoins like Tether’s USDT can be frozen by the company that issues the asset but Bitcoin, being decentralized and having no single issuer, cannot. 

Experts have warned that a recession could follow due to the war between the U.S. and Iran due to high oil prices if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed. 

This post US Closes in on Iran’s Strait of Hormuz Bitcoin Insurance Policy, Sanctions Companies first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

COLDCARD SECURITY RISK: IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED

First, yes, that is a very clickbait title and completely unusual. This is a real security issue. Here is the official announcement from Coinkite themselves posted yesterday, please read and verify the genuineness of the issue there.

TLDR: Coldcard MK2, MK3, MK4, MK5 and Q are being drained. A bug lets attackers find your seed phrase without any action on your part. Only wallets generated using the dice roll method are safe, assuming you rolled at least 50 dice. If you don’t know, don’t remember, or aren’t sure, move your funds immediately.

This is a critical issue that requires immediate action. If you used a Coldcard to generate a word seed and did NOT use the recommended 50+ dice rolls to provide your own entropy after the end of 2020, your word seed is not secure. It was generated without a sufficient amount of randomness, and can be brute forced by a malicious attacker. Wallets are actively being drained now. This issue also affects any ephemeral keys and session keys for Clone Coldcard or Key Teleport features, and BIP 85 seeds generated from a compromised seed. YOU MUST STILL MOVE YOUR FUNDS. 

This attack is being actively exploited, with around 1000 BTC seen moving on-chain connected to the vulnerability. 

Breath, and relax. You must move your funds to a new word seed, or a word seed generated by a different device, in order to secure your funds.

–   If you have another hardware wallet that is not a Coldcard, send your funds there. This is the quickest and simplest way to get them someplace secure.

–   If you do not have another hardware wallet, and only have a Coldcard, generate a passphrase using at MINIMUM six seed words from the BIP 39 word list. Use this guide to select your words for the passphrase, do NOT pick them yourself. Check your wallet fingerprint (or an address), power down your device, restart it and re-enter the passphrase. Confirm that the fingerprint (or address) matches, and send your funds to the passphrase wallet. This is not a permanent solution. This is simply giving you enough security that an attacker will not be able to brute force your keys in a matter of days, and you can generate a new seed without being in a state of panic. Make sure your passphrase is written down securely.

–   If you have no other options, or are uncomfortable with using the device at all, Nunchuck wallet available on mobile and desktop. Take your time, don’t rush yourself too fast, and make sure that all of your backups are done properly. After you have verified backups, send your funds to this wallet. If you are managing significant sums, Nunchuck has support for multisig. You can create one using multiple devices. Blockstream Green and Bluewallet are two other options for software wallets. 

Once your funds are secure, take a minute and relax. Coldcards are still safe to use as long as the word seed is generated securely. A firmware patch has been released here. Any word seed generated after this firmware update should be secure (and you can use the dice roll option too). If you have transferred your funds to a hot wallet, or something less secure, your Coldcard is safe to use after applying the firmware update and generating a new seed.

Once you have secured your own funds, stop and take stock. Reach out proactively to anyone you know who might be using a Coldcard that was vulnerable when they generated their seed. Inform them of the issue, and if needed (and you are capable) help walk them through migrating their funds. Everyone doesn’t pay attention to Bitcoin news on a regular basis, so many people might be unaware that they are even vulnerable.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, legal, or technical advice. Readers are solely responsible for managing their own private keys and executing fund transfers. Bitcoin Magazine and the author assume no liability for any loss of funds, technical errors, or operational missteps resulting from actions taken based on this content. Always independently verify security alerts directly through official project channels before taking action.

This post COLDCARD SECURITY RISK: IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Shinobi.

Japan-listed Quantum Solutions expanded the amount of Ether its group may sell through Oct. 30, 2026, after subsidiary GPT Pals Studio sold another 1,000 ETH to help fund its AI data-center push. The group can still sell up to 2,471 ETH, while only 1,714.8 ETH of its present balance is disclosed as outside a lender pledge.

The July 30 board action raised the aggregate ceiling from 1,875 ETH to 4,375 ETH. Together with 904 ETH sold on June 16, the latest transaction brought sales under the policy to 1,904 ETH.

GPT received $1.903 million in aggregate proceeds, net of transaction fees, at $1,903 per ETH. Quantum expects a roughly JPY 17 million loss because the sale price was below the May 31 carrying value of $2,003.97 per ETH.

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Jul 2, 2026 · Liam 'Akiba' Wright

Why the 756.2 ETH gap is conditional

After the sale, Quantum reported holdings of 4,764.8 ETH. Of that balance, 3,050 ETH remained pledged to a Singapore-based lender, while 1,714.8 ETH was outside the disclosed pledge.

On the current disclosed balance, the group is 756.2 ETH short of using its full remaining sale authority without touching the pledged coins. To use the entire remaining authority from its present inventory, it would need at least that much ETH released from the collateral arrangement. As a matter of arithmetic, not as a disclosed company plan, the group could instead obtain 756.2 ETH outside the pledge or combine both routes.

Whether Quantum can free any pledged ETH is unclear from the public loan terms. An April borrowing disclosure said GPT raised roughly $5.7 million for a planned one-year term using 3,050 ETH as collateral, with no ordinary loan interest. Disclosure of the structured transaction’s specific conditions was limited, and the filing did not describe collateral-release, substitution, early-repayment or liquidation mechanics.

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Feb 18, 2026 · Liam 'Akiba' Wright

Quantum explicitly said the higher maximum was not a decision to sell the entire amount immediately. Any further sale will depend on market conditions, ETH prices, progress in its AI Infrastructure Data Center business and funding needs. The 756.2-ETH gap therefore does not indicate an imminent liquidation or undisclosed lender pressure. It marks where the company’s expanded sale flexibility would meet the portion of its current balance that remains pledged.

Quantum has also disclosed a separate $1.5 million unsecured, interest-free loan to Compass Cloud AI Japan. Part of that loan, alongside group funds, helped finance the remaining $1,202,864 data-center deposit, showing that at least one disclosed AIDC payment used funding beyond ETH sales.

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Jul 15, 2026 · Oluwapelumi Adejumo

The post From crypto treasury to AI data centers: Inside the aggressive 4,375 ETH selloff that just hit a massive collateral wall appeared first on CryptoSlate.

In a July 29 forum-stage proposal, Aave risk service provider LlamaRisk recommended winding down the decentralized lender’s V3 deployments on Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium, and Aptos. The plan would put $4.1 million of debt on a staged exit path that keeps existing positions open during the initial step.

The Aave Request for Final Comments, or ARFC, covers 25 lending reserves with $12.8 million supplied, based on LlamaRisk data dated July 28. The forum thread still showed the request under discussion on July 31. Aave’s proposal lifecycle places an ARFC before a community Snapshot and any executable on-chain Aave Improvement Proposal.

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LlamaRisk’s economic case rests on support costs exceeding revenue. It said Sonic, Scroll, and zkSync each generate less than $5,000 in quarterly protocol revenue at current balances, while Metis, Soneium, and Aptos each generate less than $1,000. The proposal cites oracle, monitoring, and operational support costs but does not quantify the shortfall.

The same ARFC separately targets 50 individual reserves and 21 matured Pendle principal tokens across 11 deployments, with $85.3 million supplied and $11.5 million borrowed. Those balances sit outside the six-market totals.

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Jun 29, 2026 · Liam 'Akiba' Wright

How the six-market exit would work

For the six full-market exits, every reserve would be frozen and its supply and borrow caps cut to 1. Reserves carrying debt would receive a 99% reserve factor and a 5% interest rate model base variable rate; unborrowed reserves would not receive those two changes.

The two settings act on different sides of the market. The 5% figure is the base-rate component applied to borrowing. The 99% reserve factor determines how interest revenue is divided, directing nearly all interest paid by borrowers to the Aave treasury and leaving little for supplier yield. LlamaRisk expects lower yield to encourage withdrawals, which raises utilization and gives borrowers a stronger incentive to repay.

A freeze stops new supply, new borrowing, and use as fresh collateral. Positions already open would remain open, and the proposal says any additional unwind would be considered case by case. The starting point also varies: every listed Sonic and Aptos reserve was active in the July 28 tables, while every listed reserve on Scroll, zkSync, Metis, and Soneium was already frozen.

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What users could face next

The staged approach is designed to minimize immediate liquidation risk while preserving stronger levers if balances remain. LlamaRisk said later steps could raise interest rate curves or gradually reduce liquidation thresholds for selected collateral. After positions unwind further, deployment oracles could be replaced with fixed-price adapters under the method described in a companion oracle proposal.

Users remaining after the first step would therefore face possible rate, collateral, and oracle changes as the wind-down progresses, while the initial freeze itself leaves their positions open.

The post Why DeFi giant Aave is pulling the plug on six hyped blockchains making less than $5,000 a quarter appeared first on CryptoSlate.

VanEck's Bitcoin ETF ends its zero-sponsor-fee period today, July 31, with $1.076 billion in net assets, equal to 43.0% of the waiver's $2.5 billion asset threshold.

The VanEck Bitcoin ETF, which trades as HODL, reported the asset figure as of July 30. It was about $1.424 billion below the threshold, meaning HODL remained fully covered by the waiver through its final day.

The waiver's mechanics are more precise than a simple cap. VanEck waived the sponsor fee on the first $2.5 billion of trust assets through July 31. Had the fund grown beyond that level before the deadline, only assets above $2.5 billion would have incurred a 0.20% fee, producing a weighted sponsor fee.

After July 31, the 0.20% sponsor fee applies to all trust assets, according to VanEck's latest fee-waiver filing. VanEck had not announced another extension by Friday morning, and the fund's SEC submissions feed contained no newer fee-waiver filing.

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What HODL's post-waiver fee changes

At HODL's July 30 asset level, a 0.20% annual sponsor fee would amount to about $2.15 million if assets remained unchanged. For an investor, the same rate equals $20 a year for every $10,000 invested before changes in the share price.

That is the sponsor fee, not a measure of total ownership cost. Brokerage commissions, bid-ask spreads, premiums or discounts to net asset value, taxes and other costs can also affect an investor's result.

VanEck filed the latest extension on Nov. 25, 2025, replacing an earlier Jan. 10, 2026 deadline with the July 31 end date. Farside Investors' full daily table shows that HODL recorded a net $87.6 million of outflows across 169 dated sessions from Nov. 25 through July 30.

The flow total does not measure a change in assets under management and cannot, on its own, establish investor rejection or predict what happens after the fee begins. Net assets also move with Bitcoin‘s value and reflect creations, redemptions and expenses.

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The latest session offers only a snapshot. HODL attracted $2.3 million on July 30, about 0.99% of the $233.1 million net inflow across the tracked U.S. spot-Bitcoin products. Farside listed HODL's cumulative net inflows at $1.146 billion, a separate measure from the fund's $1.076 billion of net assets.

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Once the waiver expires, HODL's 0.20% sponsor fee will match the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF's fee. It will sit below the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF's 0.25% fee but one basis point above the Franklin Bitcoin ETF's 0.19% fee.

Among those three comparison products, HODL will be tied with one, cheaper than one and slightly more expensive than one on recurring sponsor fees. Its zero-fee period is ending on the calendar, without the $2.5 billion threshold coming into play.

The post The free ride for VanEck’s Bitcoin ETF is officially over after falling $1.4 billion short of growth target appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bitstamp accounted for $20 billion, or 77%, of the $26 billion decline in Robinhood's reported crypto notional volume from the first to the second quarter of 2026.

Volume attributed to Bitstamp fell 48%, from $42 billion in the first quarter to $22 billion in the second quarter. The Robinhood App declined 25%, from $24 billion to $18 billion, accounting for the remaining $6 billion of the sequential drop.

Robinhood’s crypto notional shrank 39%, from $66 billion to $40 billion, and Bitstamp supplied more than three-quarters of the drop. The headline total now folds two different customer mixes into one number, muddying the view of activity inside Robinhood’s retail app.

When Robinhood closed the Bitstamp acquisition in June 2025, it said Bitstamp had more than 500,000 funded retail customers and about 5,000 funded institutional customers, with most of its volume coming from institutions. Bitstamp's trajectory is therefore not a direct measure of Robinhood App engagement.

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There is a second comparability break inside the App series. Robinhood's Q2 disclosure says the metric began including executed crypto trades from WonderFi customers in June.

That adds one month of a new reporting perimeter to Q2, so the App's 25% sequential decline is not a perfectly like-for-like measure either.

Notional works like a traffic counter, tracking the dollar value of trades rather than the money Robinhood makes from them. Crypto revenue is reported at the company level, leaving Bitstamp’s and the App’s individual contributions unknown.

The venue split offers a snapshot of where trading was recorded. Customer movement between Bitstamp and the App remains outside that picture.

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For the companywide results, see CryptoSlate's broader earnings coverage.

The post Why a $20 billion Bitstamp slump makes Robinhood’s retail app look far weaker than it really is appeared first on CryptoSlate.

A new arXiv preprint studying seven major Bitcoin crashes found the warning signal shifting among price, leverage, and order flow from one event to the next.

One clue echoed across six usable cases. Taker order-flow variance tightened before each cascade, a faint weather front across the group rather than a siren traders could trust to call the next crash.

Ramon Marc Garcia Seuma submitted the single-author paper on July 29, 2026. The work has not been peer reviewed. It analyzed Binance's USD-margined BTCUSDT perpetual market across cascades from May 2022 through October 2025, using one-minute price bars and five-minute open interest, trader positioning, and taker buy/sell data over roughly two-month event windows.

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The signal moved with the trigger

In the study's framework, a market nearing a critical transition should recover more slowly from disturbances, leaving price or market structure with more statistical memory. The author tested rolling variance and lag-1 autocorrelation on detrended residuals across 39 combinations of analysis windows for every variable and event.

Price carried that signature in five of the seven cascades, but not in the February and October 2025 events tied to sudden tariff news. The paper proposes a possible split: cascades that build as markets absorb stress may leave a price signal, while abrupt external shocks may not. With only two events in the sudden-shock group, however, the author describes that pattern as a hypothesis to test, not a validated taxonomy.

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The strongest warning against generalizing came from the paper's out-of-sample test. October 2025 appeared to show the signal in leverage and order flow rather than price. When the same analysis was applied to the August 2024 cascade, the pattern inverted: price carried the signal while most leverage and flow variables did not. No tested variable carried the same positive critical-slowing-down signature across all seven events.

One inverse order-flow pattern did recur, but it did not solve the per-crash warning problem. Falling variance in the taker buy/sell ratio appeared before every cascade with usable data, covering six events.

All six observations fell in the left tail of a 300-onset placebo distribution, and four were below its fifth percentile. Yet two events overlapped the ordinary-market range individually, so the paper classifies the compression as a population-level precursor rather than a reliable alarm for a specific crash.

Related Reading

Bitcoin’s $10 billion liquidation wave reveals why the AI boom is hurting crypto

Bitcoin declined as AI-linked stocks and expected tech IPOs drew capital away from a market already vulnerable to leverage.

Jun 9, 2026 · Oluwapelumi Adejumo

The sample covers seven events on one exchange, some 2022 series are incomplete, and the public leverage and flow measures are proxies because direct intraday liquidation snapshots were unavailable. Other public gauges previously discussed by CryptoSlate, including basis, ETF flows and collateral settings, were not tested as early-warning candidates.

A later liquidation event shows how much remains outside the evidence. CryptoSlate reported roughly $1 billion in forced derivatives closures during a June 25, 2026 Bitcoin selloff, after the study's sample ended.

The post New Bitcoin study shows the strongest recurring liquidation warning signs cannot warn of an individual crash appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Hardware wallets are supposed to remove a single category of risk: the possibility that someone who is not you can compute your private key. Early this morning, roughly 500 Bitcoin holders discovered that their devices had failed at exactly that job, and had been failing quietly since March 2021.

The loss came to about 594 $BTC, roughly $38 million, and it took 25 minutes.

Bitcoin Wallet Hack: What exactly happened?

Between 01:31 and 01:56 UTC on Friday 31 July 2026, an attacker swept funds out of around 500 separate Bitcoin wallets. The mechanics were industrial. More than 1,300 individual UTXOs were moved across 500 transactions inside a three-block window, then 562 BTC was consolidated into a single address. At the time of writing, that address has not moved.

The victim profile is unusually consistent:

• Every drained wallet was single-signature.
• Every one held more than 0.15 BTC.
• Most had been dormant for years.
• Wallet creation dates spanned 2021 to 2026, closely matching the window during which the flaw was live.

That last point is the tell. The attacker was not picking targets by observing the network. The targets were determined by when each wallet was created.

How did the attacker guess keys that should be unguessable?

This is the part that matters, and it has nothing to do with phishing, malware, or a compromised computer.

A Bitcoin seed phrase is meant to be drawn at random from a pool so vast that guessing is arithmetically hopeless. The entire security model rests on that randomness being real. Hardware wallets include a dedicated hardware random number generator precisely so that the randomness does not depend on software.

According to analysis published by the Bitcoin engineering and security teams at Block, affected Coldcard firmware was not using it.

A build setting instructed the device to skip its own hardware randomness generator. A check in a supporting library then tested only whether that setting existed, not whether it was switched on. With no working hardware source and no error raised, key generation fell through to a basic software substitute, seeded from the device's serial number and its internal clock registers.

Neither of those inputs is secret. The serial number is fixed factory metadata. The clock values are timing state that an attacker can narrow down, or simply measure on an identical device they own.

The result: a seed that was supposed to be one candidate among an unimaginable number became a solvable problem. Coinkite, the Canadian firm that builds Coldcard, traced the change to a commit dated 1 March 2021, shipped in firmware 4.0.0 that same month.

The flaw sat in production for nearly five and a half years before someone exploited it.

Which Coldcard devices are affected?

Coinkite's advisory centres on Mk3 devices where the seed was generated on firmware 4.0.1 or later. Based on preliminary analysis, the company says Mk4, Q and Mk5 appear unaffected.

One critical distinction: exposure depends on which firmware was running at the moment the wallet was created, not on when you bought the device or what firmware it runs today. Updating your firmware now does not retroactively fix a seed that was generated with bad randomness. The key material is already weak.

Reporting on the full list of affected models has not been fully consistent, and the investigation is still developing. If your seed was generated on any older Coldcard, treat it as suspect until Coinkite confirms otherwise rather than assuming your model is on the safe list.

What should you do right now if you own a Coldcard?

Coinkite is urging affected users to move their funds. Concretely:

1. Identify which device and firmware generated your seed. Not what it runs now. What it ran when the wallet was first created.
2. If that was an Mk3 on firmware 4.0.1 or later, treat the seed as compromised. Not at risk. Compromised.
3. Generate a fresh wallet on a device you have reason to trust, and move the funds. Do not reuse the existing seed anywhere.
4. Do not wait for confirmation that you were specifically targeted. The wallets drained this morning were mostly dormant, which means their owners were not watching. The attack cost nothing per additional target.
5. Consider multi-signature for meaningful balances. Every wallet drained in this incident was single-signature. A multi-sig setup across devices from different manufacturers would have survived a flaw in any one of them.

If you generated your seed by rolling dice and entering the entropy yourself, a practice Coldcard has long supported, your randomness did not come from the broken code path.

Why did the Bitcoin price not react?

It barely moved. Bitcoin traded around $63,847 through the morning, down roughly 1% on the day and already softer on the week before the news landed.

Partly that is scale. $38 million is a rounding error against a $1.28 trillion market cap, and the stolen coins have not been sold, only consolidated. Partly it is the current market. This week also contained a record two-day crash in Korean equities and a 17% KOSPI rebound, and crypto ignored both. A market where almost nothing produces a reaction is not necessarily a strong one.

What does this actually tell us about hardware wallets?

Three things worth separating from the panic.

1. This is not a Bitcoin failure. The protocol worked exactly as designed. It faithfully executed valid signatures from keys the attacker was able to reconstruct. Nothing about Bitcoin's cryptography was broken.
2. This is not an argument against self-custody. Exchange failures have cost holders far more than $38 million, repeatedly. The lesson is not that self-custody is unsafe, it is that a hardware wallet is a piece of software running on a small computer, and software has bugs.
3. It is an argument against single points of failure. The uncomfortable feature of this incident is the delay. A silent randomness failure produces no symptoms. Nothing looks wrong. There is no alert, no failed transaction, no warning. The wallet works perfectly for five years and then, in 25 minutes, does not.

That is the case for multi-signature setups, for hardware from more than one vendor, and for user-supplied entropy on high-value wallets. Not because any single device is untrustworthy, but because a device that fails silently gives you no chance to notice before it matters.

If you are required to file a German income tax return for 2025 and you are doing it yourself, the clock runs out tonight. Not tomorrow morning, not the first working day of August. The statutory deadline is 31 July 2026 at 24:00, and for crypto investors this particular return carries a few things the previous ones did not.

Here is what still needs to happen in the next few hours.

Why is 31 July the hard deadline this year?

The COVID-era extensions are gone. For the 2025 tax year, the normal rule under § 149 Abs. 2 AO applies again: mandatory filers (Pflichtveranlagung) submit by 31 July of the following year. What counts is the moment your return reaches the Finanzamt, so with ELSTER or tax software it is the successful transmission that matters, not when you started filling it in.

Two exceptions buy you real time:

• Filing through a Steuerberater or a Lohnsteuerhilfeverein. Your deadline moves automatically to 1 March 2027, because 28 February 2027 falls on a weekend.
• Voluntary filing (Antragsveranlagung). If you are not obliged to file and are only submitting because you expect a refund, you have until 31 December 2029 for the 2025 year, with no penalty risk.

Everyone else is on the clock tonight.

Who actually has to report crypto in Germany?

Crypto is not treated like shares here. Coins count as "other assets" under § 23 EStG, which produces the rule that keeps Germany attractive for long-term holders: sell after a holding period of more than twelve months and the gain is tax free, no matter how large it is. The BMF confirmed in its March 2025 letter that staking or lending in the meantime does not extend that period.

Inside the twelve months, it looks different:

• Disposals under one year are taxed at your personal income tax rate, up to 45%.
• The €1,000 Freigrenze covers all private disposals in a calendar year, not just crypto. Note the word: Freigrenze, not Freibetrag. Stay below it and the gain is tax free. Reach it and the whole gain becomes taxable, not just the excess.
• Staking, lending and mining rewards are other income under § 22 Nr. 3 EStG, taxable on receipt at the market rate, with a separate €256 Freigrenze.
• Crypto-to-crypto swaps count as disposals. So do trades on decentralised exchanges. The 2025 BMF letter put DEX activity on the same footing as trades on Binance or Kraken, which means Uniswap and Curve history has to be documented the same way.
• FIFO is the method the German tax office works with, applied per wallet or per exchange.

Most private crypto activity lands in Anlage SO.

What is different about the 2025 return specifically?

Three things, and they all point the same direction.

• Anlage SO now has dedicated crypto lines. From the 2025 tax year onwards, the form has its own section for Kryptowerte rather than a generic "other assets" field. Less room to be vague.
• The grace period on documentation has expired. The BMF letter of 6 March 2025 introduced explicit record-keeping and cooperation duties for crypto, and it came with a Nichtbeanstandungsregelung covering assessment periods up to and including 2024. 2025 is the first year the stricter standard applies without that cushion. Handing over a wallet address is explicitly not enough evidence. The tax office expects transaction overviews or a proper tax report showing type, quantity, acquisition and disposal dates, costs and rates.
• This is the last return you file before the Finanzamt gets the data anyway. DAC8, implemented in Germany as the Kryptowerte-Steuertransparenzgesetz, applies from 1 January 2026. Every crypto service provider registered in the EU now reports user transaction data to the tax authorities automatically. From next year, what you declare gets compared against what your exchange already sent in.

How do you get a filing-ready crypto report in the time you have left?

If your 2025 history is spread across four exchanges, two hardware wallets and a handful of DeFi protocols, reconstructing it manually tonight is not realistic. This is what dedicated tax tooling exists for.

CoinTracking is the option most German filers end up with, for a practical reason: it was built in Germany, in Munich, and has been running since 2012, so the German output is not an afterthought. It generates the Anlage SO as a ready-to-file PDF, and also exports in WISO and SteuerGo formats if you are working inside tax software. FIFO is applied per depot with its Depot Separation setting, which matches how the BMF expects wallet-level calculation to work. Imports cover 400+ exchanges, wallets and blockchains via API, CSV or blockchain address, and the engine tags DeFi swaps, staking rewards and NFT trades automatically rather than making you classify each line by hand.

Two practical notes so you are not caught out tonight. New accounts start with a 7-day trial that includes unlimited imports, but the tax report itself sits behind a paid plan, so if you need the Anlage SO today you will be upgrading today. And the import is the fast part: getting your API keys and CSVs in usually takes far less time than reviewing the flagged transactions afterwards.

👉 Import your 2025 history and generate your Anlage SO with CoinTracking

If your history is genuinely messy, the more sensible move may be to accept the second option in the next section instead of rushing a return you cannot substantiate.

What happens if you miss midnight?

From 1 August the Finanzamt is entitled to impose a Verspätungszuschlag where filing was mandatory. It runs at 0.25% of the assessed tax per month, with a minimum of €25 for every month started, and it becomes mandatory rather than discretionary once you are 14 months late. Keep ignoring it and Zwangsgeld and an estimated assessment follow, and an estimate rarely lands in your favour.

You still have two legitimate exits:

1. Request an extension. An informal application to your Finanzamt with a real reason (illness, missing documents from an exchange) can be granted. The catch is timing: the request has to arrive before the deadline expires, so that is also a today job.
2. Engage a Steuerberater or Lohnsteuerhilfeverein. Doing so moves your 2025 deadline to 1 March 2027 automatically. For anyone with a complicated DeFi or high-frequency year, this is usually the better answer than a rushed self-filing.

One more thing ending tonight: XTB's free Nike share

Separate from the tax calendar, the XTB promotion CryptoTicker readers have been claiming this month also closes today. Open a new account and you get one Nike share (ISIN: US6541061031) credited to your trading account, free.

How it works:

1. Open a new XTB account through our link and enter referral code CRYPTOTICKER at the start of the process.
2. Complete the account opening and activate your trading account.
3. Make any first deposit and accept the promotion terms in the XTB app.
4. The Nike share is credited within three business days.

No trades required, no minimum holding period. One timing detail matters if you are starting today: the deposit and the in-app acceptance of the promotion terms must both fall inside the promotion window, which ends today, 31 July 2026. Normally you get seven days after opening. Starting now, that means completing both steps tonight.

👉 Open your XTB account and claim the free Nike share

Investing involves risk. The value of investments can fall as well as rise, and you may get back less than you invested. Promotion terms apply.

South Korea just delivered the most violent equity collapse in its history. The KOSPI has fallen more than 33% in July alone, its worst month on record, and roughly 40% from the all-time high it printed barely six weeks ago. Circuit breakers fired on consecutive sessions for the first time ever. Somewhere between $1 trillion and $2 trillion in market value has evaporated, depending on which starting point you measure from.

For crypto traders, this is not a foreign story. Korean retail capital is one of the most influential flows in digital assets, and it spent the last nine months somewhere else entirely. Now that trade has blown up.

What is the KOSPI and why does it matter?

The KOSPI, short for Korea Composite Stock Price Index, is the benchmark index of the Korea Exchange main board. It covers every common stock listed on that board and is the standard proxy for South Korean equities, in the same way the S&P 500 stands in for the US market. Its smaller, tech-heavy sibling is the KOSDAQ.

Two things make the KOSPI unusually important right now.

First, concentration. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix together account for close to half the index weighting. That is not a diversified benchmark. It is a leveraged bet on two memory chip manufacturers, which in 2026 means a leveraged bet on the global AI buildout.

Second, position in the supply chain. High-bandwidth memory is the bottleneck component for AI accelerators. When Korean chipmakers move, the market reads it as a signal about AI capital expenditure everywhere. That is why a Seoul selloff shows up in Nasdaq futures and, increasingly, in Bitcoin.

How did the KOSPI erase $2 trillion in 40 days?

The rally came first, and it was extraordinary. The index more than doubled in the first half of 2026, gaining 116% at its peak and hitting an all-time high of 9,385.59 in June. That briefly made South Korea the world's sixth-largest stock market by value.

Then the reversal. Measured from the June record, the drawdown now approaches 44%. The index closed at 5,593.56 on Thursday after a 5% morning bounce faded. July's candle opened at 8,591.50 and traded as low as 5,262.77, a 38.95% intra-month collapse. For context, the COVID crash of March 2020 took the index down 31.10% from high to low.

The two sessions of July 28 and 29 did most of the damage. Roughly 864.5 trillion won was wiped out across those two days alone, with the index plunging more than 10% on the 28th and another 6% on the 29th. Bloomberg data circulating this week puts the total destruction at close to $2 trillion since the June peak. South Korea has fallen from the sixth-largest equity market in the world to the eleventh.

Circuit breakers, which halt trading for 20 minutes when the index drops 8% or more within a minute, have now fired nine times in 2026. Before this year, the mechanism had been triggered a handful of times in the entire history of the exchange.

Samsung Electronics has lost more than 35% over the past month. SK Hynix has lost nearly 47%.

Why did the KOSPI crash happen?

There was no single trigger. Five pressures landed on a heavily stretched market at roughly the same time, and each one amplified the next.

1. Record leverage. Outstanding leveraged bets reached 29.2 trillion won, around $19.7 billion, in early July. Margin loans hit a record 61.98 trillion won in the second quarter. Retail investors piled into single-stock ETFs tied directly to Samsung and SK Hynix, products that magnify every move in both directions.
2. The AI trade unwind. Global doubts about the sustainability of AI infrastructure spending hit an index where two chipmakers dominate. What looked like structural growth in June started looking like a financing-driven bubble in July.
3. The China chip shock. On July 28, reports emerged that China had begun mass production of homegrown DUV chipmaking tools. Combined with the $8.6 billion CXMT listing, the market suddenly had to price in a real threat to DRAM pricing power.
4. The SK Hynix earnings miss. A day later, SK Hynix reported record second-quarter revenue of 79.3 trillion won and still missed the 84 trillion won consensus. Record revenue was not enough. The stock fell 9.61%.
5. Tightening and outflows. The Bank of Korea delivered its first rate hike since 2023 while foreign investors sold aggressively. On July 27 alone, foreign net sales hit 1.9 trillion won, and retail buying could not absorb it.

The feedback loop did the rest. Falling prices triggered margin calls, forced selling deepened the losses, and leveraged ETFs mechanically sold more into the decline. Regulators held an emergency meeting, and Finance Minister Koo Yun-cheol conceded that the leveraged products deserved closer scrutiny before launch, adding that further stabilisation measures would follow if needed.

Why is this important news beyond South Korea?

Because it is the first large-scale, real-money test of what happens when the AI trade unwinds in a market with retail leverage stacked on top of it.

Every argument being made about US AI capex, circular vendor financing and semiconductor valuations has now been stress-tested in Seoul. The answer was a 40% drawdown in 40 days. Somewhere around 700,000 leveraged retail traders have been caught in it, and the second-order effects on Korean consumer balance sheets have barely started to show.

It also matters because the KOSPI was the best-performing major equity market on the planet as recently as late July, up 41.5% year to date in dollar terms. Best performer to worst crash in a matter of weeks is the kind of whiplash that changes global risk appetite, not just local sentiment.

Will the KOSPI crash have repercussions on crypto?

Yes, and the mechanism is more specific than generic risk-off contagion.

• Korean retail left crypto for this trade. In late 2025, Korean investors executed what local commentators called the Great Korean Pivot, rotating out of crypto and especially memecoins into AI-linked equities. The effect on domestic exchanges was brutal. Combined daily volume across Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone, Korbit and Gopax collapsed roughly 88% year on year to around $305 million in July, down from $2.82 billion a year earlier. Fee income dried up to the point where smaller platforms like Korbit reportedly sold their own Bitcoin and Ether reserves to fund operations, and Upbit operator Dunamu posted sharp declines in quarterly revenue and profit.
• Some of that capital is now coming back. On July 28, as the KOSPI plunged past 10% and halted, combined volume across the top five Korean exchanges hit $964.11 million, up 82.45% against the prior month's daily average of $528.39 million. On July 29 it was $831.76 million, up 57.4%. Upbit did about $715 million on the 28th, roughly double its monthly average, as order flow concentrated in the deepest venue.
• But look at what they bought. On Upbit that day, Tether volume reached 121.5 billion won, ahead of Bitcoin at 89.7 billion won and Ethereum at 59 billion won. That is not a rotation into crypto risk. That is capital parking in dollars through the fastest available on-ramp. When stablecoins outrank BTC on a Korean exchange during an equity crash, the signal is defensive, not bullish.

An earlier episode supports the caution. When the KOSPI fell 8.22% and halted on July 13, Upbit's BTC volume rose from around 7,436 BTC to 8,724 BTC over two days, an increase that still left activity roughly 27% below its own 30-day average. A blip, not a migration.

Bitcoin is trading as a high-beta tech asset. $BTC sits near $64,500 as of Thursday, up marginally on the day after the Fed held rates steady, but still around 45% below its October 2025 all-time high. Through the worst of the Korean selloff, Bitcoin traded flat to soft rather than catching a safe-haven bid. The Korea Premium Index, the modern version of the kimchi premium, has been sitting in negative territory, confirming that domestic demand has not yet flipped.

There is a genuine bull case here, and it is worth stating fairly. Korean regulators are now restricting leveraged equity products. Several hundred thousand burned retail traders still want volatility. Historically, when Korean retail gets pushed out of one venue, it reappears in another, and crypto has been the usual destination. If the KOSPI stabilises and risk appetite recovers, Korean flow returning to Upbit and Bithumb would be a real tailwind for altcoins in particular.

The bear case is simpler. Margin calls are settled by selling whatever is liquid, and crypto is liquid 24/7. In a deleveraging event, correlations go to one.

What should crypto traders watch next?

Three levels and one flow.

The 5,100 to 5,300 support zone on the KOSPI has held so far, and the July low landed inside it. If it breaks, the next major support sits between 3,200 and 3,400, roughly 40% lower. That scenario would almost certainly drag global risk assets down with it.

Watch the Korea Premium Index. A flip from negative to positive is the cleanest early signal that Korean retail is re-entering crypto rather than hoarding stablecoins.

Watch Korean exchange volume mix. If the BTC and altcoin share starts taking back ground from USDT, the rotation thesis gains substance. As long as Tether leads, capital is hiding, not buying.

And watch the Fed. Wall Street just posted its worst session since April 2025 following a divided rate decision. Korean stress landing on top of an already fragile US tape is a different problem than Korean stress in isolation.

For most of 2026, the story was simple: AI stocks up, crypto down. July flipped the script. Bitcoin and Ethereum posted the strongest monthly returns of any major asset class, while the trade that carried global equities all year came apart.

The scoreboard for July:

The odd part is that almost nobody in crypto felt like they were winning. The Crypto Fear & Greed Index sat at 28, firmly in "Fear" territory, on the same day Ethereum was printing a 20% month.

How did Bitcoin and Ethereum actually perform in July?

Ethereum entered the month around $1,600 and traded near $1,920 by July 29, a gain of roughly 20%. 

Bitcoin started July near $60,000 and changed hands around $64,200 at the end of the month, up about 9%.

Neither move was a straight line. Both assets pushed higher after a softer than expected US CPI report in mid July, wobbled when spot Bitcoin ETFs snapped a week long inflow streak with a single day of $225 million in net outflows, then recovered again once Washington paused airstrikes on Iranian military targets and geopolitical risk premium came out of the market.

What matters is the shape of the month: crypto absorbed bad news and kept grinding upward, while equities did the opposite.

Why did chip stocks fall 22% while the Dow rallied?

This was not a risk off month. It was a rotation.

Semiconductors went into July having gained nearly 97% on the year. By mid month, roughly a third of that 2026 advance had been erased, and the selling accelerated into the final week. The trigger was not weak demand. It was the price investors had agreed to pay for flawless execution.

Three things broke the trade at once. Bank of America's own bubble risk indicator for semis climbed to 0.91, above the Nasdaq 100's 0.69, with strategist Michael Hartnett noting that the combination of extreme concentration and overbought conditions had not been seen since June 2000. Big Tech's AI capital spending guidance started to look like a cost rather than a growth story. And reports on China's progress in memory chips and lithography equipment raised the question of how durable the moat really is.

The damage went global in the last week of July. South Korea's Kospi dropped 10.84% in a single session, with Samsung down 13.4% and SK Hynix down more than 14.7%. Japan's Nikkei 225 fell 3.95%. Advantest lost over 10%.

Meanwhile the Dow Jones climbed 537 points on July 28 for a third straight winning day, lifted by strong earnings from Sherwin-Williams and Coca-Cola. Money did not leave the market. It left the crowded end of it, and some of it landed in crypto.

Why did Ethereum outperform Bitcoin by more than 2 to 1?

Ethereum's 20% beat Bitcoin's 9% by a wide margin, and the reasons are specific rather than sentimental.

Corporate treasury demand kept showing up. Bitmine added another $74 million in ETH during July as Tom Lee continued building toward a stated goal of holding 5% of total supply. Institutional desks also started framing ETH as the cleaner expression of a crypto recovery. Fundstrat's Sean Farrell argued mid month that the tactical backdrop was improving and that ETH increasingly stood out as the more attractive way to trade it.

There is a historical pattern behind that view. During the 2022 bear market, Ethereum began outperforming Bitcoin several months before Bitcoin found its bottom. Traders who believe that rhyme is repeating were positioned in ETH before the rotation out of semis began.

Did the Fed decision change anything for August?

On July 29, the Federal Reserve held the funds rate at 3.50% to 3.75% for a fifth consecutive meeting, the longest pause since the 2008 cycle. The vote was 9 to 3, with Beth Hammack, Neel Kashkari and Lorie Logan all dissenting in favour of a 25 basis point hike.

That is the detail to carry into August. A three way hawkish dissent is rare, and it came after prediction markets had already priced roughly a one in five chance of an actual hike, the highest of this cycle. Chair Kevin Warsh gave little explicit forward guidance, which leaves September genuinely open.

Crypto held its ground through the announcement, with BTC around $64,268 and ETH around $1,917 shortly after. But a steady rate alongside firmer yields and a stronger dollar is a tighter liquidity setup than the mid July CPI print implied. Standard Chartered still has a $100,000 year end target on Bitcoin. Polymarket's crowd is far more conservative, with top odds on BTC finishing 2026 between $70,000 and $75,000 and ETH between $2,000 and $2,250.

What should investors take from July?

The useful lesson is not that crypto is back. It is that crypto and AI equities have stopped moving as one asset. For two years they traded as the same liquidity bet. In July they diverged sharply, and a portfolio holding both would have felt that divergence as diversification rather than as double exposure.

The risk cuts the other way too. If the semiconductor unwind turns into a broader growth scare rather than a rotation, crypto's July independence will be tested quickly.

Cardano is trading at $0.1638 after a sharp three-day bounce off $0.1535, and momentum has quietly shifted back in favour of buyers. The $0.18 area is where $ADA was rejected a week ago, and it is the level that would confirm the July downtrend is over. Getting there means clearing $0.1751 first. Here is what the 3-hour chart says about the odds.

What Does the Cardano 3-Hour Chart Show Right Now?

The 3-hour chart shows ADA in a broad range with a clear pattern of lower highs. The month opened with an aggressive impulse that spiked into $0.200 on 5 July, a move that was rejected almost immediately and gave back every cent of the advance within 48 hours.

The second attempt came on 23 July, when Cardano pushed up to roughly $0.1805 before rolling over again. That lower high matters, because it confirms sellers are stepping in earlier on each rally. Price then slid into $0.1535 on 27 July, and that is where buyers finally defended.

The current candle prints at $0.1638, with an intraday high of $0.1648 and a low of $0.1626. In other words, ADA has recovered around 6.7% from the swing low but is still sitting almost 18% below the July peak.

The structure to keep in mind is simple: three horizontal levels define everything. Resistance at $0.1751, support at $0.1488, and a deeper support shelf at $0.1424 that dates back to the late-June accumulation base.

Why Is $0.1751 the Level That Decides ADA's Next Move?

$0.1751 is not an arbitrary line. It is the level that capped the entire post-spike recovery in early July and it sits just above the 23 July rejection wick. Everything ADA has done for four weeks has happened underneath it.

From $0.1638, that resistance is roughly 6.9% away. A clean 3-hour close above $0.1751, ideally with expanding volume rather than a single wick, would break the sequence of lower highs and put the $0.180 area back in play as the first target. Above that, the July high at $0.200 becomes the obvious magnet, and reclaiming it would be the first genuinely bullish monthly signal ADA has produced since spring.

Until then, every push toward $0.175 has to be treated as a supply zone rather than a breakout.

What Happens If Cardano Loses $0.1488?

The bearish scenario is equally well defined. $0.1488 is the first real support beneath current price, around 9.2% lower, and it lines up with the top of the base ADA built through late June.

Lose that on a closing basis and $0.1424 becomes the next stop, roughly 13% below spot. That level is the floor of the June accumulation range, and it is the last structural support before $Cardano is back at the multi-year lows it printed at the end of June, when ADA closed the month near $0.1453 after shedding close to 40%.

The nuance worth flagging: the 27 July low at $0.1535 held comfortably above $0.1488. That is a higher low relative to the June base, and it is the single most constructive thing on this chart.

Is the RSI Signal Strong Enough to Trust?

The 14-period RSI reads 55.89, with its moving average down at 39.27. That gap tells you two things.

First, RSI dipped close to the mid-20s during the 27 July flush, which is a genuinely oversold reading on a 3-hour timeframe, and the bounce came directly off it. Second, RSI has now crossed decisively back above its own signal line, a momentum shift that usually precedes at least a test of overhead resistance.

The caveat is the speed of the move. Going from oversold to 56 in three sessions is a fast repricing, and RSI is now entering the zone where previous July rallies stalled. Momentum is improving, but it is not yet confirming a trend change. That confirmation only comes from a price close above $0.1751.

What Fundamentals Could Support the Cardano Price?

The technical picture is not operating in a vacuum. Cardano has just moved through one of its busiest development stretches: the Van Rossem hard fork took the network to protocol version 11, adding new Plutus built-in functions and updated cost models that reduce the resources needed to run complex smart contracts. It was also the first Cardano upgrade fully ratified through the on-chain Voltaire governance system.

Behind it sits Ouroboros Leios, the scalability overhaul that went to public testnet in June and is targeted for mainnet late in 2026. Charles Hoskinson has framed it as a step change in throughput, with figures in the 10x to 65x range floated by the community, though those numbers still need to survive real-world load.

On-chain, Santiment data showed wallets holding between 10 million and 100 million ADA lifting their share of supply from 37.66% to 38.13% through the June selloff. Whale accumulation into weakness does not time a bottom, but it does explain why $0.1424 has held so far. Working against that, daily transaction counts fell to roughly 17,400 at the end of June, close to a 45-day low, so usage has not yet followed the development activity.

What Are the Key Levels to Watch for ADA?

• Resistance 1: $0.1751, the level that has capped every rally this month
• Resistance 2: $0.180, the 23 July rejection high
• Resistance 3: $0.200, the July peak
• Support 1: $0.1535, the 27 July swing low
• Support 2: $0.1488, first structural support
• Support 3: $0.1424, the June accumulation floor

The base case is continuation of the range: ADA grinding between $0.1488 and $0.1751 while the market waits for a catalyst. The bullish trigger is a 3-hour close above $0.1751. The bearish trigger is a close below $0.1488. Anything in between is noise.

The Nano Banana tool let users generate fake satellite scenes from a text prompt, alarming investigators who rely on Google Earth to verify breaking news and atrocities.

The decision requires AI companies to license copyrighted music used to train models and generate songs, marking another legal win for music rights holders in Europe.

New restrictions block future models of foreign-made robots and connected power inverters from receiving FCC approval after U.S. national security agencies warned they could pose cybersecurity and supply chain risks.

The latest attestation offers a snapshot of the assets backing the world's largest stablecoin, including U.S. Treasuries, repo agreements, and more than 146 metric tons of gold.

The approval comes weeks after Circle won federal approval to establish a national trust bank, adding another license as the USDC issuer expands.

The market's price performance is far from perfect and unfortunately that dynamic is most likely going to prevail.

A newly surfaced poll circulated among Senate Democrats shows that 84% of Democratic primary voters view crypto-backed candidates unfavorably.

SBI Holdings claims that the token appears to be "waiting" for the outcome of the long-delayed U.S. CLARITY Act.

Ripple Product Lead Jazzi Cooper unveils 5 game-changing amendments for XRP.

Shiba Inu continues sending multi-million SHIB tokens out of circulation as its burn activity becomes increasingly aggressive over the week.

TLDR:

• George Santos will pay $35,069.98 under a CFTC settlement covering $17,569.98 in disgorged profits and a $17,500 civil penalty.
• The order bars Santos from prediction market trading for three years after trades tied to his State of the Union attendance.
• The CFTC says social posts and omitted travel updates moved contract prices favorably while Santos changed positions on Kalshi.
• Kalshi says it flagged the activity, referred evidence to regulators, and plans separate enforcement with possible trader reimbursement.

George Santos has agreed to pay more than $35,000 to settle Commodity Futures Trading Commission allegations involving Kalshi trades. The CFTC settlement covers $17,569.98 in trading profits and a separate $17,500 civil penalty. It also bars the former congressman from prediction market trading for three years. 

Regulators say Santos traded contracts tied to his attendance at President Donald Trump’s February State of the Union address. They allege his social media posts omitted key travel changes while market prices moved in his favor. Santos settled without admitting or denying the agency’s findings, according to his lawyer. Kalshi reported the activity itself.

George Santos Settlement Details and Trading Sequence

The agency says George Santos first bought positions predicting that he would attend the address. He then posted about clothing choices for the event. The contract price rose, allowing him to close the position at a profit.

Travel problems later changed the situation. A winter storm disrupted his flight to Washington, and Santos discussed the delay online. His lawyer says he had booked a flight and hotel and planned to attend.

According to the CFTC, Santos then shifted toward contracts predicting that he would not attend. He also canceled a train reservation. However, the agency says he did not disclose that cancellation while continuing to post about his travel prospects.

Minutes into the speech, Santos announced that he was stranded at the airport and would miss the event. The market moved sharply after that post. Regulators say the later position generated nearly $14,400, while the trading sequence produced $17,569.98.

The settlement requires George Santos to surrender those profits. He must also pay the $17,500 civil monetary penalty. Together, the two amounts bring the payment to $35,069.98.

Attorney Joseph Murray said the agreement offers a practical resolution to avoid lengthy litigation. He stressed that Santos admitted no wrongdoing. Murray also denied any intent to deceive traders or manipulate prices.

The lawyer said the State of the Union contract marked Santos’s first prediction market wager. He maintained that changing weather, not a trading plan, forced the attendance reversal. The CFTC order nevertheless treats the social posts, omissions, and trades as connected conduct.

Kalshi Referral Expands CFTC Prediction Market Scrutiny

Kalshi said its surveillance systems flagged the George Santos activity and referred the matter to regulators. Robert DeNault, the exchange’s enforcement chief, said the company supplied evidence supporting the CFTC action. The platform now plans separate enforcement under its own rules.

Kalshi said it would seek to reimburse affected market traders if its process recovers monetary penalties. That step remains separate from the CFTC settlement. The federal order directs the forfeited profits and penalty through the regulator’s enforcement process.

The case arrives as prediction markets face scrutiny over traders who can influence contract outcomes. Political figures may know private schedule changes before other participants. Their public statements can also move prices when contracts concern their actions.

The CFTC has pursued other event-contract cases during 2026. In May, the agency charged a Google employee over alleged insider trading linked to Year in Search results. That complaint sought disgorgement, penalties, and trading bans.

Meanwhile, the regulator continues defending federal authority over event contracts against state challenges. Those disputes concern whether some contracts resemble gambling. The George Santos matter instead centers on market conduct on Kalshi.

Santos’s lawyer said the CFTC settlement should not count as an admission. The order still imposes a three-year trading ban. It creates an enforcement record tied to statements made during an active contract.

George Santos represented Queens and Long Island before the House expelled him in 2023. He later pleaded guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. President Trump commuted his prison sentence in October 2025.

The post CFTC Orders George Santos to Pay Over $35,000 for Kalshi Trades appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• IBM shares rise as UniCredit launches a major European banking tech overhaul.
• Accenture will acquire IBM’s majority stake in UniCredit’s infrastructure venture.
• IBM will supply mainframe, software and consulting for core banking upgrades.
• The partnership aims to expand cloud, data and AI capabilities across Europe.
• Regulatory approvals remain required before the transaction can be completed.

IBM (IBM) shares rose 0.86% to $223.65 at Friday’s close before slipping 0.39% to $222.78 after hours. The move followed a major technology agreement involving UniCredit, Accenture, and IBM across thirteen European markets. The partnership targets banking modernization, wider artificial intelligence use, and UniCredit’s long-term European growth.

International Business Machines Corporation, IBM

UniCredit Builds New Banking Technology Model

UniCredit plans to create a new technology operating model with support from Accenture and IBM. The bank wants greater control over system development while maintaining resilience across essential banking operations. The structure will also improve flexibility as UniCredit updates digital services across its European network.

Accenture will acquire IBM’s majority stake in the joint venture managing much of UniCredit’s technology infrastructure. That change will give Accenture a larger operating role within the bank’s multi-year transformation programme. Meanwhile, IBM will continue supplying key platforms, software, infrastructure, and consulting services.

The agreement supports UniCredit’s wider plan to improve efficiency and strengthen service delivery. It also creates a shared framework that the bank can apply across several European markets. Consequently, UniCredit expects faster technology deployment and more consistent operations throughout the group.

IBM Expands Core Banking Technology Role

IBM will provide UniCredit with modernized IBM Z platforms and related software for mission-critical workloads. The company will also deliver consulting services supporting hybrid cloud systems and operational changes. These services will help UniCredit maintain reliability while modernizing its core banking environment.

The collaboration strengthens IBM’s position among major financial institutions requiring secure and dependable infrastructure. Banks commonly use mainframe systems for payments, customer records, and high-volume transaction processing. IBM’s technology remains central to UniCredit’s planned move toward a more flexible architecture.

IBM will also help UniCredit connect existing systems with newer digital platforms. This approach can limit disruption while allowing the bank to update services gradually. It also provides a stronger foundation for data management, automation, and artificial intelligence applications.

Accenture Takes Larger Transformation Role

Accenture will manage more infrastructure operations after completing the proposed stake acquisition. The company will combine its European operations, cloud expertise, and technology delivery capabilities. As a result, UniCredit can coordinate major system upgrades through a broader regional structure.

The expanded role will cover cloud adoption, data management, and artificial intelligence across UniCredit’s businesses. Accenture will also help the bank standardize processes and expand new digital tools. These changes could improve service speed and reduce technology complexity across multiple countries.

The transaction still requires regulatory approval and other customary closing conditions. UniCredit must also complete relevant employee information and consultation procedures across affected markets. The partnership will then launch a multi-year programme covering infrastructure, operations, and digital banking development.

The post IBM (IBM) Stock: Edges Higher as UniCredit Partnership Targets AI Banking Growth appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Chime shares gained 1.73% as the fintech announced a 10% workforce reduction.
• About 150 employees will lose their roles as Chime shifts toward smaller teams.
• The company plans flatter management and wider AI use to improve efficiency.
• Chime will report second-quarter results on August 5 after its restructuring.
• Financial firms are cutting jobs as automation reshapes their operating models.

Chime Financial shares gained 1.73% to $22.99 Friday as the fintech announced a major workforce restructuring. The stock then slipped 0.04% to $22.98 after hours, keeping most of the session’s advance. Chime will cut about 150 jobs while expanding automation and reducing management layers.

Chime Financial, Inc. Class A Common Stock, CHYM

Chime Cuts 150 Roles Under New Operating Structure

The reduction represents roughly 10% of Chime’s workforce and affects teams across several operating areas. Chime employed about 1,500 people at the end of 2025, according to its annual filing. Management linked the changes to faster technology adoption and stronger productivity across smaller teams.

Chief Executive Chris Britt said new tools now allow fewer employees to complete more work. As a result, Chime plans to simplify reporting lines and shift resources toward priority growth areas. The company also expects new skill requirements as technology changes daily operations.

Chime will add selected capabilities despite the broader job reductions. Meanwhile, the company plans to increase office attendance to support faster collaboration and decisions. These measures form part of a wider effort to improve execution after its public listing.

Flatter Teams Target Faster Growth and Lower Costs

Chime completed its initial public offering in June 2025 and now faces higher public market expectations. At the same time, management wants faster growth alongside tighter spending and stronger operating discipline. The restructuring aims to create a leaner organization without slowing product development.

Chime operates as a financial technology company rather than a chartered bank. It provides banking and payment services through partners including The Bancorp Bank and Stride Bank. This model lets Chime offer digital accounts, lower fees, and simplified mobile services.

The company reported 10.2 million active members during the first quarter of 2026. That figure increased 19% from the previous year and showed continued customer growth. However, Chime must convert member expansion into durable revenue and improved profitability.

Chime Financial Stock Gains Before Quarterly Results

Chime will report second-quarter results on August 5, giving shareholders a clearer view of current performance. The update should show whether growth remained strong before the restructuring announcement. It may also clarify how management expects the job cuts to affect future costs.

The move follows similar reductions across payments, banking, and cryptocurrency companies. Visa recently announced plans to remove about 2,600 roles, equal to roughly 7% of its workforce. Block also disclosed a much larger workforce reduction while redesigning operations around automation.

Mastercard, Robinhood, and Coinbase have also reduced staffing during 2026. These actions reflect a broader shift toward smaller teams and more automated internal processes. Financial companies increasingly seek higher output while controlling expenses in a competitive digital market.

The post Chime Financial Inc. (CHYM) Stock: Surges as AI Push Triggers 10% Workforce Cut appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Profusa stock drops after hours as the G3 acquisition faces key conditions.
• The G3 deal requires at least $30 million in secured financing before completion.
• G3’s unaudited 2025 revenue estimate of $111 million supports the deal value.
• Shareholder approval is needed to convert preferred stock into common shares.
• Profusa must retain its Nasdaq listing and resolve G3 debt before the closing.

Profusa shares closed unchanged at $1.06 in regular trading before dropping 3.77% to $1.02 during after-hours trading. The decline followed a formal option agreement covering Profusa’s proposed acquisition of G3 Vision Labs and three subsidiaries. The transaction now depends on financing, debt restructuring, shareholder approval, and continued Nasdaq listing compliance for the proposed transaction.

Profusa, Inc. Common Stock, PFSA

Profusa Sets Terms for G3 Acquisition

Profusa secured the right to acquire G3 Vision Labs, Med Screen Laboratories, Dominion Diagnostics, and Acutis Diagnostics under the agreement. The option remains open until G3 provides required financial records, followed by an additional 90-day exercise period under agreed terms. G3 estimated 2025 net revenue at about $111 million using unaudited management information for the diagnostics group and subsidiaries.

The proposed combination would create a public diagnostics company operating national laboratories certified under federal CLIA standards across several markets. These laboratories serve addiction treatment, pain management, behavioral health, and other provider networks across regional markets and related clinical services. Profusa expects the business to generate recurring revenue through a broad base of healthcare providers and nationwide diagnostic testing services.

Profusa must complete several conditions before it can exercise the acquisition option under the signed agreement and related documents. The company must raise at least $30 million through completed financings or binding funding commitments for Profusa or G3 combined. G3 must also refinance, repay, settle, or secure lender consent covering specified outstanding debt obligations before Profusa completes the transaction.

Financing and Approvals Control the Deal

Profusa must keep its preferred stock designation effective and secure shareholder approval under Nasdaq listing rules before exercising the option. Shareholders must approve preferred share conversions and related transaction terms during a properly convened company meeting before any conversion occurs. Profusa must also preserve its Nasdaq listing and avoid suspension, removal, threatened delisting, or related proceedings before closing.

Profusa paid G3 stockholders 201,120 common shares and 52,903.566 newly designated non-voting convertible preferred shares as option consideration. Each preferred share converts into 1,000 common shares after Profusa receives the required shareholder approval under the agreed structure. G3 stockholders will receive another 53,918.113 preferred shares if Profusa exercises the acquisition option at the planned transaction closing.

G3 stockholders will retain the initial consideration if Profusa leaves the option unexercised, and the transaction will not change control. Tungsten Advisors advised Profusa, while Katten Muchin Rosenman and K&L Gates provided legal counsel to the two companies. Profusa expects to file further terms in Form 8-K, while the issued securities remain unregistered under federal and state laws.

The post Profusa Inc. (PFSA) Stock: Drops as G3 Deal Hinges on $30M Financing appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Grayscale urged Senate leaders to schedule a CLARITY Act floor vote before the August recess, warning that regulatory delays restrict institutional participation.
• The House passed H.R. 3633 by 294-134, while the Senate Banking Committee advanced the measure 15-9 before sending it toward the chamber floor.
• Senate negotiations still cover ethics enforcement, stablecoin rewards, developer protections, and counter-terrorist-financing compliance language.
• Republicans hold 53 Senate seats, so supporters may need at least seven Democratic votes to clear the 60-vote procedural threshold.

Grayscale has urged Senate leaders to schedule a CLARITY Act vote before lawmakers leave Washington for the August recess. The digital asset manager says delayed market rules restrict institutional participation across crypto products. Its request arrives while Bitcoin trades near $63,002, down 2.69%, with Ether near $1,863. However, no clear price move has been directly tied to the letter. 

Grayscale argues that pension funds, endowments, developers, and product issuers need predictable federal standards. The firm wants senators to finish negotiations covering regulatory jurisdiction, investor safeguards, stablecoin rules, and developer protections. Financial crime controls must be settled before floor time disappears.

CLARITY Act Vote Push Meets a Tight Senate Calendar

Grayscale addressed its request to Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. The company said hundreds of thousands of Americans hold its investment products, making the legislation relevant to regulated investors.

The CLARITY Act would establish federal rules for digital asset trading and supervision. It would divide responsibilities between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The House passed H.R. 3633 by a 294-134 vote on July 17, 2025. The Senate Banking Committee advanced it 15-9 on May 14, 2026, sending the measure toward the floor.

Grayscale said senators have spent months addressing jurisdiction, investor protection, and developer safeguards. “After months of bipartisan work, the industry is ready for CLARITY,” the firm said.

Republicans hold 53 Senate seats. Most major legislation needs 60 votes to overcome procedural barriers. Supporters therefore need at least seven Democrats if every Republican backs the measure.

The official Senate calendar lists August 10 through September 11 as a state work period. Nominations, spending measures, and foreign policy matters are also competing for the remaining floor time.

No formal floor vote had been posted when Grayscale issued its request.

A Senate-approved version could differ from the House bill. Any changes would require agreement between both chambers before the measure reaches the president.

Senate Talks Focus on Ethics and Stablecoin Reward Rules

Negotiators continue to debate ethics restrictions covering federal officials and digital tokens. The dispute includes which authority should enforce those restrictions and whether states should receive enforcement powers.

Stablecoin rewards represent another difficult issue. Banking groups argue that yield-like incentives could pull deposits from traditional lenders. Crypto companies say broad restrictions could reduce competition and limit product design.

Lawmakers are also reviewing protections for developers who write non-custodial software. Supporters want the bill to distinguish software creation from financial intermediation. That distinction could affect applications, wallets, and infrastructure developers that never control customer assets.

Countering the financing of terrorism provisions remain part of the wider negotiations. Lawmakers must balance stronger controls with language that does not treat every developer as a regulated intermediary. The final text will determine how compliance duties apply across exchanges, brokers, protocols, and software providers.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has pushed Congress to complete the legislation before recess. He recently described negotiations as near the “1-yard line” and urged lawmakers to finish the remaining work.

Grayscale linked the delay to American competitiveness. The firm said clearer rules in Singapore and Abu Dhabi could attract capital, companies, and technical workers. It argued that stable federal standards would support exchange-traded products, token markets, custody services, and institutional allocations.

Zach Pandl, Grayscale’s head of research, said uncertainty limits participation from pensions and endowments. Those investors often require settled custody, classification, disclosure, and trading rules before approving allocations.

Bitcoin, Ether, XRP, Cardano, and Solana traded lower that session. Traders watch whether Senate leaders schedule debate, release compromise language, or postpone action until lawmakers return in September.

The post Grayscale Presses Senate to Advance CLARITY Act Before Break appeared first on Blockonomi.

Cardano was up by 4% over the past 24 hours after a few choppy sessions earlier in the week. The crypto asset climbed from around $0.164 to above $0.17. The latest uptick has pushed its monthly gains to around 12%.

Amidst improving price structure, new data suggests that ADA may be entering a different phase.

Buyers Hold Their Ground

Pseudonymous analyst ‘The Boss’ said ADA may be moving from panic-driven selling toward a more constructive accumulation phase after an aggressive sell-off. The analysis pointed to higher lows in recent trading sessions rather than new breakdowns.

According to The Boss, buyers have continued to defend a major demand zone of $0.1064-$0.1503, while a short-term ascending trendline is keeping the recovery structure intact. The crypto asset is also compressing below overhead resistance, which indicates the market is looking for its next directional move rather than extending the earlier decline, the analyst explained.

Now the focus remains on whether the developing base can turn into a broader recovery. Holding current support and maintaining higher lows would strengthen the accumulation narrative and improve the overall market structure.

Further adding to the bullish case, whale activity has also picked up. CryptoPotato recently reported that large ADA holders increased their combined holdings to 25.6 billion tokens, which is nearly 70% of the circulating supply and the highest level since February 2023.

Retail exposure, meanwhile, declined, a mix that Santiment said could support the asset. Analyst Ali Martinez found that whales had accumulated 30 million ADA, which is worth more than $5 million, over the previous month. The renewed buying suggests larger investors may be positioning for another move higher.

Meanwhile, institutional interest also appears to be holding up. Recent data from Blockworks revealed that Cardano ETFs have now posted 16 straight months of net inflows.

Bigger Picture

For some market watchers, ADA’s historical performance remains a reason for worry. One market watcher highlighted the token’s poor long-term performance, while arguing that a $10,000 investment made at its all-time high five years ago would now be around $500.

The post also said that Cardano has fallen roughly 84% since Trump mentioned it in March 2025 as part of a proposed US Strategic Crypto Reserve. From its August 2021 all-time high, the token remains down about 95%.

Despite those numbers, Charles Hoskinson remains positive about the ecosystem’s future. The founder recently compared its approach to Anthropic’s rise in AI, and said that the company leapfrogged Google and OpenAI not by moving faster, but by having the “right mindset.”

Hoskinson said Cardano is seeing a similar shift, as developers and investors are placing greater importance on security and governance. He also pointed to recent DeFi incidents to highlight how quickly vulnerabilities can affect the wider ecosystem.

He said lasting stability requires clear governance, a strong software development process and a sustainable roadmap. While acknowledging Cardano’s past mistakes, Hoskinson said he is “happy” with where the ecosystem stands and expects strong growth over the next 12 to 24 months.

The post Is Cardano (ADA) Finally Shifting From Sell-Off to Accumulation? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

UNI rose 13% over the past 24 hours and reached $4.54 – a level not seen since January this year. The latest rally has lifted the asset’s gains over the past month to 60%.

The move came as Uniswap announced Launches in beta, a new tab on its Web App for discovering top token offerings. For now, Robinhood Chain is the first network featured in the new tab, but more networks are expected to be included.

New Tab Debuts

Uniswap said launchpad builders such as Bankr, Pons, Long, and others are using the platform as their trading infrastructure. The company added that Launches will give these projects more distribution. The feature currently includes token releases on Robinhood Chain, with more to come.

According to the platform’s stats, more than 340,000 new tokens launched into Uniswap across Robinhood launchpads in July alone. These collectively generated $3.6 billion in trading volume.

The new Launches tab pulls tokens from top launchpads into a single feed. Users can filter these or sort by 24-hour volume, liquidity, recently debuted, or trending.

The burn was another notable development for UNI this week, as 106,000 units were destroyed on July 29. That comes as the protocol faces renewed debate over its v4 fee structure. Some community members raised concerns that protocol fees could reduce returns for liquidity providers and push liquidity toward competing exchanges.

Uniswap founder Hayden Adams pushed back against what he called the “FUD and misunderstanding: around the changes. He said the new protocol fees are additive, meaning liquidity providers would continue earning the same 30 basis points on a 30bp pool. He also rejected claims that the protocol would take 25% of LP profits, and explained that a 5bp protocol fee on a 30bp pool amounts to about 14% of total swap fees, not LP earnings that already existed.

Adams also argued that the 5bp fee is significantly lower than the 100-200bp fees charged by centralized exchanges.

Zooming Out

The protocol has also been caught up in a wider wave of crypto scams targeting users through fake websites. Earlier this year, a fake Uniswap website was draining funds from crypto wallets. Experts warned that scammers had stolen at least $400,000. Users were advised to use only official links and verify protocols through DeFiLlama.

The warning followed a broader report from security group SEAL, which found a sharp rise in malicious Google Ads targeting crypto users. SEAL blocked more than 356 malicious ad URLs tied to scams impersonating Uniswap and other major platforms.

Interestingly, Uniswap was the most impersonated, as it accounted for 41% of tracked malicious sites. Losses linked to the campaigns exceeded $1.27 million between March 13 and March 30.

The post UNI Just Hit a 6-Month High as Uniswap Rolls Out New Token Discovery Tab appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Most leading cryptocurrencies have headed south over the past 24 hours, yet Hyperliquid’s HYPE is among the few to defy the latest red wave.

While it has risen by a mere 1.5%, one analyst assumed it might be gearing up for a staggering 40% pump in the near future.

The Necessary Condition

Currently, HYPE trades at around $54.70, placing it above the lower boundary of an important channel depicted by Ali Martinez. He suggested that if the asset holds the $53 level, a move up to $75 is possible. Also speaking on the matter was Altcoin Sherpa, who claimed that HYPE’s current level is “a good spot for a bounce.”

“Expecting huge tradfi trading volumes to come over the next few days too, which helps,” the analyst added.

Some on-chain signals also suggest that the asset may post additional gains in the short term. CoinGlass’s data shows that exchange outflows have dominated over inflows in the last several days, meaning that investors have transferred their holdings from centralized platforms to self-custody solutions. This is considered a bullish factor since it reduces the immediate selling pressure.

The Bearish Case

The number of pessimists, though, seems even more well-represented. X user Cut recently doubted HYPE’s potential, reminding of its inability to break its all-time high and wondering if its price would make a substantial decline. Ryker joined the discussion, projecting a plunge to $32 “soon.”

Cryptorphic also gave their two cents, arguing that HYPE is showing weakness after losing its long-term trendline and its price has broken below the key ascending support. They believe that if the $57-$58 range turns into resistance, the breakdown could confirm further downside, envisioning a possible crash under $30.

Meanwhile, the whales’ activity reinforces the pessimists’ outlook. Lookonchain disclosed that large investors keep selling HYPE, revealing the case of a market participant who purchased over one million tokens at an average price of $18 17 months ago and unstaked and deposited the stash into FalconX and Coinbase, perhaps with the intention to cash out.

The waning institutional interest adds more weight to the bearish perspective. Spot HYPE ETFs, which attracted substantial capital in June, have not appealed to pension funds, hedge funds, and other conservative investors during most days of July, with outflows significantly dwarfing inflows.

The post Hyperliquid (HYPE) Could Soar by 40% But Under This Condition: Details appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin’s reaction to the Bank of Japan’s latest policy decision may look calm on the surface, but one analyst believes a much bigger liquidity risk is building beneath global markets.

His warning came after the BOJ left its benchmark interest rate unchanged at 1% on July 31.

Japan’s Bond Market Dilemma Could Spill into Crypto

According to EGRAG CRYPTO, Japan’s financial system has run for more than three decades on the assumption that money would stay almost free. That assumption formed after the Nikkei peaked near the end of 1989, and policymakers spent the following decades pushing rates toward zero to avoid a repeat collapse.

The approach let Japan pile up one of the largest public debt loads of any developed economy, and the Bank of Japan became the biggest single buyer of its own bonds.

The analyst wrote that “Japan is approaching one of the most dangerous monetary crossroads in modern financial history,” pointing to wage growth that has pushed past 5%, a level not seen since before the country’s deflationary stretch started.

That change weakens the old case for near-zero rates. Raise them, and Japan risks losses for banks, insurers and pension funds sitting on low-yield bonds, plus higher refinancing costs on its own debt. Keep them low, and the yen keeps sliding, pushing up import costs on energy and food.

Cheap yen also fed the carry trade for years, with investors borrowing in Japan and buying higher-yielding assets abroad, including US Treasuries, tech stocks and Bitcoin. EGRAG warned that a fast unwind would force those same assets to be sold to repay yen loans, a chain reaction that would not stay contained to Japan.

“Foreign assets are sold → yen is bought → yen strengthens → more leveraged positions are forced to close,” he wrote.

Bitcoin traded close to $64,000 following the rate decision, per CoinGecko data, up almost 9% in the past 30 days, although it was down nearly 2% for the week and roughly 18% over three months. The OG crypto had earlier shrugged off the volatility that came after the US Federal Reserve kept interest rates unchanged at 3.50% to 3.75% during the week.

Other Analysts Have Been Here Before

The idea that Japan could become a source of tighter global liquidity is not new. Earlier in the year, analyst Ted Pillows argued that rising Japanese bond yields were already making the yen carry trade less attractive, reducing the flow of money into higher-risk assets such as cryptocurrencies.

More recently, market commentator Hupzy suggested prolonged yen weakness could continue supporting demand for Bitcoin and stablecoins, while warning that any sudden intervention by Japanese authorities could trigger short-term liquidations across crypto markets.

EGRAG himself stopped short of claiming that a major unwind is already underway. Instead, the analyst suggested that investors should closely watch the yen, Japanese government bond yields, Bank of Japan policy decisions and capital flows for signs that the country’s decades-old monetary system is beginning to change, with consequences that could eventually extend to Bitcoin and the broader digital asset market.

The post Japan’s Bond-vs-Yen Dilemma Could Shake Bitcoin and Crypto: Analyst appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The team behind the second-largest meme coin introduced an interesting challenge for its community aimed at increasing the token’s global popularity.

Some members said they plan to take advantage of the initiative soon, while others pointed to important reasons to avoid it.

SHIB in the Air

Earlier this week, the major international airline Emirates shook hands with Crypto.com, thus allowing UAE residents to book flights using the digital payment solution on the exchange’s website and application.

Shiba Inu’s official X account shared the update, reminding that SHIB is among the numerous tokens supported by the platform. It also encouraged its community to put the initiative to the test.

Many users applauded the news, and some asserted that they will use the meme coin as a payment method in the coming days. Others said they will never part with their coins, reminding the case of the programmer Laszlo Hanyecs, who bought pizza with Bitcoin (BTC) in 2010.

“Never using my SHIB for paying for anything, I don’t wanna end up being like that guy that bought pizza with his Bitcoin,” CryptoKing stated.

In the crypto world, Hanyecs’s story is considered both legendary and deeply instructive. 16 years ago, he spent 10,000 BTC to buy two pizzas, showing that the cryptocurrency can already be used as a payment method. At that time, the stash was worth around $40, yet at current rates it equals over $630 million.

Alongside promoting the idea of purchasing flight tickets with SHIB, the team has kicked off preparations for its sixth birthday, set for August 1. The community is already speculating whether the celebration will come with a major ecosystem update, but so far there are no signs that this will happen.

SHIB Price Outlook

Last weekend, the self-proclaimed Dogecoin killer posted a sudden and somewhat unexpected daily increase of 35%. Among the potential catalysts that have triggered the pump are a mysterious whale who has resumed accumulating after more than half a year of inactivity, as well as the notable resurgence of the burning mechanism.

In the following days, though, the bears stepped in and erased most of the gains, with SHIB currently trading at around $0.000004702, which is still a 12% jump on a weekly scale. According to Santiment, there were 52 whale transactions amid the rally, suggesting that large holders took profits. At the same time, retail investors joined the party too late and gave whales the necessary liquidity to reduce their exposure.

The analytics platform suggested that the optimal approach with meme coins like SHIB is to exit when retail FOMO surges and return once the crowd turns hostile and labels the token a scam.

The post Shiba Inu Team Sets a New Challenge for the SHIB Army: Who Goes First? appeared first on CryptoPotato.