CME's growing XRP futures share signals increased institutional confidence, potentially influencing broader crypto market dynamics and future XRP valuation.

The post CME’s share of XRP futures jumps as token rallies 40% in a week appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Internal dissent over Iran's nuclear strategy may hinder diplomatic resolutions, complicating regional stability and international relations.

The post Iran nuclear enrichment debate intensifies amid 2026 conflict appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The escalation in military tensions heightens regional instability and could influence market perceptions of future Russian territorial ambitions.

The post Russia attacks Ukraine’s Izmail area, closes border crossing to Romania appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

This lawsuit highlights the growing tensions and legal battles over intellectual property in the competitive tech industry landscape.

The post Apple sues OpenAI, alleging employee accessed circuit plans after jumping ship appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Trump's remarks may lower urgency for U.S.-Iran diplomacy, impacting market perceptions and potentially easing immediate nuclear tensions.

The post Trump downplays nuclear weapon use amid US-Iran tensions appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Strategy Opposes MSCI Proposal, Says Bitcoin Treasury Firms Are Being Targeted a Second Time

Bitcoin treasury Strategy has blasted Morgan Stanley Capital International’s proposal to exclude it from its Global Investable Market Indexes, calling it “misguided” and “flawed.” 

Writing in a letter to MSCI Monday, the Nasdaq-listed Bitcoin behemoth’s founder, Michael Saylor, and CEO, Phong Le, said that the company was discriminating against digital asset businesses. 

MSCI said earlier this month that it was consulting on a plan to define “non-operating companies” and make them ineligible for its Global Investable Market Indexes. The removal of such companies would exclude firms like Strategy from indexes visible to a large pool of institutional investors. 

MSCI’s latest proposal comes after the company in 2025 proposed excluding from its indices all companies whose digital-asset holdings represent 50% or more of total assets. 

“MSCI’s continued effort to discriminate against digital assets is misguided and calls into question MSCI’s neutrality and reliability,” Strategy’s letter read. 

It added: “The proposal, like the 2025 proposal that MSCI withdrew, is discriminatory, arbitrary, and misguided. If adopted, the proposal would have no meaningful impact on Strategy’s business, but it would profoundly harm MSCI’s reputation as a reliable and neutral index provider. Like the 2025 proposal, the current proposal should be withdrawn.”

Strategy argued that MSCI was relying on unprecedented classifications to define Bitcoin as a “non-operating” asset. Strategy said it reports its Bitcoin business as an operating segment and its Bitcoin gains and losses as operating expenses. 

The company said that MSCI’s methodology for targeting “non-operating companies” was “arbitrary and unexplained,” and was just a way of unfairly targeting digital asset treasuries. 

Strategy further argued that the company is an operating one, employing 1,500 people across the globe and actively using its Bitcoin to “create shareholder value.”

Strategy — formerly MicroStrategy — is an enterprise software company that pivoted to buying and holding bitcoin in 2020. It first bought the cryptocurrency to protect shareholders but has since aggressively bought the asset and is now the largest corporate holder of the cryptocurrency, with 845,050 bitcoins worth $65.8 billion at today’s prices. 

Investors can buy Strategy’s Nasdaq-listed stock (MSTR) to get heightened exposure to bitcoin’s performance. 

MSTR closed Monday trading 4% higher. Year-to-date, the stock is down 15%. 

This post Strategy Opposes MSCI Proposal, Says Bitcoin Treasury Firms Are Being Targeted a Second Time first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Unfazed by Trump’s Iran Threats

Bitcoin on Monday shrugged off tensions in the Middle East, barely moving despite U.S. President Donald Trump vowing to hit Iran hard. 

The price of the biggest cryptocurrency recently stood at $79,076, unmoved over a 24-hour period. The coin also hasn’t budged from where it stood seven days ago. 

Geopolitical strife has this year hurt Bitcoin’s price, with the cryptocurrency typically facing downward pressure on news of war and rallied in hopes of a ceasefire. 

When the U.S. and Israel first attacked Iran in February, the coin nosedived, and had been shaky on news of war in March and April. 

But in recent months, Bitcoin’s volatility has been muted, according to analysts, and Monday was no different: President Trump promised to hit Iran again but the asset didn’t flinch. 

“We’re going to hit them hard,” President Trump was quoted telling a Fox News reporter on Monday. The U.S. and Iran started strikes again on Sunday — the first in over one month. 

Bitcoin started a phenomenal run two weeks ago — its best in three years — and is up nearly 30% over the past month. 

Its price started surging after the U.S. Treasury would at least double the size of its liquidity-support buyback operations. The announcement hurt the dollar but non-yielding assets like bitcoin and gold have benefited. 

Positive regulatory news has also helped bitcoin this month: President Donald Trump last week said that the long-awaited crypto Clarity Act was a “very, very powerful” piece of legislation, and urged lawmakers to get it over the line. 

The Clarity Act aims to establish a framework for distinguishing between digital assets that are securities, commodities or payment stablecoins — legislation that the crypto industry has long called for. 

Investors have piled back into exchange-traded funds this month, too, which has also helped bitcoin’s price. From August 17 to 27, investors threw over $2.8 billion at the vehicles — the most since October. 

Bitcoin reached as high as $81,281 last week before sliding again on Friday. 

This post Bitcoin Unfazed by Trump’s Iran Threats first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Strive Becomes Fifth-Largest Bitcoin Treasury, Stock Jumps on Latest Buy

Strive’s stock soared on Monday after the company announced a $143 million bitcoin buy, making it the fifth biggest publicly traded crypto treasury. 

The Nasdaq-listed company announced its latest buy of 1,800 bitcoins between August 24 and August 28. It snapped up the coins for an average price of $79,431, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Dallas, Texas-based company now holds 23,156 coins worth $1.8 billion at today’s prices. Its stock (NASDAQ: ASST) was trading 9% higher at about 12.30pm in New York. Year-to-date, Strive’s stock has risen by nearly 40%. 

Strive’s year-to-date Bitcoin yield, a metric that compares growth in bitcoin holdings relative to share count, reached 40.8% as of its Aug. 28 filing, up from less than 37% in early June.

Strive now is the fifth biggest bitcoin treasury, behind only Strategy, Twenty One, Metaplanet, and MARA. 

Founded by former Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy in 2025, after raising $750 million to buy Bitcoin, Strive debuted as an official bitcoin treasury. 

In January 2026, it completed the acquisition of Semler Scientific in an all-stock deal — the first instance of a publicly traded Bitcoin treasury company acquiring another such company. 

The idea is that investors can get amplified returns from Strive’s stock. The company buys bitcoin with equity, and maintains a debt-free balance sheet: no bonds, no credit lines, and no leveraged positions that could trigger forced liquidation in a downturn. 

Strive CEO Matt Cole has described the company as debt-free with zero margin requirements and zero encumbered bitcoin.

Strive’s latest purchase comes as Strategy, the biggest corporate holder of bitcoin, restarted its buying last week. 

The software company had paused buying bitcoin for 10 weeks but announced it had bought 4,603 bitcoins for $369.7 million between August 24 to August 30.

This post Strive Becomes Fifth-Largest Bitcoin Treasury, Stock Jumps on Latest Buy first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Russia’s Sberbank Estimates $46.4B Trading Volume in First Year of Crypto Buildout

Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, has said it expects trading volume with its new crypto rollout to hit 4 trillion rubles ($46.43 bln) in the first year, according to reports. 

Volumes are also expected to hit 7.5 trillion rubles ($87.06 bln) by 2029, Sberbank Deputy Chairman of the Executive Board Anatoly Popov was quoted saying, as reported by Tass on Saturday. 

The forecast was deemed “conservative” according to the news report. Sberbank in July revealed plans to debut a Bitcoin and crypto wallet as well as digital asset custody by December. The Bank of Russia in July published draft regulations for crypto trading, and the State Duma is preparing the comprehensive regulation of digital assets. 

And in a Friday report, Tass quoted Sberbank Deputy Chairman Anatoly Popov saying that the bank was planning to accept Bitcoin — and other cryptocurrencies — as collateral for loans. 

Russia is fast moving ahead with regulating digital assets in the country. Russian President Vladimir Putin this month signed a law to set in stone the regulation of digital currencies and digital rights in the country. 

The new law reportedly allows only registered entities to operate as exchanges, and puts limits on the amount of crypto retail investors can use. 

Still, despite the rollout, using digital assets as a means of payment or legal tender within Russia is still banned. Using crypto as a form of payment has been prohibited in Russia since 2022. 

President Putin has appeared to praise Bitcoin in the past, once saying that the leading cryptocurrency can’t be stopped. 

Since the U.S. and European governments cut Russia off from the SWIFT payments system after it invaded Ukraine in 2022, Russian companies have been using Bitcoin to skirt around the penalties. 

But the Russian state keeps a tight grip on what its citizens can do with crypto: authorities have been cracking down and arresting people operating unregistered crypto exchanges. 

And the amounts involved barely matter — a nuclear engineer in Sarov was sentenced to 18 years for sending about $13 from his crypto wallet to groups the state designates as terrorist organizations.

This post Russia’s Sberbank Estimates $46.4B Trading Volume in First Year of Crypto Buildout first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Strategy Resumes Bitcoin Buying After 10-Week Hiatus 

Bitcoin treasury Strategy resumed its bitcoin buys last week, snapping up nearly $370 million in the leading cryptocurrency, according to a Monday announcement from the company. 

A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows that Strategy bought 4,603 bitcoins for $369.7 million between August 24 to August 30. Each coin was bought at an average price of $80,318, according to the filing. 

The buy comes after Strategy paused its bitcoin buys in June, instead focusing on building a cash buffer, buying back its stock and even sometimes selling some of its holdings. 

“Strategy is evolving from one-way capital issuance to active capital management,” Strategy CEO Phong Le said in June.

“We intend to move between issuing securities when capital is attractive and repurchasing securities when our instruments trade at levels that make buybacks accretive. This flexibility is designed to create shareholder value, improve corporate performance, and strengthen the quality and market standing of Strategy’s securities in the eyes of investors.”

Strategy now has $5.1 billion in its USD Reserve and $1.61 billion its new USD Cash reserve — which was announced last week. 

The company holds 845,050 bitcoins worth $65.8 billion at today’s prices. 

Software company Strategy — formerly MicroStrategy — began buying bitcoin in August 2020 as a treasury strategy to boost shareholder returns during the pandemic. 

It has since spent more than $63.7 billion on buying bitcoin and remains by far the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin in the world. Its approach spawned a wave of copycat companies that have since adopted similar crypto-treasury strategies of their own.

Chairman and Strategy founder Michael Saylor has said that the company is now focusing on creating digital credit: high-yield products, such as its preferred equity, STRC, which are backed by its bitcoin holdings. 

Strategy’s stock (NASDAQ: MSTR) was trading slightly higher on Monday morning in New York. Year-to-date, its price has dipped nearly 20%. 

Bitcoin was trading for $77,821 on Monday morning in New York after hitting a high last week of $81,281. Over a 24-hour period, the coin now sits unmoved, but over a 30-day period, it has jumped by more than 24%. 

This post Strategy Resumes Bitcoin Buying After 10-Week Hiatus  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Strategy raised $602.8 million by selling 4,531,421 MSTR common shares in one week, then split the proceeds among a renewed Bitcoin purchase, support for its STRC preferred stock, and additional cash.

The company's Aug. 31 filing attributed $369.7 million to buying Bitcoin, $151.8 million to repurchasing 1,557,177 STRC shares, $50.7 million to STRC dividends, and $30 million to its USD Cash account.

STRC is variable-rate cumulative perpetual preferred stock. The transaction shows Strategy using new common-stock proceeds for both Bitcoin accumulation and preferred-stock support.

The four disclosed uses total $602.2 million, $0.6 million below the filing's rounded $602.8 million net-proceeds figure. The filing reports each amount to one decimal place but does not separately reconcile the difference.

Bitcoin remained the largest destination

Strategy bought 4,603 BTC from Aug. 24 through Aug. 30 at an average price of $80,318, inclusive of fees and expenses. The purchase lifted its holdings from 840,447 BTC to 845,050 BTC, according to the filing and its official Bitcoin ledger.

The company reported an aggregate purchase cost of $63.73 billion and an average cost of $75,412 per BTC for the full position.

In its Aug. 24 filing, Strategy reported no Bitcoin purchases or sales during the prior weekly period. The Aug. 31 filing then reported the 4,603 BTC purchase, while the remaining proceeds funded other parts of the balance sheet.

Strategy sold no preferred shares through its at-the-market programs during the latest period. It instead used $202.5 million of the MSTR proceeds for STRC repurchases and dividends. After the buyback, the company said $364.8 million remained available under its wider preferred-stock repurchase program.

The final $30 million went to USD Cash, a flexible account that Strategy says may be used for Bitcoin purchases, expanding its reserve, capital management, and similar corporate purposes.

USD Cash is separate from the USD Reserve, which is intended to support preferred dividends and interest on outstanding debt. As of Aug. 30, Strategy reported $1.61 billion of USD Cash and a $5.1 billion USD Reserve.

Both balances included expected proceeds from at-the-market shares sold but not yet settled.

Bitcoin was still the largest disclosed destination for the week's MSTR proceeds. But the filing also shows how Strategy's common-stock issuance now feeds three distinct needs at once: Bitcoin holdings, preferred-stock obligations and buybacks, and flexible cash.

The post Strategy splits $603 million share sale between Bitcoin purchases and STRC support appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Ontology suspended mainnet block production to investigate a potential security concern, pausing the network while its technical team and validators reviewed the issue.

A public-node snapshot showed a gap of about five hours and six minutes since the chain's last recorded block.

The project announced the pause at 09:09 UTC on Aug. 31. Ontology called it a preventive measure and said it had not confirmed a security incident or found any indication that user assets had been lost or compromised. Based on the project's assessment at the time, its ONT and ONG crypto assets, along with other on-chain assets, remained unaffected.

Public node remained at block 20,770,893

Ontology's first-party notice said it identified the potential concern during a daily security check. The notice did not specify the technical condition under review, which systems might be involved, or what findings would allow production to resume.

The project said the suspension's duration was undetermined and that it would issue a separate announcement before or when the network resumed. It also said it would not process on-chain transactions while block production remained suspended. Ontology did not disclose a public restart timetable in the notice.

Those statements keep the episode distinct from a confirmed exploit or attack. The network interruption is clear, but the project's asset-safety statement was a preliminary assessment made while the review was still underway. Ontology did not report a loss, compromise, or active attack in either of its initial updates.

Ontology's developer documentation lists dappnode1.ont.io as a public MainNet node. A height request captured at 13:30:49 UTC returned block 20,770,893.

The record for that block carries a timestamp of 08:24:26 UTC on Aug. 31. The difference between the block timestamp and the later snapshot was five hours, six minutes, and 23 seconds.

That calculation measures time since the last block visible through the documented node. The node data does not explain why production stopped, but its unchanged height aligns with Ontology's statement that the mainnet had been suspended.

The next material update is whether validators resume block production and what Ontology's review finds. A restart would establish the final duration, while a later technical explanation could show whether the precautionary halt prevented an incident or addressed a concern that did not develop into one.

The post Ontology halts mainnet transactions as technical team investigates potential security issue appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Phemex placed 82 unique USDT spot pairs under Special Treatment on Aug. 31, requiring users to pass a mandatory Risk Cognizance Test before trading them. The restriction took effect at 10:00 UTC and applies to established assets including ETC, XTZ, SNX, YFI, NEXO, AXS, USDe and TUSD.

The exchange announced the move in separate 43-pair and 40-entry notices. Together, the pages contain 83 entries, but MAGIC/USDT appears twice in the second notice, leaving 82 distinct markets.

The 82 pairs under review

The first notice lists SHELL/USDT, PORTO/USDT, ANKR/USDT, SPELL/USDT, OPEN/USDT, CVC/USDT, DOLO/USDT, AIN/USDT, KERNEL/USDT, ORDER/USDT, TURTLE/USDT, GIGA/USDT, KAT/USDT, ZKP/USDT, DOOD/USDT, NS/USDT, WCT/USDT, TKO/USDT, FIDA/USDT, ZBCN/USDT, 1000SATS/USDT, RED/USDT, ALLO/USDT, TFUEL/USDT, GWEI/USDT, 2Z/USDT, SIREN/USDT, RAVE/USDT, HEI/USDT, BANK/USDT, Q/USDT, TST/USDT, BLUAI/USDT, PHA/USDT, AXS/USDT, NEXO/USDT, MMT/USDT, COTI/USDT, KSM/USDT, ALICE/USDT, SLP/USDT, POPCAT/USDT, and C98/USDT.

The second notice has 40 entries but 39 unique pairs: GNS/USDT, API3/USDT, YFI/USDT, MEME/USDT, CFX/USDT, ID/USDT, REZ/USDT, ACT/USDT, ZK/USDT, MAGIC/USDT, CYBER/USDT, MASK/USDT, HMSTR/USDT, CATI/USDT, DOGS/USDT, ME/USDT, AUDIO/USDT, G/USDT, METIS/USDT, XTZ/USDT, ETC/USDT, PORTAL/USDT, XAI/USDT, SNX/USDT, BANANA/USDT, JOE/USDT, USDE/USDT, 1000000BABYDOGE/USDT, GMT/USDT, TUSD/USDT, DIA/USDT, SOLV/USDT, RPL/USDT, 1000CHEEMS/USDT, B2/USDT, ZEUS/USDT, B3/USDT, WET/USDT, and STO/USDT. MAGIC/USDT is the repeated entry.

Phemex said each pair triggered one or more of three reason categories: persistently low volume and insufficient liquidity, a project team's failure to provide a valid response to requests for operational updates, or missed critical whitepaper milestones without a reasonable public explanation.

The notices do not say which reason applies to which pair, so the designation does not show that every project triggered all three.

The exchange's published Special Treatment rules are broader. A project is classified as low-liquidity if it meets three of four tests: a bid-ask spread above 0.5%, subject to a tick-size adjustment, average daily pair volume below 30,000 USDT for three consecutive months, no trades for 120 consecutive minutes outside a technical issue, or market capitalization below 3 million USDT for three consecutive months.

A separate potential-risk classification needs only one listed condition. Those include a technical or security breach, failure to update or disclose project information, possible legal or regulatory violations, negative public reports, market misconduct, a high-risk assessment by Phemex's internal teams, or another situation the exchange considers risky.

Users must pass the Risk Cognizance Test before trading a pair affected by Special Treatment. Phemex said it will continue reviewing the projects and may remove the tag if conditions improve or delist a token later if they deteriorate.

The notices set no withdrawal deadline. Holders were told to monitor Phemex announcements and evaluate the risks while the observation period continues.

The post Phemex puts 82 tokens on notice over liquidity and project compliance concerns appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Every answer you get from an AI chatbot begins with electricity. The words appear on your screen, but the actual work happens in a distant building packed with computer chips. Those chips draw power, move data, and produce enough heat to require heavy-duty cooling from AI data centers.

When you multiply that process across millions of prompts, image requests, and business tasks, you begin to understand why a quick answer to a question that feels weightless becomes a physical demand on power plants and wires.

Electric utilities are being asked to supply that demand in enormous, concentrated blocks. Your average large data-center campus can use as much electricity as a small city, and companies can plan and build one far faster than the utility can accommodate it.

The utility also has to prepare for the hours when customers use the most electricity, even if some of that capacity goes unused during ordinary periods. In short, data centers want power sooner than the grid can provide.

One solution is to build new power plants. But it's a very expensive, time-consuming solution that can take billions of dollars and years to become operational.

However, another solution is to move some of the computer work to another hour.

A chatbot reply usually needs to appear right away, but an internal experiment or an overnight video-processing queue can wait. Software that can tell the difference could slow the work that can wait when electricity is scarce, then let it catch up when more power is available.

A small experiment in Texas shows what that arrangement might look like.

Luxor Energy, a company with roots in Bitcoin mining, teamed up with Bentaus, which makes software that controls how much power computer chips use. Together, they controlled a single Nvidia B200, a high-powered chip built for AI work.

The chip was performing inference, which simply means using a trained AI model to produce an answer, when the software told it to draw less electricity.

The companies say the chip's power draw fell to roughly 25% of normal within half a second, and it processed fewer requests during the restriction.

Ethan Vera, Luxor's chief operating officer, told CryptoSlate that no job failed and no work already in progress was lost. The chip returned to full speed when the restriction ended.

Luxor and Bentaus said their public demonstration caused “no disruption,” but the phrase needs some translation. From the operator's perspective, the job survived and resumed at full speed.

However, customers could still have waited longer for an answer because the chip completed less work during the restriction. Any plan to make AI flexible will depend on how often that delay occurs, who experiences it, and what those customers were promised.

The experiment was a success, but it involved only a single chip. Large data centers contain tens of thousands of chips, along with servers, cooling systems, storage devices, and networking equipment.

The test makes a broader idea easier to see: an AI data center could sort work by urgency and occasionally ask the grid for less.

Texas lacks power to feed the computers waiting

The best example of what happens when new data centers come faster than new power infrastructure is Texas.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) operates the grid that serves most of the state. On July 22, electricity use reached a preliminary record of 91,089 megawatts, a number that is unofficial until the data gets finalized.

ERCOT says one megawatt can serve about 250 residential customers during a peak hour. By that rough comparison, the record matched the needs of more than 22 million residential customers at once.

Gov. Greg Abbott said in August that ERCOT was reviewing requests to connect more than 474 gigawatts of new electricity use, with about 90% coming from data centers. One gigawatt equals 1,000 megawatts, so on paper, the queue asks for more than five times the power used during ERCOT's record hour.

Abbott ordered regulators to audit the projects before letting them proceed.

In a July 28 preliminary review, ERCOT found that roughly 205 gigawatts had enough supporting studies to qualify for the first study batch, less than half of the 474-gigawatt total. Abbott's audit interrupted that review.

Regulators gave ERCOT more time on Aug. 20, and the agency said it would send conditional eligibility decisions by Aug. 31. Developers can submit overlapping proposals, hold places for projects that never secure financing, or ask several locations to provide power for one eventual campus.

Texas is conducting the audit partly because the list has become too detached from physical possibility to guide grid planning on its own.

But even with that caveat, 474 gigawatts shows the rush for land with access to large amounts of electricity. Far more machines are proposed than wires are ready to serve them.

A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory update published this year estimates that data centers could consume 11.8% of US electricity in 2030. Its low estimate is 9.5%, and its high estimate is 15.3%. The International Energy Agency expects data centers to account for about half of the increase in US electricity use through the end of the decade.

But even with this kind of demand, transmission lines in advanced economies can take four to eight years to complete. The agency says waits for vital equipment, including transformers and cables, have doubled over the past three years.

AI companies tend to talk in chips, but electric systems have to think in cities. An individual B200 can draw as much as 1,000 watts. Nvidia lists maximum power use of about 14.3 kilowatts for a complete eight-GPU DGX B200 server. One megawatt equals 1,000 kilowatts, and Texas's new rules for very large electricity users begin at 75 megawatts.

Under ERCOT's residential-customer comparison, that amount could serve roughly 18,750 customers during a peak hour. It could also power 75,000 one-kilowatt GPUs, at least before adding processors, cooling, networking, batteries, and electrical losses.

So learning how to control and curtail the power use of one of those chips is the first of many, many steps toward understanding how to manage power use across an entire data center.

The sheer complexity of that endeavor, in both software and hardware demands, is why grid planners treat data centers as “firm loads,” meaning electricity must be available whenever they ask for it.

Data center operators want expensive GPUs running continuously because every idle minute delays work that customers are paying for. Thousands of chips working on a single large AI job are tightly interdependent.

At certain points, one group may have to wait for another to finish before it can continue. If you slow down a selected group, the delay can ripple through nearby machines.

But not all the computing work in a data center has to happen immediately or run at full speed. Some jobs are time-sensitive, while others can be delayed or run more slowly with little consequence. Some can even be shifted to another data center where electricity is more readily available.

Each choice comes with trade-offs, but each can reduce the power a data center needs from the local grid at a given moment.

Bitcoin miners taught computers how to yield

The precedent comes from Bitcoin mining on the Texas grid. Bitcoin miners compete to earn rewards by running machines that perform calculations continuously. When a machine shuts down, the miner loses the chance to earn money for that period.

But when power returns, the machine can resume almost immediately. No customer is waiting for a response, and no unfinished computing job has to be preserved.

Texas figured out that the basic idea is called demand response: when electricity gets scarce and expensive, big users get a reason to use less of it.

Bitcoin miners were unusually well suited to the deal. They could shut down when wholesale prices spiked, get paid for cutting power during emergencies, and trim transmission charges by sitting out a handful of critical summer hours.

An ERCOT review in April described crypto miners as the main price-sensitive participants in one of its emergency programs. For a miner, the calculation is simple: when a megawatt becomes more valuable than the Bitcoin the machines might earn with it, turn the machines off.

Luxor supplies Bitcoin miners with software, energy services, and financial products, so it approached AI with an instinct for computation that can be interrupted. The experiment asks whether machines serving customers can inherit some of mining's obedience to electricity prices.

That question is becoming more urgent as miners convert power-rich sites into AI campuses. If the grid trades a Bitcoin mine that can shut down on command for a data center that runs around the clock, it may be giving up a valuable emergency brake.

How flexible a data center can be depends heavily on what its machines are doing.

Training is the long, compute-heavy process of teaching a model, repeatedly adjusting it as it works through enormous amounts of data. Inference is what happens afterward, when someone asks the finished model for an answer, an image, a translation, or a prediction. The two create different opportunities for cutting power.

A long training run can sometimes pause at a saved checkpoint and pick up later, though stopping thousands of machines in sync is not trivial. Inference can consist of millions of smaller requests, some from people expecting an answer immediately and others from automated jobs that can wait in a queue until electricity is easier or cheaper to come by.

Google has been sorting its computing this way for years. In 2023, the company described how it could delay work such as YouTube video processing when a local grid was under strain, or send that work to another region with more power available. Search, Maps, and other services people expect to work immediately stayed online.

Google later brought the same idea to machine-learning workloads. By March 2026, it said it had put one gigawatt of data-center demand response under long-term utility contracts across several US regions.

Some of those deals could also help new data centers connect to the grid sooner.

Researchers are now showing that this can work outside simulations. In a peer-reviewed Nature Energy paper, a team described an experiment at an Oracle cloud facility in Phoenix. Software cut the power used by a 256-GPU cluster by 25% for three hours without pushing priority jobs outside their promised performance levels.

The key was deciding where to absorb the slowdown. The software that determines which jobs run and when, called the scheduler, protected urgent work and pulled the power savings from jobs with more forgiving deadlines.

Emerald AI, the company that led that work, announced a $150 million financing round on Aug. 25 that valued it at over $1 billion. It also said its software was operating commercially across entire data centers, drawing multiple megawatts.

Independent performance data for every site aren't available, but even so, the financing shows that flexible AI has moved beyond research papers and into a commercial business.

Other researchers have tried to estimate how much electricity an AI facility could reliably promise to give up during a difficult hour.

A University of Chicago working paper used four years of electricity prices and 49.4 million real inference requests to model the answer. The author estimated that a facility focused on inference could commit to cutting 40% of its demand. A facility running a mix of inference and training could commit 24.6%.

Those percentages fell only slightly when the model expanded to a 10-gigawatt fleet. The main limits came from customer contracts, restrictions on moving work, and the rush of machines returning to full power.

Researchers at the University of Alberta modeled what happens to the grid when AI jobs can be delayed or moved between data centers. In the model’s most stressed scenario, that flexibility cut the amount of power-plant capacity needed by more than 21%. In another scenario, where the local grid was congested, it reduced the total cost of supplying electricity by 3.5%, even though spending on new generation rose 7.1%.

Most of the benefit from delaying jobs appeared within the first three hours, so waiting longer didn’t help much more. Although none of this eliminated the need to build new power plants and transmission lines, it showed the grid could meet more AI demand with less infrastructure and at a lower overall cost.

Four hidden moments can price an entire year

The money behind Luxor’s experiment comes from an unusual feature of the Texas electricity market. Large customers help pay for the high-voltage transmission network, and part of that bill can hinge on how much power they use during just four 15-minute windows all year.

Those windows are the moments of highest systemwide demand in June, July, August, and September, known as the Four Coincident Peaks, or 4CPs.

The catch is that nobody knows exactly when a 4CP is happening until the month is over. So large power users hire forecasters to watch the grid, the weather, and electricity demand and predict when a peak is likely.

If the odds look high enough, they cut their power use for that 15-minute window. Guess right often enough, and the savings on transmission charges can be substantial. That has turned 4CP into a recurring game of prediction and power cuts for factories, Bitcoin mines, batteries, and now, potentially, AI data centers.

That potential payoff makes many false alarms worth tolerating. The latest 2026 PUCT numbers put ERCOT transmission costs at about $6 billion, spread across an average 4CP demand of 80,859.8 megawatts.

That works out to roughly $74.89 per kilowatt per year. At that rate, 100 megawatts of demand during the four peak windows represents about $7.49 million in annual transmission costs.

While the actual bill will vary by utility territory and contract, the financial incentive here is pretty clear. A large data center can have millions of dollars riding on just one hour of electricity use scattered across an entire summer. Cutting power for a few extra hours to capture that hour can be a very good trade.

Luxor decided to throttle the GPU itself, using live grid data to decide when to act. Vera said the company watched for signs that a 4CP window might be forming, then sent its own command to the chip. ERCOT never told the GPU to slow down, and no emergency grid program was involved.

This was essentially a private bet on when electricity demand would peak, aimed at lowering the site’s transmission bill. ERCOT classifies this kind of 4CP self-curtailment separately from the demand-response programs it operates.

That also puts the half-second response time in perspective. A 4CP window lasts 15 minutes, so whether the GPU reaches its lower power level in half a second or several seconds makes almost no difference to the transmission savings.

ERCOT’s emergency program generally gives participating customers 10 or 30 minutes to deliver the power reduction they promised. Some other grid services move faster, requiring customers to start cutting power immediately and reach the full reduction within 10 minutes.

If AI hardware eventually participates in those markets, sub-second control could become more useful. For Luxor, every extra second a GPU spends throttled is a second it could have spent earning money by computing.

Bentaus had already tested the same basic idea at a larger scale. In February, CPower, Bentaus, and Supermicro described a California demonstration using a cluster of servers equipped with B200 GPUs.

The companies said the cluster responded to a signal tied to the state’s wholesale electricity market in less than 20 milliseconds and cut its power use by as much as 75%, while still meeting its promised performance levels.

The Texas experiment is smaller and much narrower: one GPU responding to a specific transmission-billing incentive. But it adds another real-world test to an idea that has already moved from individual chips to server clusters and utility programs.

Important gaps remain in what we know about the Texas test. The companies haven’t disclosed which AI model was running or how long the GPU stayed at reduced power. They haven’t said how much electricity it was using beforehand, how much its computing throughput dropped, or how much longer requests took to complete.

Luxor’s representative in the Texas electricity market verified the power reduction, but no independent analysis of the test has been published.

The test showed that one B200 running an inference workload could take a steep power cut without losing the work already in progress. It is uncertain what that did to user wait times, whether other inference or training workloads would respond the same way, or how much electricity the technique could save across an entire data center.

A GPU is only one part of a building’s power bill. Cooling systems, networking equipment, storage, pumps, and power conversion also consume electricity. So cutting a chip’s power by 75% doesn't mean the data center draws 75% less power from the grid.

The reduction measured at the building’s meter could be considerably smaller.

Luxor is already preparing its next test, this time with a group of Nvidia H100 GPUs in Texas. Vera said scaling up means building software that can figure out which jobs can safely slow down, then coordinate the machines working on them. It also has to respect whatever performance customers were promised.

Every jump in scale, from one GPU to a server, a rack, and eventually an entire data center, adds another layer of complexity. More equipment draws power, more machines have to move together, and more customer workloads may or may not tolerate a slowdown.

Texas is starting to require some of that flexibility. Senate Bill 6, passed in 2025, requires certain large power users connecting from 2026 onward to cut consumption during severe grid emergencies. It also calls for a program that would pay sites using at least 75 megawatts to reduce demand when trouble is expected.

At the same time, the state is also rethinking 4CP. Its four summer peaks can miss the evening and winter hours when the grid is under more stress. Regulators have proposed replacing it with 12CP, which would base transmission charges on one 30-minute peak each month.

ERCOT reached a similar conclusion in an April review: Texas has plenty of demand response, but it doesn’t always show up when the grid needs it most. 4CP drives most of those power cuts, but its summer peaks can miss the hours when demand is high and wind and solar output is low.

ERCOT said that mismatch is a problem. New power plants and transmission lines take years, but flexible demand can be added in months. The challenge now is making sure that flexibility shows up at the right time.

The hardest part is proving that a data center can cut power reliably. If the grid is counting on 50 megawatts to disappear, it needs to know how much the site would have used otherwise, then verify the reduction with meter data.

It also needs to know how long the cut can last and what happens when the GPUs ramp back up. Bring thousands of them back at once, and the data center could create a fresh power spike.

That makes customer contracts an essential but overlooked part of the equation. A data center could keep interactive and safety-sensitive work running normally while putting jobs like internal experiments, indexing, or overnight processing into a flexible tier.

Customers might pay less for that flexibility, while the grid pays the data center to deliver a predictable, measurable power cut when needed.

That would make one fact about AI impossible to ignore: not every computation is equally urgent. The industry already sorts work by price, speed, and compute cost, so electricity could become another variable in that calculation.

When the grid gets tight, one image might take longer to render or a training run might slip to tomorrow, while other services keep moving. Instead of treating every GPU cycle as equally important, data centers could start distinguishing between what needs to happen now and what can wait.

Luxor’s half-second power cut was the easy part. Doing this across thousands of GPUs, without breaking promises to customers and while delivering megawatts the grid can actually count on, will be much harder.

But that’s also where the idea gets interesting, because AI has a power problem and the grid has a flexibility problem, and data centers happen to be right in the middle. They're packed with machines doing work that can sometimes move by seconds, minutes, or hours without anyone noticing.

If operators can turn that flexibility into dependable power savings, AI’s enormous appetite for electricity could become something the grid can actually work with. That could make the next phase of the AI buildout as much about using power at the right time as finding enough of it in the first place.

The post AI data centers are learning the power trick Bitcoin miners mastered first appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bitcoin traded near $77,700 today, Aug. 31, putting the largest crypto asset up about 23.5% over 30 days. CryptoSlate’s market signal registered a bullish 68 out of 100 after a late-week pullback. The score measures trailing market conditions.

CryptoSlate published its latest Bitcoin September forecast at the Aug. 30 close. The model used a $77,667 reference price and produced an $81,319 median for Sep. 29. The projected gain is about 4.7%, compared with Bitcoin’s 23.5% advance during the preceding month.

Measured from the reference close, the model’s median adds about $3,651. The central forecast therefore preserves additional upside into late September at a much slower pace after the August rebound.

The model also maps a broad distribution of possible September prices. Its P80 estimate, the 80th-percentile point in that distribution, was $91,049. Its P20 estimate, the 20th-percentile point, was $72,502. The labels identify relative positions in the modeled distribution, with P80 marking the upper estimate and P20 marking the lower estimate.

The $18,547 gap between P20 and P80 quantifies that uncertainty. It covers outcomes on both sides of the reference close and places the median much nearer the middle of the published range.

The distance between the median and those estimates matters after such a fast rally. The distribution’s center points upward, and its wide span preserves substantial volatility around that path.

The late-August move had evidence of spot demand. CryptoSlate’s analysis of the rally cited $2.23 billion of spot Bitcoin ETF demand, an 11% decline in futures open positions measured in Bitcoin and funding near neutral. That combination suggested cash buying supported the advance as speculative leverage cleared.

ETF flows softened at the end of the week. A nine-day US spot Bitcoin ETF inflow streak totaling about $3.04 billion ended with net outflows of $201.9 million on Aug. 28. The reversal ended the clean daily streak. The earlier cumulative inflows still underpin part of the rally.

That shift matters because the preceding inflows were one of the clearest sources of cash demand during the climb.

Price structure supplies the immediate test. Bitcoin’s late-August rejection above $81,000 turned $80,000 back into a near-term reclaim level, and CryptoSlate’s technical analysis placed immediate support around $77,000.

The Bitcoin September forecast arrives with a bullish trailing trend and a central forecast whose projected gain is much smaller than August’s move.

A sustained recovery above $80,000 would strengthen the upside case; a loss of $77,000 would weaken it. ETF flows provide the other near-term signal for the strength of spot demand.

The post Bitcoin gains 24% as CryptoSlate price prediction model maps a volatile September appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Since August 31, 2026, another card offer has been advertising two numbers that stand out when you put them side by side: up to 10 percent cashback in USDT on every purchase, and on top of that up to 7 percent a year on the USDT balance you keep available for the card. The short answer to why you will not find terms like these at any provider licensed in the EU sits in a single article of the European crypto regulation. Article 50 MiCAR bars licensed providers from paying you anything for holding a regulated stablecoin. This piece sets out what that article says word for word, what the ban covers, where its limit runs, and what you can draw from it when you judge a card offer.

USDT cashback and 7 percent on your balance: what was announced on August 31, 2026

The trading platform MEXC presented a payment card on the Visa network on August 31, 2026, the MEXC Global Card. According to the company it is virtual to begin with, can be added to Apple Pay and Google Pay, and is funded from a USDT balance. The trade publication crypto.news, which reviewed the announcement the same day at around 19:12 UTC, names three tiers: 4 percent cashback with a monthly cap of 100 USDT, 6 percent with a cap of 300 USDT, and 10 percent with a cap of 800 USDT. Which tier applies to you depends, on that account, on a provider status score fed by trading volume, subscriptions and completed tasks.

Added to that are the terms the company names in its own release: no issuance fee, no annual fee, no top-up fee, no purchase fee until September 30, 2026 and a rate from 1 percent after that. The limits are 80,000 USDT per transaction and one million USDT per day. Before you apply, the provider requires enhanced identity verification including proof of address. And finally the offer this piece is mainly concerned with: cardholders can pay USDT into a flexible savings product with no lock-up period, advertised at up to 7 percent a year.

That cards of this kind are becoming more common is a matter of record. crypto.news puts the monthly payment volume of crypto cards for July 2026 at 759 million dollars, two and a half times the year-earlier figure, and attributes 84 percent of the recorded volume to the two dollar stablecoins USDC and USDT. If you want an overview of the models actually available in Europe, you will find one in our comparison of crypto credit cards; we broke down the fee structures of the individual providers on August 14, 2026 in a separate price and feature comparison.

Article 50 MiCAR: the ban on interest for e-money tokens word for word

Regulation (EU) 2023/1114 on markets in crypto-assets, MiCAR for short, is the legal framework under which crypto service providers operate in the European Union. Its Article 50 is headed Prohibition of granting interest and consists of three paragraphs. Paragraph 1 reads: By way of derogation from Article 12 of Directive 2009/110/EC, issuers of e-money tokens shall not grant interest in relation to e-money tokens.

Paragraph 2 extends that to service providers, meaning exchanges, custodians and card issuers: Crypto-asset service providers shall not grant interest when providing crypto-asset services related to e-money tokens. A licensed provider may therefore pay nothing even where it does not issue the token at all and merely holds or trades it. You can read the full text of the regulation at EUR-Lex.

E-money tokens explained: what the EU counts as a regulated stablecoin

Under MiCAR, an e-money token is a crypto-asset intended to serve as a means of exchange whose value is kept stable by referencing exactly one official currency. A token designed to track one euro or one dollar therefore falls into this category. It is to be distinguished from the asset-referenced token, which ties its value to a basket of several currencies, commodities or other crypto-assets.

One point matters for understanding the ban: the rules in Article 50 attach to regulated status. They address issuers holding an authorisation in the Union, and service providers authorised under Article 59 MiCAR. A token not authorised in the EU as an e-money token at all is not directly caught by the provision. The classification of the case at hand turns on precisely that, and this piece returns to it further down.

Paragraph 3 is the real lever: why rewards and bonuses count as interest

Reading paragraphs 1 and 2 alone, you might think the ban could be sidestepped by using a different label. Paragraph 3 rules that out. It provides that, for the purposes of the two preceding paragraphs, any remuneration or other benefit related to the length of time during which a holder of an e-money token holds that e-money token is treated as interest. And it expressly includes net compensation and discounts with an effect equivalent to interest, irrespective of whether they come directly from the issuer or are granted by third parties.

Two consequences follow. First, the name is irrelevant. Whether an offer is called interest, yield, reward, bonus or flexible savings product does not decide whether Article 50 applies. What counts is whether the benefit is tied to the holding period. Second, the ban cannot be dismantled by splitting the work up. A licensed provider cannot outsource the payment to a partner firm and then argue that it pays nothing itself.

For judging a card offer, that yields a usable dividing line. Cashback tied to turnover, meaning to the act of paying itself, is not remuneration for a holding period and does not fall under paragraph 3 on the wording. Interest on the balance sitting on the card or in the associated savings product is exactly the opposite. It is paid solely because the token stays put.

Recital 68: why the EU prohibits interest on stablecoins in the first place

The legislator wrote down its own intention. Recital 68 of the regulation gives the purpose as reducing the risk of e-money tokens being used as a store of value. Behind that sits a monetary consideration: an interest-bearing dollar token would be a savings product in a foreign currency, scalable at will. If large sums migrate out of bank deposits into such tokens, deposit volume shifts out of the supervised banking system, and in a crisis a rush to redeem could build that no deposit guarantee scheme covers.

On this logic a stablecoin is meant to be a means of payment and not an interest product. That explains why the ban is drawn so widely and why it knows no de minimis threshold. There is no rate below which paying interest on an e-money token would be permitted.

Article 40 MiCAR: the same rule for asset-referenced tokens

To leave no gap, the regulation states the same bar a second time. Article 40 carries the same heading and prohibits issuers and service providers from granting interest in connection with asset-referenced tokens. The broad definition applies there too: any remuneration related to the holding period counts as interest.

In practice that means there is no stablecoin category inside the authorised European framework on which a provider would be allowed to pay you running interest. Anyone who sees such an offer in the EU should therefore first ask which token is meant and what supervisory status the provider holds.

USDT and EU authorisation: why this stablecoin does not fall under Article 50

This is where the matter gets more precise than the headlines on many articles suggest. Article 50 captures e-money tokens, meaning tokens with an authorisation under MiCAR. USDT does not have that authorisation. Its issuer Tether has not applied for it, on the consistent account of several trade publications, and MiCA-licensed trading venues in the European Economic Area have not listed the token in their trading pairs since 2026. Kraken, Binance and Bitpanda have restructured their European offerings accordingly.

Two things follow. First, the interest ban in Article 50 does not apply directly to an offer built on USDT, because the connecting factor is missing. Second, and this is the genuinely useful insight, a rule of thumb for practice emerges: a provider operating inside the European framework cannot offer you running interest on a regulated stablecoin. If such an offer reaches you anyway, then either the provider is working outside that framework, or the token is, or both.

What is documented and what remains assessment

The text of the regulation is documented. Article 40, Article 50 and recital 68 stand in the Official Journal and are quoted verbatim above. The terms of the card are documented as well, so far as the company itself communicated them and crypto.news traced them. And it is documented that USDT holds no MiCA authorisation as an e-money token.

Assessment is the conclusion this piece draws from that, namely that a yield promise on a dollar stablecoin sits systematically outside the authorised European framework. That conclusion follows from the wording, but it is not a finding about any individual company. Whether a particular provider may operate in Germany is decided not by this piece but by the competent supervisor. We assert nothing on that point, and we did not obtain a statement from the company.

BaFin consumer notice on mexc.com: what the supervisor published in October 2023

One fact belongs in this context because it is public, official and still retrievable today. Germany's Federal Financial Supervisory Authority published a consumer notice on October 17, 2023 headed mexc.com: BaFin is investigating MEXC. It states: The financial supervisor BaFin warns against offers from MEXC. According to its findings, the company offers financial services without authorisation on its website mexc.com. The notice is available in full from BaFin.

What a notice of this kind does and does not say

Placing this information calls for care. The notice dates from October 2023 and describes the supervisor's state of knowledge at that time. It refers to the website as a whole and not to the card, which did not yet exist. Whether anything has changed since, we cannot establish, and an ongoing procedure is not a court ruling. What the notice does deliver is something else, and more valuable to you: it is a data point you can look up yourself before you upload identity documents. How to read a warning of this kind is something we described in detail using a wallet app as the example, in our piece on the BaFin warning on NC Wallet.

Check the authorisation yourself: company database and MiCA register

The exercise takes a few minutes and works the same way with any provider. BaFin maintains a company database listing authorised institutions and crypto-asset service providers together with the scope of their permission. Alongside it, the supervisor publishes its consumer notices on unauthorised business, which you can search by name and domain. At European level, ESMA maintains a register of authorised crypto-asset service providers as well as a list of non-compliant providers.

Two pitfalls are worth knowing, and we have counted both already. First, the European warning list is incomplete: in our review on August 16, 2026, 165 of 167 entries came from Italy and BaFin was not represented at all, as our piece on the EU warning list for crypto providers shows. A missing entry is therefore no seal of approval. Second, an authorisation is not the same as a licence to run a trading venue: our review of the MiCA register on August 6, 2026 found that only 21 of 329 authorisations cover the operation of a trading platform at all. The positive list is the better test, and anyone who wants to stay with supervised providers from the outset will find the selection in our overview of regulated crypto exchanges.

Cashback tiers, caps and status points: what the percentage is worth in practice

A double-digit cashback rate sounds like a lot and in practice is almost always less, because three limits work together. The first is the monthly cap. 10 percent with a cap of 800 USDT means the full rate only works up to monthly spending of 8,000 USDT; every euro beyond that brings nothing. On the entry tier with 4 percent and a cap of 100 USDT, the limit is already reached at 2,500 USDT of spending.

The second limit is the tier logic. On the account given by crypto.news, the high rate hangs on a status score fed by trading volume, subscriptions and completed tasks. Anyone who uses the card only to pay and does not trade therefore lands structurally on the bottom tier. The third limit is the delay: the tier is determined on the last day of the month, payout follows on the 15th of the month after, and cancelled purchases are netted off. Certain merchant categories are excluded from cashback altogether.

This mechanism is standard across the industry and no special case. In our price and feature comparison of August 14, 2026, every card model examined carried caps, tiers or a link to staking. The rate on a provider's landing page therefore says little about what arrives in your account at the end of the year.

Visa exchange rate and foreign currency fee: the costs the percentage does not contain

A card funded from a dollar stablecoin, and a purchase you pay for in euros, inevitably produce a currency conversion. On the account given by crypto.news, the card network's exchange rates apply, the provider itself adds nothing, but foreign currency fees under the card network's rules may arise. These costs rarely appear next to the cashback rate, yet they bite on every single purchase.

Then there is the purchase fee itself. According to the company it is waived until September 30, 2026 and starts at 1 percent after that. If you want to estimate the real saving, you work backwards: purchase fee and conversion costs come off the cashback rate, and the monthly cap limits the result. 10 percent on the advertising banner regularly becomes a low single-digit figure that way.

Tax: why every card payment made from crypto can be a disposal

This point is often overlooked with card offers, and it can eat up the cashback in arithmetic terms. If you pay with a card funded from a crypto holding, that holding is given away at that moment. For tax purposes this is a disposal. Under Section 23(1) sentence 1 no. 2 of the German Income Tax Act, disposals of other assets count as private disposal transactions where no more than one year lies between acquisition and disposal. For the total of such transactions, Section 23(3) of the Act provides an exemption threshold.

In practice that means anyone paying frequently with such a card generates many small events, individually unremarkable and collectively in need of explanation. With a dollar stablecoin the gain usually stays small, because the token is meant to track a fixed reference value, but exchange rate movements between dollar and euro feed through. The cashback itself is a further event with a classification of its own. How to record such events cleanly, without reconstructing hundreds of lines by hand at year end, is shown in our overview of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers. This piece is no substitute for tax advice; classifying a specific case belongs in expert hands.

Excluded countries and identity verification: what happens before you apply

On the account given by crypto.news, the card is not available to people in the United States or in China, India, Indonesia, Turkey and Russia. Germany is not on that list. Before you apply, the provider requires enhanced identity verification including proof of address.

What you know before you upload your identity documents

That order of events is the reason the check described in the section before last should happen before you apply, not after. Identity verification means that a photograph of your ID, your address and your date of birth sit with a company. This data cannot be recalled, and as the data leaks at wallet providers in August 2026 showed, it is the basis for very well-targeted fraud attempts. Where a card balance actually sits in technical terms, and which models exist for it, we broke down on August 30, 2026 in our piece on the card balance behind crypto cards. If you are instead considering simply holding part of your position, you will find the market picture in our Bitcoin price prediction.

Checking a USDT cashback card: what you take away

Three steps, in this order, before you apply for a card with stablecoin interest.

1. Look up the provider's status before you upload any data. Search the name and the domain in BaFin's company database and in its consumer notices, then in the European register of authorised service providers. A missing entry on a warning list proves nothing; the positive list is what counts. If you want to stay with supervised providers from the start, choose from the overview of regulated crypto exchanges.
2. Separate the yield part from the payment part. Cashback on spending and interest on a balance are two different promises with different legal footing. Inside the authorised European framework, nobody may pay you running interest on a regulated stablecoin. Also scale the cashback down to the cap and deduct the purchase fee and the conversion cost before you set it next to the terms in the comparison of crypto credit cards.
3. Set up your record-keeping before the first payment runs. Every card payment from a crypto holding is a separate event with a date, a quantity and a euro value. Set up the recording while it is a matter of a few lines, not in the following year; the tools for it are in the overview of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers.

(As of August 31, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Mantle (MNT) trades at 0.5659 US dollars, and that single figure carries two stories at once. Measured against the twelve-month high of 2.6896 dollars from 9 October 2025, the token is down 79.0 percent. Measured against the twelve-month low of 0.3921 dollars, set as recently as 1 August 2026, it is up 44.3 percent. Anyone asking whether Mantle is a good buy at current prices is really asking which of those two numbers describes the present more accurately.

cryptoticker.io collected the price data for this analysis itself on 31 August 2026. The market data comes from CoinMarketCap; the moving averages, the relative strength index and the twelve-month extremes were calculated from daily closing prices using standard formulas. The series covers a full 365 daily closes, so the high and the low are genuine twelve-month values.

Mantle price analysis: where the MNT price stands right now

Mantle is the 41st-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation, worth 1.87 billion dollars. The token has gained 6.2 percent in 24 hours and 5.7 percent over seven days, and the thirty-day figure is the striking one: plus 42.6 percent. Stretch the window and the direction reverses, to minus 15.0 percent over ninety days and minus 52.4 percent over the full year.

Three marks frame the current chart. The support that matters is the August low at 0.3921 dollars, the level from which the present recovery started. The current zone sits between 0.55 and 0.58 dollars, where the token has spent the past several sessions. Above that lies the 200-day exponential moving average at 0.6416 dollars, roughly 11.8 percent above the current price and the nearest meaningful resistance.

The 50-day exponential moving average sits at 0.4656 dollars, some 21.5 percent below the current price. A market standing a fifth above its own fifty-day average is not resting; it is extended.

Is the Mantle downtrend broken or only interrupted?

By the strictest reading, the downtrend is intact. The price remains below the 200-day line at 0.6416 dollars, and the twelve-month chart still shows a sequence of lower highs: 2.6896 dollars in October 2025 was never approached again, and each rally since topped out beneath the one before it.

By a shorter reading, something has changed. The August low at 0.3921 dollars held, the price has reclaimed the 50-day average at 0.4656 dollars, and it has held above it rather than falling straight back. That is the minimum requirement for a trend change, though it is nowhere near sufficient proof of one.

The honest description is an interruption that could become a break, and the threshold is specific rather than a matter of opinion. A sustained daily close above 0.6416 dollars, followed by a pullback holding that level as support, would turn the interruption into a broken downtrend. A drop back below 0.4656 dollars would mark the past month as a rebound inside an intact decline.

What RSI and moving averages mean for a Mantle entry

The 14-day relative strength index stands at 63.5, below the 70 mark conventionally read as overbought but in the upper third of the range, and far from the readings below 30 that mark genuine capitulation. Whoever buys here is not buying into a panic; they are buying into a market that has already run.

The two moving averages say the same thing from another angle. The 50-day average at 0.4656 dollars is still below the 200-day average at 0.6416 dollars, a configuration chart analysts call a death cross, and it has not yet resolved. For entry timing that leaves a clear picture: the momentum indicators are constructive, the trend indicators are not yet, and they disagree because they measure different horizons. An entry here is a bet that the shorter one proves right.

What trading volume reveals about demand for Mantle

Mantle turned over 52.4 million dollars in the past 24 hours against a market capitalisation of 1.87 billion, a daily turnover of 2.80 percent of the token's own market value.

Turnover decides whether a position can be exited near the quoted price. Several tokens of comparable size turn over a fraction of a percent per day, so a mid-sized sell order moves the price against the seller before it is filled. Mantle does not have that problem: at 2.80 percent the market is deep enough that ordinary retail positions can be closed without the exit itself becoming the risk.

The volume also corroborates the price move. A 42.6 percent monthly gain on thin volume would suggest the price rose on an absence of sellers rather than a presence of buyers. That is not the case here. Whether the demand persists is a question no volume figure can answer in advance.

Which structural factors speak for Mantle

Mantle is a layer-2 network built on Ethereum, and MNT is its native token, used to pay transaction fees and to vote in governance. That places the token downstream of two things: how much activity settles on layer-2 networks generally, and how much of it lands on Mantle rather than on its well-funded competitors. The Ethereum roadmap is therefore a relevant document for MNT holders, since the base layer sets the conditions every layer-2 operates under.

The supply mechanics are the most consequential structural fact, and they cut both ways. Of a total supply of 6,219,316,795 MNT, some 3,302,294,383 are in circulation, or 53.1 percent. That reserve funds development without selling into the open market at every turn, but every token that eventually enters circulation is supply the market must absorb at some price. A buyer today is buying a token whose circulating supply can still roughly double.

Regulation is the third factor, and for European buyers not a theoretical one. The MiCA framework governs how crypto assets may be offered in the European Union, and the supervisory positions published by the European Securities and Markets Authority shape which venues may serve EU customers. That matters less for the price than for the practical question of where the token can be bought and held.

What speaks for buying Mantle at the current price

First, the short-term trend has turned. The price at 0.5659 dollars stands 21.5 percent above the 50-day average of 0.4656 dollars, and the August low at 0.3921 dollars held when it was tested. Whatever the twelve-month chart says, the last four weeks belonged to the buyers.

Second, the market is liquid enough to leave. A daily turnover of 2.80 percent of market capitalisation means the exit exists. That sounds like a modest virtue until the moment it is needed, at which point it becomes the only one that matters.

Third, the discount against the high is real. At 79.0 percent below 2.6896 dollars, the token is priced far from its own best case. If the layer-2 thesis holds, the current price reflects a great deal of pessimism. That conditional is doing heavy lifting, and it is the assumption the whole constructive case rests on.

What speaks against buying Mantle at the current price

First, the long-term trend has not turned. The price is 11.8 percent below the 200-day average of 0.6416 dollars, and the 50-day line remains beneath the 200-day line. Every rally of the past twelve months failed at a lower level than the one before it, and this one has not yet proved itself different.

Second, 46.9 percent of the supply is not yet circulating. Roughly 2.9 billion MNT sit outside the traded float. The pace at which they enter is not something an outside buyer controls or can forecast, and every tranche has to be absorbed by demand that does not yet exist.

Third, the entry point is a run, not a dip. Buying after a 42.6 percent monthly gain at an RSI of 63.5 means paying up for a move that has largely happened. The market-wide Fear and Greed Index stands at 75, in greed territory, which is the sentiment reading under which the worst entry prices are usually paid. None of that makes a further rise impossible; it makes the risk-reward less favourable than it was a month ago.

A fourth point belongs alongside them: layer-2 networks are a crowded field, and Mantle's share of it is not guaranteed. The token has no value independent of that share.

How you can buy Mantle at the current price

MNT is listed on most large centralised exchanges. What differs is fees, regulatory standing and what happens to the token after the purchase. Trading fees at the major venues typically run between 0.1 and 0.5 percent per order for retail volumes, and the spread adds to that.

Regulatory standing is the second criterion, and for EU buyers the more practical one. Our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges sets out which venues hold which permissions; the individual assessments are in our Kraken review and our Bitpanda review.

Custody is the decision most buyers postpone and should not. Tokens left on an exchange are held by the exchange, and that counterparty risk is not hypothetical. For positions meant to be held rather than traded, a hardware wallet moves the keys into the buyer's own hands; our hardware wallet comparison covers the devices that support this class of token. MNT is an Ethereum-based token, so wallets supporting Ethereum and its layer-2 networks will generally hold it.

One note on order type: given that 6.2 percent in a single day is ordinary here, a limit order rather than a market order is the difference between the price you chose and the price you got.

Is Mantle a good buy at current prices?

The answer differs by horizon, and collapsing the two is where most of the confusion comes from.

Short term, the numbers are unattractive. An RSI of 63.5 after a 42.6 percent monthly gain, a price 21.5 percent above its own 50-day average of 0.4656 dollars, and a sentiment reading of 75 in greed territory together describe an extended market, not a cheap one. The nearest resistance at 0.6416 dollars is 11.8 percent away, while the nearest real support at 0.3921 dollars is 30.7 percent below. That asymmetry is arithmetic rather than opinion.

Long term, the case is genuinely open and rests on one question: whether Mantle holds a meaningful share of layer-2 activity as that sector matures. If it does, a price 79.0 percent below the twelve-month high of 2.6896 dollars is an entry into a discounted asset. If it does not, the supply still to enter circulation will meet demand that never arrives.

The constructive case is therefore falsifiable, and the conditions are worth stating plainly. It would be refuted by a sustained fall below 0.4656 dollars, by a failure at 0.6416 dollars followed by a lower high, or by evidence that activity is migrating to competing networks. It would be supported by a daily close above 0.6416 dollars that holds on the retest, and by the 50-day average crossing above the 200-day. None of this is a recommendation either way.

Buying Mantle: what to take away

1. The two horizons disagree, and that is the whole story. Mantle at 0.5659 dollars sits above its 50-day average of 0.4656 dollars and below its 200-day average of 0.6416 dollars. The short-term trend has turned, the long-term one has not. The same tension is worth checking on the base layer every layer-2 depends on: whether Ethereum is a good buy at current prices.
2. The supply overhang is the number to watch, not the chart. With 53.1 percent of 6,219,316,795 MNT in circulation, nearly half the eventual supply has yet to reach the market, a structural headwind no support level offsets. The same question in sharper form applies to recently listed tokens: whether Aster is a good buy at current prices.
3. Liquidity and entry discipline decide more than the thesis does. At 2.80 percent daily turnover the exit exists; at an RSI of 63.5 and a Fear and Greed reading of 75, paying up with a market order is the avoidable mistake. For how the same indicators read on the most liquid asset in the market, see whether Bitcoin is a good buy at current prices.

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

(As of 31 August 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices, fees and terms change; check them with the provider yourself before every purchase. Crypto assets are subject to high price volatility, and a total loss is possible.)

Anyone who lends out Bitcoin or other crypto assets in return for a fee pays their personal income tax rate on it, not the flat withholding tax, according to the only ruling by a German tax court so far. The Cologne Tax Court decided this on September 10, 2025, under case number 3 K 194/23. The taxpayer has appealed on a point of law, the proceedings are with the Federal Fiscal Court, and until a decision comes down there the question stays open.

For you this has two very practical consequences. The income belongs on a different line of your tax return than many investors assume. And if your tax office assesses it the way the Cologne Tax Court has laid out, you can lodge an objection and have the proceedings suspended until the Federal Fiscal Court has ruled. For that, however, you need the right case number, and this is exactly where it goes wrong: a number is circulating in the professional literature for these appeal proceedings that belongs to a completely different case.

That is why cryptoticker.io counted the Federal Fiscal Court's database of pending proceedings in full on August 31, 2026. The result is set out below and it is unambiguous.

Crypto lending explained: what you are actually doing for tax purposes

Crypto lending means that you hand over crypto assets to someone else for their use for a set period and receive a previously agreed fee for it, usually paid out in the same cryptocurrency. You remain the economic owner but give up control temporarily. It is precisely this construction, the transfer of use for consideration, that decides the tax classification.

In everyday speech the whole thing is often called interest. In tax law that term is the core of the problem, because interest within the meaning of the Income Tax Act presupposes a monetary claim. How such a transfer works economically, and which risks beyond tax hang on it, we have written up in our overview of interest and risks in crypto lending. Here the sole subject is what the tax office does with your income.

Section 20(1)(7) or Section 22(3) of the Income Tax Act: the dispute over the category of income

Two provisions come into consideration, and they lead to very different tax burdens.

Section 20(1)(7) of the Income Tax Act covers income from other monetary claims of any kind. If income falls under it, the separate tax rate for investment income under Section 32d(1) applies, that is the withholding tax of 25 percent plus the solidarity surcharge. On top of that comes the saver's allowance.

Section 22(3) of the Income Tax Act covers income from services, insofar as it cannot be assigned to another category of income, expressly including income from occasional brokerage and from letting movable property. Anyone falling under this pays at their personal income tax rate, which in the upper progression zone lies well above the withholding tax rate.

The difference is no trifle. With identical income, the classification decides whether a flat rate or your individual marginal rate applies. For small amounts, Section 22(3) can even be more favourable, because a separate exemption threshold applies there. For larger amounts and high other income it is the other way round.

Cologne Tax Court 3 K 194/23: what the court decided on September 10, 2025

In the year in dispute, 2020, the claimant had lent out Bitcoin through the platforms Crypto.com, Hodlnaut and LEDN and received fees for it. The amount of the income was not in dispute between him and the tax office. The sole point at issue was which provision it falls under. The claimant wanted the withholding tax; the tax office applied the personal rate.

The 3rd Senate of the Cologne Tax Court dismissed the claim and assigned the income to Section 22(3). The load-bearing reasoning is linguistically unremarkable and far-reaching in substance. A monetary claim within the meaning of Section 20(1)(7) must be directed at a payment of money, that is at legal tender. The judgment puts it in these words: "Bitcoin do not represent claims directed at a payment of money, that is at legal tender within the meaning of domestic or foreign statutory currencies."

The court expressly refused to interpret the concept of money economically. The mere similarity of a transaction to the cases a provision covers is not, on this reading, enough to apply it. Anyone wanting to read the full text will find it in the decisions database of the North Rhine-Westphalian judiciary: judgment of the Cologne Tax Court of September 10, 2025, 3 K 194/23.

Important for the classification: the senate allowed an appeal on a point of law on grounds of fundamental significance under Section 115(2)(1) of the Fiscal Court Code. A court does that when it considers the legal question to need clarification. The judgment is therefore expressly not a full stop.

What the judgment does not address

The judgment says nothing about the exemption threshold in Section 22(3), nothing about deductible expenses, and nothing about the question once debated of whether a transfer of use extends the holding period for private disposal transactions. Anyone drawing conclusions on these points goes beyond what the court decided.

Annex SO instead of Annex KAP: where lending income goes on the tax return

The practical part follows from the assignment to Section 22(3). Income from services belongs in Annex SO, not in Annex KAP, where investment income is declared. Anyone who has so far entered their lending fees under investment income has them, on the Cologne line, in the wrong annex.

In practice that means you need, for each item of income, the date of receipt, the quantity received and the euro price at the time of receipt. Many platforms pay out daily or weekly, so several hundred individual entries quickly add up. A tax and portfolio tool takes this conversion off your hands and delivers a schedule you can put before the tax office. Even if you end up disagreeing with your tax office on the classification, you need this basis.

A remark for completeness, because it often gets lost: the fee is usually paid out in cryptocurrency. This receipt is an acquisition in its own right for the units received. If you sell them later, a separate holding period applies to those units, counted from the day of receipt. How categories of income are delimited from one another in crypto is also shown by our piece on when mining counts as private, commercial or other income.

The 256-euro exemption threshold under Section 22(3): what it means and what it does not

Section 22(3) sentence 2 of the Income Tax Act contains an exemption threshold: income from services is not subject to income tax if it came to less than 256 euros in the calendar year. The word threshold is to be taken literally here and differs from an allowance. If you stay below it, the entire amount is tax-free. If you reach 256 euros or more, the full amount is taxable, and not just the excess.

The threshold applies to all income from services taken together, not separately per platform and not separately per cryptocurrency. Anyone earning 100 euros through each of three providers is at 300 euros and therefore above the threshold. No saver's allowance is available here, because that belongs to investment income.

Offsetting losses against other income: the restriction hardly anyone knows about

Section 22(3) brings with it a restriction that usually gets lost in the debate about the tax rate. Losses from services may not be offset against income from other categories. They can only be set against surpluses of the same kind, and then in the same year, in the previous year or in future years.

For lending income this matters when a platform fails and holdings do not come back. Whether such a failure even leads to a loss within the meaning of this provision is a separate question that the Cologne judgment does not answer. All that is certain is that the offsetting is narrower than for investment income. Anyone selecting offers by their yield should think the default question through as well; a comparison of lending providers shows how differently collateral and terms are structured.

Our own analysis: which crypto proceedings are really pending at the Federal Fiscal Court

cryptoticker.io carried out this analysis itself on August 31, 2026.

Method in one sentence: we retrieved the public database of pending proceedings at the Federal Fiscal Court in full, that is all 308 results pages individually, and searched the entries listed there for proceedings on crypto assets.

Objects examined: 3,077 entries. They are spread across 2,234 proceedings at the Federal Fiscal Court itself and across proceedings at other courts that the Federal Fiscal Court also lists, among them 273 at the Court of Justice of the European Union, 351 at the General Court of the European Union, 214 at the Federal Constitutional Court, plus individual proceedings at the European Court of Human Rights and at the Joint Senate of the Supreme Federal Courts.

Result: exactly two of these entries concern crypto assets.

VIII R 22/25, added to the database on January 20, 2026. The relevant provisions are given as Section 20(1)(7) and Section 22(3) of the Income Tax Act. The legal questions there read: whether income from crypto lending is to be assigned to income under Section 20(1)(7) or to income under Section 22(3), and whether cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are comparable to foreign currencies. The judgment of the Cologne Tax Court of September 10, 2025 (3 K 194/23) is named as the lower instance, the appellant is the taxpayer, and the appeal was allowed by the tax court. This is the case in question: entry on VIII R 22/25 in the Federal Fiscal Court's database.

IX R 27/21, added on December 20, 2021. Here the question was whether a cryptocurrency falls under the element of another asset within the meaning of Section 23(1) sentence 1 no. 2 sentence 1 of the Income Tax Act, and whether there is a structural enforcement deficit at platforms abroad. The lower instance was the Baden-Württemberg Tax Court with its judgment of June 11, 2021 (5 K 1996/19). The database entry notes: proceedings concluded by withdrawal of the appeal.

Of the two crypto cases, therefore, only one is still open.

What this analysis cannot do

Three limits belong with it. First, the case descriptions in the results list are shown truncated; a case that mentions crypto assets only in the cut-off part can escape a keyword search. We therefore additionally went through individually all 30 appeal proceedings of the VIII Senate with case numbers from the 2025 and 2026 years, because this senate is responsible for investment income. Second, the database only lists proceedings that the Federal Fiscal Court considers to be of general significance; it is not a complete register of all appeals received. Third, it is a snapshot as at the time of retrieval and is continuously updated.

VIII R 22/25 instead of VIII R 23/25: why the right case number decides the suspension

Here lies the practically most important point of this article. In several professional articles on the Cologne judgment, the appeal proceedings are given the case number VIII R 23/25. That case number exists, but it belongs to a different case.

Under VIII R 23/25 the Federal Fiscal Court is running proceedings that were added to the database on August 20, 2026 and that concern the question of whether contributions to the value credit on a working time account held by a controlling shareholder-managing director are to be assigned to investment income or to income from employment. The provisions given there are Section 20(1)(1) sentence 2 and Section 11(1) sentence 1 of the Income Tax Act, the lower instance is the Saxon Tax Court with its judgment of May 7, 2024 (1 K 1826/15), and the appellant is the administration. This case has nothing to do with crypto assets.

How the mix-up came about cannot be established from outside, and we assert nothing about it. For you, only the consequence counts: anyone applying in an objection for suspension of the proceedings by reference to VIII R 23/25 is naming a case in which their own legal question is not being heard at all. A tax office that reads the application closely can therefore reject it. So take the case number from the source that maintains it, and not from a professional article.

Objection and suspension of proceedings under Section 363(2) sentence 2 of the Fiscal Code: how it works

The sequence is manageable once you know the order.

First the deadline. You can lodge an objection against a tax assessment within one month of notification. Notification is not the day you open the letter, but the point in time laid down by law after posting. Once the deadline has passed, the assessment becomes final, and a later ruling by the Federal Fiscal Court will no longer help you for that year.

Then the suspension. Under Section 363(2) sentence 2 of the Fiscal Code, objection proceedings are suspended by operation of law insofar as proceedings on the constitutionality of a legal provision or on a legal question are pending at the Court of Justice of the European Union, at the Federal Constitutional Court or at a supreme federal court, and the objection is based on them. The Federal Fiscal Court is a supreme federal court, and VIII R 22/25 is such pending proceedings.

In practice that means the objection has to name the legal question and the case on which it relies. Your assessment then stays open until the Federal Fiscal Court has ruled. If the decision goes in your favour, it takes effect on your open case. One point that should not be suppressed: suspension does not mean a stay of enforcement. The tax assessed initially remains due unless you additionally apply for a stay of enforcement, and that application has requirements of its own.

Because deadlines and wording come together here, this is the point at which tax advice usually pays for itself. This article does not replace it.

What is settled and what remains open in crypto lending

What is settled is the state of the case law: a tax court has decided that income from crypto lending falls under Section 22(3), and has allowed an appeal. It is also settled that this appeal is being heard at the Federal Fiscal Court under VIII R 22/25, with the Cologne decision as the lower instance.

What is open is how the Federal Fiscal Court will decide. Open with it is the second question raised there, whether cryptocurrencies are comparable to foreign currencies; answering it reaches beyond lending. No date for the oral hearing is noted in the database as at the time of retrieval, and how long appeal proceedings take cannot be predicted seriously.

Also open is how the tax administration handles the question. The Federal Ministry of Finance's circular on the income tax treatment of crypto assets of March 6, 2025 is the basis the offices go by. Whether and how it will be adjusted after a decision by the Federal Fiscal Court is currently not foreseeable. Anyone wanting to see how uncertain such classification questions are with new products will find a related example in our piece on tokenised stocks and their taxation in Germany.

What you should not derive from all this: that waiting pays. The assessment for a year becomes final regardless of how a case on the same question later turns out.

Staking, airdrops and mining: why the answer there can be a different one

The Cologne decision concerns the transfer of use for consideration. It cannot be transferred without more to every other form of income, even where platforms group them under a common name such as Earn.

With staking you lock your units in the protocol in order to support the security of a network; in the basic case there is no contracting party to whom you hand them over for use. With delegated staking through a provider, the contractual arrangement can move closer to a transfer again. With mining the classification hangs on the scale and organisation of the operation and reaches as far as commercial activity. For your own return that means: check for each product what you are actually doing contractually, instead of relying on the name the platform gives it. Which providers offer which form of income is shown by an overview of staking platforms.

The question of whether a transfer of use extends the holding period for private disposal transactions to ten years has been defused in practice since the Federal Ministry of Finance's circular of March 6, 2025. It still crops up in older guides, and anyone reading it there should check the date of the text.

DAC8 and data matching: why the question becomes practical from 2026

Until recently the classification of lending income was a theoretical question for many, because the tax administration often simply did not learn of the income. That is changing. Since January 1, 2026, the reporting obligation for crypto-asset service providers has applied in the European Union, based on the DAC8 directive and implemented in Germany through the Crypto Asset Tax Transparency Act. Regulated providers report customer data and transactions to the tax authorities, who can match them against tax returns.

For you that shifts the order of the questions. What counts first now is whether a declared item is classified correctly. Whether it comes to light at all has become the weaker question. A position sitting in the wrong annex is more likely to stand out in a data match than one that sits correctly and whose classification you are keeping open by objection.

Taxing crypto lending: what to take away

Three steps, in this order.

1. Draw up your income in full. For every year affected, pull the lending receipts with the date, quantity and euro price at the time of receipt. If you stay below 256 euros in the calendar year, the exemption threshold in Section 22(3) sentence 2 applies and the question of the tax rate settles itself for that year. If you are above it, you need the schedule anyway. A crypto tax and portfolio tool takes on the conversion and delivers a schedule that will withstand a query.
2. Declare it in the right annex. According to the only tax court decision so far, the income belongs in Annex SO as income from services and not with investment income in Annex KAP. Bear in mind that the units received are acquired at the same time and that a separate holding period begins for them. Which providers still offer lending to private customers at all, and on what terms, is shown by our comparison of lending providers.
3. Check the assessment and keep an eye on the deadline. If the tax office applies your personal rate and you want to keep that open, lodge an objection within one month of notification and apply for suspension under Section 363(2) sentence 2 of the Fiscal Code by reference to the case pending at the Federal Fiscal Court, VIII R 22/25. Not VIII R 23/25, which is a different case. If you also do not want to pay for the time being, you additionally need an application for a stay of enforcement. Whether your income even comes from lending or from staking is something you clarify beforehand from your contractual terms; an overview of staking providers helps with the distinction.

(As of August 31, 2026. This article is not investment advice and not tax advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

On September 15, 2026, Trust Wallet removes built-in support for 25 blockchain networks from its app. Your coins do not disappear: the balances stay on their respective chains and remain tied to your recovery phrase. What goes is the convenient route to them. From that day the affected networks no longer appear in the app's network list, and without one manual step you will not see your balance there, cannot send it and cannot swap it.

That step is called a custom network. You enter the chain yourself, together with its technical connection details. It works for most of the affected networks, but by no means for all of them. This article names the 25 chains, walks through the manual entry step by step, shows which nine networks the route is closed to, and tells you when you are better off moving your balance before the deadline.

What happens in Trust Wallet on September 15, 2026, and what does not happen to your balance

Trust Wallet announced the shutdown on August 18, 2026, on its own product blog and explains it with a routine review of network coverage. The company puts it plainly: "Your assets remain yours." Trust Wallet is a self-custody wallet and never holds your balances itself.

What changes is the user interface, and nothing else. After the deadline, three things fall away for the affected chains, according to the provider: you can no longer view your balance in the app, no longer send it, and no longer swap it through the built-in swap function. The networks themselves keep running, your address still exists, and the balance on the chain stays unchanged. This has become a display question, not an ownership question.

In practice that covers more than the balance readout. On the retired chains, NFTs also disappear from the overview, the built-in token swaps no longer reach them, and the app no longer offers these networks for connections to dApps, meaning decentralised applications operated straight from the wallet. That Trust Wallet has discontinued networks still changes nothing about your ownership: control over the cryptocurrencies stays with you, because it hangs on your recovery phrase.

The industry term for this is a sunset: an announced, orderly retirement of a feature with a fixed end date, as opposed to an abrupt shutdown. That is exactly why you still have time to act, and exactly why September 15 belongs in your calendar if you use one of the affected networks.

Trust Wallet also makes clear that users with no balances on these chains need to do nothing at all. That is your first step: open the app, go through the network list, and establish whether this concerns you in the first place. Anyone who keeps most of their holdings on a hardware wallet and uses the app only as a secondary route will in many cases get away with a visual check.

Which 25 networks Trust Wallet is removing from the app

The provider lists the affected chains in full. In alphabetical order they are:

• Agoric
• Aurora
• Boba
• BounceBit
• Conflux
• Decred
• FIO
• Firo
• Flux (formerly Zelcash)
• GoChain
• IoTeX
• KuCoin Community Chain
• Manta
• Merlin Chain
• Meter
• Moonbeam
• Moonriver
• MultiversX
• Nano
• Neon
• Nimiq
• Polygon zkEVM
• Stride
• Viction
• Wanchain

Trust Wallet lists three further names separately, because they have already been shut down by their own ecosystems: Evmos, Nebulas and Stargaze. Here the announcement changes little in practice, since those chains no longer run in their previous form anyway.

At first glance the list reads like a collection of small fringe chains. In several cases that impression is wrong. MultiversX and its EGLD token have been among the better-known layer-1 projects for years, Polygon zkEVM carries the name of one of the largest Ethereum scaling projects, Moonbeam and Moonriver are the EVM gateways of the Polkadot and Kusama environments, and Nano has a small but very loyal user base in payments. Anyone who collected airdrops or took part in test phases over the past few years stands a fair chance of holding leftovers on at least one of these chains.

Neon is a special case on the list: this chain brings an EVM environment to Solana and is aimed mainly at developers who want to run Ethereum applications there. For your holdings that changes nothing about the arithmetic, but it does change where you look for a replacement, namely in the ecosystem of the chain itself rather than among the large Web3 wallets.

Self-custody explained: why your coins sit on the blockchain and not in the app

Self-custody means that you alone control the cryptographic key to your crypto assets and that no company keeps it for you. The recovery phrase is the sequence of words from which this key, and with it every one of your addresses, can be derived, which makes it the actual proof of ownership.

Several names circulate for the same thing. Seed phrase, recovery phrase and mnemonic all mean the same: the sequence of usually twelve or twenty-four words from which your keys are derived. Whoever holds these words holds control over the cryptocurrencies at all associated addresses, and whoever loses them makes up for that loss by nothing at all. A crypto wallet is therefore essentially a keyring and not a safe.

From that follows the point where most misunderstandings arise: a wallet app stores no coins. The program derives addresses from your recovery phrase, queries the respective balance from the networks and displays it to you. Your assets sit on the blockchain the entire time. If the display falls away, the holding is unaffected, and a blockchain explorer will still show you the same address with the same balance.

With an exchange the situation is reversed. There a company holds the keys and runs an account for you that is an entry in its database. If that company delists a token or suspends withdrawals, your access is affected immediately. Anyone who keeps this difference in mind judges news like this one far more calmly. If you want to know which providers are suited to which job, our exchange comparison and our software wallet comparison set out the respective terms and network coverage.

What a custom network is and why it is the only way back into the app

A custom network is a network you enter into the wallet app by hand instead of picking it from a prepared list. The app then knows again how to talk to that chain, and displays your balance there once more.

For that you need four technical details, which together describe the connection. The RPC endpoint is the server address through which your app sends requests to the network and receives answers back. The chain ID is the unique identifier of the chain and prevents a transaction from ending up in a different network by accident. The currency symbol names the unit in which fees are settled. The block explorer, finally, is the website through which transactions can be looked up.

Trust Wallet attaches a warning to this route that you should take seriously: the provider checks neither the legality nor the security nor the reliability of custom networks, RPC endpoints or tokens. Anyone entering the wrong data here connects their app, in the worst case, to a server that returns manipulated answers. The network details must therefore come from a source you trust, and in case of doubt that is the official documentation of the project concerned.

How to add a network manually with its RPC details

The provider describes the route in the mobile app in seven steps. It applies to iOS and Android alike, and the wording of the menu entries can differ slightly depending on the app version. The path is shorter than it sounds, provided the network details are already in front of you.

The route inside the app

1. On the home screen, scroll down to the token section.
2. Tap "See all".
3. Open the settings at the top right.
4. Select "Manage crypto".
5. Tap the plus symbol.
6. Switch from the "Token" tab to the "Network" tab.
7. Enter the network details and import the network.

Where the network details come from

For the parameters, Trust Wallet points to Chainlist at chainlist.org and describes it as a directory of EVM-compatible networks. You open that platform in a browser, on a computer as readily as on a phone. The details you pick up there are public connection data and not secrets; even so, their origin decides which server your app ends up talking to. The sequence there: call up the chain you are looking for, review the details on offer, select a trustworthy RPC endpoint, copy the values and enter them in the app. One point from practice that appears in no manual: for the same chain there are often several endpoints to choose from, and they differ in availability and speed. If the app shows a balance of zero after the import although you are certain that funds are there, the endpoint is usually the problem and not your holding. In that case you enter a different one and check again.

Before you rely on a freshly entered connection, send a small test transfer and look at it in the block explorer. Only once that single transaction has visibly gone through do you know that the connection and the address are right.

Chainlist only covers EVM chains: for nine of the 25 networks this route leads nowhere

Here lies the gap that neither the provider nor the coverage so far spells out. The EVM, short for Ethereum Virtual Machine, is the execution environment of Ethereum. EVM-compatible means that a chain uses the same address format, the same transaction structure and the same tooling. Chainlist is a directory of precisely those chains, and Trust Wallet says as much in its own instructions.

Not all 25 retired networks are EVM chains. On August 31, 2026, I checked the 25 names against the open chain database that Chainlist uses as its data source and that is available at chainid.network/chains.json. At that point the dataset covered 2,739 entries. For nine of the retired networks, no entry can be found there under their name:

• Agoric
• Decred
• FIO
• Firo
• Flux
• MultiversX
• Nano
• Nimiq
• Stride

That is not down to the directory, it is down to how these chains are built. Decred, Firo and Nano rest on their own protocol architectures, MultiversX works with its own address format, Agoric and Stride belong to the Cosmos environment, and FIO is a chain specialised in address naming. All nine simply speak a different technical language from Ethereum.

For you that means: if your balance sits on one of these nine chains, adding it as a custom network in Trust Wallet is not a solution you can assemble from an EVM directory. Instead you need the official wallet of the project concerned, another multi-chain wallet with matching support, or you move the holdings to an exchange that lists the token. And you do that best while the sending route is still inside the app, which is to say before September 15.

Trust Handles end on the same day: what users of a wallet name have to change now

A Trust Handle is a human-readable name you can give instead of a long wallet address so that someone can send you crypto assets. Technically it is a registration on the FIO chain, and because FIO is on the shutdown list, the feature ends on the same day.

The provider writes that from September 15 no new Trust Handles can be registered, and that existing ones will no longer work in Trust Wallet for sending, receiving, managing or renewing. One detail is decisive here and is easily missed: the registration as such remains in place on the FIO chain, but adding FIO as a custom network does not bring the handle feature back into the app. The route that helps with every other chain does not help with this one feature. Trust Wallet recommends using the wallet address directly in future instead.

In practice that means a small tidying-up job. If you have lodged your handle somewhere as a receiving address, as a withdrawal address with a service, in a recurring payment or simply with people you know, then you inform those places now and pass on the address. Otherwise transactions sent to the handle after the deadline will run into nothing.

Check token approvals before you leave a chain

One point the announcement does not address, and one that regularly gets lost during the clean-up: token approvals. An approval is the permission you grant a smart contract once, so that it may move a particular token from your address. That permission continues to apply even when you no longer see the chain in your wallet, because it sits on the blockchain and not in the app.

Such openings to your holdings therefore do not disappear along with the display. Anyone who has used dApps on one of the affected chains over the past few years is better off revoking open approvals now, while access is still inside the app. Afterwards revocation remains possible, but it is more awkward, because you first have to re-establish a working connection to the chain.

Moving instead of adding: when switching to another wallet or an exchange is the better choice

Adding the network is not the more sensible route for everyone. Four questions help with the decision, and you can answer them for yourself in a few minutes.

How large is the holding? For amounts in the low double digits the effort is often out of all proportion, particularly as the network fee for the move applies as well. For larger positions both are worth it: the move and the proper documentation.

Is the chain on the list of nine? If so, the convenient route via an EVM directory falls away, and you plan the switch straight off.

Do you trust yourself to enter connection details? Trust Wallet explicitly targets newcomers as well. Anyone left puzzling over the terms from the previous section is better served by a wallet that carries the network out of the box than by a self-built connection.

Do you want to hold the token at all? With leftovers from old airdrops, selling or consolidating is frequently the more honest answer than an access route you never open again.

If you decide on the move, an order of operations saves trouble: first create the destination address and read it over twice, then send a small test transfer and confirm its arrival, then trigger the remaining transfer. Whether the destination address belongs to an account at an exchange from our exchange comparison or to a wallet is something you decide according to whether you want to sell or carry on self-custodying.

Can a wallet app block your balance?

With a self-custody wallet the answer is no. The provider can restrict the display and the controls, as is happening here, but it can neither freeze nor move nor delete your holdings. The reason lies in the construction: the keys are created on your device from your recovery phrase, and the company does not know it.

With a custodial account things look different. An exchange or a provider with custody carries your holding in its own books and can suspend withdrawals, halt trading or freeze accounts, whether for regulatory reasons or because of trouble of its own. How closely this difference is tied to authorisation requirements, and how you tell when a provider needs a licence, we broke down in our piece on the authorisation requirement for the custody of crypto assets.

The honest interim verdict for September 15 is therefore this: your access through this one app can fall away, your ownership cannot. That is a noticeable difference in day-to-day use and still good news.

Why a deadline like this attracts phishing and how to spot the trick

Every announced changeover with a date is a template for fraud attempts. The pattern is always the same: a message picks up the genuine date, creates time pressure and offers help. The supposed support desk then asks for the recovery phrase or urges you to move your holdings into a "secure" wallet.

The building blocks are always the same as well: a message in the name of your wallet provider, time pressure invoking the genuine date, and phishing links leading to a rebuilt input form. Crypto fraud of this kind lives off a real event making the story credible, and an announced deadline delivers exactly that free of charge. Here you recognise fraud by the substance of the demand and never by the look of the message.

Trust Wallet devoted a separate answer to this trick in its own announcement and writes that the company will never ask for the secret phrase, for private keys or for other sensitive wallet data, and that it will never call on anyone to move funds into another wallet as part of this changeover. That gives you a clear test to hand: any approach demanding precisely that is a fraud attempt, no matter how professional it looks.

The channels for it have long since stopped being email and direct message alone. How far the perpetrators now go is shown by the case in our piece on wallet phishing by postal letter, where a printed QR code in the letterbox was meant to harvest the recovery phrase. Remember the one rule that defeats every variant: the recovery phrase gets entered nowhere except when restoring your own wallet on your own device.

The second wallet rollback in four weeks: what the comparison with Phantom shows

This announcement does not stand alone. In late August, Phantom ended support for Sui and Monad, with two deadlines and the same basic question for users. We wrote up the sequence at the time in our piece on the end of support at Phantom Wallet, and the parallels are striking: a routine review as the justification, holdings left untouched, access moving into the user's own responsibility.

More can be drawn from this for choosing a wallet than a note in the diary. The number of supported chains is a marketing promise and not a lasting commitment. That number can shrink at any time, and the more exotic the chain, the likelier it is. Anyone holding balances on smaller networks should therefore know which wallet the project itself offers, and note that information down once, before they need it.

A second point concerns storage itself. When a provider rolls back the user interface, you notice immediately how heavily you have leaned on this one app. A recovery phrase that is backed up properly, and with which you can carry on in any compatible wallet if need be, makes you independent of such decisions. That is precisely the practical core of self-custody, and it shows itself not on the day you set things up, but on a day like September 15.

Trust Wallet shutdown: what to take away

1. Check before September 15 whether the shutdown concerns you at all. Go through the 25 networks above and look in the app for whether there are balances there. If you find nothing, you need do nothing. If you find something, decide between adding and moving, and use the network coverage from our software wallet comparison as your yardstick.
2. Move holdings on the nine non-EVM chains while the sending route is still inside the app. For Agoric, Decred, FIO, Firo, Flux, MultiversX, Nano, Nimiq and Stride there is no convenient way back via an EVM directory. If you want to sell, you need a trading venue that lists the token, and the terms for that are in our exchange comparison.
3. Secure the recovery phrase before you do anything else. Every move and every manual entry assumes that you can get back into your wallet if something goes wrong. Anyone holding larger amounts shifts them on this occasion to a device with separate key storage; the differences between the models are set out in our hardware wallet comparison.

The two primary sources to read up on: the Trust Wallet announcement with the full network list and the custom network instructions, and the independent write-up at Cryptobriefing.

(As of August 31, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

On September 1, 2026, a chain is due to launch that splits away from the Bitcoin blockchain. If you hold bitcoin, you do not need to transfer anything, exchange anything or unlock anything before then. That is what the project's own documentation says, and none of the reports so far contradicts it.

What is unusual is the level at which this fork intervenes. It reaches one layer deeper than the usual points of contention: what changes is the hashing algorithm used to produce blocks in the first place. SHA-256d becomes BLAKE2b. That renders every existing bitcoin mining machine useless for the new chain, and it is precisely at this point that it will be decided whether the new chain comes into existence in practice at all.

This article sets out the case: what is planned for September 1, what the backstory tells us, what risk a chain split actually creates for you, and how German tax law treats coins from a fork if you are ever allocated any. We explained the mechanics of a chain split as such in a separate article on August 20, 2026, on the bitcoin fork and how to secure your coins. Here the subject is this specific case and what sets it apart from earlier forks.

Bitcoin fork with BLAKE2b: what is planned for September 1, 2026

Behind the project are supporters of the bitcoin software Bitcoin Knots. Bitcoin Knots is a separate variant of the bitcoin software that serves the same chain as the widely used Bitcoin Core, but offers stricter rules, for instance against storing arbitrary data in blocks. The driving figure is the developer Luke Dashjr, whose main role is chief technology officer at the mining provider Ocean Mining.

The sequence of events, as crypto.news described it on August 31, 2026: on August 29, Dashjr called on miners to power down their hash rate ahead of a test on August 30. That test was the dress rehearsal for swapping out the hashing algorithm. If it runs without errors, version 29.4.1 of the Knots software can lock in the new chain on September 1. The candidate running in the test was 29.4.1rc4, the fourth release candidate of that version.

An important qualification: September 1 is a target, not an irreversible activation deadline. If technical problems arise, further release candidates and a rollback to the last block under the old algorithm are provided for. On the public record, there is no fixed date at which the chain necessarily comes into being.

In substance, the fork brings a limit alongside the new hashing algorithm: arbitrary data in blocks is temporarily capped at around 300 kilobytes per block. According to the project documentation, this limit is due to expire on September 1, 2027; after that, node operators decide for themselves whether to keep it.

One term up front, because the rest rests on it: a hard fork is a rule change that the old software no longer accepts. From the point of separation onwards, both sides continue their own chain, and both carry the same history up to that point.

Proof of work: why the switch from SHA-256d to BLAKE2b locks out existing miners

Proof of work is the method by which a network secures its blocks: anyone who wants to append a block must solve a computationally expensive task whose result everyone else can verify in a fraction of a second. Bitcoin has used the SHA-256d function for this since 2009.

The machines that solve this task are special-purpose devices. They can do SHA-256d and nothing else. A switch to BLAKE2b therefore means that the entire existing hash rate of the bitcoin network is unavailable to the new chain. Anyone who wants to produce blocks there has to do it with ordinary processors or graphics cards, or have new hardware built.

For the project's supporters, that is the whole point of the exercise. They want to prise block production out of the hands of the large mining operations that set the pace today. The price is a chain that starts out with very little hash power behind it, and that is no side issue: the less hash power secures a chain, the easier it is to rewrite its history after the fact.

The size of the gap can be read off a figure from the public debate reported by the trade outlet CryptoSlate on August 31, 2026: one of the proposed starting difficulties would require around 870 terahash per second. The testnet4 environment under discussion for the purpose was estimated at 50 to 70 terahash per second. How much hash power operators had actually committed was not apparent from the public debate. For comparison: the bitcoin network itself has been operating for years in the range of several hundred thousand petahash per second, that is, many orders of magnitude above it.

Bitcoin Knots, BIP-110 and two blocks: the backstory of the fork

The September 1 attempt is not the first. Three weeks earlier, a fork out of the same circle was already under way. It went back to BIP-110, a proposal conceived as a user-activated tightening of the rules: nodes that enforce it reject, from a cut-off date, blocks that do not support it.

On August 8, 2026, those nodes began rejecting. The bulk of the hash rate went on producing blocks under the old rules. According to the reported figures, the enforcing branch reached 2.53 percent miner support, produced two blocks and then came to a halt.

Why a new chain can fail for want of hash power

A blockchain depends on blocks appearing at regular intervals. If the hash power does not materialise, none appear. Balances on such a chain then exist arithmetically but cannot be moved in practice, because no transfer is confirmed. Anyone hoping a fork will hand them a second balance should know about this case before putting effort into it.

On top of that comes the question of who will accept the new coins at all. On the state of reporting, no major exchange, no widely used wallet, no custodian, no block explorer and no Lightning implementation had publicly committed to supporting the BLAKE2b chain shortly before the planned launch. Without a trading venue there is no price, and without a price there is nothing to sell.

Do bitcoin holders need to do anything before September 1?

The project documentation answers this itself, and the answer is unambiguous. It states: “Your addresses, keys, and coins stay the same. You do not need to move bitcoin before the fork.” You can read it in the project's frequently asked questions.

That statement comes from the people running the project and is therefore self-reported. On this point, however, it matches the general mechanics of a chain split: your balance hangs on your keys, and a fork does not change them.

The pressure to act arises somewhere else. Anyone holding their own bitcoin in self-custody should know whether their wallet supports the signature form that prevents a replay attack, and whether it even registers that a second chain exists. Anyone whose bitcoin sits with a provider depends on that provider's decision. Which form of custody keeps control in which situation is shown in our comparison of hardware wallets.

Replay protection in the BLAKE2b fork: why SIGHASH_UNIFIED is optional

A replay attack is the most unpleasant consequence of a chain split. It works like this: you send a transfer on one chain. Because both chains know the same history and the same format, the identical transfer is also valid on the other chain. Someone picks it up there and sends it again. Your balance on the second chain thereby moves to the same recipient without you intending it.

The project documentation names a dedicated signature format called SIGHASH_UNIFIED as the countermeasure. The decisive part is how it is built: by the description, it only takes effect if a wallet actively supports and uses it. That makes it something short of protection that applies in every case. Wallets meant to spend on both chains would have to support the format.

In practice this means: as long as it is unclear whether a second chain exists and whether your wallet knows this format, holding back on larger transfers in the days around a fork is the simpler decision. That is not a rule, but a trade-off between convenience and a mistake that cannot be undone.

Light wallets and block headers: why 164 bytes instead of 80 affect your wallet software

A block header is the short record that uniquely describes a block and chains it to the previous one. In bitcoin it is 80 bytes long. According to the reports, the BLAKE2b chain works with a divergent format of 164 bytes.

That sounds technical but has a very concrete consequence. A light wallet, often called an SPV wallet, does not download the whole blockchain but only these block headers in order to verify payments. It cannot make sense of a different format without an update. Your ordinary phone wallet will therefore not see the new chain by itself.

For hardware wallets, the project documentation distinguishes two cases. Devices that verify the hashing algorithm or the chain identity themselves need new firmware. Ordinary signing of a payment, by contrast, continues to work. Security-relevant firmware updates should only ever be fetched through the manufacturer's official application, as most recently in the case of the Coldcard firmware and the seed that had to be generated anew.

Bitcoin on exchanges: what trading venues do with deposits and withdrawals during a chain split

The project documentation expressly recommends that trading venues suspend deposits and withdrawals across the period of the fork and state publicly which chain they support. That is exactly how exchanges handled earlier splits.

For you this means two things. First, you may be unable to deposit or withdraw for a few hours even though nothing has happened to your balance. Second, the provider decides whether to credit you with coins from a new chain. The terms and conditions of most houses give you no claim to that. Anyone who cares about deciding for themselves in a split needs the private keys in their own hands. Which providers are licensed in Germany and how they have behaved in such situations so far can be found in our overview of the best crypto exchanges.

One practical note: news about a fork reaches you most reliably through your provider's status page. Anyone waiting instead for posts on social networks will mostly see advertising from those who profit from the excitement.

Node operators: how to tell which software enforces your rules

If you run a node yourself, that is the only place in this article with a genuine need to act before September 1. Check which software is running on your machine and which version. Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots are two different programs with different default settings.

Anyone who wants to follow the new chain needs, according to the project documentation, a version that supports BLAKE2b, and has to set an additional configuration value; the software is distributed via bitcoinknots.org. Anyone who wants to keep following the existing chain need do nothing. That is the reassuring half of this news: doing nothing is a valid decision here, and it means your node follows the chain it follows today.

A node, incidentally, is not a prerequisite for holding bitcoin. It is the means of checking the rules yourself instead of trusting a third party's word. In a contested fork, that is the difference between an answer of your own and a borrowed one.

Fake claim sites: why nobody needs your seed phrase for a fork

Every announced fork brings with it a wave of offers to help you claim the supposed new coins. The pattern has been the same for years: a cleanly designed page, an input field for the seed phrase or a wallet connection with sweeping permissions, and after that the balance is gone.

The rule of thumb is short. A chain split creates balances automatically out of your existing keys. There is nothing to claim, nothing to register and nothing to unlock. Anyone asking for your seed phrase wants your money, no matter how the page looks.

Just as important is the second variant, in which no seed is requested but only a signature. How to recognise such an approval before you grant it is something we described using the example of wallet drainers and their signature prompts.

Tax on a bitcoin fork: what the German finance ministry says about splitting acquisition costs

If coins from a new chain are in fact allocated to you in a fork, that is not a tax non-event in Germany. The Federal Ministry of Finance set out the treatment in its letter of March 6, 2025, on individual questions of the income tax treatment of crypto assets, file reference IV C 1 - S 2256/00042/064/043.

Two points from it are material for private investors. First, the allocation of the new crypto assets counts as an acquisition. Second, the acquisition costs of the coins held before the fork are apportioned between the old and the new assets, in the ratio of their market prices at the time of the fork.

From that follows a question that stays open in the case of a chain without a trading venue: with no market price for the new chain, the yardstick for the apportionment is missing. How the tax office handles that is a question for your tax adviser and not one that can be answered in general terms. What you can do regardless: record the date, block height and balance at the time of a split, because these details are only laboriously reconstructed later. Tools that keep a running record of your holdings can be found in our comparison of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers.

What is settled about the BLAKE2b fork and what remains open

Settled is the plan: the swap of the hashing algorithm, the test on August 30, the release candidate 29.4.1rc4, September 1 as the target and the temporary data limit until September 1, 2027. Settled too is the backstory with the two blocks in August.

Open is whether a chain comes into being at all on September 1, how much hash power carries it, whether a trading venue can be found and whether the replay protection reaches widely used wallets. Anyone telling you today what such a coin allocation will be worth is going far beyond what is publicly known.

And one distinction that is quickly lost in reports of this kind: the existing bitcoin blockchain is unaffected by the project. It continues to run on SHA-256d, your bitcoin there stay where they are, and neither your addresses nor your keys change.

Making sense of the BLAKE2b fork: what you take away

1. Check your custody, do not reshuffle it. Look at whether your coins sit with a provider or in your own custody, and whether your wallet software is up to date. You do not have to move anything before September 1. Which devices take on which job is set out in the hardware wallet comparison.
2. Read your trading venue's status page. If your provider suspends deposits and withdrawals, it will say so there and not in a direct message. If in doubt, compare which provider gives clean information in such situations with the overview of the best crypto exchanges.
3. Secure your records, never enter your seed. Note the date and your holdings in case an allocation happens, and do not enter your seed phrase on any claim page. The crypto tax tools help with keeping a running record of your holdings.

(As of August 31, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Gov. Greg Abbott ordered state agencies to stop paying for the AI-powered license-plate readers as privacy concerns and officer-misuse scandals mount across Texas.

The Nasdaq-listed asset manager paid an average of $79,431 per coin, lifting its total stash to 23,156 BTC amid a wave of renewed treasury buying.

The exchange found the former congressman placed large trades on his own State of the Union attendance, then made false statements to move prices, profiting nearly $18,000.

Spot XRP funds have drawn inflows for nine straight days, reaching $1.6 billion in cumulative net inflows even as the token's price cools.

Deputy Chairman Anatoly Popov told state media that trading could hit 4 trillion rubles in its first year, as the bank prepares to broaden crypto-backed lending once regulators sign off.

The market is on its next stage post-recovery as the majority of investors are witnessing a mini-correction before continuation.

Hyperliquid Labs is in advanced talks with Kraken parent Payward to bring its popular perpetual futures products to US traders through regulated derivatives venue Bitnomial.

Ripple tops Kraken in Wall Street's C1 Fund portfolio as pre-IPO demand surges.

Bitwise’s XRP ETF has surpassed $500 million in assets under management just nine months after launching.

SHIB token is up 20% this quarter but faces its worst historical month under a huge price wall.

TLDR:

• Lazarus Group wallets moved over $30M through Hyperliquid’s HyperUnit as of August 31.
• ZachXBT linked the same wallets to $61M in stolen funds back in 2024.
• Funds reached KuCoin, LBank, Kraken, and unlabeled Tron-based services after bridging.
• Kraken parent Payward is in talks with Hyperliquid Labs for regulated US access.

Lazarus Group-linked wallets have moved more than $30 million through Hyperliquid, blockchain researcher Emmett Gallic reported.

The OFAC-sanctioned North Korean hacking group routed the funds through the platform’s HyperUnit service as recently as August 31.

The disclosure arrives while U.S. policymakers and Kraken’s parent company pursue a regulated pathway for Hyperliquid to enter American markets.

The timing places sanctioned wallet activity alongside efforts to bring the exchange under formal U.S. oversight.

Sanctioned Wallets Active on Hyperliquid

Gallic identified the wallets as belonging to the Lazarus Group, a hacking collective sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

The addresses funneled Bitcoin into Hyperliquid before converting it into Ethereum and Solana. Funds were then bridged across Tron, Solana and Ethereum networks.

The same wallet cluster was previously flagged by researcher ZachXBT in 2024. That earlier investigation linked the addresses to $61 million in stolen funds. The 2024 identification gives the current activity added weight, since the wallets were already under watch.

From Hyperliquid, the converted assets moved to several centralized exchanges. Recipients included KuCoin, LBank and Kraken, plus a number of unlabeled Tron-based services. Distributing funds across multiple platforms is a common method used to obscure the destination of illicit proceeds.

Gallic posted the findings on X, stating the addresses had been actively moving funds through Hyperliquid as recently as the day before his post. He cited ZachXBT’s 2024 identification as the basis for attributing the wallets to the Lazarus Group.

Regulated U.S. Entry Advances in Parallel

The wallet movements surfaced as Hyperliquid pursues formal access to U.S. markets. President Donald Trump said in August that CFTC Chairman Mike Selig was working on a compliant pathway for Hyperliquid. The announcement signaled direct federal engagement with the platform’s U.S. prospects.

Separately, Kraken parent company Payward is reportedly in advanced talks with Hyperliquid Labs. The discussions center on letting U.S. users trade a subset of Hyperliquid-linked perpetual futures.

Regulated exchange and clearinghouse Bitnomial would support the structure, subject to regulatory approval.

Coin Bureau reported that HYPE rose nearly 50%, climbing from $57 to $84, following news of the U.S. talks. The account referenced Bloomberg’s report that Payward, which holds CFTC licensing, could bring on-chain perpetual futures to American traders for the first time.

A “Kraken HIP-3 test DEX” was also reportedly spotted on Hyperliquid’s testnet two weeks earlier. The test deployment included permission controls that could support U.S. compliance needs. Coin Bureau noted HYPE gained another 5% following the Bloomberg report on the talks.

The post Lazarus Group-linked Wallets Moves $30M+ via Hyperliquid Ahead of US Regulatory Push appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• 94% of Argentina’s peso crypto trading volume now flows into dollar-pegged stablecoins.
• About one in five Argentines use crypto, among the highest adoption rates in Latin America. 
• Contractor USDC pay and inflation both eased to roughly a fifth of their 2024 peaks by July 2026. 
• Lemon wallet downloads rose every quarter even as monthly inflation fell from 25.5% to 2.1%. 

a16z Crypto data show that 94% of peso-denominated crypto trading volume in Argentina now flows into stablecoins. That is the highest such share among major currencies tracked by Artemis.

The finding comes from a16z crypto’s latest look at Latin American crypto adoption, published August 30, 2026. About one in five Argentines use crypto, one of the highest rates in the region.

Downloads of the country’s 15 leading crypto apps climbed 93% year over year in 2024. That points to a shift from short-term inflation hedging toward habitual stablecoin use.

A History Rooted in Distrust of the Peso

Argentina’s preference for dollars over its own currency predates the rise of stablecoins by decades. In 2001 and 2002, the government froze bank deposits.

It forcibly converted dollar accounts into pesos through Decree 214/2002. When the currency peg later collapsed, the exchange rate moved from one peso per dollar to nearly four. That shift erased about three-quarters of the peso’s dollar value.

That crisis left many Argentines wary of banks and the peso itself. Households grew accustomed to holding savings in physical dollar bills outside the financial system. This habit later shaped how people approached stablecoins once digital options became available.

Stablecoins gained momentum after Argentina reintroduced currency controls in 2019. Within months, officials capped individual dollar purchases at $200 per month.

Eligibility rules also shut out many residents entirely. Dollar-pegged stablecoins offered a workaround outside the restricted official market.

By 2023, capital controls had pushed the gap between official and parallel exchange rates above 100%, a16z crypto’s analysis noted. Stablecoins traded around the clock and sat outside those controls.

That made them attractive during that stretch. As Flores put it in the report, “buying crypto means buying dollars” in Argentina.

Stablecoin Use Persists as Inflation Cools

a16z crypto also points to stablecoins becoming a growing part of contractor pay during Argentina’s inflation spike. Year-over-year inflation reached 289% in April 2024.

Over that same period, the share of Argentina-based contractors paid in USDC rose, based on payroll data from Deel.

Deel figures indexed to January 2024 show contractor USDC pay and inflation moving together for a time. As of July 2026, both metrics were holding near one-fifth of their earlier peaks, the report found.

Exchange rate gaps that once made digital dollars pricier than official ones have also narrowed. Argentina lifted most restrictions on buying dollars in April 2025, and official and parallel rates converged. As of August 28, 2026, a digital dollar cost about 4% more than one bought through the official market.

Even as inflation falls and dollar purchases grow easier, usage tied to stablecoins has not faded, according to a16z crypto. Downloads of Lemon, one of Argentina’s largest crypto wallets, rose every quarter.

This happened even as monthly inflation dropped from 25.5% to 2.1%. Stablecoins now look less like a hedge and more like an everyday habit.

The post Argentina’s Peso Crypto Trading Goes 94% Stablecoins, a16z Finds appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Musk tied Tesla’s Bitcoin payment return to miners reaching roughly 50% clean energy usage.
• Tesla still holds 11,509 BTC worth roughly $386 million despite halting BTC payments in 2021.
• Bitcoin mining’s clean energy share has reportedly passed the 50% level Musk once requested.
• Musk has voiced support for Dogecoin and Ethereum, showing a wider crypto interest beyond BTC.

Bitcoin sits at the center of a lingering question surrounding Tesla and Elon Musk. Tesla suspended direct BTC payments in 2021 over mining energy concerns.

Musk said the company would reconsider once miners reached roughly 50% clean energy usage. That figure has reportedly been surpassed in recent research. Still, Tesla has given no confirmation that Bitcoin payments will return.

Why Tesla Paused Bitcoin Payments in the First Place

Crypto Patel, a commentator, laid out the background behind Musk’s Bitcoin decision on X. Tesla accepted Bitcoin briefly in early 2021 before halting the option.

Musk cited the environmental cost of Bitcoin mining as the main reason. Fossil-fuel-heavy mining operations drew the most criticism at that time.

Musk’s condition for resuming Bitcoin payments was narrow and measurable. He asked for close to 50% clean energy use among miners.

He also wanted that clean energy share to keep trending upward. This made his position about mining practices rather than Bitcoin as a concept.

That distinction is often missed when people summarize Musk’s Bitcoin stance. He did not reject Bitcoin outright as a currency or technology.

His objection centered on carbon intensity tied to proof-of-work mining. Cleaner mining, in his framing, could remove that objection over time.

Some data now suggests Bitcoin mining’s clean energy share has passed 50%. That would technically satisfy the number Musk gave back in 2021.

However, meeting a stated threshold does not guarantee a policy change. Tesla has stayed silent on any plan to reinstate Bitcoin payments.

What Tesla’s Bitcoin Holdings Reveal About Musk’s Position

Tesla never sold off its Bitcoin holdings after pausing payment acceptance. The company’s Q2 2026 SEC filing listed 11,509 BTC on its books.

That position carried an acquisition cost of roughly $386 million. Holding Bitcoin as a reserve asset differs from accepting it at checkout.

Keeping Bitcoin through years of price volatility points to a longer view. Rejecting Bitcoin payments and abandoning Bitcoin as an asset are separate decisions.

One choice involves daily transaction infrastructure and customer-facing systems. The other reflects treasury strategy and long-term balance sheet exposure.

Musk’s public comments on cryptocurrency have also extended beyond Bitcoin. He has been associated with both Dogecoin and Ethereum at different points.

This points to a broader interest in digital assets generally. Even so, his support does not appear to treat every coin the same way.

The core question remains whether Tesla will act on Musk’s original condition. Bitcoin mining has grown cleaner, and payment infrastructure has continued to improve.

Musk set his benchmark in 2021 without a fixed return date attached. Until Tesla makes an announcement, Bitcoin payments at Tesla remain an open question.

The post Will Tesla Bring Back Bitcoin Payments? Musk’s Vision Explained appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Hyperliquid could enter the U.S. perpetual futures market through a proposed partnership involving Payward and Bitnomial.
• Payward has presented the planned structure to the CFTC, but the arrangement still requires final regulatory approval.
• Bitnomial could offer registered U.S. users selected crypto perpetual contracts linked to Hyperliquid markets.
• Payward acquired Bitnomial earlier in 2026 for up to $550 million, gaining access to its regulated U.S. derivatives infrastructure.
• Former SEC counsel Ashley Ebersole said regulatory changes involving custody and order routing could take 10 to 12 months.

Hyperliquid could move closer to offering perpetual futures to U.S. traders through a proposed partnership involving Payward, the parent company of Kraken, and Bitnomial. Bloomberg reported that Payward has presented the structure to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, while the plan still awaits final regulatory approval.

Under the proposal, Bitnomial would give registered U.S. users access to selected crypto perpetual contracts tied to markets on Hyperliquid’s decentralized exchange and Layer 1 blockchain. Payward gained control of Bitnomial earlier this year in a deal valued at up to $550 million.

Hyperliquid Plan Targets U.S. Perpetual Futures

Bitnomial operates within the U.S. derivatives market under CFTC oversight. Its business includes exchange, clearing, and brokerage services, which gives Payward a regulated route for expanding crypto derivatives access.

The planned structure would not bring Hyperliquid directly into the U.S. market without regulatory review. Former SEC senior counsel Ashley Ebersole said both the SEC and CFTC may need to revise interpretive rules covering custody and order routing before such a model can move forward.

Ebersole said the process could take at least 10 to 12 months, even if regulators moved quickly. He now serves as co-founder and chief legal officer at real-world asset platform tx.

The wider policy debate has also moved toward perpetual contracts. The Hyperliquid Policy Center recently asked the SEC and CFTC to align their treatment of the products and create clearer rules for firms seeking to offer them in the United States.

U.S. Regulators Expand Perpetual Futures Review

The CFTC has already opened the door to more crypto perpetual products. In May, the agency allowed KalshiEX and Coinbase to list crypto perpetual futures. It later sought public comment on crude oil perpetual contracts and round-the-clock trading.

President Donald Trump also mentioned Hyperliquid during a recent press conference, saying CFTC Chair Michael Selig was working on a compliant path for the platform. A CFTC spokesperson later said the agency wants financial innovation to develop within the United States.

Hyperliquid’s native HYPE token was trading near $84.25, up about 1.3% over 24 hours. The token reached a record above $86 last week and has gained more than 85% over the past year. The proposed U.S. arrangement remains subject to regulatory approval, and no launch date has been announced.

The post Hyperliquid Targets Regulated U.S. Perpetual Futures Access appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• OpenSea has added full Solana NFT trading support, allowing users to buy, sell, and trade Solana-based collectibles.
• The rollout builds on OS2, which already supported Solana fungible tokens before adding NFT functionality.
• Solana becomes OpenSea’s first non-EVM network for NFT trading since its earlier 2022 beta ended.
• Users can now access collections such as Mad Lads, Claynosaurz, BoDoggos, Collector Crypt, and Phygitals.
• OpenSea is expanding its multi-chain strategy as the broader NFT market continues to operate well below its 2021 and 2022 trading peaks.

OpenSea has expanded its marketplace by adding support for Solana NFT trading, giving users access to buy, sell, and trade digital collectibles issued on the Solana blockchain. The move brings Solana NFTs back to OpenSea after an earlier beta launch failed to gain strong market share. The latest integration runs on OS2, OpenSea’s rebuilt multi-chain platform. The company had already added Solana fungible token trading in April 2025 and said NFT support would follow.

OpenSea Adds Solana NFT Trading to OS2

OpenSea first tested Solana NFTs in April 2022. That beta covered about 165 collections, but Solana-focused marketplaces such as Magic Eden and Tensor handled most trading activity across the network.

The new rollout gives OpenSea users access to Solana collections including Claynosaurz, Mad Lads, BoDoggos, Collector Crypt, and Phygitals. Solana also becomes OpenSea’s first non-EVM network for NFT trading since the earlier beta ended.

OpenSea completed the public rollout of OS2 in May 2025. The platform supports NFTs and fungible tokens across more than 19 blockchain networks, shifting the marketplace toward a wider on-chain trading model.

Its supported networks include Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Avalanche, Base, Monad, Sei, and Berachain. Solana adds a different blockchain design to that list and broadens the range of assets available to users.

Solana Returns as NFT Competition Changes

The Solana NFT market has also changed since OpenSea’s first attempt. Magic Eden recently closed its Bitcoin and EVM marketplaces as it shifted more attention back to Solana, while Tensor remains active in the ecosystem.

OpenSea enters that market as wider NFT trading remains far below its 2021 and 2022 peaks. Monthly marketplace volumes now stand at a few hundred million dollars, compared with billions during the earlier boom.

Several NFT platforms have reduced or ended operations as trading activity weakened. Binance closed its centralized NFT service in June, while Nifty Gateway, Kraken NFT, and X2Y2 have also shut their marketplaces.

OpenSea’s Solana rollout follows changes to its wider business. The company also moved beyond NFTs by supporting fungible tokens and has discussed a future SEA governance token, although that launch has faced delays.

The company said OS2 aims to bring several types of on-chain assets into one interface, giving traders access to collectibles and tokens without switching across multiple separate marketplace products.

The post OpenSea Adds Solana NFTs as Market Competition Shifts appeared first on Blockonomi.

A sharp contrast has emerged in active addresses across Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tron, and Cardano, as the four blockchains continue to show different patterns when it comes to network usage.

Bitcoin’s count, for one, has dropped significantly compared with previous major cycles, even though its price remains far above historical levels. According to the latest observation by Alphractal founder Joao Wedson, this does not necessarily indicate weaker usage.

Very Different Usage Trends

Bitcoin investors now tend to hold for longer and move coins less frequently, while ETFs, custodians, exchanges, and the Lightning Network are being used more often. The growing role of ETFs is particularly notable, as US-based spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds have recorded $3.31 billion in inflows so far in August. This shift in how investors access and hold BTC could help explain why on-chain activity is not increasing at the same pace as the asset’s price.

Rather than indicating that the crypto asset is necessarily being used less, the trend may reflect its growing role as a reserve asset, as more activity takes place through financial products and other structures instead of directly on the blockchain.

Ethereum’s network activity has once again begun to accelerate, and active addresses are now close to reaching 1 million, even with a significant share of the ecosystem operating on Layer 2 networks. Such a trend evidences that the asset remains highly relevant as financial infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Tron was found to have recorded more than 4 million active addresses, which makes it the strongest case among the four networks by this measure. According to Wedson, much of its activity appears to be driven by payments and stablecoins, particularly USDT, rather than simply speculation around TRX’s price. The network has become a major infrastructure layer for transferring digital dollars.

Is Cardano Struggling?

The same cannot be said for Cardano, which has witnessed its activity fall sharply since 2021 and remains at very low levels compared with its own history. Wedson explained that price can increase because of narratives, liquidity, and speculation, while on-chain activity offers a clearer indication of whether people are actually using a blockchain.

Cardano’s weak activity comes after years of criticism over the network’s slow development and its struggle to turn its technology into broader usage. More recently, the network has come under tremendous pressure, including a public warning from founder Charles Hoskinson about a “wave of failures” and closures of important dApps.

On the price side of things, ADA briefly reached $0.254 this month, before pulling back to $0.196 at the time of writing. Despite the recent weakness in price, market commentators remain optimistic. One such analyst, Sssebi, said that he expects the ADA to return to its previous all-time high of $3.10 during the coming bull market and believes it could push above that level.

The post Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tron, and Cardano Tell Four Very Different Stories Through Active Addresses appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin’s derivatives market is showing a curious split, with open interest falling nearly 4% since August 21, while funding costs for long positions have risen quickly.

Analyst Axel Adler Jr. says that combination could leave BTC exposed to a long squeeze if traders start rebuilding leverage while maintaining an increasingly bullish bias.

Falling OI Meets Rising Funding

In Adler’s latest brief, he put the focus on what is happening beneath Bitcoin’s price, with BTC-denominated open interest falling from 331,100 BTC on August 21 to 318,600 BTC on August 31, a decline of 3.8%. Over the past 24 hours, another 2,850 BTC has left open positions.

That means the derivatives market is still in a deleveraging phase following the short squeeze. But traders have not rushed to rebuild the amount of leverage that was cleared out during the earlier move.

Meanwhile, funding tells a different story, with the current funding rate at 0.00906%, while the eight-hour average sits at 0.00821% and the 24-hour average at 0.00725%. The shorter-term average is already 13% above the 24-hour figure, pointing to a stronger preference for long positions among active traders.

“The shorts have already been burned. Now the longs are in the crosshairs,” noted the market watcher.

For now, he does not consider the market overheated, with the concern coming if funding continues rising at the same time that open interest begins recovering. That would mean traders are adding new long leverage rather than simply maintaining a bullish bias within a smaller derivatives market. A decline in Bitcoin under those conditions could trigger forced liquidations as leveraged longs close.

The price action gives that risk some context, with Bitcoin dipping below $77,000 due to ongoing tensions between the US and Iran, as reported by CryptoPotato earlier today, before rising back up again to $79,000.

Why $79,700 Matters

The immediate technical question is whether Bitcoin can reclaim and hold $79,700, and CryptoRUs has identified that price as the level needed for a four-hour confirmation, with $77,000 to $78,000 acting as nearby support.

However, the setup is complicated by the amount of leverage already removed. More than $9.7 billion in crypto positions has been liquidated over the past two weeks, including $6.55 billion in shorts and $3.16 billion in longs. Bitcoin’s move back to $79,000 also caused roughly $30 million in short liquidations within an hour.

That leaves a distinction between forced buying and genuine spot demand, and according to the crypto intel provider, if BTC holds above $79,700 with stronger volume, the market may absorb higher funding without immediately becoming vulnerable to a squeeze. But if the level fails and Bitcoin falls through $77,000 to $78,000, rising funding could become much more uncomfortable for longs.

Adler’s warning is therefore conditional, rather than a prediction of an imminent liquidation event. Open interest is falling now, but the more dangerous setup would come if it starts rising again while funding keeps climbing.

More on the market’s state and the latest developments can be found in our video below:

The post These 2 Bitcoin Derivatives Signals Could Trigger a Long Squeeze: Analyst appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Cardano’s native cryptocurrency has lost much of its gains posted in mid-August and has dropped below the psychological level of $0.20.

We asked three of the most popular AI-powered chatbots about what’s next in September – a rally or a deeper decline. Here are their answers.

The Slightly Bullish Prospects

ChatGPT predicted a volatile September for ADA, claiming the asset is most likely to trade between the $0.18-$0.27 range. OpenAI’s platform noted that the rebound from $0.17 earlier this month showed that buyers are still willing to jump on the bandwagon when the token is heavily discounted.

That said, it assumed that a return above $0.23 could trigger another attempt at $0.25-$0.27. Moreover, if ADA breaks $0.27 with strong volume, the next realisting area would be $0.30-$0.35, ChatGPT added.

The chatbot claimed that the asset’s biggest problem in September is the upcoming FOMC meeting, where the Federal Reserve will discuss its monetary policy and decide whether to hike, cut, or keep interest rates unchanged.

“A hike  – or even a strongly hawkish message – could push Bitcoin lower and send ADA back toward $0.18. Losing that support would expose $0.17 and potentially $0.14-$0.15.”

In conclusion, ChatGPT remains slightly bullish but suggested that September will be more about rebuilding the chart than starting a major bull run.

Perplexity described the coming month as “challenging” and paid special attention to the $0.21 mark, classifying it as the “make-or-break” level.

“Clearing and holding $0.21 is the single most critical technical trigger for Cardano right now because it acts as the pivot point between a healthy bull market structure and a deeper correction,” it explained.

Not long ago, X user Sssebi issued a similar thesis, arguing that a weekly close above that zone would mean “game on” for ADA. If you want to explore additional price predictions involving the asset, check our detailed article here.

Bearish to Neutral

Google’s Gemini presented a more cautious outlook, suggesting that the following month could prove unfavorable for Cardano’s token due to a mix of macroeconomic pressures, market dynamics, and technical headwinds. That said, it warned that an extreme pullback to $0.10 in the next four weeks is not completely impossible.

The chatbot also noted that September has historically been the worst period for the asset. According to CryptoRank, ADA has finished the month in the green only once (in 2024), while the other seven closes were all in the red.

The post Cardano (ADA) Enters Its Worst Month: 3 AIs Examine Its September Prospects appeared first on CryptoPotato.

David Schwartz, the Ripple CTO emeritus, argued on August 31 that supporters of Bitcoin’s BIP-110 fork crossed from governance into an attack after rejecting the soft-fork result and continuing on a separate proof-of-work chain.

His exchange with fork supporter loogart captures the dispute: whether losing a consensus fight justifies creating a new Bitcoin chain, or whether that move itself amounts to attacking the network.

New Chain Goes Live

The account loogart opened the exchange by describing the sequence from the group’s perspective: it objected to the direction Bitcoin Core was taking, was told to fork, forked with a different proof-of-work algorithm, and is now building a separate chain, all while still being called an attacker.

“You’re not ‘still’ attacking,” Schwartz wrote in response to loogart’s take. “You switched from participating in governance to attacking when you refused to accept that you lost.”

Loogart replied that their group had accepted defeat and continued their version of Bitcoin elsewhere. They argued that open dialogue, a soft fork, and eventually a hard fork cannot amount to an attack because no one was compelled to follow, writing, “Nobody was forced to follow us.”

However, Schwartz rejected that framing, stating that inventing language that makes disagreement impossible to reason through moves the dispute beyond a good-faith disagreement and into what he called attacks and lunacy.

“I’m not arguing that you are incapable of pretending you have good faith disagreement over governance,” the XRP Ledger architect added. “I’m arguing that there’s lots of evidence that when you do so, you are pretending.”

The chain he referenced went live through a flag-day hard fork at block 961,640, replacing SHA256d with BLAKE2b as the mining algorithm. The update also introduced a new 164-byte block header and temporary rules capping block size at roughly 300 kilobytes until September 2027.

Bitcoin Knots developer Luke Dashjr defended the switch on August 30, arguing that BLAKE2b carries none of SHA256d’s known weaknesses, such as ASICBoost, and that the redesigned header closes a block-withholding loophole that previously relied on miner monitoring to catch.

A Fork That Struggled Before It Split Again

As CryptoPotato reported previously, the BIP-110 chain split from Bitcoin’s main chain at block 961,632 after failing to draw enough miner support.

The backing pool, Roughnecks, produced only two blocks before the branch stalled while the main chain kept its normal pace, and the gap between them grew to several hundred blocks within weeks. Dashjr was separately removed as an editor of Bitcoin’s improvement proposal repository over what was described as a conflict of interest in his handling of BIP-110.

The dispute traces back to Bitcoin Core dropping its old limit on OP_RETURN data, which let more non-monetary content, including Ordinals and Runes, fill blocks that BIP-110 supporters wanted reserved for payments.

That disagreement has since split Bitcoin’s online community into camps, exemplified by how one X user, Robin Seyr, called BLAKE2b hostile in the same way Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Bitcoin SV (BSV) were viewed, while another poster, Luke Mikic, described BIP-110 as an attempt to fix bugs introduced by Taproot rather than an attack on Bitcoin at all.

The post Ripple CTO Emeritus: BIP-110 Vote Loss Doesn’t Justify New Chain appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has accused “entrenched incumbents” of lobbying against the CLARITY Act, arguing that established financial players are trying to stop crypto companies from competing in US financial services.

His comments frame the fight over the bill as a contest between traditional firms protecting their position and crypto businesses seeking clearer rules.

Armstrong Puts Competition at Center of CLARITY Fight

Armstrong said the Trump administration came to power after millions of Americans felt “disenfranchised” by the previous administration’s approach to crypto.

He pointed to Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign promise to remove former SEC Chair Gary Gensler, recalling the reaction when Trump said at a Bitcoin conference that he would fire Gensler “on day one.”

He then ran through what he sees as progress since Trump took office: an executive order calling for clearer crypto rules, the appointment of SEC Chair Paul Atkins and CFTC Chair Mike Selig, and passage of the GENIUS Act for stablecoins. The CLARITY Act, Armstrong said, is the next piece.

“Make no mistake, there are people out there actively fighting against this,” Armstrong said. “There are entrenched incumbents who don’t want competition from crypto companies that would provide better financial services.”

He went further, alleging that some of those firms are “actively lobbying against it, trying to kill it.” The Coinbase chief also singled out Senator Elizabeth Warren, saying she is among those seeking to stop the legislation. His argument comes as the bill approaches a September 15 Senate vote on a motion to proceed.

As CryptoPotato reported previously, Armstrong had earlier said on August 21 that regulatory clarity was coming either through Congress or through action by the SEC and CFTC. He pointed to September 15 and 16 as possible dates for that development.

The Senate needs 60 votes for cloture, while Republicans hold 53 seats. That means if all of them support the measure, it would still leave them needing at least seven additional votes from Democrats or independents.

Furthermore, the bill still faces disputes over ethics rules, anti-money laundering provisions, and whether crypto companies can offer rewards on customer stablecoin holdings.

Banks Remain a Point of Tension

The banking industry’s concerns over stablecoin rewards sit close to Armstrong’s competition argument. The provision has drawn resistance from traditional lenders, who say such products could pull deposits away from banks.

That dispute helps explain why the CLARITY debate is about more than deciding which regulator handles crypto. The legislation would establish federal rules for digital assets, including how tokens are classified and where SEC and CFTC responsibilities begin and end.

With all that going on, Armstrong’s message is direct: the bill should pass because consumers and crypto firms need clearer rules, while established financial companies should not be able to block competitors through lobbying.

“It’s time to get the Clarity Act, which will protect consumers, over the finish line,” he wrote on X. “There’s something in it for everyone: banks, law enforcement, crypto companies, and most importantly the American people.”

The post Brian Armstrong: ‘Incumbents’ Are Trying to Kill Crypto Competition appeared first on CryptoPotato.