The incident underscores the critical need for transparency and originality in AI development, impacting trust in decentralized AI ecosystems.

The post Quasar unveils 120B-parameter AI model amid scrutiny over training provenance appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Rising borrowing costs and stricter loan terms could slow growth and innovation in PE and AI sectors, impacting broader economic dynamics.

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Claude Design democratizes sophisticated design, potentially disrupting the $60 billion market and raising IP concerns with automated extraction.

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Iran's proxy strategy heightens regional instability, disrupts global oil supply, and complicates diplomatic resolutions, impacting markets.

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Silicon Motion's revenue surge highlights the growing importance of AI-driven storage solutions across diverse sectors, potentially reshaping tech infrastructure.

The post Silicon Motion crushes earnings with 127% revenue surge as AI storage demand accelerates appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Coldcard Bitcoin Thief Likely Used Top Blockchain Services Provider: Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bitcoin Magazine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bitcoin Magazine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some Multisignature Wallets May Be At Risk

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

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

Beyond The Immediate Crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Multi-vendor, Multi-key Wallets and Covenants

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

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

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

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

Bitcoin Magazine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bitcoin Magazine

COLDCARD SECURITY RISK: IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moonbeam's standard GLMR migration window closed last night at 23:59 UTC (July 31), as its Polkadot network moved into an operational wind-down ahead of a relaunch on Base.

The cutoff ended the standard route for self-custodied free balances, while exchange holdings, frozen balances, and protocol positions remained subject to separate handling.

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The official migration locked GLMR on Moonbeam and released the same amount from a reserve minted in advance on Base, sending tokens to the same user address at a 1:1 rate.

At 20:20 UTC on July 31, less than four hours before the cutoff, the migration contract held about 308.183 million GLMR. Total issuance was about 1.241 billion GLMR, putting direct-bridge uptake at 24.83% at that timestamp.

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The remaining 75.17% covers a mix of free holdings, exchange custody, staking, treasury, and other balance categories. Exchange processing and snapshot-covered locked balances followed separate routes, so the contract ratio cannot measure stranded or at-risk supply.

How the cutoff affected GLMR holders

Before the deadline, Moonbeam told users to withdraw funds from liquidity pools, lending markets, staking, crowdloans, governance locks, and other protocols where possible before bridging. The project's July 3 announcement warned that funds left deployed in on-chain protocols may become inaccessible after the network wound down. Its support guidance said the bridge processed only free balances.

For staking and crowdloan balances frozen at the cutoff, Moonbeam said it would honor them on Base if a holder met Moonbeam's account-signature and snapshot requirements. Its public guidance did not extend the same explicit commitment to arbitrary governance locks, DeFi positions, or unclaimed rewards.

After the standard bridge closed, the migration portal directed late holders to email the helpdesk for individual review. Moonbeam had not published a universal late bridge or public post-cutoff claim portal. Individual review therefore remained discretionary, with no public guarantee that every balance could be recovered.

Exchange handling varied. KuCoin said it would automatically convert GLMR balances held on its platform at 1:1. Bybit announced its GLMR network migration and cutover schedule separately. Exchange-held balances followed each venue's process rather than the direct migration-contract route.

Under Moonbeam's published wind-down schedule, the network entered maintenance mode at 00:00 UTC on Aug. 1 and began rejecting transactions. Moonscan's notice said blocks would continue during the operational wind-down. User-directed transactions ended at the cutoff while block production continued.

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The post Moonbeam just halted all user transactions, leaving late GLMR holders at mercy of an email helpdesk to recover funds appeared first on CryptoSlate.

By the time SBI Crypto pulled the plug on its Bitcoin pool in Japan on July 31, its seven-day average hashrate had fallen 64% in a month. Later that day, a Hashrate Index reading put Foundry USA, AntPool and F2Pool at 60% of recent blocks. The timing makes them look connected. Weekly data tell a messier story.

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SBI Crypto's official update set the first cutoff at 22:00 UTC on July 30, or 07:00 JST on July 31. Share acceptance stopped, and miners began a graceful disconnect. The company scheduled a full Stratum shutdown by 23:59:59 UTC. Its website would stay open for historical data and payout status. The final payout schedule remained unspecified, as did the end dates for API and portal access.

At about 11:22 UTC on July 31, Foundry held 26.67% of attributed blocks, AntPool 17.13% and F2Pool 16.21%. SBI Crypto was down to 0.72%, or an estimated 6.8 exahashes per second. The dashboard moved again within minutes. The 60.01% reading captures a moment, rather than a lasting level of control.

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SBI Crypto's daily telemetry charted a month-long retreat. Its seven-day average BTC hashrate dropped from 16.222 EH/s for the period ending June 30 to 5.817 EH/s for the period ending July 30. By 11:17 UTC on July 31, separate operational statistics put the 24-hour average at about 0.452 EH/s. SBI's official block list showed July 29 as its latest block.

The top three were already above 60%

Matched weekly buckets from mempool.space put Foundry, AntPool and F2Pool at a combined 64.8039% for July 20, then 60.7843% in the still-incomplete July 27 bucket. SBI Crypto's share fell from 0.9804% to 0.6192%. The top tier had cleared 60% before the cutoff. The July 27 bucket spans the shutdown and remains incomplete, leaving any immediate concentration effect unmeasured.

Individual pool movements pulled in different directions. Foundry, AntPool and F2Pool each showed lower estimated hashrate in the partial July 27 bucket than in the prior week.

Luxor rose, Braiins fell, and NeoPool was absent. Pool-share records reflect work credited to a service.

Thus, the routes behind SBI Crypto's lost pool hashrate stay hidden in these aggregate totals.

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The post A major Japanese Bitcoin mining pool just pulled the plug on its Bitcoin service just as 3 mega-miners claimed 60% of the network appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Starting Aug. 1, Louisiana users may cancel a virtual-currency-kiosk transaction made on or after that date and demand a full refund at any time if the machine's owner or operator was unlicensed when the transaction occurred.

Act 482 puts the cost of an eligible refund on the operator. Eligibility depends on the operator's license status when the transaction occurred, so the provision does not cover every kiosk payment. The act separately preserves Louisiana's general rule requiring an operator to hold a transaction for 72 hours or allow the user to cancel within 72 hours for a full refund. The measure takes effect Aug. 1.

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How the refund process works

For a cancellation and refund request made under R.S. 6:1389(B), the operator must acknowledge and respond within 10 business days. Its response must clearly disclose all requirements for obtaining the refund. The 10-business-day deadline applies to the response, not the payment.

The statute requires operators to provide live support through a toll-free number during kiosk operating hours, with that number displayed on the machine and included on the transaction receipt.

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For a request based on suspected fraud, an operator may require proof of a police or other governmental-entity report and proof of identification. A police report or proof that the user filed a complaint with the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center qualifies the activity as suspected fraud under the act.

A covered refund must be completed within 90 calendar days of the initial request. If the operator's clearly communicated policy requires the report and identification and the user supplies them later, the deadline becomes 90 days from that submission. Payment can therefore arrive more than 90 days after the user first asks.

License status may require more than a current-list check. Louisiana law treats owning, operating, soliciting, marketing, advertising, or facilitating a kiosk in the state as virtual-currency business activity subject to licensing. As of July 31, the Louisiana Office of Financial Institutions listed 36 active virtual-currency business licensees.

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The change arrives against a documented fraud backdrop. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded 144 Louisiana complaints involving cryptocurrency kiosks and $2,874,450 in adjusted losses for 2025. The agency cautions that those complaints can include other transaction types within the same scams, so the loss total cannot be attributed solely to the kiosks.

The post Louisiana just armed crypto ATM users with a legal cheat code to demand full refunds from unlicensed operators appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bitcoin is trading near $63,000, with rate markets assigning roughly 66% odds to a September Federal Reserve hike, under a policy framework Kevin Warsh has left partly hidden.

The Fed chair has defined his reaction function around “underlying inflation,” then declined to disclose how he weighs the indicators that produce that judgment.

The official dashboard spans 1.5 percentage points: headline PCE runs at 3.7%, core PCE at 3.3%, the Atlanta Fed’s sticky-price CPI at 2.8%, Cleveland Fed 10-year expected inflation at 2.43%, and the Dallas Fed’s trimmed-mean PCE at 2.2%.

One economy supplies readings from nearly twice the Fed’s 2% goal to barely above it.

Warsh told reporters that the Fed’s January strategy document keeps PCE as its formal objective. He invoked Goodhart’s Law, said the central bank could revisit its strategy in January 2027, and described a broader data project that aims to “separate the noise from the signal.”

His operative judgment can therefore come from a wider set of inputs than the measure the formal framework identifies.

That distinction leaves Bitcoin traders pricing two unknowns at once: the next inflation readings and the weight Warsh assigns each one. A 3.7% headline figure supports tighter policy, and a 2.2% trimmed mean gives the Fed room to wait when long-term expected inflation sits near 2.43%.

The Fed is rebuilding its inflation lens

The Federal Reserve created five monetary-policy task forces on July 9. Raj Chetty, Doug McMillon, and Kevin Murphy head its Data Sources group, which will seek timelier economic information.

A separate Inflation Frameworks group will reconsider how the central bank interprets the drivers of inflation.

Warsh plans to review the groups’ work before Jackson Hole, and he left open the possibility that their early findings could shape his August speech. The next hard policy deadline arrives Sept. 15-16, when the FOMC meets with a new Summary of Economic Projections.

January 2027 then offers the first formal opening for a revised strategy statement.

The FOMC kept its target range at 3.50% to 3.75% through a 9-3 vote, with Beth Hammack, Neel Kashkari and Lorie Logan supporting a quarter-point increase. September hike odds neared 65% on July 31, and the Atlanta Fed tracker had placed the probability at 83.05% on July 29, illustrating how quickly traders reprice the path.

The 10-year Treasury yield ended July near 4.743%, and the 30-year reached 5.274%, its highest level in 19 years. Subtracting Cleveland Fed 10-year expected inflation of 2.434% from the nominal 10-year yield produces a simple expected real rate near 2.31%.

That real return competes directly with Bitcoin, which offers zero cash yield. Higher real rates raise the opportunity cost of holding BTC, support the dollar, and reduce the balance sheet capacity available for risk assets.

Bitcoin’s move toward $63,000 has occurred inside that tighter liquidity setting.

US-traded spot Bitcoin funds took in $233.1 million on July 30, then recorded $87.9 million of net redemptions on July 31. Cumulative net inflows stand near $51.56 billion, giving Bitcoin an institutional demand channel whose daily support can still reverse.

When headline PCE sets policy

The bearish path starts with Warsh treating headline PCE at 3.7% and core PCE at 3.3% as the best evidence of generalized inflation.

Higher oil prices, firmer inflation expectations and continued economic resilience would reinforce that interpretation, giving the three July dissenters a stronger case for September.

Rate markets would push up hike odds, Treasury yields would stay firm, and the dollar would gain another source of support. Bitcoin would then face tighter financial conditions alongside mixed ETF flows, placing renewed stress on the $62,000 area.

A sustained loss of $62,000 would bring $60,000 into the immediate price map. The late-June zone near $58,000 enters only once sellers establish acceptance below $60,000. Confirmation would come from higher real yields, firmer breakevens, a stronger dollar and another round of ETF redemptions.

The lower inflation gauges would carry less policy weight under this path. Warsh could conclude that trimmed measures remove too much of the tariff and energy transmission entering household prices, leaving the 2.2% reading unable to justify patience.

The path through trimmed inflation

The bullish path requires Warsh to classify energy and other volatile categories as noise, giving greater weight to trimmed-mean PCE at 2.2%, sticky-price inflation at 2.8%, and 10-year expected inflation near 2.43%. Continued cooling across those measures would give the Fed room to hold in September.

Lower hike odds would ease real yields and weaken the dollar’s support, reopening liquidity for Bitcoin. BTC would first need to recover $64,500, then clear the Friday high near $65,300.

A clean move through that area would reopen $66,000 and $68,000.

Spot-market buying, falling open interest during the rebound and renewed ETF creations would strengthen that case. Those conditions would tie the advance to spot demand and reduced hedging demand, giving Bitcoin a firmer foundation than a derivatives-led burst.

Jackson Hole may provide the first public clue about Warsh’s weighting system, and Sept. 16 carries the rate decision and fresh projections.

By then, markets may know every major inflation print and still lack the formula that converts those readings into policy, and Bitcoin is already trading that gap.

The post If the Fed trusts this single 2.2% metric, Bitcoin could break $65.3k and ignite a path to $68k appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Tether's second-quarter materials report $1.5 billion in net operating profit, earned mainly from Treasuries and repo activity. However, the attached reserve report shows a negative $3.17 billion first-half financial result, and the company's materials do not reconcile the two figures.

Subtracting the first quarter's positive $1.04 billion financial result from that first-half figure implies a negative $4.211 billion result for the second quarter alone.

After an $89 million net capital offset, the implied hit reduced the cushion above roughly $184 billion of liabilities from $8.23 billion to $4.11 billion in three months.

Reconstructing the missing number

Tether's implied financial result is negative $4.211 billion for the second quarter, followed by an implied net capital movement of positive $89 million. The total is roughly $4.110 billion, matching the reported June 30 figure, given the Mar. 31 cushion of $8.23 billion.

Total assets fell from nearly $191.8 billion to $187.7 billion over the same stretch, the primary source of the cushion compression. Total liabilities moved only slightly higher, from $183.5 billion to $183.6 billion, over that same period.

Tether's reserve report values gold, Bitcoin, public equities, and financial investments at fair value, meaning price swings alone can move the numbers. Gold's disclosed valuation price fell from $4,668.06 to $4,008.02 per ounce between the two dates, and Bitcoin's fell from $68,193.95 to $58,642.15.

At Mar. 31, Tether's holdings were roughly 4.25 million ounces of gold and 97,137 BTC, implying about $2.8 billion of gold markdowns and $928 million of Bitcoin markdowns, or $3.73 billion combined.

That estimate excludes purchases, sales, realized results, public equity exposure, and other investments in the second quarter. It explains a large share of the implied hit, leaving the rest unaccounted for.

Secured loans fell from $15.83 billion to $13.45 billion, a roughly 15% reduction Tether has framed as deliberate de-risking, adding nuance to the broader asset mix. Public equities and the “other investments” category both grew slightly, adding $354 million and $402 million respectively.

The thinner margin

Tether's June 30 report still shows assets exceeding liabilities by $4.109 billion, keeping the reserve collateralized throughout, even as the cushion's share of total liabilities fell from roughly 4.49% to 2.24%.

Gold and Bitcoin alone totaled $24.64 billion at quarter-end, so a roughly 14.5% decline across gold, Bitcoin, and public equities would consume the remaining cushion before any offset from operating income arrives.

Once other investments are included in the count, the threshold drops to about 12.2%.

A repeat of the second quarter's financial result would exceed the entire remaining buffer unless retained earnings, new capital, or recovering prices offset it. That comparison tests sensitivity, stopping well short of any forecast that Tether becomes undercollateralized.

Tether can retain Treasury and repo earnings, add outside capital, reduce or hedge its market-sensitive holdings, or let the buffer continue to move with gold and Bitcoin prices.

Assuming $1.5 billion of quarterly operating profit and steady asset prices, rebuilding the cushion to its first-quarter level would take roughly 2.75 quarters.

Restoring the lost cushion through gold alone would need an increase of about $877 an ounce, or through Bitcoin alone, a gain of roughly $41,700 per coin.

In the bull case, gold or Bitcoin recovers meaningfully from its June 30 valuations, mechanically restoring some or all of the lost cushion on its own. Tether gets to frame the quarter as volatility its diversification strategy absorbed, with the damage proving temporary.

In the bear case, Treasury and repo income keeps flowing, but further price swings, distributions, or shifts within harder-to-read investment categories offset it just as quickly. The buffer stays parked near 2% to 3% of liabilities, leaving it to be seen if a $184 billion token issuer should operate with a margin that thin.

Why this reaches beyond Tether

Tether's reserves include roughly $140.6 billion in cash equivalents and short-term deposits, most of it Treasury bills and Treasury-backed repos. BIS research has linked stablecoin inflows to lower short-term Treasury yields, with the effect strengthening as the sector grows.

A 2026 Fed note estimated that Tether held about 1.04 times its reserves per coin overall, with only about 0.74 of that in higher-quality reserves such as Treasuries and bank deposits.

BIS has argued that stablecoins used at scale need par-redeemability, low-risk reserves, and credible backstops against forced selling under stress.

Tether's cushion compression gives that argument something concrete to point to, as enormous Treasury exposure sits alongside an equity buffer that market-sensitive assets can still cut in half within a single quarter.

The document is a point-in-time assurance report, not a full financial statement audit, and Tether says its financial figures report lacks the presentation and disclosures needed for IFRS compliance. That is why the arithmetic behind the missing number for the second quarter carries as much weight as the number itself.

The post Tether claims $1.5B profit, but hidden math reveals a $4.2B hit that halved its safety cushion in 90 days appeared first on CryptoSlate.

The crypto market is doing something unusual today: almost nothing. Hourly moves across the top 15 assets sit within a few hundredths of a percent of flat, and 24-hour changes cluster between minus 2% and plus 3%. That is a market holding its breath rather than one finding direction.

Zoom out, though, and the year-to-date column tells a far harsher story. Bitcoin is down 28%. Most large caps have lost between a third and half their value since January. And exactly three assets in the top 15 are still in the green for 2026.

Here is where every major coin stands right now.

What Is the Crypto Market Doing Right Now?

$Bitcoin trades at $63,018, up 0.06% on the hour, down 1.23% on the day and down 1.55% on the week. Market cap sits at $1.26 trillion against $22.73 billion in 24-hour volume.

That volume figure is the number worth pausing on. Turnover equivalent to roughly 1.8% of market cap in a day is thin for Bitcoin, and thin volume in a downtrend usually means sellers have stopped panicking rather than buyers have arrived. It compresses ranges, which is exactly what today's price action shows.

$Ethereum is at $1,865, up 0.10% on the hour and down 0.90% on the day, but positive over the week at plus 0.48%. Its $225.07 billion market cap now sits at less than a fifth of Bitcoin's. The year-to-date figure is where the damage shows: minus 37.14%, meaningfully worse than Bitcoin's minus 27.99%.

That gap is the defining structural fact of this market. Ethereum has underperformed Bitcoin by nine percentage points in seven months, and the rest of the smart contract sector has done worse still.

Which Assets Are Actually Up in 2026?

Only three names in the top 15 are positive year to date, and they have nothing in common.

• Hyperliquid ($HYPE) at $52.03 is the outright winner, up 104.60% this year with a $13.13 billion market cap. It is also today's biggest loser, down 4.89% on the day and 9.45% on the week. A perpetuals DEX token doubling in a market where Bitcoin fell 28% is a genuine outlier, but the current weekly slide suggests some of that outperformance is being handed back.
• TRON ($TRX) at $0.3274 is up 15.20% year to date, the only large cap outside HYPE with a meaningful gain. It is flat today, down 0.09% on the hour and up 0.36% on the day. TRON's stablecoin settlement volume gives it a revenue base that is largely indifferent to speculative appetite, which is precisely why it holds up when speculation dries out.
• UNUS SED LEO at $9.75 is up 1.50% for the year, effectively flat. Note its 24-hour volume: $404,110 against an $8.97 billion market cap. That is an exchange token that barely trades, so its price stability reflects illiquidity more than demand.

Why Are Privacy Coins Holding Up Better?

Zcash and Monero are the quiet story in this table.

Zcash ($ZEC) trades at $463.33, up 0.70% on the day and down only 9.59% year to date. Monero ($XMR) sits at $362.83, up 3.39% on the day, the strongest 24-hour move in the top 15, and down 16.25% for the year.

Set those against Cardano at minus 48%, XRP at minus 42% and Solana at minus 41%, and the divergence is stark. Privacy assets have lost roughly a third of what the large-cap alt sector has given up.

Two explanations compete. The charitable one is that privacy demand is genuinely uncorrelated with risk appetite, so these assets have a buyer base that does not disappear when the Fed turns hawkish. The blunter one is that both have small floats, low volumes and shallow order books, so they simply move less in either direction. Monero's $96.57 million in daily volume, the lowest of any non-stablecoin in the top 15 apart from LEO, supports the second reading.

Where Do XRP, Solana and Cardano Stand?

This is the damage zone of the 2026 market.

• $XRP at $1.06 is down 0.85% on the day, 2.54% on the week and 42.30% year to date, with a $66.39 billion cap. The psychological problem is obvious: the dollar level is now the story, and a break below it would be the first sustained sub-$1 period in over a year.
• $Solana at $72.79 is down 0.91% on the day and 41.52% for the year, with $42.29 billion in market cap and $1.22 billion in daily volume. Volume relative to cap remains healthier than most of this list, which means Solana is still being actively traded rather than abandoned.
• $Cardano at $0.1723 is the worst performer in the top 15 for 2026 at minus 48.23%. It is also, curiously, the best seven-day performer at plus 6.38%, up 1.44% on the day. That combination is typical of assets that have fallen far enough to attract mean-reversion buyers without changing anything fundamental.
• $Chainlink at $8.08 sits at minus 33.66% year to date, down 2.01% on the day. BNB at $579.68 is down 32.85% for the year but up 2.56% on the week, one of the few large caps with a positive weekly print. Dogecoin at $0.06975 is down 40.53% year to date and essentially flat today.

What Should Traders Watch Next?

Three things stand out from this snapshot.

First, compression. Hourly changes near zero across the entire top 15 rarely persist. Ranges this tight resolve, and the direction of that resolution usually follows the prevailing trend, which is currently down.

Second, the rotation pattern. Money that stayed in crypto through this drawdown went to assets with revenue (TRON), assets with a genuine product cycle (Hyperliquid) or assets with a use case detached from speculation (Zcash, Monero). It did not go to the 2021 generation of layer ones.

Third, the weekly greens. BNB at plus 2.56%, Cardano at plus 6.38% and Ethereum at plus 0.48% are the only meaningful positive weekly prints. That is a narrow base for any rebound thesis, but it is the first time in several weeks that anything outside the privacy sector has posted a positive week.

For Bitcoin specifically, the level that matters has not changed: the $60,000 to $62,000 band. Today's $63,018 sits directly above it, and everything in the table above is ultimately a derivative of whether that floor holds.

Crypto just closed one of the ugliest earnings weeks in its short public-market history. Strategy, the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin on the planet, reported an $8.22 billion net loss for the second quarter. Coinbase followed with a $359 million loss and its third consecutive revenue miss. And Bitcoin, the asset underneath both stories, spent the week sliding under $63,000.

None of this happened in isolation. A hawkish Federal Reserve, a 27% Bitcoin drawdown since January, and a market structure bill stuck in the Senate have combined into the most defensive backdrop crypto has seen since 2022. Here is what actually happened, and what matters from here.

What Exactly Did Strategy Report?

The headline number is enormous, but it needs context. Strategy posted an operating loss of $8.33 billion for Q2 2026, driven almost entirely by an $8.32 billion unrealized markdown on its digital assets under fair-value accounting. Net loss came in at $8.22 billion, or $24.45 per diluted share.

Twelve months earlier, the same accounting treatment produced a $14.05 billion unrealized gain and $10.02 billion in net income. That is roughly an $18 billion swing in reported earnings, with no change to the underlying business model.

The software business, almost forgotten at this point, actually grew. Revenue rose 6.9% year over year to $122.4 million, with gross margin at 66.6%.

Michael Saylor framed the quarter as a phase of muted sentiment rather than a structural problem, and reiterated the company's push to build out what it calls Digital Credit as a new asset class.

Is Strategy's Bitcoin Position Actually in Danger?

This is the question that matters, and the answer is more nuanced than the headline suggests.

Strategy held 843,775 $BTC as of 26 July, up 25% since the start of 2026. Those coins carry an aggregate acquisition cost of roughly $63.69 billion and were worth about $54.77 billion at the time of reporting. Average cost basis sits near $75,476 per coin, which puts the position roughly $10,700 underwater per Bitcoin and around $8.9 billion below cost in total.

Crucially, that loss is unrealized. It reflects mark-to-market movement, not selling. The company did sell approximately $218.4 million of Bitcoin this year, but that was to fund preferred stock dividends rather than a forced unwind.

The balance sheet work is where the real story sits. Strategy raised $17.06 billion through at-the-market share offerings this year, cut convertible notes from $8.21 billion to $6.71 billion via a discounted $1.5 billion repurchase, and built a dollar reserve of $3.75 billion. Management says that reserve covers about 2.1 years of preferred dividends and interest under current policy.

Translation: the company is not in immediate distress. But its capital structure has become complex enough that investors are now scrutinising the dividend machine as closely as the Bitcoin stack.

Why Did Coinbase Disappoint Again?

Coinbase reported revenue of $1.22 billion, down 18.5% year over year, against roughly $1.30 billion expected. GAAP loss came in at $1.36 per share versus consensus near breakeven. Shares fell around 6% after hours to about $153.

The problem is straightforward: total crypto market capitalisation fell 11% quarter over quarter and spot trading volumes dropped 25%. Transaction revenue landed at $599 million, subscription and services at $555 million, and stablecoin revenue slipped to $292 million. Monthly transacting users fell to 7.6 million from 8.7 million a year earlier, while assets on platform dropped to $245.9 billion from $425 billion.

The bright spots were real, though. Coinbase took a record 10.3% share of global crypto trading volume, its third straight quarterly high. Prediction markets revenue more than doubled quarter over quarter and crossed $100 million annualised. Adjusted EBITDA stayed positive at $207.8 million, the fourteenth consecutive positive quarter. Bitcoin-linked transactions now account for just 12% of revenue, down from more than half historically.

Brian Armstrong summarised the pitch bluntly, saying the company is no longer just a bet on the Bitcoin price. The market, for now, is not paying for that story.

What Is the Fed Doing to Crypto Right Now?

Macro is the pressure that turned a soft quarter into a bad one.

The FOMC held rates at 3.50% to 3.75% at its 29 July meeting, but the tone was the hawkish part. Three regional Fed presidents dissented in favour of an immediate hike, and Chair Kevin Warsh made clear that inflation above 2% is not acceptable. With inflation running near 4.1%, a cut is off the table and a September hike is now a live debate.

For crypto, tighter liquidity is a direct tax on leverage. Holding leveraged positions gets more expensive, risk appetite compresses, and capital rotates toward cash and short-duration paper. DWF Labs managing partner Andrei Grachev called the hawkish hold the least favourable outcome available and argued institutional positioning should turn defensive.

Regulation has not helped either. Odds on the CLARITY Act passing collapsed toward the high 20s on prediction markets after the Senate missed its August deadline, even as a 616-page merged committee draft circulated.

Where Does Bitcoin Go From Here?

$Bitcoin is trading in the low $63,000s, down from roughly $88,400 at the end of 2025 and far below the October 2025 peak near $126,000.

The technical picture is contested. Price is pressing against a descending trendline from that 2025 high, with all four weekly EMAs sloping downward overhead. The 20-week sits near $69,445 as the first real ceiling. On the downside, the $60,000 to $62,000 band has held through repeated tests since the June low and is the level bulls need to defend. Lose it, and the June low near $57,500 comes back into play.

Seasonality is not on Bitcoin's side. July closed up around 9%, roughly in line with its historical average, but in the two most comparable bear-cycle years, 2018 and 2022, August erased those gains entirely.

The counterargument is that a restrictive Fed is now fully priced, ETF flows have shown signs of stabilising, and a weekly RSI divergence is flashing the opposite of what the macro tape suggests. Analysts looking at the same Fed decision have reached genuinely different conclusions, which is usually a sign the market is at an inflection rather than in a trend.

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

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

Bitcoin Wallet Hack: What exactly happened?

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

The victim profile is unusually consistent:

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

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

How did the attacker guess keys that should be unguessable?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which Coldcard devices are affected?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why did the Bitcoin price not react?

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

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

What does this actually tell us about hardware wallets?

Three things worth separating from the panic.

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

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

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

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

Why is 31 July the hard deadline this year?

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

Two exceptions buy you real time:

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

Everyone else is on the clock tonight.

Who actually has to report crypto in Germany?

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

Inside the twelve months, it looks different:

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

Most private crypto activity lands in Anlage SO.

What is different about the 2025 return specifically?

Three things, and they all point the same direction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happens if you miss midnight?

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

You still have two legitimate exits:

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

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

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

How it works:

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

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

👉 Open your XTB account and claim the free Nike share

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

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

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

What is the KOSPI and why does it matter?

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

Two things make the KOSPI unusually important right now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why did the KOSPI crash happen?

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

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

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

Why is this important news beyond South Korea?

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

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

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

Will the KOSPI crash have repercussions on crypto?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What should crypto traders watch next?

Three levels and one flow.

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

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

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

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

The Binance founder urged holders to spread funds across multiple wallets as Galaxy Research put the toll from the Coldcard exploit at roughly $70 million—nearly double the initial estimate.

Gallup says Americans are growing more skeptical of artificial intelligence, with rising concerns about job losses, businesses' use of the technology, and the technology’s growing impact.

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

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

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

116% Jump in Dogecoin spot flows has traders watching one key question.

Binance's CZ has encouraged crypto users to stay vigilant and maintain precautions in holding crypto assets, explaining to them that nothing guarantees 100% safety.

Cardano maps out first steps for Its next big upgrade.

Bitcoin social sentiment shifts rapidly in response to the recent Coldcard firmware exploit that saw investors collectively lose funds worth over $70 million.

Ripple CTO emeritus quietly shuts down XRP retirement speculation.

TLDR:

• US 30-year Treasury yield surged past 5.20%, its highest level recorded since 2007.
• Fed held rates at 3.50%-3.75% despite three dissenting members favoring a rate hike instead.
• Credit card serious delinquencies climbed to levels not seen since 2010 amid rising costs.
• Bitcoin dipped briefly on the news before recovering, showing contained crypto market reaction.

US Treasury yields climbed to their highest level since 2007 this week, rattling markets well beyond bonds. The move came even though the Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged at its late July meeting.

Fed Chair Kevin Warsh signaled a shift away from forward guidance, telling investors to trust market signals over central bank commentary.

The 30-year yield pushed past 5.20%, while credit card serious delinquencies reached levels last seen in 2010. Together, these signals point to mounting strain across the US financial system.

Fed Holds Rates While Yields Surge

The Federal Open Market Committee voted 9-3 to hold rates steady at 3.50% to 3.75%. Three regional presidents dissented, favoring a quarter-point hike instead.

This marked the most hawkish split of Warsh’s tenure so far. Markets had priced in roughly a 40% chance of a hike before the meeting.

Financial commentary account The Kobeissi Letter noted the unusual timing of the yield move. Most of the increase came after the Fed’s decision was announced.

Analysts called this pattern unusual, since a less restrictive decision typically eases yields rather than raising them. Instead, long-term borrowing costs moved in the opposite direction.

Warsh explained the shift during his press conference, saying the Fed wants markets to “play the ball, not the referee.”

For years, Fed policy leaned heavily on guidance and forward messaging. Warsh’s approach flips that dynamic, leaving markets to interpret data without direct signals.

US inflation remains near 4%, well above the Fed’s 2% target. Record federal deficits and an energy shock tied to the Iran conflict add further pressure.

With few tools left to ease conditions without reigniting inflation, the Fed opted to pause and let markets set the pace themselves.

Mortgage Rates and Credit Stress Rise

Credit card serious delinquencies have climbed to their highest level since 2010. Rising borrowing costs are squeezing household budgets across income levels.

Consumers are increasingly relying on credit to cover everyday expenses. This trend often signals broader stress within the economy.

Mortgage rates are following a similar trajectory, with some estimates nearing 8%. Just eight months ago, consensus expected three rate cuts by year-end. Markets now price in two hikes by January instead, a sharp reversal in sentiment.

The shift has been swift and largely unexpected by most forecasters. Analysts note the Fed’s hands appear tied despite hopes for cuts. Cutting now risks pushing inflation toward 5%, an outcome policymakers want to avoid.

Crypto markets absorbed the news with relatively contained price action. Bitcoin dipped briefly before recovering within the same session.

Ether and XRP traded steadily, though the Fear and Greed Index stayed low. Rising long-end yields now function as tightening the Fed avoided imposing directly.

The post US Treasury Yields Hit 18-Year High as Fed Holds Rates Under Warsh appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Stellar XLM’s tokenized real-world assets reached $3.06 billion across 70 products this month.
• Stablecoin supply on Stellar XLM expanded 38.3%, while monthly volume hit $6.45 billion total.
• RWA transfer volume fell to $386 million despite overall asset growth trend continuing.
• Elliott Wave analysis suggests XLM could target $8.36 to $32 in a longer cycle.
  

Stellar XLM is emerging as a leading blockchain for tokenized real-world assets, according to data shared by wallet platform Scopuly.

The network now hosts $3.06 billion in tokenized real-world assets across 70 products, placing Stellar XLM second only to Ethereum in this category.

The figures come as stablecoin activity on the network continues to expand alongside institutional interest in payment infrastructure.

Stellar XLM Sees Growth In Tokenized Assets And Stablecoin Volume

Scopuly’s data shows tokenized real-world assets on Stellar XLM grew by 5.88% over the past month. This growth places the network in a strong position among blockchains competing for institutional tokenization business.

Stablecoin supply on Stellar XLM rose 38.3% during the same period, according to the platform. That expansion reflects increased issuance activity from stablecoin providers building on the network.

Monthly stablecoin transaction volume on Stellar XLM reached $6.45 billion, Scopuly reported. This figure indicates the network’s payment rails are processing substantial transaction flow already.

However, real-world asset transfer volume on Stellar XLM declined to $386 million during the same window. Scopuly noted this drop alongside the broader asset growth trend.

The combination of rising asset totals and falling transfer volume points to a specific pattern. Assets are accumulating on Stellar XLM faster than they are being actively traded or moved.

Scopuly framed this as an early stage in the network’s development cycle. The next phase, according to the platform, involves converting held assets into higher transaction activity.

Institutional infrastructure projects factor into this outlook for Stellar XLM. Scopuly referenced upcoming integration with the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation as one relevant development.

Tokenized treasuries and stablecoin issuers continue to select Stellar XLM for settlement infrastructure. These factors combine to support the network’s positioning within the broader tokenization sector.

Technical Analysis Points To Alternative Long-Term Scenarios For XLM

Separately, trader CG_trades shared a technical outlook for XLM price movement using Elliott Wave theory. This analysis presents an alternative scenario distinct from the fundamental growth narrative.

It suggests XLM may be tracing a macro cycle inverse ABC pattern across multiple years. Under this reading, wave A completed at the 2017 price peak.

The analysis places XLM currently within wave B, forming an ascending triangle pattern. This structure suggests a period of accumulation before further price movement occurs.

CG_trades projects wave E of this pattern could complete near the 2020 trendline. Estimated price levels for this completion sit between $0.11 and $0.12.

Should XLM reverse following completion of wave E, a longer-term target emerges. The trader’s analysis points to cycle wave C reaching between $8.36 and $32.

This range represents a wide potential outcome under the stated wave count. CG_trades identified a monthly close below the 2020 trendline as invalidation for this scenario.

Both the fundamental data from Scopuly and the technical outlook from CG_trades offer separate views. One centers on network usage metrics tied to real-world assets and stablecoins.

The other relies on historical price pattern recognition across multiple market cycles. Together, they represent two distinct frameworks analysts use to evaluate Stellar XLM.

The post Stellar XLM RWA Assets Hit $3.06B as Stablecoin Supply Surges 38.3% appeared first on Blockonomi.

AlienWP, a digital platform established over a decade ago, is branching out into iGaming journalism by launching a dedicated casino news division. The expansion includes comprehensive coverage of industry developments, operator reviews, regulatory updates, promotional offers, and responsible gaming initiatives as the company makes its debut in the online gambling media landscape.

Platform Expansion Details

The newly introduced division will chronicle significant developments throughout the iGaming sector, delivering coverage on regulatory shifts, licensing announcements, promotional requirements, and player protection initiatives. According to AlienWP, the objective is to deliver unbiased, fact-based reporting about online gaming operators instead of content created solely for promotional purposes.

This venture into iGaming media represents a natural evolution for AlienWP, which has operated as a digital information hub since 2013. The company recognized significant demand among both players and industry professionals for reliable, straightforward casino-related content.

Additional Platform Features

In conjunction with the casino journalism initiative, AlienWP is building Alien Wise Play, a web-based tool designed to enable players to evaluate different online casinos, bookmark preferred platforms, monitor promotional offers, and review licensing credentials. The dashboard functions purely as an information resource and does not operate gaming services, handle transactions, or offer gambling consultation.

Revenue for Alien Wise Play comes through affiliate relationships, though AlienWP characterizes the platform as player-centric rather than a conventional affiliate marketing site. The company emphasizes that transparency and responsible gaming principles are foundational to the platform’s design philosophy.

A distinguishing feature of Alien Wise Play is the Wise Play Score, a proprietary evaluation framework that rates gaming operators across multiple criteria including regulatory compliance, trustworthiness, payment dependability, transparency standards, customer service quality, and player safeguards. AlienWP has indicated that upcoming iterations of this scoring system will integrate compiled player feedback and AI-powered evaluation tools while maintaining editorial autonomy.

Additional details about the platform can be found at Alien Wise Play.

Official Statement

Oliver Dale, representing AlienWP, commented: “Launching our casino news division enables us to provide players with transparent, unbiased coverage and operator evaluations. This initiative complements our work on Alien Wise Play, a platform designed to empower players with comparison tools and resources for making well-informed, safer gaming choices.”

Development Roadmap

The company intends to broaden its casino journalism offerings in upcoming months while simultaneously advancing Alien Wise Play and refining the Wise Play Score methodology. Planned enhancements include incorporating aggregated user feedback and implementing AI-assisted evaluation capabilities, with editorial independence maintained as a core principle.

Company Background

Established in 2013, AlienWP operates as an iGaming journalism platform and casino information resource, delivering coverage on online gaming news, operator evaluations, regulatory matters, promotional offerings, responsible gaming practices, and sector trends. The organization is concurrently developing Alien Wise Play, a player-oriented dashboard that enables users to compare operators, monitor promotions, and access straightforward licensing and security data. Further information is accessible at alienwp.com.

Press Inquiries

Oliver Dale
AlienWP
Website: https://alienwp.com

The post AlienWP Launches Casino News Division Focused on Player Safety and Industry Updates appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Republicans aim to pass the CLARITY Act before November 3 midterms to claim a policy win.
• Democrats seek stronger ethics rules, AML measures, and conflict-of-interest oversight in the bill.
• A split Congress after midterms would likely extend negotiations rather than end the bill.
• Bitcoin active addresses near one million show steady network activity despite political uncertainty.

The CLARITY Act remains one of the most closely watched cryptocurrency bills in the United States Congress. Its progress now depends heavily on political timing rather than regulatory debate alone.

With midterm elections scheduled for November 3, lawmakers face mounting pressure to finalize the bill before voters head to the polls.

The legislation aims to define regulatory roles for the SEC and CFTC while strengthening protections for digital asset customers nationwide.

Republicans Push for Passage Before Election Day

Republican lawmakers view the CLARITY Act as a policy win they can present to voters this fall. Passing the bill would let them point to clearer crypto rules as a completed achievement.

Party leaders have emphasized customer asset protection as a central selling point of the legislation. They also argue the bill would improve America’s standing in the global digital asset race.

Time pressure is shaping how Republicans approach negotiations on Capitol Hill. Getting the bill signed before November would give the party a concrete talking point.

That urgency has pushed GOP leaders to move quickly through committee stages. Delays past the midterms could weaken the political value of any eventual passage.

The bill’s core goal is separating oversight duties between the SEC and CFTC. Supporters say this division would reduce confusion for exchanges and token issuers.

Clearer jurisdiction has been a long-standing demand from parts of the crypto industry. Republicans frame this clarity as good for both markets and consumers.

Party strategists are aware that election outcomes could reshape the bill’s future entirely. A loss of either chamber would change who holds negotiating leverage.

That reality has added extra motivation to finish work on the bill now. Every week before Election Day matters for the bill’s political framing.

Democrats Seek Stronger Protections as Markets Watch Closely

Democratic lawmakers are not broadly against cryptocurrency regulation moving forward. Many instead want stronger ethics rules attached to any final legislation.

Enhanced consumer protection measures remain a top priority for several Democratic offices. Some have pushed for tougher anti-money laundering requirements within the bill’s text.

Conflicts of interest involving government officials have also drawn Democratic attention. Lawmakers want clearer rules governing officials with personal crypto holdings.

This concern has become a sticking point in ongoing bipartisan talks. Analysts following the process note this issue remains unresolved on Capitol Hill.

The most likely post-election scenario involves a Democratic House and Republican Senate. That split would likely stretch negotiations rather than end the bill outright.

Crypto policy account noted that a divided Congress “changes the entire negotiating table” for digital asset rules. Compromise language may become necessary to keep the bill alive.

On-chain data offers a separate signal away from political debate. Bitcoin active addresses remain close to one million despite ongoing uncertainty. That level suggests steady network engagement regardless of legislative timing. Investors are watching both political outcomes and blockchain activity together.

The post CLARITY Act’s Fate Hinges on 2026 Midterms as Bitcoin Activity Holds Steady appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• BNB Chain confirms the Asteroid Shiba token was launched without company authorization or support.
• Former employee retained unauthorized seed phrase access after leaving BNB Chain’s team.
• BNB Chain pursues legal action and cooperates with authorities over the incident.
• Asteroid Shiba market cap hit millions as thousands of holders joined rapidly.

BNB Chain has confirmed it is taking legal action against a former employee accused of unauthorized token issuance. The company said the individual retained access to a wallet’s seed phrase after leaving the organization.

That access was later used to launch a meme token called Asteroid Shiba without company approval or involvement.

Legal Action Follows Unauthorized Wallet Use

BNB Chain explained that the wallet address at the center of the dispute was originally created for internal purposes.

According to the company, “a wallet address was previously created by a former employee, which they then used to generate a token, as part of a video tutorial.” That token was intended solely for demonstration and educational content at the time.

After leaving the company, the individual kept unauthorized access to the wallet’s associated seed phrase. BNB Chain stated, “The individual retained unauthorised access to the associated seed phrase after their departure and used it to generate a new private key.” This continued access went unnoticed by the company until the new token surfaced publicly.

The company confirmed it became aware the same wallet address was being used to launch Asteroid Shiba. BNB Chain said the token was not created, authorized, promoted, or supported by the company in any form. It further clarified that it “has no control over the token or wallet address” involved.

In response to the discovery, BNB Chain announced it is now pursuing formal legal action against the former employee.

The company stated it is “pursuing legal action against the former employee and cooperating with relevant authorities on this matter.” No further details about the scope of legal proceedings have been disclosed at this stage.

Background Incident and Market Fallout

BNB Chain referenced a similar situation from 2025 involving a test token known as TST. That token had briefly appeared in a company tutorial video before gaining unexpected trader attention. Its value surged shortly after the appearance, despite carrying no official endorsement from BNB Chain.

The Asteroid Shiba token has followed a similar trajectory since its unauthorized launch. Market capitalization quickly reached millions of dollars as thousands of holders acquired the token.

Speculative trading interest built rapidly, reflecting patterns seen in prior unofficial token episodes tied to established platforms.

BNB Chain also emphasized that the token carries no legitimate ties to the company or its operations. The company noted, “these are not affiliated with or endorsed by BNB Chain,” addressing speculation directly. This distinction has become central to the company’s public messaging since the token’s appearance.

Community reactions have varied considerably following news of the legal action and unauthorized token launch. Some traders view the situation as a speculative opportunity despite its uncertain origins. Others have raised caution, pointing to the deployer’s past history connected to questionable token launches.

BNB Chain’s decision to pursue legal recourse signals a firm stance against unauthorized use of company-linked wallets. The case may also prompt renewed scrutiny of internal access protocols following employee departures.

Traders have been urged to research independently before engaging with tokens lacking verified company backing.

The post BNB Chain Takes Legal Action After Ex-Employee Launches Rogue Meme Token appeared first on Blockonomi.

Perhaps due to the quickly re-escalating tension in the Middle East, the cryptocurrency market has posted fresh losses over the past few hours, with BTC dropping to $62,000 after failing to reclaim the $63,000 support during the day.

XRP was not spared, as it just slipped below $1.05. The asset was rejected at $1.20 during the mid-July rally after the favorable US inflation data for June, and eventually lost the coveted $1.10 support. Now, it fights for the last line of defense before the bulls would have to defend the $1.00 zone.

Popular analyst EGRAG CRYPTO outlined the significance of the $1.05 level, calling it the ‘battlefield’ region. Although he noted earlier today that the cross-border token had managed to maintain that level, he acknowledged the predominantly bearish structure of lower highs on the 4-hour chart.

The short-term path of recovery would be a successful defense of $1.05 before XRP can bounce above $1.083 and eventually reclaim the $1.10 level, which now acts as resistance.

EGRAG laid out an even more promising road ahead for the asset if it manages to continue its recovery, with the “major price target” set at $1.30.

However, a decisive breakdown below $1.05 would essentially mean that XRP will head toward the notable liquidity zone at around $1.00, he warned.

Mikybull Crypto also believes XRP has the strength to stage a surprising comeback. The analyst claimed that the asset’s bullish reversal run is currently loading despite the negative outlook.

His long-term chart compares the current market structure with the one from two years ago when XRP was highly compressed at around $0.60. Once it broke out the upper boundary, though, it rocketed to a fresh all-time high within less than a year.

“Before the last run, I screamed for you to buy at a crazy discount. The opportunity is presenting again,” he said now.

History is not on XRP’s side at the moment, though, as August has been quite a painful month for the asset. As reported earlier today, the cross-border token was deep in the red in all four previous editions.

The post XRP Price Dips to ‘Battlefield’ Zone, but Analysts See Major Reversal Opportunity appeared first on CryptoPotato.

We will begin with the mandatory disclaimer, as we are well aware that historical performance does not guarantee similar moves in the future. However, history does tend to rhyme, and that’s what happened in July for BTC.

The question is: will August follow suit, as the month has not been kind to the largest cryptocurrency, especially the last four editions.

July Brought Some Gains

Before we explore what happened in July, here’s a brief outlook of the painful June, which set the stage for a rebound during the seventh month of the year. The 2026 edition of June became the most violent in terms of price moves for the cryptocurrency in precisely four years. It tumbled by 20.48% in 2026 compared to 37.28% in June 2022.

As such, it was almost expected that July would be a better month. History was also on BTC’s side as 9 out of the last 11 were in the green. However, the start was actually quite surprising as bitcoin dipped below $58,000 on July 1 for the first time in nearly two years.

The bears quickly lost control, though, and the asset reclaimed the coveted $60,000 level within a day or two. It wasn’t the most volatile of months, but BTC still managed to post some gains and peaked on July 21 at $67,000. This became its highest price tag in two months.

However, it was rejected there despite the softer-than-expected inflation data for June and the fact that the Fed refused to hike interest rates last week. Thus, bitcoin ended the month at under $64,000, which was still a 9% monthly increase.

Your Move, August

As popular analyst Ali Martinez put it yesterday: August hasn’t been kind to bitcoin. In fact, the last four have all been in the red, posting losses of 13.88%, 11.29%, 8.6%, and 6.49%, respectively. The silver lining is that the declines become less violent over time.

The broader August perspective is still deeply negative, though. Only three out of the last 12 editions have been in the green, with 2017 standing out as the most bullish one on record. At the time, BTC rocketed by over 65%, but it was a different time and a vastly different market phase.

For now, BTC enters August 2026 with lots of uncertainty not only within the industry itself, where interest has dwindled lately, but on a macro perspective as well. The war in the Middle East continues, and the one between Ukraine and Russia too, while inflation remains an issue, and Trump’s controversial actions tend to halt each breakout attempt in its tracks.

The post Bitcoin Rebounded in July, but Bears Target an August Pullback appeared first on CryptoPotato.

It was precisely six years ago when a rather unknown company in the cryptocurrency industry at the time made a revolutionary change to its asset reserve strategy and adopted Bitcoin. The entity in question, called MicroStrategy back then, started to accumulate BTC en masse and only accelerated its purchases after the 2024 presidential elections in the US.

The community became accustomed to hearing about new acquisitions made by the company, some of which were worth billions of dollars. Its total stash grew exponentially and currently sits at 843,775 units. Within this timeframe, BTC bulls consistently heard that the company (and its former CEO) would never sell… until they did. And then everything changed.

During the most recent earnings call, the company hinted that it has plans to sell up to $5 billion in bitcoin, which is significantly higher than the previously claimed $1.25 billion.

The Latest Shift

Strategy (as it is called now) has gone five consecutive weeks without purchasing BTC, marking its longest acquisition pause in years. Instead of deploying capital into BTC, the firm has steadily increased its cash reserve through recent fundraising activities. As we previously reported, Strategy has been rebuilding its USD position while continuing to explore financial options tied to its expanding portfolio of preferred stock offerings.

In the most recent official change, CEO Phong Le took to X to announce the company’s new primary corporate objective, which reads:

“Our corporate objective is for STRC to trade at $99-$100 over time.”

In the earnings call, he was more specific:

“Our intent is to sell bitcoin for three reasons when we think it’s appropriate for the company. One, fund the U.S. dollar reserve up to $1.25 billion. Additional reasons include funding dividend and interest payments of $1.76 billion a year and funding up to $2 billion in common and preferred stock repurchases,” Le said, according to a FactSet transcript.

The tweet and comments garnered immediate reactions from some well-known industry commentators as well as constant critic Peter Schiff, who was quick to determine that: “In other words, common shareholders are screwed.”

Crypto Kaleo, though, a popular analyst who recently argued that Strategy would have to sell at least 50,000 BTC in the next couple of years to fund dividend payments, wasn’t so kind. In one tweet, he ironically asked whether the CEO remembers when the company’s primary corporate objective was to increase Bitcoin per share before adding: “It was only two months ago, so shouldn’t be difficult!”

In another post, though, he brought the bashing to a higher level, claiming that Strategy is no longer a BTC company. Instead, it operates as a credit company, and its credit rating is “atrocious.”

Strategy went from having a primary objective of increasing Bitcoin per share to trying to make sure their preferred shares trade back to $100… in just two months.

They’re no longer a BTC company.

They’re a credit company.

And their credit rating is atrocious. https://t.co/fHoXr376QY

— K A L E O (@CryptoKaleo) July 31, 2026

The comments below his post were split. Some agreed that Strategy is increasingly resembling a leveraged financial organization rather than a straightforward BTC holding company. Others defended the firm’s approach, noting that maintaining confidence in STRC is essential if Strategy wants to continue raising capital efficiently and safely for future crypto purchases.

STRC Matters

The Saylor-co-founded company launched STRC as part of its growing suite of preferred stock offerings designed to finance its long-term BTC accumulation strategy. However, it needs to trade at its par price of $100 to function properly, and it hasn’t been able to for months. It dumped below $75 at one point, before the company shifted its focus to rebuilding its USD reserve. It has since recovered to almost $90.

As such, some investors view Le’s comments as a tactical, short-term objective rather than believing Strategy has abandoned its Bitcoin-focused vision. Still, the timing has fueled questions about the firm’s evolving identity and strategy, especially given the ongoing market uncertainty.

The post Analyst Blasts Strategy After CEO Signals New Priority Beyond Bitcoin appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Although Bitcoin has gone through countless phases of massive fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD), the current crisis around Coldcard has triggered the worst wave of fear ever recorded on crypto social media channels.

So far, BTC has been able to weather the storm in terms of price moves to a large extent, even though it has slipped by a few grand. However, it appears that those losses are largely connected to other factors, such as the escalating tension in the Middle East.

Fear Through the Roof

Data provided by the analytics company Santiment Intelligence shows that Bitcoin has registered its lowest positive-to-negative commentary ratio since the firm began tracking such discussions across some of the most used platforms like X, Reddit, and Telegram. The current numbers show just 0.58 bullish comments for every bearish one, indicating that fear has overwhelmingly replaced optimism.

What’s even more intriguing is that this reaction is quite unusual since it has dwarfed all previous market shocks, including the rapid collapse of FTX, Mt. Gox, and the COVID-19 “Black Thursday” crash. None of them generated such extreme levels of negative comments online.

Santiment attributed the difference to psychological factors. While earlier crises primarily involved centralized exchanges or broader macroeconomic events, the Coldcard incident has raised questions about self-custody itself, which has long been considered Bitcoin’s safest storage method.

Binance’s Changpeng Zhao also commented on the recent developments, suggesting that even old wallets with a long history can have bugs. He believes nothing is 100% certain, which is why investors need to stay informed.

What Happened With Coldcard?

Security researchers disclosed last week that attackers had distributed malicious firmware capable of stealing wallet seed phrases during the device setup process. Coldcard users who installed the compromised software unknowingly exposed their recovery phrases, allowing attackers to drain their wallets after funds were deposited.

The estimated scale of the incident has grown significantly over the past few days. Current data shows that roughly 1,200 wallets have been compromised, losing nearly 1,100 BTC (worth over $70 million at current prices) during a coordinated 41-minute operation.

All transactions shared the same unusual fingerprint: identical 30sat/vB transaction fees, far above prevailing network rates, suggesting an automated sweeping tool. Furthermore, the attack occurred more than a day before Coldcard publicly warned customers about the compromised firmware.

The post Bitcoin Fear Reaches Record High as Coldcard Exploit Shakes Confidence in Self-Custody appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The cryptocurrency market is back in the red after bitcoin’s rejection on Friday and a subsequent drop to a multi-week low, but, as usual, there are some exceptions.

Pi Network’s native token is among those, which might sound surprising given its recent calamity. Nevertheless, PI is up by 5% daily after an important reminder was issued by the team.

The Reminder

The Core Team announced on X that the blockchain has already begun the process of migrating to the next major protocol version, 26. As with previous similar statements, the post highlighted the importance of Pi Validators having to complete the upgrade by the deadline of August 11 to remain connected to the network.

Protocol version 26 will be among the biggest updates implemented by the team, and perhaps the most significant one since v20.2, which laid out the fundamentals for smart contract building. It’s designed to improve contract safety, state management, interoperability, and cryptographic capabilities.

Moreover, it comes before the final planned upgrade, protocol version 27, which is likely to be introduced in late August or September.

Reminder: the Pi Mainnet is upgrading to Protocol v26. All Mainnet node operators must complete the upgrade by August 11 to remain connected to the network.

Protocol v26 is a major milestone that improves contract safety, state management, interoperability, and cryptographic… pic.twitter.com/FXM5A8Tzo9

— Pi Network (@PiCoreTeam) July 31, 2026

The Core Team set the August 11 deadline earlier this week, which essentially meant that protocol version 25 was successfully deployed, even though there was no official confirmation at the time.

PI Rockets

A very small percentage of all the Pi Network updates, product features, redesigned apps, or new developments announced by the team in the past month or so have had a positive impact on the native token. However, the version 26 deadline set from a few days ago and last night’s reminder might be the exception.

PI jumped after the team first announced the upcoming protocol version 26 and has done the same over the past 24 hours. It’s up by 5% daily and now sits at $0.086 after it challenged $0.088 hours ago. This comes despite the broader market’s weakness, led by BTC’s dip to $62,400.

Nevertheless, the broader picture around PI is still very painful. The asset remains down by over 97% since its all-time high from February last year. Its market cap is well below $1 billion, making it the 68th-largest asset by that metric.

The post PI Surges 5% Despite Market Slump After Important Pi Network Reminder appeared first on CryptoPotato.