CXMT's earnings report will shape perceptions of its growth potential and competitive edge in the volatile semiconductor market.

The post CXMT’s first earnings report tests investor confidence after blockbuster IPO appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Asian markets' cautious optimism reflects global anticipation of potential Fed policy shifts impacting currencies and emerging market dynamics.

The post Asian stocks rise ahead of Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh’s Jackson Hole speech appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Warsh's response at Jackson Hole could redefine market dynamics, influencing borrowing costs and economic stability amid inflation concerns.

The post Investors urge Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh to address inflation ahead of Jackson Hole appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The NYSE's expansion into Texas signifies a strategic shift, potentially reshaping the U.S. financial landscape and enhancing regional influence.

The post New York Stock Exchange opens Dallas outpost to boost listings appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

High-leverage trades by institutional players like Matrixport can significantly impact market dynamics, influencing both volatility and retail trader strategies.

The post Matrixport-linked whale deposits $10M USDC, opens $17.44M ETH long at 20x leverage appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Genius Group Sets $2B Dual Treasury Target Months After Liquidating Bitcoin Holdings

Genius Group has announced a new plan to buy bitcoin — just months after selling its entire stash. 

The NYSE-listed AI-powered education company said in a Thursday statement that it was aiming to build parallel AI and bitcoin treasuries worth a combined $1.6 billion, with total company assets targeted at $2 billion by fiscal year 2031. 

Just in April, Genius Group sold its entire bitcoin reserves to repay $8.5 million in debt. The sale came as a number of digital asset treasuries were struggling due to a drop in crypto prices. 

“Every dollar of preferred capital deployed into our bitcoin and AI Treasury that generates returns above the preferred dividend rate flows directly to our ordinary shareholders’ net asset value,” Genius Group CEO Roger James Hamilton said. 

Genius Group first adopted a “Bitcoin first” strategy in late 2024, building a position that grew to 440 BTC by February 2025. 

That effort was disrupted when a court order blocked the company from raising funds or issuing shares, forcing a series of sales that reduced its holdings — including roughly 86 BTC sold in a single month, leaving about 84 BTC by February 2026. 

The company has now sold its remaining bitcoin entirely, using the proceeds to eliminate $8.5 million in debt. The liquidation reportedly came at a loss, leaving Genius Group with no crypto reserves.

Against that backdrop, the company is now proposing to rebuild a bitcoin treasury — this time alongside a similarly sized AI treasury — funded not through equity sales but through a new preferred stock offering.

Genius Group intends to draw on its $1.2 billion SEC-cleared shelf registration to issue Perpetual Preferred Securities, targeting an initial $12.5 million raise. Proceeds would be split between the AI treasury, the bitcoin treasury and a cash reserve covering about 18 months of dividend payments. 

The plan mirrors moves by the biggest corporate holder of bitcoin, Strategy. The company has raised over $16 billion via perpetual preferred stock for its bitcoin holdings. Nasdaq-listed Strive Asset Management has raised more than $150 million similarly. 

Genius Group says preferred capital will become its primary funding tool going forward, reducing reliance on its ordinary share ATM program.

This post Genius Group Sets $2B Dual Treasury Target Months After Liquidating Bitcoin Holdings first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Japanese Bitcoin Industry Unveils ‘Aurora’ to Let Global Anime Fans Support $2 Trillion Yen Space

Japan Bitcoin Industry Co., Ltd. has debuted a self-custodial Bitcoin payments platform designed to help Japanese companies sell to international fans who are often shut out by traditional payment systems.

Using this week’s Bitcoin Asia conference in Hong Kong to introduce the product, JPI dropped Aurora — aiming to reach an audience that could not be serviced before. 

The pitch is simple: anime, manga, games, and other Japanese content have a massive global following, but the payment rails supporting that content haven’t kept pace. 

Aurora aims to close that gap by letting international customers pay in Bitcoin over the Lightning Network, while giving Japanese merchants a simple point-of-sale and API layer to manage invoicing, payment tracking, and integrations.

According to JBI, the market for Japanese anime content outside Japan reached ¥2.17 trillion in 2024, up 26% year-over-year — yet many overseas fans still struggle to pay for streaming subscriptions, digital merchandise and limited-access drops due to geographic payment restrictions.

The platform’s core design principle is that JBI never touches the money. Each merchant runs its own self-custodial Lightning node, receiving Bitcoin directly from customers. 

JBI says this setup gives businesses cleaner regulatory footing, since the company isn’t acting as a custodian, while still handling the harder operational lift — node uptime, liquidity, accounting and auditing, and conversion to fiat — that has historically kept enterprises from adopting Bitcoin payments on their own.

JBI says aurora draws on lessons from its existing consumer business, UseBitcoin.jp, which has let customers buy digital gift cards — including au PAY, V-Preca and Kyash cards — using Lightning payments for the past two years.

The company is inviting media, prospective merchants and wallet providers to connect with the team at Bitcoin Asia 2026 in Hong Kong.

This post Japanese Bitcoin Industry Unveils ‘Aurora’ to Let Global Anime Fans Support $2 Trillion Yen Space first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Again Flirts With $81,000 Ahead of Fed’s Jackson Hole Meeting 

Bitcoin again closed in on the $81,000 mark on Thursday before dropping again as its stellar week continued. 

The leading cryptocurrency was recently trading for $80,236 after notching as high as $80,793 earlier in the day in New York. 

Bitcoin is now up more than 2% over the past day after gaining 10% in a week. The coin’s rise comes ahead of Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh’s keynote on Friday where he is expected to talk about digital payments — including crypto. 

The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City will hold the annual event at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where central bankers, Federal Reserve officials, policymakers and academics will gather to discuss “Financial Innovation: Implications for Payments and Policy.”

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City website, this year’s event will touch on how “recent years have seen a dramatic increase in innovation in financial intermediation and payments,” including new technologies such as “cryptocurrencies and stablecoins.” 

It will be Warsh’s first major speech as chairman of the Federal Reserve. Warsh, who has made pro-Bitcoin statements in the past, has been reluctant to lower interest rates; President Donald Trump, who nominated Warsh, has since last year pushed for borrowing costs to come down. 

Bitcoin in the past has done well in a low interest rate environment. 

Bitcoin’s run started last week when it sustained its biggest run in years following positive regulatory news and an announcement from the U.S. Treasury. 

But recent positive regulatory news has helped the coin. While a vote on the long-awaited crypto Clarity Act has been delayed until September, President Donald Trump last week said that the bill was a “very, very powerful” piece of legislation, and urged lawmakers to get it over the line. 

The proposed law will establish a framework for distinguishing between digital assets that are securities, commodities or payment stablecoins — legislation that the crypto industry has long called for. 

And U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also last week announced the department would double the size of its long-dated bond buybacks. 

The news sent yields down lower; lower long-term yields reduces the opportunity cost of holding non-yielding assets like bitcoin and gold, and generally supports risk-on sentiment. 

This post Bitcoin Again Flirts With $81,000 Ahead of Fed’s Jackson Hole Meeting  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

No Fork Required: Bitcoin’s First Quantum-Safe Transaction Just Happened

Should fund managers dealing in Bitcoin be worried about the threat of quantum computing? 

The short answer is yes — but there’s time to prepare and solutions are already being found.

One of them? Post-quantum Bitcoin transactions on the mainnet. And the first one happened this week thanks to the Starknet Foundation. 

Speaking at Bitcoin Asia in Hong Kong on Thursday, Damian Chen, VP of growth at the Starknet Foundation, demonstrated how funds vulnerable to future quantum attacks can be secured without requiring a network-wide fork, thanks to the company’s latest solution. 

“This is a monumental moment,” Chen said. “This is the first post-quantum-resistant Bitcoin transaction on bitcoin mainnet today. It required no soft forks; it required no hard forks; it required no core protocol upgrades, and it’s live today.”

The transaction happened using a method created by StarkWare researcher Avihu Levy. It works like this: Bitcoin transactions sit briefly in a public queue before confirmation. During that window, they expose cryptographic material that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could use to forge a signature and steal the funds before the transaction is confirmed.

But rather than accepting the first valid signature, his method generates millions of signature candidates until it finds one with a specific structural property that doesn’t expose that vulnerable material while waiting in the mempool. 

This “signature grinding” is deliberately computationally expensive — a single transaction takes hours to produce — but that cost is what makes it resistant to quantum shortcuts.

Touting Quantum safe Bitcoin transactions — dubbed “QSB” — to institutions, Chen said that even if attackers have a fund’s private keys, they couldn’t make a fraudulent transfer. 

“QSB introduces a new hash authorization, and so an attacker with a sufficiently capable computer, even if they have your exposed public key, even if they derive your private key from your public key, even if they try to use that to authorize a spend to move your coins out of your wallet, those things are not enough for them to do so,” he said. 

It’s worth noting that ordinary Bitcoin nodes currently don’t recognize this non-standard transaction format, so it couldn’t go into the public mempool and instead had to be handed straight to a miner willing to accept it — with mining company MARA’s Slipstream service being the one that mined the QSB transaction. 

Quantum researchers have warned that a time will come when Bitcoin’s software — which underpins the biggest and strongest computer network in the world — will need to be upgraded to deal with quantum computing. 

While some crypto VC firms have urged action, top Bitcoin developers have argued that many of today’s quantum computers have limited capabilities, and have only demonstrated trivial computations. 

Still, they have noted that their development could arrive unexpectedly — just like advances with artificial intelligence — and have started developing some solutions. 

Chen added: “The question to me has never been when will quantum arrive. We all know quantum will arrive at one stage, but the question to me has always been, how long will it take for you to be ready when quantum does arrive?”

This post No Fork Required: Bitcoin’s First Quantum-Safe Transaction Just Happened first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Asia: Binance’s CZ Says $1M Bitcoin Is Coming — and Gold Won’t Keep Up

Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao has said that Bitcoin will hit $1 million dollars per coin sooner than we think — and eventually surpass gold’s market value. 

Speaking at this year’s Bitcoin Asia on Thursday, the crypto entrepreneur also said that Bitcoin is “dangerous” for countries that don’t use it. 

Bitcoin Asia kicked off on Thursday in Hong Kong, bringing the biggest names in the space to Hong Kong to talk about everything from treasury companies to building apps from scratch. 

“I think for Bitcoin hitting a million dollars would be a good thing — it will happen,” CZ said. “You think we need 25 years for that to happen? No, I actually don’t think we need 25 years, I think it’s going to happen much quicker.”

CZ continued: “Bitcoin will, for sure, become more important than gold,” adding that large counties would over the years realize that the leading cryptocurrency is a “much better asset.” 

Bitcoin’s price started surging last week on news that the U.S. Treasury would at least double the size of its liquidity-support buyback operations. The announcement last week hurt the dollar but non-yielding assets like Bitcoin and gold have benefited.   

The price of Bitcoin has jumped nearly 12% over the past seven days, touching as high as $81,160 this week before dropping again to its current price of $80,520. 

Bitcoin’s $1.6 trillion market cap is still well below gold’s $32.2 trillion value. 

Regarding nation state adoption, CZ said that countries that don’t end up adopting Bitcoin will lose out — just like with other emerging technologies, such as AI. 

“If you think about AI, which country doesn’t want to hold the AI technology itself? Not investing in AI technology, not promoting the AI industry in your country, is dangerous for you,” he said. 

“Many countries view Bitcoin as this dangerous thing — it’s not. Bitcoin is much more dangerous if you don’t use it: you’re missing out.”

He added that countries making the move to shift into Bitcoin would take time but would eventually happen. 

This post Bitcoin Asia: Binance’s CZ Says $1M Bitcoin Is Coming — and Gold Won’t Keep Up first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Matt Corallo followed up on an earlier post on Aug. 25, addressing what stablecoin users increasingly see: apps routing around ETH, SOL, and other non-stablecoin tokens.

A wallet can let someone receive and send USDC without displaying a native-token balance. Behind that interface, an app, paymaster, sponsor, or infrastructure provider still settles the network fee in the asset the chain accepts.

The native-token demand debate turns on who funds execution, manages the fee balance, and absorbs volatility after the user-facing requirement disappears.

The scale of the stablecoin rail makes that question more than a user-experience footnote. Visa's Onchain Analytics dashboard showed about $1.3 trillion in adjusted stablecoin volume and 230.3 million adjusted transactions over the 30 days viewed on Aug. 27.

Before adjustment, the same window contained about $6.8 trillion and 1.75 billion transactions.

Visa and Allium's adjusted methodology uses probabilistic labels for more than 3 million addresses, counts only the largest stablecoin transfer within a single transaction, and filters unlabeled addresses that exceed 1,000 transactions or $10 million in rolling 30-day volume.

The data still includes exchange, decentralized exchange, lending, mint-and-burn, and ramp activity. Visa's “retail-sized” bucket logged about $7.6 billion across 158.8 million adjusted transactions below $250.

Gasless is a change of payer, Ethereum makes the example

Fee abstraction separates three roles that conventional wallets often bundle together: the user authorizes an action, an intermediary funds its execution, and the network charges its native fee.

“Gasless” can be accurate for the customer's wallet while still being misleading about chain economics.

Ethereum's documentation notes that reads can be performed without gas, while state-changing contract writes cost gas. Ethereum denominates gas in ETH, burns the protocol-set base fee, and sends the priority fee to the validator.

Under ERC-4337, which introduced account abstraction, users submit operations that a bundler packages into an Ethereum transaction. A paymaster can cover an operation instead of the smart account, but it must maintain a native-currency deposit at the EntryPoint contract. EntryPoint checks whether that deposit can cover the operation's maximum cost and charges the actual cost against it.

No universal “enough ETH” balance exists for a paymaster. The requirement moves with the operation's gas limits, maximum fee settings, transaction volume, and the buffer an operator maintains for service continuity.

Coinbase's ERC-20 gas-payment flow can quote a fee in USDC while the paymaster covers native gas, while Alchemy's Gas Manager fronts gas and bills separately. The user can remain economically inside the stablecoin while the provider funds and manages native-fee capacity.

At the retail layer, the design reduces the need for users to maintain ETH balances. At the execution layer, it replaces that scattered requirement with managed payer accounts or services whose operators replenish balances and recover costs through token, fiat, or service billing.

Solana changes the signer

Solana's fee documentation states that every transaction requires a fee paid in SOL. The base fee is 5,000 lamports per signature, split evenly between burning and the validator, while an optional priority fee can raise the total and goes to the validator.

By default, the fee payer is the first signer, but an app can name a sponsor instead. The user signs to authorize the stablecoin transfer and the sponsor signs to authorize the SOL fee.

Solana's fee-abstraction guide makes the resulting requirement explicit: the sponsor needs SOL for fees, though it does not need to hold the token being transferred. Kora packages that primitive into a service that can fully sponsor fees or accept payment in an SPL token such as USDC.

The user may therefore experience an all-dollar transaction while the Solana transaction fee is still paid in SOL by the sponsor or Kora operator.

The 5,000-lamport base fee also shows why transaction count alone cannot establish large SOL demand. Signature counts and priority fees affect the bill, while service volume and the operator's funding buffer determine how much SOL a sponsor needs.

Solana's fee sponsorship, like Ethereum's paymasters, changes who holds the fee balance. It gives the application control over when the user pays, which asset the user sees, and whether the app subsidizes the cost.

For a sponsor, the user-facing payment asset changes the recovery leg rather than the network leg. The service still needs a funded SOL fee-payer account before submission, while its USDC billing or subsidy policy operates around that requirement. A larger stream of sponsored transfers therefore increases the number of fees the operator must fund, even though signatures and priority settings determine each transaction's SOL cost.

Native-token demand becomes wholesale

With sponsorship, an app or provider can aggregate the requirement that each active user needs a native-token balance. It may replenish a managed ETH or SOL balance and recover the cost in USDC, fiat, or a service charge.

That architecture can shift operational exposure toward fewer payers as stablecoin adoption grows. Sponsors must manage fee funding, pricing, and abuse controls even though their customers never see a gas balance.

Representative Coinbase, Alchemy and Kora implementations establish how the architecture works, while leaving its market-wide distribution unresolved. Any claim that a handful of providers already dominate Ethereum or Solana gas demand would require payer-level onchain analysis beyond these sources.

Aggregation can also reduce the need for every user to hold a dormant native-token balance. Managed services can replenish balances as needed and recover costs through their own billing models.

Native-asset demand also depends on how many transactions settle, the fees attached to them, execution efficiency, and the balances payers maintain. Value capture depends on what is burned, what validators receive, and whether activity moves to cheaper environments.

Solana activity can grow while SOL value capture remains limited, particularly when stablecoin users need little SOL beyond fees. Ethereum can host a large stablecoin economy while base-chain revenue remains comparatively thin.

Fee abstraction changes the customer for the native asset. ETH and SOL can disappear from the user journey while remaining mandatory at the network layer. The gas bill moves upstream to the companies making stablecoin payments feel like ordinary money, concentrating operational responsibility even as the effect on aggregate token demand remains unmeasured.

The post Ethereum and Solana are hosting trillions in dollar volume, yet their native tokens risk losing direct consumer demand appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Stacks founder Muneeb Ali said on Aug. 27 via X that HashKey Cloud will deploy Bitcoin in Stacks, making the Asian infrastructure provider the second institution announced for the network’s Genesis Bond pilot.

HashKey will time-lock BTC on Bitcoin, retain the keys, and pair the position with STX worth roughly 5% of the committed Bitcoin.

Retaining custody of the principal does not make the yield native to Bitcoin. Stacks targets about 3% annualized from BTC committed by its miners, so payouts depend on STX and Stacks miner economics and are therefore variable.

HashKey’s allocation was not disclosed, while the total BTC committed is expected to become visible on-chain when the bond begins around Sept. 10.

BTC stays on Bitcoin while the return depends on Stacks

Under the native-BTC protocol bond, a participant places Bitcoin in a time-locked output on Bitcoin's base layer and retains the keys. The asset stays outside a lending agreement, wrapper or third-party custody arrangement. It remains immobile during the bond unless the participant uses the early-exit path.

An early exit returns the BTC principal and ends the remaining yield, and the paired STX stays locked for the full term, so the two asset legs carry different liquidity constraints.

The bond requires STX worth roughly 5% of the BTC position, and that amount determines the participant's Bitcoin capacity and leaves the position exposed to STX price movements for about six months.

Stacks miners commit BTC as they compete to produce blocks and receive STX block rewards. Protocol-bond holders receive their target return first from that BTC pool.

Across 24 reward cycles, a roughly six-month bond would deliver about 1.44% of locked BTC if the target is realized, and the payouts can vary with miner economics.

The BTC available for rewards depends on the economics of mining Stacks, which in turn depend on STX block rewards, fees and network activity. Excess miner revenue can build a reserve. Under a sustained shortfall that depletes the reserve, Stacks says returns would compress first for STX-only stakers and later for protocol-bond holders.

The design therefore separates principal custody from return generation. Bitcoin keys remain with the participant, while the yield carries STX market exposure and Stacks protocol risk.

The first bond operates inside a managed bootstrap rather than an open auction. During PoX-5, the Stacks Endowment sets each bonding period's capacity, target yield, BTC-to-STX ratio and allocation.

A future PoX-6 proposal is intended to replace those managed settings with an algorithmic, permissionless auction. Until then, Genesis tests the product within boundaries chosen by the Endowment.

On-chain commitments can show the amount of BTC institutions place in the bond, weekly distributions can show whether miner revenue supports the target, and reserve data can show the buffer available when revenue falls short.

HashKey's name alone establishes participation. Its disclosed allocation and the bond's realized payouts will determine how much weight that participation carries as evidence of institutional demand.

Self-custody leaves contract and reward risk

PoX-5 activated at Bitcoin block 960,230 on July 30. Stacks said the codebase was audited by Trail of Bits and Clarity Alliance, with additional review by Asymmetric Research.

An open medium-severity issue in the official stacks-core repository identifies a flaw in the bond rollover path. Near the end of a bond, a participant moving into a later bond can remain credited with old reward shares after withdrawing the collateral behind them. Other participants could then receive a smaller share of the final-cycle reward.

The issue leaves the native Bitcoin under the participant's keys and does not establish a failure in ordinary Genesis Bond enrollment. The 4.0.1 PoX-5 contract source still contains the affected behavior, making a public fix or mitigation important before that rollover window arrives.

The Genesis Bond reduces reliance on a borrower or custodian, then adds STX exposure, miner-funded payout risk, managed program settings and new contract code. Block 966,350 will begin putting numbers to the test.

The post HashKey Cloud backs Stacks’ Genesis Bond to prove institutional appetite for native Bitcoin yield appeared first on CryptoSlate.

KuCoin has expanded sanctions screening to indirect crypto transfers across 17 crypto platforms, including Justin Sun-linked HTX.

Under an Aug. 27 compliance notice, KuCoin said Shelbit, Aban Tether, A7 Nigeria, A7 Africa, PilotFinance, Rapira, Aifory Pro, ABCeX, WhiteBird, NoOnecrypto, Tradex, Monease, BitPapa, Exnode, Exnode Pay, EXMO and “HTX (Huobi Global SA)” are covered by the restrictions.

The policy means users can face held or rejected transactions even when they do not transact directly to one of the listed platforms. KuCoin said it may screen the source of funds, originating and destination addresses, and intermediary service providers for connections to the affected entities.

Transactions attempted to these platforms may undergo enhanced review or trigger temporary wallet and account restrictions. KuCoin said repeated or serious violations could ultimately lead to suspension or withdrawal of its services from the user.

The controls broadly track recent US and European sanctions actions, but their reach extends beyond direct counterparties.

KuCoin has not disclosed how many transaction hops it traces or what level of on-chain attribution is sufficient to establish an indirect connection.

HTX faces growing isolation from major exchange rails

HTX is the most consequential name on KuCoin’s list by scale and is already facing similar restrictions elsewhere.

Binance stopped processing transactions involving HTX and 10 other platforms from Aug. 23 as part of its own sanctions-compliance measures. This narrows the routes through which HTX-linked funds can move across major exchanges even as HTX itself remains operational.

HTX continues to dispute the sanctions-related allegations and the corporate identity behind the designation. The EU regulation names “HTX (Huobi Global SA),” a label also used by KuCoin.

However, HTX said in May that Huobi Global S.A. is distinct from the online HTX exchange.

Meanwhile, the Justin Sun-linked exchange said it is pursuing legal and compliance discussions with authorities in the UK and EU as some users report funds being frozen on third-party platforms, including Kraken.

HTX said it has submitted materials relating to 17 Kraken user freeze cases to the courts and is working to reduce disruptions affecting customers.

Molly, HTX’s head of markets, said the exchange processed more than 100,000 deposit and withdrawal transactions over two days without identifying new cases of indiscriminate freezes.

She also said HTX recently upgraded its wallet infrastructure and introduced a withdrawal-address rotation mechanism. The exchange described the changes as a security measure intended to reduce disruption from third-party risk controls and on-chain labeling.

For users, the practical effect is increasingly clear. Funds linked to HTX or another listed provider can face restrictions before they reach KuCoin, depending on the transaction path and the intermediaries involved.

That pushes sanctions enforcement beyond direct counterparties and deeper into transaction provenance, with exchanges increasingly assessing where funds originated, where they are headed, and which services they touched along the way.

The post KuCoin can block your crypto transactions even if you never sent it to these 17 sanctioned platforms appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bitcoin has confirmed a quantum-resistant transaction on mainnet using its existing consensus rules, showing that some holders could migrate funds away from future quantum risk without waiting for a protocol upgrade.

The Aug. 26 transaction used a construction developed by StarkWare researcher Avihu Levy that shifts the critical spending condition away from elliptic-curve signatures and toward hash-based security. It was included in block 964,199 after being submitted directly to Bitcoin miner MARA through its Slipstream service.

StarkWare described the transaction as the first quantum-safe spend on Bitcoin mainnet. Earlier experiments explored post-quantum approaches in Bitcoin Script and on Blockstream’s Liquid sidechain, but this test showed that Bitcoin itself could accept a hash-based spending path without changing consensus rules.

However, the workaround does not make Bitcoin quantum-safe.

StarkWare Chief Executive Eli Ben-Sasson said the test should not be interpreted as evidence that Bitcoin is already prepared for quantum computing. He argued that broader soft-fork solutions are still needed to protect the network at scale.

“A quantum-safe Bitcoin tx on mainnet” proves that workable approaches exist, Ben-Sasson said, while warning that the main task remains building a migration path before quantum hardware becomes capable of threatening exposed keys.

How Quantum-Safe Bitcoin operates

For many Bitcoin addresses, the public key stays concealed behind a hash until the holder spends from that address. That delay matters because a future quantum attacker would need the public key before attempting to derive the corresponding private key.

Levy’s Quantum-Safe Bitcoin, or QSB, construction uses that window to move eligible coins into a hash-based spending condition before the classical public key is revealed.

The method works by repeatedly varying candidate transaction data until it produces a hash that Bitcoin accepts as a validly formatted signature. That computation takes place before the transaction is broadcast, shifting the security assumption away from elliptic-curve cryptography and toward the difficulty of reversing hash functions.

Quantum computers can also accelerate attacks on hashes, but the advantage is far smaller than the one Shor’s algorithm provides against public-key cryptography. That gives QSB a potential migration path for coins whose public keys remain hidden.

The protection does not extend to coins whose public keys are already visible. Older pay-to-public-key outputs, Taproot outputs, and reused addresses remain exposed because a future quantum attacker could target those keys before the owner completed a migration.

QSB also remains impractical for routine wallet use.

Although the transaction is valid under Bitcoin’s consensus rules, it is nonstandard under default node policy and therefore will not normally propagate through the public mempool. StarkWare had to submit the transaction directly to MARA through Slipstream, its service for handling certain nonstandard transactions.

The required computation adds another barrier. StarkWare said the mainnet test cost several hundred dollars, while the project’s open-source repository estimates roughly $75 to $150 for some configured cloud-GPU search phases.

Those constraints leave QSB as a specialized escape route for some holders rather than a scalable answer to Bitcoin’s broader quantum risk.

Bitcoin’s larger quantum problem remains unresolved

The demonstration arrives as quantum risk moves further into institutional planning.

Roughly 7 million BTC are considered potentially vulnerable because their public keys are already visible through older address formats, Taproot usage, or address reuse. QSB does not provide a rescue path for those coins.

In July, BlackRock, Coinbase, Strategy, and six other institutions formed the Bitcoin Security Consortium and pledged a combined $15 million over three years toward Bitcoin security research, including post-quantum cryptography. Members direct the funding independently rather than through a common pool.

The US Treasury has also brought digital assets into the financial sector’s broader quantum-readiness planning.

That leaves Bitcoin with two separate challenges: developing migration tools for holders whose keys remain hidden and finding a protocol-level answer for coins already exposed.

The Aug. 26 transaction shows that the first problem has at least one working mainnet solution. The second, which covers millions of Bitcoin, still requires a broader answer.

The post Bitcoin now has a quantum computing escape route, but 7 million BTC may still be exposed appeared first on CryptoSlate.

A New York Federal Reserve study found that dollar stablecoins are more likely to flow into wallets tied to countries experiencing currency or banking crises.

Wallets linked to countries experiencing some form of financial crisis were 1.8% more likely to receive dollar stablecoins during the week a crisis began, researchers Pablo Azar, Maryam Farboodi and Nish Sinha found in an August staff paper. Receipt volumes of these assets across these wallets also increased significantly during those periods.

The findings provide evidence for a growing challenge facing central banks in economies under financial stress.

Governments have traditionally relied on banks and other regulated intermediaries to enforce restrictions on foreign-exchange purchases and cross-border transfers.

However, the advent of stablecoins has given households and businesses another route to dollar exposure that can operate outside those domestic banking channels.

The research comes as the stablecoin market has grown beyond $300 billion and is expected to reach the trillions of dollars before the end of the decade. That expansion could make the alternative payment rails identified by the New York Fed increasingly relevant during future currency crises.

Crisis demand shifts onto blockchain rails

According to the paper, the researchers studied nine episodes across eight countries between 2021 and 2025, including monetary disruptions, banking restrictions, sanctions and devaluations affecting Argentina, Egypt, Iran, Myanmar, Nigeria, Russia, Turkey and the United Kingdom.

They linked Ethereum Name Service registrations carrying country signals, such as languages, scripts and national identifiers, with transfer histories for 19 major dollar-pegged stablecoins.

During crisis weeks, tagged wallets recorded both a higher probability of receiving stablecoins and larger receipt volumes. A separate specification found no significant increase in the two weeks before the shocks, while the probability of receiving stablecoins rose 1.9% during the crisis week.

Sending activity increased later, with wallets becoming 1.3% more likely to send stablecoins two weeks after the crisis began.

The sequence supports the researchers’ argument that demand for blockchain-based dollars rises when confidence in domestic financial arrangements comes under pressure.

However, these estimates require qualification. The dataset does not represent every resident or crypto wallet in the countries studied. Its roughly 4.5 million observations are wallet-event-week records, and the sample focuses on wallet-country pairs that received stablecoins at some point within a 53-week window around each crisis.

The result therefore captures a change in behavior among wallets already connected to stablecoin activity rather than showing that stablecoin adoption rose by 1.8% across an entire national population.

Stablecoins complicate the capital-control playbook

The behavior feeds directly into a longstanding constraint on monetary policy.

Under the Mundell-Fleming framework, countries cannot simultaneously maintain a fixed exchange rate, unrestricted capital mobility, and independent control over domestic interest rates.

Governments seeking to protect a currency while retaining monetary autonomy can restrict capital movement through banks and other financial institutions.

The New York Fed researchers model stablecoins as weakening that enforcement channel.

A household facing restrictions on buying or transferring dollars through its bank may instead receive dollar-denominated tokens into a blockchain wallet. As access to those rails expands, the government must devote more resources to enforcement or allow more of the pressure to emerge through currency depreciation or domestic interest rates.

The paper does not establish that stablecoins caused particular currencies to weaken during the nine episodes.

Instead, the observed wallet activity supports the model’s central assumption that financial stress encourages stablecoin adoption. Its broader monetary-policy consequences remain theoretical.

Governments also retain significant points of control. Major dollar tokens such as USDT and USDC are issued by centralized companies that can freeze addresses, while regulated exchanges can be required to restrict transactions or identify customers.

Those powers shift enforcement away from a country’s banking system toward a wider network of issuers, exchanges, and blockchain addresses.

Transfers between self-custodied wallets can leave governments with fewer immediate domestic chokepoints even when issuers retain the ability to intervene at other stages.

A $300 billion market shifts where governments can't intervene

The policy challenge becomes more consequential as stablecoins expand from a niche crypto product into a global dollar-payment network.

The market has already grown beyond $300 billion and is expected to reach trillions of dollars before the end of the decade.

Blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis projects an even steeper rise in activity, estimating that adjusted stablecoin transaction volume could reach $719 trillion by 2035 through organic growth alone and approach $1.5 quadrillion if broader macro and adoption trends accelerate usage.

That growth would increase the number of routes available to households seeking dollar exposure during periods of domestic financial stress, but it would not put stablecoins entirely beyond government reach.

The largest dollar tokens remain centralized. Issuers such as Circle and Tether can freeze identifiable addresses, while governments can impose requirements on regulated exchanges and other intermediaries even when a transfer initially bypasses the domestic banking system.

The problem is that enforcement becomes less uniform once tokens move beyond those points.

Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision Michael Barr warned in June that US stablecoin legislation left an illicit-finance vulnerability around secondary-market transfers involving unhosted wallets.

The Bank for International Settlements has identified a similar problem for monetary policy, arguing that stablecoin dollarization can threaten monetary sovereignty while restrictions may prove less effective when bearer-like tokens circulate through self-custodied wallets.

That creates a more fragmented enforcement map. Governments can exert substantial control over banks, stablecoin issuers and regulated trading venues, but may have less visibility or immediate reach when dollar tokens move between private wallets without returning to those intermediaries.

The distinction becomes particularly important during a currency crisis, when demand for an alternative store of value and payment rail can rise just as authorities try to restrict capital movement.

The New York Fed paper suggests that this choice of financial infrastructure is becoming part of the macroeconomic constraint itself. As stablecoin networks grow, effective capital mobility increasingly depends on both the controls governments impose and the blockchain rails households can still access.

At the scale projected for the next decade, that could turn stablecoins from an alternative payment mechanism into a material constraint on how governments defend currencies during periods of financial stress.

The post The next currency crisis may be harder to contain because of stablecoins, New York Fed report shows appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Anyone who sets out to send crypto and picks the wrong network along the way will as a rule lose the balance for good. The exchange executes the withdrawal correctly, the chain confirms it, and still nothing arrives at the other end. Kraken puts this in its own withdrawal guide without softening it: a withdrawal to an unsuitable network can lead to the permanent loss of the funds.

How large that risk is across the market is a question nobody had counted out. We have. Of the 100 largest crypto assets by market capitalisation, 51 exist on two or more blockchains at the same time, 22 of them on five or more. For every one of those 51, the network selector in the withdrawal form is not a detail. It is the decision over whether the money arrives. cryptoticker.io compiled this analysis itself on August 26, 2026; the method and its limits are set out openly further down.

The timing is no coincidence. Several transfer deadlines are running out at once in these weeks, and tens of thousands of accounts have to move holdings that sat untouched on an exchange for years. Anyone who rarely transfers meets the network question for the first time at exactly the moment when the pressure is greatest.

Sending Crypto: What Technically Happens With the Wrong Network

A withdrawal consists of two entries that have to match each other: the destination address and the network the exchange sends over. Both are asked for separately, and the exchange checks only the form of the address, not where it belongs.

That is the core of the problem. An address beginning with 0x is valid on Ethereum, on BNB Smart Chain, on Arbitrum, on Base, on Polygon and on a dozen further chains. All of these chains use the same address format. The withdrawal form therefore has no way of recognising that you have entered an address belonging to an account on a chain other than the one being sent over.

The transfer then goes through cleanly. A valid transaction to a valid address comes into being on the chosen chain. It is just that nobody controls that address there, or it belongs to an exchange that accepts no deposits for this token on this chain at all. The balance is visible on the chain and out of reach all the same.

Why Nobody Retrieves the Transfer

A confirmed transaction on a blockchain cannot technically be reversed. Whoever holds the private key to the receiving address can move the balance. Whoever does not hold it cannot. There is nothing in between.

In a share of cases an exchange controls the key, because the address belongs to its deposit system. A way back then exists in theory, but it runs through support, takes weeks, costs fees and is expressly voluntary. Several large providers rule out recovery outside a list of supported chains from the outset.

Network, Chain and Layer 2: What These Terms Mean for a Transfer

Three terms turn up in the withdrawal form and are regularly confused with one another. A brief clarification, because the rest does not hold without it.

A network, in the withdrawal form, is the transfer route over which the exchange sends your coins. A blockchain, or chain, is the independent ledger on which that transfer is recorded. A layer 2 is a chain of its own that passes its results to a larger chain for security, but appears in the withdrawal form as its own entry and carries a balance of its own.

A wrapped token is an issue of a crypto asset on a foreign chain, backed by the original on its home chain. It often carries the same name and, in case of doubt, the same ticker, yet it is a different asset with a contract address of its own.

For a transfer this yields a single rule, and Kraken writes it into its guide in exactly those terms: always choose the same network your receiving wallet uses. Not the cheapest, not the fastest, not the preselected one.

Our Own Analysis: 51 of the 100 Largest Crypto Assets Sit on Several Chains

To put a figure on the risk, on August 26, 2026 we retrieved two public data sets from the CoinGecko programming interface and set them against each other. The first supplies the 100 largest crypto assets by market capitalisation, the second the complete list of all crypto assets held there, together with the chains on which they are recorded as a contract. On the day of collection that list ran to 18,684 entries. Both retrievals answered with HTTP 200.

For each of the 100 assets we evaluated how many different chains carry a contract entry. All 100 could be matched, and there was no gap. The result:

• 51 crypto assets are recorded on two or more chains.
• 22 of those on five or more chains.
• 10 of those on ten or more chains.
• 23 crypto assets sit on exactly one chain.
• 26 crypto assets carry no contract entry at all, because they run a blockchain of their own. Among them are Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Solana, Litecoin and Monero.

Ethereum appears most often as the host chain: 57 of the 100 largest crypto assets are recorded there. BNB Smart Chain follows with 25, Solana with 23, Arbitrum with 19 and Base with 16.

What the Numbers Do Not Say

The analysis measures how many chains record a crypto asset as a contract. The count does not measure which networks a particular exchange actually offers for withdrawing that asset. An exchange can support considerably fewer chains than there are contract issues, and precisely that gap is a source of error in its own right: the token exists on the destination chain, but your exchange does not send there.

Second, the figure is a snapshot from August 26, 2026. New issues on further chains are added continuously.

Third, we did not check whether every recorded contract actually carries trading volume. For the question of whether a misdirected transfer is possible, that plays no role, because an address on a chain accepts a transfer even when nobody trades there.

Chainlink, USDC and Tether: The Crypto Assets With the Most Chains

The top of the analysis shows how far a single crypto asset can spread. Chainlink leads the field with contract entries on 87 different chains, well clear of USDC with 34 and Ethena USDe with 30. Then come Ethena with 19, Aave with 15, Ondo US Dollar Yield with 14, Uniswap with 13 and Tether with 11 chains. Cosmos Hub and PancakeSwap reach ten each.

The stablecoins on this list deserve a look of their own, because they are moved most often. Withdraw USDC or Tether from an exchange and you are choosing from a dozen chains or more, and the balances on those chains are entirely separate. A Tether holding on Tron does not exist for a wallet that knows only Ethereum.

Why Bitcoin and Ethereum Are Special Cases in This Count

The 26 assets without a contract entry are the point at which the numbers are easily misread. These assets run a blockchain of their own, which is why the database lists no host chain for them. That does not remotely mean the network question fails to arise for them.

With Ethereum the opposite is true. Withdraw ether from an exchange and you will usually be choosing between Ethereum mainnet, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism and further layer 2 networks. All of them carry genuine ether, all use the same address format, and the balances are separate. That choice does not show up in our count, because these are not contract issues.

With Bitcoin there are additionally wrapped issues on foreign chains, which the database keeps as entries of their own and which therefore also fall outside the count. In practice that means the 51 is a lower bound. The number of cases in which the network choice decides between arrival and loss is higher.

Withdrawal Deadlines When an Exchange Closes: Why the Network Choice Counts Right Now

Misdirected transfers pile up when many people transfer at the same time and under time pressure. That is exactly the situation in August 2026. On August 20 Binance announced that it would end trading in ICON, Secret and Storj on September 3 at 03:00 UTC; deposits will no longer be credited after September 4, withdrawals remain possible until November 3, after which the exchange automatically converts residual holdings into stablecoins. Several trade publications reproduced this schedule independently of one another from the announcement.

Further transfer deadlines are running in parallel. Our own reporting has documented them one by one, most recently on August 22 on the withdrawal cut-off at OKX for MAJOR and J and on August 11 on the Kraken forced liquidation of 56 tokens. Anyone clearing several accounts faces the network decision repeatedly in short order, and each time in a different form with a different default.

On top of that comes a cost effect that tempts people into the wrong decisions. The fee differs between networks by a factor of a hundred in some cases, as we broke down in our overview of withdrawal fees at crypto exchanges. The cheapest chain is tempting, but it only serves if the receiving side carries it too. If you do not yet have a suitable destination address, it is better to look for one beforehand among the regulated crypto exchanges with EU authorisation, or to set up a wallet of your own, rather than improvising under deadline pressure.

The Reflex That Costs the Most

Under time pressure many people reach for the preselected chain, because the form suggests it anyway. That default follows what is favourable for the exchange, not what your receiving address accepts. This preselection is the most common starting point of a misdirected transfer.

Checking the Address Format: How to Recognise the Right Chain

The receiving side dictates the chain, not the sending side. Every withdrawal therefore begins with you having your wallet or the destination exchange display the deposit address for exactly this crypto asset and exactly this network. Most wallets name the network directly above the address.

The address format gives a first indication, but it does not replace the check. An address with the prefix 0x and 42 characters belongs to the Ethereum family and therefore to dozens of possible chains. Bitcoin addresses begin with 1, 3 or bc1. Solana addresses are a longer character string with no fixed prefix. Tron addresses begin with T.

What is practically useful above all is the direction of exclusion: if the format does not fit, the chain is certainly wrong. If it does fit, the chain may be right. With all addresses in the Ethereum family, the only remaining route is to look the network up explicitly in the receiving wallet.

Three Entries That Have to Match

Before sending, you reconcile three things: the crypto asset, the network and the address. All three appear both in the exchange's withdrawal form and in the receiving wallet. If one of them fails to match, you break off. This check takes a minute and is the only step that reliably prevents a misdirected transfer.

Sending a Test Amount: When It Pays Off and What It Costs

A test amount is a small advance transfer over the same route, with which you play through the whole path once before the main amount follows. It costs the network fee a second time, and that is exactly why many people do without it.

The arithmetic is unambiguous all the same. With a fee in the range of a few euros and a holding in the four- or five-figure range, the price of the insurance lies in the per-mille range. It pays off whenever you are using this route for the first time, whenever you have newly created the destination address, or whenever the crypto asset exists on several chains according to our analysis.

What matters is that the test amount lies above the other side's minimum deposit. Many exchanges do not credit amounts below their threshold, and then you have no misdirected transfer but no confirmation either. Wait for the credit as well, not merely the confirmation on the chain. Only the credit proves that the receiving side really carries the chain.

Anyone taking their holding off the exchange anyway should think a step further at this point. A transfer to a wallet of your own does not dissolve the network question, but it moves it into your hands; which devices and programs come into consideration for that is covered in the hardware wallet comparison and in the software wallet comparison.

Memo and Tag: The Second Common Source of Error in a Transfer

Not every misdirected transfer goes back to the network. With some crypto assets the receiving side additionally requires a second entry, called a memo, a tag or a destination tag depending on the chain. That entry assigns the transfer to your account within the exchange, because many customers there share the same deposit address.

If the entry is missing, the balance does land on an address the exchange controls, but with no assignment to you. The way back then runs through support and is an application, not an entitlement. Affected assets include XRP, Stellar and Cosmos Hub, along with some exchanges on deposits to their own chains.

Caught by the Wrong Network: Which Routes Are Left

Once the transfer has gone out, everything turns on who holds the key to the receiving address. That yields three situations whose prospects differ markedly.

If the address belongs to your own wallet and that wallet also handles the chain the balance landed on, the case is harmless. You add the network in the wallet, along with the token's contract where necessary, and the holding appears. To move it on you then need some of that chain's fee currency.

If the address belongs to an exchange, everything hangs on its recovery procedure. Some providers offer one for a fee, many only for a limited list of chains, and some not at all. The application belongs submitted immediately in any case, with the transaction identifier, the time, the chosen network and the destination address.

If the address belongs to nobody who can be reached, there is no route. All that remains then is documentation. Record the process in full regardless, because for tax purposes a loss can only be presented with supporting evidence; how that looks in combination with a forced sale is something we described in our article on the forced sale at a crypto exchange.

What You Should Secure Immediately

Secure the transaction identifier, the screenshot of the withdrawal form showing the chosen network, and the exchange's confirmation email. You need these documents both for a recovery application and for the tax file. Anyone closing an account anyway should take the complete history along while access still exists.

When the Exchange Itself Closes: Order Before Haste

In a closure two deadlines come together that are often confused: the end of trading and the end of withdrawals. Depending on the provider, hours or weeks lie between them. For the network question it is the withdrawal cut-off that counts, because the transfer has to be initiated by then.

A fixed order makes sense. First you settle where the holding is to go and create the deposit address there. Then you check which networks both sides carry and look for the overlap. Only after that do you send the test amount, and last of all the remainder. What happens when this order can no longer be kept is something we described in the article Crypto Exchange Shutting Down: What to Do Now; for holdings with no remaining trading venue, what stands in the article on transferring delisted tokens applies in addition.

One special case deserves attention: some providers require proof that the destination address belongs to you before the withdrawal. That costs additional time, which is missing when a deadline is tight. We gathered the requirements for it in the article on proof of ownership for your own wallet.

What the Network Choice Means for Tax

A transfer between your own addresses is not a sale and triggers no tax in itself. The holding period runs on. That applies regardless of the network you send over.

Two points remain to be observed all the same. The network fee is not to be treated identically for tax purposes in every case; we broke the question down in the article on sending bitcoin between wallets. And a switch between an original and its wrapped issue on another chain is not mere transport, because a different asset comes into being in the process. Anyone taking that route should settle the classification beforehand rather than at the tax return.

For record-keeping the same applies in both cases: every movement needs a date, an amount, an address and a network. Anyone using several chains loses that overview quickly, and a portfolio tracker with a tax function takes the assignment off your hands.

Sending Crypto Without a Misdirected Transfer: What to Take Away

1. Before every withdrawal, check whether your crypto asset exists on several chains. For 51 of the 100 largest that is the case, and the network selector in the form then decides between arrival and loss. If you lack a reliable destination address, set one up beforehand, for instance at one of the regulated crypto exchanges with EU authorisation.
2. Look the network up in the receiving wallet and send a test amount. The receiving side dictates the chain, and only the credit proves that the route carries. Anyone taking a holding into their own custody will find the matching devices in the hardware wallet comparison.
3. Document every movement with the network and the transaction identifier. You need those entries for a recovery application just as much as for the tax file. The running assignment across several chains is handled by a portfolio tracker with a tax function.

To place our own analysis in context: the basis was the public data sets of the CoinGecko programming interface, retrieved on August 26, 2026. The network rule itself stands in Kraken's withdrawal guide, which expressly names the permanent loss that follows from an unsuitable network.

(As of August 26, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

The deadline that Cardano's self-governance is hanging on right now does not fall on September 1. It falls on September 6, 2026, at around 21:45 UTC. By then a governance action has to be ratified on chain that fills four of the seven seats on the constitutional committee. If that does not happen, the committee shrinks to three members and drops below the minimum size the protocol requires. From that moment on it can no longer confirm any governance action. This piece sets out what is actually happening, where the vote stands, and what you as an ADA holder can genuinely do in the days that remain.

Cardano Constitutional Committee: What Really Expires on September 6, 2026

Every governance action on Cardano has a fixed lifespan. The protocol parameter govActionLifetime is set to six epochs: if an action is not ratified within that window, it lapses with nothing to replace it, and the 100,000 ADA deposit returns to the submitting address.

The action at issue here is of the type NewCommittee. It was submitted in epoch 646 and carries epoch 653 as its expiry mark. An on-chain query of our own through the public Koios interface on August 27, 2026 at 00:38 UTC shows it still open: neither ratified_epoch nor enacted_epoch nor expired_epoch carries a value.

The exact window can be calculated from the chain tip. Epoch 651 began on August 22, 2026 at 21:44:51 UTC, and an epoch on Cardano lasts exactly five days. That places epoch 653 between September 1, 2026, 21:44:51 UTC, and September 6, 2026, 21:44:51 UTC. The deadline is therefore a piece of chain mechanics that runs down on its own. No editorial calendar governs it, and nobody can move it.

Four of the Seven Seats Expire: What the Constitutional Committee on Cardano Actually Does

The constitutional committee is a body of elected members whose only task in a governance action is to check whether a proposal is compatible with the Cardano constitution. It does not comment on the merits of a proposal; its sole yardstick is constitutionality.

On-chain governance means that the rules of self-governance sit in the protocol itself and every decision is recorded as a transaction on the blockchain. On Cardano that has applied to all governance actions since the move into the Conway era. There is no parallel body that could decide around the chain.

The committee is therefore the third chamber alongside the delegated representatives and the stake pool operators. Most governance actions need the approval of two or three of these groups, and the committee is involved in almost all of them.

The current line-up can be read straight off the chain. It lists eight entries, one of them marked resigned, meaning that member stepped down voluntarily. Of the seven remaining active members, four carry expiration epoch 653 and three carry expiration epoch 726. That is the figure at issue: four of the seven seats expire in the same epoch in which the renewal action lapses.

Why the Reports Say September 1 and What the Chain Says

Practically every German-language report on this subject names September 1 as the cut-off. That is understandable but imprecise: September 1 is the start of epoch 653, not its end. Anyone going by that date gives away five days.

The difference is not academic. Five days is a full epoch on Cardano, and the movement in the vote count over the past week shows that double-digit percentage points can accumulate in that span. Give up on September 1 and you give up an epoch too early.

One qualification belongs here, and I am not smoothing it over: what I measured was the expiration field of the governance action together with the epoch boundaries taken from the chain tip. Whether the ledger discards an action at the beginning or at the end of its expiration epoch is a question of ledger semantics that I have not worked through myself. The window between September 1 and September 6 is certain; the later date is the conservative reading.

Governance Standstill Explained: What Happens if the Committee Falls Below Five Members

The protocol parameter committeeMinSize is set to five. That figure has the standing of a hard ledger rule, not of a recommendation.

CIP-1694, the underlying standard, spells out the consequence unambiguously: if the number of non-expired committee members falls below the minimum size, the constitutional committee can no longer ratify governance actions. Only those actions that manage without committee votes can still proceed.

Governance standstill therefore does not mean the blockchain halts. Blocks continue to be produced, transactions confirmed, staking rewards paid out. What comes to a stop is the administration of the network: parameter changes, treasury withdrawals and the initiation of a hard fork all require the committee's approval.

Two types of action manage without it, and both are aimed at the committee itself: the no-confidence motion and the action that installs a new body. That is the built-in emergency brake. The way out of a standstill therefore runs through the very same vote that is currently not getting through, only under time pressure and by way of a fresh submission with a fresh deposit.

The On-Chain Vote Count: 51.68 Percent Among DReps, 18.16 Percent Among Stake Pool Operators

The figures below come from a query of our own on the Koios interface on August 27, 2026 at 00:38 UTC, epoch 651. They shift with every vote cast; anyone who wants to look them up runs the same query again.

The direction is right, the pace is an open question. The trade publication CryptoSlate still reported 32.46 percent approval among DReps for August 17. An on-chain measurement by this desk on August 24 produced 39.52 percent. On August 27 the chain shows 51.68 percent. That amounts to roughly 19 percentage points in ten days.

Whether that will be enough cannot responsibly be forecast, and both readings are defensible. The optimistic calculation sees an accelerating pace and around fifteen points still missing with ten days to go. The sceptical one looks at the stake pool operators: more than thirty points are missing there, and that group has moved considerably more slowly so far.

The 67 and 51 Percent Thresholds: How a Governance Action Is Ratified on Cardano

Both thresholds sit on the chain as protocol parameters and can be read off it. For a committee change under normal conditions, dvt_committee_normal stands at 0.67 and pvt_committee_normal at 0.51.

Stake pool operators are the operators of the nodes that produce blocks on Cardano. In governance they form a chamber of their own with a threshold of their own; their voting weight follows from how much stake is delegated to them.

Both thresholds have to be cleared at the same time. An action that would sail through among the delegated representatives while staying below 51 percent among the stake pool operators is not ratified. That second threshold is the larger one at present.

The count works in voting power, not in heads. A DRep with a great deal of ADA delegated to them weighs more heavily than one with little delegation. That is how 115 votes in favour against 3 votes opposed can still add up to no more than 51.68 percent.

What Delegating to Always Abstain Does to Your Voting Power

Always abstain is a predefined delegation option. Give your voting power to it and you remain registered for staking rewards, but under CIP-1694 your ADA expressly do not count towards active voting power.

The ADA token carries two functions at once: it is the means of payment on the network and at the same time the weight by which governance is counted. Anyone who holds the cryptocurrency automatically holds voting power, whether they use it or not.

And this is where the real obstacle to this vote lies. Around 9.75 billion ADA of voting power sits on always abstain among the DReps. At the stake pools, a further 10.51 billion ADA from 563 pools sit passively on the same option.

These amounts are not missing from the count; they have been taken out of it. The percentages above refer to active voting power, which is to say to whatever is left. Move your delegation from always abstain to an active DRep and you enlarge the denominator, which shifts those percentages.

The second option belongs in the picture as well: delegating to always no confidence does count towards active voting power, but it automatically casts a no to everything except a no-confidence motion. That is a deliberate vote against rather than an abstention.

What You as an ADA Holder Can Do Right Now

The honest answer first: if your coins are sitting on an exchange, you have no vote. Voting power attaches to the stake address in your own wallet, not to an account balance with a provider. Anyone who wants a say needs a wallet in self-custody.

Step 1: Check where your voting power is delegated

The common Cardano wallets have a governance section of their own. It shows whether your voting power points to a named DRep, to always abstain or to always no confidence. The community's official governance explorer carries the same information along with each DRep's voting record.

Step 2: Check whether your DRep is still active at all

The parameter drepActivity is set to twenty epochs, roughly a hundred days. A DRep who has not voted for that long counts as inactive, and the voting power delegated to them no longer counts towards active voting power. That is the most common quiet reason for a delegation running into the void.

Step 3: Change your delegation if that is what you want

Re-delegating costs network fees in the cent range and changes nothing about your staking: vote delegation and stake delegation are two separate processes. Your rewards carry on unchanged while you move your voting power. If you want to know how rewards are put together in the first place, the basics are in the comparison of staking platforms.

Becoming a DRep yourself is possible too, but it costs a deposit of 500 ADA. For most holders, delegating to an active representative is the more practical route.

Dijkstra Upgrade and Hard Fork: What a Standstill Means for Cardano's Next Upgrade

Cardano currently runs on protocol version 11, which can be read off in the epoch parameters. That version comes out of the van Rossem hard fork and is the basis the next set of rules builds on. The next major upgrade goes by the name Dijkstra and is meant to lift the network to protocol version 12 in a first phase, together with the Ouroboros Linear Leios scaling method. The development teams involved name the fourth quarter of 2026 as their target and point out expressly that this is a target corridor and not a fixed date.

The connection to the constitutional committee is direct: a hard fork on Cardano is initiated through a governance action of the type HardForkInitiation, and that action needs committee votes. A body below the minimum size cannot confirm it. The same applies to the parameter change through which the Dijkstra parameters are to be written into the constitution.

A governance standstill from September onwards would therefore reach beyond procedure and hit the network's upgrade schedule as well. How long it would last depends solely on how quickly a new renewal action is submitted and ratified.

Putting the Governance Risk in Context: What This Means for Staking and Custody of Your ADA

For the everyday life of an ADA holder, a standstill changes little at first. Staking carries on, rewards continue to be paid out, transactions are confirmed. What does change is the network's ability to react to problems: fee parameters, block sizes and treasury withdrawals are then fixed in place.

For assessing this cryptocurrency as an investment, this is one governance risk among several, and a different one from the risk of a technical fault. If your question is about the current valuation, the arguments are laid out in our stocktake, Is Cardano a Good Buy at Current Prices?

What this piece deliberately does not contain is any statement about how the market will react to one outcome or the other. The chain data says something about procedure and deadlines. About prices it says nothing.

Cardano Constitutional Committee: What to Take Away

1. Remember September 6, not September 1. The renewal action can still be ratified up to the end of epoch 653. Anyone holding ADA in self-custody should look into the governance section of their wallet during this period; the hardware for it is covered in the hardware wallet comparison.
2. Check where your voting power sits. If it rests on always abstain or with a representative who has been inactive for more than twenty epochs, it does not count. Re-delegating costs a matter of cents and leaves your staking rewards untouched, as the comparison of staking platforms shows.
3. Keep procedural risk separate from the price question. A governance standstill blocks upgrades and treasury withdrawals, not block production. If you are drawing conclusions from it for your own choice of provider, work with the comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.

The rules at issue here are publicly available to read: the Cardano constitution in its German version and the governance standard CIP-1694, the source of the rule on the committee's minimum size.

(As of August 27, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Solana traded at $109.41 on 27 August at 17:08 UTC, its highest level of the year. Bitcoin was hovering just below $80,000 at the same time. For the first sustained stretch in months, the larger asset is not setting the pace. The timing is not a coincidence. Solana's first formal on-chain governance vote closed at roughly 15:30 UTC on 27 August, at the end of epoch 1023. SOL cleared $109 within about two hours of that deadline, taking out the $102.70 level that had rejected it a day earlier.

How far has Solana actually run?

$SOL has gained roughly 46% since mid-August, rising from near $75 to above $109.

The move has three distinct phases visible on the chart. Through late July and the first half of August, SOL held a tight range around $75, drifting slightly lower into the 7 August low. From 9 to 18 August it ground upward to about $78, still without much conviction. Then on 19 August the character of the move changed completely: an almost vertical leg carried SOL from the high $70s into the $90s within days.

That third phase is what most traders are reacting to. The 7-day gain sat at 31.87% as of 25 August, with a 30-day move near 35.6%. Both figures are now higher after today's push.

It is worth being precise about what got broken. SOL briefly touched $102.88 on 26 August and was immediately rejected, falling back to the mid-$90s while leveraged longs took $17.51 million in liquidations in a single day. Resistance around $102.70 marked a 13-week high. Today's move through $109 is the second attempt at that level, and this time it held.

Is Solana really outperforming Bitcoin?

Yes, on both the weekly and monthly view, though the gap is narrower than it feels.

Over the seven days to 25 August, Solana rose about 27% against Bitcoin's 23%. On 26 August, SOL gained 1.5% while $Bitcoin lost 0.2% and slipped back below $79,000. Today's move widens that spread further.

The nuance worth holding onto is that this is not capital leaving Bitcoin for Solana. On 24 August, US-listed Bitcoin, Ether, Solana and Hyperliquid products drew nearly $192.6 million in combined demand. Bitcoin ETFs alone took $208.9 million that day, following roughly $1.6 billion the previous week. Both assets are absorbing inflows at the same time.

That distinction matters for how you read the ratio. A genuine rotation means money moving out of one asset and into another. What is happening here looks more like fresh capital arriving across the board, with Solana capturing a disproportionate share of it relative to its size. The outperformance is real. The rotation framing is not, at least not yet.

What did the governance vote actually decide?

Three proposals went to a stake-weighted vote between 22 and 27 August, two of which would tighten SOL supply meaningfully.

This is the substance behind the price move, and it is the part most of the commentary is skipping.

• SGP-0001, the Solana Constitution. Ratifies a canonical governance framework and activates Solana's on-chain governance system, svmgov.
• SGP-0002, faster disinflation. Doubles the annual disinflation rate from 15% to 30%. Under SIMD-0550, this would cut future issuance by roughly 18.9 million SOL over six years, worth around $1.7 billion at current prices.
• SGP-0003, fee restructuring. SIMD-0553 proposes a fixed inclusion fee of 2,500 lamports per transaction, with a resource component scaling to computational demand and burned rather than paid out. This could lift daily burns from roughly 648 SOL toward 9,000, close to a fourteenfold increase.

Two caveats deserve more weight than they are getting. First, an approving vote only green-lights development. Technical implementation, testing and on-chain activation all follow separately through the SIMD process, so nothing changes about SOL's supply the moment the vote closes. Second, Solana Company, listed on Nasdaq as HSDT, backed the constitution but voted against both the faster disinflation and the fee changes. When a major stakeholder splits its vote that way, the supply-shock narrative is less unanimous than the price action suggests.

Do the three technical claims hold up?

Partly, and one of them cuts both ways.

Three claims are circulating alongside this move: that SOL/BTC hit a seven-month high, that RSI broke out of a five-year downtrend, and that SOL bounced from support held since 2021. All three come from chart reading rather than reported data, so treat them as one analyst's interpretation rather than established fact.

The SOL/BTC observation is directionally consistent with the price data. At $109.41 against Bitcoin near $79,000, the ratio sits around 0.00138, and SOL last traded above $100 in February 2026. Whether that constitutes a clean seven-month high depends on where you measure Bitcoin, and we have not independently verified the exact reading.

The support claim rests on a trendline drawn from 2021. SOL/BTC has been in a broad downtrend since mid-2021, so a bounce from a level with that much history would be meaningful if it holds. It also cannot be confirmed from reported data, and trendlines drawn across five years are unusually sensitive to where you place them.

The RSI claim is the one that needs care, because it points in two directions at once. A breakout from a long-term RSI downtrend is a momentum signal. But the same indicator on the 14-day timeframe recently read 84.31, and touched roughly 79 during the 26 August rejection. Both readings are deep in overbought territory. Anyone citing RSI as evidence of strength here should also be citing it as evidence of exhaustion, because it is the same number.

Is the ETF bid real money?

This is the most solid part of the case, because it is reported rather than inferred.

US spot Solana ETFs took $33.5 million on 24 August, the largest single-day inflow since December 2025 and the biggest of the year to date. That extended the streak to five consecutive sessions and pushed cumulative net inflows to a record $1.22 billion.

The on-chain picture supports it. Solana processed 4.2 billion transactions in July. Stablecoins on the network sit around $15.94 billion, with weekly DEX volume near $19.74 billion, and tokenized assets on Solana are approaching $4 billion. Galaxy Digital launched SOL-backed lending on 26 August, letting holders borrow against staked SOL without selling, which adds a channel for holding rather than rotating out.

Corporate treasury demand is present too. Forward Industries holds over 6.9 million SOL and runs its own validator.

What could break this?

The overbought reading, the gap between voting and shipping, and Bitcoin itself.

The most immediate risk is positioning. An RSI in the 80s after a 46% run is the textbook setup for a sharp unwind, and yesterday's $17.51 million in long liquidations showed how quickly it happens when a breakout fails. The first attempt at $102.88 was rejected within hours.

The second risk is the gap between a vote passing and supply actually changing. If traders bought a supply shock that will not touch circulating SOL for months, the catalyst is spent while the fundamentals are unchanged. Votes that only authorise development are the easiest kind to overprice.

On the downside, the levels to watch are $94.42, the 23.6% Fibonacci retracement, then $88.18, and the 200-day EMA near $81.15 below that.

The third risk is the one nobody controls. Bitcoin needs to hold the $75,000 to $76,000 zone. High-beta assets that have run 46% do not fall proportionally when the market turns, they fall harder, and SOL currently carries elevated funding. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh delivers his first Jackson Hole keynote on 28 August, which puts a macro event directly in front of a heavily positioned market.

Solana is outperforming Bitcoin, and unlike most claims of that kind this month, it has identifiable reasons behind it: record ETF demand, genuine network usage, and a credible supply argument. Whether the outperformance survives contact with an overbought chart and a governance process that has only just begun is a separate question.

Bitcoin has just closed out its strongest stretch of 2026. The price climbed from roughly $62,800 in early August to above $80,000 on 25 August, a gain of about 22% in a single week and close to 28% across the month. It was Bitcoin's best weekly performance since 2023.

Momentum came from several directions at once. The US Treasury doubled the size of its bond buyback operations, renewed movement behind the Clarity Act lifted risk appetite, and roughly $2.7 billion in short positions were force-closed on the way up. Spot Bitcoin ETF inflows, negative for the year at one point in 2026, turned positive again through July and August.

One thing worth keeping in perspective before anyone calls this a new bull market: Bitcoin peaked at $126,198 in October 2025 and fell to a 21-month low near $59,300 in June 2026. At $80,000 the asset is still roughly 37% below its record. This is a recovery, not a breakout to new highs.

Is the entire crypto market up, or just Bitcoin?

The whole market is up, but $Bitcoin is still taking the larger share, and that gap is where the opportunity sits.

The total crypto market capitalisation now sits near $2.75 trillion. The altcoin market excluding Bitcoin, tracked as TOTAL2, added roughly $215 billion between 19 and 22 August and pushed back above $1 trillion. CryptoQuant analyst Darkfost found that 56% of Binance-listed altcoins have reclaimed their 200-day moving averages, a sharp reversal from the months when 80 to 85% traded below that line.

So altcoins are participating. What they are not doing is leading.

Bitcoin dominance climbed to around 61% during the week before easing back to roughly 59%, near its highest level of the year. In a genuine rotation, dominance falls as capital moves down the risk curve. Here it rose. CoinMarketCap's Altcoin Season Index reads in the mid-40s, up sharply from 33 a week earlier but still well short of the 75 mark that defines an actual altcoin season.

The result is a market where a handful of names ran extremely hard and the rest went nowhere. Over the seven days to 25 August, $XRP gained 43.7%, $Ethereum 28.6% and Solana 25.6%, all beating Bitcoin's 22.6%. Chainlink added more than 30%. Zcash rose roughly 75% and Aave more than 60%. Below that top tier, plenty of established projects posted single-digit weeks.

How were these five altcoins selected?

Each coin underperformed Bitcoin over the past week, the past month, or both, and each has an identifiable catalyst rather than just an oversold chart.

Three filters were applied:

1. Clear underperformance versus Bitcoin's 22.6% weekly gain, its 28% monthly gain, or both.
2. A real reason to reprice, meaning a shipped upgrade, a regulatory shift, a structural supply change, or measurable business growth.
3. Sufficient liquidity to enter and exit without moving the market against yourself.

Meme tokens and projects with no independent development activity were excluded. The list is ordered by market capitalisation, not by conviction.

Why is BNB the largest altcoin still trailing Bitcoin?

BNB gained 15.4% over the week against Bitcoin's 22.6%, making it the only top-five asset to materially underperform during the rally.

$BNB trades near $700. Every other major, Ethereum, XRP and Solana included, beat Bitcoin over the same seven days. BNB did not, and it did so while carrying one of the cleanest fundamental profiles in the sector.

The case rests on structure. BNB's quarterly burn mechanism removes supply on a fixed schedule regardless of sentiment, which is a rare thing in an asset class where most tokens face unlock pressure rather than contraction. BNB Chain continues to carry high transaction throughput, and the token retains direct utility across the largest exchange ecosystem in crypto.

The case against is concentration risk, and it is not a small one. BNB's value is tied to the fortunes of a single exchange operator and to whatever regulatory posture the US and EU adopt toward it next. That link cuts in both directions. It has powered the token through past cycles and it is precisely why some institutional allocators will not touch it.

For a September position, BNB is the lowest-volatility name on this list. It is unlikely to triple. It is also the least likely to go to zero.

Can Hedera (HBAR) turn enterprise adoption into an actual price move?

$HBAR trades around $0.068 with a market cap near $3 billion, still roughly 22% below its 200-day EMA, despite regulatory clarity and a live US spot ETF.

The gap between Hedera's institutional footprint and its chart is the widest of any asset here.

On the adoption side, the Hedera Governing Council has grown to 31 members including FedEx, Google, IBM, Boeing, Standard Bank, NVIDIA and ServiceNow. Each member operates a node. Archax has facilitated tokenized UK gilts and money market funds on Hedera, and Lloyds Banking Group has used tokenized Hedera assets as FX collateral.

On the regulatory side, HBAR was included among 16 major crypto assets formally classified as digital commodities in a joint SEC and CFTC interpretive rule in March 2026, removing them from stricter securities oversight. The Canary HBAR ETF launched on Nasdaq in October 2025, making HBAR the third cryptocurrency to obtain US spot ETF status, and it has recorded steady inflows since. Hedera also added full EVM compatibility in July 2026, letting developers build with standard Ethereum tooling.

So why is the price flat? Two reasons. Scheduled treasury releases add continuous dilution pressure, which absorbs demand that would otherwise show up as price. And Hedera has a long track record of announcing enterprise partnerships that do not convert into sustained token demand. HBAR broke a daily descending trendline on 21 August with strong volume, but the structure only genuinely changes on a decisive close above $0.082.

Is Avalanche (AVAX) cheap enough for the discount to matter?

$AVAX trades around $7.50, down roughly 70% over the past year and more than 90% from its 2021 high, while its DeFi ecosystem has been expanding.

Avalanche is the deep-drawdown name on this list, and drawdown alone is never a thesis. What makes AVAX interesting in September is that the ecosystem activity has diverged from the price.

Aave deployed its V4 on Avalanche and launched Stable Vaults, a product that lets fintechs offer stablecoin yield without building DeFi infrastructure in-house. That matters because it routes institutional-adjacent flow through Avalanche rather than around it. The chain's subnet architecture also remains one of the more credible answers to the tokenized real-world asset question, a sector that crossed $36 billion on-chain in 2026.

The counter-argument is straightforward and it has been correct for two years running. Avalanche has repeatedly attracted high-quality integrations without translating them into token demand, because subnets can use the technology while accruing limited value to AVAX holders. This is the same value-capture problem that has hollowed out several Layer-1 tokens, and nothing has definitively resolved it.

Treat AVAX as a bet that the RWA narrative eventually rewards the chains doing the work. That is a thesis, not a certainty.

Does Uniswap (UNI) finally have a value capture story?

$UNI has been one of the weakest large-cap DeFi tokens of the summer, falling 18.5% in the week to 18 August while the sector rallied around it.

Uniswap remains the dominant decentralised exchange by volume, and UNI remains a token that historically captured very little of that. This is the single most-discussed value-accrual problem in DeFi.

The reason to look at it now is that the debate over routing protocol fees to token holders has moved from perennial forum discussion toward something closer to a live governance question, helped by a US regulatory environment that is materially friendlier than the one that froze the issue for years. If a fee mechanism is ever ratified, the repricing would be mechanical rather than narrative-driven.

The reason for caution is that this has been the bull case for UNI since 2021 and it has not happened yet. Governance tokens that might one day capture revenue trade at a persistent discount to ones that already do, and that discount is rational. Uniswap also faces genuine competitive pressure from newer venues and from perpetuals platforms that have taken share of on-chain volume.

UNI belongs on this list because the outcome is binary and the market is currently pricing only one side of it. That also makes it the name most likely to keep going nowhere.

Why is Polkadot (DOT) still lagging after shipping so much?

$DOT sits far below its cycle highs despite an ambitious architectural roadmap, making it the most contrarian entry on this list.

Polkadot's problem has never been engineering output. It has been that the engineering output does not reach the token.

The forward case centres on the JAM upgrade, a rearchitecture of the relay chain into a more general compute environment, plus continued work on making parachain deployment cheaper and less capital-intensive than the original auction model. If Polkadot succeeds in becoming infrastructure that other chains rent, DOT's role changes from a staking-and-governance asset into something with recurring demand.

The case against is the same one that has held for three years. Inflation continues, parachain demand has been well below early projections, and developers can build with Substrate without needing DOT at all. Polkadot has consistently ranked among the highest in development activity while ranking among the worst in price performance, which tells you the market does not currently pay for that.

Include DOT only if you accept it as a bet on tokenomics and go-to-market execution rather than on technology. The technology was never the bottleneck.

Which of these five altcoins carries the most risk?

All five carry meaningfully more risk than Bitcoin, and buying laggards is a strategy that fails at least as often as it works.

There is a specific trap in laggard investing worth naming plainly. A coin can lag because the market has not got to it yet, or because the market has already examined it and concluded it is not worth more. Being early and being wrong look identical right up until they do not. Uniswap and Polkadot in particular have been the cheap-looking option for several years running.

Three risks apply to the whole list in September. First, this rotation is unconfirmed: the Altcoin Season Index in the mid-40s is an improvement, not a signal. Second, Bitcoin needs to hold the $75,000 to $76,000 area. If it breaks, overbought altcoins carrying high funding rates unwind faster than Bitcoin does. Third, the macro calendar is dense. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh delivers his first Jackson Hole keynote on 28 August, and his guidance since taking office in May has been deliberately sparse, which leaves considerable room for a surprise in either direction.

A final note on mechanics rather than markets. Rapid price increases create exactly the conditions in which people make their worst security decisions. Fake wallet promotions and seed-phrase phishing become far more effective when attention returns to crypto. If you are moving size, move it carefully.

Pump.fun (PUMP) changes hands at $0.004564 at the time of writing. That is roughly 47 percent below the twelve-month high of $0.008619 set on 16 September 2025, and almost four times the twelve-month low of $0.001196 from 26 June 2026. After a gain of 42 percent in seven days and 126 percent in thirty, the question facing anyone looking at the token today differs from the one that applied in June: is Pump.fun a good buy at current prices, or does the price already reflect what the platform delivers?

cryptoticker.io collected the price data behind this analysis on 27 August 2026. The source is market data from CoinMarketCap, retrieved through the numerical asset ID rather than the ticker, because the symbol PUMP is carried by several unrelated tokens. The method is standard: daily closing prices across 365 days, from which we calculated the 200-day and the 50-day exponential moving average, the 14-day relative strength index and the twelve-month extremes.

Pump.fun price analysis: where the PUMP price stands and which levels matter

At $0.004564 the token holds a market capitalisation of about 1.81 billion dollars and ranks 42nd by that measure. Both averages that define the medium-term picture sit far below that quote: the 200-day average at $0.002349, the 50-day average at $0.002717. Price is therefore around 94 percent above its 200-day line and about 68 percent above its 50-day line, a configuration that says the advance has been rapid rather than gradual.

Three price zones organise the chart. The upper reference is the twelve-month high of $0.008619 from September 2025, still roughly 47 percent away. The current zone runs between the round $0.004 mark and the $0.005 area. Beneath that, the first structural floor is the 50-day average at $0.002717, and below it the 200-day average at $0.002349 marks the boundary of the trend that began at the June low of $0.001196.

The gap between the current quote and those two lines is the central fact of this analysis. A pullback that merely returns the token to its 50-day average would cost around 40 percent from today's level. That is arithmetic rather than forecast, and it defines the risk an entry at $0.004564 accepts.

Is the Pump.fun downtrend broken or only interrupted?

From the September 2025 high of $0.008619 to the June 2026 low of $0.001196, PUMP lost about 86 percent. Since that low the price has recovered roughly 282 percent, and over the full twelve months it stands about 57 percent higher than a year ago.

Technically, the downtrend is broken rather than merely interrupted. Price trades above both averages, and the 50-day average at $0.002717 sits above the 200-day average at $0.002349, the sequence trend followers read as a confirmed upward structure.

Two qualifications belong next to that reading. The token began trading in July 2025, so the entire data set covers a single market cycle. And a broken downtrend is a statement about direction rather than about valuation: the same chart that shows a recovery also shows a token that has moved 282 percent in nine weeks without a meaningful correction along the way.

What RSI and moving averages mean for a Pump.fun entry

The 14-day relative strength index stands at 70.2. Readings above 70 are conventionally called overbought, which does not mean a decline is due. It means recent daily gains have dominated recent daily losses to an unusual degree, and that new buyers are entering after the move rather than before it. In strong trends an RSI can remain elevated for weeks; what changes is the price paid for the same exposure.

The moving averages tell the same story in a different unit. An asset trading 94 percent above its 200-day line has stretched far from its own medium-term mean, and mean reversion in this segment tends to be abrupt rather than orderly. For a buyer, the practical consequence is the distance to the levels where support would first be tested: $0.002717 and, further down, $0.002349.

Broader sentiment points the same way. The CoinMarketCap Fear and Greed reading stood at 80 on 27 August 2026, in the extreme greed band, which says the market is positioned for continuation. Positioning of that kind has historically made pullbacks sharper when they arrive. The longer-dated view sits in our Pump.fun price prediction.

What trading volume reveals about Pump.fun demand

Turnover in PUMP amounts to about 288.5 million dollars over 24 hours, against a market capitalisation of roughly 1.81 billion dollars. Close to 16 percent of the float trading in a single day is high in absolute terms and typical for this segment.

The trend in volume matters more than the level. Average daily turnover over the past 30 days sits near 177.5 million dollars, while the 90-day average is about 105.2 million. Activity has expanded alongside the price, which is the pattern that gives a rally its confirmation. Advances on shrinking volume are the ones that tend to fail.

One detail argues for caution. Over the most recent 24 hours the token lost about 6 percent while turnover stayed above 288 million dollars. Falling prices on elevated volume are the signature of distribution, of holders selling into demand. A single day proves nothing, and it is worth watching whether the pattern repeats.

Which structural factors speak for Pump.fun: supply mechanics, usage and regulation

Supply is the first structural fact, and it cuts both ways. Of a maximum supply of 1,000,000,000,000 tokens, about 397,291,627,668 circulate today, close to 40 percent. Every market capitalisation figure quoted for PUMP therefore describes a minority of the eventual float, and the tokens still outside circulation are a supply overhang that a rising price does nothing to remove.

Usage is the second. Pump.fun operates as a token launch platform on Solana, and its revenue comes from fees charged on token creation and on trading activity across the platform. That gives the token an anchor that pure memecoins lack: platform activity is measurable, and it rises and falls with speculative appetite across the Solana ecosystem. It also makes PUMP a leveraged expression of that appetite rather than an independent one. The infrastructure it depends on is documented in the Solana developer documentation.

Regulation is the third. In the European Union, crypto asset service providers operate under the MiCA framework, and the classification of platform tokens carrying fee-linked value remains an area of active supervisory attention. The European Securities and Markets Authority publishes its guidance for the sector, and anyone building a position of size should follow that work rather than assume the status quo persists.

What speaks for buying PUMP at current prices

The first argument is trend structure. Price sits above both the 200-day average at $0.002349 and the 50-day average at $0.002717, with the shorter line above the longer one. Buyers who work with trend confirmation rather than with bottom fishing have their signal.

The second is the volume backing. A 42 percent weekly advance carried by turnover well above its own 90-day average of roughly 105.2 million dollars per day is better supported than a move on thin trading, and that depth lowers the cost of building or exiting a position.

The third is the distance to the record. At $0.004564 the token remains about 47 percent below its twelve-month high of $0.008619. For anyone who accepts the platform's revenue model as durable, that gap is the part of the case that has not yet been closed by the rally.

What speaks against buying Pump.fun at current prices

The first counterargument is the extension itself. Buying at $0.004564 means paying 94 percent above the 200-day average and 68 percent above the 50-day average, and accepting that a routine return to the shorter line would take roughly 40 percent off the position. An RSI of 70.2 says that entry happens after the crowd, not ahead of it.

The second is the supply overhang. With around 397,291,627,668 of 1,000,000,000,000 tokens in circulation, roughly 60 percent of the eventual supply has yet to reach the market. Tokens that enter circulation later meet whatever demand exists at that moment, and schedules of this kind have repeatedly capped recoveries in comparable assets.

The third is the thinness of the record. The price history covers a single cycle, from the July 2025 launch through the September 2025 high of $0.008619, the June 2026 low of $0.001196 and the current recovery. There is no second cycle against which to test how platform revenue behaves when speculative activity contracts for a prolonged period, and the concentration of that revenue in one ecosystem is a risk no chart displays.

How to buy Pump.fun (PUMP) at the current price: costs, custody and providers

PUMP is listed on a smaller set of venues than the large caps, so the first practical step is checking availability rather than fees. Where the token is offered, the cost consists of the trading fee, typically between 0.1 and 1.5 percent depending on venue and order type, and the spread, which in less liquid pairs frequently exceeds the visible fee. Limit orders are the standard defence against the second cost. Our exchange comparison sets the fee models side by side, and the reports on Kraken and Bitvavo cover deposit routes and account requirements.

Custody is the second decision. Positions held for months belong in wallets whose keys the holder controls, and the options are compared in our hardware wallet comparison. Leaving the token on the venue substitutes counterparty risk for key-management risk. For derivative exposure, our comparison of perpetual DEX platforms is the relevant reference.

Position sizing is the third. A token that has moved 282 percent in nine weeks and lost 86 percent in the nine months before belongs, if at all, in the part of a portfolio whose complete loss would not change the plan.

Is Pump.fun a good buy at current prices, short term and long term

Short term, the picture is a strong trend at a stretched price. Momentum, volume and sentiment point the same way, while an RSI of 70.2 together with a 94 percent premium over the 200-day average describes an entry with limited margin for error. The nearest reference for a failed continuation is the 50-day average at $0.002717.

Long term, the case rests on a question no chart answers: whether fee revenue from token launches on Solana proves durable across a full cycle rather than only in a phase of high speculative activity. If it does, the 47 percent discount to the twelve-month high of $0.008619 is the relevant framing. If it does not, the June low of $0.001196 shows what this token does when that activity dries up.

This is an assessment, not a recommendation, and it can be falsified. The constructive reading would be wrong if the price closed back below the 200-day average at $0.002349, if daily turnover fell durably beneath the 90-day average of about 105.2 million dollars while the price held, or if further supply entering circulation coincided with a persistent decline in platform activity. The cautious reading would be wrong if the token consolidated above the $0.004 area for several weeks while volume stayed elevated, letting the averages close the gap from below rather than the price closing it from above.

Buying Pump.fun (PUMP): What to Take Away

1. At $0.004564 the token trades far above both of its averages and about 47 percent below its twelve-month high, so the entry pays for a trend that is already established. The longer-dated view sits in our Pump.fun price prediction.
2. The supply schedule matters more than the chart: roughly 60 percent of the maximum supply has yet to circulate, which is the structural difference between this token and the large caps examined in our analysis of whether Bitcoin is a good buy at current prices.
3. PUMP is a leveraged expression of speculative activity on Solana, so the ecosystem view belongs with the token view, as set out in our assessment of whether Solana is a good buy at current prices.

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

(Last updated: 27 August 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices, fees and terms change; check them with the provider before every purchase. Crypto assets are subject to high price volatility and a total loss is possible.)

The transaction used Bitcoin’s existing rules to protect funds from a future quantum attack without requiring a network upgrade.

Google's new privacy standard scrambles the one field of a web request that still travels in the clear: the name of the site being opened.

Developer Craig Raw said an AI-assisted review produced most of the fixes in version 2.5.4, though none appeared likely to put users’ funds at risk.

OpenAI says the model never sees your password—but a signed-in session can persist across tasks, and you can step away while it works.

Deribit's Friday settlement covers nearly a fifth of the exchange's Bitcoin open interest, and max pain sits well below where BTC is trading right now.

The market is battling for momentum at this point in time as bears are finally ready to step up.

Ripple is recommending that the XRP Ledger community withdraw the long-running XChainBridge (XLS-38) amendment.

Bitcoin has climbed back above $80,000 as renewed demand for spot exchange-traded funds fuels a sharp recovery.

As XRP surges to $1.5, AI agents pivot to Ripple USD stablecoin, driving a 100% rise in volume to shield on-chain budgets from high volatility.

Ether holders pull 1.4 million ETH off exchanges during a 27% rally as no one is selling at $2,528.

TLDR

• The Trade Desk launches Kokai Zuma with new AI tools and simpler campaign workflows.
• Kokai Zuma combines agentic AI with forecasting to improve digital advertising results.
• The Trade Desk reports a 32% average CPA improvement from Zuma forecasting upgrades.
• Koa now supports campaign creation, audience targeting, and frequency optimization tasks.
• Zuma simplifies measurement, reporting, and campaign management across the open internet.

The Trade Desk, Inc. (TTD) stock traded at $13.39, up 2.76%, as the advertising technology company expanded its AI capabilities by launching Kokai Zuma globally. Zuma combines agentic AI, improved forecasting, and simpler measurement tools within The Trade Desk’s Kokai platform.

The Trade Desk, Inc., TTD

Zuma builds on Kokai, which The Trade Desk introduced in 2023 for planning, buying, and measuring digital advertising. The platform serves advertisers across channels, formats, and devices, while growing fragmentation has increased campaign management demands. The latest release focuses on reducing workflow complexity and improving access to campaign information.

The Trade Desk also upgraded the infrastructure behind Kokai, rather than limiting Zuma to a redesigned interface. The company strengthened its forecasting engine and AI systems to predict inventory and model campaign outcomes. Those systems support Koa’s real-time agentic functions and help advertisers make faster campaign decisions.

The Trade Desk Expands Koa’s Agentic AI Capabilities

Koa remains central to The Trade Desk’s strategy, and Zuma expands its role across more campaign activities. The AI system analyzes more than 20 million ad impressions each second to support advertising decisions. Now, specialized Koa Agents can automate tasks, identify opportunities, and provide campaign support through a conversational interface.

Koa Assistant gives users a direct way to manage campaign creation, audience development, troubleshooting, and performance analysis. Koa can identify relevant audiences that advertisers may have missed during campaign planning. Audience Unlimited extends this capability across more than 70% of global data providers in The Trade Desk Data Marketplace.

Zuma also applies Koa to frequency optimization, which can reduce manual work during campaign management. The system adjusts frequency settings according to campaign objectives and performance data. Advertisers can spend more time improving campaign strategy while Koa handles selected operational decisions.

Zuma Simplifies Measurement and Campaign Reporting

Measurement represents another major part of the Zuma update, as The Trade Desk expands tools for evaluating advertising outcomes. The enhanced Conversion Lift feature simplifies lift studies and adds reporting dimensions for campaign planning. This change gives advertisers a more direct way to connect campaign activity with measurable results.

The reporting homepage now organizes frequently used reports, saved templates, and generated reports in one location. The updated Report Builder provides greater flexibility when advertisers customize reports and review available dimensions. These changes can reduce time spent searching for information during regular campaign analysis.

Zuma also improves campaign management through clearer page designs and consolidated targeting information. The Applied Settings View brings targeting parameters together, so users can see settings that influence campaign spending. Upgraded bulk editing allows users to preview potential changes before applying them across campaigns.

TTD Stock Gains New Platform Catalyst From Zuma Rollout

The Zuma rollout adds another technology-driven development to The Trade Desk’s advertising platform and broader business strategy. Initial results from its upgraded modeling and forecasting systems show an average 32% improvement in CPA performance. The company attributes those gains to improvements in forecasting, modeling, and the AI infrastructure supporting Kokai.

The Trade Desk has also positioned the backend investment as a foundation for future platform development. Its forecasting systems predict available inventory, model campaign outcomes, and support Koa’s real-time capabilities. Hence, the company can expand Zuma’s functionality while maintaining a common technology base across Kokai.

Zuma began rolling out globally to Kokai clients, while The Trade Desk expects additional capabilities and enhancements over time. Some features already have general availability, while others remain in open or closed beta programs. The release strengthens Kokai with AI automation, simpler measurement, and improved workflows for digital advertising buyers.

The post The Trade Desk, Inc. (TTD) Stock: New Zuma Platform Brings Smarter AI, Simpler Measurement and Better Ad Performance appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Laser Photonics stock rises 9.93% as SOCOM engagement strengthens LSAD defense prospects.
• LASE presents its LSAD counter-drone technology directly to U.S. Special Operations Command.
• LSAD detects, tracks, and neutralizes a simulated drone target in under three seconds.
• Laser Photonics advances government evaluations amid growing demand for counter-UAS systems.
• LASE targets military sites with modular laser defenses against small drone threats.

Laser Photonics Corporation (LASE) shares jumped 9.93% to $1.55 after the company advanced its LSAD counter-drone program. The company recently engaged U.S. Special Operations Command and presented its Laser Shield Anti-Drone system. The engagement adds momentum to Laser Photonics’ efforts to expand its defense technology operations.

Laser Photonics Corporation, LASE

Laser Photonics Corporation Advances LSAD After SOCOM Engagement

Laser Photonics and affiliated Fonon Technologies presented LSAD’s directed-energy counter-UAS capabilities during the SOCOM engagement. The discussions focused on how the system could address small unmanned aircraft threats across military and protected locations.The company said the engagement produced strong interest and identified potential steps for continued defense discussions.

The SOCOM engagement comes as U.S. military agencies increase efforts against small drones and coordinated drone attacks. Army Lt. Gen. Joseph Jarrard recently highlighted gaps in sensors and effectors for defeating incoming drone swarms. The need for practical counter-UAS systems continues to gain attention across U.S. defense operations.

The Department of War also increased its focus on small drones through a July 2026 counter-UAS handbook.The publication promotes layered and integrated defenses against inexpensive drones with increasingly capable technologies. Laser Photonics is positioning LSAD within a defense market that requires flexible and localized protection.

Laser Photonics Corporation Develops Standalone Counter-Drone Defense

Laser Photonics designed LSAD as a transportable and scalable counter-UAS architecture for Group 1 and Group 2 drones. The platform combines detection, tracking, target identification, decision support, and laser engagement functions within its architecture. As a result, the system can provide localized protection around military installations and other sensitive facilities.

The company also designed LSAD as a standalone perimeter-defense system that can create a dedicated protective zone. Its modular structure supports fixed-site, palletized, vehicle-mounted, soldier-portable, and autonomous platform configurations. This approach allows defense operators to deploy the system across different locations and operational environments.

LSAD targets small drone threats that can create security challenges while remaining relatively inexpensive to deploy. The company says the system can operate under environmental conditions suitable for Group 1 and Group 2 drones. Hence, the platform could support military installations, expeditionary sites, critical infrastructure, and other protected areas.

Laser Photonics Corporation Reports Three-Second LSAD Test Result

Laser Photonics also reported a live LSAD demonstration at its facility in Lake Mary, Florida.
During the test, the system detected, tracked, and neutralized a simulated Class I drone decoy in less than three seconds.The demonstration used autonomous target acquisition, precision beam tracking, and laser engagement against a low-altitude aerial target.

The latest test builds on earlier field evaluations involving LSAD detection software and real-world operating conditions.Those tests showed target identification and tracking in more than 95% of tested scenarios involving background clutter and environmental noise. The results provide performance data as Laser Photonics continues its counter-UAS development program.

The company is also progressing through several U.S. government evaluation efforts for its counter-drone technology. These efforts include the U.S. Air Force Shaw Air Force Base Battle Lab CSO process and the MEIA Vulcan Call for Solutions. Fonon Technologies will support LSAD commercialization as the group expands government and defense-sector engagement.

Laser Photonics develops laser systems for industrial and defense applications across several major markets. Its portfolio serves defense, government, aerospace, energy, maritime, automotive, and advanced manufacturing customers. The LSAD program adds a defense-focused application to the company’s broader laser technology business.

The post Laser Photonics Corporation (LASE) Stock: SOCOM Engagement Puts Counter-Drone System in Focus appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Ethena Foundation bought out locked tokens from seed investors who sold ENA in nine months.
• A new Master Framework Agreement moves protocol IP and value accrual fully to token holders.
• Monthly VC token unlocks end as Ethena Foundation releases unvested investor tokens early.
• Risk Committee approval clears a fee switch directing Ethena’s net revenue toward ENA buybacks.

Ethena Foundation announced four structural changes to ENA’s tokenomics this week. The updates cover investor buyouts, governance rights, and revenue-driven buybacks.

Ethena Labs and the Foundation also finalized a new equity framework. Details appeared in a blog post shared through the Ethena Foundation’s official channels.

Ethena Foundation Buys Out Early ENA Investors

The Foundation bought out all locked tokens from certain major seed investors. These investors had sold portions of their ENA holdings within the past nine months. 

The buyout removes their remaining locked allocations from future circulation risk. It also closes out positions tied to investors who exited early, reducing potential future sell pressure.

Ethena Foundation and Ethena Labs also signed a Master Framework Agreement. The agreement assigns intellectual property and protocol value accrual to the Foundation. 

Token holders now govern that value exclusively going forward. No separate entity retains a competing claim over protocol revenue under the new structure.

Equity investors in the Labs entity lose any residual claim to future cash flows. The Foundation confirmed no ongoing payments will reach that entity. 

Governance rights now sit fully with ENA token holders. The arrangement centralizes protocol value under a single, token-governed structure.

The Foundation and its lead investors also agreed to end monthly VC unlocks. Unvested tokens tied to those investors will be released immediately instead of monthly. 

This step removes future token overhang tied to scheduled VC unlocks. Team token allocations remain locked under their original vesting schedules.

ENA Buyback Fee Switch Moves Through Governance

A governance proposal to activate a fee switch is now live. The mechanism would direct net revenue toward buying back ENA tokens. 

Voting on the proposal is currently open to token holders. The proposal follows internal review by Ethena’s governance structure before reaching a public vote.

Ethena’s Risk Committee has already approved the buyback proposal. Its approval covers revenue collected across all business lines under the Ethena brand. 

The buybacks would run on a programmatic basis once implementation begins. Committee approval typically precedes a full token holder vote on treasury changes.

Net revenue used for the buybacks spans every product line tied to Ethena. That includes activity beyond the core synthetic dollar protocol. 

The Foundation did not specify a start date for buyback execution. Programmatic buybacks would apply revenue directly against circulating ENA supply once active.

The post Ethena Foundation Overhauls ENA Tokenomics With Buyouts and Buybacks appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• ETH exchange balances fell nearly 18% between June 3 and August 27, per new Santiment data.
• Bitcoin exchange balances rose about 0.25% over the same twelve-week stretch, holding near recent highs.
• Another 275,000 ETH left exchanges after August 19, marking the period’s lowest exchange balance point.
• ETH price has gained roughly 27% since August 16 even as more coins left exchange wallets.

Ethereum holders moved 1.4 million coins off exchanges since early June, according to Santiment data. The withdrawal accelerated even as ETH price climbed toward multi-week highs.

Bitcoin balances on exchanges moved in the opposite direction over the same period. The diverging pattern points to a shift in how traders are positioning across the two largest cryptocurrencies.

Ethereum Exchange Balances Fall as ETH Price Climbs

Exchange-held ETH dropped from about 7.69 million coins on June 3 to roughly 6.28 million by August 27. That marks a decline of nearly 18% over twelve weeks. Santiment tracked the shift across the full period.

Bitcoin followed a different path over the same stretch. BTC balances on exchanges rose about 0.25%. They now sit near the top of their recent range.

The ETH outflow did not slow as price gained ground. Another 275,000 coins left exchanges after August 19 alone. That pushed balances to the lowest point of the twelve-week period.

ETH has climbed roughly 27% since August 16, Santiment noted. The exchange exodus continued through that rally. It did not pause during the price gains.

CoinGecko pricing data placed ETH at $2,523.03 at time of writing. The token was up 3.17% over the past 24 hours. Trading volume reached $15.89 billion, with ETH gaining 8.50% over the past week.

Ethereum Technical Setup and Staking Narrative Point to Higher Prices

Trader Axel Bitblaze flagged a technical pattern forming on the weekly chart. A weekly close above $2,550 would validate a structure resembling last year’s setup, the trader said.

That prior pattern included a bottom near $1,500 and a base built below $2,000. A large weekly candle then pushed price into a major moving-average cluster.

ETH consolidated for several weeks after reclaiming that zone. It then rallied toward $4,800, based on the trader’s reading of last year’s chart pattern.

Market commentator Ignas offered a different view on ETH’s next catalyst. He argued that cheaper blockspace and data availability weaken the link between adoption and fee-driven demand.

Ignas said adoption is rising without a matching increase in ETH burn. Gas costs are increasingly abstracted away from users, he noted. He pointed to institutional staking as a stronger potential driver instead.

Large asset issuers may prefer securing their own transactions rather than relying on liquid staking providers, Ignas argued. Native issuance of real-world assets on Ethereum could tie ETH demand to the value it secures instead of transaction fees.

The post Ethereum Holders Pull 1.4M ETH Off Exchanges as Price Nears $2,550 appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Ripple Prime launched its Delta One business with total return swaps tied to U.S. equities, indexes, and digital assets for institutional clients.
• Clients can cross-margin eligible exposures through one counterparty, combining traditional and digital market positions within the same brokerage relationship.
• The Delta One business enters the market with more than $1 billion in regulatory net capital, alongside new debt financing raised during 2026.
• Ripple built Ripple Prime from its $1.25 billion Hidden Road acquisition, creating a multi-asset brokerage that clears more than $3 trillion annually.

Ripple Prime has launched its Delta One business, moving deeper into institutional equity derivatives. The service went live on August 27, 2026, following the announcement. It offers total return swaps tied to U.S.-listed equities, stock indexes, and digital assets. Hedge funds, asset managers, and other institutions can access these exposures through one brokerage relationship. 

Ripple Prime also supports cross-margining across approved asset classes. The setup extends foreign exchange, fixed income, derivatives, and digital asset services. Ripple said the platform operates around the clock. The launch also brings equity-linked products into the brokerage formed after Ripple acquired Hidden Road in 2025.

Ripple Prime Adds Total Return Swaps Across Major Markets

Delta One gives institutional clients economic exposure without requiring direct ownership of the referenced assets. Total return swaps generally exchange an asset’s performance against agreed financing payments. That structure can include price changes and other economic returns from the underlying instrument.

Ripple Prime will act as the counterparty for the new swaps. Clients can combine supported equity, index, and crypto exposures within the broader prime brokerage framework. The firm said positions can be cross-margined across eligible asset classes.

Cross-margining can reduce duplicated collateral when institutions hold related positions across different markets. It can also simplify collateral management under one brokerage relationship. The brokerage already covers foreign exchange, fixed income, derivatives, swaps, and digital assets.

The business also uses what Ripple describes as a conflict-free execution model. Ripple Prime said it focuses on clearing and financing flows rather than proprietary trading. That structure separates its brokerage activity from market-making businesses that may trade against client flows.

President Noel Kimmel said the launch expands the platform into another institutional market segment. He said clients can now access several asset classes through one counterparty. The company also said the service can be adjusted for different investment horizons, reporting needs, and risk mandates.

The Delta One launch follows other institutional market integrations during 2026. The brokerage added support for Hyperliquid in February, extending access to decentralized derivatives liquidity. It later integrated with EDX Markets in May for spot and perpetual futures liquidity.

Capital Growth Supports the New Institutional Brokerage Push

Ripple Prime said it enters the equity derivatives market with more than $1 billion in regulatory net capital. The capital base directly supports clearing, financing, and brokerage activity across its multi-asset platform.

The company also raised additional financing during 2026. In May, Ripple Prime secured a $200 million debt facility from funds managed by Neuberger Specialty Finance. Ripple said the facility would expand capacity for institutional prime services and margin financing.

On August 18, the brokerage closed a $275 million private placement of senior unsecured notes. Ripple said the offering was increased from its original size after institutional demand. The notes received a BBB investment-grade rating from KBRA.

The brokerage emerged after Ripple completed its $1.25 billion acquisition of Hidden Road in October 2025. Hidden Road already operated across traditional and digital markets before the deal. The acquisition placed its clearing, financing, and prime brokerage operations under the Ripple Prime brand.

Ripple says the platform clears more than $3 trillion annually across markets. It also serves more than 300 institutional customers. Those activities include digital assets, foreign exchange, precious metals, exchange-traded derivatives, OTC swaps, and fixed income repo markets.

The new Delta One business extends that structure into swaps tied directly to U.S.-listed equities and indexes. Digital assets remain part of the same offering. Institutions can therefore manage supported exposures through one counterparty while using cross-margining across eligible positions.

Ripple Prime said the business will focus on execution, clearing, and financing. The service is already live for institutional clients using total return swaps across supported U.S. equity, index, and digital asset markets.

The post Ripple Prime Launches Delta One for US Equity Derivatives Trading appeared first on Blockonomi.