John Ternus' leadership may pivot Apple towards AI and new hardware innovations, potentially reshaping its competitive landscape.

The post Apple transitions leadership from Tim Cook to John Ternus after 15-year run appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The proposed stablecoin regulations in Singapore could enhance market stability and clarity, influencing global crypto regulatory trends.

The post Singapore MAS proposes stablecoin regulations, public comment open until Oct 2026 appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

GlobalWafers' US expansion could reshape the semiconductor landscape, enhancing domestic production and aligning with US industrial policy goals.

The post GlobalWafers outlines US expansion plans at SEMICON Taiwan, eyes $7.5B total investment appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Geopolitical tensions could lead to global economic instability, affecting energy markets and potentially driving up costs for consumers worldwide.

The post Oil prices climb as Trump threatens new strikes on Iran appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

China's opposition to Taiwan's participation highlights escalating geopolitical tensions, potentially impacting regional stability and international relations.

The post China opposes Taiwan’s participation in Pacific islands meeting, warns of consequences appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Unfazed by Trump’s Iran Threats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bitcoin Magazine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bitcoin Magazine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bitcoin Magazine

Strategy Resumes Bitcoin Buying After 10-Week Hiatus 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Saylor recently published an essay arguing that institutional custody and securities can expand Bitcoin without eliminating self-custody. On the same day, Strategy reported $2.0065 billion of net MSTR share-sale proceeds, $5.10 billion in its USD Reserve, $1.59 billion in a new USD Cash pool and a $136.4 million repurchase of STRC preferred stock.

Saylor's “The Bitcoin Reformation” defines sovereignty as the ability to choose among direct ownership and transparent institutional claims. Strategy's Aug. 24 Form 8-K shows the company raising, protecting and reallocating capital through exactly those layers while holding 840,447 BTC.

The essay remains attributed directly to Saylor; Strategy's formal policies appear separately in its filings. Shared timing doesn't establish a motive; it does place a broad adoption doctrine beside the capital system that benefits most directly from investors accepting Bitcoin-linked equity, preferred stock, debt, and custodial products as legitimate but distinct claims.

Saylor describes self-custody as a vital exit right and a check on intermediaries. He rejects turning that right into an obligation for every person and institution.

The distinction rests on risk allocation. Direct control removes a custodian while making the owner responsible for keys, backups, inheritance planning and protection from digital or physical threats. Institutional custody adds legal, counterparty and concentration risks while potentially providing segregation of duties, multiple approvals, audits, insurance and continuity.

The same logic shapes the essay's treatment of “paper Bitcoin.” Saylor says the phrase accurately captures an unbacked promise falsely presented as Bitcoin. He argues that it obscures more than it explains when applied equally to exchange-traded products, company shares, preferred stock, bonds and derivatives.

Those instruments remain different from Bitcoin and from one another. Their usefulness depends on the holder's needs for custody, income, liquidity, priority or risk transfer. A pension fund, bank, insurer, corporation and individual may all seek Bitcoin exposure through different legal forms.

The capital machine beside the manifesto

Strategy's disclosures show why those distinctions matter to the company.

The Aug. 24 filing said Strategy sold 18,261,118 MSTR shares during Aug. 17-23 for $2.0065 billion in net proceeds. The share count included sales that had yet to settle as of Aug. 21, and the disclosed cash balances included expected proceeds that had yet to settle as of Aug. 23.

Strategy allocated $300 million to its USD Reserve and $136.4 million to repurchase 1,431,212 STRC shares. The remaining proceeds increased the separately designated USD Cash pool. Strategy reported no Bitcoin purchases or sales during the week.

The cash categories carry different constraints. Strategy's USD Reserve remains governed by the policy disclosed in its June 29 Form 8-K. The board-approved policy restricts that reserve to preferred dividends and debt interest and requires management to maintain at least 12 months of expected obligations unless the board authorizes a reduction.

The June filing also records a separate board-authorized BTC Monetization Program. It permits specified Bitcoin sales to add as much as $1.25 billion to the reserve, cover or replenish dividend and interest payments, or fund authorized securities repurchases. The program remains discretionary and may be modified, suspended or terminated.

This week's activity ran in several directions at once: Strategy issued common stock, kept its Bitcoin balance unchanged, expanded dollar liquidity and bought back preferred stock. After the STRC purchase, $516.6 million remained under the broader Digital Credit Securities repurchase program.

Saylor's doctrine can accommodate that mix. Once transparent equity, preferred, debt and derivative claims are treated as components of a Bitcoin capital market, issuance, cash retention, repurchases and potential BTC monetization can function as parts of one capital-management system.

That is an analytical alignment between the essay and the disclosures. Saylor's reason for publishing remains unknown, and his essay creates no promise about Strategy's future capital allocation.

Bitcoin exposure comes in different legal claims

For holders, the practical issue is what they own, who controls the asset and which claims rank ahead of theirs.

Strategy makes the common-stock distinction explicit. Its published metric definitions say the company is neither an ETF nor an exchange-traded product, does not seek to make MSTR track its underlying Bitcoin and gives security holders no ownership interest or redemption right in that Bitcoin. An issuer-filed MSTR investor briefing describes common stock as the residual claim below debt and preferred stock.

Gross Bitcoin holdings therefore cannot describe every holder's economics. Common shareholders participate after senior claims and face new issuance, repurchases, cash allocation, corporate liabilities and the market's valuation of Strategy's financing operation. Preferred holders and creditors have different priority and payment terms, yet neither group owns a segregated portion of Strategy's Bitcoin.

The sovereignty question shifts based on the instrument. Direct holders focus on private-key control. Investors using custodians, funds or corporate securities also need to examine legal title, withdrawal rights, fees, dilution, seniority, liquidity, collateral, governance and counterparty exposure. The framing follows from the distinctions Saylor and Strategy disclose and does not imply that mediated exposure is inherently safer.

BIP-110 shows the other side of exit

Saylor extends his exit-based logic to Bitcoin governance. He presents BIP-110 as a test of whether one faction could impose a contested view of legitimate Bitcoin use through consensus rules. The BIP repository records the proposal as closed after a chain split and stalled mining in August.

In the essay's account, developers, miners, node operators, companies, exchanges and users can choose their participation, while broader adoption determines which network the economy follows. The episode supplies governance context for Saylor's thesis; it did not drive Strategy's disclosed capital actions.

The doctrine and the capital machine are internally consistent on one point: direct Bitcoin ownership remains the fallback, while a larger economy develops through mediated claims. Wider access expands the range of people and institutions that can hold Bitcoin-linked exposure. It also makes sovereignty depend increasingly on the terms of the claim.

The post How Saylor’s $2 billion capital loop is quietly rewriting the rules of Bitcoin ownership appeared first on CryptoSlate.

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

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

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

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

Bitcoin remained the largest destination

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Public node remained at block 20,770,893

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 82 pairs under review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Texas lacks power to feed the computers waiting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bitcoin miners taught computers how to yield

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four hidden moments can price an entire year

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You copy the receiving address from your wallet, switch to your exchange window, paste it and confirm the withdrawal. If what is known as a clipper is running on your computer, the address you pasted is no longer the one you copied. It belongs to the attacker, it is technically entirely valid, and your wallet has no reason to reject it. The money is gone as soon as the transaction is confirmed.

This type of attack is old, but over the summer of 2026 it changed in three ways that concern you directly as a holder: the route onto the machine, the operating system, and the question of how much is taken from you at all. This piece explains each of the three using the publications in which they were described, and ends by saying which check actually works.

Clipboard attacks explained: how malware swaps the wallet address you copied

A clipper is a malicious program that monitors the contents of the clipboard and replaces any crypto address it recognises with an address controlled by the attacker. That is the whole idea. Nothing is decrypted, no wallet file is opened, no password is guessed. The attack exploits the one moment in which an address leaves the secure area of your wallet and travels through the operating system as plain text.

What sets it apart from almost every other attack on crypto assets is that you do everything right and still lose. You copied the address correctly. Your wallet is not compromised. Your seed phrase sits untouched in the safe. The transaction you sign is exactly the transaction you see, only to a different recipient. That is why none of the precautions that protect against forged approvals or against key theft apply here.

Bitcoin is only one of the targets. If you are interested in the price of the largest crypto asset, you will find our current assessment in our bitcoin price prediction. For this piece, only one thing about Bitcoin matters: the address formats are publicly documented and easy to detect by machine, and that is precisely what makes them convenient for a clipper.

ClickFix: why you paste and run the malicious code yourself

ClickFix describes a deception in which a website places a command in your clipboard and then gets you to paste and run it yourself in your computer's command line. The name comes from the fact that the page acts out a problem for you and immediately offers the matching repair.

That is why this type of attack works so well. There is no email attachment for a virus scanner to check, and no download for your browser to flag as suspicious. The malicious code arrives as text in the clipboard, and the user carries out the execution with their own hand. From the operating system's point of view, the logged-in user entered a command. Which is exactly what they did.

The sequence in detail: what the Federal Office for Cybersecurity described

The Swiss Federal Office for Cybersecurity broke the sequence down into six steps in its weekly review of February 24, 2026. First the attackers manipulate a website or place an advertisement with a convincingly realistic window. Merely opening the page already copies the malicious code into the clipboard automatically, without anything having to be clicked. The window then claims a technical problem, usually a failed browser update or a CAPTCHA still to be solved.

The user is then instructed to enter innocuous-looking key combinations. These open the console, paste the prepared code and run it. At the end comes the download of a program that harvests login credentials and wallet data. The agency puts its most important recommendation unambiguously: be suspicious as soon as a website claims the browser needs updating, and never copy code from an unknown source directly into the command line. The notice deliberately names no specific command lines, because the attackers keep swapping them out anyway.

For you, that yields a rule of thumb that requires no technical knowledge. No reputable software anywhere has you paste a command from the clipboard into a black window in order to fix a browser problem or to prove that you are human. Anyone who asks you to do that is attacking you.

Every 500 milliseconds: how often a clipper reads the clipboard

On June 17, 2026, Microsoft described a Windows campaign that, by its own account, has been running since February 2026. The malware polls its command server and reads the clipboard roughly every 500 milliseconds. In doing so it looks not only for addresses but also harvests seed phrases and private keys as soon as they appear there.

Twice a second means, in practice: there is no window of time short enough. Between copying and pasting, a withdrawal rarely involves more than a few seconds, and that is orders of magnitude more than enough. The second part of the finding is at least as unpleasant. Anyone who ever copies their recovery words to the clipboard, for instance when moving to different wallet software, exposes them on an infected machine.

Bitcoin, Tron and Monero: which address formats the malware recognises

The variant documented by Microsoft recognises six address formats by their beginning and their length. For Bitcoin these are the legacy addresses beginning with a one and 32 to 36 characters long, the P2SH addresses starting with a three and of the same length, the Taproot addresses beginning bc1p with 40 to 64 characters, and the Bech32 addresses beginning bc1q in the same range. Added to these are Tron addresses, which begin with a capital T and count exactly 34 characters, and Monero addresses with a four or an eight at the start and exactly 95 characters.

This list is no secret knowledge, and it shows how mechanically the attack works. A pattern matches or it does not. Once it matches, the swap happens. Anyone who moves value between networks more often should keep in mind that detection can be extended to further formats with a few lines of code; the six above are the state of a single documented campaign, not an exhaustive list of what is possible.

Why the checksum of your bitcoin address is no help here

This is where the most dangerous misunderstanding lies. Crypto addresses carry a checksum, a few additional characters from which it can be computed whether the rest is unaltered. Many holders conclude from this that their wallet would inevitably reject a manipulated address.

That is a fallacy, and the reason is simple. The checksum detects a corrupted address. But the clipper does not deliver a corrupted address; it delivers the perfectly sound address of a different recipient. It is correctly constructed, its checksum is right, its network is right, and the wallet therefore confirms it without objection. A checksum protects against typing errors and transmission errors. Against a swap it does not, because from the point of view of the mathematics a swap is not an error at all.

USB sticks and scheduled tasks: how the clipper digs in and spreads

The Windows variant described by Microsoft arrives via prepared shortcut files on USB storage. After execution it searches the drive for ordinary documents, hides the originals and puts shortcuts with the same file names in their place. Anyone who opens the stick afterwards appears to see their files and in truth starts the malware.

To nest permanently, the software sets up two scheduled tasks with no end date. One ensures that every freshly inserted, still clean USB device is prepared as well, the other runs the actual harvesting. That explains why such infections return in households and small offices after they seemed already cleared: the next stick brings them back.

Tor and a local proxy: why the traffic stays inconspicuous

The campaign brings along a portable Tor client and routes its traffic through a local SOCKS5 proxy on port 9050. In practice that means there is no conspicuous connection to a suspicious server visible on the network for a firewall or a router to act against. Anyone relying on their home network to block malicious destinations has nothing to work with here.

A contract on BNB Smart Chain: why blocklists achieve little against ClickFix

On August 6, 2026, Microsoft Threat Intelligence described a group of compromised websites that serve ClickFix lures. The injected, Base64-encoded JavaScript code connects to an access node of BNB Smart Chain and queries a smart contract there for its instructions. What gets delivered includes Lumma Stealer, the remote control tools Xworm and AsyncRAT, and a downloader called MintsLoader. Microsoft speaks of campaigns that target thousands of devices daily in businesses and households worldwide.

The trick lies in where the instructions are stored. A domain can be taken down, a server seized. An entry in a public contract on a blockchain cannot be removed from outside, and it can only be changed by whoever holds the corresponding key. Defence thereby loses its most effective lever, and protection shifts from the network to the device and to the habits of its user. That a public blockchain of all things takes on this role is the uncomfortable punchline: the very property that makes it valuable as a ledger turns it here into an unreachable letterbox.

macOS is no safe harbour any more: the finding from early August

On August 7, 2026, The Hacker News reported on macOS malware written in Go and distributed via ClickFix lures. The analysis comes from the security researchers at the vendor Huntress. Affected, in their account, are Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Monero, Ethereum and XRP.

With that, an assumption falls that persists stubbornly among holders. The claim that a Mac is the safer choice for crypto custody was already more habit than finding, and the attack route via a pasted terminal command works under macOS for the same reason as under Windows: it rests on the user executing it themselves. The agency notice from February, too, names Windows and macOS explicitly side by side.

Partial draining instead of total loss: why a small shortfall can be more dangerous

One detail of the August 7 finding deserves particular attention. The malware contains a routine that first queries a wallet's balance and can then also withdraw a partial amount instead of the entire holding. The researcher quoted describes this as the first malware known to him with that capability.

Why that is worse than it sounds: an emptied wallet is noticed immediately. A shortfall that stays small enough may go unnoticed by anyone for months, and during that time the infection persists, keeps collecting credentials and travels onward via the next USB device. Anyone who only knows their holdings roughly will not notice such an outflow. A properly kept record of holdings is therefore also a security measure and not merely an obligation towards the tax office.

Address poisoning and clippers: two routes to the wrong address

On August 22, 2026, we described in detail a case of address poisoning in which around $2 million went to a lookalike address. The difference from today's subject matters, because it determines the right defence.

With address poisoning there is no malware on your computer. The attacker places a deceptively similar address in your transaction history, and later you reach for the wrong line yourself. What helps against that is an address book, a whitelist and a deliberate refusal to copy from the history. You will find exactly those steps in our guide to checking a receiving address, and we deliberately do not repeat them here.

With a clipper the malware sits on the device. It intervenes between copying and pasting, which is to say after every choice you make. An address book in wallet software helps only as far as the address does not travel via the clipboard. That is the core of the difference, and it explains why a holder should know both attacks even though the outcome looks the same in either case. Related, but again differently arranged, are forged approvals, which we covered under wallet drainers and signature approvals, as well as malicious browser extensions.

The hardware wallet display: the screen the clipper cannot reach

Against an address swap on the computer there is a defence that works regardless of how good the malware is. A hardware wallet shows the receiving address of an outgoing transaction on its own small screen before you confirm it. That device has no operating system for a clipper to nest in, and it shows what is actually being signed.

The benefit only materialises through reading it, however. Anyone who merely presses the confirm button on the device without comparing the characters against the intended destination has given the advantage away. It makes sense to compare the first five and the last five characters plus a group from the middle, because attackers deliberately generate their addresses so that the beginning and the end look similar. Which devices display the address in full and at a sufficient size differs noticeably; a look at our overview of hardware wallets is worth it before buying for precisely that reason.

Withdrawal whitelists at exchanges: what they achieve and what they do not

Most larger trading venues allow you to register withdrawal addresses once and to block withdrawals to all other addresses. The protection here is greater than it first appears: even if a clipper inserts a foreign address at the moment of withdrawal, the payment goes nowhere, because the destination is not approved.

The limit of this protection lies in creating the entry itself. If the address is pasted from the clipboard when it is first registered, it may have been swapped at exactly that moment, and from then on the wrong address is the approved one. That is why the comparison on the wallet display belongs at this point, not at the later withdrawal. It also makes sense to use the change period that many providers impose after a new address is added.

What is established and what remains assessment

Established are the technical details, because they come from the publications named and are dated there: the sequence of the ClickFix deception per the agency notice of February 24, 2026, the polling interval of around 500 milliseconds, the six address formats, the spread via USB storage, the two scheduled tasks and the Tor route per the Microsoft analysis of June 17, 2026, the querying of a contract on BNB Smart Chain per the Microsoft observation of August 6, 2026, and the macOS variant including partial withdrawal per the report of August 7, 2026.

Assessment, and labelled as such, is the reading of these points as one connected development. That an attack route spreads to a second operating system within a few weeks and moves its command channel onto a blockchain points to growing effort. How many devices are actually affected and how high the damage in Germany turns out to be is not known, and we deliberately give no figure for it. Nor does this text make any statement about who is behind the campaigns.

An assessment of how to handle the residual risk belongs here too. No procedure makes an infected computer trustworthy again. Anyone with well-founded suspicion that a clipper is running on their device should enter no further address from that device and type no further recovery words on it, but move their holdings from another, clean machine.

Defending against clipboard attacks: what to take away

1. Never paste a command into a command line or terminal that a website has placed in your clipboard. That is the only step that prevents the infection at all; everything else merely limits the damage. No browser update and no human verification asks for anything of the sort. If you keep assets on a device that is also used for browsing, move custody to a device with its own screen; the differences are shown in our overview of hardware wallets.
2. Read the receiving address on the display of the signing device, not on the computer screen. Compare the first five characters, the last five and a group from the middle. If you use a pure software solution, the limits of this approach are greater, because display and clipboard sit on the same system; how much the individual programs catch is set out in our overview of software wallets.
3. Register a withdrawal whitelist at your trading venue and check the address especially carefully when creating it. After that, a later address swap goes nowhere. Which providers offer this lock and how long their change periods run is in our rundown of crypto exchanges.
4. Keep a traceable record of your holdings. A partial withdrawal is only noticed if you know what should be there. That holds regardless of whether a tax return is due at the end of the year.

The two publications on which this text principally rests are ones you can read yourself: the technical analysis of the Windows campaign at Microsoft Security and the German-language description of the ClickFix sequence at the Federal Office for Cybersecurity.

(As of September 1, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

If you hold aUSDT, consistent industry reports give you until September 17, 2026 to return the token through the Alloy by Tether platform and take back the Tether Gold (XAUT) held as collateral. After that date, this route through the platform is closed to you. That is the whole action, and it takes a few minutes for as long as the platform is running.

What makes the case notable is something else: on the Ethereum blockchain, the outstanding amount has barely moved. We read the contract ourselves for this article on September 1, 2026, and used an archive node to work back to the day of the announcement. The result is set out in a table further down. It suggests that the vast majority of aUSDT has yet to be returned, with a good two weeks left on the clock.

This piece explains what aUSDT actually is, how redemption works, what hangs on it for tax, where to keep the Tether Gold you free up, and what the case teaches about token wind-downs in general. Alloy is not an isolated incident but the normal course of business in an industry where issuers retire products.

What is aUSDT, and why is Tether winding down the gold stablecoin?

aUSDT is a synthetic dollar, a token pegged in price to the US dollar but backed by gold rather than by cash or government bonds. You may know the mechanism from decentralised lending: you deposit an asset as collateral and receive a dollar unit worth less than what you put up.

The collateral here was XAUT, or Tether Gold in full. XAUT is a token that represents a claim on physical gold; one token corresponds to roughly one troy ounce, held in a Swiss vault. Depositing XAUT with Alloy allowed you to mint aUSDT against it. Because the gold collateral always had to be worth more than the dollar units issued, the arrangement is described as overcollateralised: the buffer absorbs swings in the gold price before the backing gives way.

The product launched in June 2024. Two years later, Tether is pulling the plug. According to the available reports, the company cites simply a lack of demand and a focus on its larger products, above all XAUT itself and the dollar stablecoin USDT. The platform has taken no new positions since the announcement, and nothing is being minted either.

For you as a holder, that changes the picture fundamentally. A token whose issuer closes the issuing desk loses its most important price anchor: the ability to swap it back for the collateral at any time. That is precisely the option that ends with the deadline.

By when do you have to redeem aUSDT? The September 17, 2026 deadline

The stated cut-off date is September 17, 2026. It follows from the three-month redemption window Tether granted when it announced the wind-down on June 17 and 18, 2026. Anyone who has not returned by then can no longer assert a claim on the underlying XAUT through the platform.

Two caveats go with this, and both matter more than they sound.

First, no time of day is known. None of the available sources names an hour at which the window closes, nor a time zone. Acting only on September 17 therefore means trusting that the platform will still be reachable throughout that day. That is a bet taken for no reason: the last day on which the action can safely be completed is September 16.

Second, the date rests on media reporting. We opened Tether's news page on September 1, 2026. Four items were listed there, the most recent dated August 13, 2026, and not one of them covers Alloy or aUSDT. The June statement on which all the reports rely is currently not findable through the company's public news overview. The outlets that reported it consistently include The Block, DailyCoin, CoinCentral and Coinpedia, each with the same date and the same deadline.

A plain recommendation follows: check the cut-off date in the application itself or with the provider's support before you redeem. For an irreversible deadline, do not rely on reporting alone, this article included.

The on-chain supply is not moving: 50 million aUSDT still sit in the contract

The aUSDT contract sits as an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain at address 0x9eEaD9CE15383cAEEd975427340B3A369410CFBF and uses six decimal places. The totalSupply() function returns how many units exist in total. We queried it on September 1, 2026, plus four historical blocks via an archive node, and cross-checked the current value with two independent providers.

The first value comes from the day after the announcement. Across 75 days, the amount has not fallen by a single unit. Between August 7 and August 23 it even rose by 20,642.05 units, and has been flat since.

That increase comes with a warning about the obvious false conclusion. Where the additional units came from cannot be read off the total supply alone. A mint by the issuer itself is as possible as an internal transfer or a technical operation in the contract. The number does not work as an accusation against anyone, and we expressly do not make one. All that is solid is the observation: the outstanding contract supply has not shrunk since the announcement.

How large is the affected holding really? The figures diverge widely

This is where it gets murky, and you should treat the numbers with scepticism even when they come from large providers.

The reports from June 2026 put aUSDT at a market capitalisation of around $1.27 million, backed by 14.73 kilograms of gold worth some $2.2 million. Market capitalisation here is nothing other than the circulating supply multiplied by the price.

Data provider CoinGecko, by contrast, listed the full contract supply of 50,020,647.05 units as circulating on September 1, 2026, at a quoted price of $1.08 and a market capitalisation of around $54 million. The underlying data set carried August 29, 2026 as its last update.

Both cannot be true at once. The range therefore runs from a good $1.2 million to around $54 million, a factor of 40. The most plausible explanation is that the overwhelming share of the contract supply sits with the issuer itself and was never in circulation; we cannot prove that without an analysis of holder addresses. So we do not smooth the range and give you both ends of it.

For your own decision the dispute is secondary anyway. What matters is not how much is affected in total, but whether you are affected. Check your wallets and your accounts at trading venues for the balance, and do it before the deadline runs, not after.

Redeeming with Alloy by Tether: how the aUSDT-for-XAUT return works

Redemption follows the same pattern as any collateralised loan, only without interest. You hand back the dollar units and your gold collateral is released. In practice, that means:

1. Establish your balance. Open the wallet you minted with at the time and check the aUSDT balance. If you no longer remember the address, a blockchain explorer helps: it shows the tokens held by any address.
2. Get access to the platform. Redemption runs through the Alloy interface, connected with the same wallet. Keep some ether ready for transaction fees; without a network fee, no transaction goes through on Ethereum.
3. Close the position. You return the aUSDT and thereby release the deposited XAUT. Before confirming, check that the gold amount shown matches your original collateral.
4. Check the result. After the transaction, the aUSDT balance should read zero and the XAUT holding should have risen accordingly. Save the transaction hash; it is your evidence for the tax office later.
5. Escalate early if something goes wrong. If the interface jams or a transaction fails, you still have time for support before the deadline. Two weeks out that time exists; on the cut-off date it does not.

If your aUSDT sits at an exchange rather than in your own wallet, the route is a different one: the trading venue then decides whether it handles the redemption for you, halts trading, or asks you to withdraw. Ask there actively instead of waiting for a notice. If you want to be more broadly set up, our overview of the best crypto exchanges shows the venues that carry Tether products and offer the swap at all.

What happens to the deposited gold if nobody redeems?

No German-language piece has asked this question so far, and there is no solid answer, because Tether has not commented publicly. All that can be said cleanly is what the reports support and what follows from that.

What is reported: after September 17, holders can no longer settle their claims through the platform. That wording does not rule out other routes, such as a support case or a later special arrangement. But nothing of the sort has been promised. A claim for which no process is provided any more is hard to enforce in practice, even if it survives in law.

That is exactly where the risk lies, and it is independent of the provider. In a wind-down, the burden of proof shifts to you: you then have to demonstrate that something is owed to you, instead of simply pressing a button. That is why the deadline deserves to be taken seriously even if your holding is small. The effort of redeeming today is minor; the effort of sorting it out afterwards is not.

Storing XAUT after redemption: exchange, software wallet or hardware wallet?

After the return you hold Tether Gold, which raises the custody question afresh. XAUT is a token like any other: whoever holds the private key controls the gold behind it.

For small holdings you intend to sell soon anyway, custody at a regulated trading venue is defensible. If you want to hold the gold as a longer-term hedge, more speaks for self-custody. A hardware wallet is a device that generates and stores your private key without ever releasing it to an internet-connected computer; transactions are approved on the device itself. Which models support Ethereum tokens such as XAUT cleanly is shown in our hardware wallet comparison.

One point is regularly overlooked: XAUT is a claim against an issuer, not a coin in a safe deposit box. Self-custody protects you against the failure of a trading venue and against losing your login details. It does not protect you against an issuer's decision to retire a product. The Alloy case demonstrates exactly that.

Tax: is redeeming aUSDT for XAUT a taxable exchange?

Under the reading common in Germany, swapping one cryptocurrency for another counts as a disposal of the asset given up. For private disposals under Section 23 of the Income Tax Act, that means a gain within the one-year holding period is taxable, and outside it generally is not. An exemption threshold applies, and once it is exceeded the entire gain becomes taxable.

Whether returning aUSDT for your own collateral is an exchange in that sense at all depends on the specific structure. If the position is treated like a collateralised loan, a mere unwinding would also come into question, which is not a disposal. In your case, this distinction can decide a four-figure sum, and it is not something an article can settle for you. Settle it with a tax adviser.

What you should do regardless: document the process without gaps. Date, transaction hash, amount of aUSDT, amount of XAUT received and the price at the time of the transaction belong in your records. Doing this as you go saves you the reconstruction in spring; the usual tools for it are in our overview of crypto tax software and portfolio trackers.

Tether is building up gold while switching off the gold derivative

At first glance the wind-down looks like a retreat from the gold business. The opposite is true, and that contradiction explains the decision better than any press release.

In the second quarter of 2026, Tether says it expanded its gold holdings further and reported growth in Tether Gold holdings of 9.5 percent; the quarterly report speaks of more than 146 tonnes of gold. XAUT itself, according to the available reports, most recently reached a market capitalisation of around $3 billion. For comparison: a single XAUT was valued at $4,446.66, or 3,825.55 euros, on September 1, 2026, according to CoinGecko.

The product being retired is therefore not the gold, but the detour via a synthetic dollar built on gold. That detour never found demand, while the plain gold token is growing. From the company's point of view, the wind-down is housekeeping in the product range. For the few holders who took the detour, it is nonetheless a deadline with consequences. Both are true at the same time, and the second half gets lost in international coverage. How tokenised gold was meant to work as a hedge is something we described in detail in our assessment of Tether Gold as a hedge.

If you want to read the original report: the piece by trade outlet The Block from June 18, 2026 summarises the wind-down of aUSDT and the Alloy platform. The site blocks automated access; in a browser it loads normally.

What the Alloy case teaches about token wind-downs

The real value of this deadline lies beyond aUSDT. Issuers retire products, exchanges delist trading pairs, networks are shut down. There have been several such cases in recent weeks. Anyone holding crypto assets should therefore have a fixed procedure for them.

Three points have proved their worth. First: every token you hold should have an issuer or a protocol whose announcements you actually follow. Second: for every position, note which address and which access route gets you to it; a claim is no use if the access is missing. Third: deadlines are not dealt with on the last day, because interfaces fail, fees rise and support takes time.

The gap in German-language coverage is also striking. Many outlets write about Tether's gold purchases, while almost none cover the parallel wind-down of the gold derivative with its fixed deadline. Anyone reading only German-language sources may not learn of this date at all. That is not an accusation against individual newsrooms, but it is a reason to check for yourself when you hold assets outside the big names.

Redeem aUSDT: what to take away

1. Check by September 16 whether you hold aUSDT, and return it. The last safe day to act falls before the cut-off, because nothing is known about the time the window closes. If your holding sits at a trading venue, ask there actively about the procedure; which venues carry Tether products at all is shown in our crypto exchange comparison.
2. Decide deliberately where the freed-up XAUT should sit. For short-term holdings a regulated trading venue is enough; for longer-term ones, more speaks for self-custody with a tested device from our hardware wallet comparison.
3. Document the transaction immediately and clarify the tax treatment. Transaction hash, amounts and prices belong in your records the same day, most easily with one of the tax tools and portfolio trackers; whether a taxable exchange has taken place is a question for a tax adviser.

(As of September 1, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is documented and what remains assessment

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

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

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

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

What a notice of this kind does and does not say

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

Check the authorisation yourself: company database and MiCA register

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excluded countries and identity verification: what happens before you apply

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

What you know before you upload your identity documents

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

Checking a USDT cashback card: what you take away

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

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

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

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

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

Mantle price analysis: where the MNT price stands right now

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

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

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

Is the Mantle downtrend broken or only interrupted?

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

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

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

What RSI and moving averages mean for a Mantle entry

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

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

What trading volume reveals about demand for Mantle

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

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

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

Which structural factors speak for Mantle

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

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

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

What speaks for buying Mantle at the current price

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

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

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

What speaks against buying Mantle at the current price

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

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

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

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

How you can buy Mantle at the current price

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

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

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

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

Is Mantle a good buy at current prices?

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

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

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

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

Buying Mantle: what to take away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the judgment does not address

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Result: exactly two of these entries concern crypto assets.

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

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

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

What this analysis cannot do

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

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

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

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

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

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

The sequence is manageable once you know the order.

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

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

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

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

What is settled and what remains open in crypto lending

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taxing crypto lending: what to take away

Three steps, in this order.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ripple has unlocked 1 billion XRP from its escrow wallets as part of the company’s regular monthly release, according to blockchain transaction tracker Whale Alert.

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

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

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

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

Key Points

• Andrew Macdonald, Uber’s President, forecasts that driver’s licenses and personal car ownership will become obsolete in 15-20 years
• Macdonald describes privately owned vehicles as extremely inefficient assets, unused 98% of the time
• The cost of new vehicles has surged 30% in the last six years, diminishing the appeal of ownership
• Uber has abandoned its in-house self-driving car development, choosing instead to collaborate with Waymo and Waabi
• CEO Dara Khosrowshahi supports this timeline, suggesting robots could handle the majority of rides

A senior executive at Uber believes we’re approaching the twilight of an American tradition: owning cars and holding driver’s licenses may soon become relics of the past as self-driving technology and shared transportation redefine mobility.

A Transportation Revolution on the Horizon

During an appearance on entrepreneur Harry Stebbings’ 20VC podcast, Andrew Macdonald, who serves as Uber’s President and Chief Operating Officer, outlined his vision for transportation’s future.

According to Macdonald, the next 15 to 20 years will witness a dramatic transformation where bicycles, electric scooters, mass transit systems, and self-driving cars replace personal vehicle ownership for most individuals.

“Nobody’s going to have their driver’s license because you’ll be able to get around,” Macdonald said.

This prediction challenges a deeply ingrained cultural milestone. For countless American teenagers, obtaining a driver’s license at age 16 represents freedom and independence. Macdonald suggests this tradition may become obsolete as transportation alternatives proliferate.

The economics of car ownership increasingly support this shift. Vehicle prices have jumped 30% in just six years, while cars remain parked and unused for the vast majority of their existence.

“The individually owned car is the most inefficient asset that anyone owns,” Macdonald said. “It sits idle 98% of the day. It’s depreciating. The ongoing operating costs are actually high.”

Beyond the purchase price, vehicle owners face continuous expenses including insurance premiums and maintenance, even during periods when their cars aren’t being driven.

Uber’s Pivot to Platform Provider

Uber has fundamentally changed its approach to autonomous vehicles. Rather than investing in proprietary self-driving technology, the company now focuses on serving as a marketplace connecting autonomous vehicle providers with customers.

The ride-hailing giant has forged partnerships with Waymo and Waabi to integrate their autonomous fleets into Uber’s existing platform. This strategic pivot allows Uber to capitalize on the autonomous vehicle revolution without shouldering the massive research and development expenses.

CEO Dara Khosrowshahi articulated a comparable vision during his appearance on The Diary of a CEO podcast earlier this year.

“You can imagine the majority of our trips being fulfilled by robots of some kind,” Khosrowshahi said. “Probably not 10 years from now, but you go 15 to 20 years from now, you’re going to start getting there.”

Self-driving vehicles are already operational in multiple metropolitan areas across the country. Uber has begun compensating drivers to assist in training artificial intelligence systems that will power future autonomous fleets.

Meanwhile, competitor Lyft has started paying former drivers to maintain and clean self-driving vehicles that are gradually replacing traditional ride-hailing positions.

As Uber’s most tenured active employee since joining in 2012, Macdonald brings significant institutional knowledge to his predictions. CEO Khosrowshahi has praised him as “an execution machine.”

These forecasts from Uber’s leadership team signal a transportation revolution already in motion, as the ride-hailing industry steadily transitions toward an automated future with diminishing reliance on human drivers.

The post Uber Executive Forecasts the End of Driver’s Licenses Within Two Decades appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• Jim Cramer maintains a bullish stance on Micron despite recent volatility triggered by Samsung’s disappointing buyback announcement
• The company reported fiscal Q3 revenue of $41.46 billion, representing a 346% year-over-year surge, with non-GAAP EPS of $25.11 exceeding expectations by 24%
• With $100 billion in contracted AI revenue secured through 2030, Micron’s HBM and DRAM production capacity is completely booked through 2027
• At a forward P/E ratio of approximately 6, Micron trades at a fraction of Intel’s 68.97 and AMD’s 61
• Cramer identified Micron as his preferred choice among four essential memory chip manufacturers, including SanDisk, Seagate, and Western Digital

Jim Cramer continues to champion Micron Technology, arguing the memory chip giant remains severely undervalued despite share price fluctuations driven by developments among South Korean competitors.

Micron Technology, Inc., MU

While Micron shares have surged approximately 254% in 2026, a recent decline has drawn investor attention. According to Cramer, the downturn has virtually nothing to do with Micron’s business performance.

The catalyst was Samsung’s shareholder return program announcement. Market participants deemed it insufficient when compared to SK Hynix’s earlier commitment. SK Hynix had already revealed a plan to repurchase and retire approximately $28.6 billion of its shares between August 20 and November 19.

Samsung was anticipated to unveil returns surpassing $72 billion. The actual announcement significantly underdelivered against those expectations.

“The Samsung buyback was regarded as not good enough,” Cramer observed, describing the market’s response as “chimerical” considering Micron’s impressive financial performance.

The Financial Case for Micron Is Compelling

Micron delivered fiscal Q3 revenue of $41.46 billion, marking a 346% increase from the prior year. Non-GAAP earnings per share reached $25.11, surpassing consensus forecasts by 23.8%. The company achieved a record non-GAAP gross margin of 84.9%, compared to just 39% twelve months earlier.

The memory maker holds $22 billion in customer deposits from 16 strategic partners, secured with take-or-pay agreements and minimum pricing guarantees. The company has locked in $100 billion worth of AI-related contracted revenue extending through 2030.

Both HBM and DRAM production capacity remain fully committed through 2027. Industry projections indicate AI data centers will account for approximately 70% of worldwide memory chip output in 2026.

Cramer highlighted Micron along with SanDisk, Seagate, and Western Digital as four memory chip manufacturers he considers “indispensable” in the current market. He connected the sector’s momentum to remarks from Elon Musk, who stated during SpaceX’s Q2 earnings discussion that memory availability has emerged as the primary constraint for AI data center expansion.

“While I acknowledge that I am not early, I do not think I am late,” Cramer explained to his audience.

The Samsung Connection Explained

The link between Samsung and Micron extends beyond a single disappointing capital return program. Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron collectively dominate roughly 90% of worldwide DRAM production. Developments affecting one company are frequently interpreted as indicators for the entire group.

Samsung also initiated mass production of HBM4 in February 2026, establishing a first-mover advantage. Micron continues to focus on shipping HBM3E. This technological gap provides some market participants with justification for concerns about Micron’s competitive positioning in next-generation products.

An additional challenge exists in Micron’s regulatory constraints. The company’s CHIPS Act funding agreement prohibits significant share buyback programs until December 9, 2026. Meanwhile, Samsung and SK Hynix maintain the flexibility to repurchase billions worth of their own shares. Micron currently lacks this option.

Nevertheless, institutional capital continues flowing toward Micron. Hedge fund ownership expanded from 154 to 184 funds between Q1 and Q2. Coatue Management dramatically increased its Micron holdings by 1,794% to $3.6 billion. The fund managed by George Soros nearly multiplied its position eightfold during Q2.

Micron’s forward price-to-earnings ratio stands at approximately 6, creating a stark contrast with Intel’s 68.97 and AMD’s 61. Following a visit to Micron’s Boise, Idaho manufacturing facility, Cramer expressed conviction that the demand environment is genuine. The company has pledged over $250 billion through 2035 toward expanding its U.S. production capabilities.

The post Why Jim Cramer Remains Bullish on Micron (MU) Despite Samsung Buyback Fallout appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Highlights

• GRAM token advanced approximately 2% toward $1.40 following Telegram’s initial Gram Wallet distribution to select users
• Daily trading activity spiked 137% in response to the wallet launch news
• The Gram Wallet serves as Telegram’s native self-custodial solution, enabling fee-free transactions and transfers
• Blockchain validators greenlit the underlying smart contract infrastructure prior to deployment
• Technical analysis shows GRAM encountering resistance between $1.39–$1.45, with downside support identified at $1.33–$1.36

The GRAM token experienced an approximate 2% price increase, reaching the $1.40 level after Telegram’s founder Pavel Durov revealed on August 31 that the messaging platform had begun distributing Gram Wallet to a select group of users. The digital asset momentarily peaked at $1.46 before experiencing pullback pressure, while market activity exploded with a 137% increase in trading volume coinciding with the announcement.

Through his official Telegram channel, Durov detailed the deployment strategy, explaining that the platform would “gradually roll it out to our billion+ users over the next couple of weeks.”

The Gram Wallet represents an integrated solution embedded within the Telegram application itself, positioned to serve as the primary wallet option in user configurations. Operating on a self-custodial framework, the wallet empowers users to maintain direct control of their digital assets instead of relying on third-party custodians.

This integrated wallet solution enables zero-cost transfers, transaction processing, and in-app purchases throughout the Telegram ecosystem. Additionally, users gain access to purchase Telegram Collectibles, encompassing digital items such as unique gifts, premium usernames, and exclusive phone numbers.

Prior to initiating the phased distribution, network validators conducted a thorough review and approval of the smart contract infrastructure supporting Gram Wallet. The contract architecture incorporates forward-compatible upgrade mechanisms, enabling future enhancements without necessitating user fund migrations to replacement contracts. This design choice minimizes user friction while simultaneously reducing vulnerability to phishing schemes that exploit fake migration notifications.

According to official figures, Telegram’s user base exceeded one billion monthly active participants during 2025. The messaging giant has yet to publish specific adoption benchmarks or disclose the exact number of accounts granted access during this initial distribution wave.

Evolution From Toncoin to GRAM

This wallet deployment arrives approximately ten weeks following Toncoin’s official transformation to GRAM. The community-driven rebrand secured approval through an overwhelming 81.22% favorable vote and became official on June 15. Importantly, the naming transition maintained token continuity—no new cryptocurrency was created, and existing holders faced no swap requirements.

When Durov initially floated the rebrand proposal in early June, GRAM experienced significant market enthusiasm with an almost 19% rally, climbing to approximately $2.21 before experiencing partial retracement.

Technical Analysis and Critical Price Zones

Examining the four-hour timeframe reveals GRAM’s recovery trajectory from a session low of $1.332 to roughly $1.385. The upper Bollinger Band currently positions near $1.386, establishing the $1.385–$1.40 range as the immediate resistance threshold.

Breaking decisively above $1.40 would bring the $1.45–$1.46 territory into focus, a region where profit-taking emerged during the wallet announcement-driven rally. The Average Directional Index registers around 29, suggesting moderate directional momentum.

Market analyst CryptoJack highlighted via X platform that GRAM is currently confined within a descending wedge formation on the 4-hour timeframe, identifying this chart pattern as either a legitimate breakout opportunity or a potential bull trap, and emphasized active monitoring of the breakout scenario.

The Awesome Oscillator maintained negative territory at roughly minus 0.029, indicating that bearish pressure persists despite the recent price recovery action.

The post Telegram’s Gram Wallet Launch Drives GRAM Token Surge with 137% Volume Spike appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Highlights

• Strive acquired 1,800 BTC for $143 million during the Aug. 24-28 period at an average cost of $79,431 per Bitcoin
• The company’s Bitcoin reserves now total 23,156 BTC, securing its position as the fifth-largest public corporate holder
• TD Cowen increased ASST’s price target from $28 to $32 while maintaining its Buy recommendation
• ASST shares climbed approximately 6% on Monday and have surged nearly 165% in the last six months
• Strategy also resumed Bitcoin accumulation last week, acquiring 4,603 BTC for approximately $370 million

Strive, the publicly listed Bitcoin treasury corporation, has secured a position among the top five corporate Bitcoin holders following its acquisition of 1,800 BTC last week for roughly $143 million.

The transaction occurred between Aug. 24 and Aug. 28, with an average cost of $79,431 per Bitcoin, fees included. CEO Matt Cole announced the purchase on Monday through an official Form 8-K disclosure.

This acquisition elevated Strive’s cumulative Bitcoin reserves to 23,156 BTC, rising from 21,356 BTC in the previous week. During the preceding week, the firm had already accumulated 1,110 BTC for approximately $81.5 million at an average rate of $73,409 per coin.

The recent transaction propelled Strive beyond Bullish, the cryptocurrency exchange and digital asset firm, securing the fifth position among publicly traded corporate Bitcoin holders. The company commemorated the achievement on X with a concise statement: “Strive to five.”

ASST shares were trading approximately 6% higher on Monday morning at $23. The equity has climbed nearly 165% during the past six months.

Strive, Inc., ASST

Adviser Adam Livingston observed that the most recent acquisition expanded Strive’s Bitcoin portfolio by approximately 8.4% within just five trading days.

TD Cowen Increases Price Target

TD Cowen reacted to the announcement by elevating its price target on ASST by more than 14%, moving from $28 to $32, while retaining a Buy rating. The investment firm stated the adjustment reflects treasury operations that have “substantially surpassed” its earlier projections.

The analysts currently anticipate Strive will acquire nearly 4,300 BTC during the third quarter, representing an increase of more than 180% from their previous estimate of just 1,500 BTC. They subsequently forecast an additional 3,000 BTC acquisition in the fourth quarter.

These projections would place Strive’s aggregate holdings above 27,100 BTC by year’s end. Such a figure would position the company within striking distance of claiming the fourth spot, currently occupied by Adam Back’s Bitcoin Standard Treasury Company with just over 30,000 BTC.

TD Cowen maintains its year-end Bitcoin valuation estimate at approximately $97,500, combined with a 3x multiple on Strive’s anticipated Bitcoin treasury appreciation.

Strive’s year-to-date BTC yield climbed to 40.8% as of its Aug. 28 filing, increasing from below 37% in early June.

Strategy Resumes Bitcoin Accumulation

Strive isn’t the sole company accumulating Bitcoin. Strategy, the world’s largest corporate Bitcoin holder, also resumed purchasing last week following an approximately 10-week hiatus.

Strategy purchased 4,603 BTC for nearly $370 million at an average cost of $80,318. This acquisition pushed its total reserves back above 845,000 BTC. The company had suspended acquisitions in late June to concentrate on replenishing cash reserves.

Both corporations have been accumulating during a broader Bitcoin resurgence. The upward movement commenced on Aug. 19 following the US Treasury’s announcement to double long-term bond repurchases, driving yields downward and boosting risk assets. Bitcoin has since rallied more than 23%, recently trading above $81,000.

TD Cowen’s revised forecast now projects Strive concluding 2026 with 27,156 BTC, nearly 4,300 more than its earlier estimate.

The post Strive (ASST) Climbs 6% Following Major Bitcoin Acquisition, Enters Top 5 Corporate Holders appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• Dogecoin declined 2.48% to $0.082 on August 31, marking three consecutive days of net selling pressure
• Large holders possessing 1M–100M DOGE have offloaded approximately 260 million tokens starting August 21
• Futures open interest contracted from $1.58 billion down to $1.27 billion as long positions get unwound
• DOGE exchange-traded funds have attracted $800,000 in fresh capital since August 17, bringing total net assets to $12.33 million
• Critical support level established at $0.082; failure to hold could trigger a decline to August’s $0.069 low

The popular meme cryptocurrency currently sits at $0.082 following a weekly decline exceeding 12%. Net selling activity has persisted for three straight days beginning August 28, with DOGE sales outpacing purchases by approximately $21 million throughout this period.

Large wallet holders represent a significant component of the current narrative. According to Santiment tracking data, addresses containing between 1 million and 100 million DOGE have liquidated roughly 260 million tokens beginning August 21. Meanwhile, smaller whale addresses holding 100,000–1 million tokens picked up approximately 10 million DOGE during the identical timeframe — a behavior typically associated with distribution cycles rather than strategic accumulation.

Futures Activity Points to Weakening Conviction

Open interest in Dogecoin futures contracts fell from $1.58 billion to $1.27 billion, suggesting traders are closing out leveraged long positions. Liquidations of long positions totaled $5.96 million on August 31, significantly exceeding the $833,000 worth of short position liquidations recorded during the same trading session.

The aggregate long/short ratio registered 0.87 on August 31, indicating a higher concentration of bearish positions compared to bullish ones. Trading volume in futures markets surged 99% to reach $1.34 billion, reflecting heightened market participation as participants respond to ongoing price volatility.

Technical analyst Trader Tardigrade identified a concerning formation on the monthly inverted chart, observing that Dogecoin developed a Hanging Man candlestick pattern at a key resistance zone. He emphasized this marks the third occurrence of this identical setup, with both previous instances preceding significant price declines. His projected downside target sits at $0.07.

Institutional Products Show Modest Demand

Countering the bearish technical landscape, institutional participation has demonstrated modest growth. Dogecoin ETF products have registered two consecutive weeks of positive inflows accumulating $800,000 since August 17. This represents a reversal from July’s challenging period, which saw net outflows of $525,000 from these investment vehicles.

Aggregate net assets held within DOGE ETF products currently total $12.33 million, representing 0.09% of Dogecoin’s overall $12.87 billion market capitalization.

DOGE funding rates flipped to positive territory, registering 0.0010% on Monday, offering a marginally constructive signal from perpetual futures markets.

From a charting perspective, DOGE is consolidating within a descending triangle formation. Immediate support is positioned at $0.082. Overhead resistance zones include $0.088, followed by the 200-day exponential moving average at $0.093, and subsequently $0.102.

The Relative Strength Index registers 36 on the four-hour timeframe, while the MACD indicator has crossed into slightly negative territory. Dogecoin maintains its position above the 100-day EMA at $0.081 and the 50-day EMA at $0.078, though it continues trading beneath the 200-day EMA at $0.093.

A decisive break below the $0.082 support zone could catalyze a retracement toward $0.069, corresponding to August’s monthly low.

The post Dogecoin (DOGE) Under Pressure as Whales Exit and Short Interest Climbs appeared first on Blockonomi.

[PRESS RELEASE – Garabito, Costa Rica, September 1st, 2026]

Frogbet, a new cryptocurrency casino and sportsbook, has officially launched at frogbet.com, debuting a catalog of 70 original games developed entirely in-house alongside more than 7,000 titles from providers including Pragmatic Play, Hacksaw Gaming and BGaming.

Every Frogbet original is provably fair, allowing players to cryptographically verify the outcome of any bet at any time. The proprietary catalog spans in-house slots, eight blackjack variants, poker, and a full range of instant games including Mines, Dice, Plinko, Crash, Limbo and Keno — none of which areavailable on any other platform. According to the team, Frogbet’s proprietary slots are the first original games in the industry to ship with built-in bonus buys, letting players purchase direct entry into feature rounds.

The originals suite is built around a high-volume betting engine. Players can place up to 100,000 instant bets in a single click, with all rounds settled immediately, and a built-in strategy builder lets players define their own rules and automate their play hands-free.

“Original games are usually a side menu at crypto casinos — at Frogbet they are the product. We built all 70 games ourselves, made every one of them verifiable, and then built the tools serious players actually want: bonus buys on originals, six-figure batch betting, and a strategy builder. And when you win, the money is in your wallet in seconds, not days, ” said a Frogbet spokesperson.

Withdrawals are processed instantly, 24 hours a day, with payouts typically reaching players’ wallets within seconds of the request. The platform is fully crypto-native, supporting deposits and withdrawals in more than 50 cryptocurrencies including BTC, ETH, USDT and SOL, and pairs the casino with a complete sportsbook offering live in-play betting.

New players receive a 150% deposit match plus 100 free spins on their first deposit. Ongoing promotions at launch include a $10,000 Weekly Race, a $500 Daily Raffle and a Weekly Jackpot Lottery. Frogbet’s six-tier VIP program runs from Bronze to Elite with weekly cashback of up to 25%, and rakeback that accrues on every bet and can be claimed every 15 minutes.

Through the platform’sVIP Transfer program, players who hold VIP status at another casino can wager $500, share their current level with support via live chat, and be upgraded to the matching Frogbet tier instantly.

“The crypto gambling audience has become the most sophisticated betting audience in the world. They check the seeds, they hunt bonus buys, they automate strategies. Frogbet is built for exactly that player,” the spokesperson added.

Frogbet’s originals lobby, sportsbook and full game catalog are live now at frogbet.com.

About FrogbetZ

Frogbet is a crypto-native online casino and sportsbook offering 70 provably fair original games built in-house, more than 7,000 titles from leading providers, a full sports betting product, and instant cryptocurrency withdrawals, 24/7. Frogbet is intended for players aged 18 and over. Players are encouraged to gamble responsibly. Learn more at frogbet.com, or follow Frogbet on X at x.com/frogbetcom and on Telegram at t.me/frogbetcom.

The post Frogbet Launches Crypto Casino With 70 In- House Original Games, Instant Withdrawals and a $10,000 Weekly Race appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin’s August rally is facing a tougher test as fresh ETF demand meets growing expectations for tighter U.S. monetary policy. The cryptocurrency is holding above $77,100, but its next move may hinge on whether fresh liquidity can offset rising rate risks, according to Bitfinex Alpha.

This tension was evident in Bitcoin’s recent price action. Bitcoin closed above $80,000 on August 27 for the first time since May, ending at $80,256 after briefly reaching $81,500. It later fell to $76,857 after Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh’s Jackson Hole remarks pushed markets to reassess the outlook for U.S. rates.

Bitcoin Holds Up Despite Rate Fears

The pullback came as markets raised the implied probability of a September rate increase from the mid-30% range to about 60%. Warsh also stressed the Federal Reserve’s 2% inflation target and suggested that monetary policy may not yet be restrictive enough.

Despite the shift in rate expectations, Bitcoin showed some resilience. It closed Friday only about 3% lower and remained above previous range highs through the weekend. Bitfinex identified $77,100 as an important volume-node support level after it helped define the cryptocurrency’s August breakout.

Continued ETF demand may have helped support that resilience. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded $924.5 million in net inflows last week despite $202 million leaving the products on Friday. The funds had attracted $3.04 billion during the previous nine sessions, showing continued demand despite shifting expectations around U.S. monetary policy.

Beyond ETFs, stablecoin liquidity also remains relevant to the broader crypto market because it can provide capital for digital assets. However, the Bitfinex report points more directly to ETF demand as a key driver of Bitcoin’s current liquidity conditions.

Market Positioning Remains Stable

Bitcoin’s derivatives market has remained relatively controlled during the rally, according to the report. Perpetual futures open interest reached $55.6 billion, about 20% above the start of August, while funding rates and futures basis remained contained.

Meanwhile, on-chain data points to a shift in Bitcoin ownership. Wallets holding 1,000 to 10,000 BTC have reduced their balances by about 50,500 BTC since late June, while exchange and ETF custodial wallets have added roughly 59,100 BTC.

The post Bitcoin’s Rally Faces Fresh Test as Rate Fears Grow: Bitfinex appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Asset manager Bitwise said that its XRP ETF (XRP) has crossed $500 million in assets under management (AUM) just nine months after launch. The fund’s page showed $502.7 million in net assets across 364.75 million XRP last Friday and $507.23 million after Monday’s close.

“14 years in, and the $XRP community continues to be unstoppable,” the firm wrote in its announcement on X, adding it was “grateful for the chance to expand mainstream access to XRP.”

14 years in, and the ripple:native community continues to be unstoppable.

The Bitwise XRP ETF (XRP) crossed $500,000,000 in AUM—just 9 months after launch.

Grateful for the chance to expand mainstream access to XRP and steward investors’ exposure to the opportunities in this… pic.twitter.com/sgeMDiY5ce

— Bitwise (@Bitwise) August 31, 2026

First Half Closed at $299 Million

The fund logged $25.9 million in trading volume on its first day on the New York Stock Exchange on November 20, one week after Canary Capital’s XRP ETF (XRPC) opened the US spot category with a nearly $60 million debut.

It was Bitwise’s 49th investment product at launch, and the new funds even outdrew Bitcoin and Ethereum products in their first weeks, with cumulative inflows reaching $756 million by December 1.

Net assets stood at $241.4 million at the end of December and $299.1 million on June 30, according to the trust’s 10-Q for the second quarter. Investors added roughly 181.5 million XRP worth $269.9 million through share creations over the first half, including 105.3 million XRP worth $137.9 million in the June quarter alone.

Bitwise charges a 0.34% sponsor fee, which it waived entirely on the first $500 million of trust assets through December 19, 2025.

Bullish Resilience

Over the same six months, the trust recorded a $176.6 million net decrease from operations, which the filing attributed primarily to “XRP price depreciation from $1.82 on December 31, 2025, to $1.04 on June 30, 2026.”

The token then climbed from $1.00 to a multi-month high of $1.70 between August 19 and 22, slid below $1.40 by Friday’s close, and changed hands at $1.38 on Monday, per CoinGecko.

US XRP funds took in $110.49 million last week, their best weekly haul since early December, pushing cumulative net inflows to a record $1.66 billion on Friday, according to SoSoValue data. Every trading day landed in double digits, topped by $28.14 million on Wednesday.

Bitwise’s fund leads that table with more than $600 million in cumulative net inflows, ahead of Canary’s XRPC at $483 million and Franklin Templeton’s XRP fund (XRPZ) at $462.86 million.

The post Largest XRP ETF Crosses $500 Million in Assets Just 9 Months After Launch appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Ripple’s cross-border token has declined by nearly 7% over the past week, yet numerous analysts remain optimistic that a renewed uptrend could be on the horizon.

Many believe the price could shift into an “up-only” phase from here, while others expect a substantial pullback before any major increase.

‘Breakout Confirmed’

As of press time, XRP trades at around $1.38 (per CoinGecko), boasting a market capitalization of approximately $86 billion. While the current level marks a clear drop from the local top seen earlier in August, Ali Martinez still views it as a constructive development.

The popular analyst observed the asset’s price action and assumed that the breakout was confirmed after XRP supposedly “cleared resistance.” He thinks the next target is $1.70.

Shortly after, Martinez touched on the token again, praising the solid institutional interest, which signals “a notable increase in demand.” Spot XRP ETFs have indeed attracted significant capital lately. Last week, for instance, the inflows exceeded $110 million for the first time since December, 2025. Moreover, the ETFs have recorded nine consecutive green days, something last observed eight months ago.

Other analysts recently making XRP bets include X users Diana and XRP Update. The former claimed that the asset currently sits directly on the $1.38 support and the next Elliot wave targets point to a short-term surge to $1.88 and an eventual explosion to $7.07.

“There’s another interesting signal on the 4H chart: RSI has recovered to roughly 47.5 and moved back ABOVE its signal line near 44.7. That means momentum is attempting to turn bullish again while XRP is STILL sitting near support – very different from chasing the move when RSI was above 80,” the analyst added.

For their part, XRP Update opined that the token has broken out of a downtrend and could now be gearing up for a wild rally toward $2.50, $3.50, $6, and finally $13.

Going South?

It is important to note that some analysts, like Crypto Lens, expect XRP to tumble before posting new gains. In their view, the asset may first retreat to $1.17, then begin a new bull run toward $1.90, $3.10, and $5.20. For their part, ChartNerd opined that XRP failed to reclaim its 50-week EMA for the second week in a row.

“I warned that consecutive weekly closes below the 50 could trigger a deeper correction, and we have retraced 22% thus far. The 20 EMA sits below as a short-term support floor ($1.27),” they added.

The post Ripple (XRP) Breakout Confirmed? Analyst Sets the Next Big Target appeared first on CryptoPotato.

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

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

Very Different Usage Trends

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

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

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

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

Is Cardano Struggling?

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

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

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

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