The Iran-Oman agreement may ease geopolitical tensions, potentially stabilizing oil markets and influencing future global energy strategies.

The post Oil prices rise as Iran and Oman agree on Strait of Hormuz shipping route appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

China's yuan push could reshape global trade dynamics, weaken dollar influence, and impact commodity markets, notably gold price trends.

The post China accelerates yuan internationalization, bypasses dollar in trade appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The recent escalation in Yemen could destabilize the region further, impacting markets and increasing the risk of broader Middle Eastern conflict.

The post Houthi strikes in Yemen kill dozens, Saudi Arabia warns of further attacks appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Iran's proposed fee could heighten regional tensions, impact global shipping costs, and challenge diplomatic relations with the U.S.

The post Iran proposes 5-7% fee on Strait of Hormuz cargo amid US opposition appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Pendle Finance's expansion to Morpho enhances DeFi's accessibility, offering users diversified, automated yield strategies with reduced risk.

The post Pendle Finance adds PT-USDai and PT-sUSDD on Morpho with up to 27% APY appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

“We Need Clarity,” Says Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo

Ex-governor of New York and Democrat Andrew Cuomo has said lawmakers need to hurry up and get the “highly political” Clarity Act over the line. 

Cuomo, who is also the director of crypto exchange OKX, said that Democrats and Republicans were mainly locking horns over the ethics language in the bill. 

A number of lawmakers are hoping the Clarity Act — which would set in stone crypto regulation in the U.S. — gets passed before Congress departs for August recess. The bill was passed by the House of Representatives last year but sticking points remain. 

“We need clarity,” Cuomo said Thursday on CNBC’s Squawk Box. “Tell me the rules — I want to play the game fairly, but you have to tell me the boundaries, and that’s what the Clarity Act is all about.”

Cuomo added that Democrats wanted to “raise in the campaign” the issue of the Trump family making money in crypto — and so were continuing to bring up the issue of ethics. 

A new draft of the Clarity Act started circulating that tackled the issue of ethics, banning government officials from promoting or making money from crypto. 

Some Democrats have criticized President Trump’s crypto business interests, with some alleging conflicts of interest as his family has made money from meme coins and the decentralized finance protocol, World Liberty Financial. The White House has always said there have been no conflicts of interest.

New language has been drafted, bipartisanly, adding changes to the ethics section of the bill. The White House is reportedly looking over it this week. 

Cuomo continued: “I think Democrats have to be a little careful because you want to talk about conflicts of interest, meanwhile you have Democrats who are buying stocks and they have inside information also.”

He warned: “And again, the world is passing us by. OKX, we’re doing gangbusters in Europe, and they’re passing regulations, and the technology is flourishing.”

“When you pass the regulations, and you allow innovation to develop, it takes off, and that’s what’s happening around the world, and it’s not happening here in the U.S. because of the Clarity Act,” he added. 

This post “We Need Clarity,” Says Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Breez Announces Glow, an Open Source Bitcoin to Stablecoins Progressive Web App

Developed by Breez in partnership with Bitcoin Spark, the Glow app lets users send stablecoins from their Bitcoin balance, while empowering developers to build better user experiences without having to worry about the difficult parts of building on top of Bitcoin. Breez’s SDK takes care of asset exchange in the background while supporting lightning payments through its Spark integration. 

“Glow is a Bitcoin app for everyone,” said the company in a press release shared with Bitcoin Magazine. Users can access the app on both Apple and Android app stores. Glow re-invents the Bitcoin wallet experience, deviating from the seed phrase backup flow that many wallets attempt to introduce users to. Instead, Glow leverages the Passkey standard engineered and now encouraged by the Silicon Valley giants, which makes passwords and, in this case, pass phrases a thing of the past. Despite the change, Glow promises self-custody and cryptographic control over funds to its users, in an auditable software package. 

As an MIT-licensed, free and open source progressive web app (PWA), Glow is built so that developers can look under the hood, take it apart, and implement features as they see fit, leveraging the Breez API and SDK. Besides the Passkey login, Glow has full support for native Lightning payments, sending and receiving with customizable Lightning addresses that look like emails, such as BM@breez.tips. First deployed to a Bitcoiner user base, Glow can currently send USDT and USDC across most networks and blockchains through their partnership with Flashnet, drawing value from the user’s Bitcoin balance. 

Glow comes integrated with a couple of onramps from the start as well. Users can onboard to bitcoin instantly via Cash App and MoonPay which the SDK connects to via their API. Sats arrive in seconds. The app also has contacts integration, letting users save their friends’ lightning addresses as a contact, hiding away ugly public keys and lightning invoices and delivering a more familiar and mainstream payments app experience. 

Users can also avoid bitcoin’s volatility by swapping their BTC holdings to USD value at will and, according to the press release, they earn sats as they do. Glow’s stablecoin is USDB; the B stands for Bitcoin, a stablecoin issued by Brale Inc which is licensed as an MSB across over 45 states, and claims to be compliant with GENIUS Act standards: “Regulated & fully backed Issued by Brale, a U.S. regulated entity, and 100% backed by T-bills, cash, and cash equivalents”. There appears to be no way to verify Brale’s compliance with the GENIUS Act right now as the regulations are still being implemented and do not take effect until 2027.

What is remarkable about USDB is that it is a Bitcoin native stablecoin, deployed through the Spark protocol, which is compatible with the Lightning Network, essentially unlocking the stablecoin across Bitcoin rails. USDB holders earn up to 6% APY delivered from Flashnet DEFI exchange’s profits, according to a Spark announcement earlier this year. 

Breez believes this combination of partnerships and technologies means that “Bitcoin has finally crossed a threshold.” The UX unlocked by Glow is now fully available to developers as a software development kit, something unimaginable by traditional finance. 

This post Breez Announces Glow, an Open Source Bitcoin to Stablecoins Progressive Web App first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

Bitcoin Magazine

Senate Whip Barrasso Becomes Latest Lawmaker to Support Crypto Clarity Act, But Time May Be Running Out 

Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso is the latest lawmaker to call for action on the crypto Clarity Act, though recent developments show work on the bill may be slowing. 

Speaking to the Senate Thursday, Barrasso reminded lawmakers that the U.S. passed the first major digital asset bill last year, the Genius Act, and the same bipartisan work was necessary for the Clarity Act. 

Lawmakers are rushing to get a vote on the Clarity Act before a five-week recess this week. Some Republicans have criticized Democrats for dragging their feet with the bill and deliberately being pernickety. 

“It’s time for the Senate to build on [the Genius Act] by passing the Clarity Act,” Barrosso said.  

Bipartisan work has gone into putting the bill together, and on Wednesday, Senator Thom Tillis reportedly said that the White House was reviewing the latest amendments to the bill. 

But on Thursday, Punchbowl News Senior Reporter Brendan Pendersen posted on X that Tillis had said he hadn’t yet heard back from the White House, despite optimism this week and Senate Majority Leader John Thune previously telling reporters that they were hoping for a vote before the break. 

Lawmakers have other proposed bills to vote on ahead of their recess and the Clarity Act seems to have been pushed back. 

The bill, which would set in stone digital asset regulation in the U.S., was passed last year by the House of Representatives. It has since become a much fatter text, according to Senator Cynthia Lummis, thanks to Democrats who wanted more added to the draft. 

Since July, a new text with changes regarding ethics has been circulating among lawmakers. It banned government officials and their families from issuing or promoting crypto — something Democrats had previously bemoaned. 

But it hasn’t been enough, according to some lawmakers, and a group of Democrats wrote a letter in July saying the bill fell short. 

Other than concerns around ethics, the Clarity Act has been in a deadlock this year after the banking lobby raised concerns over stablecoin yield paid by crypto companies to their customers, clashing with companies like Coinbase. 

Some Republicans are still sure a vote will pass this week, with Senate Banking Committeeman Tim Scott telling Fox Business that the Clarity Act is “something we should have, the first vote before we leave without any question.” 

Senator Lummis added on Wednesday that a vote would happen — and that lawmakers would stay a day or two extra later. 

This post Senate Whip Barrasso Becomes Latest Lawmaker to Support Crypto Clarity Act, But Time May Be Running Out  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

The End of the Closed-Source Era Is at Hand: Obscurity Was Never Security

Over the last few days, people who were trying to do everything right lost their Bitcoin. They bought a respected hardware signer, generated a seed offline using that device, and trusted the device to do the one thing a signer exists to do: produce a number no one else can guess. The Coldcard did not. A preprocessor guard that checked the wrong thing had quietly routed seed generation to a weak software PRNG (pseudorandom number generator), MicroPython’s Yasmarang, instead of the hardware entropy source. On some models the effective entropy collapsed to around 40 bits. The flaw shipped in March 2021 and sat in publicly readable firmware for more than five years. Attackers swept 500 addresses before anyone understood why; within days Galaxy Research’s tally reached 4,585 addresses and nearly $90 million; the attack is ongoing as of the date of this article.

Coinkite’s working assumption, with wide agreement on X, is that someone used AI to comb the publicly available firmware to find the bug. Whether or not that’s how this attacker found it, the next one will. While an AI-assisted audit was run weeks before the theft, it found nothing (potentially due to the capabilities of the model, potentially due to the specific construction of the search). Since the attack started, researchers have shown several frontier models locating the same flaw in minutes from a single prompt. The code sat open to human review for five years and no human caught it.

Coinkite had moved its firmware from a free-software license to source-available terms, MIT with a Commons Clause, after Foundation Devices used the code in a competing product. You could read the source but not build a business on it. It changed nothing. The bug lived in code a machine could read regardless of what the license permitted; it entered the tree, in fact, in the very rewrite that stripped out the last of the GPL code. The license change didn’t increase protection; it merely changed the economics of finding the bug.

In the age of highly skilled AI, everything that is distributed is readable, or soon will be. Strip a binary of its symbols, run it through a decompiler, and out comes the pseudo-C that greets anyone who has opened Ghidra: nameless variables, flattened control flow, functions labeled FUN_00401a20. Unreadable to most people. That high barrier to human understanding was the entire security premium of “closed source.”

A compiled program has no choice but to tell the truth. Code that stays encrypted cannot run. At the moment of execution the processor must receive the actual instructions, so whatever the program does, it hands the machine a complete and exact account of how to do it. The information is all there in the machine code. Obfuscation does not, and cannot, remove it.

If reading a binary sounds too hard for a machine to master soon, weigh it against what machines are already doing to problems far harder. Reading a binary is analysis: every fact you need is in front of you, and the work is extraction. Mathematical invention is another order of difficulty, because it demands an object no one has ever seen. At 02:19 UTC on July 20th, Levent Alpöge, a mathematician working with Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5, posted a counterexample to Keller’s Jacobian conjecture, a problem open since 1939 and hard enough to sit on Stephen Smale’s list of challenges for the twenty-first century. Generations had tried it. The disproof is three polynomials in three variables. Lean verified it within hours, and it is short enough for anyone to confirm in a computer-algebra system in about a minute.

The Jacobian fell in an afternoon, while the questioner was apparently watching the final match of the FIFA World Cup. In May an OpenAI model toppled the Erdős unit-distance conjecture, a question open since 1946; in late July a 30-year-old graph-theory conjecture fell to four prompts; between them came the Jacobian disproof and a run of other results that had stood for decades.

Set that pace beside the modest task of reading machine code already sitting out there on the Internet. Today’s models handle source and decompiler output better than raw bytes, so a fully closed binary keeps a thin margin. That margin is a cost speedbump, and it is eroding at the speed you are watching everywhere else. Betting security on how long it lasts means betting against a clock that is only speeding up.

The same capability that finds your entropy bug reads your proprietary method. This is the quieter casualty, and it impacts companies that never thought of themselves as exposed to open-source anything. Trade secrecy in shipped software was always just obscurity in a suit. The law has said so for as long as trade-secret law has existed: reverse engineering a product you lawfully possess is fair play, and therefore a secret survives only while that reverse engineering stays expensive. When the cost of extraction falls to a subscription and a prompt, the secret embodied in the code you hand your customers stops being one. Your clever algorithm, your undocumented format, your edge in the binary: legible to anyone who cares to look, on a timeline increasingly measured in minutes.

None of this necessarily makes open source safe. Heartbleed hid in the most widely deployed TLS library on earth for two years, because visibility without funded attention finds nothing. The xz backdoor showed that the open contribution model is itself an attack surface, one a patient adversary can walk through with a friendly face and two years of good commits. While openness once was a shield, it is no longer. What it does buy is reviewers who are permitted to look, builds which can be independently reproduced and verified, an exit when a vendor dies or turns, and acknowledgment that this all will happen whether you like it or not.

Now we must assume every line shipped will be read by someone who wishes harm, because it will be. The defender holds one structural advantage the attacker never will: time. You can turn the same frontier models on your own code before release, in the space between commit and ship, while the attacker waits for a binary that does not yet exist. Make your builds reproducible, so it ties back to the source and the source can be checked. Design to fail closed, and keep the trusted core small enough that one bug cannot take everything. For the specific business of holding Bitcoin, learn the lesson Coldcard is teaching in real time: own the entropy you cannot afford to have guessed, keep the secure element minimal and behind a published interface, and spread your keys across independent implementations, so that no single device, and no single vendor’s mistake, is the whole of your exposure.

For Bitcoin the stakes are unforgiving in a way they are not elsewhere, since mere knowledge of the private keys grants possession. The entropy bug has left permanent scars. Patching the generator does nothing for the seeds it already produced; a weak keyspace stays sweepable forever, and disclosure hands the attacker the recipe. We have watched this before. The Milk Sad vulnerability in the libbitcoin explorer tool, bx, seeded private keys from a 32-bit value, and attackers were draining the wallets it produced before the flaw was ever made public. Attackers keep their own schedule, invited or not. For money that cannot be clawed back, “findable eventually” is a synonym for “gone eventually.”

Bitcoin never trusted obscurity. The protocol is open, its rules checkable by anyone, its security resting not on secrets but on mathematics and incentives that hold in full view. The hardware and software we build around it deserve the same standard, because the alternative is no longer on the table. The choice was never open or closed. It was disciplined or exposed.

The broader lesson of this Coldcard situation is that having closed source software is like having a seed generated by a broken Coldcard; it looks good but it’s fundamentally built on sand. Everyone can read the code — the only question left is whether you acknowledge that fact, or you and your users learn it the way Coldcard’s users did, one drained address at a time.

This is a guest post by Colin Crossman, who is the Wyoming Deputy Secretary of State. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

This post The End of the Closed-Source Era Is at Hand: Obscurity Was Never Security first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Colin Crossman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Breez Drops New Bitcoin App Which Doubles As Wallet and Developer Toolkit

Bitcoin software provider Breez has released a new app it says will serve both everyday users and developers. 

The product, dubbed Glow, is supposed to be an easy way to make Lightning transactions easier for everyday users, while also doubling as an open-source blueprint — a way to see exactly how easy it is to implement Bitcoin features using the SDK’s API — for builders. 

Breez claims the app will help developers exploring Bitcoin see what’s possible by packaging in the features that are essential for any Bitcoin app to compete in its category.

Being open-source, developers can open up Glow’s codebase and see exactly how each of those features — such as passkey login, Lightning addresses or stablecoin transfers — work and use them for their own app, rather than building it from scratch. 

For example, a developer building a social app doesn’t need to figure out how Lightning address or contacts should work — they can look at Glow’s code, see the API calls it makes, and replicate that in their own product with minimal effort. 

Developers can fork Glow, rebrand it, and ship it as their own, according to Breez. 

Because developers building on the SDK never take custody of user funds, Breez notes the regulatory footprint stays minimal — letting teams focus on product rather than compliance overhead.

The Glow app release comes after Breez announced it was working with Turnkey last month, a deal letting developers add non-custodial Bitcoin to apps running wallets from their own servers — solving a custody problem that has kept many of the largest consumer platforms from integrating Bitcoin at all.

According to the companies, keys now stay out of reach of the app’s servers, Breez, and Turnkey. The company’s backend holds a credential that defines what actions it can take, while authority to move funds rests with the user.

The deal positions some of the world’s largest consumer apps to add non-custodial Bitcoin without rebuilding their backend architecture or taking custody of user funds.

This post Breez Drops New Bitcoin App Which Doubles As Wallet and Developer Toolkit first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

An unnamed institutional investor has drastically tightened its leash on AVAX One, raising the Nasdaq-listed crypto firm's minimum liquidity requirement 35-fold and strictly excluding its namesake Avalanche token from counting toward the new threshold.

The stringent restructuring, detailed in an Aug. 5 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing, follows the July departure of CEO Jolie Kahn. Her exit triggered a default on a key-person covenant, forcing the digital asset treasury company to renegotiate its debt.

Kahn previously orchestrated the firm's pivot from agriculture to digital assets under the AgriFORCE moniker. Since her exit, the company’s shares have fallen about 42% to $3.20.

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This move comes amid a broader restructuring where AVAX One retired $6.8 million in outstanding principal debentures.

AVAX One faces stringent debt conditions

Under the agreement, the institutional investor waived the breach after AVAX One paid $1.3 million and accepted significantly tougher financial conditions.

The first change was a 3,400% increase in the company’s minimum liquidity requirement to $3.5 million from $100,000. The amended covenant recognizes only bank cash and Bitcoin held in custody.

This means that AVAX One’s core Avalanche treasury is unable to satisfy the test regardless of its market value. CoinGecko data shows the company holds nearly 14 million AVAX tokens worth about $88 million.

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AVAX One also faces a 180-day deadline from Kahn’s departure to appoint a permanent CEO deemed acceptable to the lender. Peter Wylie Jr. currently serves as interim chief executive.

The agreement also raised the remaining debenture’s principal to $8.47 million from $7.7 million before applying the $1.3 million payment.

The filing did not explain the $770,000 increase. AVAX One said the broader restructuring included repayment premiums, but did not directly link them to the adjustment. After the payment, about $7.42 million remained outstanding.

The lender also accelerated its capital recovery by increasing monthly redemptions to one-tenth of the original principal from one-twenty-fifth.

Finally, the accelerated conversion price was reduced to 82.5% from 85% of a benchmark tied to the three lowest trading prices over the previous 10 trading days.

The deeper discount could allow the lender to receive more shares when converting the debt, increasing potential dilution for existing investors.

The post AVAX One holds $88 million in Avalanche tokens, but its lender only wants cash or Bitcoin appeared first on CryptoSlate.

PowerCompute will face its first monthly decision on 307 pledged BTC on Sept. 2, when its $18.13 million loan from Arch Lending reaches the end of its initial 30-day period. The Bitcoin treasury and mining company refinanced three existing facilities into the collar loan at an initial 2% annual rate, avoiding an immediate sale of the coins but accepting a recurring repricing and settlement clock.

The filed Reset Confirmation sets an 8:00 a.m. EST reference-price check against a $58,860 floor and $66,370 ceiling. PowerCompute then has until 5:00 p.m. EST to accept a new quote or close out. For any new period, the floor and ceiling will be re-struck from the reset reference price, while the annual rate will be re-quoted.

The timing is the structure’s central protection and risk. Price and LTV moves during the initial period trigger no margin call or liquidation, even if Bitcoin crosses either strike before Sept. 2. The collar is tested only at the reset time, shifting the pressure from daily price moves to a monthly financing choice.

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If the reference price is below $58,860, PowerCompute may let Arch keep the pledged BTC in full satisfaction of the debt, with no deficiency claim. It can instead repay and recover all the Bitcoin. To roll, it must elect by 5:00 p.m. and eliminate the quoted shortfall during the following 24-hour Cure Period by adding Bitcoin, paying down principal or combining both.

A price between $58,860 and $66,370 lets PowerCompute repay the secured obligations, including accrued interest, and recover the collateral, or roll on newly quoted terms. Above $66,370, its upside for the ending period is capped. Arch receives the excess appreciation through retained Bitcoin or USD/USDC on closeout; a roll can instead add it to principal or reflect it in the new ceiling-and-rate quote.

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No response produces automatic maturity rather than a default. Below the floor, Arch keeps the BTC. At or above the floor, Arch may sell enough Bitcoin to discharge the secured obligations and separately settle any excess appreciation before returning the balance or surplus. Arch must give at least one business day’s notice before a sale, and PowerCompute may repay first.

The operative schedule records 307 BTC and an applicable LTV of 92.33%. A master-form disclosure separately lists an estimated 307.0003 BTC and a 92.54% “Original LTV,” but the annex says that disclosure does not govern the collar loan.

The executed balance is $18,127,131.88. Although the 8-K narrative shows an apparent truncation at $18,127.88, its exhibit table and the agreement carry the larger figure. The ledger records $18,068,845.28 of retired principal plus $58,286.60 of prorated existing interest, with no additional cash disbursed to PowerCompute.

The refinancing replaced an $11 million Galaxy Digital loan and two Liebel loans of $5 million and $2 million, according to PowerCompute’s filed release. A Dec. 31, 2025 debt table listed Galaxy at 0% and both Liebel loans at 12%. The new 2% initial rate applies to the full facility, but the release’s 12%-to-2% comparison covers only the $7 million Liebel portion.

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The post Inside the $18 million Bitcoin gamble with zero margin calls until September appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Two Solana supply reforms are now on a live governance clock. SGP-0002 would cut future issuance, and SGP-0003 would burn resource fees in full. Both moved into discussion after the governance interface marked their 15% stake-support thresholds as met.

The official records for the Solana supply reforms, SGP-0002 and SGP-0003, place the end of both discussion periods at Aug. 22, 15:13 UTC. A governance vote comes next. Implementation and feature-gating would follow any successful vote before the economics could change on-chain.

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When checked, the live records showed Helius and Jupiter as the largest named supporters of both proposals, backing them with 16 million SOL and 12.47 million SOL, respectively. Those stakes move the proposals through discussion; the binding governance decision comes later.

Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz separately called the milestone the first step on the road to discussion and a final on-chain vote.

Solana supply reforms: SGP-0002 speeds up disinflation

SGP-0002 takes aim at issuance by doubling Solana's annual disinflation rate from 15% to 30%. The 1.5% terminal target and existing reward mechanism stay in place.

According to the authors' model, the network reaches 1.5% inflation in about 2.8 years, cutting nearly three years from the current 5.7-year path. Across six years, the model yields about 18.9 million fewer SOL, or 2.6% less issuance. Both numbers remain modeled outcomes built on the proposal's assumptions.

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Staking yield falls with the issuance curve. Under the authors' 68% staking-participation scenario, the yield begins at 5.84%, then drops to 4.34% after one year, 3% after two years and 2.25% after three years. Commissions, MEV and block rewards sit outside that calculation.

Margins tighten at the edge of the validator set. The same cost model counts 290 unprofitable validators at baseline, rising to 292 after one year, 303 after two years and 320 after three years. Those totals swing with SOL's price, operating expenses, commissions and voting costs. The terminal rate remains 1.5%, so SGP-0002 concentrates that pressure into an earlier window.

SGP-0003 ties burns to resource use

SGP-0003 rewires the fee split. Today, each signature carries a 5,000-lamport base fee, half burned and half paid to the block leader. The proposal would replace that with a 2,500-lamport inclusion fee paid entirely to the leader and a separate, usage-based resource fee burned in full. Priority fees would keep flowing to the leader.

The resource charge would step through 0.1, 0.25 and 0.5 lamport per requested cost unit. Using May 2026 network data and the stated throughput, the authors estimate daily burns of 1,500 to 1,800 SOL at the first rate, then 7,500 to 9,000 SOL at the terminal rate. Signature fees currently burn about 648 SOL a day.

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At the terminal rate, efficient and accurately budgeted transactions could cost less. Resource-heavy or loosely budgeted ones could pay more, shifting more of the fee burden onto the computing resources they request.

The post Solana whales just triggered a countdown that could skyrocket SOL’s daily burn rate by over 1,200% appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Block’s Bitcoin Ecosystem gross profit fell 31% year over year to $72 million in the second quarter, making it the only category in the company’s three-part gross-profit breakdown to contract while Block’s total gross profit rose 25% to $3.166 billion. Commerce Enablement gross profit rose 18%, while Financial Solutions gross profit increased 43%.

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Bitcoin revenue held up better than profit. Bitcoin Ecosystem revenue fell about 13% to $1.894 billion from $2.172 billion a year earlier, according to Block’s Q2 shareholder letter. Based on the filing’s exact revenue and cost figures, the category’s implied gross margin narrowed to about 3.82% from 4.84%, a compression of roughly 102 basis points. That equates to about $38.20 of gross profit per $1,000 of revenue, down from $48.40 a year earlier. In dollar terms, revenue declined roughly $278 million while gross profit fell about $33 million.

Block said the gross-profit decline reflected two factors: “a strategic decision” to reduce the fee charged on certain Cash App bitcoin transactions and bitcoin trading dynamics. The company did not quantify either factor’s contribution, so the full 31% drop cannot be assigned to pricing alone.

Cash App separately announced on Feb. 9 that it was lowering transaction fees and removing fees and spreads entirely for bitcoin buys over $2,000. Block’s Q2 filing referred more broadly to lower fees on “certain” transactions, so the $2,000 offer cannot be treated as the entire affected transaction set. The February announcement gave no end date.

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Block reported 59 million overall Cash App monthly transacting actives in June, but that metric does not show how many customers bought bitcoin. The filing supplied no Bitcoin-specific transaction volume, user count, or adoption lift. Bitcoin Ecosystem revenue also declined, but revenue alone does not reveal whether transaction counts changed or whether higher activity offset lower fees. Without Bitcoin transaction counts, fee revenue per trade, or Bitcoin-user totals, the filing cannot show whether a larger trading base absorbed the lower take rate.

Block also recorded an $88.474 million bitcoin remeasurement loss, compared with a $212.165 million gain a year earlier. That $300.639 million swing was a non-operating fair-value effect recorded separately from Bitcoin Ecosystem revenue, costs, and gross profit.

Combining the remeasurement swing with the category result would overstate the operating damage. The 31% gross-profit decline measures weaker economics inside Block’s Bitcoin category, while the remeasurement loss reflects a change in the value of bitcoin held on the company’s balance sheet.

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Block disclosed the margin squeeze but not an activity gain from the fee cuts. Trading dynamics also contributed, leaving the impact of the pricing change unquantified.

The post Block’s total profits jumped 25%, masking a 31% profit drop inside its $1.8 billion Bitcoin arm appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Next Technology Holding Inc. (Nasdaq: NXTT) will turn every 100 shares into one at 12:01 a.m. ET on Aug. 10, 2026. Nasdaq trading is expected to open on a split-adjusted basis that morning. The Aug. 5 filing projects the outstanding count will fall from approximately 147,296,192 shares to approximately 1,472,962.

This is the company’s second reverse split in less than 11 months. Its 1-for-200 action took effect on Sept. 16, 2025, cutting approximately 566.3 million shares to a later audited count of 2,862,556. The contemporaneous filing projected 2,831,326 shares. An interim quarterly report later listed 2,865,730. The filings leave those small differences unreconciled.

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New shares began arriving weeks later. Equity-plan grants added 2.02 million shares and took the total to 4,882,556 by Dec. 31. A March registered direct offering added another 71,381,818 common shares. The outstanding count reached 76,264,374 at March 31 and was unchanged at April 29, according to the company’s first-quarter report.

Pre-funded warrant exercises added another 71,031,818 shares during the second quarter. The latest quarterly filing puts the June 30 total at 147,296,192, roughly 51.5 times the later-reported post-September baseline.

For investors who held the stock before the September reset, the two ratios compound to one share for every 20,000 originally held, subject to fractional-share rounding. The Aug. 10 action itself has a 1-for-100 ratio.

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Bitcoin per share fell as the share count rebuilt

Next Technology reported approximately 5,833 BTC at June 30, matching its approximate Sept. 30 balance. The June filing carried those holdings at $351.5 million.

The math is stark. Using approximately 5,833 BTC at both endpoints, calculated Bitcoin per share slid about 98%, from roughly 204,000 satoshis at the later-reported September baseline to about 4,000 satoshis at June 30.

The Aug. 10 split would lift that calculation to about 396,000 satoshis for each new share. An investor’s 100 old shares become one, so the 100-fold jump reflects the new unit size. Apart from rounding, the investor keeps the same proportional slice. The Bitcoin stays on Next Technology’s balance sheet. Shareholders get indirect exposure through NXTT.

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A large equity-plan reserve stays in place after the split. The latest quarter lists 7.98 million shares available under the 2025 Equity Incentive Plan, and the Aug. 5 filing says the split will leave that reserve untouched. It equals about 5.4 times the projected post-split share count. The company’s authorized common share count remains unlimited.

Those figures describe capacity alone. Future issuance remains uncertain. The reverse-split filing supplies no motive and makes no mention of a new Nasdaq deficiency.

The post How a Nasdaq Bitcoin holder diluted investors by 98% without selling a single coin appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Nikita Bier announced on Wednesday that he is stepping down as X's head of product. After a little more than a year, in his own words: "time to pass the torch and demote myself to my natural state: a poster." He stays on as an adviser.

Crypto circles have been treating his exit as a turning point since yesterday. That overstates it — Bier was not the crypto lead at X. The timing is interesting all the same, for one concrete reason: he leaves a few weeks after X launched its payments product, and the question of whether cryptocurrencies will ever arrive there remains unanswered.

What Bier actually built at X

Bier took over product in July 2025. Across roughly 400 days, around 30 new products shipped under his responsibility, and practically every major part of the platform was reworked: the timeline feed, the Android app, new-user onboarding, the notification system, chat and direct messages. TechCrunch has the detail.

His responsibilities are being split rather than refilled: design, core product engineering and mobile engineering go to three different leads. For a company standing up a financial service, that is a notable choice — payment products tend to depend on one hand holding the whole thing together.

The crypto connection: two points, both documented

The first is Smart Cashtags, announced in January 2026. Cashtags have been X's shorthand for tickers for years — a dollar sign in front of a symbol. The smart version was meant to turn that into a financial toolkit. That feature is still described in reporting as the most likely entry point through which cryptocurrencies could reach the platform.

The second point is less flattering. Also in January, X changed its algorithm, and the consequences hit the platform's crypto corners harder than most: shifted reach, a noticeable rise in automated accounts, and a discussion culture that got worse for many users. Anyone following on-chain debate in real time follows it mostly on X — so the complaints were loud.

X Money is running — without crypto

At the end of July, X rolled out its payments product in the US, initially by invitation for Premium and Premium+ subscribers. Two years of groundwork sit behind it, including money transmitter licences across most US jurisdictions. What it does:

The figures and terms are documented at crypto.news. Six percent on balances is an aggressive offer, and it shows what this is about first: gathering deposits, not selling bitcoin.

That is the real finding of the week. Elon Musk has talked about crypto for years and says he holds bitcoin, ether and dogecoin — and the payments product of his own platform launches with Visa and interest. Not with a wallet.

Why that makes sense

A payments product needs licences, and licences come more easily without crypto. In the US, X acquired money transmitter licences state by state. Any crypto capability would have extended that process and brought additional supervisors into it. Launching without them is not a rejection; it is the order every payment provider chooses.

The US Senate wrote to Musk in April about the planned launch and asked questions about oversight — a preview of how closely this will be watched once digital assets are added.

For European users it is further away still

X Money exists only in the US so far. An EU launch would require an e-money licence and, once cryptocurrencies were involved, a MiCA authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider on top. Neither is known to have been applied for.

For a sense of how long that takes: Coinbase received its MiCA licence via Luxembourg in June 2026, after a process that ran for months. The last MiCA transition period expired on 1 July 2026 — since then that authorisation decides who may offer crypto services in Europe at all. Binance withdrew its application in June and is winding down its EU business accordingly.

So anyone waiting to buy bitcoin through X in Europe is waiting on two approvals, neither of which is in progress. Realistically, that is not a 2026 story.

What to take away

A product chief leaving is not, by itself, news that moves a portfolio. What it makes visible is:

• The platform where the crypto debate happens is building a bank — without crypto. That is a more realistic signal about the coming months than any announcement.
• Smart Cashtags remain the thing to watch. If cryptocurrencies come to X, they will likely come there, and likely no earlier than late 2026.
• A feed is not a broker. Buying crypto requires an authorised platform — and those exist today, with names and supervisors.

The concrete step, if you were considering it anyway: check whether your exchange is still permitted to operate under regulation in Europe after 1 July. Since this summer that is no longer a formality but the dividing line between providers who stay and providers who leave. The overview is in our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges. If you buy regularly rather than speculate, the terms are in our guide to buying bitcoin.

And the lesson that outlasts this personnel change: reach does not replace a licence. X built the two separately — first the users, then, slowly and laboriously, the permission. That the crypto capability sits at the end of that sequence rather than the start says more about the maturity of this industry than any announcement on the platform itself.

(As of 6 August 2026. This article is not investment advice. Details of X Money products and terms refer to the US market at the time of publication.)

Transparency note: This article was produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence and reviewed by our editorial team before publication. All figures and claims were checked against the primary sources linked in the text. The feature image was generated with AI.

The crypto market is barely moving today. Bitcoin trades at $64,387.44, up 0.13% over 24 hours, and most of the top ten is drifting within a percent of flat. Look at the year to date column, though, and the calm on the surface starts to look like exhaustion rather than stability.

Crypto Price Today: Where do the majors stand right now?

Ethereum is the strongest of the large caps today with a 1.73% gain to $1,906. It is also the worst performer of the majors on the year, down 35.76%.

Which coins are actually working this year?

Three names, and only three. Hyperliquid is up 126.58% year to date at $55.13, the single best performer on the board by a wide margin, despite giving back 3.39% today. TRON is up 15.26%, and UNUS SED LEO is up 1.90%.

That is the entire list of winners. Everything else in the top ten by market cap is down between 26% and 46% since January.

The HYPE story is the one worth understanding, because it is not a meme rotation. Institutional attention has shifted toward projects where token economics are transparent and where value visibly accrues back to the token rather than to an off-chain entity. Hyperliquid has been repeatedly cited as the clearest example of that model working. When capital is scarce and risk appetite is thin, it concentrates in the few assets that can answer the question of where the revenue goes.

Why is the damage so uneven?

The spread between Bitcoin at -26% and Dogecoin at -46% is not random. It maps almost exactly to how much of each asset's price depends on narrative versus flow.

Bitcoin has an institutional bid underneath it. US spot ETFs have been buying through the first week of August, with several hundred million dollars of net inflows across consecutive sessions and BlackRock's IBIT taking the overwhelming majority. That is a structural buyer who shows up regardless of sentiment.

XRP at -43.22%, Solana at -41.21% and Dogecoin at -45.96% have no equivalent. They depend on retail risk appetite, and retail has largely left. The capital that would have chased them in a normal cycle went to AI equities instead, a rotation that has been running all year.

What about Zcash Price?

Zcash is the oddity on the board. It is down just 3.82% year to date, by far the best relative performance among the older assets, and it added 3.79% over the past week even after shedding 4.95% today. At $492.92 it has held value while almost every peer from its era has been cut in half.

Privacy assets have quietly outperformed through this drawdown. It is a small sector and moves are exaggerated by thin liquidity, so treat the daily swings accordingly.

Crypto Future Price: What should traders watch next?

Bitcoin's behavior around $64,000 is the reference point for everything else. It has slipped 0.81% over the week while ETF money was flowing in, which means spot demand is currently absorbing supply rather than driving price higher. That is a holding pattern, not a breakout.

If Bitcoin loses the low $63,000s, the altcoins with no institutional bid will take the larger percentage hit, as they have all year. If it clears $65,000 on continued inflows, the assets most likely to follow are the ones already showing relative strength on the week: BNB, Zcash and Hyperliquid.

Until then, this is a market where the yearly numbers matter far more than the daily ones.

Since 1 July 2026, any platform serving customers in the EU needs a granted MiCA authorisation. An application in progress no longer counts. Anyone who wants to know which firms actually cleared that bar does not have to take a press release on trust: the European Securities and Markets Authority publishes the register of authorised providers as an open file, no login required.

We downloaded that file and worked through all of it. The register is dated 4 August 2026 and was pulled on 6 August. What comes out of it matches the industry's self-description only in part. The most striking finding sits further down and reads: of 329 authorisations, exactly 21 permit the operation of a trading platform.

What the register actually says

At the cut-off date the register holds 329 authorisations, spread across 322 legal entities with their own LEI code and 26 states of the European Economic Area. The gap between the two figures comes down to companies appearing more than once, typically where an authorisation was later extended.

The raw data is available as a CSV. Anyone who wants to redo the arithmetic will find it here: CASPS.csv in the ESMA register. The folder in the path reads 2024-12, but the contents are kept current. The authority's own MiCA overview page is here.

Germany accounts for one authorisation in five

The geographic spread is far more lopsided than the public debate about Malta and Cyprus would suggest. With 72 authorisations Germany leads the field, more than twice as many as second-placed France with 35. The Netherlands follow with 29, Cyprus with 27 and Malta with 22.

Why Germany leads

Together those five countries account for 185 of the 329 authorisations, or 56 per cent. The remaining 21 states share what is left. The German lead has a cause that has little to do with crypto, though: a large share of the domestic authorisations sits with banks, savings-bank networks and investment firms that offer crypto trading as an add-on to an existing business. Of the 72 German authorisations only two permit the operation of a trading platform, and 56 apply to the German market alone.

Germany does not lead because an unusual number of trading venues sprang up here. It leads because the established financial sector filed as a bloc.

The finding that matters most: authorised rarely means exchange

MiCA defines ten separate services, each authorised individually. An authorisation is therefore not a blanket seal but a list of permitted activities. We counted how often each of those ten activities appears in the register.

Custody of crypto-assets is the most common at 221 mentions, followed by transfer services at 206 and exchange for euros or other currencies at 184. At the bottom sits the service most people have in mind when they say "crypto exchange": operating a trading platform appears 21 times. That is 6.4 per cent of all authorisations.

What the difference means in practice

A trading platform under the regulation brings together the orders of different clients in an order book. You trade against other users; the operator only provides the venue. The far more common service, "exchange of crypto-assets for funds", works differently: there the provider is your counterparty. It quotes you a price and you take it or leave it.

Both are legal, both are regulated, and for many retail investors the broker model is in fact more convenient. The pricing simply works differently. In the register 170 providers may exchange against funds without running a trading platform. With them the margin sits in the spread, the gap between the buying and the selling quote, and that is rarely disclosed as clearly as a percentage fee.

Confusing the two models means comparing costs that are not comparable. That is precisely why our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges lists the legal entity and the actual trading costs separately for every provider.

Only half of them use the EU passport

MiCA's central promise is the European passport: an authorisation from one member state is valid across the single market. A provider authorised in Ireland may operate in Spain, Poland and Finland without a further procedure. In practice this is used far less often than expected.

The distribution splits into two camps with almost nothing in between. 125 authorisations cover exactly one country. 150 cover 25 countries or more, most of them 29 or 30. The middle is missing: only 49 providers sit somewhere between two and 24 countries.

Two very different business models sit behind that. One group are regional institutions, often banks, serving an existing client base with no interest in going abroad. The other are platforms that think in European terms from the outset and treat the passport as the actual reason for applying. For consumers this matters, because a provider holding a single national authorisation may not serve you if you live elsewhere.

The June peak and what followed

Plot the authorisations by month and a pattern emerges that supervisors know from other regulatory projects.

For a year and a half monthly authorisations moved in the low double digits. December 2025 brought a first spike to 44. Then, in June 2026, the last month before the deadline, 76 authorisations were granted, more than in the preceding five months combined. July brought 31, August three up to the register date.

The effect has an uncomfortable side. Firms that made it through in June often filed late. Supervisors had little time, and the review period of up to four months that MiCA allows for a complete file is likely to have been used to the limit in many cases.

For others the deadline became the exit. In July 2026 AscendEX, BitMEX and BitMart announced they would give up their EU business or close entirely. At BitMart trading ends on 26 August 2026 and the platform shuts on 31 January 2027. AscendEX ceased operations on 1 July, with withdrawals available only on a limited basis. Anyone still holding balances there should arrange to move them rather than wait for an extension.

The brand is not the legal entity

The most useful point in the register is also the easiest to miss. MiCA protection does not attach to a brand. It attaches to the specific legal person that received the authorisation, and that entity is almost never named after the app on your phone.

Kraken appears in the register as Payward Global Solutions Limited and Payward Europe Solutions Limited, both in Ireland. Crypto.com is listed as Foris DAX MT Limited in Malta. Behind Coinbase sits Coinbase Luxembourg S.A., behind the European Bybit entity Bybit EU GmbH in Austria. Bitpanda holds three authorisations: in Austria, in Germany and through BP23 CA Limited in Malta.

The one-minute check

Look in the terms and conditions or the legal notice to see which company you are actually contracting with. That is the name to search for in the register, not the brand. If the contracting party is based outside the EEA, MiCA protection does not apply, even where a sister company holds an EU authorisation.

What we noticed while working through the data

A word on data quality, because it explains why figures circulating about this register diverge. The field listing the authorised services is not filled in consistently. Most supervisors prefix the service letter, as in b. operation of a trading platform. In 20 of the 329 entries that letter is missing altogether, mostly in Cypriot and Estonian authorisations. Search for the letter alone and those entries drop out of the count, among them one trading platform.

At one German institution the letters are shifted by a position, so the text and the label no longer agree. One provider is entered twice with an identical record, and two French companies share the same LEI code. We therefore identified the services from the descriptive text and cross-checked the result against the letter-based method. The analysis script is on file with the newsroom.

None of this is a charge against ESMA, which consolidates what national authorities report. It is a reminder that any number drawn from this register should travel with the method that produced it.

Why we curate at all

A register answers the question of who may operate legally. It does not answer where it makes sense to trade. A Latvian payment provider with a single national authorisation and a pan-European trading venue are worlds apart, yet both sit in the same register and both may legitimately advertise as "MiCA licensed".

That is why we think a curated selection earns its place. Our comparison of MiCA-regulated crypto exchanges states for each provider the legal entity and the date of authorisation, each checked against the register. For a broader view there is the general exchange comparison; and anyone holding for the long run is independent of any platform's licence with a hardware wallet anyway.

What to take away

1. Check the legal entity, not the brand. Find out from the terms which company you are contracting with, then search that name in the ESMA register. It takes a minute and it is the only evidence that holds.
2. Establish whether you trade on a venue or against the provider. Only 21 authorisations cover the operation of a trading platform. Under the more common broker model the cost sits in the spread rather than in a stated fee. Our comparison of regulated exchanges reports both separately.
3. Move balances off platforms leaving the EU market. AscendEX, BitMEX and BitMart have announced their withdrawal. At BitMart trading ends on 26 August 2026. Waiting means negotiating later under time pressure.

Disclosure: some of the providers named in our comparison work with us through partner programmes. This has no bearing on the analysis of the ESMA register — every figure in this article comes from the official file and can be reproduced from it. Whether a provider is a partner changes nothing about its licence status.

This article is not investment advice and not a recommendation to buy or sell crypto-assets. Crypto-assets are highly volatile and a total loss is possible. Analysis as of 6 August 2026; ESMA register as of 4 August 2026.

Institutional money is stepping back into $Bitcoin at a pace the market has not seen in weeks. US-listed spot Bitcoin ETFs took in $244.4 million on Wednesday, capping three straight inflow days worth a combined $626 million according to SoSoValue data. It is a notable shift for a product category that spent most of the summer bleeding.

How much did the ETFs actually buy?

The run started on Monday and built through the week. Tuesday's session brought $211.5 million in net inflows, with IBIT capturing $170.3 million, FBTC $19.6 million, ARKB $9.2 million, BITB $8.7 million and MSBT $3.7 million. Wednesday was the largest single day of the week.

The concentration is the real story. BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust took $479 million of the three-day total, lifting its cumulative net inflows to almost $61 billion. Every other issuer is fighting over the remainder.

Why is this happening now?

Two things lined up. Risk appetite improved across traditional markets at the start of the month, with equity indices grinding back toward record territory and crude oil easing after geopolitical tension around Iran cooled off. Bitcoin tends to trade with that tape.

The second driver is regulatory. Franklin Templeton has argued that federal crypto rules could open bank liquidity to the asset class for the first time, a structural change that would matter far more than any single week of flows.

Price followed the money. Bitcoin briefly pushed above $64,920 on Wednesday and traded near $64,744 shortly after, up roughly 0.7 percent on the day.

Is the ETF complex actually healthy?

This is where the picture gets more complicated, and it is worth being honest about it.

The US spot Bitcoin ETF market holds $77.6 billion in net assets and has taken in $51.5 billion in cumulative net inflows since launch. That is a serious footprint. But the growth is lopsided. IBIT accounts for $60.5 billion of total inflows, Fidelity's FBTC roughly $9.95 billion, while Grayscale's GBTC has shed $27.47 billion.

The squeeze on smaller issuers has now produced its first casualty. Hashdex is closing its Bitcoin ETF (DEFI), the smallest US spot product by net assets, with a final trading day of Aug. 17 before it sells its remaining Bitcoin and returns cash to shareholders. It is the first closure of its kind in the US.

Part of the drag is competition for attention. K33 Research's Vetle Lunde noted in June that much of the market sees the opportunity cost of holding BTC as too high while AI-linked assets rally, with BlackRock's iShares Future AI & Tech ETF up 39 percent through July against a roughly 36 percent decline in the broader crypto market.

What does the sentiment data say?

Not what you would expect from a three-day buying streak. The Crypto Fear & Greed Index sat at 25, firmly in Extreme Fear, and slipped from 27 the day before.

That gap between institutional flows and retail sentiment is the thing to watch. Historically, ETF accumulation into fearful conditions has been a constructive setup, because it means supply is being absorbed by holders who are not reacting to daily price swings. It is not a guarantee of anything, but it is a different market structure than a leveraged retail bid.

What comes next?

The near-term question is whether the streak survives the rest of the week and whether inflows broaden beyond BlackRock. A three-day run led almost entirely by one fund is a narrower signal than the headline number suggests.

For traders, the levels are straightforward. Bitcoin needs to hold the $63,000 to $64,000 zone to keep the structure intact, and a clean break above $65,000 would confirm that ETF demand is doing more than absorbing supply. Fail there and the Extreme Fear reading starts looking like the more accurate gauge.

Within eight days in July, two decentralised perpetuals exchanges on Arbitrum were emptied: Ostium on 15 July, AFX Trade on 22 July. Together the attackers took roughly $42 million.

In both cases the entry point was not a smart contract but a private key held by people. That is where the industry's central marketing promise starts to crack. "Decentralised" has meant: nobody can take your money because nobody holds it. With many providers it actually means the deposit sits behind a bridge whose signing keys are kept on servers users know nothing about.

The two cases in detail

Ostium, 15 July

At the Arbitrum perp DEX Ostium, the private key of a price oracle was compromised. That allowed fake, future-dated price reports to be signed and fed through the protocol's own PriceUpKeep infrastructure. The attacker opened a position at a fabricated bitcoin price of $5,000 and closed it at the actual price of around $60,000. The difference came out of the liquidity providers' vault: $18 million to $23.75 million, depending on the assessment. Trading was suspended.

One detail from the bug bounty programme stands out: the exact component the attack ran through was explicitly excluded from it. Security researchers therefore had no incentive to look there. Security firm Halborn has reconstructed the attack step by step.

AFX Trade, 22 July

A week later it was AFX Trade, also on Arbitrum. The attacker gained control of the validator signing keys for the USDC custody bridge the protocol operates itself, through which cross-chain withdrawals are authorised. $24.15 million USDC left the platform. The funds were moved to Ethereum and swapped into roughly 12,467 ETH; the platform's total value locked was effectively empty afterwards.

AFX offered the attacker 30 percent of the sum as a so-called white hat bounty — about $7.2 million — in exchange for returning the rest. No return has been confirmed. Bridge operations were suspended, the infrastructure rebuilt and credentials rotated. On 3 August the project announced a goodwill plan for those affected. Our report on the incident: AFX Trade hack — Arbitrum perp DEX loses $24M as bridge keys are compromised.

The shared pattern

Both attacks follow the same logic. Trading itself runs on-chain, verifiable and without a custodian. At two points, though, the chain has to leave the blockchain:

• At the price. A perpetual needs an external quote. Whoever holds the oracle key determines what the protocol treats as reality.
• At the money. Deposits from other chains arrive over a bridge. Whoever holds its signing keys can withdraw.

Both are off-chain keys held by a small group. Neither the smart contract audit nor the decentralisation of the order book says anything about them. A perp DEX ends up as decentralised as its key management, and for many providers that is simply a company with servers.

For context: DeFi has already lost more than $840 million to hacks in 2026. The two July cases are not outliers in that series.

The segment is shrinking anyway

That is a decline of more than 50 percent across five consecutive months, with no meaningful counter-move. The market has also reshuffled: Hyperliquid held around 71 percent of on-chain perp volume in May 2025 and now sits near a third. The reason is less migration than the division of a smaller overall market — Aster with incentive programmes, Lighter with a zero-fee model.

For users that means thinner order books, higher slippage and rising liquidation risk. There is also a side effect that is harder to see: providers under cost pressure economise, and security architecture is where economising stays unnoticed the longest.

Who is behind it?

A regulated exchange states in its imprint who is liable. A perp DEX, in case of doubt, offers a Discord handle. That is not an accusation but part of the design. It has a consequence that rarely features in the marketing: if the keys sit with people, then the question of who those people are is a security question.

Seven points can be clarified before your first deposit, and they say more than an audit certificate:

1. Who holds the bridge keys? A single signer, a multisig or a distributed validator set? How many signatures does a withdrawal require, and who signs?
2. Where does the price come from? A single oracle with one key is a single point of failure; several independent feeds with sanity checks are not.
3. What is excluded from the bug bounty scope? Ostium showed that the exclusions are the most interesting passage of the programme.
4. Is there an insurance fund, and is it visible on-chain? A commitment in a blog post is not a fund.
5. Who is behind the project? Anonymous teams are not automatically dishonest, but they are not accountable either. That is worth knowing before depositing.
6. How was communication handled in past incidents? Was there a technical post-mortem with a timeline, or only an announcement without figures?
7. Where are users directed after an incident? If the same channels that promoted a platform then funnel users to one particular centralised exchange, that is an advertising relationship and belongs disclosed as one.

Our own position

Screenshots and claims about links between the AFX orbit and particular centralised exchanges are circulating in German-language groups. We could not verify that material independently and therefore name no names. A screenshot is not evidence, and a suspicion you cannot test does not belong in a headline. Anyone with material that holds up can contact our newsroom.

What we can say from our own experience: we also assess trading platforms by how they respond to editorial enquiries. With Phemex that experience has repeatedly been unsatisfactory, which is why the exchange appears in none of our recommendations. That is an assessment of our own dealings and not an allegation of misconduct towards users.

What to take away

The most uncomfortable conclusion of this summer is one the scene voices reluctantly: regulated, centralised exchanges have an argument again.

Not because they are technically superior, but because they offer something an anonymous perp DEX structurally cannot — an address you can serve papers to, a supervisor, a balance sheet, and somebody who is liable when keys go missing. Since the last MiCA transition period expired on 1 July 2026, it is also possible in Europe to look up who holds the relevant authorisation.

This is explicitly not an invitation to leave funds on an exchange permanently; "not your keys, not your coins" still holds. It is an invitation to price convenience honestly. At a regulated exchange you pay in fees and KYC. At an anonymous perp DEX you pay with the risk that a validator key changes hands on an ordinary Tuesday morning.

Three steps follow from that:

1. Separate your holdings. Trading margin sits on the platform, nothing more. The rest belongs in your own custody. The AFX users who parked capital there have been waiting since 22 July for a goodwill plan. Which hardware wallet fits is covered in our hardware wallet comparison.
2. Run the seven questions before your next deposit. It takes a few minutes. If you cannot answer them, you already have your answer. Providers side by side — fees, liquidity, key architecture, incident history — are in our perp DEX comparison.
3. At least do the maths on the regulated route. If you do not need leverage, a regulated exchange costs a few basis points more and gives you a counterparty. In a market with halved volume, that is rarely the worse deal.

The question worth asking from here is less "is this decentralised?" than "who holds the keys, and what happens when that person has a bad day?". Decentralisation is not a property a logo promises but one that can be counted.

(As of 5 August 2026. This article is not investment advice and not a recommendation of any individual trading platform. Loss figures follow the analyses available at the time of publication and may change.)

Transparency note: This article was produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence and reviewed by our editorial team before publication. All figures and claims were checked against the primary sources linked in the text.

The financial regulator subscribed to a global flight database covering more than a billion tickets to monitor activity.

Tokyo has asked Washington to stop meme-posting Mario, Pokémon, and Naruto without permission in a clash between meme-heavy statecraft and strict IP norms.

The company says a configuration error by an outside testing partner gave one of its Muse Spark models internet access during a cybersecurity evaluation.

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The new law creates a licensed, central bank-supervised market for trading digital assets, yet crypto remains barred from everyday payments.

The market is at the stage where local recoveries aren't leading to properly formed bullruns.

Microsoft has uncovered a new malware campaign that abuses the BNB Smart Chain to make malicious infrastructure more resilient.

A well-known German Bitcoin developer has revealed that fears over self-custody security kept him from buying more BTC.

Learn how hidden malware steals keys and how to save your Dogecoin (DOGE) this August 2026.

XRP sees first outflow in multiple weeks as its price continues to plunge deeper, causing both retail and institutional investors to exercise caution.

TLDR

• Amrize Q2 net income climbed 14.4% to $476 million on stronger project demand.
• Revenue rose 8.6% to $3.49 billion as major projects increased sales volumes.
• Adjusted EBITDA increased 5.8%, but higher costs reduced quarterly margins.
• Amrize expects 2026 revenue of $12.5 billion to $12.7 billion despite inflation.
• Shares fell to $48.58 after hours as rising costs weighed on market sentiment.

Amrize (AMRZ)  reported stronger second-quarter profit and revenue, but cost pressure weakened margins across its North American construction network. Net income climbed 14.4% to $476 million, while revenue rose 8.6% to $3.49 billion. Amrize shares closed 3.14% lower at $51.22, then fell 5.15% after hours to $48.58.

Amrize Ltd, AMRZ

Amrize Q2 Revenue Growth Outpaces Margin Performance

Amrize generated $3.49 billion in second-quarter revenue, compared with $3.22 billion one year earlier. Higher volumes added $200 million, while recently acquired businesses contributed another $54 million. Aggregates pricing, foreign exchange gains, and demand from large infrastructure projects across key markets also supported growth.

Net income increased to $476 million from $416 million during the same quarter last year. Diluted earnings per share rose 14.7% to $0.86, while adjusted earnings reached $0.88. Adjusted EBITDA increased 5.8% to $986 million, although the margin fell 80 basis points.

Higher freight, diesel, and raw material costs reduced the benefit from stronger sales and savings. Amrize responded with price increases, fuel surcharges, and its ASPIRE cost program. However, oil-linked inflation continued to pressure earnings and influenced the updated annual outlook.

Building Materials Leads Growth While Roofing Costs Weigh

Building Materials revenue rose 8.2% to $2.45 billion during the second quarter. Cement volumes increased 5.0%, while aggregates volumes advanced 6.5% from last year. Acquisitions and stronger aggregates pricing also supported the segment.

Segment adjusted EBITDA increased 5.2% to $793 million, despite higher freight and diesel expenses. Cement pricing declined 0.2% in constant currency, but improved from the first quarter. Aggregates pricing rose 4.0% on a constant-currency and freight-adjusted basis.

Commercial and residential roofing demand lifted Building Envelope revenue 9.4% to $1.05 billion. Segment adjusted EBITDA fell 5.2% to $237 million during the quarter. Higher freight and raw material costs outweighed volume growth and reduced the segment margin.

Amrize Updates Guidance and Returns Cash to Shareholders

Amrize now expects full-year revenue between $12.5 billion and $12.7 billion. The company forecasts 2026 adjusted EBITDA between $3.1 billion and $3.2 billion. Management expects stronger pricing, but oil-related inflation will remain an earnings headwind.

The company targets about $80 million in ASPIRE savings during 2026. Amrize also plans roughly $900 million in capital spending for expansion and efficiency projects. Recent Texas acquisitions should further strengthen its cement, aggregates, and ready-mix network over time.

Amrize returned $502 million through dividends and repurchases, including $197 million under its buyback program. Net debt reached $5.28 billion, while the net leverage ratio stood at 1.7 times. The company also revised prior periods after finding immaterial accounting errors, mainly involving extended warranty revenue.

The post Amrize Ltd (AMRZ) Stock: Q2 Profit Rises 14% Despite Higher Fuel and Freight Costs appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Rigetti stock fell after hours as quarterly losses overshadowed revenue growth.
• Quantum fidelity gains strengthened Rigetti’s long-term technology roadmap.
• Rigetti ended June with $541.3 million in cash and no debt on its balance sheet.
• Potential federal funding could provide Rigetti up to $100 million for research.
• HPE and Pittsburgh partnerships expanded Rigetti’s hybrid computing network.

Rigetti Computing (RGTI) stock extended losses after second-quarter results showed higher revenue but deep operating and net losses. Shares closed 1.49% lower at $16.53 before dropping 4.48% after hours to $15.79. However, stronger fidelity results and potential federal funding highlighted continued progress across its quantum computing roadmap.

Rigetti Computing, Inc., RGTI

Rigetti Computing Posts Wider Second-Quarter Losses

Rigetti reported second-quarter revenue of $5.1 million for the period ending June 30, 2026. The company recorded an operating loss of $28.1 million during the quarter. Meanwhile, its GAAP net loss reached $52.6 million as development spending remained elevated.

Non-GAAP net loss totaled $16.0 million, while the GAAP loss per diluted share reached $0.16. The adjusted loss per share came to $0.05 for the same reporting period. These figures showed that Rigetti still faces significant costs while expanding its technology and commercial programs.

Rigetti ended June with $541.3 million in cash and available-for-sale investments. The company also reported no debt, supporting continued research spending and customer deployments. That balance sheet provides flexibility as Rigetti advances hardware performance and seeks larger system contracts.

Fidelity Gains Support Rigetti’s Quantum Roadmap

Rigetti reported measurable progress across qubit fidelity, coherence development, and gate speed. Its Cepheus-1-108Q system reached about 99.9% median single-qubit gate fidelity. The platform also delivered roughly 99.1% median two-qubit fidelity and 60-nanosecond gate speeds.

At smaller system sizes, Rigetti achieved stronger two-qubit results across its testing programs. Its 9-qubit platform reached 99.8% median two-qubit gate fidelity. Meanwhile, the 36-qubit system achieved 99.6%, supporting the company’s chiplet-based scaling strategy.

Rigetti continues improving chip design, fabrication methods, materials, and manufacturing processes. These efforts target longer coherence times and higher fidelity as systems increase in size. Better coherence could also strengthen system reliability across research, cloud, and on-premises deployments.

Government Funding and Partnerships Expand Rigetti’s Reach

Rigetti signed a letter of intent with the Commerce Department for potential funding worth up to $100 million. The proposed three-year award would support superconducting quantum computing research under the CHIPS Act. However, the agreement could give the department an equity position linked to the funding amount.

The company also expanded its work with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. Rigetti will deliver a 9-qubit Novera system for the new TangleLab testbed. A National Science Foundation grant supports the project and its hybrid quantum-classical computing research.

Beyond that project, Rigetti continues fulfilling on-premises systems for research and government customers. Its pipeline includes Novera deployments and a 108-qubit program for India’s C-DAC. Still, the stock decline showed that quarterly losses outweighed recent technology gains and funding potential.

The post Rigetti Computing, Inc. (RGTI) Stock: Falls Despite Fidelity Gains and Government Funding Potential appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• The Trade Desk stock fell 19.64% after hours following weaker Q2 financial results.
• Quarterly revenue rose only 3% as earnings and operating margins declined sharply.
• Adjusted EBITDA dropped to $241 million while overall profitability weakened.
• Third-quarter guidance pointed to continued pressure on growth and profit margins.
• Strong customer retention and major partnerships failed to ease market concerns.

The Trade Desk (TTD) stock sank after weak growth and a softer third-quarter outlook hit confidence. Shares closed 6.80% lower at $17.67, then fell another 19.64% after hours to $14.20. The drop reflected slower growth, weaker earnings, and near-term execution concerns.

The Trade Desk, Inc., TTD

The Trade Desk Q2 Revenue Growth Slows

The Trade Desk reported second-quarter revenue of $715 million, up 3% from $694 million last year. That pace slowed sharply from 19% growth during the same quarter of 2025. Six-month revenue rose 7% to $1.40 billion, compared with 22% growth one year earlier.

Net income fell to $64 million from $90 million, while the net income margin dropped to 9%. GAAP diluted earnings reached $0.14 per share, down from $0.18 a year earlier. Meanwhile, six-month net income declined to $104 million from $141 million.

Adjusted EBITDA decreased to $241 million from $271 million, while the margin narrowed to 34%. Non-GAAP net income fell to $158 million, compared with $203 million one year earlier. Non-GAAP diluted earnings also dropped to $0.34 from $0.41 per share.

Weak Guidance Deepens TTD Stock Selloff

The company expects third-quarter revenue of at least $650 million and adjusted EBITDA near $160 million. That forecast signaled continued pressure after weaker growth and lower profitability. It also suggested limited operating leverage while costs remain elevated.

The company withheld GAAP net income guidance because several future charges remain difficult to estimate. Stock-based compensation could change significantly because share-price movements directly affect the expense. Therefore, reported earnings could vary more widely than the adjusted outlook.

The Trade Desk spent about $78 million on share repurchases during the second quarter. It retained $269 million under its authorized buyback program at June’s end. However, the repurchases provided little support as weak results drove the after-hours plunge.

Partnerships Support The Trade Desk’s Expansion

Customer retention stayed above 95%, continuing a record lasting over ten years. The company also expanded partnerships with Dentsu, Databricks, Adobe, Booking.com, Marriott, Uber, and United Airlines. These agreements support data use, measurement, and advertising across the open internet.

Netflix joined the company’s inventory marketplace and widened access to its premium streaming advertising environment. Samsung Ads also opened home-screen inventory to programmatic platforms, including The Trade Desk. Both additions strengthened the company’s connected television offering during the quarter.

The Trade Desk operates a major advertising platform across global digital media markets. However, slower growth now tests its ability to turn partnerships and platform upgrades into stronger revenue. Management has changed several senior roles while focusing on execution, product improvements, and commercial discipline.

The post The Trade Desk (TTD) Stock: Plunges 19% After Weak Q2 Results appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• MiNK Therapeutics stock moves after Phase 2 pneumonia trial update.
• agenT-797 shows early gains in oxygenation and infection control.
• Data presented at 2026 Military Health System Research Symposium event.
• Patients treated in Ukraine show no major adverse events reported.
• MiNK Therapeutics advances off-the-shelf iNKT therapy for lung injury.

INKT shares traded at $11.48 after the company released new clinical updates. The stock reflected a $0.22 decline, or 1.88%, during Thursday’s session. MiNK Therapeutics announced initial results from its Phase 2 study evaluating agenT-797 in severe hypoxemic pneumonia.

MiNK Therapeutics, Inc., INKT

Trial Data Reveals Early Clinical Progress

MiNK Therapeutics presented the findings at the 2026 Military Health System Research Symposium, and Dr. Terese Hammond led the presentation. Researchers from First Lviv Territorial Medical Union in Ukraine co-authored the data alongside MiNK Therapeutics. Severe lung injury carries high mortality, and no approved therapy currently reduces it effectively.

Multidrug-resistant infections often worsen outcomes in conflict zones, so traditional antibiotics frequently fail. agenT-797 aims to restore barrier immunity and limit inflammatory lung damage in these settings. Patients treated with agenT-797 remained alive through Day 28, and their hemodynamics improved noticeably.

Oxygenation levels rose alongside mental status improvements among the treated group. Microbiological testing confirmed control of baseline infections in these critically ill patients. Blood and lung fluid analyses also showed reduced inflammatory markers following treatment with agenT-797.

Physician and Executive Commentary Highlight Results

Dr. Hammond stated that patients entered the study facing severe respiratory failure and substantial medical risk. She noted encouraging improvements in oxygenation, infection control, and markers tied to inflammation reduction. The biological changes also aligned with earlier findings MiNK Therapeutics presented at ASGCT and ATS conferences.

Jennifer Buell, President and CEO of MiNK Therapeutics, emphasized the trial’s rapid execution timeline. She said the team activated the randomized trial and dosed the first patient within days of approval. Buell added that Day 28 observations followed weeks later, despite the active conflict environment surrounding the site.

Buell highlighted the value of an off-the-shelf therapy that skips patient-specific manufacturing steps. She noted the treatment avoids HLA matching and lymphodepletion, unlike many competing cell therapies. MiNK Therapeutics said it remains focused on supporting medical readiness for service members and critically ill patients.

Company Background Supports Pipeline Direction

MiNK Therapeutics develops allogeneic invariant natural killer T-cell therapies for cancer and immune-related disorders. The company positions agenT-797 as a scalable option for austere and resource-limited medical environments. No major serious adverse events tied to agenT-797 emerged among the initial treated patients.

MiNK Therapeutics continues advancing this program following the Phase 2 update. The company plans further data disclosures as enrollment and treatment progress across sites. MiNK Therapeutics remains focused on expanding its iNKT-cell platform across additional disease indications going forward.

The post MiNK Therapeutics, Inc. (INKT) Stock: Climbs on Encouraging Phase 2 Data for agenT-797 in Severe Pneumonia appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• HTZ revenue rose 10% as record RPD and pricing lifted second-quarter performance.
• Hertz posted stronger EBITDA while liquidity remained near the $1 billion mark.
• HTZ advanced transformation as pricing gains offset recall-related challenges.
• Hertz reported record RPD, stronger utilization, and improved operating spreads.
• Hertz strengthened commercial momentum while expanding its long-term mobility platform.

Hertz Global Holdings, Inc. stock traded at $1.7350, up 11.22%, after the company reported stronger second-quarter operating results. Revenue increased to $2.4 billion, reflecting a 10% year-over-year gain. The results highlighted stronger pricing, improving utilization, and continued progress across its transformation strategy.

Hertz Global Holdings, Inc., HTZ

Commercial performance drives stronger revenue growth

Hertz generated its strongest second-quarter Revenue per Day, excluding the pandemic-driven peak recorded during 2022. Revenue per Day increased 9%, while Revenue per Unit climbed 8% from the previous year. Strong pricing and disciplined airport fleet management supported those improvements throughout the quarter.

The company also reported total utilization of 79%, representing an increase of 80 basis points year over year. Utilization reached 81% after excluding vehicles affected by elevated recalls. better fleet efficiency supported higher revenue generation despite operational challenges.

Adjusted Corporate EBITDA reached $81 million during the quarter. That result improved by $63 million from the same period last year and exceeded the company’s revised guidance. GAAP net income totaled $64 million, while adjusted net loss reached $47 million because of ongoing transformation-related factors.

Fleet strategy offsets operational headwinds

Hertz reported Net Depreciation per Unit per Month of $302, matching its revised guidance for the quarter. Management expects the full-year figure to remain at or below $300. The company also operates its youngest U.S. fleet in twelve years, with 94% consisting of 2025 and 2026 model vehicles.

Adjusted Direct Operating Expense per Day increased 4% compared with the prior year. Higher revenue-related variable costs and sale leaseback expenses contributed to the increase. Normalized operating expenses improved about 2% after adjusting for recalls and related operational impacts.

Recall activity remained a major challenge during the quarter because affected vehicles increased nearly 300% year over year. Around 15,000 vehicles remained unavailable on average because of those recalls. Even so, the spread between Revenue per Day and operating expense improved 17%, marking the third consecutive quarterly increase.

Liquidity strengthens as transformation expands

Hertz ended the quarter with approximately $984 million in available liquidity, matching previous guidance. The company also completed a $350 million exchangeable first lien notes offering during June. An additional $30 million issuance followed in July, pushing pro forma liquidity above $1 billion.

The broader transformation strategy continues expanding beyond the traditional rental business. Hertz strengthened its franchise network while improving used vehicle retail operations through Hertz Car Sales. Those efforts aim to improve long-term profitability and expand commercial opportunities across multiple business segments.

The mobility business also recorded measurable progress through operating affiliate Oro Mobility. Drivers completed more than six million miles across four active markets. In addition, Oro expects to launch its first autonomous vehicle fleet partnership later this year through Uber’s robotaxi program using Lucid vehicles equipped with Nuro autonomous technology.

Hertz remains one of the world’s largest vehicle rental companies, operating Hertz, Dollar, Thrifty, and Firefly brands across approximately 160 countries. The company continues investing in fleet quality, commercial execution, and mobility services while improving financial performance. Strong revenue growth, improving operating metrics, and expanding platform initiatives reinforced its transformation progress during the second quarter.

The post Hertz Holdings, Inc. (HTZ) Stock: Revenue Surges on Record RPD While Liquidity Nears $1 Billion appeared first on Blockonomi.

Analyst Crypto Patel said on August 6 that Lido DAO’s LDO token could recover more than 1,700% after falling nearly 94% from its previous all-time high.

The market watcher believes LDO is sitting in a high-risk accumulation zone but warned that the token’s bearish structure remains intact until it reclaims major resistance levels.

LDO Tests Multi-Year Support After Heavy Sell-Off

Crypto Patel’s analysis on X placed LDO inside a long-term demand area after its decline from the previous cycle peak near $4.

“Everyone Forgot About $LDO After A -94% Crash,” he wrote. “The Long-Term Recovery Potential From Here Could Exceed 1,700%.”

The token is currently trading around $0.29, close to the analyst’s proposed accumulation zone between $0.275 and $0.24.

He said that LDO is still inside a multi-year descending channel, with price action still showing lower highs and lower lows. A weekly close below $0.23 would invalidate the current setup, while a move above $0.47 would be needed to signal a possible trend change.

The token’s recent weakness has been linked to concerns around Ethereum’s proposed EIP-8361. Developer Jerome de Tychey said on August 5 that the proposal aims to prevent staking from rising without limits.

Analyst Ted Pillows suggested that LDO’s decline was likely connected to fears that lower ETH fstaking rewards could reduce demand for liquid staking tokens such as stETH.

“$LDO is selling off because of concerns around Ethereum’s EIP-8361 proposal,” Pillows wrote on X.

He added that the proposal is still an early draft and has a long process before any possible implementation.

Lido has also had to deal with changing conditions across Ethereum staking. As CryptoPotato reported last month, the platform started moving around $16 billion worth of staked ETH onto larger post-Pectra validators, with the idea being that Lido’s curated node operators stop running thousands of identical 32 ETH validators and collapse them into fewer, bigger ones.

Case for a Longer-Term Bottom

LDO is currently about 25% above the $0.235 low it hit on June 25, a level that replaced its previous floor and now marks the bottom of its five-year trading history since launching in 2021 at an all-time high near $7.30.

In the last seven days, it has fallen close to 18% and is down roughly 27% over the past two weeks, according to CoinGecko. Furthermore, trading volume sits near $50 million, down 43% from the previous day.

The bullish case hinges on LDO reclaiming $0.47 on a weekly closing basis, a level that flipped from support to resistance after a breakdown in 2024. From there, Crypto Patel maps out targets at $1.50, $2.50, and eventually back toward the token’s old cycle high near $4, the move that would produce the kind of gain he’s describing. He points to Lido’s continued lead in Ethereum liquid staking and the shrinking token supply left to unlock as reasons the setup could work if ETH climbs back above $3,000.

The post Analyst Predicts 1,700% LDO Rally From Long-Term Support appeared first on CryptoPotato.

PEPE recorded a net exchange outflow of 4.54 trillion tokens in a single day, which was the meme coin’s largest daily outflow from exchanges since November 14, 2024.

Fewer tokens on exchanges mean less immediate selling pressure.

Exchange Exodus

According to the latest findings by Santiment, PEPE has traded mostly sideways over the past two months. Recent market commentary has focused on meme coin rotation, weak funding, and support level testing instead of any major project-specific catalyst.

The analytics firm explained that when a relatively quiet meme coin sees tokens leave exchanges while trader interest remains muted, bullish holders may view it as supply moving into stronger hands before attention returns.

Additionally, PEPE continues to rank among Ethereum’s largest meme coins by holder count, according to data cited by BSCN. 571,613 wallet addresses currently hold the token. It trails just behind Shiba Inu, which happens to be the largest meme coin on Ethereum by holder count. In fact, SHIB is held by 1,678,653 unique wallet addresses.

Institutional interest has also emerged. Canary Capital filed a Form S-1 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to launch a spot ETF linked to the asset in April. The proposed fund, called the Canary PEPE ETF, would track the token’s live market price. The filing stated,

“PEPE has no identified blockchain-based utility beyond its branding and association with meme culture, and its market value is primarily driven by cultural relevance and online community sentiment. There is no assurance that interest in or demand for PEPE will continue to grow or be sustained.”

Some market watchers see more upside ahead. Crypto analyst Rafaela Rigo, for instance, projected that the asset could deliver a 3x to 5x return in the next bull cycle. The trader marked a target near $0.0000143, which represents a gain of about 400% from the current level of $0.0000028.

Liquidity Trap

Meme coins, meanwhile, continue to divide opinion across the crypto market. Last month, veteran crypto trader Ogle warned that these assets with limited liquidity can unravel within minutes if just a handful of large holders decide to sell.

Citing the recent price action in CASHCAT, Ogle said many traders often mistake unrealized gains for locked-in profits. He added that thin liquidity, concentrated ownership, and leveraged trading can quickly turn sharp rallies into steep declines, particularly after perpetual futures listings amplify volatility and trigger liquidations.

The post PEPE Supply on Exchanges Just Took a Massive Hit – What’s Next? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange will conduct a major scheduled upgrade on Saturday that will pause certain trading activities.

The second major statement from the firm outlined the delisting of numerous trading pairs, one even against BTC.

An Upgrade and Delistings

Binance revealed that it will temporarily halt US stock trading on the platform on August 8 due to a scheduled system upgrade carried out by a partner broker. The process is set to be completed in approximately three hours, and during this period, users will not be able to access such services.

The company has the habit of briefly pausing operations to support certain improvements. Not long ago, it performed wallet maintenance for the Tron Network, making TRX deposits and withdrawals unavailable for about an hour. It also supported a Zcash hard fork, temporarily suspending ZEC deposits and withdrawals.

Binance also regularly checks all listed spot trading pairs available on its platform and scraps those that no longer meet important criteria like adequate liquidity and volume. Based on its latest analysis, it will delist QNT/BTC, RPL/USDC, SIGN/BNB, and SKL/USDC on August 7.

“The delisting of a spot trading pair does not affect the availability of the tokens on Binance Spot. Users can still trade the spot trading pair’s base and quote assets on other trading pair(s) that are available on Binance,” it clarified.

The Previous Announcement

The aforementioned disclosure did not cause a significant decline in the involved cryptocurrencies, which is rather normal, as such a reaction is usually witnessed in the event of a total delisting. Being the leading crypto exchange, withdrawing support from Binance leads to reduced availability, thinner liquidity, and reputational damage.

Earlier this month, Binance said goodbye to Across Protocol (ACX), Hashflow (HFT), PIVX (PIVX), Vulcan Forged PYR (PYR), Vanar (VANRY), and Viction (VIC), and their prices headed south by double digits.

Prior to that, the company terminated all services with Alchemix (ALCX), Ardor (ARDR), NFPrompt Token (NFP), and Marlin (POND), triggering a similar collapse for the affected tokens.

The post Binance Pauses Services and Delists Several Crypto Pairs: Who Is Affected? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Crypto analyst Ali Martinez said on August 6 that Ethereum’s recent move above a major MVRV pricing level could open the way toward a $3,000 target.

The market watcher’s view is based on historical on-chain patterns that have previously appeared before major ETH recoveries, though resistance levels remain ahead.

Ethereum Reclaims MVRV Level as Analysts Watch $3K Target

“ETHEREUM IS HEADING TO $3,000,” Martinez announced in a post on X.

He said the asset turned bullish after breaking above its 0.8 MVRV Pricing Band near $1,800 and explained that this level has historically acted as a point where ETH goes from weakness into recovery phases.

The move followed an earlier July 6 post from the analyst, where he had identified $1,800 as the level Ethereum needed to clear. At the time, ETH was testing that area as resistance, with a successful daily close above it expected to increase the chances of a move toward its Realized Price.

In his August 6 post, Martinez confirmed that the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency had since reclaimed the MVRV as support. According to him, similar recoveries over the last six years have often led Ethereum toward, or above, its Realized Price, which currently sits near $2,300.

He also pointed to an MVRV Momentum golden cross that formed after ETH’s recovery, with previous signals of this type being followed by rallies of 50%, 166%, 74%, and 113%. The metric compares Ethereum holder profitability with its 160-day moving average and is used by analysts to track shifts between selling periods and recovery phases.

The asset was trading around $1,900 at the time of writing after rising 1.6% in the last 24 hours. It has gained almost 7% over the last 30 days but remains down more than 47% over the last year. ETH reached an all-time high near $4,950 in August 2025 and is still around 62% below that level.

According to Martinez, the $3,000 area is the next major target if buying pressure continues. The analyst pointed to on-chain transaction data showing more than 10 million ETH previously changed hands around that price, making it a major resistance zone.

Market Watches Ethereum’s Breakout Attempt

Other traders have also focused on Ethereum’s recovery, with trader Ted Pillows saying it could move toward $2,000 if it holds the $1,800 region following an 18.5% jump in July, adding that the fact that there was spot buying activity was a positive sign.

Michaël van de Poppe also said holding $1,800 could lead to a move above $2,000 and then toward $2,300.

Some traders believe a stronger ETH move could improve sentiment across the wider market, possibly affecting the next phase for altcoins, although that depends on whether Ethereum can continue breaking through resistance levels.

For now, Martinez’s $3,000 forecast relies on ETH maintaining its MVRV breakout and continuing the pattern seen in previous cycles. According to him, the next areas traders should be watching are around $1,980 to $2,080, followed by the $2,773 region he had mentioned in a previous update.

The post Analyst Forecasts Ethereum Rally to $3K After Key On-Chain Breakout appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin has extended its recovery from recent lows and is now testing an important resistance region. While short-term momentum has improved, the asset is approaching an area that could determine whether the current rebound evolves into a larger breakout or another rejection within the broader consolidation.

Bitcoin Price Analysis: The Daily Chart

On the daily timeframe, Bitcoin continues to trade within its well-defined consolidation range. The recent rebound has carried the price back toward the major resistance zone at $66.2K to $66.8K, while the broader support remains at $57.8K to $60.2K.

Although buyers have regained short-term momentum, BTC is still trading beneath the declining 100-day and 200-day moving averages, which continue to reinforce the broader bearish structure. The descending long-term trendline also remains intact, adding further confluence around the overhead resistance.

For now, the market continues to favor range-bound conditions. A confirmed breakout above the $66.2K to $66.8K resistance would be the first signal that buyers are regaining control and could pave the way toward the next resistance around $72K to $74K. Until then, the current move appears to be another recovery leg inside the broader consolidation.

BTC/USDT 4-Hour Chart

The 4-hour chart shows that buyers have staged a strong recovery from the $61.8K to $62.3K demand zone, pushing Bitcoin back into the immediate resistance area around $64.8K to $65.4K.

This resistance has already rejected the price several times over the past two weeks, making it the key short-term barrier. A successful breakout above the $64.8K to $65.4K region would likely open the door for another rally toward the daily resistance around $66.2K to $66.8K.

However, failure to overcome this supply zone could trigger another rejection back toward the buyers’ defense at $61.8K-$62.3K, keeping BTC trapped within its broader consolidation range.

Sentiment Analysis

The latest two-week liquidation heatmap highlights a significant concentration of short liquidation liquidity above the current price, particularly around the $66K region. As Bitcoin continues pressing higher, this cluster becomes an attractive magnet for price, increasing the probability of an upward liquidity sweep.

If buyers manage to push through the nearby resistance, the liquidation of overleveraged short positions could trigger a short squeeze, accelerating bullish momentum toward higher resistance levels.

While a liquidation cluster also exists below the current market, it primarily reflects aggressive long positioning. For now, the more considerable and more attractive liquidity target remains overhead, favoring an upside sweep if buyers can maintain control.

The post Bitcoin Price Analysis: BTC Battles Key $65K Barrier as Short Liquidation Cluster Builds appeared first on CryptoPotato.