Liverpool's struggles to secure wins highlight potential challenges in adapting to new management, while Forest's resilience signals competitive intent.

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Liverpool's ongoing winless streak highlights defensive vulnerabilities, while Forest's resilience suggests potential for future upsets.

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Cursor's reliance on diverse AI models highlights the strategic importance of multi-supplier resilience in the evolving AI landscape.

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Nvidia's influence and liquidity shifts may redefine market dynamics, affecting asset valuations and investor strategies across sectors.

The post Nvidia and global liquidity shifts impact market landscape: Fundstrat appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

EIP-8141's inclusion in the Hegot upgrade enhances Ethereum's competitiveness by simplifying user transactions and future-proofing security.

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Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Cools Off After $3 Billion ETF-Driven Surge 

Bitcoin slid Friday afternoon, cooling down after a phenomenal run following huge investment from U.S. ETF buyers. 

The leading cryptocurrency was trading for $77,379 on Friday afternoon in New York after dropping more than 3% over a 24-hour period. 

Bitcoin hit a high this week of $81,281 but slowed down after Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh gave his first major speech as head of the central bank — saying on Friday that he had “more work to do” to fight inflation. 

The Bitcoin price has in the past dropped when the Federal Reserve thinks inflation is too high because it means less chance of a rate cut; the leading cryptocurrency typically does better in a low-interest rate environment. 

Bitcoin started surging last week after the U.S. Treasury would at least double the size of its liquidity-support buyback operations. The announcement last week hurt the dollar but non-yielding assets have benefited. 

Exchange-traded funds, managed by the likes of BlackRock, Fidelity, and Grayscale have received net positive inflows for nine days in a row, according to Farside Investors data. Last week was their best week since October — when bitcoin hit a new all-time high — and that run has continued into this week. 

Since August 17, investors have thrown over $3 billion at the funds. BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust received the lion’s share of the investment, but Morgan Stanley’s new Bitcoin Trust — which debuted this year — also experienced significant inflows. 

Analysts have said that the so-called debasement trade — when investors buy an asset as a way to hedge against a currency losing value — was leading investors to eye-up bitcoin again. 

Investors taking part in the trade think that bitcoin, gold and other precious metals are a good way to protect themselves from excessive government spending. 

Total U.S. debt crossed $40 trillion for the first time this month. 

This post Bitcoin Cools Off After $3 Billion ETF-Driven Surge  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Debasement Trade Is Here Thanks to Government Debt — And Bitcoin Will Benefit: Grayscale

The debasement trade is back — and will benefit bitcoin. 

That’s according to asset manager Grayscale’s crypto research team, who wrote in a note this week that the U.S. government debasing its currency would lead to cash hitting digital assets. 

“Unchecked government debt growth undermines the credibility of fiat currencies and drives investors to seek out alternative stores of value like physical gold and certain cryptocurrencies,” the note by the firm’s head of research, Zach Pandl, read, adding that primarily bitcoin would benefit. 

The so-called debasement trade is when investors buy an asset as a way to hedge against a currency losing value. The trade was hot last year, and helped bitcoin’s run, but the digital asset’s run lost steam after October as traders turned their attention to stocks related to artificial intelligence. 

But since last week, bitcoin has benefited from news that the U.S. Treasury would at least double the size of its liquidity-support buyback operations. The announcement last week hurt the dollar but non-yielding assets have benefited. 

“That buybacks are needed at all is the problem: heavy growth in government debt is driving up the cost of borrowing,” the note continued. “The Treasury is treating the symptoms (rising bond yields) because they cannot cure the disease (structural deficits).” 

The note added that on the same day last week as the buyback announcement, the Treasury also said the U.S. public debt exceeded $40 trillion for the first time.

As debt and interest payments grow, the government needs to either raise taxes, cut spending, or issue more debt. 

Bitcoiners see the more politically likely path as expanding the dollar supply — which is ultimately bad for the dollar, and good for scarce assets like bitcoin. 

After bitcoin started surging last week, the dollar had its worst week of August and was trading at a three-month low. 

Bitcoin was trading for $77,493 on Friday afternoon in New York after hitting a high this week of $81,281. Over a 24-hour period, the coin now sits unmoved, but over a 30-day period, it has jumped by more than 20%. 

This post Debasement Trade Is Here Thanks to Government Debt — And Bitcoin Will Benefit: Grayscale first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin’s Moment Has Come for the Far East, Says Metaplanet CEO

Bitcoin’s time has come in Asia — especially with a changing regulatory landscape — and its people and companies should take advantage. 

That was the message Metaplanet CEO Simon Gerovich gave at this year’s Bitcoin Asia conference, where on Friday he spoke of how his company went from failing to the third biggest bitcoin treasury in the world. 

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

“The previous cycles belonged to the West, and the first Asian cycle has already started,” Gerovich said. “The only question left is who builds it. Will you?”

Often dubbed Asia’s answer to Nasdaq-listed Bitcoin treasury Strategy, Metaplanet pivoted from its core hotel and technology business to buying Bitcoin in 2024. The Tokyo Stock Exchange now holds 43,000 bitcoins worth about $3.3 billion at today’s prices.

Gerovich said in his speech that his company was small and going nowhere fast until it started putting bitcoin on its balance sheet, basically allowing investors to buy exposure to the biggest digital coin via its regulated shares. 

He said that the strategy is a major opportunity for Asian companies, which can now capitalize on the changing regulatory landscape and the growing interest in Bitcoin.

Asian nations, including Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, are making regulatory changes to support digital assets.

Gerovich noted that Japan in particular is a country where its citizens have saved like no other part of the world — and that capital can now be put to good use. 

“Hoarding cash has stopped making sense, and every household in Japan can now feel it,” he said. 

“Japanese households hold roughly 14 trillion dollars in financial assets. About half of that sits in bank deposits, earning almost nothing, and that’s just Japan, add Korea, Southeast Asia, and the wealth managed out of this place, Hong Kong, and you’re looking at the deepest pools of patient savings on Earth. 

“And for the first time in a generation, these savings are looking for somewhere to go.”

Gerovich added that Asian companies, institutions, and savers should take advantage of the current market conditions and build the Bitcoin infrastructure in their own regions.

“The end of the cash hoarding strategy and new rules are arriving at exactly the same time, and together, they set up what I think is the single biggest opportunity in Asian markets today,” he added. 

This post Bitcoin’s Moment Has Come for the Far East, Says Metaplanet CEO first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Capital B Raises €21M From Adam Back and TOBAM To Buy More BTC

Capital B, the Euronext Growth-listed company that bills itself as Europe’s first bitcoin treasury company, has raised €21 million ($24 million) in a private placement backed by Blockstream’s Adam Back and asset manager TOBAM — money it says could buy 270 more bitcoin and push its stack to roughly 3,415 BTC.

The company said Friday that a total of 36,219,070 shares were sold at €0.58 each as part of the deal, a 6.45% discount to Wednesday’s closing price.

Capital B said the net proceeds are expected to reach about €19.9 million after fees and transaction costs.

Capital B is the 27th biggest publicly traded bitcoin treasury in the world, according to Bitcoin Treasuries, with a total of 3,145 bitcoins in its stash — worth $245 million at today’s bitcoin price of $77,960. 

Capital B, which describes itself as Europe’s first bitcoin treasury, built much of that position through fundraising rounds during the first half of 2026. 

In May, it acquired 192 coins for €13 million after completing three capital raises.

Capital B’s announcement as other treasuries look to raise funds and accelerate their buys. Just this week, NYSE-listed AI-powered education company Genius Group said it was aiming to build parallel AI and bitcoin treasuries worth a combined $1.6 billion, after the company sold its entire bitcoin reserves to repay $8.5 million in debt. 

Bitcoin treasuries have faced headwinds since 2025 when the price of the leading cryptocurrency took a hit. A number of companies in the space have had to liquidate their holdings, including the biggest corporate holder of bitcoin, Nasdaq-listed Strategy.

This post Capital B Raises €21M From Adam Back and TOBAM To Buy More BTC first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Drops Before Shrugging Off Fed Chair’s Inflation Comments 

Bitcoin dropped, then popped after Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh gave his first major speech as head of the U.S. central bank and said he had “more work to do” to fight inflation. 

The leading cryptocurrency was recently trading for $79,474 after dropping as low as $78,630 before quickly rising again. 

Bitcoin has typically done well in a low interest rate environment but the Federal Reserve has been reluctant to lower borrowing costs due to sticky inflation in the world’s biggest economy. 

“But on the price-stability side of our mandate, the numbers are more concerning,” Warsh said after talking about employment. 

He added: “We must be confident that underlying inflation is moving to our objective, clearly and at sufficient speed. Otherwise, we have work to do.”

Bitcoin has in the past dropped on news that the Federal Reserve thinks inflation is too high because it means less chance of a rate cut. Following Warsh’s speech, traders priced in a 50% chance of rate hike in September. 

But Bitcoin has appeared to — at least for now — shrug off the speech. 

Bitcoin’s started surging last week after the U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the department would double the size of its long-dated bond buybacks. 

The news sent yields down lower, and the dollar slid while non-yielding assets like bitcoin and gold jumped. 

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

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

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

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

This post Bitcoin Drops Before Shrugging Off Fed Chair’s Inflation Comments  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin gained 21.5% from the Aug. 17 close through Aug. 21, yet six of seven large US-listed miners finished the same trading stretch much lower. MARA Holdings rose 16.1% and came closest to BTC, while Cipher Digital fell 14.8%, TeraWulf lost 11.2%, Hut 8 dropped 8.1%, and IREN declined 6.8%.

The stocks still sold as Bitcoin proxies had separated during one of Bitcoin's strongest weeks of the year.

QQQ fell 2.3% over those sessions as long-term yields stayed volatile, placing the miners inside a weaker technology-equity market. Their corporate structure helps explain this, as several former mining specialists now derive revenue, financing, or forward valuation from long-duration data-center contracts.

The same electricity, land, and grid connections can support ASIC miners or GPU clusters, and public markets price each use through a different set of risks.

CryptoSlate analyzed two years of daily closes to see whether the August week fit a longer pattern. Bitcoin sensitivity has weakened across most of the group as data-center contracts gained weight, although the rate coefficients vary too widely to treat every AI-oriented miner as a long-bond proxy.

Power is the second product for Bitcoin miners

A conventional miner essentially uses computing hardware to convert electricity into Bitcoin, so its operating result depends on the coin's price, network difficulty, transaction fees, fleet efficiency, and power cost.

High fixed expenses magnify that relationship because a percentage increase in Bitcoin can produce a larger percentage increase in expected equity value when revenue climbs faster than the cost base.

Bitcoin held on the balance sheet is another layer of exposure, especially when a company finances expansion while retaining most of its production. Investors have so far treated miner equities as amplified Bitcoin positions with corporate, financing, and execution risk attached.

That worked reasonably well while mining supplied nearly all revenue and management teams allocated capital around hash rate.

AI infrastructure changed that because power has become the scarce input both industries pursue. A miner with a grid agreement can lease capacity to a hyperscaler or build a GPU cloud business, exchanging volatile mining income for a contract backed by a tenant's credit.

Debt and Bitcoin sales are financing those buildouts, adding construction schedules, equipment procurement, and customer concentration to valuations that once depended only on hash price.

Company filings place our little group of public miners pivoting to AI at several different stages of that conversion, with TeraWulf generating $31.9 million of its $44.8 million second-quarter revenue from high-performance-computing leases and roughly $12.8 million from digital assets.

Hut 8 says its Beacon Point leases cover 949 megawatts of contracted IT capacity and carry $26.6 billion of base-term contract value, subject to future delivery and tenant performance.

IREN reported $70.5 million of AI cloud revenue and $66.7 million of Bitcoin mining revenue in its June quarter, moving AI above mining in its current revenue mix. Its Aug. 27 release also put operating annual recurring revenue at $1 billion as of Aug. 26 and contracted ARR tied to 2026 capacity at $4 billion, with the latter targeted to become operational by Dec. 31 subject to commissioning, testing, and customer acceptance.

The quarter included a $450.4 million impairment largely tied to decommissioned mining hardware as sites convert to AI.

Cipher still recorded second-quarter revenue from Bitcoin mining, but it has contracted 700 megawatts of high-performance-computing capacity across three sites and began delivering the first capacity at Black Pearl in August.

Riot Platforms sits closer to the middle, reporting $113.7 million of mining revenue, $23.2 million from data centers and $37.3 million from engineering in a $174.2 million quarter. Its 241 megawatts of contracted AI capacity carry roughly $9.8 billion of company-estimated long-term revenue, giving investors a contract book to value alongside 11,380 Bitcoin held at June 30.

CleanSpark would have served as a mining-only control earlier in the year, though that classification expired before the August breakout. The company signed a 20-year, $6.6 billion data-center lease on Aug. 6 while its operating revenue still came from mining, placing it in the newly hybrid group.

MARA now provides the closest large mining-led comparator, even as it explores adjacent energy and computing businesses.

The split shows up in the beta

CryptoSlate analyzed Alpaca/IEX historical equity closes for HUT, WULF, IREN, CIFR, RIOT, MARA, CLSK, and QQQ, together with Alpaca's BTC/USD closes, from Aug. 22, 2024 through Aug. 24, 2026.

Daily stock returns used exchange trading days, and each Bitcoin return covered the interval between consecutive stock-market dates, so Monday observations included the weekend. Ten-year Treasury yields came from the Federal Reserve's DGS10 series.

Close-to-close returns from Aug. 17 through Aug. 21 capture the initial separation by pairing Bitcoin's rally with QQQ as a broad technology-equity reference for the same sessions.

The longer calculation used rolling 90-trading-day correlations and univariate Bitcoin betas, with one comparison ending Aug. 22, 2025, and the current one ending Aug. 24, 2026.

A Bitcoin beta of 1.10 means that a 1% daily Bitcoin move was associated with an average 1.10% move in miners during that window, while correlation measures how consistently their directions and magnitudes traveled together.

Bitcoin beta declined from the comparable 2025 window for six companies, with IREN holding near 0.93, while Bitcoin correlation fell for six and edged up for WULF from an already low 0.17 to 0.22.

QQQ correlation exceeded Bitcoin correlation for all seven companies in the current window, meaning their daily returns tracked the Nasdaq proxy more consistently than the coin they mine.

MARA retained the group's highest Bitcoin correlation and beta, matching its heavier dependence on mining economics.

HUT, WULF, and CIFR occupy the bottom half of current Bitcoin correlation as their data-center contracts carry more weight in investor estimates, while MARA occupies the top. IREN breaks the simple ordering because its Bitcoin beta stayed steady even as its QQQ correlation reached 0.60, allowing an operating mining base and a large AI pipeline to appear in the same return series.

CryptoSlate also ran a 2026 year-to-date regression that included daily Bitcoin returns, QQQ returns, and the daily move in the 10-year Treasury yield. The three-factor model explained roughly 28% to 45% of daily variation across the seven miners, while the estimated effect of a 10-basis-point yield increase ranged from a 0.52% decline for WULF to a 0.79% gain for CIFR.

Four rate coefficients were negative, and three were positive, so the sample doesn't support a common duration trade across the group.

Mixed coefficients block an easy bond analogy because higher yields reduce the present value of cash flows expected years from now and raise project financing costs, while daily equity returns also absorb tenant announcements, construction updates, Bitcoin holdings, power prices, and capital raises.

Contracts explain why the businesses carry different exposures, while the data provide no common rate trade across the group.

Contracts give the miners a second risk map

TeraWulf is the best example of a company whose income statement has already crossed into a new category. High-performance-computing leases supplied about 71% of second-quarter revenue, and its filings describe repurposing or curtailing mining equipment as computing capacity expands.

A Bitcoin rally can improve the residual mining operation, while the equity valuation now also depends on tenant payments, construction delivery and the financing attached to the campus.

Cipher shows how the stock-market identity can move before the revenue mix catches up. Its June quarter still reflected mining, though investors can model contracted computing capacity and the company-estimated $793 million of average annual net operating income associated with its base lease terms.

The gap between current revenue and promised capacity makes delivery dates, capital cost, and counterparty quality central inputs for the share price.

Riot and IREN carry both sets of exposures more visibly, although their current revenue mixes have separated. Mining supplies most of Riot's current revenue, while IREN's June quarter put AI cloud revenue just above Bitcoin mining revenue.

Their mining operations retain asset-price sensitivity, and signed AI agreements add another stream of projected cash flows. Each quarterly filing can shift the weight on Bitcoin production versus data-center delivery, making beta an output of the business mix rather than a permanent company trait.

Contract announcements carry plenty of uncertainty because base-term value represents payments expected across many years, revenue and net operating income estimates depend on timely delivery, and project-level debt protects a parent balance sheet only within the terms of its structure.

A multiyear headline value can help classify the company's direction, though it can't substitute for a discounted cash-flow model or completed capacity.

The Aug. 17 breakout captured a real separation, and the longer sample confirms a broader sector reclassification. MARA rose alongside the coin, every company retained a positive current Bitcoin beta, and mining cash flow still funds or supports several AI buildouts.

Bitcoin has become one factor among several, with its weight lowest where contracted computing capacity has become the center of the equity case.

“Bitcoin miners” now describe these companies' origin more reliably than their destination. Investors buying the group through a mining basket can receive exposure to Bitcoin production, hyperscaler credit, construction schedules, power-delivery risk, project finance and technology-equity multiples in different proportions.

The contracts help explain why the stocks separated, while the remaining Bitcoin betas show their old identity still travels with them.

The post Bitcoin miners are no longer pure crypto proxies and are morphing into high-performance computing hubs appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bitcoin trades near $78,000 heading into the weekend, sitting almost between $77,000 support and $80,000 resistance after a sharp rejection from above $81,000 hit on Aug. 28.

A confirmed break below $77,000 opens the mid-$75,000s, while a reclaim of $80,000 puts the roughly $81,300 high from Aug. 28 and the $82,000 to $83,000 zone back in range.

Bitcoin reversed its Aug. 28 intraday high once Kevin Warsh's Jackson Hole remarks lifted September rate-hike odds to around 55% from roughly 40% before the speech. Warsh said the Fed still had work to do if inflation failed to return toward its target.

That repricing put Bitcoin back below $80,000 by the close, turning a level buyers had briefly reclaimed back into resistance and leaving $77,000 as the immediate line traders now have to defend.

Friday cleared a major Bitcoin positioning anchor

Roughly 81,700 Bitcoin options worth about $6.44 billion expired on Deribit Friday at 08:00 UTC, removing a positioning cluster that had helped keep price anchored near key strikes through the week.

Calls outnumbered puts by a ratio of 0.83, with the largest call interest concentrated around $75,000 and $80,000, the same two levels now framing the weekend's downside and upside cases.

US-traded spot Bitcoin ETFs posted nine straight days of net inflows through Aug. 27, totaling roughly $3 billion. That demand pauses over the weekend, since ETF creation and redemption activity runs on the same weekday schedule as US equity trading.

CME moved to 24/7 trading in late May, with only a weekly maintenance window interrupting the schedule. Regulated institutional derivatives can now react directly to a Saturday or Sunday move, well before Sunday evening's Globex reopen would previously have allowed.

That leaves Bitcoin's weekend with one of its strongest recent demand channels offline while the market that used to sit dormant through the weekend stays fully active.

The map traders are watching

Above spot, $80,000 works as the trigger. A sustained reclaim would suggest buyers absorbed the Aug. 28 hawkish shock and turned the failed breakout back into a bear trap.

That opens a path toward the Aug. 28 $81,300 high and, beyond that, the $82,000 to $83,000 zone where fresh options positioning and technical resistance now overlap.

Below spot, $77,000 does the same job in reverse, with the Aug. 28 low printed near $77,078. Losing that level with sustained acceptance over several hours would move the setup from consolidation toward continued downside, pointing first toward $75,000 to $75,500, an area that already carries heavy options interest from Aug. 28 expiry.

A deeper break below $75,000 opens the low $70,000s, with $72,000 to $73,000 as the next real target if that acceptance holds. The $69,000 to $70,000 zone remains a longer-term support region.

Reaching it over a single weekend would probably require a larger liquidation event or an additional macro shock beyond the Aug. 28 repricing.

Citi cut its 12-month Bitcoin target to $82,000 from $112,000 in July, lowered its ETF inflow assumption to zero, and set a recession-driven bear case near $53,000. That makes the weekend's own $82,000 to $83,000 upside zone notable on its own terms, since it now overlaps with a major bank's full-year base case from only eight weeks ago.

Bernstein's longer-term view sits far above any of this weekend's levels, with the bank pointing toward $150,000 by mid-2027 and as high as $500,000 in a debasement-driven bull case.

That forecast belongs to a different timeframe entirely, offering context for where the asset could eventually trade over the coming years.

Which side of the range wins first

The bull case has Bitcoin reclaiming $80,000 and clearing the Aug. 28 high, with CME's continuous futures market reinforcing the move through the weekend even without ETF flows behind it.

Under that path, $82,000 to $83,000 becomes the next real test, and the failed breakout above $81,000 gets reread as a shakeout inside an intact uptrend.

The bear case has Bitcoin losing $77,000 with genuine acceptance below it, flushing out buyers who chased the breakout above $80,000 earlier in the week.

In that scenario, $75,000 to $75,500 becomes the immediate target, and a further failure there opens $72,000 to $73,000 as the market prices in a correction that has outgrown the Aug. 28 single-day rate shock.

Bitcoin's next move may get decided before US ETF desks reopen Monday, in a market where regulated futures now trade straight through the weekend.

The post Bitcoin’s failed $81,000 breakout just put $75,000 back on the table appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Polygon Labs said any Polygon PoS node that stayed on pre-hardfork Bor or Heimdall binaries past two August activation heights has already fallen out of canonical consensus. In practice, the stale node must upgrade and catch up before it can follow the network’s accepted history again.

The company’s Aug. 27 security review described a client-compatibility consequence. Polygon said it had not observed mainnet disruption from Austin and framed the disclosed changes as proactive fixes.

Bor is Polygon PoS’s execution client, while Heimdall handles consensus and checkpointing. Bor versions earlier than v2.10.0 are incompatible after Austin activated at mainnet block 91,949,700, a cutoff that applies to all Bor node roles.

Heimdall validators and full nodes need v0.11.0 after Kyoto activated at height 51,533,000. Polygon’s Heimdall release notice dates that mainnet activation to Aug. 18 at 10:10:31 UTC.

Austin and Kyoto addressed separate client risks

Austin capped the gas consumed while Bor processes state-sync events from L1-to-L2 bridge deposits. Those events execute contract code and precompiles, but their gas use was not previously counted against a fixed block-level ceiling.

Enough events, or one sufficiently costly event, could make block processing slow enough to stall the chain transiently.

The second weakness sat in Bor’s TxDependency extra-data field, a hint used for parallel execution. Because the producer-supplied field had no size limit, a block producer could place an arbitrarily large blob in an otherwise valid sibling block and crash peers that tried to process it.

Austin removed the field from the wire format, and Polygon classified both weaknesses as resource-exhaustion risks.

The public Bor v2.10.0 release records Austin’s mainnet and Amoy activation blocks. GitHub showed v2.10.1 as the latest Bor release when checked Aug. 28, while v2.10.0 or later provides Austin compatibility.

Operationally, one Austin path threatened delayed block processing, while the other could terminate peers receiving a producer’s oversized data field.

Kyoto’s highest-severity fix targets deeply nested google.protobuf.Any messages. A sender could cheaply construct one transaction that forced every validator to spend heavily on decoding. The hardfork added a byte-level nesting check at both mempool admission and block-proposal processing, keeping those paths consistent.

It separately capped fee-coin lists before an O(n) validation scan, and Heimdall’s integration permits one fee coin.

Other Kyoto changes address distinct edge cases. They normalize checkpoint signature recovery bytes so a valid signature cannot fail recovery on Ethereum and stall anchoring, make repeated producer-downtime messages idempotent, bind milestone-range votes to the signed parent hash, and prevent a failed future-span creation from blocking milestone commitment.

Replay keys for topup, clerk, and stake events were also made injective for out-of-range log indexes so distinct layer-1 events cannot silently shadow each other.

Both hardforks are plain binary upgrades with no state migration or genesis change, and nodes that had not diverged require no resync.

Operators already past the relevant height on an older client should install the applicable release, roll back to a pre-hardfork point if needed, and resync under Polygon’s guidance.

The post Polygon Labs issues urgent client upgrade notice following Austin and Kyoto hardforks appeared first on CryptoSlate.

US spot Ethereum ETFs appeared to begin trading with $10.36 billion already inside them, an opening balance large enough to resemble an institutional buying wave before the first full session ended.

However, almost all of that amount came from ETH that Grayscale's older trusts already held, so the launch moved an existing pool into exchange-traded products, while a much smaller share came from the other issuers' seed positions.

The same accounting issue appears in Solana funds, but on a smaller scale, with Farside Investors listing $449.3 million on the products' seed row and assigning $102.7 million to the conversion of Grayscale's earlier Solana trust.

Counting all of that money as “ETF demand” compresses inherited assets, launch financing, and later creations into one number, even though each describes a different transaction.

Four numbers drive most crypto ETF totals: seed capital, legacy assets carried through a conversion, primary-market creations and redemptions, and assets under management.

They're often grouped together, even though they describe different transactions, and only some increase the fund group's holdings during the measured period.

A fund can launch old and fully funded

An issuer needs shares outstanding before an ETF can begin normal trading, so a sponsor, affiliate, or market participant provides a seed position. The seed lets the fund acquire its opening portfolio, establish a net asset value, and supply inventory for exchange trading.

The size of the position can reflect the launch plan and the operating minimum needed to support creations and redemptions. A sponsor can commit cash beforehand, an authorized participant can bring inventory, or an existing product can contribute assets during a reorganization, giving the seed row several possible economic origins.

A conversion carries an older vehicle and its holdings into a new exchange-traded structure. Existing shareholders receive ETF shares or continue holding shares under the new listing, while the underlying crypto stays within the product complex.

The fund can open with billions of dollars in assets because those coins were accumulated years earlier, giving the launch scale without requiring billions of dollars of same-day buying.

Grayscale's products dominate Ethereum ETFs. Farside's Ethereum data assigns $9.199 billion of the $10.36 billion seed base to conversions of the Grayscale Ethereum Trust (ETHE), and another $1.023 billion to the Grayscale Ethereum Mini Trust (ETH).

The remaining eight issuers supplied $138.5 million in total, leaving 98.7% of the displayed seed base tied to Grayscale conversions.

Farside records the final row on a separate accounting line from the seed base. Its nearly $12.9 billion cumulative figure through Aug. 27 measures post-launch net creations and redemptions, while the $10.36 billion seed row records assets present at launch.

Adding or subtracting those lines would blur two distinct periods and produce a total that Farside itself doesn't report.

The Ethereum Mini transaction makes the conversion process visible because Grayscale's ETHE annual filing records the contribution of 292,262.98913350 ETH, about 10% of ETHE's holdings, to the Mini Trust on July 23, 2024.

The transferred Ethereum was valued at $1,010,934,757, and ETHE received 310,158,500 Mini shares at $3.26 each before distributing those shares to ETHE holders on a pro rata basis.

That repackaged an existing block of ETH and placed the resulting shares with existing investors. Farside's $1.023 billion classification and the filing's $1.011 billion transaction value use values captured for different reporting purposes, while both document the same economic origin.

A launch table can record the position as seed because it supplied the Mini Trust's opening assets, even though the coins had already spent years inside ETHE.

ETF flow measures shares while AUM measures everything

Primary-market activity begins once authorized participants create and redeem large blocks of ETF shares. During a creation, an authorized participant delivers the required basket of assets or cash and receives new fund shares. Meanwhile, during a redemption, it returns shares and receives assets or cash.

The process expands or contracts the fund's share count and helps arbitrage its exchange price toward net asset value.

Daily flow estimates generally translate the net share-count movement into dollars at the fund's net asset value. Positive flow means the product gained assets through net creation activity for that session, while negative flow means redemptions exceeded creations.

Secondary-market buying between two investors can raise trading volume without altering shares outstanding, so heavy exchange activity can coexist with a zero-flow day.

A daily creation has a complicated relationship with spot-market buying. An authorized participant or market maker can acquire crypto before the reported creation, hedge through futures, source coins from inventory, or deliver assets in kind where the structure permits.

The creation confirms that the fund's holdings and share count expanded, while the associated crypto trade can occur at another time or exchange, and the source account stays outside the data.

Assets under management measure how much the fund currently holds in dollar terms. Ending AUM reflects opening assets plus creations, minus redemptions, plus or minus the valuation move and fund expenses, allowing assets to fall during an inflow or climb during a zero-flow session.

CryptoSlate has examined the same distinction in Bitcoin ETF asset declines, where price performance can dominate the share-count movement.

Solana puts every bucket in one launch

Farside's Solana table shows $449.3 million on the seed row across six funds, with Grayscale Solana Trust accounting for $102.7 million as a conversion.

The other products supplied $346.6 million, making Solana's opening base more broadly distributed than Ethereum's while still carrying an inherited trust component equal to 22.9% of total seed assets.

GSOL's registration statement says the trust was formed in November 2021 and already had baskets outstanding before its NYSE Arca listing, so the conversion required no initial basket creation on the listing date. A later quarterly filing records that its shares began trading on NYSE Arca on Oct. 29, 2025.

Solana's $1.284 billion cumulative net-flow figure measures creations and redemptions through Aug. 27, while the $449.3 million seed row stays separate.

The post-launch amount records real expansion across the product group, although some capital may have rotated from spot accounts, trusts, other funds, or derivatives.

Secondary trading and SOL's value can continue moving during a flat-flow session, and CryptoSlate's Solana coverage provides wider market context.

The $346.6 million supplied by Solana's other issuers still contains useful information, with BSOL alone accounting for $222.9 million.

Sponsors and market makers choose seed sizes based on distribution plans, expected creations, and the inventory needed for orderly trading, so a large commitment can show confidence in product placement. It describes institutional launch preparation more directly than retail appetite, which becomes visible through later creations, brokerage allocations, and sustained secondary-market activity.

Staking can add one more accounting layer for Solana products whose mandates permit it. Rewards earned inside a fund increase its assets before fees and can affect total return, leaving creations, token appreciation, and staking income as separate contributors to the value shareholders see.

Investors can separate the buckets by checking whether a figure includes seed assets, how much came from a conversion, and whether the number tracks primary-market flow or AUM. The valuation date completes the accounting, while the creation method shows whether an intermediary supplied cash, transferred assets in kind, or used inventory it had already assembled.

Bitcoin products carry the same distinctions because a converted trust can bring a large installed asset base, seed investors can fund opening baskets, and later creations can represent new ETF shares while the associated Bitcoin was sourced elsewhere in the trading chain.

Comparing launch sizes across Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana requires the same accounting boundary for each group.

Dashboards and issuer announcements often place several accurate figures side by side under similar labels. “Total,” “seed,” “flow,” and “assets” each have their own definition, and swapping one label for another alters the transaction being described.

Showing the conversion component and the separate post-launch flow takes another line, but that line carries the economic meaning.

Ethereum's $10.36 billion opening row and Solana's $449.3 million opening row both describe successful product launches, though their ingredients differ sharply. Ethereum started with a conversion-heavy base, Solana combined an older trust with larger seeds from newer issuers, and subsequent net creations expanded both groups.

Keeping those buckets separate turns ETF demand from a promotional total into an account of when assets entered, where they came from, and what investors did next.

The post Crypto ETFs appeared to hit $10B in hours, but filing data exposes where that money really came from appeared first on CryptoSlate.

The proposal to double Solana’s annual disinflation rate has been marked Accepted after closing with 176.29 million SOL For, 66.19 million SOL Against and 20.63 million SOL Abstain, according to Validator Info.

The result gives Solana validators and stakers a directional mandate to accelerate the network’s path toward lower issuance. However, it does not immediately change SOL’s monetary schedule. The next phase still depends on implementation through SIMD-0550, client coordination, feature gating and eventual activation.

That distinction now defines the story. Solana’s first major governance cycle has moved past the question of whether SGP-0002 crossed the line and into a more important question: whether a narrow, high-stakes vote can become a clean consensus change.

The vote passed, but the margin depends on the denominator

The final public tally still produces two different-looking margins from the same balances.

Validator Info shows 176.29 million SOL For, equal to about 67.0% of the 263.12 million SOL in displayed turnout. That headline figure explains why the vote looked like a last-minute cliffhanger.

Solana’s governance-proposal policy excludes Abstain from the approval denominator. Under that rule, For is measured only against For plus Against.

That produces 242.48 million SOL of decisive stake. A two-thirds threshold on that base is about 161.65 million SOL, meaning the 176.29 million SOL For balance cleared the policy threshold by roughly 14.64 million SOL. Under that denominator, support was about 72.7%.

The rounded vote buckets add to 263.11 million SOL while the page reports 263.12 million SOL of turnout, so the derived percentages and margin are approximate.

That arithmetic does not erase the political drama. It explains it. The vote looked razor-thin on the all-ballot display, while Solana’s written rule produced a wider cushion because abstentions did not count against approval.

The confusion reflects a broader issue CryptoSlate flagged before the vote opened: Solana’s public governance surfaces were not always presenting the same participation and threshold logic. The earlier 60% quorum display issue did not imply corrupted voting, but it did preview the legitimacy problem that would follow if the interface, repository and public debate used different numbers.

Late validator shifts drove the X debate

Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz, one of the proposal’s most visible supporters, said on X that “500 calls” brought votes in during the final seconds and that the proposal passed by a “literal hair.”

Validators linked to Kraken and Galaxy shifted toward majority For shortly before voting closed. Kraken 2, described as representing about 2% of votes, changed from Against to For, while Galaxy reallocated from mostly Abstain to majority For near the deadline.

Kraken’s larger validator recast 8.92 million SOL from 100% Against to 90.34% For and 9.66% Against, while Galaxy moved from 92% Abstain to 58.36% For.

Acceptance is not implementation

SGP-0002 is a governance mandate. The technical path runs through SIMD-0550, which remains the vehicle for implementing the faster disinflation schedule. A consensus-affecting emissions change still has to be specified, tested, and coordinated across Solana clients before activation.

Solana’s governance process separates proposal acceptance from later implementation and activation. The vote has given the network a policy direction, but validators still need a consensus-safe implementation path before the schedule changes in production.

SGP-0002 asks Solana to double annual disinflation from 15% to 30% while keeping the 1.5% terminal inflation rate unchanged. The proposal’s model estimates about 18.89 million fewer SOL issued over six years, a figure that could affect staking yields.

That estimate assumes specific staking-participation bands, validator costs, commission levels, and voting costs. The eventual dollar value of foregone issuance will move with SOL price, validator economics, staking participation and implementation timing.

Solana Company had announced opposition to SGP-0002 before the close, arguing against changing the issuance schedule during the first governance cycle. Staking on company-held SOL accounted for 99.4% of its $2.5 million-plus second-quarter revenue, making the vote a live test of how validator economics and delegated governance interact.

The vote exposed a broader split between builders and scarcity advocates who wanted faster issuance reduction, and staking operators or yield-sensitive participants concerned about lower nominal rewards.

Governance legitimacy now moves to execution

SGP-0002 was accepted with 176.29 million SOL For and 66.19 million SOL Against. Solana has shown that its new governance system can produce a binding directional signal, but it also showed how much narrative risk emerges when the denominator, interface, and social debate do not line up cleanly.

Solana’s governance model lets validators vote with delegated stake by default, while native stakers can override that choice. Solana and Cardano governance argued that this structure reduces voter-apathy risk but increases the need for delegators to monitor the agents voting with their stake.

Passive stake flowed through validators unless delegators intervened. That design can make governance more decisive, but it also makes validator incentives, labeling, and late vote changes more important to public trust.

If SIMD-0550 advances cleanly, clients converge on identical arithmetic, and a feature gate activates without controversy, the vote will look like Solana’s first successful move toward a more active monetary-policy process.

If implementation stalls, the result will read as evidence that passing a governance mandate is easier than turning it into production consensus.

SGP-0002 passed and has been accepted. It gives Solana a mandate to double annual disinflation, but the emissions change itself is not live until the technical implementation and activation path catches up.

The post Kraken and Galaxy flipped late as Solana approved a major supply cut appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Canton (CC) changes hands at 0.1108 US dollars, some 41.1 percent below its record high of 0.1880 dollars from 3 February 2026. The token sits 19th by market capitalisation at 4.37 billion dollars and trades 15.3 percent below its 200-day average. That gap frames the question: whether the discount reflects a market that has moved on from Canton, or a settlement network whose adoption case has not yet shown up in the price.

cryptoticker.io collected the price data behind this analysis on 29 August 2026. The source is market data from CoinMarketCap, queried through the numeric asset ID rather than the ticker, because the symbol CC is assigned to more than a dozen separate listings. The method is daily closing prices and standard formulas for moving averages and the 14-day relative strength index. One limitation belongs in the open: the daily series begins on 11 November 2025 and covers 291 closes, so the figures below described as the twelve-month high and low are extremes since the token began trading, not a full annual cycle.

Canton price analysis: where the CC price stands and which levels matter

The current Canton price of 0.1108 dollars sits between two averages that tell different stories. The 50-day average stands at 0.1159 dollars, only 4.5 percent above spot, which makes the past two months a drift rather than a collapse. The 200-day average stands at 0.1307 dollars, 15.3 percent above spot, and that is the line the market has failed to reclaim through the summer.

The twelve-month high of 0.1880 dollars was set on 3 February 2026, when the token first pushed into the upper ranks of the market. The twelve-month low of 0.0622 dollars dates from 6 December 2025. Canton trades 77.9 percent above that low and 41.1 percent below the high, closer to the middle of its short history than to either extreme.

The practical levels follow from those numbers. The 50-day average around 0.1159 dollars is the first resistance any recovery has to clear, and the 200-day average near 0.1307 dollars is the level that would turn a bounce into a trend change. Below spot, the market has no long price history to lean on, and that thinness of reference is itself a risk.

Is the Canton downtrend broken or merely interrupted?

On the evidence, it is interrupted. Canton has lost 28.1 percent over 90 days and 9.4 percent over 30 days, while the last seven days cost a further 5.9 percent and the last 24 hours 0.9 percent. The rate of decline has slowed, and a price 4.5 percent under the 50-day average describes a market that has stopped falling hard rather than one that has turned.

The technical definition of a broken downtrend is a close above the 200-day average that holds. At 0.1307 dollars, that line is 15.3 percent away, and nothing in the current data comes close to meeting the test.

A second reading belongs here as a supposition rather than a finding. Canton fell through the spring while the CoinMarketCap Fear and Greed Index moved into greed territory, where it currently reads 77. An asset drifting lower while sentiment elsewhere is bullish suggests selling specific to this token rather than general risk aversion. The interpretation fits the data, but the series is too short to treat it as established.

What RSI and moving averages mean for a Canton entry

The 14-day relative strength index reads 51.9, as close to neutral as the indicator gets. It offers no oversold signal that would mark a bounce and no overbought reading that would warn against buying.

The moving averages are more informative because they disagree with each other. Price below the 200-day average and only slightly below the 50-day is the signature of an asset in a medium-term downtrend that has found short-term footing, and the RSI at 51.9 gives no hint which way it resolves.

The practical consequence is that the chart supports staging rather than a single decision. An investor who intends to hold Canton can treat the 0.1159 dollar area as confirmation of short-term strength and the 0.1307 dollar area as confirmation of a trend change, and size the position accordingly. That is a framework, not a recommendation. The same method is applied to a larger asset in our analysis of whether Bitcoin is a good buy at current prices.

What trading volume reveals about Canton demand

This is where the analysis turns uncomfortable. Canton turned over 18.4 million dollars in 24 hours against a market capitalisation of 4.37 billion dollars. That is 0.42 percent of the outstanding value changing hands in a day, and for an asset ranked 19th in the market it is remarkably little.

Assets of similar size routinely turn over several percent of their capitalisation daily. A ratio below half a percent means the quoted price rests on a thin book, and thin books move disproportionately when a single large order arrives. The 4.37 billion dollar valuation is what the market says the token is worth, and comparatively little capital has had to agree on it.

Two consequences follow for a private investor. Entering or leaving a position of any size will move the price against you, so limit orders matter more here than with liquid majors. And the valuation is more sensitive to sentiment than the ranking suggests.

Which structural factors speak for Canton

Canton positions itself as a settlement layer for regulated financial institutions, with privacy at the level of individual transactions rather than the full transparency of a public ledger. That design targets institutions wanting the settlement finality of a blockchain without publishing their positions to competitors. Whether the network wins that market is open, but the problem it addresses is genuine and large.

The supply picture is the second structural factor, and it cuts both ways. CoinMarketCap reports 39.44 billion CC in circulation and no fixed maximum, with circulating and total supply identical. The absence of a hard cap distinguishes Canton from the fixed-supply model set out in the original Bitcoin white paper, so the scarcity argument that supports some assets does not apply here in the same form.

The third factor is regulatory fit. A network built for institutional settlement operates in the environment that the European Securities and Markets Authority shapes for European market infrastructure, and institutional adoption of tokenised assets depends more on that framework than on retail sentiment. The Ethereum roadmap documents a different approach to the same finality questions, and Canton's earlier move into the upper ranks was covered in our analysis of the CC breakout.

What speaks for buying Canton at current prices

Three arguments carry weight. The first is the discount to the 200-day average. At 0.1108 dollars against an average of 0.1307 dollars, an investor buys 15.3 percent below the level that has defined the past year of trading, and mean reversion toward that line is the most common outcome for an asset that stops falling.

The second is that the selling appears to have exhausted itself. The decline easing from 28.1 percent over 90 days to 0.9 percent over the last day describes a market running out of sellers, and entering during a pause costs less than entering during a trend.

The third is the position in the ranking. A token at rank 19 with a 4.37 billion dollar capitalisation cleared within a year of listing a hurdle that most projects never clear. That is not proof of durability, and it is evidence that the network attracted serious capital rather than only speculative flow.

What speaks against buying Canton at current prices

Three arguments cut the other way, and the first is liquidity. A daily turnover of 0.42 percent of market capitalisation means the price is set by a small pool of capital. In a sell-off that pool disappears first, and the 0.0622 dollar low from December 2025 shows how far the token can travel when it does.

The second is the length of the record. With 291 daily closes, Canton has traded through one market phase. Every average here, including the 200-day line at 0.1307 dollars, rests on a series that has never seen a full cycle, and the high of 0.1880 dollars is the extreme of a short life rather than of a tested range.

The third is the open supply schedule. With 39.44 billion tokens outstanding and no stated maximum, future issuance is a variable an investor cannot size from the public data. That does not make dilution certain, and the burden of proof sits with the buyer. Investors who prefer longer records and deeper books may find our assessments of XRP and Hedera the more useful comparison.

How to buy Canton at the current price

Availability is the first hurdle and it is not a formality. Canton is a recent listing and coverage across retail venues is uneven, so confirm that a provider actually lists CC before building a plan around it. Our crypto exchange comparison sets out fees and coverage side by side, and the overview of regulated exchanges holding a MiCA licence narrows the field for European buyers.

Costs come in three layers that are easy to underestimate on a thinly traded asset. There is the trading fee, typically a fraction of a percent on the venues in our Kraken review, Bitpanda review and Coinbase review. There is the spread, wider on an asset turning over 0.42 percent of its capitalisation a day than on a major. And there is slippage on market orders, the cost most retail buyers never see itemised, which limit orders address directly.

Custody is the final decision. Leaving tokens with an exchange keeps them available for trading and exposed to the venue, and moving them to self-custody reverses both. Our hardware wallet comparison covers which devices support which networks, a check that matters more for newer chains. Fees and conditions change, so verify them with the provider before buying.

So is Canton a good buy at current prices?

Short term, the chart argues for patience rather than purchase. An RSI of 51.9 gives no edge, the price sits below both averages, and a thin order book means a short-term position pays a spread on the way in and again on the way out. The cost of waiting for a close above 0.1159 dollars is low.

Long term, the case rests on a proposition rather than a chart: that regulated institutions will settle tokenised assets on a network of this design, and that the token captures value when they do. An investor who finds that plausible is buying 15.3 percent below the 200-day average of 0.1307 dollars with a downside reference at the 0.0622 dollar low. An investor who does not has no reason to hold the token at any price, because the technical picture alone does not support a position.

The assumption behind the constructive case would be refuted by specific developments: daily turnover staying below half a percent of market capitalisation as the capitalisation grows, a sustained break below the 0.0622 dollar low, or a supply expansion that is not matched by network usage. A close above 0.1307 dollars that holds for several weeks would be the first evidence on the other side. Our Canton price prediction tracks these levels as they develop.

Buying Canton: what to take away

1. Canton trades at 0.1108 dollars, 15.3 percent below its 200-day average of 0.1307 dollars and 4.5 percent below the 50-day average of 0.1159 dollars, between a twelve-month low of 0.0622 dollars and a high of 0.1880 dollars. The discount is real, and so is the downtrend it comes from. The same levels are tracked in our Canton price prediction.
2. Liquidity is the binding constraint. A daily turnover of 0.42 percent of a 4.37 billion dollar capitalisation makes the quoted price fragile, so limit orders and staged entries matter more here than with liquid majors, at the fees compared in our crypto exchange comparison.
3. The record is short. With 291 daily closes, every average rests on a single market phase, which argues for position sizes an investor can hold through a full cycle and for custody decided in advance, as covered in our hardware wallet comparison.

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

(As of 29 August 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices, fees and conditions change; check them with the provider yourself before every purchase. Crypto assets are subject to high price volatility, and a total loss is possible.)

For three weeks in August, XRP did absolutely nothing. It sat on the $1.00 handle like a rock in a river, and most of the market stopped looking at it. Then on August 19 it went vertical, and by August 22 it had printed roughly $1.66. XRP now trades around $1.38.

That is the setup. Now let's look at why it happened and where the chart says it goes from here.

What XRP News Is Actually Moving The Price?

Three headlines are doing the heavy lifting, and only one of them is really new.

• Evernorth cleared its SEC hurdle. The XRP treasury company announced that the SEC declared its registration statement effective for the proposed business combination with Armada Acquisition Corp. II. Armada shareholders now vote on September 30, and if it passes, the combined entity is expected to list on Nasdaq under the ticker XRPN. Evernorth currently holds around 473 million XRP and is backed by Ripple, SBI Group, Pantera Capital, Kraken, GSR and Arrington Capital. Think of it as the first serious attempt at a Strategy-style treasury vehicle built entirely around XRP.
• ETF flows woke up. SoSoValue data showed US spot XRP ETFs pulled in $28.14 million in net inflows on August 26, the second-largest single day of 2026 and the strongest in more than seven months. The streak has now run multiple weeks without a single day of net outflows. Cumulative inflows since launch sit near $1.62 billion.
• The XRP Ledger crossed 5 billion lifetime transactions. Nice milestone for a 14-year-old network, and it will get quoted in every bullish thread this week. Be honest about what it is though: a lagging adoption stat, not a price catalyst.

One caveat worth keeping in your head. A $28 million inflow day being called a seven-month high tells you more about how dead the previous seven months were than about how big this session was. And ETF flow data does not tell you who bought. Retail with a brokerage account buys the exact same share as a pension fund.

How Did XRP Jump From $1 To $1.38?

The move was not a slow accumulation. It was a squeeze.

$XRP spent August 5 through August 18 grinding lower inside a tight band between roughly $1.00 and $1.06, with a visible flush toward the $1.00 line around August 11 to 15. That is the kind of price action that builds up a wall of short positions and stop orders sitting just above the range.

On August 19 the range broke. Over the next 72 hours XRP went from about $1.05 to a spike high near $1.66, a move of roughly 58% measured from the breakout and about 66% measured off the $1.00 base. Futures volume across Binance, Bybit, OKX and Bitget hit $11.37 billion on August 22, the highest reading since early February.

That combination, a long flat base plus a vertical candle plus record futures volume, is the fingerprint of a short liquidation cascade rather than steady spot accumulation. Bitcoin breaking above $80,000 in the same window gave the whole altcoin complex the push it needed, and XRP was the most heavily shorted large cap sitting on a spring.

Since the $1.66 spike, XRP has been rolling over in a sequence of lower highs: roughly $1.55, then $1.52, then $1.50, now $1.38. That is textbook post-spike distribution.

What Does The XRP Chart Actually Show?

Look at the shape of the move, not the percentage.

The rally from $1.05 to $1.40 happened so fast that almost no volume traded in between. There is a price vacuum sitting under the market between roughly $1.10 and $1.30. Nobody accumulated there, nobody has a cost basis there, so there is nothing structural to catch a falling price inside that zone. Vacuums cut both ways: they let price rip upward with no resistance, and they let it drop back through with no support.

The second thing the chart shows is that XRP has failed to make a new high since August 22. Every push since then has topped lower. The pullback has now been running for a full week, which matches how XRP corrections have historically behaved after moves of this size. They take time. They do not resolve in an afternoon.

Third, XRP is still holding above its key daily moving averages and is still up meaningfully on the month. This is a pullback inside an uptrend until proven otherwise. It only becomes a failed breakout if $1.30 goes.

Worth remembering for scale: XRP printed roughly $2.43 in January 2026 and its cycle top was $3.65 back in July 2025. Even at $1.66, this rally recovered a small fraction of that.

Where Are The Key XRP Support And Resistance Levels?

Resistance:

• $1.43 to $1.47 is the immediate ceiling. This has capped price repeatedly over the past few sessions.
• $1.55 is the level that matters. It was the floor of the post-spike consolidation, and it flipped to resistance when XRP lost it. A sustained daily close above $1.55 is the single cleanest bullish confirmation available right now.
• $1.66 to $1.69 is the spike high. Getting there requires new buyers, not just short covering.

Support:

• $1.38 is first support and XRP is sitting directly on it as you read this.
• $1.30 is the line that defines the whole setup. Below it, the vacuum opens up.
• $1.10 is the top of the old range and the first real structural shelf underneath.
• $1.00 is the base. Losing this invalidates everything about the August move.

XRP Price Prediction: What Are The Realistic Targets?

Bullish case: $1.55, then $1.80 to $2.00

XRP holds $1.38, reclaims $1.47, and closes a daily candle above $1.55. That confirms the pullback was a consolidation rather than a top and opens a retest of $1.66. Above the spike high, the next meaningful area is $1.80 to $2.00, with $2.00 being the round number every analyst is already circling. The fuel for this is a clean Evernorth shareholder vote on September 30, continued ETF inflow streaks, and Bitcoin holding above $80,000. Probability feels moderate. This needs a catalyst, not just hope.

Base case: chop between $1.25 and $1.50

The most boring outcome is also the most likely. XRP has just moved 66% in three days on a squeeze. Markets that do that usually spend weeks digesting it. Expect XRP to grind sideways inside a widening $1.25 to $1.50 range, frustrating both sides, until the September calendar delivers something. The two dates on that calendar are the Fed decision on September 16 and the Evernorth vote on September 30.

Bearish case: $1.20, then $1.10, then a $1.00 retest

If $1.30 breaks with volume, the vacuum does its job. There is very little to slow a move down until $1.10, and once there, the $1.00 base is only one bad session away. The structural argument for this case has not gone anywhere: Ripple releases 1 billion XRP from escrow at the start of every month and typically re-escrows 600 to 800 million, leaving 200 to 400 million tokens of new circulating supply each month. That is still entering the market faster than the entire ETF complex is absorbing it.

What Could Break This XRP Setup?

Watch these four things:

1. The Evernorth vote on September 30. A delay, a failed vote or a closing condition problem kills the XRPN narrative outright, and that narrative is carrying a lot of this move.
2. ETF flows turning negative. The inflow streak is the second leg of the story. The day it snaps, the bid thins out.
3. Bitcoin losing $80,000. XRP has no independent bid right now. If BTC rolls over, XRP goes with it and faster.
4. The monthly escrow release. September 1 brings another billion. Check the re-escrow number before reacting to the headline, because most coverage ignores it and gets the supply math wrong.

The Bottom Line On XRP

XRP did something genuinely impressive in August. It broke a range that had been suffocating it since June and it did so with real volume behind it. But the move was driven more by liquidations than by accumulation, and the week of lower highs since the top tells you the buyers who chased $1.60 are now underwater and selling into strength.

$1.30 is your line. Above it, this is a healthy pullback in an uptrend with $1.55 as the next real test. Below it, you are looking at a fast trip back to where this all started.

On September 1, 2026 at 00:00 UTC, 39,488,745 EIGEN leave lock-up at EigenCloud, the project that ran under the name EigenLayer until 2025. That amounts to 4.49 percent of circulating supply and, at the August 29 price, roughly $7.66 million. The whole tranche goes to two recipient groups that the emissions model lists as Investors and Early Contributors: to backers and to early staff. There is no airdrop inside it, and none of it reaches stakers.

The date itself is the smaller part of the answer. September 1 is not a special tranche but the next instalment of a fixed monthly series that began in October 2025 and ends in October 2027. Anyone holding EIGEN is therefore dealing with a permanent property of that position: on the first of every month, insider supply can reach the market on schedule. Nobody had written this up in German until now, even though the series has been running for eleven months.

What is a token unlock?

An unlock is the point at which contractually locked tokens become transferable again. Before it, the recipient can hold them but neither sell nor move them. After it, they may. Whether they will is not something the term says.

The technical term for the lock-up plan is the vesting schedule: A vesting schedule is the calendar, fixed in advance, along which locked tokens are released step by step. It can run linearly, in even small increments, or in larger stages. With EIGEN the two are combined, and it is exactly that construction which explains why the first of the month matters for this token.

Distinct from it is the TGE, the token generation event: The TGE is the moment at which a token is created and issued for the first time, while an unlock concerns only the tradability of tokens that already exist.

How the EIGEN vesting schedule is built: cliff or linear?

The Eigen Foundation sets out the rule in its token documentation in two sentences. First, the EIGEN token became transferable on September 30, 2024; that day is called the EIGEN Unlock in the documentation and is the anchor point for everything that follows. Second, the holdings of early staff, backers and service providers to the foundation stayed fully locked for a whole year after that, and from the anniversary onward 4 percent per month is released.

The technical term for this is the cliff: A cliff is an initial period during which nothing at all is released and at the end of which the first tranche arrives in one go. With EIGEN that cliff fell on September 30, 2025. The series has run monthly ever since, always on the first of the month at 00:00 UTC.

Why that adds up to three years in total

One year fully locked, then 4 percent a month: the documentation itself draws the conclusion that the holdings of backers and early staff are only fully free three years after transferability. Counting from September 30, 2024, that lands on September 30, 2027. The independent emissions model at DefiLlama lists October 1, 2027 as the final monthly date and matches it.

That calculation is why EIGEN leaves you with a clearly limited remaining term. After September 1, 2026, 14 monthly tranches are still outstanding. That is manageable, and it is verifiable, because two sources arrive at the same end date independently of each other.

Who receives the 39.5 million EIGEN on September 1?

The emissions model splits the tranche into two lines:

• Investors: 20,189,050 EIGEN. The investor allocation stands at 504.73 million EIGEN; 4 percent of that is 20,189,200. The 150-token difference from the figure shown is pure rounding. The rule taken from the primary source therefore reproduces the model figure almost exactly.
• Early Contributors: 19,299,695 EIGEN. Here the arithmetic does not work out as neatly. The allocation for early staff is 458.55 million EIGEN, 4 percent of which would be 18,342,000. The model, however, shows 19,299,695 for September, 19,698,418 for August and 18,835,880 for October, so it lets the figure fall from month to month.

This discrepancy in the Early Contributors line has not been explained publicly. Anyone who needs a dependable number should therefore take the investor tranche and the four-percent rule; the early-staff line is a model figure and not a number derived from the rule in the primary source. It has no place in a headline, though it does belong in the overall picture, as long as its origin is stated alongside it.

The point that separates this tranche from an ordinary emissions event: Both recipient groups are insiders. On September 1 there is no community share, no distribution to restakers and no reward for stakers. If you are looking for yield on tokens you hold, an unlock is the wrong place for it anyway; how returns on crypto holdings actually come about and what they cost is set out in the comparison of staking platforms.

What “unlocked” means and what it does not

This is where most unlock pieces go wrong, so to be clear: the source says the lock-up falls away. It says nothing more. Whether a backer sells their tokens on September 1, on December 1 or not at all is unknown and cannot be derived from the calendar.

Unlocked tokens can simply stay in the recipient's wallet. They can just as easily move to an exchange and sit there, be sold in tranches over months, or go across a market maker's trading desk without any of it ever becoming visible in the order book. An unlock raises the possible supply, nothing more.

The second common error is confusing release with new issuance. The 39.5 million EIGEN already exist and are already allocated to someone. No new tokens come into being out of nothing on that day. What changes is tradability alone.

How big is the EIGEN unlock relative to circulating supply and trading volume?

An absolute number of tokens says little. Only the ratio makes it readable. All market figures below come from CoinGecko, retrieved on August 29, 2026 at 06:33 UTC.

• Share of circulating supply: 39,488,745 out of 878,726,027 EIGEN, or 4.49 percent.
• Value: at a price of $0.194073, roughly $7.66 million, or about 6.62 million euros.
• Ratio to trading: volume over the past 24 hours stood at $16.69 million. The tranche therefore equals roughly 46 percent of a full trading day.
• Share of market cap: against a market capitalisation of $170.58 million it is likewise around 4.5 percent.
• Plus the weekly inflation: on top of the monthly instalment, a further 1,287,421 EIGEN arrive from emissions every week, in September on the 3rd, 10th, 17th and 24th. That is roughly $250,000 per week. It is not included in the monthly figure.
• September as a whole: all releases added together come to 44,638,427 EIGEN, a good 5 percent of today's circulating supply.

The number that lets you pin down the order of magnitude is the ratio to trading volume. A tranche worth just under half a trading day is neither a footnote nor an earthquake. It is a quantity the market can absorb if it arrives spread out, and one that gets noticed if it arrives all at once.

Circulating supply, total supply and FDV: where is the difference?

Circulating supply is the quantity of tokens actually in free circulation and tradable, with EIGEN the 878.7 million already mentioned. Total supply additionally covers everything that exists but is locked, reserved or not yet distributed; here that is 1,837,770,172 EIGEN, more than twice as much. The initial total supply stood at 1,673,646,668 EIGEN; the rest has been added by inflation since.

FDV, spelled out as fully diluted valuation, is the market value a token would have if the entire total supply were in circulation today and the price stayed unchanged. With EIGEN it stands at $356.75 million against a market cap of $170.58 million. From that gap you can read off in a single sentence how much dilution is still outstanding: slightly more than half of the tokens that exist are not in circulation today.

How much longer does the EIGEN unlock series run?

The next dates are fixed and can be checked against the emissions model. After September 1 come:

• October 1, 2026: 39,024,930 EIGEN
• November 1, 2026: 37,825,418 EIGEN
• December 1, 2026: 36,794,832 EIGEN

The tranches are therefore shrinking slowly, because the falling Early Contributors line overlays the constant investor line. For comparison: on August 1, 2026 the figure was 39,887,468 EIGEN, a good 400,000 more than now in September.

How far the series has progressed can be quantified as well. Around 12 percent of the investor allocation has been released so far, and a good 14 percent of the Early Contributors allocation. The larger part of both allocations therefore remains locked. At the end of the series, backers will hold around 25.7 percent and early staff around 23.4 percent of the supply existing at that point. Together that is just under half.

Did the price fall after earlier EIGEN unlocks?

The question is an obvious one, and it can be answered for the two most recent dates without turning it into a forecast. The daily closing prices below come from CoinGecko's price history.

Before the unlock on July 1, 2026, EIGEN stood at $0.2178 on June 30 and at $0.2026 on the unlock day itself, a fall of just under 7 percent. Eight days later, on July 9, the price was well above the starting level at $0.2493.

Before the unlock on August 1, 2026, the token was quoted at $0.1831 on July 31 and $0.1783 on August 1, a fall of 2.6 percent. The greater part of the downward move lay behind that date here: from July 17 at $0.2466 to the turn of the month, the price had lost around a quarter, long before the release day. It then fell further to $0.1667 by August 13 and rose again afterwards; on August 29 EIGEN stands at $0.1943, a good 8 percent above where it was 30 days ago.

Two dates are two data points and not a rule of nature. What can be read from them is modest but usable: the move on the unlock day itself stayed in single-digit percentages both times, and the larger swings lay before and after it. Anyone who turns a calendar entry into a price target has claimed more than the data supports.

You can follow the same construction with other tokens: with Hyperliquid we broke down the monthly dilution in the article on the HYPE unlock, and the arithmetic there follows the same pattern of cliff, monthly instalment and remaining term.

What is EigenLayer and what is the EIGEN token needed for?

EigenLayer is a protocol for restaking on Ethereum. Restaking means that ETH already committed to Ethereum consensus serves a second time as collateral, this time for additional services. Instead of building its own security budget for every new service, that service borrows the existing cryptoeconomic security of Ethereum.

The services that live off this are called AVS in the vocabulary of the protocol. An AVS, spelled out as Actively Validated Service, is a service whose correct execution is attested by the restakers of the network and penalised in the event of failure. The best-known in-house example is EigenDA, a layer that holds data for rollups and keeps it available.

Since the rename to EigenCloud, the project has been presenting itself more broadly and describes itself as a platform for verifiable applications. The EIGEN token remains the unit through which security and incentives in the network are organised. For the unlock question the change of name makes no difference: the vesting schedule hangs on the token and runs on regardless of what the product is called.

Where the large community share comes from

Of the initial total supply, 45 percent goes to the community, split into three equally sized blocks of 15 percent each: Stakedrops, Community Initiatives and R&D and Ecosystem Growth. A stakedrop is a distribution of tokens to users who have previously made capital available to the network, in contrast to the classic airdrop, which works without any commitment. Around 251 million EIGEN were earmarked from this category, roughly 186.6 million were made claimable in seasons 1 and 2, and as of the cut-off on September 30, 2024 the foundation had recorded around 158.8 million as claimed.

These blocks are the counterweight to the insider allocations. They explain why circulating supply already stands at almost 879 million EIGEN today, even though only a good tenth of the investor holdings is free.

How do you look up coming token unlocks yourself?

The route is short, and you do not need a subscription service for it. Two places are enough, and they complement each other:

1. The documentation of the issuer. That is where the rule sits: lock-up period, percentage and recipient groups. For EIGEN you will find it in the token overview of the Eigen Foundation. What it usually lacks is concrete calendar dates and quantities.
2. An independent emissions model. It carries the dates and quantities the issuer does not publish. For EIGEN, DefiLlama lists 181 individual release events with date, time and recipient group.

The real work lies in the reconciliation. When the rule from the documentation reproduces the figure from the model, you have two mutually independent pieces of evidence instead of one copied number. That is exactly what works for the EIGEN investor line, with a deviation of 0.0007 percent, and exactly what does not work for the Early Contributors line. This reconciliation is the difference between a checked figure and a believed one.

A practical note on aggregators: different services often show different “next” dates for the same token, because they point at different months of the same series. That looks like a contradiction but usually is not one. Once you know you are dealing with a monthly series, the apparent conflict resolves itself.

What the EIGEN unlock means in practice for you as a holder

If you hold EIGEN on an exchange

There is nothing to do on September 1. An unlock is not a network upgrade, not a migration and not a deadline at which a balance could expire. Deposits and withdrawals continue unchanged, your holding stays the same, and there is no swap and no address change. All you need to know is that on that day more tradable supply exists, as scheduled, than the day before.

If you are checking where your holdings sit anyway, it is worth a look at the regulatory status of your trading platform; which providers in Germany operate under which supervision is set out in the overview of regulated crypto exchanges.

If you hold your own keys

Technically nothing changes here either. Your tokens were never affected by the lock-up, because only the holdings of backers and early staff are locked. No wallet action, no claim and no confirmation is needed, and anyone offering you such an action by message on September 1 wants something from you other than your best interests.

If you run restaking

Restaking and unlocks are two separate processes. Your deposited positions, withdrawal periods and rewards do not hang on the vesting calendar of the insiders. What returns from restaking and liquid staking trigger for tax purposes we have written up in a separate piece on restaking, liquid staking and taxes; the questions raised there are untouched by this date.

EIGEN unlock: what you take away from it

1. Put the first of the month in your calendar, not September 1. The single date is one instalment out of 14 remaining. If you hold EIGEN for longer, the series running to October 2027 is the relevant quantity. Where to track your holdings cleanly over time is shown by the comparison of portfolio trackers and tax tools.
2. Check every unlock figure against two sources. The rule from the documentation of the issuer, the date and quantity from an independent emissions model. If the two agree, the number is dependable; if they diverge, the divergence belongs in the text rather than smoothed away. The same standard applies to yield products on the same tokens, as set out in the comparison of staking platforms.
3. Do not confuse release with selling. An unlock raises possible supply and says nothing about whether anyone sells. Anyone deriving a price target from it has left the source behind. If you are reviewing your custody arrangements while you are at it, the overview of regulated crypto exchanges helps with sorting them out.

(As of August 29, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

The short answer first: through an ordinary German brokerage account you will, in all likelihood, not get anywhere near the Zcash ETF trading under the ticker ZCSH. The product is set up in the United States and listed on NYSE Arca, and for sale to retail investors in the European Union it is missing one document, without which your broker is not even allowed to accept the order. This article explains what exactly the block hangs on, which routes are genuinely open, and why the second route, buying the coin directly, carries an expiry date in the EU.

The occasion: on August 25, 2026, Grayscale opened trading in the Zcash ETF on NYSE Arca. According to the provider it is the world's first exchange-traded product with spot exposure to Zcash (ZEC), meaning the privacy coin itself rather than futures contracts. German-language coverage reported the launch. The follow-up question every German reader asks next went unanswered.

What the Zcash ETF ZCSH Is and What Actually Sits Inside It

ZCSH is a spot ETP. An ETP, an exchange traded product, is an exchange-listed security that tracks the value of an underlying asset. The word spot means the fund holds that underlying physically and does not replicate it through futures contracts. In the case of ZCSH, real ZEC therefore sit in the fund's assets.

The product is a conversion of an existing vehicle rather than a fresh launch. The Grayscale Zcash Trust has been running as a private placement since October 2017. Moving into the ETP structure gives it a mechanism the old trust lacked: authorized participants, the licensed trading firms permitted to create and redeem shares against delivery of the underlying. That mechanism is what keeps the exchange price and the net asset value from drifting apart for long. According to the reports on the trading debut, Jane Street and Virtu take on this role, custody sits with Coinbase and fund administration with BNY.

Two figures matter for context. Grayscale puts the annual sponsor fee at 2.5 percent. At the trading debut the fund held roughly 387,000 ZEC according to the available reports, corresponding to fund assets in the region of a good $300 million. Both values change continuously; the fee is the more stable of the two and the more important one for judging the product.

Can I Buy ZCSH Through My Broker as a German Investor?

As a rule, no. When you enter an order for a US-listed ETP at a German custodian bank or at a neobroker operating in Germany, the system checks before execution whether a key information document in German exists for that security. If none exists, the order is rejected. This is not the broker's house policy but the implementation of a European regulation.

How clearly this plays out in practice can be read in the providers' own help pages. DEGIRO writes in its helpdesk verbatim: "Due to the new PRIIPS rule, a range of (foreign) products has no longer been available for purchase since January 2, 2018. Holding or selling these products does, however, remain possible." And further: "US products are particularly affected." That wording comes from the broker's public help page and describes exactly the situation ZCSH falls into.

The second half of that sentence is worth noting: holding and selling remain permitted. The block bites only on the purchase and on adding to a position. Anyone who already owns US fund shares through a foreign account is therefore not stuck with them because a regulation suddenly made them unsellable. Anyone who wants to enter fresh stands in front of a closed door.

Why the PRIIPs Regulation Blocks US Products for Retail Investors

The legal basis is Regulation (EU) No 1286/2014, known in the jargon as the PRIIPs Regulation. Its unwieldy title names the subject precisely: key information documents for packaged retail investment products. A packaged investment product is any product where the amount repaid depends on the performance of an underlying value rather than directly on the investor. A fund on a coin clearly falls under it.

The regulation obliges anyone who sells such a product to retail clients, or advises on it, to provide a standardised information document before the transaction is concluded. The legislator wanted risks, costs and mechanics to be presented in comparable form. The practical side effect is a market border: where the document is missing, no sale to retail clients takes place.

What a Key Information Document Is and Why US Funds Usually Lack One

A key information document, known internationally as a KID, is a strictly formatted document of a few pages. In a prescribed order it describes what the product is, which risks exist, which costs arise and how long the recommended holding period is. The issuer draws it up, answers for it and is liable for it.

That liability is exactly where it snags. A US fund provider that does not actively work the European retail market has little reason to produce a document in several EU languages and stand behind it. For such a provider, distribution to European retail investors is a liability risk without any return, and no business goal at all. You know the consequence from your own account: large, well-known US funds do appear in price lists yet cannot be ordered.

Nothing different applies to ZCSH. Grayscale set the product up for the US market, the approval runs through the SEC, the trading venue is NYSE Arca. A European key information document is no part of that structure. As long as nothing changes there, buying through a German brokerage account stays barred. How such a US product works technically, and why the construction regularly becomes a problem for European investors, we described in more detail using the example of the filed leveraged funds in Leveraged Bitcoin ETF.

Is There a Zcash ETP in Europe? The Result of the Issuer Check

The obvious fallback question runs: if the US product is blocked, is there a European counterpart? Crypto ETPs are widespread in Europe; unlike in the US they are mostly issued as collateralised debt securities and listed on venues such as SIX in Zurich or in Xetra trading. For Bitcoin and Ether an entire product family exists.

For Zcash the picture looks different. On August 29, 2026 we called up the product overviews of the three large European issuers, along with the product database of justETF, which maps the inventory distributable in Germany. The result in short:

• 21Shares product overview: no Zcash product listed.
• CoinShares ETP overview: no Zcash product listed.
• Bitwise Europe product page: no Zcash product listed.
• Search for "Zcash" in the justETF database: no hit in the product category, only references in editorial articles.

That is a snapshot and no proof for all time, but the direction is unambiguous: at the time of writing, no European-issued Zcash ETP is available that a German retail investor could order in a brokerage account. Anyone who wants to check regularly whether that changes has, in the justETF search and the issuer pages, the two places that react first.

The Direct Route via the Coin and Its EU Expiry Date

That leaves buying the coin itself. ZEC can be acquired on regulated venues holding an EU authorisation under the crypto regulation MiCA. Which providers those are, and how you recognise an authorisation, is set out in our overview of regulated crypto exchanges. This route works today, but it has a date on the horizon.

The EU anti-money-laundering regulation removes anonymity-enhancing crypto assets from regulated trading venues from July 10, 2027. We worked through this classification and the date on August 23, 2026 in the article Buying Zcash Despite the EU Trading Ban, on the basis of the regulation's text. For you as a holder, the finding there means that your own holdings are not confiscated, while the orderly trading route inside the EU closes.

Out of this comes the peculiar situation this article is about. The product that would give you regulated access to ZEC in a securities account is blocked for want of a key information document. The coin you could buy directly instead loses its regulated trading venue in the EU in less than two years. Both routes are narrowed, and for two entirely different reasons that have nothing to do with each other.

Getting Classified as a Professional Client: The Way Out That Isn't One for Most

The PRIIPs obligation applies towards retail investors. Anyone classified by their broker as a professional client under the rules of the financial markets directive MiFID II falls outside the protective scope, and with that the reason for the order block falls away for this client. Some institutions unlock US products for this client group.

The hurdles for it are deliberately set high. Institutions usually require proof of two of the following three points: a securities portfolio above a six-figure threshold, a minimum number of larger transactions per quarter across several quarters, and at least one year of relevant professional experience in the financial sector. Whoever accepts the classification also gives up part of the protective provisions that apply to retail clients. For the vast majority of readers this is no sensible way to reach a single product. Anyone who meets the requirements anyway is best off clarifying the unlock directly with their own institution, because the handling differs from house to house.

What the Detour via Foreign Brokers Really Costs

Guides circulate online that recommend the detour via a broker outside the EU. Before you pursue that thought, four points belong on the table which such guides rarely mention.

First, tax. A foreign account withholds no German capital gains tax. You are obliged to declare all income yourself in the Anlage KAP tax annex, and for that you need records meeting German requirements. How to keep the necessary evidence cleanly is shown in our comparison of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers.

Second, the inheritance position. A US account can end up in a US probate procedure on death, which becomes laborious and lengthy for relatives. Third, the currency: on top of the price risk of the underlying you carry the risk of the dollar exchange rate, and without any hedge. And fourth, deposit protection, which in a third country follows different rules from the European framework you are used to.

None of these points makes the route impossible. Taken together, however, they change the arithmetic considerably, particularly for a product whose running costs already sit at the upper end.

A 2.5 Percent Sponsor Fee: Why the Price of This Access Stands Out

The sponsor fee is the annual management fee taken continuously from the fund's assets. This fee accrues regardless of whether the underlying rises or falls, and year by year it reduces the number of coins deposited per share.

2.5 percent a year is a high figure compared with established crypto ETPs; large Bitcoin products have moved into a distinctly lower range since the price competition of recent years. The premium is explained partly by the vehicle's origin as a private placement and partly by the fact that ZCSH currently has no direct competitor. For you as an investor the number is above all an input for the calculation: it describes how much performance has to accrue over a year before the position even stands at zero.

Whoever holds the coin directly and stores it themselves pays no running fee and takes on responsibility for the keys instead. Which devices come into question for that, and what matters in securing them, is set out in the hardware wallet comparison. This trade-off between running costs and personal responsibility is the real decision behind the access question.

Five Mistakes That Cost Money When Accessing the Zcash ETF

Working through the topic, a few recurring misunderstandings crystallised out. The following points are quickly told and can spare you expensive detours.

1. Confusing the ticker. Two spellings circulated in the coverage of the product. What counts is the ticker the provider itself names and under which NYSE Arca lists the security. Check it on the exchange page before you type it in anywhere.
2. Buying a similar-sounding security. When the search in your account returns nothing, the temptation is strong to take the next best security with a similar name. With crypto products that regularly leads to certificates with an entirely different risk profile.
3. Treating the fee as a side issue. Over a holding period of several years, 2.5 percent a year becomes a noticeable part of the result and far more than a footnote.
4. Overlooking the EU date. Whoever opts for the direct purchase should have July 2027 in the calendar and clarify in good time how their own holdings will be stored afterwards.
5. Gathering the tax records too late. With foreign accounts and with directly held coins the burden of proof lies with you, retroactively across the entire holding period.

How the Situation Could Change

Three developments would change the answer to the opening question. The first would be a European issuer that launches a Zcash ETP and provides a key information document for it; access through an ordinary brokerage account would then exist immediately. The second would be a decision by Grayscale to produce the necessary documentation for the European market, which given the liability position is unlikely though not ruled out. The third concerns the regulation of the coin itself: how supervisors handle shielded transactions from July 2027 has not yet been spelled out in detail, and the interpretation will help determine how attractive a European product would be for an issuer at all.

In parallel, the protocol itself is moving. We reported on the ongoing coinholder vote about the future issuance curve on August 22, 2026 in Zcash Vote on the Halving. For the access question it plays no role; for judging the underlying it certainly does.

Zcash ETF: What You Take Away

1. Check first whether access exists at all, before you think about entering. Type the ticker into the securities search of your account. If no orderable hit appears, the question is answered for this account. If you are comparing anyway which provider unlocks which products, the overview of regulated crypto exchanges helps with the sorting.
2. Decide deliberately between a fund share and your own holdings. The fund takes custody off your hands and charges an annual fee for it. Your own holdings cost no running fee and demand a working backup in return. Which devices are up to it is set out in the hardware wallet comparison.
3. Set up the tax records before the first position exists. With directly held coins and with foreign accounts you must be able to document the acquisition date and the acquisition cost without gaps. The right tools for that are found in the comparison of crypto tax tools.

(As of August 29, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Selling Bitcoin Privately: What Tax Applies to Direct Sales in Austria

Bitcoin does not have to be sold through a crypto exchange. Buyer and seller can also agree directly and move the coins from one private wallet to another.

For tax purposes in Austria, however, that generally makes no difference. Anyone who disposes of bitcoin for euros or another legal currency generally realises a taxable event, regardless of whether a crypto exchange sits in between.

The Gain Is Taxed, Not the Sale Price

What matters is the difference between the sale proceeds and the acquisition cost for tax purposes.

Example:

• bitcoin bought for 15,000 euros
• later sold directly to a private buyer for 30,000 euros
• taxable gain: 15,000 euros

For bitcoin acquired after February 28, 2021, the special tax rate of 27.5 percent generally applies. In the example, that would generally come to 4,125 euros in tax.

Cash Changes Nothing About the Bitcoin Tax

Payment in cash does not make the transaction tax-free either.

Whether the buyer:

• transfers euros,
• hands over cash,
• pays in another legal currency,

generally makes no difference to the fact that bitcoin has been disposed of for fiat money. A swap for goods or services can likewise constitute a taxable realisation event.

How a Private Sale Differs From Selling on an Austrian Exchange

The decisive practical difference lies in the tax deduction. Where a domestic crypto service provider is involved, the tax is in many cases withheld automatically as capital gains tax and paid over to the tax office. In a direct private sale, by contrast, there is regularly no party obliged to withhold it.

The seller therefore has to:

• determine the sale proceeds,
• establish the acquisition cost,
• calculate the gain,
• account for the taxable income in the assessment.

Worked Example: Tax on a Private Bitcoin Sale in Austria

Written Proof Matters Especially Here

Private bitcoin sales should be documented in detail.

The following are particularly worth recording:

• date of the sale
• BTC amount
• agreed euro price
• proof of payment
• transaction ID
• sender and recipient address
• original acquisition cost
• any fees

Where payment is made in cash, a written receipt should be drawn up as well. Years later the blockchain will still show that the bitcoin was transferred, but not automatically which purchase price was agreed and actually paid.

What Happens When You Swap Bitcoin for Other Cryptocurrencies?

A direct private sale has to be distinguished from a swap into another cryptocurrency. Swapping bitcoin for another cryptocurrency that qualifies for tax purposes is generally not a taxable disposal in Austria. The existing acquisition cost carries over to the cryptocurrency received instead. Bitcoin for euros and bitcoin for ether can therefore have completely different tax consequences.

Legacy Holdings Can Still Be Free of Bitcoin Tax

Bitcoin acquired up to and including February 28, 2021 generally counts as a legacy holding and does not automatically fall under the current crypto tax regime. For legacy holdings held privately, a sale can generally be tax-free under the earlier rules once the speculation period that applied back then has expired. Anyone selling old bitcoin privately in 2026 should therefore document the original date of acquisition with particular care.

Selling Bitcoin to Friends Counts as a Sale Too

Whether buyer and seller are related or friends is generally not decisive for the question of a disposal for consideration. Anyone who sells bitcoin to a friend at the market price has made a sale.

Where bitcoin is genuinely transferred without consideration, it is a gift. The Austrian rules on reporting gifts can then become relevant in place of the taxation of a sale.

Documentation deserves particular care where bitcoin is transferred well below its market value. Depending on how the transfer is arranged, it can be partly for consideration and partly without.

Conclusion

For tax purposes in Austria, a direct bitcoin sale between private individuals generally has to be taken just as seriously as a sale through a crypto exchange. For bitcoin acquired after February 28, 2021, a realised capital gain is generally taxed at 27.5 percent.

The key difference: in a private sale there is regularly no Austrian crypto service provider that handles the capital gains tax deduction automatically. The seller therefore has to document the taxable gain and, where applicable, declare it through the income tax assessment.

(As of August 28, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

The roughly $42.5 million cash-and-stock deal adds derivatives, structured products and capital-markets capabilities, while letting NYDIG focus on its power and data-center business.

BTC gave back some of its gains after Fed Chair Kevin Warsh talked tough on inflation, but prediction market traders are still leaning bullish.

The company says it needs more skilled workers as its AI infrastructure expands, but employees fear automation could reduce or eliminate some roles.

Evernorth has gained SEC clearance, teeing up a shareholder vote on its Nasdaq listing—while the firm's XRP stash sits well below what it paid for it.

Austin is the latest city to consider restrictions as communities challenge the water and electricity demands of AI infrastructure.

BlackRock’s ETHA has recorded more than $1 billion in net inflows over nine straight trading sessions, leading U.S. spot Ethereum ETFs.

Major crypto exchange Coinbase names two tokens to be delisted in September in fresh shakeup.

Ripple has hired LME treasury executive Joseph Thompson as the company expands its tokenization and institutional markets businesses.

Actor Matt Damon will appear alongside top Ripple executives, including CEO Brad Garlinghouse, President Monica Long and CTO Emeritus David Schwartz.

Dogecoin is set to close its best performing month so far in 2026 after registering a return of 21.4% for the month, the highest return seen this year.

Key Takeaways

• Chevron is on the verge of securing agreements to broaden its Venezuelan operations, with two additional heavy-oil fields under negotiation
• An official announcement is anticipated Wednesday in Venezuela’s capital, coinciding with Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s planned visit
• Oilfield services giant Halliburton is simultaneously negotiating to deploy equipment and services in Venezuela
• The company currently operates three partnerships with state oil firm PDVSA and remains the sole major American oil producer in the country
• Shares of CVX climbed 1.05% following the announcement; competitors ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips remain absent from the market

The American energy giant is preparing to finalize an arrangement that would significantly enlarge its Venezuelan presence, bringing two heavy-oil field assets into its portfolio alongside three existing partnerships with government-controlled PDVSA. CVX shares advanced 1.05% following the disclosure.

Chevron Corporation, CVX

Officials plan to unveil the arrangement Wednesday in Venezuela’s capital city, where leadership from multiple American energy firms will formalize production agreements. The nation’s Energy Secretary Chris Wright is scheduled to attend the proceedings.

The arrangement would transition Chevron’s current partnerships into Venezuela’s updated energy regulatory structure, granting the American corporation enhanced operational authority. Additionally, it encompasses a previously negotiated asset exchange enabling Chevron’s Petropiar heavy crude operation to extend into the adjacent Ayacucho 8 territory.

Negotiations also encompass a secondary territory within the Orinoco Belt, plus a prospective additional oil region that may join Chevron’s holdings, informed sources indicate. The company has not issued a statement on the matter.

Meanwhile, Halliburton, a leading American oilfield services provider, is actively negotiating to supply its technology and services to Venezuela’s petroleum industry.

Motivations Behind the Expansion

Following Nicolas Maduro’s removal in January, the Trump administration has encouraged American energy corporations to commit capital to Venezuela, aiming to strengthen oil production throughout the Western Hemisphere and guarantee additional heavy crude supplies for domestic refineries.

The South American nation possesses among the planet’s most substantial confirmed petroleum reserves, representing approximately 17% of worldwide totals. Present production levels hover around 1.1 million barrels daily, essentially unchanged from the previous year.

Chevron stands alone among major American oil producers with active Venezuelan operations, functioning under exclusive U.S. government authorization. This operational experience provides a competitive advantage over industry peers still evaluating market entry.

Competition Remains Hesitant

ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips have opted against participation at this time. Both corporations lost their Venezuelan holdings to nationalization under Hugo Chavez in 2007 and continue pursuing billions in compensation nearly twenty years later.

Numerous fields Venezuela is presenting are undeveloped territories, without fundamental infrastructure or power supply. Converting these into operational assets would demand billions in initial capital expenditure.

Hunt Oil became the inaugural American firm to formalize an agreement for Venezuelan oil extraction earlier this month, preceding the current wave of industry contracts.

These corporate negotiations occur independently from sophisticated discussions between the Trump administration and Venezuelan authorities regarding direct American ownership stakes in 17 of the nation’s highest-potential fields, containing approximately 90 billion barrels of confirmed reserves.

By the conclusion of Q2 2026, Chevron ranked as the energy sector’s most widely held stock among hedge funds tracked in the Insider Monkey database, with 101 institutional investors maintaining combined positions valued at roughly $23.2 billion.

The post Chevron (CVX) Stock Climbs on Major Venezuela Expansion Agreement appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• CRWD surged 20% following Q2 earnings release, reaching $227.96 and touching a 52-week peak of $229.08
• Adjusted EPS of $0.31 topped analyst expectations by $0.02; sales of $1.47B climbed 26% from the prior year
• Net new ARR reached an all-time high of $333 million, representing 51% annual growth, pushing total ARR to $5.84B
• Annual FY2027 revenue outlook increased to $5.99B-$6.01B; Q3 sales projected between $1.523B-$1.529B
• Shares retreated more than 6% the subsequent trading session as investors questioned the premium 40x sales multiple

CrowdStrike delivered what CEO George Kurtz characterized as “the best quarter in CrowdStrike’s history” on August 26, propelling CRWD shares 20% higher to finish at $227.96 the next trading day.

CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc., CRWD

The cybersecurity giant reached a new 52-week peak of $229.08 during the session, accompanied by trading volume of approximately 23.3 million shares—close to triple its one-month average level.

Adjusted earnings per share landed at $0.31, surpassing the $0.29 analyst estimate by two cents. Total revenue hit $1.47 billion, marking a 25.6% increase from the year-ago period and exceeding projections by $30 million.

Subscription-based revenue jumped 27% to $1.40 billion. Professional services generated a company record of $71 million.

The star metric was net new annual recurring revenue. This figure reached an unprecedented $333 million during the quarter, reflecting 51% growth compared to last year. Total ARR rose more than 25% to $5.84 billion, marking the fourth consecutive quarter of accelerating expansion.

Expanding Platform Adoption

CrowdStrike’s Falcon security platform is seeing increased customer engagement. Approximately 51% of subscription clients now utilize six or more modules, with 35% deploying seven or more.

The Falcon Flex offering is contributing to higher wallet share. Organizations transitioning from traditional subscriptions to Flex experienced average ARR increases exceeding 40% during the period.

Leadership also highlighted growing interest in AI security readiness and incident response capabilities, viewing these as catalysts for expanded platform utilization.

Upgraded Financial Outlook

Leadership increased its full-year FY2027 net new ARR projection to roughly $1.355 billion at the midpoint. This represents an approximately $116 million elevation from the original FY2027 forecast, suggesting around 34% annual growth compared to the initial 22.5% estimate.

Annual revenue guidance was boosted to a range of $5.99 billion to $6.01 billion.

For the third quarter, CrowdStrike projects revenue between $1.523 billion and $1.529 billion, indicating 23% to 24% year-over-year expansion.

Notwithstanding the impressive results, shares declined over 6% the morning following the rally. Valuation continues to dominate investor discussions, with the forward price-to-sales ratio hovering near 40x and the forward price-to-earnings multiple at 153.

Analyst sentiment shows a “Moderate Buy” rating overall. Multiple analysts who maintained cautious positions before the report noted that significant growth expectations appear already reflected in the current price.

The 200-day moving average stands at $139.62, approximately 35% beneath the post-earnings closing price. The 52-week low of $85.68 now sits more than 165% below the recent close.

CrowdStrike’s previous 52-week high was $227.50 before Thursday’s advance pushed the stock to $229.08.

The post CrowdStrike (CRWD) Stock Soars 20% on Record-Breaking Quarterly Performance appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• Hewlett Packard Enterprise releases Q3 fiscal 2026 financial results September 2, following market closure
• Company forecasts revenue between $11.5B-$12.1B with non-GAAP EPS projected at 88-93 cents
• J.P. Morgan analysts anticipate full-year outlook upgrade fueled by artificial intelligence and traditional infrastructure strength
• Shares have surged 126.6% year-to-date while maintaining a modest 13x forward earnings valuation
• J.P. Morgan maintains Overweight stance with $70 target price for HPE shares

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) prepares to unveil third-quarter fiscal 2026 financial performance on September 2 following the closing bell. Despite year-to-date gains exceeding 126.6%, market observers believe the shares remain attractively valued.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, HPE

Company management has established Q3 revenue expectations ranging from $11.5 billion to $12.1 billion. Analyst consensus aligns with the upper boundary at $12.1 billion, indicating approximately 32% expansion versus the corresponding period last year.

For profitability metrics, HPE projects non-GAAP earnings per share between 88 and 93 cents. The Zacks analyst consensus stands marginally above at 94 cents, representing a 113.6% year-over-year jump. Recent weeks have seen upward revisions to this forecast.

The company’s recent performance history shows earnings surpassing Wall Street predictions across the previous four consecutive quarters, delivering an average beat of 16%. This consistent outperformance provides market watchers with optimism approaching Wednesday’s announcement.

J.P. Morgan’s Joseph Cardoso anticipates HPE will elevate its full-year revenue and profitability projections. His analysis points to robust performance in conventional server systems, campus network solutions, and cloud routing technologies as primary momentum drivers.

“We expect tailwinds across both AI and non-AI infrastructure to support a further raise to HPE’s revenue and earnings outlook for FY26,” Cardoso said.

Artificial intelligence infrastructure represents a particularly compelling growth catalyst for the quarter. The company has accelerated deployments in AI inferencing capabilities, agentic AI frameworks, and data-heavy workload infrastructure, amplified through its strategic alliance with NVIDIA.

Artificial Intelligence and Private Cloud Strategies

The AI Factory platform and Private Cloud AI solutions from HPE, developed collaboratively with NVIDIA, target enterprise implementations spanning data center facilities and edge computing locations. Market demand for these solutions likely stimulated order volume increases and backlog growth throughout Q3.

The company’s Juniper Networks transaction remains strategically significant. This acquisition broadened HPE’s networking capabilities across campus environments, data center switching infrastructure, routing systems, and security offerings, all projected to enhance Q3 financial performance.

GreenLake represents HPE’s consumption-oriented IT framework, enabling enterprise clients to orchestrate on-premises deployments, colocation facilities, and public cloud resources. Strategic purchases including Morpheus and OpsRamp have enhanced this platform with advanced automation and observability functions.

Attractive Valuation Metrics Persist

Notwithstanding substantial share price appreciation throughout 2025, HPE’s valuation metrics remain significantly below industry comparables. The stock currently commands a forward price-to-sales ratio of 1.45x, contrasting sharply with the sector average of 5.26x.

Trading at 13x projected earnings, HPE maintains a valuation discount relative to most competitors, which typically trade above 20x multiples. Cardoso characterized this positioning as offering “highly digestible near-term risk-reward” for market participants.

Shares have actually declined nearly 10% following the previous quarterly report, while the S&P 500 index advanced approximately 1% during the identical timeframe.

J.P. Morgan maintains its Overweight recommendation alongside a $70 price objective for HPE. The firm’s Q3 projections include adjusted EPS of 93 cents on revenue of $11.94 billion.

The company produced substantial operating cash flow and free cash flow during Q2 while maintaining capital allocation through shareholder dividends and stock repurchase programs.

The post Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Stock: Q3 Earnings Preview and Wall Street Expectations appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• Broadcom’s fiscal Q3 FY26 earnings release is scheduled for September 2, with analysts projecting EPS of $3.22, representing a 90.5% year-over-year increase.
• Benchmark’s Cody Acree maintains a Buy rating on AVGO with a price target of $545.
• Year-to-date, AVGO has climbed only 7% and currently trades at the lower range compared to other AI semiconductor stocks.
• Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest purchased 55,131 shares of AVGO on August 28, valued at more than $20 million.
• Consensus among Wall Street analysts is Strong Buy for AVGO, with a mean price target of $512.36, suggesting 39% potential upside.

As Broadcom prepares to unveil its fiscal third-quarter FY26 financial results on September 2, Wall Street analysts are expressing considerable optimism about the semiconductor giant’s performance.

Broadcom Inc., AVGO

Shares of AVGO are currently changing hands at $368.62, reflecting a modest 7% gain since the beginning of the year. This follows a challenging period that saw the stock tumble 13% after delivering second-quarter FY26 results. While those figures were objectively solid, they fell short of the lofty AI-driven expectations that investors had developed.

Ahead of the upcoming earnings announcement, Benchmark’s Cody Acree has reaffirmed his Buy recommendation on AVGO while maintaining his $545 price objective. According to Acree, the recent stock decline has created an attractive opportunity for new investors to establish positions.

Acree holds the No. 63 position among over 12,499 analysts tracked by TipRanks, boasting a 68% accuracy rate and delivering an impressive average return of 33.40% per recommendation across a one-year timeframe.

Earnings Expectations and Projections

The consensus among Wall Street analysts calls for fiscal Q3 FY26 earnings per share of $3.22, marking a substantial 90.5% increase compared to the prior-year quarter. Revenue projections stand at $29.24 billion, representing an 83.3% surge year-over-year.

Acree’s own estimates run slightly above the Street consensus. He’s forecasting Q3 revenue of $29.403 billion alongside EPS of $3.24.

Looking toward Q4 FY26 guidance, Acree anticipates Broadcom will guide for revenue of $34.902 billion with EPS reaching $3.89. His analysis suggests that investors will place greater emphasis on the forward-looking Q4 guidance rather than any minor variations in the Q3 actual results.

Regarding AI chip shipments, Acree highlighted management’s expectations for approximately 10 gigawatts of FY27 deliveries, with the 2026-27 timeframe already locked in and strategic planning now extending into the 2028-29 period.

While Google continues to be the dominant volume customer for Broadcom’s custom XPU solutions, Acree identified Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta Platforms as emerging demand drivers. Additionally, two other customers are reportedly joining the pipeline.

Competitive Landscape Analysis

Acree acknowledged certain competitive headwinds on the horizon. MediaTek is positioned to serve as a secondary supplier in select programs, while Marvell has introduced new inference and TPU-related offerings that could potentially challenge AVGO’s market position.

Despite these developments, Acree doesn’t consider either competitor a meaningful short-term risk to Broadcom’s core high-performance TPU partnerships. He emphasized Broadcom’s April partnership extension with Google, which secures multiple future TPU generations and AI networking capabilities extending through 2031, as a critical foundation for sustained growth.

Google’s strategy to broaden its chip supplier base was characterized as representing a “share-of-growth” concern rather than an immediate threat to AVGO’s established TPU revenue streams.

From an institutional investment perspective, ARK Invest acquired 55,131 shares of AVGO on August 28, representing an investment of approximately $20.48 million. This purchase came on the heels of a comparable transaction earlier that same week, occurring simultaneously as ARK was divesting its AMD holdings.

The Strong Buy consensus rating from Wall Street analysts on AVGO corresponds with an average price target of $512.36, implying approximately 39% upside potential from current trading levels.

The post Broadcom (AVGO) Stock Gains Momentum as ARK Invest Loads Up Ahead of Q3 Earnings appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• Shares of Amazon climbed approximately 4% following Evercore ISI analyst Mark Mahaney’s price target increase to $355 from $315
• New survey data revealed 92% penetration among U.S. online shoppers and increasing AI-powered retail engagement
• Amazon Web Services is set to deploy 2 million Nvidia GPUs between 2027-2028, signaling robust cloud infrastructure expansion
• Analysts maintain a Strong Buy rating on AMZN with a consensus price target of $334
• The company’s Q2 earnings showed EPS of $5.75, significantly exceeding the $1.82 estimate, with revenues increasing 19.6% year-over-year

Shares of Amazon (AMZN) gained approximately 4% on Friday, starting the day at $266.43, following an analyst upgrade from Evercore ISI’s Mark Mahaney, who increased his price objective to $355 from the previous $315 while maintaining an optimistic rating.

Amazon.com, Inc., AMZN

According to TipRanks data, Mahaney holds the 423rd position among over 12,500 financial analysts and demonstrates an 84% accuracy rate on Amazon calls, with an impressive 21.81% average return per recommendation over one-year timeframes. His proven performance record lends credibility to this latest assessment.

The price target revision was supported by findings from Evercore’s recent U.S. Online Retail survey, which highlighted multiple positive indicators for Amazon’s e-commerce operations.

The data shows Amazon commands a commanding 92% penetration rate among U.S. online shoppers, significantly outpacing Walmart. Customer satisfaction scores reached 76%, while approximately 60% of Prime subscribers indicated they would maintain their membership even with a $20 annual fee increase.

Emerging AI technology is also generating tangible commerce results. Survey responses revealed that 57% of users engaging with Alexa AI purchased products they hadn’t actively searched for, indicating artificial intelligence is generating fresh demand patterns beyond simply redirecting existing shopping behavior.

Enhanced Logistics and Prime Member Value

Fulfillment performance metrics showed notable improvement. Standard same-day delivery adoption recovered to 49%, while Prime subscribers utilizing same-day services now spend 3.1 times more than non-Prime customers—the largest spending differential Mahaney has observed in his coverage.

Amazon’s Perishable Checkout feature is driving grocery category growth, with approximately half of exposed users adding fresh food items to their shopping carts.

In terms of technology infrastructure, AWS is executing an aggressive expansion strategy. The cloud division plans to integrate 2 million premium Nvidia GPUs, featuring Blackwell Ultra and Rubin architectures, throughout 2027 and 2028. This expansion brings Amazon’s total disclosed semiconductor procurement to roughly 3 million units.

Market participants interpret this substantial GPU investment as confirmation that artificial intelligence computing demand on AWS remains robust and that management is committed to capital deployment to capture this opportunity.

Impressive Q2 Financial Performance

Amazon’s latest quarterly results, announced on July 30, reinforced the positive momentum. The technology giant delivered Q2 earnings per share of $5.75 versus analyst expectations of $1.82, representing a substantial beat of $3.93 per share. Total revenue reached $200.61 billion, surpassing the $197.03 billion consensus forecast and marking a 19.6% increase compared to the prior year quarter.

AWS revenue expanded roughly 37% to reach $42.2 billion in Q2, while Amazon’s artificial intelligence and semiconductor businesses each achieved annualized revenue run rates exceeding $25 billion.

Among institutional investors, Athena Wealth Management expanded its Amazon holdings by 47% throughout Q2. Multiple other investment firms similarly increased their stakes during this reporting period.

Analyst sentiment remains overwhelmingly bullish. With 39 Buy ratings and just one Hold recommendation issued over the past three months, the consensus stands at Strong Buy. The mean price target of $334.05 suggests approximately 25% appreciation potential from present trading levels.

Mahaney’s updated $355 price objective exceeds the Street average, implying 33% upside potential from Friday’s opening price.

The post Amazon (AMZN) Stock Surges 4% on Evercore Upgrade and Major AI Infrastructure Plans appeared first on Blockonomi.

Ethereum’s explosive rally has stalled around a major resistance area, with price action now turning increasingly choppy near $2.5K. The broader recovery remains intact, but weakening short-term structure and a more hawkish macro backdrop raise the probability of consolidation or a corrective pullback before another sustained advance.

Ethereum Price Analysis: The Daily Chart

Ethereum is consolidating after its powerful breakout from the $1.85K-$1.92K base. The price has now reached the major $2.4K-$2.52K supply zone, where buyers have so far struggled to generate another impulsive continuation. The repeated rejection around this region suggests that supply is becoming increasingly relevant following the near-vertical advance.

As a result, choppy consolidation appears likely in the short term, while a corrective move should not be ruled out. The first notable support sits around the $2.21K-$2.31K zone. Below it, the $2.06K-$2.14K area represents the next important support region and could become relevant if selling pressure accelerates.

The macro environment is also adding pressure. Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh’s latest Jackson Hole remarks emphasized that inflation remains too elevated and suggested that rates may need to remain restrictive or potentially move higher if inflation fails to make sufficient progress toward the Fed’s 2% objective.

Markets interpreted the comments as hawkish, with expectations for another rate increase rising after the speech. This backdrop appears to be weighing on risk sentiment and could make an immediate Ethereum breakout more difficult.

ETH/USDT 4-Hour Chart

The short-term picture is showing clearer signs of exhaustion. Ethereum has repeatedly tested the upper portion of the $2.4K-$2.52K resistance zone, producing three successive peaks around the same broad area.

This price action creates the potential for a three-drive pattern. Such a structure typically signals that the preceding directional move is losing momentum and can precede either a sideways range or a temporary reversal. More importantly, Ethereum has now slipped below the ascending trendline connecting the recent higher lows, adding weight to the possibility that the immediate bullish impulse is weakening.

The first downside area to monitor remains the $2.21K-$2.31K pullback zone. A correction into this region would still be compatible with the broader bullish structure and could allow the market to establish a healthier base. If that support fails, the second pullback zone around $2.07K-$2.11K becomes the next significant target.

Alternatively, holding the current $2.4K area and reclaiming the rising trendline would reduce the immediate bearish pressure. A convincing breakout through the $2.52K region would also invalidate the developing reversal setup and favor continuation of the broader bullish trend.

Sentiment Analysis

Ethereum’s Spot Average Order Size chart provides additional context for the current indecision. The metric distinguishes periods dominated by larger whale-sized spot orders from more ordinary market activity.

Most recent observations appear to be classified as normal orders, with no notable concentration of large whale transactions at the latest readings. This suggests that neither exceptionally strong whale demand nor aggressive whale supply is currently dominating the spot market.

The absence of substantial large-player participation fits the technical consolidation scenario. With limited evidence of strong directional conviction and relatively subdued participation, Ethereum may remain vulnerable to volatile swings within a range rather than immediately establishing another sustained trend. A meaningful return of large whale orders could therefore provide a more useful signal that stronger demand or supply is entering the market.

The post Where Will ETH Find Support After the $2.5K Rejection? (Ethereum Price Analysis) appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Solana’s native token became one of the recent top performers in the crypto market, surging to a new seven-month high at over $105 before it was finally halted and retraced slightly.

This substantial rally from under $75 came amid several major developments within the broader Solana ecosystem. Perhaps the most important came from the network itself.

Issuance Changed

The network finally succeeded in reducing future SOL issuance. Although the decision could hardly have been any closer, validators approved SGP-0002, which endorses doubling Solana’s annual disinflation rate from 15% to 30%. The proposal finished with approximately 67%, barely clearing the two-thirds supermajority required for approval.

Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz, one of the most prominent and vocal supporters, summed up the dramatic finish by saying his team made hundreds of calls in the final hours and ultimately passed the measure by a “literal hair.”

It’s worth noting that the proposal does not eliminate inflation. It doubles the speed at which SOL’s existing inflation rate declines each year – from 15% to 30%, while leaving the network’s terminal inflation rate unchanged at 1.5%. Under the current schedule, Solana was expected to reach that floor in the first half of 2032. The new schedule reduces that time by half, bringing it to H1 of 2029.

The trade-off is that normal staking yields are projected to fall faster as fewer new tokens are distributed, which is where most of the arguments against it come from.

SOL ETF Breaks $1 Billion Milestone

The Bitwise Solana Staking ETF (BSOL) became the first exchange-traded fund tracking the altcoin to surpass the coveted $1 billion target in assets under management on Friday. It saw the light of day last October, meaning that it took around 10 months to do so.

What’s particularly interesting here is that this achievement occurred despite SOL’s broader price performance. As Bitwise President Teddy Fusaro pointed out, BSOL shares remain about 40% below their listing prices, while SOL itself is still 60% away from its ATH.

BSOL held more than 9.3 million SOL when it crossed the $1 billion mark. It targets staking 100% of its holdings, while the net staking reward rate currently stands at around 5.8%.

Whales Go Big

Lookonchain data from earlier today showed that two major Solana whales have continued to withdraw major holdings from exchanges after completing significant accumulations. A wallet ending with 3WzfuP withdrew almost $3.9 million in SOL from Kraken, while another one, ending with 5p6zPz, transferred nearly $30 million worth of the asset from Binance.

SOL’s price has been on the move lately, surging to a six-month peak at over $105 on Friday before the broader market’s correction drove it south. Nevertheless, it remains well above $100 after a 42% monthly surge. Some analysts believe more gains are around the corner, with predictions ranging from $150 to $300.

The post 3 Major Solana (SOL) Developments You Should Know About appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Changpeng “CZ” Zhao made headlines earlier this week after stating Bitcoin (BTC) will reach $1 million, and that the climb will not take 25 years.

“I think for Bitcoin to hit $1,000,000 would be a good thing. And it’ll happen,” the former Binance CEO said on the conference’s Nakamoto Stage, in a video clip posted by Bitcoin Magazine, which is owned by conference organizer BTC Inc.

“I don’t think we need 25 years. I think it’s gonna happen much quicker.”

Bitcoin Overtaking Gold?

Zhao spoke during “The Bitcoin Century,” a session moderated by When Shift Happens host Kevin Follonier on the opening day of the two-day event at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center.

“For sure, I think Bitcoin will become more important than gold. It will take some time, but it will happen.”

He put gold’s market capitalization at about ten times Bitcoin’s and said sovereign reserve allocations will eventually tilt toward digital assets, with Bitcoin making up more than 50% of strategic crypto holdings alongside Ethereum (ETH) and BNB.

CZ SAYS: “I THINK #BITCOIN WILL TAKE OVER GOLD PRETTY SOON”

“For sure, I think Bitcoin will become more important than gold.”

“It will take some time, but it will happen.”

THE BULL RUN IS BACK! pic.twitter.com/lqsZUnF0Fv

— The Bitcoin Conference (@TheBitcoinConf) August 27, 2026

Rally Runs Into an $83,000 Test

Bitcoin closed below $65,000 on August 18 and $79,000 on August 28, per Coin Metrics data, still well below its October 2025 peak of over $126,000. But CryptoQuant said in an August 25 report that Bitcoin may be entering a new bull-market phase, with its Bull Score index climbing to 80 from 30, and put confirmation at a daily close above the 365-day moving average near $83,000.

South China Morning Post reported that the remarks drew applause and cheers from a large crowd, against what it described as a lingering crypto slump with capital and talent moving toward artificial intelligence.

Zhao also called the UAE’s crypto rules “the most progressive” and said Hong Kong was “moving pretty quickly.” He claimed “a tiny bit of advocacy” in the UAE’s recognition of Bitcoin as a store of value.

Zhao pleaded guilty to a US anti-money-laundering charge in 2023, served a four-month sentence in 2024, and received a presidential pardon from Donald Trump in October 2025. He returned to the US in February for a Mar-a-Lago crypto event hosted by Trump-family-backed World Liberty Financial.

The post Changpeng Zhao Believes Bitcoin at $1M Is Coming ‘Much Quicker’ Than 25 Years appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin’s price rally that drove it past $81,000 on a couple of occasions in the past week came to a halt after the hawkish stance by the new Fed Chair displayed yesterday, and the asset slipped to a five-day low of under $77,000.

Most altcoins followed suit, posting 3-5% daily declines. Ripple’s XRP, which recently peaked at $1.70, initiated another leg down, dropping below $1.40.

BTC Dips Below $77K

The primary cryptocurrency’s explosion that began on August 19 took it from under $65,000 to almost $80,000 in 48 hours last week, where it finally faced some resistance and slipped to $75,500 during the previous weekend. However, the bulls quickly regained control and pushed the asset north as the new business week began.

At first, BTC challenged the $80,000 level, which the bears managed to defend initially, but buyers were more persistent and drove bitcoin above it to $81,000 on Tuesday morning. It couldn’t keep climbing and retraced to $79,000 on Wednesday.

The bulls returned in full force on Thursday and Friday morning, pushing the cryptocurrency to another 15-week high of $81,500. Nevertheless, BTC was rejected once again, and the Jackson Hole speech didn’t bring any positives. Shortly after its conclusion, the hawkish stance by Warsh resulted in another leg down for bitcoin, dipping below $77,000 within an hour or so.

Although it has rebounded slightly to over that level now, bitcoin is still more than 2% down on the day. Its market cap has declined to $1.555 trillion, while its dominance over the alts remains above 57%.

Alts Back in Red

Ethereum is down by almost 3% in the past 24 hours as it was rejected at $2,500 once again and now sits at $2,430. BNB has slipped further away from the $700 level, now trading beneath $690. XRP tanked from $1.45 to $1.38 as of now, following a 3.2% daily drop.

SOL, DOGE, LINK, XLM, and HYPE have produced similar losses, while BCH has slumped by more than 7% to under $250. RAIN and XMR are among the few alts with slight gains today.

The total crypto market cap has decreased by $80 billion from yesterday’s top to $2.720 trillion on CG.

The post BTC Recovers From Sub-$77K Dip, XRP Drops Below $1.40: Weekend Watch appeared first on CryptoPotato.

A newly launched meme coin on Solana briefly attracted millions in trading activity after it appeared on a Trump-linked X account.

Trump Digital Gold (GOLD) was published and promoted on the X account @realtrumpcoins1, which is associated with an official Trump collectible business. The promotion immediately attracted attention, but on-chain sleuths raised some enormous red flags that didn’t stop people from getting into it.

Data from Lookonchain shows that the developer initially controlled 600 million tokens, while 15 newly created wallets spent $18,657 to acquire another 224.5 million coins. Combined, these two addresses alone controlled roughly 82.45% of the entire supply.

Yet, traders continued to pile in, with one wallet chasing GOLD near the top and losing over $62,000 in just seven minutes.

The situation deteriorated rapidly as it typically does when such shady coins see the light of day, when the promotional posts disappeared from the Trump-linked account, fueling suspicions that it had been compromised.

GOLD plunged by more than 95% in a single minute, with its market cap plunging to under $2 million and then dumping again to $600,000.

Lookonchain updated that the 15 wallets mentioned above dumped all 224.5 million GOLD for 3,178 SOL, worth approximately $330,000. This means that their original investment of $18,657 was turned into a $312,000 profit – or a 17x return.

Later on, it was confirmed that the account was hacked, while the perpetrator claimed to have generated more than $8.2 million from the fiasco. The figure is the hacker’s own claim and has now been independently verified.

Official Trump (TRUMP), the meme coin indeed related to the POTUS, has been quite volatile lately. It has posted several double-digit moves in either direction, but it was rejected at $3.00 yesterday despite a major announcement from the Korea Blockchain Week conference.

The post Trump-Themed Meme Coin Tanks 95% in Minutes as Traders Get Rugged: What Happened? appeared first on CryptoPotato.