The U.S. military's focus shift may weaken its strategic deterrence in the Indo-Pacific, affecting global power dynamics and regional stability.

The post US shifts military focus from Pacific to Middle East amid Iran-Israel conflict appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Miller's campaign faces increased vulnerability as legal issues erode union support, potentially reshaping political dynamics in Ohio.

The post Max Miller faces union support loss amid domestic-abuse allegations appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Stewart's record-breaking performance enhances Liberty's playoff prospects, potentially boosting their championship odds and market confidence.

The post Breanna Stewart fastest to 3,000 points with single WNBA team appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Rising bond yields may lead to increased borrowing costs and drive investors towards gold, impacting global economic stability and market dynamics.

The post Global bond yields hit multi-decade highs amid inflation fears, AI debt expansion appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The new passage could reshape regional security and global energy routes, impacting geopolitical dynamics and maritime management strategies.

The post Iran, Oman to announce new passage through Strait of Hormuz appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

BitBox Warns Bitcoiners After Discovering ‘Severe’ Vulnerability In Firmware 

Bitcoin wallet manufacturer BitBox has told users it was able to fix “severe vulnerabilities” with its hardware wallet’s firmware, and reassured users that no funds were taken. Yet it still urged users to upgrade carefully. 

Writing in a blog post Tuesday, the Swiss company said that one of the vulnerabilities would have allowed an attacker to manipulate users into installing firmware that could lead a criminal to steal funds. 

Users should update firmware through the official BitBoxApp, ideally by clicking the in-app update prompt rather than searching for it, BitBox said. 

“There are no reports of stolen user funds and there is no reason for users to panic,” the company said. “We recommend all users to update their BitBox devices to the latest firmware version, which fixes all security issues described in this article.”

It added that another “severe vulnerability” discovered was related to memory corruption. In its post, BitBox said the finding was related to the Multi edition of the BitBox, and could enable arbitrary code execution and the subsequent installation of malicious firmware and potential loss of funds. 

BitBox also mentioned that the Bitcoin-only edition of the BitBox was not affected, as its firmware does not contain the affected code. 

Bitcoiners are still reeling after users of the popular Coldcard product, designed by Canadian company Coinkite, had their funds drained due to a firmware bug in the devices that lead to a weak seed generation (RNG). Unlike the Coldcard hack, users or BitBox do not need to migrate funds, only update the firmware. 

Hackers have since stolen a confirmed $115 million in bitcoin, according to Galaxy Research’s latest figures — but the figure could be much higher. 

Canadian company Coinkite first warned users on July 31 that a firmware bug in Coldcard Mk3 devices — starting with version 4.0.1 in March 2021 — caused seed generation to fall back to a weak software Pseudorandom Number Generator instead of the hardware true random number generator, allowing hackers to essentially guess investor seedphrases. 

The number has slowly risen as the criminals have targeted more recent devices while Coinkite and other Bitcoiners have urged Coldcard users to immediately move their funds.

This post BitBox Warns Bitcoiners After Discovering ‘Severe’ Vulnerability In Firmware  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

SEC Proposes Crypto Rulebook as Clarity Act Stalls

The Securities and Exchange Commission has proposed its own framework for crypto asset offerings, pressing ahead while landmark legislation stalls. 

The regulator unveiled “Regulation Crypto Assets” on Tuesday, a tailored offering regime it says will let token issuers raise money in the U.S. without falling foul of securities laws.

Tuesday’s proposal carves out two exemptions from registration under the Securities Act of 1933. The first is a one-time exemption allowing issuers to raise up to $5 million in crypto over four years. The second permits up to $75 million in any 12-month period, but comes with financial statements and ongoing reporting obligations. Both require issuers to make narrative disclosures — written explainers for investors outlying a business and its risks — available. 

The rules also dangle a conditional safe harbor. Once an issuer has completed — or permanently abandoned — the managerial work it promised, its token would no longer be deemed subject to an investment contract, and so would sit outside the definition of a “security.” 

SEC Chairman Paul Atkins said the proposal was another step to “onshore innovation in crypto asset markets,” and would give entrepreneurs clear pathways to raise capital “as Congress works to establish a lasting regulatory framework.”

That framework is going nowhere fast. Pro-crypto lawmakers had hoped to pass the Clarity Act before Congress broke for August recess, but the vote slipped to September after Democrats balked at the latest draft. Some Republican senators — like Senator Cynthia Lummis — accused some of deliberately holding it back.

Regulators aren’t waiting. CFTC Chairman Michael Selig has said he will proceed with rulemaking whether or not the Clarity Act is enacted, aiming to finalise rules before the administration’s term is out.

The proposal builds on the SEC’s March interpretation of how securities laws apply to crypto. Comments are open for 60 days after publication in the Federal Register.

This post SEC Proposes Crypto Rulebook as Clarity Act Stalls first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin’s Wild Swings Go Quiet, Even as the Bears Won’t Let Go

Bitcoin is deep into its bear market, though it’s doing something it doesn’t typically do: sit still. 

That’s according to a new report by VanEck, which noted that thirty-day realized volatility has fallen to 27.2% annualized, down from 30.4% the prior month and less than half bitcoin’s long-run average of roughly 80%. 

For an asset known for double-digit daily swings, that’s an unusually still market.

The calm comes as bitcoin claws back from a June low near $58,500, holding inside a tight $62,265-to-$66,509 band through most of July. 

Bitcoin remains about 9% below its 200-day moving average — a narrower gap than the 14% discount seen a month ago — and still sits roughly 49% below its all-time high.

Trading activity tells a similar story of a market on pause. Spot volume over the trailing 30 days is down 27% from the prior month, landing in just the 10th percentile of its own history, VanEck noted. 

Analysts at investment firm note the summer slowdown is deeper than in either 2024 or 2025, pushing spot volumes down toward levels last seen in the 2023 bear market.

At the same time, longtime holders have started letting go of coins, VanEck said. Bitcoin held for more than a year fell by about 356,000 BTC (-2.9%) over the month, pushing the long-term holder share of total supply below 60% for the first time in months. 

The selling was concentrated in coins held one to three years, while the oldest holders — those sitting on coins for more than a decade — barely moved, down just 0.1%.

Coming into a period historically associated with bitcoin’s four-year boom-and-bust cycle, VanEck’s research points to 8 of 12 tracked capitulation signals currently flashing, consistent with the later stages of a drawdown. 

Based on the length of prior cycles, the firm sees a bottom potentially forming anywhere between September and November of this year — though it cautions that the historical record of returns following similar signal clusters is mixed, and only shows a clear edge over a full one-year horizon.

For now, bitcoin’s story is less about direction and more about the unusual stillness of a market that, by its own history, rarely stays this quiet for long.

This post Bitcoin’s Wild Swings Go Quiet, Even as the Bears Won’t Let Go first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin as Digital Real Estate: An Excerpt from Leon Wankum’s Digital Real Estate

Bitcoin can be understood through an analogy with real estate.16 Michael Saylor, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), has compared investing in bitcoin to buying real estate in downtown Manhattan during the early stages of its development. As population, commerce, and cultural activity concentrated in the city, demand for limited land surged, dramatically increasing property values. Many of the world’s wealthiest families built their fortunes by owning scarce real estate. When something limited is in high demand, its value rises. As the saying commonly attributed to Mark Twain goes, “Buy land—they’re not making it anymore.”

Scarcity plays a central role in determining value, which is why real estate in densely populated areas is more expensive than in sparsely populated ones. Real estate has utility value—it can be used for living or production—but its price is largely driven by the limited supply of land in prime locations. There are only so many properties that can be built in Manhattan, London, Shanghai, Mumbai, Paris, Beijing, Tokyo, or Venice. What ultimately makes these locations valuable is what occurs on top of them: the people, the capital, the creativity, the energy. As a city flourishes, whether through rising population, growing business activity, or cultural relevance, demand for that scarce land surges.

The value of land does not rise in a vacuum; it rises because it captures an expanding layer of economic activity that cannot be easily replicated or relocated. This dynamic is further amplified by fiat monetary expansion, which channels ever more liquidity into real estate, raising nominal prices well above what utility and income-generating capacity alone would support. Market mechanisms such as speculation and the widespread expectation of rising prices reinforce this scarcity and deepen that perception.

Bitcoin operates under a similar logic. Just like prime real estate, it gains value as more people, capital, economic activity, and trust accumulate around it. At the same time, the economic network built on top of it—financial infrastructure, global adoption, liquidity, and digital connectivity—can continue expanding globally through digital networks without corresponding expansion of the underlying monetary base. Adoption on the internet occurs globally and continuously—much faster than in the physical world, where economic expansion is constrained by geography.

But there is a crucial difference. In real estate, prices are shaped by development potential, location-specific utility, and relative scarcity, which is frequently intensified by regulations and policy decisions. Government interventions such as tax incentives for investors, zoning laws, and restricted building permits can artificially limit supply, pushing prices higher. These dynamics are further amplified by speculative behavior and the widespread expectation of continued price increases, making scarcity appear more absolute than it is. Bitcoin’s scarcity, by contrast, is absolute: its supply is fixed at twenty-one million, beyond the reach of policy decisions or political interference. Real estate’s manufactured constraints highlight the importance of distinguishing between natural and engineered scarcity in asset evaluation.

Owning bitcoin is comparable to owning a plot in a growing, borderless economy not tied to any government or geography. As more people and businesses adopt bitcoin, the value of that digital “plot” increases. The difference is mobility—this digital plot is not tied to any location and can be transferred globally within minutes. Unlike land, bitcoin enables the rapid, low-friction transfer of value anywhere in the world, subject only to network conditions and liquidity constraints.

Holding bitcoin provides a new way to participate in the global economy. While bitcoin operates on a global network, its effects are local. By enabling individuals to hold and transfer value without centralized permission, it allows participation in economic systems that are less dependent on institutions able to impose restrictions, exclude participants, or change rules unilaterally.

Bitcoin’s accounting model reinforces the real estate comparison. In a traditional bank account, value is recorded as a balance held by an institution. In Bitcoin, ownership is defined by direct control over individually defined units—unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs)—recorded on the network.

You can think of each bitcoin as a square of land that remains under your control until it is spent. Once spent, that square disappears, and new squares are created for the recipient. Each UTXO can be independently transferred or combined in future transactions. The result is a continuously evolving map of property claims secured by cryptography rather than institutional authority.

The analogy has limits. Bitcoin differs from real estate used to generate income. It generates no operating cash flow and is best understood as a scarce digital asset whose value lies in absolute scarcity and optionality rather than income. But like real estate, bitcoin functions as a long-term savings vehicle and increasingly as collateral, capable of supporting credit formation and broader economic activity while absorbing monetary demand. This makes real estate a useful framework for understanding bitcoin’s evolving role within capital markets and monetary systems.

This post Bitcoin as Digital Real Estate: An Excerpt from Leon Wankum’s Digital Real Estate first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Leon Wankum.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Is Down but Asset’s Role as Global Monetary Alternative Remains, Says Blackrock

Bitcoin’s price is down nearly 50% since its October record. But investors shouldn’t worry, the world’s largest asset manager has said, and the cryptocurrency still plays a role as “a global monetary alternative.” 

In a report Monday, Robert Mitchnick, global head of digital assets at the firm, said that the ongoing rise in U.S. and global government debt and deficits hasn’t slowed. 

BlackRock has argued alongside other Bitcoin proponents that the oldest and biggest cryptocurrency can be a hedge against governments printing money. 

Noting that there was seemingly no way governments could not debase their currencies, the report added: “With no credible path for consolidation on the horizon, these fiscal dynamics reinforce the strategic case for assets with supply constraints beyond the discretion of central banks, governed by geology in the case of gold and mathematics and code in the case of bitcoin.” 

The Wall Street titan added that bitcoin’s price has consistently been volatile during its 17-year history, but investors shouldn’t be put off. 

“And while bitcoin remains inherently volatile, its volatility has trended lower over the past decade as market structure has matured, supported by the growth of derivatives markets and the expansion of and exchange-traded products,” the report noted. 

The report continued by saying that the asset still deserves a spot in investors’ portfolios for uncorrelated returns. 

Wall Street’s top regulator, the SEC, approved BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust in January 2024. 

Of all the Bitcoin ETFs, BlackRock’s product has been the most successful, attracting the most investment and trading volume. 

BlackRock has previously said that Bitcoin is in an asset class of its own, and that investors are buying it to hedge against any potential debt crises.

Bitcoin’s price recently stood at $64,713, up by nearly 2% over the past day but flat over a 30-day period. Year-to-date, the asset is down 27% and has shed nearly half of its value since its all-time high last year of $126,080. 

This post Bitcoin Is Down but Asset’s Role as Global Monetary Alternative Remains, Says Blackrock first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

The SEC's new crypto fundraising proposal deliberately treats tokens as free to trade as soon as a buyer acquires them, unless the issuer or another law says otherwise.

Insiders typically know more than the public while a token project is still being built, and their incentives do not always line up with everyone else's.

The Senate's July 22 CLARITY draft would force insiders to hold a token for a full year before its network clears a specific control test, then six more months once it does. The bill also limits how much they can sell, but the SEC's proposal skips those requirements.

How the SEC reached its decision for crypto insiders

The SEC's Regulation Crypto Assets spends space building the case for insider lockups before setting one aside. It discusses the information gap between insiders and buyers, reviews research showing token offerings tend to do better under vesting or lockup terms, and then settles on disclosure as its answer.

Issuers get to decide whether to restrict their insiders, and the SEC goes one step further by asking commenters whether it should require a one-year holding period before finalizing the rule.

That question wouldn't make sense if the draft already included a one-year period.

The proposal still caps how much insiders can sell, even without a mandatory holding period. A Tier 2 offering under the SEC's fundraising exemption can raise up to $75 million in a year, and affiliates of the issuer can supply up to $22.5 million of that. Tier 1 tops out at $20 million total, with $6 million available to those same insiders.

A separate cap kicks in during an issuer's first year of offerings, capping securities sold by insiders at 30% of the total raise. Run the math on a full $75 million Tier 2 offering, and that ceiling lands at $22.5 million, the same number as the affiliate cap itself.

The caps govern how much insiders can sell through a qualified offering, leaving timing as the real open question. An insider can sell the moment a token stops counting as a restricted security, with no minimum holding period required.

The Senate draft, in a section titled Special Restrictions on Disposition, requires insiders to hold a covered token for at least 12 months before its network is certified as free of coordinated control.

Once that certification lands, the minimum drops to six months, and the bill still caps how much an insider can sell in any 12-month stretch, with the SEC left to set the number.

Two different definitions of insider

The comparison gets messier when looking at who counts as an insider under each framework.

The SEC casts a wide net built for disclosure, covering founders, employees, directors, consultants, and even immediate family members. Congress draws tighter lines based on crypto ownership thresholds, such as founders holding at least 4% of a project's ancillary asset or holders controlling at least 10%.
Decentralized governance systems are excluded from the definition altogether.

Both describe the same idea of someone close enough to a project to know things the public does not. They just built that idea with different legal architecture, two different tools aimed at a similar problem.

Every detail in this comparison points back to the same underlying question. Should token buyers price insider risk themselves once it's disclosed, or should insiders be legally forced to stay exposed to that same risk while the project is still finding its feet?

The SEC's economic analysis argues both sides, saying easier exits for founders and early employees can encourage investment and free up capital for its next use. In the same breath, the Commission admits that large insider sales can make the very conflicts a lockup would prevent even worse.

The SEC's proposal is built for crypto tied to an issuer that still has work to finish. That description fits early-stage projects far more than an asset with no roadmap, and no team left to deliver on one.

That gap between Bitcoin and most of the tokens this rule governs is why the lockup debate barely touches Bitcoin.

Which version of crypto insider liquidity wins

The bull case for tighter insider rules has the SEC's comment period building enough momentum to add a one-year holding requirement before the final rule ships.

Congress could also pass something close to its current CLARITY language first. Either path pushes US token fundraising toward a world where insiders carry the same downside as everyone else for a defined stretch.

The cost falls on the faster-liquidity founders and early employees were hoping for.

The bear case is that the SEC's disclosure-first approach becomes the operating reality while CLARITY sits unfinished in Congress. Crypto lockups turn into something projects opt into for credibility, and a project with no restrictions at all can still raise money.

It just does so at a steeper discount, since the risk of insiders cashing out early stays on the buyer's side of the ledger.

Neither version is law yet, and the two frameworks define insider in genuinely different ways. They agree the risk is real, but split on who has to live with it: the buyer who gets a disclosure or the insider who gets a deadline.

The post SEC opens door to day-one crypto insider sales that Senate draft would block appeared first on CryptoSlate.

SOL Strategies may sell part of its Solana treasury to meet obligations, as much of its holdings remain pledged against debt.

According to an SEC filing, the company said it had C$1.87 million in cash as of June 30 and that roughly C$22 million of digital assets were unencumbered and available for conversion into fiat.

SOL Strategies also reported C$37.33 million of current liabilities, although those obligations are staggered and do not represent a single payment due immediately.

The financial statements show those obligations include about C$3.31 million of accounts payable, a C$7.75 million HoudiniSwap acquisition note, C$784,000 owed to a vendor, a C$865,000 current acquisition holdback, C$13.90 million borrowed through DeFi protocol Kamino Finance and C$10.73 million of current convertible debentures.

Their repayment schedules vary considerably. Trade payables are generally due within 30 days, while the Houdini note matures Dec. 1. A US$1.25 million Houdini acquisition holdback is split between payments nine and 18 months after the June 1 closing. Kamino carries no fixed maturity, while some debenture conversion or maturity dates extend into 2028 and 2030.

Management said its liquidity plan includes cost reductions, revenue from staking, validators and HoudiniSwap, selective SOL sales, securities issuance and potential additional borrowing through its ATW convertible note facility.

The disclosure puts greater focus on how the company finances operations while preserving a treasury of roughly 460,000 SOL worth C$48 million at quarter-end.

Notably, more than half of those holdings were already tied to borrowing. SOL Strategies pledged 252,851 SOL, valued at C$26.4 million, to Kamino Finance against roughly C$13.9 million of debt.

While the absence of a fixed maturity reduces immediate repayment pressure, Kamino can automatically liquidate collateral if the loan-to-value ratio reaches 75%, increasing the company's exposure to a sharp decline in SOL.

SOL Strategies said its digital assets provided roughly C$34 million of net liquidity after accounting for the Kamino borrowing. Management also said its available cash, crypto and other resources were sufficient to support operations for at least 12 months.

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The company nevertheless reported a C$119.36 million net loss for the nine months through June. That included C$61.95 million in digital-asset revaluation losses, C$22.82 million in realized crypto losses, and C$16.11 million in impairment charges.

The accounting loss was much larger than the actual cash drain. SOL Strategies used C$7.80 million of cash in operating activities during the period.

SOL sales have already helped reduce debt

Selling SOL is more than a hypothetical liquidity option for the company.

On June 8, SOL Strategies sold 65,001 SOL at an average of C$87.88, generating roughly C$5.75 million to repay debt.

Meanwhile, the company can preserve more of its SOL exposure by raising capital instead, but those routes can increase dilution or future liabilities.

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During the nine months through June, holders converted US$2.85 million of ATW debt into about 1.78 million shares. SOL Strategies also raised C$2.14 million through its at-the-market equity program.

Its newly acquired HoudiniSwap business generated C$1.2 million in fees and C$768,000 of EBITDA during June, while staking and validator operations contributed C$622,299 during the quarter.

While those businesses could reduce reliance on asset sales and external financing, the near-term challenge is whether they can generate enough cash to meet staggered obligations without requiring substantially more SOL sales or shareholder dilution.

The post This Solana treasury company may sell SOL as a DeFi loan ties up more than half its treasury appeared first on CryptoSlate.

ZisK's new four-GPU benchmark claim has lowered the headline hardware count in Ethereum's real-time proving race. In February, CryptoSlate examined a roughly 12-GPU setup as a possible centralization risk. The new figure could bring proof generation closer to independent operators, provided the workload and operating conditions are comparable.

ZisK is an open-source zero-knowledge virtual machine project, and on Aug. 18 it said its v1.1.0-alpha prover recorded a 9.62-second p99 on four RTX 5090 GPUs. A follow-up said 99.7% of tested Ethereum blocks finished in less than 10 seconds.

Jordi Baylina amplified the result as a milestone combining four-GPU proving with claimed 128-bit security and post-quantum resistance.

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Ethereum's working standard calls for at least 99% of mainnet blocks to be proved within 10 seconds. If ZisK's p99 was calculated over an equivalent mainnet-block workload and timing boundary, 9.62 seconds would sit 0.38 seconds below that threshold.

ZisK has yet to publish the block range, sample size, p99 calculation, timing boundary, proof size, or measured whole-system power for the four-GPU run. That announcement is, as of now, a benchmark claim.

The six-part test

The Ethereum Foundation paired its latency target with five other conditions intended to preserve decentralization: on-premises equipment costing no more than $100,000, power use no higher than 10 kilowatts, fully open-source code, at least 128-bit security and proofs no larger than 300 KiB without trusted setups.

CryptoSlate has also tracked the Foundation's emphasis on the 128-bit security threshold.

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ZisK's repository is licensed under MIT or Apache 2.0, and the project claims 128-bit security for the new result. The latency condition remains provisional because the announcement lacks the workload and measurement details needed for an equivalent test.

The hardware arithmetic looks promising while leaving household practicality unresolved. Nvidia specifies 575 watts of total graphics power for a reference RTX 5090. Four cards carry a combined GPU-only rating of 2.3 kW, below the 10 kW ceiling before CPUs, memory, storage, conversion losses and cooling enter the calculation.

Nvidia launched the RTX 5090 at $1,999, putting four cards at $7,996 at launch MSRP. That figure leaves substantial room below $100,000 for the rest of a multi-GPU machine.

A rig can fit beneath a nominal budget and still strain a smaller operator's power delivery, cooling, or host-hardware capacity. Fast proof generation also has to satisfy Ethereum's proof-size and setup rules.

OpenVM shows why benchmark boundaries matter

OpenVM's July production release reported a 9.8-second p99 on eight 5090 GPUs across 7,200 Ethereum mainnet blocks beginning at block 24,000,000. The run used 100-bit provable security and produced proofs under 300 kB.

ZisK's four-GPU number may represent a genuine efficiency gain, while the missing equivalent inputs prevent a reliable ranking. The security levels differ, ZisK has not attached a proof size to its result, and its tested block population and timing boundary remain unpublished.

The Ethproofs API defines proving time as including witness generation while excluding data fetching and proof-submission latency. A p99 calculated around a different interval can look similar while measuring a different operational burden.

Ethproofs currently lists ZisK versions through v0.18.0 and exposes a 16-GPU RTX 5090 ZisK configuration. It has yet to show an independent four-GPU v1.1.0-alpha p99 result, leaving the announcement without a public reproducibility baseline.

ZisK's release history identifies v1.1.0-alpha, while its repository describes the current line as a foundation for a production release undergoing security and correctness audits.

An OpenZeppelin review published in November 2025 examined a limited set of ZisK binary and main constraints at a historical commit. It reported 13 findings, including one critical and two high-severity issues, with none marked resolved in that report.

CryptoSlate's February analysis framed a roughly 12-GPU, seven-second setup as a new centralization risk. ZisK now places a claimed four-GPU run beside that earlier concern, though the configurations have not been shown to be equivalent.

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A disclosed mainnet block set, full timing definition, sub-300-KiB proofs without a trusted setup, measured wall power, and an independently runnable release would turn the result into evidence for a home-proving breakthrough.

For now, the claim has weakened the simple data-center-scale objection while leaving the operational case open.

The post Ethereum’s 12-GPU proving problem just got a 4-GPU answer appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Canaan's July mining update counted 4.96 exahashes per second from paused operations in Ethiopia inside 14.24 EH/s of global operating computing power. That means nearly 35% of the reported total came from a country where Canaan did not confirm how much capacity was hashing at month-end.

Subtracting the Ethiopia row from the rounded global figure leaves 9.28 EH/s, but that is an exclusion calculation because Canaan's July operating update defines operating computing power more broadly than a live meter.

Canaan's definition notes that operating computing power is the theoretical output of energized mining machines, assuming all were operating. The metric can include machines that are temporarily offline and applies to the company's non-joint-venture operations.

The July table assigned the full 4.96 EH/s to two Ethiopia projects in both the operating and installed columns. Footnote 10 then said Canaan had paused its mining operations in Ethiopia but kept the hashrate in installed capacity.

The filing did not say whether the paused machines remained energized or how much, if any, was hashing on July 31.

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A sharp change from June

As of June 30, Canaan listed Ethiopia at only 0.36 EH/s of operating computing power against 4.96 EH/s installed.

Canaan said that the decrease primarily reflected one mining site going temporarily offline beginning in mid-June because of local power-grid maintenance. A month later, the July table returned Ethiopia's full 4.96 EH/s to the operating column even as the new footnote described the country's mining operations as paused.

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The two disclosures do not establish that the July Ethiopia pause had the same cause, or that Canaan still considered it temporary. The documents also show why the 9.28 EH/s subtraction cannot be treated as an adjusted live total, since the filings provide table classifications.

The scope issue also limits comparisons with production. Canaan reported mining 46 BTC in July and holding 1,917 BTC and 3,952 ETH at month-end, but those production numbers do not cover every row in the global capacity table.

Canaan separately reports metrics for its 49%-owned Alborz, Bear and Chief Mountain joint ventures in West Texas. It says joint-venture output is excluded from the company's Bitcoin production and average all-in power-cost calculations, even though joint-venture capacity appears in the global projects table.

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Canaan's 14.24 EH/s figure is best read as operating capacity under the company's theoretical definition.

The post Canaan counted paused Ethiopia mining as nearly 35% of its July operating hashrate total appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has floated the idea of expanding SOL’s supply, paying for a company with incremental tokens, then using the acquired business’s revenue to buy and burn SOL. The posts sketch a tokenomic cycle, but leave its issuance and acquisition mechanics undefined.

In an Aug. 15 post, Yakovenko called the concept more bullish than simply lowering inflation. He clarified the next day that company revenue would fund SOL purchases and burns, which he characterized as returning value to holders.

As of Aug. 18, the reviewed official merged-proposal directories contained no acquisition SGP or SIMD.

Protocol approval cannot buy a company with Solana

Solana’s current governance framework could supply a directional mandate. A validator vote account with at least 100,000 SOL staked may submit a Solana Governance Proposal, support from 15% of active stake opens voting, and approval requires two-thirds of decisive stake. Individual delegators can override their validator’s vote.

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That would answer whether stakeholders want to pursue the idea. A completed protocol change would normally require one or more technical proposals, client implementation, and activation under the SIMD process.

The Solana Foundation describes itself as a Zug-based nonprofit, while Solana Labs identifies itself as a separate company group. Validators and delegators are separate network participants, and the cited materials do not name either as the buyer or grant it acquisition authority for the network.

Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz responded sarcastically that validators would have to agree on running a company. A stake-weighted mandate would not identify a legal buyer, and the cited governance materials do not specify who could sign a purchase agreement, hold the asset, appoint management, or direct revenue.

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Apr 17, 2025 · Gino Matos

If newly issued SOL were transferred to a seller, total supply would rise at issuance. A holder receiving none would then hold a smaller share of total supply unless, and only to the extent that, later burns reduced it.

A separate draft fee-burn proposal, SIMD-0553, estimates that Solana currently burns about 648 SOL per day from signature fees alone at roughly 3,000 transactions per second, compared with about 60,000 SOL of daily inflation.

Its staged resource-fee burns illustrate the scale of the existing gap, but the document contains no acquisition mechanism and does not authorize Yakovenko’s idea.

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Why is Solana falling despite ETF inflows and booming activity?

Solana ETF inflows and network activity are rising, but inflation, weak fee burn, and macro pressure still weigh on SOL.

Jun 11, 2026 · Gino Matos

Until a formal proposal defines both tracks, control remains unresolved: validators and delegators could signal a direction, the SIMD process would still require technical specification, implementation and activation, and the corporate side would need to identify who selects the target, which legal entity buys and owns it, and who controls operations and revenue.

The post Yakovenko wants Solana to mint SOL to buy a company, but who would own it? appeared first on CryptoSlate.

When a decision on crypto is taken in the United States, the first question is which agency was responsible in the first place. Two supervisors share the field, work under different statutes and have disagreed for years about where the border between them runs. On 20 August 2026 an advisory body of one of them convenes for the first time, staffed among others with the chief executives of Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, Ripple and Solana Labs.

For you as an investor in Germany, two things matter here that regularly get muddled. First, neither of these agencies protects your balance: your rights come from the European MiCA regulation and are enforced by the BaFin. Second, what happens in Washington reaches you all the same, because the same companies sitting at that table also run your trading platform.

Two agencies share a market that knows no borders

Responsibility in the US grew up historically and sits badly on digital assets. The Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC for short, is the securities regulator and sees to it that securities are registered and that investors receive the information they need. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the CFTC for short, supervises commodities and the trading of derivative contracts, meaning futures, options and swaps.

A token fits neatly into neither of those drawers. It can behave like a stake as long as a team works on a network and buyers speculate on its success, and like a commodity once the network runs and nobody earns from it centrally any more. At that fault line arises the uncertainty that accompanies the US market. How long the conflict has been running is shown in our review of the rapprochement between the SEC and the CFTC on crypto regulation from March 2026.

In Europe the question does not arise with that sharpness, because MiCA created a set of rules of its own for crypto assets instead of pressing them into existing categories. Which providers are authorised under it is shown in the comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.

The CFTC supervises derivatives and treats Bitcoin as a commodity

The CFTC has long held the view that Bitcoin and Ether are commodities within the meaning of the Commodity Exchange Act. That sounds academic but has tangible consequences: it means the agency supervises above all the trading of derivatives on those assets and not the simple purchase of a coin on an exchange.

A gap follows from that: the spot market, where you buy a cryptocurrency directly and hold it, falls under ongoing supervision in the US only to a limited extent. The CFTC can act there after the fact against fraud and market manipulation, but it issues no authorisation in the proper sense. Several bills in Congress set out to change that; none is in force.

The SEC supervises securities and tests tokens with the Howey test

The SEC works with a yardstick from 1946. In SEC v. W. J. Howey Co., the US Supreme Court developed a test for when an arrangement counts as an investment contract and therefore as a security. Four features have to come together: an investment of money, a common enterprise, an expectation of profits, and the dependence of those profits on the efforts of others.

Apply that to a token sale and it becomes clear why the agency considers itself responsible: anyone buying tokens in the early phase is as a rule betting that a development team will get the network running. The dispute has turned for years on whether that classification applies permanently or whether a token can lose its character as a security once a network is sufficiently decentralised. A ruling from the highest court is still outstanding.

The Innovation Advisory Committee meets for the first time on 20 August

The date falls into this setting. On 10 August 2026 the CFTC announced that its Innovation Advisory Committee, the IAC for short, would convene for the first time on 20 August. The official notice in the Federal Register of 11 August names the window of 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, meaning 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. Central European Summer Time. Members meet in person; the public can watch virtually by livestream.

One detail was reproduced incorrectly in several reports: the CFTC press release speaks of 1 p.m. EST, but in August daylight saving time, EDT, applies in Washington. What governs is the official notice, which names EDT. Written comments are possible until 27 August 2026.

The body is not a new creation but the renamed successor to the former Technology Advisory Committee; its charter was amended on 3 March 2026. The agency's chairman, Michael S. Selig, acts as sponsor.

Who sits on the advisory body: 43 members from Coinbase to Nasdaq

The membership list the CFTC keeps on the committee's page runs to 43 names. Less interesting than the number is the mix, because it shows whom the agency regards as an interlocutor.

From the crypto sector, Brian Armstrong (Coinbase), Arjun Sethi (Kraken), Tyler Winklevoss (Gemini), Brad Garlinghouse (Ripple), Hayden Adams (Uniswap Labs) and Anatoly Yakovenko (Solana Labs) are among those at the table. Vlad Tenev (Robinhood) and Haider Rafique (OKX) add two names that German users are likely to know from their own app. The second half comes from classic financial infrastructure, among them Terry Duffy (CME Group), Adena Friedman (Nasdaq) and Jeff Sprecher (Intercontinental Exchange), plus financiers such as Chris Dixon (a16z crypto).

That a supervisor takes advice from the supervised is the rule with advisory bodies of this kind. What is notable is the weighting: a body advising on crypto rules is staffed in the majority with people whose companies are affected by those rules. Consumer protection organisations do not appear on the list.

Prediction markets are on the agenda and are the hardest point of contention

The notice names three subject areas for the session: crypto assets, artificial intelligence and prediction markets, along with the agency's recent activity in those markets. The third point is likely to be the most contentious.

Prediction markets are venues where contracts on the outcome of future events can be bought, from elections to economic data. In the US these are event contracts and therefore derivatives, which is why the CFTC is responsible. With Tarek Mansour (Kalshi) and Shayne Coplan (Polymarket), the chief executives of the two best-known providers sit on the committee, alongside representatives of the sports betting industry such as Jason Robins (DraftKings) and Christian Genetski (FanDuel). How much difficulty the agency has with this field was already shown by the case in which the CFTC served Coinbase with a subpoena in the Polymarket proceedings.

For German users the field calls for caution: prediction markets do not fall under MiCA in Europe, and whether such an offering requires authorisation here depends on the individual case. No blanket statement can be made about it.

An advisory body writes no rules, it delivers recommendations

Sobriety is called for at this point. The IAC is an advisory committee under the Federal Advisory Committee Act: it can issue recommendations, adopt reports and put topics on the agenda. Legally binding rules do not arise there; that would require formal rulemaking by the commission or an act of Congress. The predecessor committee produced two reports, both position papers without legal effect. What the session delivers is a signal about which topics the agency regards as pressing and whose arguments it listens to.

The SEC, meanwhile, is stuck on its own crypto rule

The contrast with the second agency is striking. While the CFTC convenes an advisory body, the SEC is making no progress: as CryptoTicker reported on 15 August 2026, the agency cancelled a vote scheduled for 14 August on a bespoke issuance regime for crypto investment contracts on the eve of the meeting and has so far named no replacement date. The details are in the analysis of why US regulation is currently stuck on two fronts.

The juxtaposition describes the situation fairly precisely: one agency gathers advice, the other postpones a vote. No coordinated roadmap for the US crypto market can be read from it. For you that means announcements from Washington will keep making headlines without anything changing in your legal position.

MiCA applies to you, and your supervisor is called the BaFin

This is where most misunderstandings arise. If you live in Germany and buy from a provider authorised in the EU, protection of your assets follows the regulation on markets in crypto-assets, MiCA for short. For crypto-asset service providers it has applied since 30 December 2024 and governs, among other things, the separation of client assets from own holdings, custody and information duties.

Responsible for supervising providers authorised in Germany is the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority. Neither the SEC nor the CFTC owes you any duty of protection. If a provider is based outside the EU and accepts you as a German customer, foreign law with a foreign place of jurisdiction applies in the event of a dispute.

How to tell whether your trading platform is under EU supervision

The check takes a few minutes.

Four points you can look up

• The contracting party. What matters is not the brand name but which company appears in the terms of use and where it is based. Many providers run several group companies alongside one another.
• The authorisation status. MiCA authorisations are granted by the national supervisors and kept in public registers. Anyone advertising European regulation should be able to name the competent authority and the type of authorisation.
• The scope of the permission. An authorisation as a custodian does not automatically cover the operation of a trading platform. An analysis by CryptoTicker of 6 August 2026 on the MiCA register found that of 329 authorisations counted, only 21 went to trading platforms.
• The protection in the event of insolvency. Statutory deposit protection does not apply to crypto assets as it does to bank balances. Anyone expecting it is mistaken about their own risk.

Anyone wanting to hold their balance independently of a provider's authorisation cannot avoid self-custody. Which devices come into question for that is shown in the hardware wallet comparison.

What US decisions set off in your portfolio all the same

It would be wrong to conclude from this that the American debate is of no relevance to you. The influence is indirect and runs along three routes.

First through the products: whether a provider launches a staking offering, an exchange-traded product or a new type of derivative is often decided first in the largest market, and what becomes permissible there surfaces with a delay in European variants. Second through the listings: if the classification of a token is disputed in the US, trading platforms take it on less often or remove it again, which feeds through to liquidity and shows up in the spread.

Third through the price. Regulatory news from Washington moves prices regardless of where you buy. Anyone trading frequently should keep an eye on the tax side; which tools help with that is shown in the comparison of crypto tax software.

Making sense of US crypto regulation: what to take away

1. Place the reports correctly. The CFTC and the SEC are two agencies with two statutes and an unsettled border. The advisory session on 20 August 2026 produces a recommendation, not a rule; you can follow the livestream from 7 p.m. German time.
2. Check whose supervision you are under. Look in the terms to see which company your counterpart is and what authorisation it holds. The comparison of regulated crypto exchanges is the quickest way in.
3. Separate custody and trading. Holdings you want to keep for longer do not belong on a trading platform permanently. Suitable devices are in the hardware wallet comparison, and the tax documentation is handled by a tool from the comparison of crypto tax software.

Primary sources: the CFTC announcement of the first IAC session of 10 August 2026 and the official notice in the Federal Register of 11 August 2026.

(As of August 16, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

The bitcoin.de trading halt: what is documented since 12 June 2026

At bitcoin.de, the trading venue operated by Bitcoin Group SE, trading and deposits have been suspended since 12 June 2026. Every report on the matter agrees on this point: in its version of 29 July 2026, updated on 7 August, Bitcoin-Kurier writes in as many words that "deposits and trading have been suspended since 12 June until further notice". Börsen-Parkett and the Handelsblatt comparison name the same date.

On the planned relaunch the accounts differ slightly, and that range is left standing here rather than smoothed over. Börsen-Parkett names 1 July 2026; the Handelsblatt comparison of 10 August names 29 June 2026. Both record in agreement that the date was not met and that no new date had been named by the time the texts appeared.

Counting from the documented start date to 16 August 2026, customers have 65 days without trading behind them. That figure is not somebody else's claim but plain arithmetic from two dated points, and it therefore doubles as the test for reports quoting a longer duration: a summary published by Krypto Guru on 16 August 2026 speaks of "more than five months" of trading silence, which does not square with 12 June as the starting point.

On the order of magnitude the sources give two closely spaced figures: Börsen-Parkett puts the registered customer base at around 1.07 million, Bitcoin-Kurier writes of "more than one million registered users". How many of those accounts carry a balance is stated by none of the accounts.

What this assessment does not claim: the line between evidence and judgement

Documented is everything in the previous section: the start date, the two intended dates, the absence of a new date, the order of magnitude of the registrations. Documented too are the company dates further below, which come from the operator's financial calendar.

Assessment is everything concerning reasons and further course. This editorial team has no solid basis for that, and where connections are presumed below, it is stated as such.

What this text expressly does not do: it makes no statement about the economic position of Bitcoin Group SE, imputes misconduct to nobody involved, and asserts neither an official proceeding nor any objection by a supervisor. That would require a statement from the company.

From peer-to-peer marketplace to broker model: what the rebuild changes technically

On the concurring account of Börsen-Parkett and Bitcoin-Kurier, a broker model is replacing the previous peer-to-peer marketplace. That explains why this is not simply a server restarting.

The difference matters more for you as a customer than it sounds. On a peer-to-peer marketplace you trade against another person who happens to be looking for the counterpart to your order; the platform brings the two sides together and secures settlement. In a broker model you trade against the provider itself. Execution becomes more predictable, but the counterparty to your order is then the company.

As the planned range of functions, Börsen-Parkett names more than 100 tradable cryptocurrencies, a trading app for iOS and Android, savings plans, staking and a minimum investment of one euro. These figures describe an intention and not a state that has been reached.

Why a change of model is more than a software update

An intermediary and a broker rest on different regulatory foundations. Whoever steps into customer orders as the counterparty carries responsibility for pricing, execution and custody differently from a marketplace operator. Stated expressly as a presumption: where technology and authorisation have to be finished at the same time, the slower process sets the date.

The MiCAR authorisation procedure: what Bitcoin Group SE writes in its own 2025 annual report

On the regulatory position there is one statement that comes not from second hand but from the company's 2025 annual report, published on 26 June 2026. Bitcoin-Kurier quotes it verbatim: "futurum bank AG, currently still regulated as an investment firm under the German Securities Institutions Act, is in this sense currently undergoing the MICAR authorisation procedure".

That sentence carries more weight than any speculation, and both parts of it come from the company itself: the bank belonging to the group has so far been supervised as an investment firm under the Securities Institutions Act, and an authorisation procedure under the European crypto-markets regulation is running. A pending procedure is a normal state of affairs and not an accusation; almost every provider in Europe has been through it.

What the sentence does not say matters just as much: it names neither an expected conclusion nor a date. Anyone deriving a date for the trading restart from it is adding an assumption.

CASP authorisation under MiCA: why 1 July 2026 counts for every trading platform in the EU

What is happening at bitcoin.de does not stand alone. Regulation (EU) 2023/1114 on markets in crypto-assets established a uniform authorisation framework across the union, and the last Europe-wide transitional period expired on 1 July 2026. Since then, anyone offering trading, custody, exchange or intermediation in the EU needs authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider.

That has turned the summer of 2026 into a summer of deadlines. The running deadlines of several providers are set out in our overview of crypto exchange deadlines, and the general sequence is described in our piece on what to do when a crypto exchange shuts down. The bitcoin.de case is different: nobody here is withdrawing and setting a wind-down deadline. The provider is announcing a return.

For you as a customer that makes much of it easier and one thing harder: no deadline looms at which balances would lapse or be sold off, and at the same time there is no date you could plan around.

Withdrawal and transfer: why the sources diverge here

The Handelsblatt comparison of 10 August 2026 writes: "According to user reports in forums, withdrawals and the transfer of existing balances remain possible." Bitcoin-Kurier likewise records that customers can dispose of their holdings despite trading being suspended. The summary by Krypto Guru of 16 August 2026 presents it the other way round: anyone without access has to wait for the relaunch.

Two observations on that. The most favourable of these accounts expressly relies on forum reports from users and therefore on no assurance from the operator. And the same summary that disputes access contains, with its "more than five months", a time reference that contradicts the documented start date. None of the three accounts comes from the company.

An uncomfortable but clean conclusion follows: whether your balance can be moved is a question no article answers for you, this one included. Only a look into your account shows that.

A balance on a paused platform: what you can check yourself in fifteen minutes

Log in first and see whether the account balance and transaction history are displayed in full. Then check whether withdrawal or transfer to an external wallet address can be opened or appear greyed out. Anyone who can answer yes to both should test the route with a small amount before moving the whole holding; the network fee for that is the cheapest insight available in this situation.

If a function stays blocked, the only thing that helps is a written enquiry to support through a channel that leaves you a copy. If you want to shift part of your activity to an authorised provider anyway, check the permission position yourself beforehand rather than relying on advertising claims; our overview of regulated crypto exchanges sets out which firms operate in Germany with an authorisation.

Transferring to another platform: why a transfer is not a sale under Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act

Many hesitate to switch out of concern about a tax consequence. The governing provision is Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act: a private disposal transaction becomes relevant for tax where an asset is acquired and disposed of again within a year. Anyone transferring their coins from one account of their own to another account of their own, or to their own wallet, is disposing of nothing: owner and holding stay the same, and only the place of custody changes. The one-year period continues to run and does not start afresh.

The case is different if you sell on the old platform and buy back on the new one: a disposal followed by an acquisition, with all the consequences for the period and the calculation of gains. You can read the statutory text at Section 23 of the Income Tax Act; the provision also governs the exemption threshold for gains from private disposal transactions.

Anyone who transfers rather than sells saves themselves the tax question and takes on an accounting one: the receiving account does not know your acquisition date.

Acquisition data and records: what to secure before you move anything

The most important advice in this text is aimed less at the trading halt than at the rebuild that is meant to follow it. A platform built again from the ground up offers no guarantee that the history will remain available afterwards in the same depth. Secure it while your account still shows the past.

That includes the purchase date and time of each position, the quantity, the price at the time of purchase, the fees paid, and the transaction identifiers of completed deposits and withdrawals. Download the account statement or trading history as a file if the platform offers it, and additionally file screenshots of the overview pages. What counts for your tax return in the end is what you can prove.

Annual general meeting on 28 August and half-year report in September: the next documented dates

Anyone wanting to follow the course of events does not have to wait for rumours. The financial calendar of Bitcoin Group SE names three dates for the current financial year, two of which still lie ahead: the 2025 annual report appeared in June 2026, the ordinary annual general meeting is set for 28 August 2026, and publication of the 2026 half-year report for September 2026. These entries appear as such in the company's financial calendar and come first hand.

For customers the general meeting is the more interesting of the two, because it is the first fixed occasion at which the management answers questions publicly. The half-year report then delivers the first set of figures covering the period of the trading halt. Put as an assessment: a solid indication of the further schedule is most likely to surface at one of those two dates.

What this assessment leaves open: the limits of this text

First, the platform itself could not be read out: requests to bitcoin.de are answered with status code 403 for automated queries, even with a browser identifier, while the site is normally reachable in a reader's browser. Everything above on account access therefore comes from media reports.

Second, no statement from the company is available. Without one, any evaluation going beyond the quoted documents is left undone.

Third, the European register of authorised providers cannot be evaluated with the means available here, because the search mask loads its contents by script. This text therefore makes no statement about which company of the group is listed there with what status.

Fourth, at the time of publication there is no date for the restart. Anyone who reads one should check which source it rests on.

Checking the bitcoin.de trading halt: what to take away

On the documented dates the standstill has lasted 65 days, no date for its end is known, and the accounts of account access contradict one another. Three steps for today follow from that.

1. Check and document your access. Log in, see whether withdrawal and transfer can be opened, and test the route with a small amount if in doubt. If you then want to hold part of the balance at an authorised provider, get an overview of the regulated crypto exchanges first.
2. Secure the history while it is still available. Download the trading history and account statements and record purchase times, quantities, prices and fees. Bring the data together in one place, for instance with one of the crypto tax software and portfolio trackers, so that holding periods stay traceable across a change of account.
3. Decide on custody deliberately. A transfer to an address of your own is not a disposal and lets the one-year period keep running. Anyone taking that route should have settled key management beforehand; our hardware wallet comparison weighs up the classes of device for it.

(As of August 16, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Anyone holding Monero, Zcash or Dash at a European trading platform has been running into headlines about an imminent EU ban on privacy coins for months. This piece is an assessment and not a news report. What is documented is the wording of an EU regulation together with its date of application, and one recorded case from 2024 in which a large trading platform forcibly converted Monero holdings. Everything that follows from this for individual coins and providers is assessment. The two are kept apart here.

The documented core fits into two sentences. Article 79 of the European Union's anti-money-laundering regulation prohibits certain companies from keeping accounts that obscure the holder or the transactions, and it names anonymity-enhancing cryptocurrencies explicitly in doing so. The regulation becomes applicable on 10 July 2027. No reason to hurry follows from that, but there is reason to check where your holdings sit and what would happen to them if the platform holding them reshapes its range.

Article 79 of the EU anti-money-laundering regulation: what the wording says

The relevant provision is Article 79(1) of Regulation (EU) 2024/1624, adopted on 31 May 2024. It sits in Chapter VIII, formally headed "Measures to mitigate risks deriving from anonymous instruments". The first sentence reads:

"Credit institutions, financial institutions and crypto-asset service providers shall be prohibited from keeping anonymous bank and payment accounts, anonymous passbooks, anonymous safe-deposit boxes or anonymous crypto-asset accounts as well as any account otherwise allowing for the anonymisation of the customer account holder or the anonymisation or increased obfuscation of transactions, including through anonymity-enhancing coins."

Two observations matter in practice. First, the sentence addresses companies and not you as an investor: what is prohibited is the keeping of certain accounts, and the addressees are credit institutions, financial institutions and crypto-asset service providers. Second, the provision attaches to an effect and not to a product name. What is barred are accounts that permit anonymisation or obfuscation "to a high degree"; anonymity-enhancing cryptocurrencies are named as one route to that end.

The second sentence covers existing holdings: where anonymous accounts already exist, due diligence measures must be applied to holders and beneficiaries before any further use. That the same article also clears away bearer shares in paragraph 3 shows the thrust of it.

Application from 10 July 2027: the timetable of Regulation (EU) 2024/1624

The final provision is unambiguous. The regulation "shall apply from 10 July 2027", with an exception for a narrowly drawn group of obliged entities for which application is set at 10 July 2029. The text is binding in its entirety and directly applicable in every member state, so it needs no German implementing act.

That leaves just under eleven months. Individual platforms are likely to react earlier: anyone wanting to be compliant on the deadline does not rebuild their range the night before.

Crypto-asset service providers: who the provision addresses

The anti-money-laundering regulation uses the term "crypto-asset service provider" in the meaning it already carries in European crypto law. What is meant are authorised service providers offering trading, custody, exchange or intermediation of crypto assets on a commercial basis. That covers the regulated platforms where most investors actually keep their holdings, including the providers in our overview of regulated crypto exchanges.

Not addressed is software you run yourself, or networks that belong to nobody. A wallet on your device keeps no customer account for you, and a public protocol has no operator on whom a supervisor could impose anything. What is regulated is the route of access, not the technology behind it.

Anonymity-enhancing cryptocurrencies: why the wording contains no list of coins

Not a single token name appears in the regulation. There is no annex, no official list and no register of affected crypto assets. The text works with a description that supervisors and companies have to apply to specific crypto assets.

This is where the realm of assessment begins, and it is expressly marked as such here. It stands to reason that a crypto asset falls under the description the harder it is to reconstruct sender, recipient and amount from the public data. Crypto assets offering a choice between open and shielded transfers may have to be judged differently from those where the obfuscation always applies. None of these classifications is documented; none appears in any official document that could be checked for this piece.

The Kraken precedent of 2024: how a forced conversion of Monero unfolded

On the question of what happens in practice, nobody has to speculate: there is a documented sequence that the platform concerned published itself. Kraken removed Monero from its range in the European Economic Area and set out the process on a help page on Monero support in Europe that is still available today, last updated on 31 March 2025.

On 31 October 2024 at 15:00 UTC, trading and deposits were halted for all Monero markets and open orders were closed. Withdrawals remained possible until 31 December 2024 at 15:00 UTC. For anyone still holding the asset after that, the Monero was automatically converted into Bitcoin at the market rate; distribution to the accounts concerned was completed by 6 January 2025.

Two months lay between the end of trading and the end of the withdrawal window. Anyone who did nothing lost no money, but the platform made the decision about which crypto asset the value would end up in. Our guide on what to do when a crypto exchange shuts down describes how to recognise a credible announcement.

Why this case carries more weight than any forecast

The episode predates the anti-money-laundering regulation and was not justified by reference to it. It is therefore no evidence of the future legal position, though it does show the mechanics a platform chooses in a case like this.

Forced conversion and Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act: why a forced sale is a sale for tax purposes

Here lies the point many discussions overlook: a conversion triggered by the platform is not a neutral event for tax. Under Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act, private disposal transactions include "disposal transactions involving other assets where the period between acquisition and disposal does not exceed one year". Whether you trigger the sale yourself or a provider carries it out after a deadline passes makes no difference to that.

In practice this means: if the acquisition lies less than a year back, the conversion is taxable, and the gain counts in the calendar year of the conversion. Under paragraph 3, gains remain tax-free where the total gain from private disposal transactions in the calendar year came to less than 1,000 euros. That exemption threshold applies to all private disposal transactions together and not per crypto asset.

The decisive factor is the loss of control over timing: anyone who lets the conversion happen can no longer choose the more favourable moment for tax, such as waiting for the one-year period to run out. No statement about the amount of tax can be made here, because it depends on the acquisition date, the acquisition cost and the other private disposal transactions of the year.

Travel Rule and MiCA: why Article 79 does not stand alone

The anti-money-laundering regulation is the most recent building block and not the only one. Regulation (EU) 2023/1113 "on information accompanying transfers of funds and certain crypto-assets" already requires certain details to accompany a transfer. According to its recitals it applies from the date of application of the European crypto-asset regulation, in step therefore with the rulebook under which the platforms hold their authorisation.

For crypto assets whose transfers cannot be attributed technically, this creates a tension that exists today already and into which earlier delistings fit. Whether the transmission obligation, the authorisation requirements or a commercial decision tipped the balance cannot be established from the outside.

Self-custody as a way out: what a wallet of your own does and does not do

Anyone wanting to keep a crypto asset independently of a platform's decision cannot avoid holding it themselves. The reason is in the wording: what is prohibited is the keeping of accounts by companies, and a holding on a device in your hand is not such an account. Our hardware wallet comparison shows which classes of device come into question.

This solution has limits. Self-custody shifts the risk from the platform to you: losing the recovery words means losing the holding, with no complaints desk and no reversal. It also solves only the custody part. For a later exchange into euros you need a service provider again, and whether a regulated provider will still offer that is precisely the open question of this piece.

Between doing nothing and full self-custody lies a third option: converting the holding at a moment of your own choosing into something the question does not touch. That is no recommendation for any particular crypto asset, only a reminder that the decision is still yours to make.

Holding stays permitted: what the regulation does not govern

The wording addresses credit institutions, financial institutions and crypto-asset service providers. Article 79 contains no provision barring private individuals from holding a particular crypto asset, and no such rule could be found elsewhere in the regulation either. Anyone holding Monero or Zcash in a self-managed wallet is not directly affected by a prohibition on companies keeping accounts.

What is governed is regulated access, meaning trading, custody and exchange at authorised companies. For the vast majority of investors that access is the only one they use, which is why the practical effect turns out considerably larger than the company-only circle of addressees suggests.

Open questions of interpretation until 2027: where this text remains assessment

On these points the piece deliberately makes no statement of fact.

• Which crypto assets supervisors will classify as anonymity-enhancing is open. No official list exists.
• Whether crypto assets with optional shielding will be treated differently from those with continuous obfuscation has not been decided so far.
• When individual providers will react cannot be foreseen. The date of application is a latest point in time, not a provider announcement.
• How individual platforms would wind down residual holdings is open. The 2024 case is an example, not a rule.

Documented, by contrast, are the wording of Article 79(1), the application date of 10 July 2027, the course of the Monero forced conversion in the winter of 2024, and the treatment under Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act.

Checking privacy coins: what to take away

A deadline just under eleven months away calls for no panic, but it does call for a stocktake. These steps can be done today and spare you the time pressure under which decisions rarely get better.

1. Check where your holdings actually sit. Look at whether you hold crypto assets built for obfuscation, and at which provider they sit. Only a holding at an authorised service provider is affected. If you want to part with them anyway, our overview of selling crypto assets sets out the routes.
2. Sort out your acquisition data before somebody else picks the moment. The acquisition date of each individual position is what counts for the one-year period. Anyone who has it to hand can calculate rather than search when it matters. Our comparison of crypto tax software and portfolio trackers sets out the tools.
3. Decide on custody deliberately. Anyone wanting to hold an affected crypto asset for the long term is better off preparing self-custody than improvising it under deadline pressure. Which solutions come into question is covered in our software wallet comparison.

Nothing about this situation forces you into a transaction today. What is called for is an overview, so that the decision belongs to you and not to a provider's calendar.

(As of August 16, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

This piece is an assessment rather than a report on a launch that has already happened. What is documented so far is a narrow core: DekaBank is building an execution-only crypto service for the Sparkassen that covers the entire value chain, from trading through custody to the user interface, and Boerse Stuttgart Digital supplies the liquidity behind it. Both firms described the arrangement in those terms when they widened their partnership. The timetable, the selection of crypto assets and the pricing, by contrast, come from the trade publication Platow and were picked up by several specialist outlets in late July 2026. No public statement from DekaBank or from the German Savings Banks Association covers those points. Everything in this text that goes beyond those reported details is labelled as an assessment and is expressly not a statement of fact.

Sparkasse crypto trading: what is documented and what remains an assessment

The dividing line follows the source. The joint account given by DekaBank and Boerse Stuttgart Digital establishes that the service is aimed at self-directed investors, that it is meant to be execution-only, and that it will be run as a product of the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe. Boerse Stuttgart Digital is described there as MiCAR-compliant and takes on the supply of liquidity. That division of roles is the solid part.

The second part concerns how the service works in practice, and it rests on a single chain of reporting. The financial service Platow reported the timetable, and specialist outlets repeated it on 23 July 2026. According to that account, an internal test phase involving staff and their families is planned from mid-September 2026, with the regular launch following roughly a month later and running in several waves. Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Solana and Polygon are to be tradable at the start. A flat 99 cents per order is quoted, plus a spread set by DekaBank. The service carries the name "Krypto powered by Deka" and is meant to appear inside the Sparkassen app.

What follows from that is assessment. A timetable that became known through a trade service is not a date you can rely on, and it is not a commitment either. Launch dates for this project have been named several times in recent years and were later pushed back. A further slip beyond October is therefore a plausible possibility rather than an established fact, and there is no figure to attach to it.

The timetable for the Deka launch: testing in September, rollout from mid-October

The reported sequence has two stages. The first is a closed trial in which employees and people close to them use the service under real conditions. Phases like this exist to surface faults in the interplay between the app, the order route and custody. The second stage is the launch proper, and it is meant to be staggered.

For you as an investor, the staggering is the more important part. A launch in waves means there is no nationwide start date on which the feature appears everywhere at once. When it shows up in your app depends on which wave your institution falls into and on whether it enables the feature at all.

Why a September trial is not yet a starting signal

An internal trial is an intermediate step and not a pre-sale. A phase of that kind says nothing about how many institutions will take part in the end, and it does not fix a price either. If reports of first usage surface in September, that is an indication the timetable is holding, and for the moment nothing more.

Why each Sparkasse decides on its own: a rollout in waves instead of a fixed date

The Sparkassen are legally independent institutions under a shared roof. A centrally developed product is offered to them, not imposed on them. The reporting records exactly that: each institution decides for itself whether and when to switch the feature on. On the reported state of affairs, a nationwide October launch is therefore not assured.

In practical terms, the question of whether you can buy crypto at your own Sparkasse has no national answer, only one per institution. Anyone who wants to know where they stand should ask there rather than rely on general reporting. If you want to buy in the meantime, you will find the authorised firms in our overview of regulated crypto exchanges.

Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Solana and Polygon: the planned trading range

The selection named is a narrow one and follows the market capitalisation of large, widely traded crypto assets. For a banking product that is the obvious line-up, because every additional position creates work in custody, connectivity and documentation. Whether the list grows later is not known.

An assessment on that point: anyone already invested more broadly than these five assets will not be able to hold their portfolio through the bank offering alone. For beginners who only want to hold Bitcoin or Ethereum, the restriction barely matters.

Order fee and spread: what the 99-cent price tag leaves open

A flat order fee of 99 cents is a clear figure, and it has been reported. That number describes only one part of the price. The second part is the spread, the gap between the buying and selling quote, which DekaBank sets. Nothing is publicly available on its size, and no projection is offered here, because it would have to rest on an invented figure.

The conclusion that can be drawn is concrete all the same. On small amounts the fixed fee dominates; on larger amounts the spread does. Anyone judging the cost of a service therefore has to know both components and not only the one that communicates well. Once the terms are published, the spread is the number to look for first.

Custody through DekaBank: why a bank offering gives you no keys of your own

One point follows from the description of the full value chain and is often lost in the debate: custody sits with the provider. What you hold is a claim against the bank, not private keys in your own hands. That is the norm for crypto services from banks and brokers, and it is common at trading venues too.

Risk therefore shifts rather than disappears. The mistakes self-custodians make fall away: lost recovery words, a failed storage device without a backup, a transfer to the wrong address. In their place comes dependence on the provider and on its processes. If you want to weigh the two against each other, the device side is covered in our hardware wallet comparison.

What bank custody means in practice

Whether and how holdings from such a service can be moved to a wallet of your own is a detail with tangible consequences. Nothing is publicly known about this for the Deka offering. It is one of the questions to settle first when the terms are published, because it determines whether you can later move your holdings without selling them.

DekaBank and Boerse Stuttgart Digital: who provides trading, liquidity and custody behind the scenes

The division of labour is the most solid part of the whole story, because both firms described it themselves. DekaBank is responsible for the product up to the interface in the app. Boerse Stuttgart Digital, DekaBank's infrastructure partner in institutional crypto business since 2024, supplies the liquidity for trading and is listed as MiCAR-compliant.

For the individual Sparkassen this structure serves an obvious purpose: the individual institutions do not need to obtain their own authorisation as crypto-asset service providers if the business runs through one firm within the group. This assessment is not based on our own query of the European register covering the authorisation of the companies involved; on this point it relies on the account given by the parties.

Execution-only for self-directed investors: what the MiCAR framework does and does not do

Execution-only means nobody tells you whether the purchase suits you. The bank provides access, the decision stays with you, and there is no investment advice that could later be held against anyone. That is standard at neobrokers and trading venues, and it is notable for a Sparkassen product, where advice is otherwise a core component.

The European regulation on markets in crypto-assets governs above all who may provide such services, what information has to be made available and how client assets are to be handled. What the regulation does not do is turn a volatile asset into a safe product. If you want to read up on the structure, it is set out in the official summary of the MiCA regulation.

The holding period under Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act: why acquisition data matters in a bank account too

A one-year period applies to private disposal transactions in Germany. Anyone holding a crypto asset for more than a year can take the gain on a sale free of tax; within the period the gain is taxable, provided the exemption threshold is exceeded. The rule can be read in the wording of Section 23 of the Income Tax Act; the details are worked through in our article on the holding period for cryptocurrencies.

The point easily overlooked when moving to a bank offering is the acquisition date. It attaches to the individual holding and not to the account. Anyone moving holdings from one trading venue to another provider still has to be able to prove when they were acquired, and keeping those records in order is their own responsibility. A clean history across every platform you have used is therefore not paperwork but the basis of your own tax return.

What to bear in mind in the current tax debate

The one-year period is politically contested. The state of that debate and the two taxation models under discussion are covered separately; for the question of where you buy, the debate changes nothing for now. For the question of how good your records should be, it changes a good deal.

What the bank offering means for existing exchange accounts: an assessment

Documented ground ends here, and that should be visible. An offering inside the banking app lowers the barrier for people who have so far shied away from registering with a trading venue themselves. That is in all likelihood where the real effect lies.

For investors who already hold an account with an authorised provider, there is little to be said for a quick switch while the terms remain unpublished. Moving holdings creates work, can trigger fees and makes documentation more complicated. Anyone who wants to switch should decide once the spread, the transfer options and the tax report are known, and not before. All three points are currently open.

A note on how to read this judgement: it rests solely on what was publicly known on 16 August 2026. Neither DekaBank nor the German Savings Banks Association has confirmed the reported terms, and none of the parties involved has commented on the open points. Should an official statement follow, it may overtake individual assumptions in this text.

Sparkasse crypto trading: what to take away

1. Ask your own institution instead of waiting for a start date. The launch is meant to run in waves, and each Sparkasse decides for itself. As long as nothing has been switched on, the route runs through an authorised provider; you will find which ones in our overview of crypto exchanges.
2. Hold off on comparing costs until the spread is known. The 99 cents per order have been reported, the mark-up in the quote has not. Only both figures together give you the price. Until then, a sober look at the providers in the comparison for buying Bitcoin via app is worth more.
3. Get your acquisition records in order before you move anything. The one-year period attaches to the individual holding, not to the account, and when you change provider you have to be able to prove it yourself. Tools for that are covered in our overview of crypto tax software and portfolio trackers.

(As of August 16, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

A blockchain is treated as a ledger you can only add to at the end. That very promise is up for debate whenever a protocol, hit by an attack, starts weighing a rollback. Because a rollback does not erase only the attack. It also erases the purchases and transfers of uninvolved holders.

Since August 12, 2026, this can be watched in a live case: on the layer-1 chain Harmony, an attacker created roughly four billion ONE out of nothing, according to an external analyst's estimate. The team shipped an emergency patch and has been weighing a rollback of the chain ever since. This article explains what happens technically in that process, why the window for an unwind closes fast, and what an unwound purchase means for your holding period.

What a blockchain rollback is and why it breaks the promise of immutability

A rollback is a network's agreement to reset the state of the chain to an earlier block and to keep writing from there. Everything that happened between that block and the decision drops out of the recognised history.

A rollback is not a button a board presses. It works only if enough validators or miners install a software version that treats the old state as valid. Anyone who does not follow along stays on the old chain. Immutability therefore rests on an agreement that carries technical costs.

A reorg and a rollback are two different things

A reorganisation, reorg for short, belongs to normal operation and concerns one or two competing blocks. A rollback, by contrast, reaches back in a coordinated way over hours or days.

The Harmony case: four billion ONE from a faulty cross-shard receipt

On August 12, 2026, the Harmony team confirmed an incident on mainnet in which ONE tokens were created without authorisation. The protocol instructed validators to install the emergency version v2026.1.1, halted its own bridge and asked exchanges to block balances from four named addresses. In its own words, it was working on "a patch and rollback options".

On the amount there is still no confirmation from Harmony itself. The on-chain analyst Juiceberg estimated roughly four billion newly created ONE, a premium of about 26 percent on the roughly 15 billion previously in circulation; some 2.8 billion of them are said to have reached exchanges. These figures come from an outside observer and are expressly not confirmed by the protocol, as CryptoSlate notes.

The price loss on the day of the incident ranged between roughly 26 and 40 percent depending on the measurement point, as CoinDesk traced over the course of the day. More important than the percentage is the state that has persisted since: the patch prevents further minting, no decision has been taken on the tokens already created, and a block from which a reset would start had not been named by the team as of mid-August.

A protocol with a history

It is not the first incident: in 2022, roughly $100 million was taken through the Horizon bridge, and in 2023 a staking bug produced roughly 146.3 million ONE too many.

Infinite-mint exploit explained: how a validation flaw becomes new money supply

Infinite mint describes attacks in which an attacker gets the protocol to credit them a balance without anything being debited elsewhere. So no money is stolen; money is created. For the remaining holders the effect is the same as with a theft.

At Harmony the published code changes centred on the cross-shard receipts that carry the result of a transaction from one part of the chain to another. The first weakness lay in the quorum check: the verifier counted the full committee instead of the validators actually represented, so a receipt went through without the necessary approvals. The second lay in the marking that a receipt has already been spent: because individual proof fields were not bound to the signed block header, a processed receipt could look like a new one. The destination shard credited the amount again without the source shard being debited, and it is in that gap that the additional money supply arises.

The pattern is not new. In April 2026, a flaw in a bridge's proof procedure created more than a billion counterfeit DOT on Ethereum, with thin liquidity limiting the damage. You will find the comparison in our write-up on the Hyperbridge exploit at Polkadot.

Patch, freeze and rollback: a protocol's three tools after a mint exploit

A protocol has three means at its disposal, and each later one is harder to enforce than the one before.

First: the patch

The emergency patch closes the gap so that nothing more is added. But it only takes effect once a sufficient share of validators has installed it. At Harmony, reports say roughly 53 percent had updated about four hours after release. That ratio is the yardstick of an emergency response, not the speed of the press release.

Second: the freeze

Freezing works only where someone holds control, that is, at centralised exchanges and stablecoin issuers. The protocol publishes addresses and asks for a block; whether the exchanges respond is their own decision. At Harmony, it was disclosed neither which venues went along nor what amount was frozen. The effectiveness is therefore barely verifiable for you.

Third: the rollback

The rollback is the most expensive means. It requires a majority of validators, the consent of the largest venues and a community that accepts the break with immutability. The longer the vote drags on, the more uninvolved transactions hang on the period that is to be erased.

Why a rollback gets harder once the tokens have reached the exchanges

As long as the unauthorised tokens sit on the chain, an unwind is technically clean: the blocks concerned fall away, the tokens no longer exist, and no one outside has paid anything for them. Once the attacker has sold them on a centralised exchange, the process has stepped out of the chain: the buyer handed over real euros and holds a claim in the exchange's books in return.

A rollback of the chain does not undo that trade; it only devalues the basis on which the exchange made the credit. The gap between chain state and internal ledger then has to be carried by someone: the venue out of its own pocket, or the customers through adjusted balances. The estimate that roughly 2.8 billion tokens reached exchanges at Harmony therefore above all describes how small the window for a clean unwind has become.

Ethereum 2016 and Ravencoin: what earlier rollback decisions show

The best-known case is the attack on The DAO in the summer of 2016. The Ethereum community opted for an unwind, part of the operators did not go along, and the chain split; the variant without the unwind runs to this day as Ethereum Classic. The underlying risk: in the end there can be two chains and two tokens, and your holding sits on both, with very different values.

One day before the Harmony incident, it struck Ravencoin, whose network had accepted invalid blocks. The miners rebuilt the chain from a point before the flaw, putting several days of transactions at risk. Both cases show the same trade-off: whoever reverses an attack always reverses legitimate transfers as well.

Exchange account or self-custody: where a rollback hits you differently

If your tokens sit on a centralised exchange, you legally hold not a coin but a claim against the venue. In an emergency the venue decides what happens to your balance: deposits and withdrawals are stopped, trading is suspended, and whether your holding stays unchanged depends on the provider's booking practice.

In self-custody it is the other way round. Your key stays valid, but the chain state decides what it controls. If a reset happens, the account balance of the restored block applies to you, and every transaction after it is gone. Anyone wanting to self-custody will find the device classes in our hardware wallet comparison.

A common misconception persists here. A hardware wallet protects your private key from outside access. It does not protect you against a change in the money supply at the protocol level, and just as little against a rollback. Both happen one layer down, where the validity of the chain is decided.

Acquisition date and holding period: what an unwound purchase triggers for tax

In Germany, gains from selling crypto assets held as private assets are treated as a private disposal transaction under Section 23 of the Income Tax Act. What counts is the one-year period between acquisition and disposal: if it is exceeded, the gain stays tax-free; below it, the €1,000 exemption threshold per calendar year applies. How that works in practice is set out in our explainer on the holding period for cryptocurrencies.

A rollback calls into question the very figure this calculation hangs on: the acquisition date. If the block your purchase sits in falls out of the chain and the transaction is executed later or not at all, the start of the period shifts, or the deal never came about. For this case there is no explicit rule in Germany you could rely on.

What you take from this in practice

Do not rely on your software reconstructing it later. Portfolio and tax programs draw their data from exchange interfaces and from block explorers. If the chain is reset, one source changes retroactively while the exchange data stays put, and from that moment the two states diverge.

So save your exchange's transaction history as a file while it is still available, keep the transaction hashes of your own transfers, and note the time and price of your purchases. These records are the only basis on which a diverging chain history can later be explained to the tax office. For larger amounts, the case belongs with a tax adviser.

How to gauge, before buying, how large a chain's rollback risk is

The ability to rescue quickly and the ability to rewrite history are the same ability: a network in which a small team rolls out a patch within hours and everyone follows can just as quickly decide on an unwind. Watch for these features:

• Number and distribution of validators. A few dozen operators who know one another decide differently from thousands of nodes.
• Track record. A protocol that has already put addresses on a block list will do it again.
• Complexity of the architecture. Sharding, bridges and cross-chain receipts enlarge the attack surface, because every handover of value is a check.
• Verifiability of the money supply. Can the circulating amount be recalculated independently from the chain's raw data? In the Harmony case that was a problem, because the reported total did not show the increase at first.
• Communication in an emergency. Anyone who, after days, has named no reference block and no figures has not reached agreement internally.

None of these features is a knockout on its own. Together, though, they tell you how much trust the finality of a booking on this chain deserves.

Gauging rollback risk: what to take away

1. Separate the venue from custody deliberately. Keep on an exchange only what you actively trade, and check your provider's terms and supervision in the comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.
2. Document your acquisitions independently of the chain. Export the transaction history regularly and store the files off the exchange. Which programs output them in a form fit for the tax office is shown in the crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers.
3. Move larger holdings into your own custody, but with realistic expectations. Your key protects against outside access, not against decisions of the protocol. The right devices are in the hardware wallet comparison.

(As of August 15, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

The Nasdaq-listed privacy firm launched Cypherpunk Mining through a $33.33 million equity deal with Winklevoss Capital, adding roughly 18% of the Zcash network's hashrate to accelerate its treasury ambitions.

Gov. Josh Shapiro ordered new restrictions on large data centers aimed at shielding residents from higher electricity costs and giving communities more control over proposed projects.

The optional window puts an assistant of your choice next to your tabs, with a switch to disable it.

A tracking device planted in a book order ended at a Las Vegas facility where Amazon strips bindings to scan pages for training data.

X’s algorithm may turn argumentative replies into a feedback loop that serves users more content that clashes with their values, with the effect stronger among Democrats, researchers found.

Bitwise Bitcoin ETF captures a $16.15 million single-day inflow as net assets climb to $2.38 billion amid a broader Wall Street market resurgence.

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse has signaled a more neutral stance on a potential initial public offering.

Solana's recovery potential is higher than you might think as mini-golden cross formation is being enforced.

Early Uber investor Jason Calacanis has questioned whether Bitcoin can reach $250,000 or even $1 million.

The market stays in front of a pivoting structure and it's not clear if it'll improve or not.

TLDR

• SUI price fell 3.11% to $0.6552 after losing the $0.67 support level.
• The $0.642-$0.65 zone is now the key area traders are watching.
• Analyst BitGuru flagged the breakdown from $0.67 to $0.65 on August 18.
• Bollinger Bands and MACD both point to ongoing bearish momentum.
• A reclaim of $0.67 could open the door to $0.68-$0.69 and $0.70.

SUI is under pressure after failing to hold above $0.67, a level that had acted as support for the token in recent sessions.

At the time of writing, SUI trades at around $0.6556. That marks a drop of 3.11% over the past 24 hours.

Daily trading volume sits near $375.06 million. Market capitalization is close to $2.67 billion.

Crypto analyst BitGuru shared this development on August 18. The post noted that SUI failed to hold its accumulation zone at $0.67 and slipped down to $0.65.

BitGuru’s post pointed to the $0.642-$0.65 range as the next area to watch. This zone could decide whether SUI stabilizes or falls further.

Support Zone Now in Focus

If buyers step in around $0.642-$0.65, SUI could attempt a bounce back toward $0.68-$0.69.

A move back above $0.67 would suggest the recent breakdown was short-lived. That would put the $0.68-$0.69 area back in play.

The downside case is also on the table. A drop below $0.642 without a quick recovery could send SUI toward $0.62 next.

Technical Indicators Show Weakness

SUI currently trades below its lower Bollinger Band, which sits at $0.66254.

The middle band is at $0.68181. The upper band is at $0.70107.

Trading below the lower band points to continued selling pressure and weak price strength.

The MACD line is at -0.01232, sitting below the signal line at -0.01188. The histogram reads -0.00043.

This keeps the MACD in negative territory. It suggests bearish momentum remains in place for now.

The coming sessions will matter for SUI’s next move. The $0.642-$0.65 zone is the first area to watch for a reaction.

If buyers show up there, SUI could push back above $0.67 and test $0.68-$0.69, followed by the upper Bollinger Band near $0.70.

If selling continues below $0.642, the next level in view is $0.62.

As of August 18 at 11:59 PM, SUI remains below $0.67, with the $0.642-$0.65 zone acting as the line for the next directional move.

The post SUI (SUI) Price: Drops Below $0.67 Support as Analysts Eye $0.642 Level appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• AVAX trades near $6.35 after the launch of the Neuberger Securitize High Income Tokenized Fund (HINC) on Avalanche.
• HINC is sub-advised by Neuberger Berman and holds high-yield bonds, CLOs, and leveraged loans.
• AVAX sits below the Bollinger mid-band at $6.43, a short-term resistance point.
• Open interest in AVAX derivatives holds near $250 million, according to CoinGlass.
• A move above $6.43 could open the path to $6.67 and $6.97; a drop below $6.20 would signal more selling.

Avalanche’s price sits close to $6.35 as of August 19, 2026. The move comes after news of a new tokenized fund launching on the network.

The fund is called the Neuberger Securitize High Income Tokenized Fund, or HINC. It is sub-advised by Neuberger Berman and follows a fixed-income strategy.

Securitize built the fund on the Avalanche blockchain. It adds another real-world asset product to the network’s growing list.

Avalanche’s official account described the fund on social media. The post read: “High-yield bonds, CLOs, leveraged loans. Now in a tokenized fund on Avalanche.” The message points to a mix of high-yield bonds, collateralized loan obligations, and leveraged loans inside the fund.

Tokenization Growth on Avalanche

The HINC launch follows other tokenization moves on the network. Dinari recently launched tokenized U.S. stock trading on Avalanche as well.

Securitize has also helped push Avalanche’s real-world asset market close to $2 billion. These launches show a steady build-out of tokenized products on the chain.

Despite the new fund, the AVAX price has not moved much yet. The token still trades below short-term resistance levels on the chart.

AVAX Chart Levels to Watch

TradingView data shows AVAX consolidating after a downtrend in June. The price sits below the Bollinger mid-band, which is at $6.43.

The upper Bollinger Band sits at $6.67, marking the next resistance point. The lower band sits at $6.20, marking near-term support.

A move above $6.43 could open the door to $6.67 and then $6.97. A drop below $6.20 would point to renewed selling pressure.

CoinGlass data shows AVAX open interest near $250 million. Trading volume has swung up and down without a clear upward trend.

As of the latest check, AVAX remains near $6.35, still trading below the $6.43 resistance line.

The post Avalanche (AVAX) Price: Holds Near $6.35 as Tokenized Fund Launches appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• WYFI shares tumbled 25% in extended trading following the announcement of a $250 million convertible senior notes offering
• The convertible debt matures in 2032 and will be sold privately to qualified institutional investors
• Funds raised will support data center buildout, GPU server purchases, and possible strategic acquisitions
• The stock had already declined 8.5% during Tuesday’s regular session to approximately $27.78
• Wall Street analysts maintain a generally bullish stance with 11 Buy ratings and a consensus target of $36.08

Shares of WhiteFiber (WYFI) experienced a sharp 25% decline in after-hours trading on Tuesday following the company’s disclosure of plans to issue $250 million in convertible senior notes. The selloff compounded existing weakness from the regular trading day, where the stock had fallen 8.5% to close near $27.78 on notably light volume—74% below typical daily averages.

WhiteFiber, Inc. Ordinary Shares, WYFI

The convertible notes carry a 2032 maturity date and will be sold through a private placement exclusively to qualified institutional buyers. Additionally, WhiteFiber has granted the initial purchasers an option to acquire up to $37.5 million in additional notes beyond the primary offering amount.

These notes represent senior unsecured debt obligations of the company and will accrue interest payable on a semiannual basis. Upon conversion, WhiteFiber retains flexibility to settle the obligations through cash payment, delivery of ordinary shares, or a combination of both methods.

Capital Deployment Strategy

The majority of capital raised will be allocated toward expanding WhiteFiber’s data center footprint. This encompasses acquiring or leasing additional properties, covering construction expenses, securing energy service contracts, and procuring GPU servers to bolster its cloud computing capabilities.

Management has indicated that a portion of the proceeds may also fund strategic acquisitions, collaborative partnerships, and joint venture opportunities, alongside general corporate purposes. The company acknowledged that supplementary project-level financing, including construction-specific loans, will be necessary to fully realize its expansion objectives.

Final terms of the offering, including the conversion rate and interest rate, will be determined when pricing occurs.

Prior to Tuesday’s sharp downturn, WhiteFiber delivered mixed financial results in its latest quarterly report. The company posted an adjusted loss of $0.39 per share, marginally outperforming analyst expectations of a $0.40 loss. Quarterly revenue reached $28.84 million.

The company continues to operate with significant negative margins, reporting a net margin of -46.87% and return on equity of -10.72%. Analyst consensus calls for a full-year loss of $0.97 per share.

Wall Street’s Perspective

Despite recent stock volatility, the analyst community maintains a constructive outlook on WYFI. Among 14 analysts tracking the stock, 11 assign Buy ratings, two recommend Hold, and one suggests Sell. The overall consensus stands at “Moderate Buy” with an average price objective of $36.08.

Recent analyst activity includes Needham increasing its price target from $38 to $41 while reaffirming a Buy recommendation. Cantor Fitzgerald upgraded WYFI from Neutral to Overweight, simultaneously raising its target from $27 to $36. BTIG continues to rate the stock as Buy with a $50 price objective.

Barclays adjusted its target upward from $29 to $32 while maintaining an Equal Weight stance.

Technical indicators show the stock’s 50-day moving average positioned at $30.42, with the 200-day moving average at $23.01. The company’s market capitalization currently stands around $1.06 billion.

Institutional interest remained evident in the fourth quarter, with new positions initiated by Strs Ohio, Royal Bank of Canada, and MetLife Investment Management, among others.

Specific terms of the convertible notes offering, including the final conversion mechanics and coupon rate, were not disclosed at the time of announcement.

The post WhiteFiber (WYFI) Stock Plunges 25% on $250M Convertible Debt Announcement appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Block traced the first Coldcard theft wave to a paid blockchain data account used during the attack.
• Galaxy Research says the first wave removed 1,082.65 BTC, worth about $69 million at recent prices.
• The FBI has not confirmed identifying a suspect, making an arrest, or recovering any stolen funds.
• At least 1,700 BTC has been stolen across multiple theft waves tied to the same firmware flaw.
• Users with vulnerable seeds must update firmware, create new seeds, and move their funds to stay safe.

Investigators may have identified the person behind the first wave of a Bitcoin theft involving Coldcard hardware wallets. Bitcoin Magazine reported the update on August 18.

Galaxy Research analyst Alex Thorn said law enforcement may already know who carried out the first attack. His comment was careful and stopped short of confirming anything.

The FBI has not made a public statement about the case. No arrest, charge, or fund seizure has been announced so far.

The first wave of the theft removed 1,082.65 Bitcoin from wallets created with flawed firmware. At recent prices near $64,000 per coin, that amount is worth roughly $69 million.

How investigators traced the theft

Block engineering lead Clay Garrett said his team found an unusual pattern in how the attacker searched for wallet data. The person allegedly used a paid account with a blockchain data provider during the theft.

Block contacted that provider. Internal records reportedly matched the timing and pattern of the suspicious activity closely.

Garrett said Block passed the information along to authorities. It remains unclear what records the provider kept or who controlled the account.

Block said it found no sign the data provider knew how its service was being used. The company appears to have offered normal services without awareness of any theft.

What “may be known” actually means

Thorn’s wording leaves room for doubt. A name that investigators suspect is not the same as someone formally charged with a crime.

No criminal complaint, indictment, or forfeiture filing tied to the case has turned up in public records. Authorities would still need to confirm who controlled both the account and the wallet addresses.

The Bitcoin from the first wave has not moved since it was taken. It also has not shown up at any known exchange or mixing service.

Bitcoin transactions cannot be reversed once confirmed. Getting the funds back would require the private keys, a voluntary return, or a transfer through a service able to follow a legal order.

The Coldcard theft was not limited to one attacker or one event. Galaxy Research says at least 1,700 Bitcoin has been stolen across several separate waves.

Later thefts showed different patterns than the first one. This has led researchers to think more than one person may have used the same weakness.

Coinkite, the company behind Coldcard, said certain firmware versions created wallet seeds with weak randomness. This affected some Mk2, Mk3, Mk4, Mk5, and Q devices starting with version 4.0.1.

New firmware fixes the flaw for wallets made after the update. It does not repair wallets already generated using the weak method.

Coinkite has told users to update their firmware, create a brand new seed, and move their funds. It recommends testing with a small transaction first.

Coinkite says its full technical review of the incident is still underway. Independent checks have taken place but have not confirmed every piece of updated firmware.

The case remains open. What happens next depends on whether authorities can link the data account to a real person and whether the stolen funds ever move.

The post Coldcard Bitcoin Theft: What We Know About the FBI Investigation appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• Klarna shares plummeted more than 22% following a reduction in full-year revenue projections and the announcement of two executive departures.
• The company lowered its 2026 revenue forecast to a range of $4.08B-$4.16B, missing both prior guidance of $4.3B and analyst expectations of $4.4B.
• Second quarter revenue reached $1.04B, representing 27% year-over-year growth and surpassing analyst projections of $996.5M.
• JPMorgan analysts downgraded KLAR shares from Overweight to Neutral while reducing the price target from $22 down to $18.
• The revised outlook stems primarily from deteriorating conditions in Germany, which represents Klarna’s most significant market.

Shares of Klarna (KLAR) experienced a dramatic selloff on Tuesday, plunging over 22% to $15.44, following the fintech company’s decision to lower its revenue projections while simultaneously disclosing the upcoming departures of two key executives.

Klarna Group plc, KLAR

Chief Financial Officer Niclas Neglén and Chief Marketing Officer David Sandström will both exit the organization in early 2027, concluding tenures of six and nine years respectively. The company has yet to announce successor appointments and indicated it is actively seeking a New York-based candidate for the CFO position.

The stock has now declined approximately 48% since the beginning of the year and has surrendered roughly 67% of its value over a twelve-month period. Klarna went public in late 2025 with an initial offering price of $40 per share.

Despite the negative market reaction, second quarter performance exceeded analyst forecasts. Revenue surged 27% year over year to reach $1.04 billion, surpassing the Wall Street consensus estimate of $996.5 million. The company posted net income of $9 million, contrasting favorably with the anticipated $18 million loss. This marked Klarna’s second consecutive quarter of earnings outperformance.

The concern centered on future expectations. Management now anticipates Q3 revenue between $940 million and $980 million, significantly trailing the $1.11 billion consensus forecast. Full-year projections were similarly reduced to $4.08B-$4.16B from the previous $4.3B target, falling short of the $4.4B analyst consensus.

German Market Weakness Drives Revision

The guidance reduction was predominantly attributed to weakening consumer expenditure patterns in Germany, which represents Klarna’s most substantial market by transaction volume. CFO Neglén indicated the company observed discretionary spending deceleration during the latter portion of Q2, with that weakness persisting into the current period.

Management also identified an expected $600 million headwind from currency translation effects on full-year revenue.

JPMorgan analysts responded swiftly to the developments. The investment bank downgraded KLAR from Overweight to Neutral while slashing its price objective from $22 to $18, pointing to diminished clarity regarding medium-term business trajectories. Analysts highlighted that Klarna had previously reduced its 2026 expectations in February, with JPMorgan warning at that juncture that an additional reduction could fundamentally alter the investment thesis.

The bank lowered its second-half 2026 adjusted operating income projection by approximately 40%.

Some Business Fundamentals Remain Solid

The quarterly report contained several positive elements. Gross merchandise volume totaled $36.6 billion in Q2, marginally exceeding the $36.4 billion forecast. The platform added 9 million active users during the trailing twelve months, pushing the total above 12 million. Revenue per customer on average also increased during the period.

Klarna rolled out its tiered subscription offering across 11 European markets and recently integrated Apple’s device leasing program into the Klarna ecosystem. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski stated the Apple collaboration is anticipated to contribute positively to adjusted operating income during the current year.

Tuesday’s decline represented the most severe single-session loss for KLAR shares since a nearly 27% drop recorded in February.

The post Klarna (KLAR) Stock Plunges 22% as JPMorgan Slashes Price Target to $18 appeared first on Blockonomi.

Bitcoin’s price suddenly jumped by a grand yesterday and tapped $65,000 for the first time in over a week, before it was stopped and now sits at around $64,000 again.

Most larger-cap alts have produced minor gains within the same timeframe, with ETH climbing above $1,900 and SOL trading above $75. BTW has stolen the show again.

BTC Tapped $65K

Bitcoin went through a few legs down last week after it was rejected at $65,400 first and then at $64,400. The culmination took place on Friday afternoon when the asset slumped to $62,500 for the first time in ten days. The bulls finally intervened after this nosedive and helped the asset recover to $63,000, where it spent the entire weekend without any moves in either direction.

Monday began with a dip to $62,600 before BTC jumped by a grand to $63,600. After a minor rejection there, the cryptocurrency went on the offensive again to $64,500. It was stopped there at first and slipped to $64,000. Then came the surprising uptick to $65,000, which became its highest price tag since last Monday.

BTC failed there and dipped to $64,100 earlier today, where it found some support and now sits a few hundred dollars higher. Its market cap has remained sideways at $1.290 trillion, while its dominance over the altcoins has lost some traction and is below 57% on CG now.

BTW In a League of Its Own

The top performer in the crypto market continues to be Bitway (BTW). The token has skyrocketed by over 900% in the past month. Its daily gains stand at a whopping 85%, and it just reached a new all-time high of $0.067 (CoinGecko data).

PUMP, CAKE, LINK, and DOT follow suit in terms of daily gains, but are significantly more modest at somewhere between 4% and 7%. Ethereum has jumped by just over 1% to $1,920, while SOL is at $77 after a 1.5% increase. XRP, TRX, DOGE, and ZEC are also slightly in the green, while HYPE and CC are down by around 2% each.

The total crypto market cap has added around $20 billion daily and is up to $2.280 trillion on CG.

The post Viral Altcoin Explodes to New All-Time High, Bitcoin (BTC) Touched $65K: Market Watch appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed a new rule on August 18 that would let crypto companies raise money through two exemptions from standard securities registration.

The plan, called “Regulation Crypto Assets,” sets one path capped at $5 million every four years and another at $75 million per year, alongside a safe harbor that could pull certain crypto assets outside the legal definition of a security.

Two Paths to Raise Capital

Under the proposal, the smaller exemption is a one-time offering worth up to $5 million over a four-year period. Issuers using it would need to give investors narrative disclosures about the offering, written in plain language rather than the dense form typical of a full registration statement, and the requirements stay fairly informal by comparison.

The larger exemption goes up to $75 million in any 12-month stretch, but it comes with more paperwork: financial statements and ongoing reporting obligations for as long as a company keeps raising money under it.

The rules also includes a conditional safe harbor removing certain crypto assets from the “investment contract” definition found in both the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

If a project meets the conditions, largely tied to whether management has finished or permanently stopped the work it promised investors, the token would no longer count as an investment contract, and by extension, not a security. Chairman Paul Atkins said the change would apply “once an issuer has completed or permanently ceased all essential managerial efforts” it promised.

“Congress designed our securities laws to amplify – within specific guardrails – opportunities for entrepreneurs to innovate and build new products,” Atkins added. “Advancing this regulatory framework is a key element in our strategy to advance the rule books for the modern era and another step by the Commission to onshore innovation in crypto asset markets for generations to come.”

The rule further preempts state securities registration and qualification requirements for offerings made under either exemption, plus some secondary market sales.

The Backdrop in Washington

The proposal builds on the SEC interpretation from March 2026 that first laid out how federal securities law applies to certain crypto assets and transactions. It also landed one day before a White House meeting scheduled for August 19, where executives from Ripple, Coinbase, Chainlink, Paradigm, Kalshi and a16z are expected to sit down with regulators as CryptoPotato had earlier reported.

President Donald Trump is reportedly expected to attend, and Atkins himself is also expected to show up, per updates from journalist Eleanor Terrett. Reports have suggested that some traditional finance executives could join too, though there is no official confirmation of a full guest list.

That meeting comes as the CLARITY Act, the broader bill meant to draw a line between SEC and CFTC authority over digital assets, sits stalled in Senate. Lawmakers left for their August recess without a vote, and Majority Leader John Thune has filed cloture for a vote on September 15.

Unresolved disputes over ethics provisions, anti-money laundering rules and stablecoin rewards for customers have slowed things down, with banks lobbying against the reward idea because it could pull deposits out of traditional systems.

The SEC will take public comments on Regulation Crypto Assets for 60 days once the proposal is published in the Federal Register.

The post SEC Unveils ‘Regulation Crypto Assets’: New $5M and $75M Path for Token Offering appeared first on CryptoPotato.

[PRESS RELEASE – Willemstad, Curaçao, August 19th, 2026]

1win, a crypto entertainment platform, has added Crypto Genesys, Pragmatic Play’s new crypto-themed slot, giving its players access to a title currently available across only a limited selection of gaming platforms.

As one of the few selected gaming platforms that offer Crypto Genesys, 1win is expanding its entertainment offerings beyond cryptocurrency transactions to include gaming experiences designed specifically for crypto-oriented audiences.

Set in the world of crypto, AI, and digital culture, Crypto Genesys takes players into a neon-lit cyberpunk metropolis where digital currencies meet futuristic gameplay. A cyborg character overlooks the reels, while crypto-inspired tokens, including a prominent Bitcoin symbol, drive the game’s visual identity.

Instead of traditional paylines, Crypto Genesys uses a scatter-pays system across a 6-reel, 5-row grid, allowing winning symbols to land anywhere on the reels. Tumbles clear winning symbols to make room for new ones, creating opportunities for consecutive wins within a single sequence.

The game also features multiplier symbols and Free Spins with accumulating multipliers. Players looking for more control over the gameplay can use the Ante Bet feature to increase their chances of triggering Free Spins or access the bonus round directly through the Buy Free Spins option.

With high volatility and a maximum win of up to 15,000x the stake, Crypto Genesys is designed for players looking for high-risk, high-reward gameplay wrapped in a distinctly crypto-inspired experience.

Crypto Genesys is now available to play on 1win.

About 1win

Founded in 2016, 1win is a crypto entertainment platform in the global gaming industry. Operating across Asia, Latin America, and Africa, 1win offers a wide range of entertainment products adapted to regional audiences. The brand has active collaborations with international public figures, including football legend Luis Suarez, martial artist Jon Jones, and Olympic champion and UFC fighter Gable Steveson. In 2026, 1win welcomed rapper Tyga, UFC legend Ilia Topuria, and reggaeton star Nicky Jam as members of the 1win VIP community.

The post Crypto Genesys Goes Live on 1win in Limited Platform Release appeared first on CryptoPotato.

SkyBridge Capital founder and managing partner Anthony Scaramucci told CNBC’s Squawk Box on Tuesday that Bitcoin (BTC) will climb back over $100,000 as the halving cycle tightens prices, a level the asset has not closed above since November 13, 2025.

“I think as the halving cycle comes in again, it will tighten prices and you’ll see a move back up over $100k,” says @Scaramucci of $BTC. https://t.co/x8GF2oK0uh pic.twitter.com/lVSyypTzEN

— Squawk Box (@SquawkCNBC) August 18, 2026

Bitcoin briefly hit $65,000 on Tuesday, according to CoinGecko. The next halving falls at block 1,050,000, which countdown trackers place around April 2028, and the network stood at block 963,063 on Tuesday.

Halvings arrive every 210,000 blocks, and the block subsidy will drop to 1.5625 BTC from 3.125 BTC.

Prior Call Targeted $170,000

Coin Metrics puts Bitcoin at $64,908 on April 20, 2024, the day of the last halving. The cycle that followed peaked at over $126,000 on October 6, 2025. The asset last closed at or above six figures on November 13, 2025, at $100,035, then fell to $86,505 by December 1, $76,911 on February 1, and $65,734 on March 1. Its 2026 low was at under $58,000 on July 1.

Scaramucci made a similar argument before the last halving in early 2024, expecting Bitcoin to reach $170,000 after the April halving, based on a pattern he described as multiplying the halving-day price by four roughly 18 months later. BTC traded near $43,000 when he made that call.

The four-year pattern is itself disputed now, as even analysts, including Scott Melker and Arthur Hayes, are questioning whether the cycle still holds, with Melker noting Bitcoin ran 1,080 days from its last major low against a historical peak window of 1,060 to 1,070 days, and PlanB placing a possible top anywhere between 2026 and 2028.

Clarity Act Vote Set for September

Some of the catalysts for the price surge, at least in the short term, could be the impact of the Clarity Act and the state of crypto among the topics covered across the eight-minute interview.

The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, filed as H.R. 3633, is scheduled for a Senate cloture vote on September 15 at 2:15 PM ET.

CryptoPotato reported that Senate Majority Leader John Thune filed cloture shortly before the August recess after Democrats declined to back a procedural vote, and that the bill’s odds of becoming law this year have fallen, according to experts and prediction platforms.

The motion needs 60 votes, and senators will not be voting on the legislation itself that day.

The post Bitcoin Back Above $100K? Scaramucci Says the 2028 Halving Holds the Key appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin is struggling to hold its June range floor after $390 million left US spot BTC ETFs last week, according to Wintermute’s newest market update.

The trading firm says falling rate-hike odds have failed to lift BTC, while ETF redemptions and miner selling have left the market without a strong source of fresh demand.

ETF Flows Fail to Sustain Bitcoin’s August Recovery

As Wintermute pointed out, July CPI came in at 0.1% month-on-month, cutting September rate-hike odds from roughly even to about one-in-three, with retail sales also posting their steepest decline since May 2025.

Almost nothing rallied on it: the S&P 500 added just 0.40%, long-dated Treasuries fell 0.87%, and BTC sat at the bottom, down 3.12%. CoinGecko data shows the cryptocurrency is currently around $64,000, up 1.2% over 24 hours. However, it is down nearly 1% over 30 days and 49% below its October 2025 all-time high.

Brent crude jumped 7.91% as Hormuz ship transits collapsed from 31 the prior weekend to five Saturday and zero Sunday, with the 60-day ceasefire expiring and talks stalled. A re-escalation that holds Brent near $89 puts the August CPI print at risk.

For Wintermute, that combination matters. Lower rate-hike expectations would normally improve the case for risk assets, but Bitcoin failed to respond. The firm said the market was moving toward a situation where “the inflation problem seems to be moving from the Fed’s hands to oil’s.”

The ETF picture was also weak. Roughly $390 million left US spot Bitcoin ETFs between August 10 and 14, the largest weekly redemption since early July. As CryptoPotato reported, Bitcoin ETFs recorded only one positive session last week, with Monday seeing $145 million leave the funds, followed by $61 million on Wednesday, $131 million on Thursday, and nearly $58 million on Friday. Tuesday brought just under $5 million of net inflows.

“An asset that cannot rally on good news while its dedicated vehicles bleed is telling us the marginal seller is back, which weakens the depletion argument we have been carrying since W31,” wrote the trading company.

Miner Selling Adds Another Problem

Wintermute also pointed to Riot Platforms as evidence that miners may remain a source of Bitcoin supply. The firm sold 4,300 BTC during the second quarter after selling 3,778 BTC in the first quarter. Its treasury fell to 11,380 BTC as mining costs approached $91,000 per unit. Bitcoin was trading below $64,000, contributing to Riot’s $237 million quarterly loss.

Riot is also shifting part of its business toward AI data centers, with the miner reportedly agreeing to supply 191 megawatts of capacity to Anthropic under a 20-year contract worth $9.1 billion.

The ETF picture is not uniformly negative, though, as Jane Street disclosed more than $1 billion in US spot Bitcoin ETF holdings as of the second quarter, including about $828 million in IBIT. However, the filing only shows quarter-end holdings and does not capture the firm’s full derivatives exposure.

The post Wintermute: Bitcoin Range Breakout Delayed by ETF Outflows and Miner Selling appeared first on CryptoPotato.