The semiconductor selloff highlights vulnerabilities in tech markets, potentially reshaping global supply chains and impacting AI investments.

The post Nasdaq 100 enters correction territory as semiconductor selloff rattles markets appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Hyperscale Data's Bitcoin strategy highlights a trend of tech firms leveraging cryptocurrency for financial flexibility and strategic growth.

The post Hyperscale Data buys additional 18.59 Bitcoin, totaling 1,106.04 BTC appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

China's lithography advancements could weaken Western export controls, alter global chip supply dynamics, and impact tech trade negotiations.

The post China’s chip tool push intensifies pressure on ASML amid US-China tensions appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The projected $7.5T AI infrastructure investment could reshape tech industry dynamics, influencing market valuations and competitive positioning.

The post Goldman Sachs forecasts $7.5T AI infrastructure spend over five years appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

S&P Global's earnings miss highlights the vulnerability of global markets to geopolitical tensions, potentially affecting future growth and stability.

The post S&P Global earnings miss sends shares tumbling as US-Iran War rattles energy division appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Dips As Crypto Clarity Act Hopes Fade 

Bitcoin’s price slid further on Tuesday as investors weighed up the chances of lawmakers voting on the long-awaited crypto Clarity Act. 

The price of Bitcoin was recently $63,634 after sliding 2% over a 24-hour period. The cryptocurrency dropped as low as $62,784 at one point. 

Market observers now give the Clarity Act a 35% chance of getting signed into law this year on crypto betting platform Polymarket. 

While major financial institutions like Fidelity and Goldman Sachs have thrown their weight behind the new bill, some Democrats are still unhappy with it in its current form. A group of Democrats last week said in a statement that the bill in its current form falls short.  

A number of lawmakers are hoping the bill gets passed before Congress departs for August recess. 

U.S. lawmakers have an action packed week of voting before its five-week recess, including sweeping Russian energy sanctions. 

Despite being passed in the house of representatives last year with strong bipartisan support, the Clarity Act has been in a deadlock for much of 2026, partially because big bankers raised concerns over stablecoin yield among Democrat concerns around ethics language.

Banking lobbyists have said that if crypto exchanges pay attractive yields to customers, banks could lose their deposit base. 

An updated bill of the Clarity Act was introduced last week that addressed the ethics concerns, banning government officials and their families from issuing or promoting crypto. 

Republicans are hoping to gain bipartisan support for the bill this week to advance the legislation. If passed, the long-awaited bill would create a regulatory framework for the cryptocurrency market.

This post Bitcoin Dips As Crypto Clarity Act Hopes Fade  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

I Scanned the Entire Bitcoin Blockchain for Images. What I Found Will Shock You

I scanned the Bitcoin blockchain for images; what I found will shock you. Much has been said online about the arbitrary data and content that can be found on the Bitcoin blockchain. Not only has this possibility spawned a niche art scene, but it has also led to a movement against ‘non-monetary transactions’ on the Bitcoin network. Were you to hear from one of its proponents or detractors, you’d figure the blockchain is basically a wall filled with graffiti. 

Well, I decided to put the question to the test: are there actually images on the blockchain? And what does this actually mean for Bitcoiners simply trying to run their own full node and maximize their financial sovereignty?

My methodology was simple: I was to buy a fresh hard drive to store the blockchain on, and then I was going to run classic image recovery software over the data- something used to rescue images from broken hard drives, something designed to find raw image data. 

I chose PhotoRec to do the image recovery work, an open source image recovery program that’s been around for over 20 years. The software is designed to find image files in raw data. This can be used to recover images and other file formats from hard drives that have failed or been corrupted. It is actually often used to recover lost wallet.dat files from the early days of Bitcoin wallets, before the proliferation of the seed word format. 

Syncing The Full Bitcoin Node 

For storage of the full Bitcoin blockchain, I decided to buy a 4-terabyte disk drive for a couple hundred dollars. I then installed the latest version of Bitcoin Core on it and started to sync the chain. The process, which involves downloading and verifying the accounting integrity of all transactions in Bitcoin history, took about 72 hours or three days, automated and running in the background by the Bitcoin Core software.

I did this with an otherwise powerful gaming machine; the main bottleneck in terms of time was the disk drive, which is slow to read and write data as needed when syncing Bitcoin’s blockchain. The slow part of the process involves the unspent transaction output set, or UTXO. When a user syncs the blockchain, every unspent transaction value (output) or positive balance is organized into the UTXO set, and as those values are spent, they are removed from the set, while the new address to which those satoshi were sent is added. 

On the disk drive, this UTXO indexing process could have taken three weeks according to some estimates, so to speed it up, my clanker (AI agent) suggested we index the data in RAM instead, then move the data back to the 4-terabyte disk drive. While the whole process took three days, running in the background, an SSD could have done the whole job in about a day. SSD drives are much faster than disk drives; they are more modern, but they are also easily four times the price, or more.

Once the blockchain was fully downloaded and validated, we moved the UTXO index from RAM back to the disk and booted the Bitcoin software; the chain was fully synced and the wallet ready to go. Now it was time for the next step: recovering the images stored on the blockchain.

Image Recovery on the Blockchain with PhotoRec

With the full Bitcoin blockchain on my disk drive, I turned off Bitcoin Core and asked my clanker (Cursor AI agent) to run PhotoRec 7.2 on the drive. The default PhotoRec process looks for jpg, png, gif, tif, bmp, ico, psd, and raw formats. The process ran for over 11 hours on the blockchain data and ultimately found … (drum roll) … nothing.

Over a terabyte of blockchain data and half a day of scanning and no images turned up. The PhotoRec wiki page gives a simple example of how the software works: “PhotoRec identifies a JPEG file when a block begins with: 0xff, 0xd8, 0xff, 0xe0, 0xff, 0xd8, 0xff, 0xe1, or 0xff, 0xd8, 0xff, 0xfe.” In other words, the program looks at the data on the disk for bytes that signal that there’s an image file. 

The program is capable of false positives; it saved 8 ICOs and 4 identical PNG files that don’t show any images when opened, as seen in the picture below. So, effectively no meaningful images of any kind were found. 

Where Did the Jpegs Go? XOR Magic Tricks

How is this possible? For years, crypto people have been talking about NFTs and how to engrave image data on the Bitcoin blockchain. Millions of dollars have moved in this niche, and a whole culture war is being fought on the matter as we speak. Can there really be no images on the chain? 

Turns out the risks involved with arbitrary data have been discussed and planned for in Bitcoin Core development circles for a long time, as early as 2011. XOR, a simple data obfuscation technique, is used to scramble all the blockchain data while it is at rest on a hard drive. 

You might have heard that the fundamental language of computers is made up of 0’s and 1’s. Well, in a nutshell, XOR compares two digits or bits and returns 1 if the bits are different or 0 if the bits are the same. In the case of Bitcoin, XOR compares every bit of the blockchain data to a random key generated during initial install, resulting in data at rest that other programs can find no meaning in. However, when the Bitcoin software runs, it has the key to unscramble that data and use it at will. XOR is also very fast, so it does not meaningfully impact performance. Here’s an example of the Bitcoin genesis block before and after an XOR.

XOR is currently applied to both the blockchain data and the UTXO set. XOR was initially discussed in 2014 when anti-virus software started getting tripped up by blockchain data it interpreted as virus code. The anti-virus software would then quarantine a block, corrupting the blockchain data and crashing Bitcoin, making sync impossible. By the end of 2015, XOR had been implemented on the UTXO set data at rest and in 2024 it was implemented on all blockchain data at rest. 

Incidentally, the XOR process means that no arbitrary data can be identified or extracted from the blockchain without intentionally bypassing the XOR, a process that is not necessary for monetary use of Bitcoin. Since the Bitcoin Core software keeps a simple database of the location of each scrambled block, it can get its data, unscramble it and use it in a targeted manner easily.

Syncing Bitcoin in an unscrambled way is a custom process that can take as much time as syncing from scratch, since it basically has to re-write the full terabyte of data in a new order, and there’s not much point in that for someone that just wants the normal privacy and security benefits of running a Bitcoin node. So when it comes to the vast majority of copies of the Bitcoin blockchain data, resting on the computers of normal Bitcoiners throughout the world, there’s effectively no arbitrary data or images that can be identified. Shocking, I know. Feel free to run the PhotoRec test yourself on your own node!

This post I Scanned the Entire Bitcoin Blockchain for Images. What I Found Will Shock You first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

Bitcoin Magazine

Quick Maths On STRC Buybacks: The Truth About Net Bitcoin Per Share and Accretion

Strategy initiated open-market repurchases of STRC last week (July 20 through July 26, 2026), buying 288,930 shares for ~$25 million at an average price of $86.52. Notably, the company bought no Bitcoin and continued to grow its cash reserve. 

So what is going on here? Why is the largest Bitcoin treasury company buying back its credit? 

Context 

In June 2026, STRC fell far below the $100 stated amount. Check out these two articles for some in depth analysis about what exactly happened: 

• Crash Post Mortem – What Happened to STRC in June 2026
• The Sixth Lever 

Last week’s STRC buyback follows Strategy’s Digital Credit Capital Framework, announced on June 29 in response to the June volatility, which authorized up to $1 billion of repurchases across STRC, STRF, STRD, and STRK. Likely because STRC is now viewed as Strategy’s flagship product, STRC was identified as the initial priority for these buybacks. 

Buyback logic starts with the position of MSTR common stock in the capital structure. Common equity owns the residual value after every senior claim has been satisfied. Strategy’s BTC and cash are its liquid assets. Debt and preferred stock sit ahead of MSTR. Strategy’s USD Reserve (read: cash) offset part of those senior claims. The common stock therefore represents the value left after subtracting debt and preferred stock from the bitcoin reserve and adding back available cash.

This is effectively Strategy’s recently introduced “Net Bitcoin Per Share” metric. Strategy’s current methodology calculates Net BTC by taking bitcoin holdings and subtracting the bitcoin-equivalent value of out-of-the-money convertible debt, other debt-like instruments, and outstanding perpetual preferred stock, then adding back the USD Reserve. Notice that this is exactly the same description as the prior paragraph! 

Net BTC is divided by fully diluted common shares to produce Net BPS. Strategy’s disclosures mark July 23 as the boundary for its revised mNAV methodology, which uses Net BPS as its denominator.

This metric gives MSTR investors a direct view of BTC economically attributable to common equity after senior claims. Gross Bitcoin Per Share can rise when Strategy issues more preferred stock or debt to buy bitcoin. Net Bitcoin Per Share captures the liability created alongside that bitcoin purchase, answering the question of how much bitcoin remains for common shareholders after the more senior investors in the capital structure are paid. 

Therefore, Net BPS provides a framework for measuring the accretive or dilutive effect of capital markets transactions on MSTR. Think of it as another new metric that investors may evaluate along with the existing metrics already being used. 

Ok, but why STRC buybacks? 

The answer is that retiring liabilities at below their notional values is accretive on a net BTC basis. 

Let’s consider a simple balance sheet with easy numbers to understand the basic mechanics.

Assume a company owns $100 million of BTC and carries $50 million of senior liabilities. Common equity is therefore a $50 million residual claim: 

$100 million assets –  $50 million liabilities = $50 million equity 

Now assume the company can retire those $50 million of liabilities for $40 million. It uses $40 million of its assets, leaving $60 million of assets and zero remaining liabilities. The common equity residual rises from $50 million to $60 million. 

$60 million assets –  $0 liabilities = $60 million equity 

The equity claim went from $50 million to $60 million. So spending $40 million to eliminate a $50 million claim creates $10 million of value for the residual owner (the common equity investor). 

The STRC repurchase follows the same structure. Strategy paid an average of $86.52 to retire a security with a $100 stated amount. Each repurchased share removed $100 from the preferred stock claim used in the company’s Net BTC calculation while consuming only $86.52 of capital. The $13.48 spread creates gross accretion to MSTR.

Strategy retired $28.893 million of STRC stated amount for about $24.998 million based on the reported average price. The difference equals approximately $3.895 million, and this value accrues to MSTR. 

(It’s worth mentioning that also related to this is STRC’s current 12% annualized dividend rate. Retiring $28.893 million of STRC stated amount also removes roughly $3.47 million of annual dividend requirements. Also consider that since STRC is still well below $100, the company likely will raise the dividend, meaning the actual annual dividend expense removed is likely higher.)

Conclusion 

Net BTC identifies the residual BTC owned by the common stock by considering all the senior liabilities which sit ahead. The STRC buyback is a move of financial engineering to improve the Net BTC per share metric of the company.

Disclaimer: This content was prepared on behalf of Bitcoin For Corporations for informational purposes only. It reflects the author’s own analysis and opinion and should not be relied upon as investment advice. Nothing in this article constitutes an offer, invitation, or solicitation to purchase, sell, or subscribe for any security or financial product. 

This post Quick Maths On STRC Buybacks: The Truth About Net Bitcoin Per Share and Accretion first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Allard Peng.

Bitcoin Magazine

Core Scientific Adds More Bitcoin To Balance Sheet in Q2 Despite Selling Strategy

Nasdaq-listed miner Core Scientific is rebuilding its Bitcoin treasury after seeing its balance sheet shrink at the start of this year. 

In a regulatory filing Tuesday, the miner said it had a total of 848 Bitcoins — worth over $54 million at today’s prices — after finishing the first quarter of this year with 547 Bitcoins. 

Core Scientific finished 2025 with 2,537 but started aggressively selling coins to fund its transition to the AI and high-powered computing industry. 

But the miner has started stacking Bitcoin again, using coins from mining, in order to have a strong balance sheet. It added 301 coins this quarter alone. 

Selling Bitcoins can reduce reliance on equity issuance or additional borrowing, especially in a higher-interest rate environment. It also gives a company more cash on hand.

Core Scientific shares (CORZ) were trading about 2% lower Tuesday afternoon in New York. 

The company, which operates data centers across Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Texas, added that its revenue in the second quarter of this year rose sharply to $164.2 million from $78.6 million in Q2 2025. 

Gross profit rose to $70 million from $5 million in the same period as the year before. 

Core Scientific is one of a number of top publicly listed miners that have started directing resources to providing the infrastructure for high-powered computing.

On Tuesday, the miner signed a deal with chipmaker AMD for 2.5 gigawatts ‌of data center capacity. The deal will give ​AMD access to more than 500 megawatts of Core Scientific’s AI-ready ‌data ⁠center capacity. 

A number of Bitcoin miners have already gone all-in on the industry as minting the biggest digital coin by market cap becomes harder and demand for AI compute surges. 

Instead of dropping mining operations completely, a number of Bitcoin miners have instead marketed themselves as “compute” or “digital infrastructure” companies while switching between minting digital coins and providing compute for AI — depending on which is more profitable.

Branching out into AI data centers isn’t always easy for miners as the world of HPC requires more expertise with heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems than those for Bitcoin mining.

This post Core Scientific Adds More Bitcoin To Balance Sheet in Q2 Despite Selling Strategy first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bank of Russia Creates New Rules For Crypto Trading 

Russia’s central bank on Monday published draft regulations for the trading of digital currencies. 

The Bank of Russia released the changes to its “organized trading” rules, including the term “digital currency” throughout. 

The new rules are for organizations like crypto exchanges, which now have to report digital assets into their existing systems for pricing, monitoring and reporting — using the same processes they already run for regular currencies and securities.

Russia’s central bank is implementing the new rules as the State Duma prepares comprehensive regulation of crypto. 

Pro-Bitcoin Russia? 

While the new rules don’t specifically mention Bitcoin, Russia has a complex relationship with the leading cryptocurrency. 

Using crypto has been illegal in Russia as a form of payment since 2022 but lawmakers in the country have been open about using them for international settlements.

President Vladimir Putin has also spoken about how the country has “competitive advantages” when it comes to Bitcoin mining due to the abundance of cheap energy in Russia. 

And back in 2023, the Russian legislature passed a bill legalizing the use of digital currency as a way to make international payments. 

The bill likely has helped the country skirt international sanctions: The U.S. and European governments sanctioned Russia when it annexed Crimea in 2014, and Western nations have stepped up penalties since it invaded Ukraine in 2022.

President Putin even hinted that the country had been using Bitcoin specifically: While speaking at a forum in Moscow in December 2024, he said that new technologies were emerging that could help people move money. 

“For example, Bitcoin, who can ban it? Nobody,” he said at the time. 

This post Bank of Russia Creates New Rules For Crypto Trading  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

ISBNdb is marketing physical-book orders of up to one million titles to AI developers, including material it describes as non-digitized, rare, or out of print.

The offer, reported by 404 Media, puts a 2025 copyright ruling in an uncomfortable new light: discarding a purchased book can support the legal premise that its internal scan replaced the original while keeping the library's copy count unchanged.

ISBNdb's current service and Anthropic's historical scanning program follow separate source chains. Physical disposal is the shared incentive created when books become scalable training data.

The one-copy incentive

In February 2024, Anthropic hired Tom Turvey, the former head of partnerships for Google's book-scanning project, to develop a lawful route to a much larger research library.

The company later spent many millions of dollars buying millions of print books. Service providers removed the bindings, cut the pages to size, scanned them, and discarded the paper originals, according to the federal court record.

The Washington Post later reported on the project using material that had become public. The operation predates ISBNdb's current marketing and stands on its own documented procurement chain.

The June 23, 2025 order reached two distinct fair-use conclusions. It held that Anthropic's use of copies to train specific large language models was transformative fair use on the record before it.

Separately, it held that converting lawfully purchased print books into non-distributed digital library copies was fair use because the PDFs replaced the purchased books without increasing the library's copy count.

The same order treated Anthropic's pirated central-library copies differently. The court denied Anthropic summary judgment on those copies and left the claims for trial. Its ruling stopped short of a general license to acquire books by any means or to treat every destructive scan as lawful.

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The order's one-for-one reasoning implies that destruction did practical work. Discarding the paper original preserved the premise that one owned copy had been exchanged for another format. The court never declared destruction mandatory.

Keeping both the book and its scan would present a different copy-count fact pattern, making preservation legally inconvenient even when the physical object carries value beyond its text.

ISBNdb brings that preservation question into the present through a separate commercial offer. Its pages advertise book data and physical acquisition filtered by ISBN, subject, publication year, language, and edition, with orders of up to one million titles. The catalog can include non-digitized, rare, and out-of-print material.

A separate ISBNdb sourcing article promotes a legally binding nondisclosure agreement for each engagement and describes destructive scanning followed by verifiable destruction or recycling.

It also acknowledges the reputational problem created by headlines about AI companies destroying books. These are vendor marketing and compliance claims. Public material identifies no completed engagement, buyer, or disposal record for a specific title.

ISBNdb says pre-2022 print books are less exposed to AI-generated text and modern data-poisoning techniques than newer online material. That positioning makes the physical publishing record attractive as a source of human-produced text. Transaction data and comparable pricing needed to demonstrate a measurable premium have not surfaced.

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Anthropic's program and ISBNdb's offer remain separate source chains. Neither ISBNdb's marketing nor 404 Media's public report identifies an AI buyer behind a completed ISBNdb order or shows that such an order ended in destructive scanning.

What a scan cannot preserve

ISBNdb uses terms such as rare and out of print. Those labels say nothing about bibliographic scarcity on their own. A title can be hard to buy without being unique, and a particular copy can be replaceable even when its edition is uncommon.

Any claims of cultural loss which are now spreading on social media need title-level evidence identifying the book, the copy destroyed, and the number of comparable copies that survive.

The public record contains no named rare, unique, nearly extinct, or last-surviving book or edition destroyed by Anthropic or an ISBNdb customer.

The July 27, 2026 HedgieMarkets post that drove wider attention fused Anthropic's historical project, the 2025 ruling, and ISBNdb's 2026 marketing into one account. Its claims about rare-book shredding and a price premium remain unsubstantiated by the underlying sources.

Title-level proof is absent. The preservation incentive remains. Copyright analysis asks whether protected expression was copied and how the copy was used. Conservation asks about a binding, an annotated page, a particular printing, or an object's provenance.

The court's copy-count logic and ISBNdb's acquisition pitch assign value to different things: one to control over reproductions and the other to text that can be extracted at scale. The physical artifact can fall between them.

We've seen something similar in crypto before. In a 2021 episode involving Banksy's Morons, we saw the limit of digital representation from another direction. Injective Protocol, not Banksy, bought and burned the physical print before selling a token representing it, according to the BBC.

The blockchain recorded ownership and provenance without preserving the artwork. Destructive book scanning has a different purpose. A scan likewise retains information while leaving the object's survival to a separate decision.

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The documented facts reveal a systemic preservation tension. A court's case-specific one-copy reasoning now sits beside a vendor's industrial-scale pitch for pre-AI books. Cultural loss has not been demonstrated, while the incentive to treat preservation as expendable is already visible.

The post AI firms are shredding physical books because copyright law is quietly rewarding them appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Apple’s tightly controlled App Store is facing renewed scrutiny after three Bitcoin holders alleged they lost $1.8 million to a fake crypto wallet, adding to a growing list of malicious wallet apps that have reached users despite the company’s screening process.

The lawsuit, filed July 24 in California, accuses Apple of failing to adequately review and remove applications impersonating Sparrow Wallet while promoting the App Store as a safe and trusted source for software.

The case follows warnings dating back more than two years about fake Sparrow apps and comes months after researchers identified 26 applications impersonating major crypto brands across Apple’s ecosystem.

Together, the incidents are putting pressure on one of Apple’s longstanding arguments for maintaining tight control over software distribution: that screening applications before they reach users provides greater protection against fraud and malicious software.

Sparrow developer warned Apple more than a year before losses

Apple’s exposure in the case rests less on the initial appearance of a fraudulent app than on what the company allegedly knew before later victims were hit.

Sparrow founder Craig Raw had been flagging unauthorized mobile versions of his wallet since early 2024. Sparrow is a desktop-only product, so an iPhone app bearing its name should not have required a complex technical investigation to identify as an impersonator.

Yet the complaint says variants carrying the Sparrow name continued to surface inside the App Store over the following year.

The first plaintiff cited in the lawsuit, Jalen Delgado, allegedly downloaded one of those apps in May 2025. After supplying his seed phrase, he lost just over 1 BTC, valued at about $120,000 in the filing.

The alleged notice to Apple became more direct two months later.

James Ramirez says he lost 7.4 BTC, worth approximately $875,000, after using another Sparrow impersonator on July 25, 2025. He reported both the application and the theft to Apple that day.

Christopher Ellis allegedly encountered a Sparrow app through the App Store nine days later. He entered his recovery phrase and lost crypto assets valued at roughly $840,000, according to the complaint.

That sequence is central to the plaintiffs’ case. They are arguing that Apple was no longer dealing only with a previously reported brand impersonation by the time Ellis was targeted. It had allegedly received a fresh report linking a specific fake wallet to a major Bitcoin theft.

The complaint further claims Apple did more than distribute the app. It alleges the platform ranked the Sparrow impersonator and surfaced it within cryptocurrency app collections, potentially increasing the credibility and reach of software masquerading as an established wallet.

According to the lawsuit:

“Despite multiple reports made to Apple that its App Store hosted fraudulent and dangerous applications, Apple failed to warn consumers that spoofed wallet apps, including fake Sparrow applications, had appeared in the App Store and posed a serious risk of theft of cryptocurrency, seed phrases, private keys, wallet credentials, and other sensitive account information.”

Apple says it removed fraudulent Sparrow apps and terminated the developer accounts responsible for them.

The company has also pointed to its reporting channels and said it acts when applications are found to breach App Store rules.

Raw’s experience, however, illustrates the difficulty legitimate developers have faced in stopping the impersonations.

Last month, Raw revealed that he submitted a basic iOS listing intended to tell users that Sparrow had no official mobile version.

Apple initially treated that submission as potentially deceptive and warned that his developer account could be closed, according to Raw, before later reversing course.

The episode adds another layer to the lawsuit’s argument: Apple allegedly struggled not only to keep impersonators out, but also to distinguish the genuine wallet developer from those misusing his brand.

Apple's App Store fake wallet problem has spread beyond Sparrow

The Sparrow dispute is part of a wider wave of crypto wallet impersonation targeting Apple users.

Kaspersky Threat Research said in April that it had identified 26 fraudulent applications mimicking crypto brands including MetaMask, Ledger, Trust Wallet, Coinbase, TokenPocket, imToken and Bitpie.

The campaign had been active since at least fall 2025 and was linked with moderate confidence to threat actors behind SparkKitty, according to the cybersecurity firm.

The attack was more elaborate than simply publishing a malicious wallet directly through the App Store.

Kaspersky found that the applications could redirect victims to phishing pages designed to resemble Apple's marketplace and persuade them to install developer profiles. Those profiles could then be used to install trojanized versions of crypto wallets outside the App Store.

Once installed, the malicious software targeted the credentials controlling users' assets.

For hot wallets, the malware monitored wallet recovery or creation screens for seed phrases. Attackers obtaining those words could then gain control over the victim's funds.

Cold-wallet users faced a similar social-engineering threat. Fraudulent software impersonating interfaces associated with hardware wallets could persuade victims to surrender recovery credentials that should never be entered into an unverified application.

The campaign largely targeted users of Apple's Chinese App Store, where official iOS versions of several wallets being impersonated were unavailable.

But significant losses involving fake wallet software have also emerged in the United States.

American musician Garrett Dutton, better known as G. Love, said in April that he lost 5.9 BTC after downloading what he believed was legitimate Ledger software from Apple's App Store.

Dutton entered his recovery phrase when prompted by the application. His Bitcoin, worth roughly $424,000 at the time, was subsequently transferred away.

Blockchain investigator ZachXBT traced the stolen assets to deposit addresses associated with crypto exchange KuCoin, which temporarily froze a suspected account as the incident was investigated.

The episode closely resembles the allegations at the center of the Sparrow lawsuit: users encountered software carrying the identity of an established crypto wallet through Apple's ecosystem, trusted it enough to enter recovery credentials and lost control of their assets.

Crypto scams challenge Apple’s App Store security pitch

The repeated incidents are increasingly colliding with how Apple markets its control over software distribution.

Apple describes the App Store as a “safe and trusted place” and says applications undergo a review process intended to protect users from fraud, malware and other security threats.

That promise has also supported Apple's broader defense of its tightly managed ecosystem.

The company has argued that allowing unrestricted sideloading could weaken privacy and security protections on its devices, while its centralized review process allows potentially dangerous software to be intercepted before reaching customers.

Crypto wallets create a particularly difficult test for that model because an application does not necessarily need sophisticated malware to cause an irreversible loss.

A convincing imitation can be enough.

Seed phrases typically provide control over the assets associated with a self-custodied wallet. Once a user enters those words into malicious software, attackers can transfer the assets to addresses they control, with no bank or payment processor capable of reversing the transaction.

That makes the perceived legitimacy conveyed by an app marketplace especially important for crypto users.

The Sparrow plaintiffs argue that Apple's own representations encouraged them to believe software distributed through the App Store had been sufficiently vetted. They are seeking reimbursement for their stolen assets, along with compensatory and punitive damages, restitution, and legal fees.

They also want Apple to improve and publicly disclose its procedures for detecting fraudulent applications and introduce warnings about risks associated with cryptocurrency apps.

Whether Apple bears legal responsibility for the losses remains unresolved, and the company can contest both the plaintiffs' reliance on its security representations and their decision to enter sensitive recovery credentials into third-party software.

Apple also points to the scale of threats its review process already prevents.

The company said last year that the App Store blocked more than $9 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions between 2020 and 2024, including more than $2 billion in 2024 alone.

During 2024, Apple said it rejected nearly 2 million app submissions that failed to meet standards for security, reliability and user experience, while terminating more than 146,000 developer accounts over fraud concerns and rejecting another 139,000 developer enrollment attempts.

Those figures show the scale of malicious activity Apple is attempting to keep outside its ecosystem. They also highlight the stakes when fraudulent financial software gets through.

For crypto users, where surrendering a single recovery phrase can put an entire wallet beyond recovery, the growing list of impersonators is testing how much confidence Apple's App Store badge should inspire.

The post Apple’s App Store promoted fake Bitcoin wallet that stole $1.8M after developer spent a year warning them appeared first on CryptoSlate.

A two-minute price shock in a Hyperliquid market tied to South Korea’s SK Hynix has put the mechanics and oversight of equity-linked perpetuals under scrutiny.

SKHX, a TradeXYZ-operated perpetual on Hyperliquid that tracks the US dollar value of one Korean SK Hynix share, briefly sank to $927 during South Korea’s pre-market window before recovering within roughly two minutes, according to local media.

A later DefiLlama snapshot put open interest at $407 million, down 20% over 24 hours, while 24-hour trading volume reached $959 million. Open interest measures the rolling value of outstanding positions, incorporating changes in both position size and price.

The underlying market was already under severe pressure. South Korea’s KOSPI closed 10.84% lower after a 20-minute marketwide circuit breaker, while SK Hynix’s Korean shares finished down 14.65% at 1.55 million won, Yonhap reported.

TradeXYZ’s contract specification defines SKHX as the dollar value of one SK Hynix common share, calculated by converting the Korean share price at the prevailing USD/KRW rate. TradeXYZ documents an external-pricing window from 8:00 a.m. to 8:50 a.m. Korean time. SKHX is separate from the company’s US-listed depositary receipt and from tokenized shares.

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From price input to liquidation

Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 specification gives a market deployer control over its oracle definition, oracle prices, leverage limits and settlement. The deployed market uses HyperCore’s order books and margin system.

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TradeXYZ says its relayers compute and transmit the XYZ market’s oracle, mark and external prices about every three seconds. HyperCore handles matching, margining, liquidations and auto-deleveraging. In the documented design, TradeXYZ supplies the bespoke price inputs and HyperCore applies its risk machinery to the resulting mark.

The HIP-3 deployer API accepts an oracle price, an external-perpetual price and as many as two deployer-supplied mark-price inputs. HyperCore contributes a local price derived from the best bid, best offer and latest trade. TradeXYZ says the final mark is the median of the oracle, a smoothed oracle-to-market difference, and that local order-book price.

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The rulebook shows how SKHX pricing is meant to work. The plunge to $927 is still a black box, with the raw observations and mark-price ingredients absent from the public record. DefiLlama names Pyth Lazer as the oracle provider. TradeXYZ says its relayer and updater carry prices into HyperCore. The incident-level handoff between those systems remains the missing piece.

BlockMedia reported at 18:41 Korean time that Hyperliquid said TradeXYZ was investigating and planned an update after reaching a conclusion. At that cutoff, the reviewed sources contained no official incident report or event-specific account of compensation, insurance impact, a halt, a cap change, or slashing.

HIP-3’s allocation of controls is clear even as responsibility for this price shock remains open: the deployer operates the oracle settings, and HyperCore executes the market and risk functions. TradeXYZ’s findings will determine whether the episode reflected the published design under extreme conditions or a price-feed safeguard that needs revision.

The post Inside the brutal 2-minute flash crash sending a $400M South Korean market plunging on Hyperliquid appeared first on CryptoSlate.

A federal judge has temporarily barred Minnesota from enforcing its new prediction-market felony law against federally regulated exchanges designated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as contract markets, including Kalshi and Polymarket US, days before the statute takes effect on Aug. 1.

Judge Katherine Menendez granted preliminary-injunction motions filed by the CFTC, KalshiEX and QCX, the registered entity doing business as Polymarket US. Her July 27 order prevents named Minnesota officials from enforcing Minn. Stat. § 609.7615 against CFTC-designated contract markets until the cases reach a final merits decision.

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Why the court found likely partial preemption

Menendez found the plaintiffs likely to prove that the Commodity Exchange Act expressly preempts part of Minnesota’s law. Federal law gives the CFTC exclusive jurisdiction over swap transactions conducted on designated contract markets, and the swap definition can include event contracts whose outcomes have a reasonably connected potential financial, economic or commercial consequence. A trader’s potential profit alone is not enough.

The order does not treat every event contract as a swap. Menendez identified markets tied to a Senate election, the World Cup winner, a LeBron James signing and Strait of Hormuz traffic as likely swaps. She questioned a 20-point-lead market and said contracts on the winning Love Island USA couple or words used by World Cup announcers appeared unlikely to qualify. Any permanent injunction could therefore apply to fewer contracts.

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Chapter 118 replaced the prediction-market provisions enacted earlier in Chapter 97. The law remains scheduled to take effect Aug. 1 for crimes committed on or after that date.

Under its core offense, creating or operating a covered prediction market, or intentionally facilitating it through specified listing, funds, settlement, counterparty or pricing activity, is a felony when done for consideration and as part of a business. Other provisions cover providers who knowingly supply data directly to a market, or geolocation, funds-transfer or payment services to one, to enable or settle prohibited wagers. A separate clause criminalizes advertising or marketing financial or technological products that promote prohibited transactions.

Because the order protects only CFTC-designated contract markets, it does not expressly shield customers, independent advertisers or outside service providers. The statute remains in force, and the court has not decided the plaintiffs’ implied-preemption or First Amendment claims.

Polymarket US welcomed the ruling and said it expected to keep serving Minnesota users. Attorney General Keith Ellison said the state disagreed and would continue defending the law as the record develops.

By contrast, a New York court denied Kalshi interim protection from existing state gambling enforcement earlier in July. Both cases remain open, and the opposite preliminary results do not settle how federal registration interacts with state gambling laws nationwide.

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The post Federal court shields Kalshi and Polymarket from Minnesota’s felony crackdown days before deadline appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Maine's new virtual-currency unclaimed-property rules take effect July 29 with a five-year dormancy clock, while the State Treasurer's current reporting manual still shows three years. The mismatch leaves businesses that hold customer crypto without published transition instructions as the statute becomes effective.

Public Law Chapter 675, approved April 13, creates section 2067-A of Maine's Revised Unclaimed Property Act. The Legislature identifies July 29 as the general effective date for nonemergency laws passed during its 2026 Second Regular Session.

The new section presumes virtual currency abandoned five years after an apparent owner's last indication of interest. If a holder sends first-class mail during its regular course of business, the five-year period instead runs from the date that communication is returned as undeliverable.

The State Treasurer's 2026 Holder Reporting Manual, however, lists “VC02 Virtual Currency – Liquidated” with a three-year dormancy period. The manual reflects LD 1969 elsewhere by giving stored-value obligations a July 29 transition date, but it provides no parallel virtual-currency schedule.

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The manual says most holders other than life insurers report by Nov. 1. It does not identify the first virtual-currency cycle under section 2067-A or explain how to treat balances that its table would classify as dormant after three years. Whether VC02 is legacy coding, a distinct category or an entry awaiting revision remains unresolved in the holder guide.

What holders must do under the statute

For a business holding customer crypto, the remittance duty applies when it has private keys, credentials or other information needed to transfer presumed-abandoned assets. It must report the property and deliver the crypto in native form within 30 days before filing, following the unclaimed-property administrator's directions. A holder without sufficient transfer information must retain the assets until a transfer becomes possible. Assets controlled only by an owner using their own wallet are not part of that described third-party transfer process.

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For virtual currency worth at least $1,000, a holder must send certified U.S. mail at least 60 days before filing when it has a sufficient owner address that its records do not identify as invalid.

Liquidation is not automatic. The administrator may direct a holder to liquidate within 30 days before filing, decline certain assets, exempt classes by rule or direct another disposition when liquidation is not reasonably possible. An owner cannot recover gains that occur after an administrator-directed holder liquidation.

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That pre-filing process differs from native crypto delivered into state custody. The administrator generally may not sell those assets for one year. If the state sells within that period and the owner files a qualifying claim before the year expires, the statute allows the greater of sale proceeds or claim-time market value, plus applicable increments.

July 29 does not itself liquidate or transfer every account. The five-year dormancy, notice and reporting conditions still must be met, while the Treasurer's manual leaves holders without an answer on the first report cycle or the transition from its three-year VC02 entry.

The post Crypto holders face a July 29 Maine deadline as state manual conflicts on when abandoned funds trigger seizure appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Dubai's flagship carrier has flipped the switch. Emirates has officially launched Crypto.com Pay, allowing customers to use the digital payment solution on the airline's website and app platforms. It makes Emirates the first major Gulf airline to accept cryptocurrency payments for flight bookings, and it turns a 12-month-old paper agreement into a live checkout button.

What exactly did Emirates launch?

Customers with a Crypto.com account booking on emirates.com or the Emirates App can now select Crypto.com Pay at checkout, with transactions processed in compliance with UAE regulatory standards. The option is open to eligible UAE residents for bookings priced and settled in Emirati Dirham (AED).

The rollout is the delivery of a deal signed a year ago. Emirates and Crypto.com signed a Memorandum of Understanding in July 2025 to explore integrating Crypto.com Pay into the airline's payment systems. One notable gap in the announcement: the specific cryptocurrencies accepted have not been spelled out, so the assets available at checkout will depend on what sits in a user's Crypto.com wallet.

Adnan Kazim, Emirates' Deputy President and Chief Commercial Officer, framed it as a generational shift, pointing to younger travellers who "manage their money and plan their journeys primarily from their phones" and expect airlines to keep up.

How does paying for an Emirates flight with crypto work?

The flow splits by device. On mobile, customers booking through the Emirates App are pushed into the Crypto.com app to complete payment from their wallet, then redirected back to the Emirates App for the booking confirmation and e-ticket. On desktop, they pick Crypto.com Pay at the payment step, scan the QR code shown on the booking page and approve the payment in the Crypto.com app, after which the confirmation and e-ticket are issued on screen.

No card, no bank transfer, no manual wallet address. Functionally it behaves like any QR based mobile payment, which is exactly the point.

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Why does the Central Bank licence matter here?

This is the part most travel coverage is glossing over. The integration is powered by Crypto.com's Dubai entity, the first Virtual Asset Service Provider to be granted a Stored Value Facilities (SVF) licence by the Central Bank of the UAE, and it operates inside that SVF framework. emirates

In other words, this is not a crypto payment gateway bolted onto the side of a regulated business. It sits within the UAE's formal financial plumbing, under Central Bank supervision. That is why an airline of this size was willing to put it in front of customers at all. The same licence, granted in May, already lets UAE residents pay government fees with digital assets.

What does this mean for crypto adoption in the UAE?

The state agenda is doing a lot of the work. The launch supports the Dubai Cashless Strategy under the D33 Economic Agenda, which targets 90% of all financial transactions across government and private sectors being digital by the end of 2026. It also builds on Emirates' own digital payments partnership with Dubai Finance, and follows Crypto.com's separate tie-up with Dubai Finance for government service payments.

For Crypto.com, the strategic value is distribution rather than volume. Eric Anziani, the company's President and COO, called the Emirates partnership a milestone for the Pay product. Flight tickets are high ticket, high intent purchases, and an airline with Emirates' brand weight normalises crypto at checkout in a way that a hundred smaller merchant integrations cannot.

The bear case is simple: AED settlement means the crypto leg is a funding rail, not a currency. Users spend digital assets, Emirates receives dirhams. That is the same model that made card-linked crypto spending work, and it is also why it will not, on its own, move the price of anything.

Still, for a sector that has spent a decade promising payments and delivering speculation, a working checkout button on one of the world's largest airlines is a real data point.

Russia now has a comprehensive crypto trading law. The United States, one year after the House passed its own market structure bill by a landslide, still does not. That gap closed in a single week, and this week it got a detail almost too on the nose to be true: the US Senate cleared its floor for a Russia sanctions bill and pushed the crypto bill back again.

What exactly did Russia just pass?

On 21 July 2026, Russia's State Duma completed the second and third readings of bill No. 1194918-8, titled "On Digital Currency and Digital Rights." The vote was not close. It cleared with 340 in favour, after a first reading in April that carried 327 of 340 deputies.

The core provisions:

• Crypto is legally property. Holders get judicial protection in courts, bankruptcy proceedings and divorce settlements, and that protection applies even to assets that were never declared to the authorities.
• Licensed intermediaries only. Exchanges, brokers, custodians, asset managers and exchange service providers go into a single registry supervised by the Bank of Russia. Banks will be required to reject transfers to providers outside it.
• Cross-border settlement is allowed, domestic payment is not. Russian companies can settle foreign trade in crypto. Paying for coffee in Bitcoin inside Russia stays illegal, and the ruble remains sole legal tender.
• Hard retail caps. Non-qualified investors are limited to roughly 300,000 rubles per year, about $3,800, per licensed intermediary. Qualified investors get up to 3 million rubles.
• A liquidity filter on listings. Only assets with an average market cap above 5 trillion rubles, around $64 billion, and average daily volume above 1 trillion rubles, around $12.8 billion, over the prior two years automatically qualify for trading.

The bill still needs Federation Council approval, which has a 14-day window, then Putin's signature within a further 14 days. Main provisions are slated for 1 September 2026, with the licensed-intermediary regime fully enforced from 1 July 2027. Notably, the digital ruble rollout is scheduled for the same 1 September date, so Moscow is launching its CBDC and its private-crypto framework on one timeline.

For context on what is being formalised: Russia's Finance Ministry has estimated domestic crypto trading at roughly 50 billion rubles a day, about $640 million, most of it currently outside any oversight.

Why does this look like Russia's version of the CLARITY Act?

Because it does the one thing the CLARITY Act was written to do. It answers the question "who regulates what, and under which rules can a platform legally operate."

Russia's answer is narrower and far more restrictive than anything Washington has drafted. There is no equivalent of a developer safe harbour, no DeFi carve-out, and retail access is capped at a level a US trader would find absurd. It is regulation by permission slip, and the sanctions motive is explicit: lawmakers stated on the record that the law lets Russian firms pay foreign counterparties in crypto while working around sanctions restrictions.

But it is a rulebook. Firms can read it, budget for it, and know the deadline. That is the comparison that stings.

Where does the US CLARITY Act actually stand right now?

Nowhere new, which is the problem.

The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, H.R. 3633, passed the House on 17 July 2025 by 294 to 134, with more than 70 Democrats crossing over. The Senate Banking Committee advanced it 15 to 9 on 14 May 2026. Since then it has sat on the Senate Legislative Calendar as Calendar No. 423. No cloture motion. No floor vote. The White House's informal 4 July signing target came and went.

Senate Republicans released revised text on 22 July, merging the Banking and Agriculture Committee approaches and adding ethics language negotiated with the White House. Senator Cynthia Lummis published it publicly. It did not break the deadlock. A group of pro-crypto Democrats responded that the draft still falls short on ethics provisions, illicit finance and conflicts of interest.

The arithmetic is brutal. Cloture needs 60 votes, meaning roughly seven Democrats on top of a fully unified Republican caucus, and the Republican whip count itself is not clean.

Then came this week. Majority Leader John Thune moved a package of nominations on Monday and a Russia sanctions bill on Tuesday, which pushes any CLARITY floor action to the final days before the 7 August recess. Thune already told reporters on 23 July that he did not expect the bill to pass before the break, though he wants to at least get the process started. White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt pushed back and said he would not count out the first week of August.

Prediction markets have voted. Polymarket odds on the CLARITY Act becoming law in 2026 sank to a record low near 32% in mid-July, sat around 38% this week, and Galaxy Research has trimmed its own estimate to about 30%. Stifel's Washington strategist has warned that missing the August recess would cause the bill's prospects to deteriorate materially. After the recess, senators head into midterm campaigning, and even a Senate passage would need the House to approve the amended version.

Is the rest of the world really moving faster than Washington?

Largely yes, and Russia is not even the most striking example.

• Japan approved amendments to its Financial Instruments and Exchange Act on 15 July 2026, reclassifying many blockchain-based assets as financial instruments.
• The European Union has MiCA fully in force, and it has become the template other jurisdictions copy from.
• South Korea has unveiled a national digital asset strategy.
• Vietnam introduced Decree No. 284/2026/NĐ-CP with fines for traders using unlicensed platforms, ahead of launching a licensed market.
• Hong Kong and the UAE continue expanding their licensing regimes, with Dubai's VARA now a default choice for international exchanges.
• The UK is finalising an FCA regime targeted for late 2026 implementation.

The US still runs a multi-agency model where the SEC, CFTC and FinCEN each claim a slice, and the boundaries get drawn by enforcement actions rather than statute. For a compliance officer, that is the worst of both worlds: real legal exposure, no fixed rulebook.

How is this showing up in crypto prices?

Not well, though regulation is only part of it.

Bitcoin opened Tuesday 28 July at $63,706, about 2.5% below Monday's open, and traded in the $63,300 to $63,800 range through the US morning. Ethereum opened at $1,890, down 3.2%. Total crypto market cap sat near $2.26 trillion, off 1.6% on the day, with Bitcoin dominance around 56%. The Fear and Greed Index is at 29, firmly in fear.

Market breadth is the uglier number. Only 29 of the top 100 coins are trading above their 50-day moving averages, and Bitcoin and Ethereum are two of them. That is a market where the majors are holding and everything else is bleeding, which is exactly the pattern you get when institutional flows are cautious and speculative capital has no thesis to price.

Two things are pressing at once. The Federal Reserve opened a two-day meeting on 28 July, and CME FedWatch has the odds of a hike at around 35.8%, up sharply from 25.7% a week earlier. That alone is enough to drain risk appetite. Spot Bitcoin ETFs have also seen recent outflows, pointing to softer institutional demand.

Regulation sits underneath both. The honest read on the CLARITY delay is that it is not a crash catalyst, it is a ceiling. Traders who bought the "market structure passes in 2026" thesis in the first quarter have been unwinding it since, and each slipped deadline removes a reason to add risk rather than adding a reason to sell. Exchanges cannot finalise listing strategy, token issuers cannot plan disclosures, and ETF issuers cannot expand product lines beyond what the current agency posture allows. That is capital sitting on the sidelines, not capital fleeing.

The mirror image is worth noting too. Russia's framework is restrictive enough that it will not import much new demand. Retail caps of $3,800 a year and a listing filter that only clears the very largest assets do not create a bid. What it creates is a legal channel for cross-border settlement, and that matters more for stablecoin flows and commodity trade than for altcoin prices.

What should traders watch next?

Four concrete markers:

1. Whether Thune files cloture at all before 7 August. Starting the floor process, even on a failing vote, forces senators on the record and can unlock negotiations in September.
2. Whether the ethics language gets bipartisan sign-off. That single issue is the gating item, not the market structure text itself.
3. Putin's signature and the 1 September date. Watch whether the effective date holds, since the original target was 1 July and already slipped once.
4. Actual Russian volume data in Q4. Passage of a law is not adoption. The real signal is which counterparties start routing trade through Bank of Russia-licensed venues.

If CLARITY misses the recess and the September window closes, 2027 becomes the base case, and the agency framework carries the load in the meantime. That is a longer stretch of the same limbo the market has already priced.

Crypto is red across the board today, and for once the trigger did not come from crypto at all. It came from a single subscription-only tech report about lithography machines in Shanghai. That story took down South Korea's stock market, dragged the entire AI hardware complex with it, and landed on a crypto market that was already sitting on its hands ahead of tomorrow's Federal Reserve decision.

Here is what actually happened, in order of importance.

How far has crypto fallen today?

$Bitcoin broke back below $64,000 on July 28, trading around $63,150 and down roughly 2.8% over 24 hours. It is the third time BTC has cracked that level since July 24, and each break has come with a liquidation cascade attached. Today's flush wiped out about $100 million in leveraged positions inside a single hour. The July 24 version was larger, at roughly $87 million.

Altcoins took the harder hit, as usual:

• Ethereum ($ETH): around $1,872, down about 3.5%
• $XRP: around $1.05, down about 4.4%
• Solana ($SOL): around $73, down about 4.1%
• Hyperliquid ($HYPE): around $56, down about 6%

Total crypto market capitalisation sits near $2.16 trillion, with Bitcoin dominance above 56%. That dominance number matters: capital is not rotating into altcoins on this dip, it is consolidating into the largest asset or leaving entirely.

Why did a Chinese chip machine crash the crypto market?

This is the actual catalyst, and it is worth understanding properly because it explains the timing.

On July 27, The Information reported that a Shanghai-based, state-backed manufacturer has started mass-producing immersion deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography machines. First deliveries go to SMIC, Hua Hong Semiconductor and ChangXin Memory Technologies this year. Volumes are small, roughly five machines in 2026 rising to about twenty in 2027, and the tools reportedly still trail ASML on performance and reliability.

Small volumes, big implications. US and Dutch export controls have blocked China from buying advanced EUV systems, which made ASML's older immersion DUV machines one of its most important China revenue lines. If Chinese fabs can now source comparable tools domestically, that revenue has a ceiling.

Markets did not wait for the qualification data. ASML fell between 6% and 8%. Applied Materials, Lam Research and KLA followed. Then Asia opened and it got worse: the Kospi closed 10.8% lower at 6,023.66, triggering a circuit breaker, with Samsung Electronics down 13.4% and SK Hynix down 14.7%. Between them those two names are close to half the index. The Nikkei fell about 4% and Taiwan's Taiex about 4.7%.

Crypto does not have a lithography exposure. What it has is a correlation problem. Institutional allocators increasingly hold digital assets inside the same technology risk book as AI infrastructure names, so a sector-wide de-risking event sells Bitcoin whether or not the news has anything to do with it.

The closest precedent is DeepSeek's R1 release in January 2025, which triggered an identical one-day repricing of AI infrastructure. AI capex did not actually fall afterwards. It accelerated. Worth remembering before treating today as structural.

Is the Fed decision the real reason crypto is down?

It is the reason nobody is buying the dip.

The FOMC opened its two-day meeting on July 28 under chair Kevin Warsh, with the federal funds rate held at 3.50% to 3.75% for a fourth consecutive meeting. The policy statement lands at 2pm Eastern on July 29.

A hold is the base case. CME FedWatch and prediction markets including Polymarket and Kalshi have put hold probability in the 70% to 93% range through July. The important detail is what the residual probability points at: a hike, not a cut. The reescalation of the Iran conflict and the energy prices that came with it have pushed the entire 2026 rate-cut timeline later across multiple forecasts.

For a market that spent the first half of 2026 waiting for monetary relief, that is the single most bearish framing available. There is no rescue priced in for this month.

Traders are not fully bearish either. Options and leverage positioning has clustered between the $65,000 and $70,000 strikes, and roughly $2.5 billion in notional BTC call spreads expire on July 31. That is why $64,000 keeps getting tested from both sides instead of breaking cleanly.

What does the stalled CLARITY Act mean for crypto?

Washington added a crypto-specific layer to the macro problem.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune confirmed last week that the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act will not pass before the August recess. His exact framing left a crack open, saying he would like to at least get the bill started and see where the votes are, but the arithmetic is unkind. The bill needs 60 votes. Republicans hold 53 seats. No Democrat currently supports the text.

The sticking point is an ethics standoff over conflicts of interest tied to the President's crypto business interests, plus unresolved fights over stablecoin yield restrictions and developer protections.

Prediction markets have repriced accordingly: Polymarket odds on 2026 passage fell to roughly 37%, down from above 80% earlier this year. Industry support has never been broader, with BlackRock, Fidelity, Goldman Sachs and Franklin Templeton all publicly behind the bill, and it still is not enough. Miss the pre-recess window and the next realistic opening is a narrow post-midterm one.

Practically, this means US market structure stays governed by executive orders and agency discretion rather than statute, and DeFi, Layer 2 networks and yield-bearing stablecoins keep operating without legal certainty.

Why does USD/JPY at 164 matter for Bitcoin?

Because it is the one item on this list that can turn a correction into a cascade.

The yen approached 164 per dollar on July 24, a level last seen in 1986, prompting another warning from Japanese authorities that they are prepared to intervene. Japan has already spent roughly $74 billion defending the currency since late April. It did not work, and local commentary has started treating the 160s as the new normal.

That is the setup that concerns leveraged traders. Reporting on July 22 indicated officials are discussing raising rates faster than markets expect, and swap pricing now implies roughly an 80% chance of a hike to 1.25% in October, up from around 70%. If the yen spikes suddenly, whether from intervention or a hawkish surprise, yen-funded carry positions get margin-called and the forced selling hits everything at once. That is the August 2024 playbook, and it took Bitcoin down about 30% at the time.

Nothing has broken yet. But a market this close to an intervention threshold explains why nobody wants size on the books going into a Fed statement.

Are AI spending fears dragging crypto lower?

Yes, and this predates today.

Investors have been openly sceptical about the capital expenditure required for AI infrastructure, and the tape is showing it. SpaceX has erased more than $1.2 trillion in market cap since its June high, falling for the 13th session out of the last 16. Nvidia and the wider AI complex sold off last week even as Bitcoin held near $65,000.

Add thinning demand from the ETF channel. US spot Bitcoin ETFs posted net outflows above $200 million across July 23 and 24, breaking a seven-session inflow streak worth close to $1 billion. Ethereum spot ETFs managed a modest $9.23 million net inflow on July 27, which is functionally flat.

When the largest structural buyer steps back and market depth thins out, the same order flow moves price further. Kaiko has flagged declining depth across major exchanges all year. That is the mechanical reason today's drop feels sharper than the headline percentages suggest.

What happens next for Bitcoin?

Three things resolve inside the next week, and none of them have resolved yet.

The Fed statement arrives July 29 at 2pm Eastern. The CLARITY Act either starts its Senate floor process in early August or it does not. And the July 31 options expiry unwinds the call spread positioning that has been quietly supporting the $65,000 to $70,000 zone.

Levels traders are watching: $64,000 has been the battleground all month, with the June low near $58,000 as the structural floor beneath it. On the total market cap chart, $2.15 trillion is the line that matters. Above it, this is a range. Below it, the June lows come back into play.

Sentiment is already cautious rather than panicked, with the Fear and Greed Index reading in the high 20s. That is not capitulation. It is also not a market positioned for good news.

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The single most important chart for crypto traders this week is not Bitcoin. It is crude oil.

WTI gapped straight down at Sunday's open, tearing a hole in the chart that took it from roughly $91.7 on Friday's close to $85.3 within minutes. It has since drifted lower to $84.04. Measured from last week's high near $94.3, that is a decline of almost 11% in three sessions.

The trigger was diplomatic, not economic. Washington quietly halted its bombing campaign against Iran late on Friday after 13 consecutive nights of strikes, Tehran responded by suspending its own retaliation, and talks resumed in Oman over the Strait of Hormuz. Brent, which had touched $102 last week, dropped more than 7% in the first minutes of Monday trading.

Crypto noticed immediately. $Bitcoin pushed back through $65,000, Ether ran to a two-month high near $2,000, and the total market gained around 1.7%. Here is why the two are connected, and why the connection is more fragile than it looks.

What Actually Happened Over the Weekend?

The pause was never formally announced, which is part of what makes it unstable.

The US stopped striking Iranian targets after Friday night. Iranian officials then signalled through Reuters that Tehran would refrain from attacks for as long as Washington did the same. Mediators in Oman continued working on the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint that carried roughly a fifth of global oil and gas before the conflict and has been effectively closed for months.

US Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz framed the halt as room for diplomacy to work, while confirming that additional military assets are moving into the region in case it does not. Reporting also suggests Trump's advisers had warned that the campaign was running short of viable targets.

There is no signed agreement here. There is an absence of shooting, which is not the same thing.

How Far Has Oil Actually Fallen?

Price spent the week from July 21 grinding steadily higher: $83.5, then $86, then a push to $89 on July 22, then a run through $90 into a peak of roughly $94.3 late on July 23. That was pure war premium being priced in, one headline at a time.

The fade began on July 24. WTI slipped from $94.3 back toward $90, bounced to $91.7 into the weekend close, and then gapped. The entire five-day climb was erased in a single, untradeable move while the market was shut.

That is the important detail. This was not a sell-off. It was a repricing that happened when nobody could react, which is why the follow-through matters more than the gap itself. So far the follow-through is bearish: WTI bounced to $86.4 on Monday morning, failed, and made a new low near $83.6 before stabilising around $84.

For context, pre-war Brent traded near $72. Even after an 11% collapse, there is still a substantial war premium embedded in the price. Oil is not back to normal. It is back to elevated.

Why Does the Oil Price Matter for Bitcoin?

Because oil is the transmission belt between the Middle East and your portfolio, and the mechanism runs through the Federal Reserve.

The chain works like this. Higher crude feeds into headline inflation. Higher inflation forces a more hawkish central bank. A more hawkish central bank means tighter liquidity and a stronger dollar. And tighter liquidity is poison for the longest-duration, highest-beta assets on the board, which is exactly what crypto is.

That chain was visibly tightening through July. US inflation has been running near 3.7%, well above the 2% target. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh has committed publicly to bringing it back down. As oil surged past $100, the market-implied probability of a rate hike at this week's meeting jumped from around 12% to roughly 38% in a single week.

Cheaper oil pulls that chain slack. The 10-year Treasury yield has already retreated to 4.64% from six-month highs, the dollar weakened against every G10 currency on Monday, and gold pushed back above $4,100.

In short: the oil crash is a liquidity story dressed up as a geopolitics story. Crypto is trading the liquidity.

How Is the Crypto Market Reacting?

Bitcoin cleared the $64,800 to $65,000 resistance zone it had been stuck under and now trades around $65,300, up roughly 1.2% on the day. Market cap is back above $1.3 trillion and BTC dominance sits just under 57%.

Ether is the standout. ETH gained more than 3% to trade near $1,958, its highest level in 55 days and within touching distance of $2,000. Solana and XRP added 1% to 2%. The pattern of ETH outperforming BTC is the classic signature of a risk-on rotation rather than a defensive bid.

Two caveats stop this from being a clean bullish picture.

First, the flows have not turned yet. US spot Bitcoin ETFs shed around $225 million on Thursday and another $240 million on Friday, with roughly 90% of that coming out of IBIT alone. That wipes out most of July's accumulated inflows. Price has recovered. Institutional money has not come back.

Second, sentiment is still poor. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index remains in Fear territory, even though it has improved off its recent extremes. Crypto equities also took a beating on Friday, with miners including Cipher, Iren and CleanSpark falling between 7% and 10%, and Coinbase and Strategy each down about 2%.

This looks like a relief rally in a market that is still nervous, not the start of a new leg.

Have We Seen This Movie Before?

Yes, and it is worth remembering how it ended.

In March 2026, Trump ordered a five-day pause on planned strikes against Iranian energy infrastructure and described talks as constructive. WTI plunged more than 10% in a single session. Crypto and equities rallied on the same logic being applied today. Within 24 hours, Iranian state media denied that any negotiations were taking place and characterised the pause as an attempt to manage financial markets. WTI climbed straight back above $91.

The setup in July is not identical. This time Iran has actually confirmed a reciprocal halt, and Oman is hosting live talks on Hormuz. But the structural risk is the same: the entire trade rests on a verbal understanding with no enforcement mechanism, and both sides retain the ability to break it overnight.

The Houthis, meanwhile, have not paused anything. They stepped up attacks on Red Sea shipping over the weekend and struck Saudi energy assets. Hormuz traffic remains a trickle.

What Should Crypto Traders Watch This Week?

This is arguably the densest macro week of 2026 for risk assets.

• Wednesday, July 29, 2:00 PM ET. The FOMC rate decision, with no dot plot attached. The base case is a hold at 3.50% to 3.75%, but a hike is genuinely live at roughly one-in-three odds. Critically, the oil crash landed 48 hours before the decision, which arguably takes some of the urgency out of the hawkish case. If Warsh acknowledges that energy-driven inflation pressure has eased, that is the bullish trigger. If he leans hawkish anyway, the relief rally dies quickly.
• Mega-cap earnings. Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Amazon all report this week. Crypto has traded in near lockstep with the Nasdaq for most of 2026, so these matter more than most crypto-native catalysts. Coinbase reports Thursday.
• ETF flow data. Watch whether the Thursday and Friday outflows reverse. Price recovering without flows recovering is a warning sign.
• Oil itself. If WTI holds below $85 and grinds toward the pre-war $72 to $75 zone, the inflation argument collapses and crypto gets a sustained tailwind. If a single headline breaks the truce and crude gaps back above $90, expect the whole relief rally to unwind just as fast as it arrived.

What will happen to Crypto Next?

The oil crash is real, it is significant, and it removes the single biggest macro headwind crypto has faced this month. Bitcoin above $65,000 and ETH testing $2,000 are the direct consequence.

But this is a ceasefire without a treaty, priced by a market that has already been fooled once this year. The FOMC on Wednesday will decide whether the relief becomes a trend or stays a bounce.

Trade the reaction, not the narrative.

$Ethereum has quietly put together one of its strongest months of 2026. ETH tagged $1,980 in early European hours on July 27, a level it had not seen in 55 days, and is now trading around $1,958 after a marginal pullback. Zoom out and the move is bigger than it feels: ETH bottomed near $1,540 in late June and has gained roughly 30% in 30 days.

The rally has been methodical rather than explosive. Higher lows since July 1, a clean break of $1,800 in mid-July, and now a direct test of the psychological $2,000 barrier. The question for traders is whether this is the start of a genuine trend expansion or the final leg of a relief rally into heavy supply.

What Does the ETH Chart Actually Show?

The 3-hour chart tells a clean story in three phases.

1. Phase one, the base. Between June 24 and June 30, $ETH ground sideways in a tight $1,540 to $1,600 box. That range low was defended three separate times. It is the single most important reference level on the entire chart, because it is where sellers ran out of ammunition.
2. Phase two, the breakout. ETH cleared $1,600 on July 1 and never looked back. Price ran to $1,800 by July 5, stalled, pulled back to $1,720, and then built a higher base. On July 14 a single large candle punched through $1,800 on visibly expanded volume. That level has since flipped from resistance into support, which is the textbook behaviour you want to see after a breakout.
3. Phase three, the grind higher. From July 15 onward ETH built a $1,800 to $1,935 range, tested the top twice (July 16 and July 22), pulled back to a higher low near $1,845 on July 25, and then broke out again on July 26 into the current $1,980 high.

The structure is intact: higher highs, higher lows, and a flipped support level holding on every retest. Nothing on this chart is broken.

Is ETH Overbought at RSI 72?

The 14-period RSI sits at 72.08, comfortably above its 61.56 signal line. That is technically overbought territory, and it is the first thing bears will point to.

Context matters here. RSI above 70 in a downtrend is a sell signal. RSI above 70 in a confirmed uptrend is a momentum confirmation. Look at what the oscillator did during this move: it peaked near 78 in early July and price kept climbing for three more weeks. More importantly, RSI never broke below 40 on any of the pullbacks. That is the signature of a bullish regime, not an exhausted one.

The caveat worth flagging: price has made a higher high at $1,980 while RSI is reading lower than its early-July peak. That is a mild negative divergence. It does not invalidate the trend, but it does suggest the next leg needs fresh buying rather than momentum alone.

What Are the Upside Targets for Ethereum?

• Target 1: $2,000. The obvious one. Round numbers attract liquidity, stops sit above them, and options open interest clusters there. A 3H close above $2,000 with follow-through volume is the trigger for everything else.
• Target 2: $2,070. This is the measured move. The July consolidation between $1,800 and $1,935 was roughly $135 tall. Project that from the breakout point and you land at $2,070. Measured moves are not guarantees, but they give you a mechanical, non-emotional first objective.
• Target 3: $2,150 to $2,200. Above the measured move, ETH runs back into supply left behind from the late-May and early-June breakdown. This is where anyone who bought the previous range and held through the drawdown gets their chance to exit at breakeven. Expect resistance to be sticky here.

Worth noting: prediction markets earlier this month priced only a 32% chance of ETH touching $2,000 before July closes. That positioning is now badly offside, which is exactly the kind of setup that produces squeeze candles.

Where Is the Downside Risk?

Bulls have three lines of defence, in order:

• $1,900: the immediate breakout retest. A dip here is normal and healthy.
• $1,845 to $1,850: the most recent higher low from July 25. Losing this breaks the short-term sequence and puts the July rally on hold.
• $1,800: the structural line. This is the flipped resistance, and it is the level that defines whether the entire July trend is still alive. A sustained 3H close below $1,800 turns the chart neutral to bearish and reopens $1,600 as a downside magnet.

Below that, $1,600 and then the $1,540 base are the last stops. A return there would mean the whole 30% move was a bull trap, which the current structure does not support, but it is the map you want if things break.

What Could Move ETH This Week?

The chart shows US macro event markers clustered on July 27, 29 and 30, and they matter.

The FOMC announces its rate decision on Wednesday, July 29 at 2:00 PM ET, following a two-day meeting. Consensus is for another hold in the 3.50% to 3.75% range, so the reaction will hinge on the statement language and the press conference rather than the number itself. Any hint of a more accommodative stance would be fuel for high-beta assets like ETH.

On top of that, a wave of mega-cap tech earnings lands in the same week, which tends to drive broad risk sentiment. Crypto has been trading with a high correlation to the Nasdaq for most of 2026.

The underlying bid, though, looks structural rather than macro. Spot ETH ETF flows have held up through the consolidation, staking participation is at record levels, and ETH's market cap has climbed back to roughly $237 billion. Those are slow-moving drivers, and they are the reason this rally has been a grind rather than a spike.

The Bottom Line for ETH Traders

Ethereum is in a confirmed short-term uptrend testing the most watched round number on its chart. The bull case needs a decisive close above $2,000 to open $2,070 and then $2,150. The bear case needs a loss of $1,845 to stall the move and $1,800 to end it.

The asymmetry currently favours the bulls, but $2,000 is a level that rarely breaks on the first attempt.

The Strategy chairman's latest thread extends his war far beyond BIP-110: now covenants, larger blocks, and any base-layer change are all the same "constitutional offense."

The Wall Street giant has launched spot Ethereum and Solana exchange-traded products, expanding its digital asset strategy.

The Senate kicked the can, the Fed has traders on edge, and XRP's charts are running out of support zones to fall back on.

The long-awaited network upgrade retires Zcash's vulnerable Orchard shielded pool and introduces new safeguards to protect the cryptocurrency's supply.

The dev told Claude Opus 5 to be "utterly perfect" and left the rest up to the model—the results turned out to be utterly perfect, for an AI model.

Crypto-friendly states are emerging as the biggest winners in the race for innovation, according to the latest Draper Innovation Index.

Coinbase has appointed longtime engineer Rob Witoff as its new chief technology officer, bringing one of the exchange’s earliest builders back into the spotlight as the company accelerates its push toward AI-powered development.

Flare CEO Hugo Philion targets Bitcoin for FBTC integration following a 150 million FXRP surge.

PayPal offsets an $81 million crypto loss with an EPS beat and $486 billion in payment volume, holding steady amid rumors of a $53 billion Stripe acquisition.

Morgan Stanley is expanding its ETF offering to launch the biggest yet cheapest Ethereum and Solana ETFs, according to Senior ETF Analyst Eric Balchunas.

TLDR

• EthSystems believes privacy is the main barrier stopping banks from using public blockchains.
• The startup emerged from the Ethereum Foundation’s Institutional Privacy Task Force.
• EthSystems helps institutions protect sensitive transaction data while settling activity on Ethereum.
• The company will advise clients, build custom privacy systems, and publish open-source research.
• EthSystems plans to work with existing privacy projects instead of creating a new blockchain.

Ethereum startup EthSystems has made privacy the center of its plan to bring banks and other institutions onto public blockchains. The company believes confidentiality, rather than network speed, remains the main barrier to institutional use of Ethereum.

The startup emerged from the Ethereum Foundation’s Institutional Privacy Task Force earlier this month. It now operates as a for-profit company focused on banks, asset managers, governments, stablecoins, and tokenized financial assets.

EthSystems Targets Institutional Privacy Needs

EthSystems helps institutions add privacy controls while settling transactions on Ethereum. Its systems aim to protect sensitive financial data without removing the transparency and security offered by a public blockchain.

Co-founder Mo Jalil said financial institutions need control over who can view transaction details. The company does not treat confidentiality as full anonymity. Instead, it supports limited access based on rules.

The startup does not plan to build a new blockchain or replace current privacy tools. It will advise clients, design privacy systems, build custom infrastructure, and publish open-source research.

EthSystems expects to work with projects such as Aztec, Miden, and other privacy providers. It will select and connect tools based on each institution’s legal and business needs.

Demand Moves Beyond Blockchain Tests

The team previously built proof-of-concept systems inside the Ethereum Foundation. Financial institutions later asked whether they could pay the group to turn those tests into working products.

The foundation could not support that type of commercial work. The move to a for-profit structure now allows EthSystems to charge clients, fund development, and meet corporate procurement rules.

Jalil said discussions have shifted from innovation teams to business units that manage trading and assets. These teams now want to move real financial activity onto public blockchains.

EthSystems says institutions no longer need basic proof that blockchain can support finance. They need privacy systems that meet internal controls, regulatory duties, and data protection rules.

The company sits alongside other groups created during the Ethereum Foundation’s wider restructuring. EthLabs focuses on protocol work, while Ethereum Institutional handles enterprise coordination.

EthSystems will focus only on privacy and cryptography for institutional users. Its strategy rests on helping banks use Ethereum without exposing sensitive data to every network participant.

The post Ethereum Startup EthSystems Targets Institutional Blockchain Privacy appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Bitcoin fell 3% in 24 hours and briefly touched the $63,000 level.
• Wallets holding 10 to 10,000 BTC added 19,696 BTC in eight days.
• Small retail wallets showed weaker buying activity during the pullback.
• Bitcoin ETFs recorded more than $222 million in July inflows.
• Exchange balances dropped by about 78,000 BTC over six months.

Bitcoin price turned lower on Monday after showing strength. The asset fell 3% over 24 hours and briefly touched $63,000. Despite the decline, data shows that large holders continued to add coins during the pullback.

Santiment reported that wallets holding between 10 and 10,000 BTC bought 19,696 BTC over eight days. Smaller wallets holding less than 0.01 BTC showed weaker buying activity. The shift suggests that retail demand has slowed while larger investors remain active.

Bitcoin Price Pullback Meets Whale Accumulation

The Bitcoin price decline has not stopped large holders from building positions. Santiment described the market setup as constructive because supply appears to be moving toward stronger holders.

Bitcoin exchange-traded funds also recorded more than $222 million in inflows during July. These inflows arrived while prices remained under pressure. Combined with whale buying, the activity shows that some investors still see value at current levels.

Swissblock said Bitcoin remains in a consolidation phase called a “Bullish Transition.” The firm said a past transition lasted 40 days before a recovery began. The current phase has lasted about 30 days.

Source: X

The market must keep its bottom signal before entering a stronger recovery. Swissblock noted that these periods often remove short-term traders from the market. They can also test demand before prices move higher.

Exchange Supply Continues to Decline

Bitcoin held on exchanges has dropped by about 78,000 BTC over six months. Exchange balances fell from 2.783 million BTC to 2.705 million BTC. The total is now near the lowest level of the current cycle.

CryptoQuant said investors usually send coins to exchanges during capitulation. Instead, holders have continued moving Bitcoin into self-custody. That pattern points to long-term holding rather than broad selling.

BSCN reported that two large wallets withdrew 6,765 BTC from Binance on Monday. The coins were worth about $441.34 million. Both transfers took place within the same hour.

The withdrawals moved spot liquidity from Binance into private storage. Lower exchange supply could support stronger price moves if demand rises. However, a sustained increase in the seven-day netflow average could signal new selling and raise the risk of a move toward $58,000.

The post Bitcoin Price Setup Turns Constructive as Whales Accumulate appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Kroger stock climbs 3.23% to $59.85 after launching its new shopping tool today.
• The assistant builds meal plans and carts around budgets and dietary needs.
• Customers can scan lists, recipe cards, or links to create digital carts quickly.
• The launch targets back-to-school demand for simple meals, snacks, and routines.
• Kroger strengthens its digital grocery strategy across pickup and delivery.

Kroger(KR)  shares rose 3.23% to $59.85 after the grocer launched a new digital shopping assistant. The stock surged during late-morning trading before easing and stabilizing near $60 through the afternoon session. The launch strengthens Kroger’s push to simplify meal planning, product discovery, and digital grocery shopping.

The Kroger Co., KR

Kroger Expands Digital Shopping Tools

Kroger introduced the assistant across its family of companies’ websites and mobile applications. The tool helps customers plan meals, find products, and manage grocery spending more efficiently during routine grocery trips. It also connects meal ideas directly with Kroger’s online shopping system and current product listings before checkout.

Customers can create weekly meal plans based on budgets, diets, and household needs during busy weeks at home. They can also request recipes and immediately add the required products to their carts without manual searching. This process reduces the number of steps between planning meals and completing purchases.

The assistant can process photographed shopping lists, handwritten recipe cards, and pasted website links. It then identifies matching products and builds a digital cart within seconds. Kroger designed the feature for routine shopping and special events, including parties and tailgates.

New Assistant Targets Back-to-School Demand

Kroger launched the tool as families prepare for school schedules and tighter daily routines. The timing connects the digital feature with stronger demand for convenient food options. It also supports customers managing breakfasts, packed lunches, dinners, and snacks.

The grocer highlighted breakfast sandwiches and protein yogurt for quick morning meals. It also promoted lunch kits, yogurt tubes, fruit strips, and applesauce pouches. These products target families seeking simple school-day preparation.

Kroger also promoted frozen meals, beef bulgogi, and salad kits for weeknight dinners. Snack options included chips, energy bars, juice boxes, fruit cups, and snack trays. The company positioned these products as affordable solutions for busy households.

Kroger Stock Gains as Digital Strategy Advances

The launch supports Kroger’s wider investment in online ordering and personalized shopping services. Customers can use the assistant before choosing pickup, delivery, or in-store shopping. Kroger also offers delivery through DoorDash, Instacart, and Uber Eats.

Kroger continues using its private-label portfolio to compete on quality, convenience, and value. Its brands cover breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack categories across different price points. That range gives customers more options while supporting Kroger’s margin strategy.

The company also maintains consistent pricing across stores, its website, and its mobile application. Delivery can reach customers within 30 minutes in selected markets. Kroger’s new assistant adds another digital feature to its broader grocery platform.

The post Kroger (KR) Stock: Jumps as New AI Shopping Assistant Launches appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Core Scientific increased its Bitcoin holdings from 547 BTC to 848 BTC during the second quarter.
• The company added 301 Bitcoin after selling part of its treasury earlier this year.
• Core Scientific ended 2025 with 2,537 BTC before using sales to fund its AI expansion.
• Second-quarter revenue rose to $164.2 million from $78.6 million a year earlier.
• Gross profit increased to $70 million from $5 million in Q2 2025.

Core Scientific increased its Bitcoin holdings in the second quarter, reversing part of this year’s decline. The Nasdaq-listed miner reported 848 Bitcoin in Tuesday’s regulatory filing, worth more than $54 million at current prices.

The company ended the first quarter with 547 Bitcoin, meaning it added 301 coins during Q2. Most came from Bitcoin produced through mining.

Core Scientific Rebuilds Its Bitcoin Treasury

Core Scientific finished 2025 with 2,537 Bitcoin but sold a large share of its holdings during the first quarter. The company used those sales to support its move into artificial intelligence and high-performance computing services.

The miner has now started keeping more of the Bitcoin it produces. The approach gives the company a larger digital asset reserve while supporting its balance sheet without relying only on new shares or debt.

Core Scientific reported second-quarter revenue of $164.2 million, up from $78.6 million in the same period last year. Gross profit increased to $70 million from $5 million in Q2 2025.

CORZ shares traded about 2% lower on Tuesday afternoon in New York. The company operates data centers in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Core Scientific, Inc., CORZ

AMD Deal Expands AI Data Center Business

Core Scientific also signed a data center agreement with AMD covering 2.5 gigawatts of capacity. The deal will provide AMD with access to more than 500 megawatts of AI-ready capacity.

The agreement supports the company’s move into AI and high-powered computing. Core Scientific is using existing power access and data center sites to serve customers that need large amounts of computing capacity.

Several public Bitcoin miners are expanding into AI infrastructure as mining becomes harder and demand for computing power grows. Many companies now combine Bitcoin mining with data center services instead of leaving mining completely.

This model allows miners to direct power and equipment toward the business with stronger returns. However, AI data centers require more advanced cooling, ventilation, and facility systems than standard Bitcoin mining sites.

The post Core Scientific Restarts Bitcoin Accumulation After Q1 Sell-Off appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• SoFi signs landmark Notre Dame partnership with £1.4 million annual support.
• SOFI expands college sports presence through Notre Dame Athletics deal.
• SoFi launches athlete financial education partnership with Notre Dame.
• Notre Dame selects SoFi as official financial services partner.
• SoFi adds jersey patch and scholarship programme through Notre Dame deal.

SoFi Technologies, Inc. (SOFI) stock traded at $16.65, down 1.39%, as the company announced a major partnership with Notre Dame Athletics. The multi-year agreement expands SoFi’s presence across college sports and financial education. The partnership introduces new funding and branding opportunities for student-athletes.

SoFi Technologies, Inc., SOFI

SoFi Expands Reach Through Notre Dame Partnership

SoFi became the official financial services partner of Notre Dame Athletics under the new agreement. The company also became the first brand to appear as a jersey patch on Fighting Irish uniforms. The partnership creates a visible presence across all 26 varsity sports.

The agreement includes an annual $1.4 million fund supporting Notre Dame’s “4 for Forever” programme. The initiative provides scholarships, financial education, career development, and additional opportunities for student-athletes. The funding strengthens resources available throughout their academic and athletic careers.

The partnership supports SoFi’s broader strategy of improving financial knowledge among younger adults. Company research found that many graduates wanted stronger financial management skills during university. The collaboration connects educational resources with student-athletes before they enter the workforce.

Programme Adds Scholarships and Financial Education

The collaboration introduces the SoFi Champions Scholarship for walk-on student-athletes. Each year, one male and one female recipient will receive a full tuition scholarship. The programme recognises leadership, resilience, service, and academic commitment.

SoFi will also establish a Student-Athlete Financial Success Hub on campus. The hub will provide financial planning tools, educational resources, and personalised guidance. As a result, participants can build stronger financial habits during university and beyond.

The agreement also includes SoFi Saturdays and exclusive member experiences throughout the year. These activities feature ticket giveaways, tailgates, private events, and community engagement programmes. The company will integrate its brand into national broadcasts and campus activities.

Partnership Supports Long-Term Brand Growth

The agreement aligns SoFi with one of the most recognised athletic programmes in college sports. Notre Dame sponsors 26 varsity teams and has won 39 national championships across multiple sports. The university maintains a long-standing reputation for academic and athletic achievement.

Notre Dame continues producing successful athletic programmes while maintaining strong graduation outcomes. Its student-athletes consistently rank among the nation’s academic leaders across Division I schools. The partnership connects SoFi with a respected higher education institution.

SoFi continues expanding beyond traditional financial products through strategic partnerships and brand initiatives. The company serves 14.7 million members across lending, banking, investing, insurance, and cryptocurrency services. Its Galileo technology platform supports financial services across 133 million global accounts, strengthening its position in the digital finance industry.

The post SoFi Technologies, Inc. (SOFI) Stock: Slightly Plunge  After Landmark Notre Dame Athletics Partnership appeared first on Blockonomi.

Crypto critic Ben McKenzie has urged Congress to block the CLARITY Act due to President Trump’s financial ties to the digital asset industry.

McKenzie joined Senate Democrats like Richard Blumenthal and Chris Van Hollen at a Capitol Hill anti-corruption forum on Monday to lobby against the bill.

Trump Crypto Concerns

The actor argued that lawmakers could not oppose “Trump’s crypto corruption” while supporting the CLARITY Act, saying the legislation would only allow it to continue. He urged Democrats to reject the bill, warning that only a handful of votes could be enough for it to go through.

His comments come as Democrats continue to push for stronger ethics rules, consumer protections and national security safeguards in the bill. While Republicans added language banning the president and other public officials from issuing or sponsoring cryptocurrencies, Blumenthal believes the updated version still leaves loopholes that could allow Trump to profit from his crypto ventures.

“Donald Trump made $2 billion last year, and $1.4 billion of his income last year consists of cryptocurrency profits that exploit weaknesses in the current law,” he said.

He explained that the current CLARITY Act does not require Trump to divest his crypto holdings and that its ethics provisions would expire in 2029, leaving enforcement to the Department of Justice, which, according to him, would not be enough.

As for what they are doing to stop this, the Democrats said they plan on using their bargaining power to push for changes to the legislation before it comes up for a vote. This is especially important because the Senate will need at least 60 votes to advance the legislation.

New York AG Warns Legislation Could Weaken Oversight

On the same day, New York Attorney General Letitia James warned that the CLARITY Act could weaken state enforcement against crypto fraud, saying stronger regulations are needed to protect investors.

The proposal, she said, would limit the state’s ability to hold digital asset platforms accountable even as crypto scams continue to cost Americans billions of dollars a year.

James finished by saying that strict rules are needed to maintain trust in the financial markets, and warned that without sufficient laws and oversight, there would be financial crises. She therefore urged Congress to strengthen investor protections and safeguard the economy and national security.

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader John Thune has put the CLARITY Act on hold for now as the Senate focuses on confirming government nominees and debating a Russia sanctions bill. This now pushes the crypto bill off the pre-recess agenda, with September now the earliest it is expected to return for consideration.

The post ‘OC’ Actor Ben McKenzie Urges Congress to Block CLARITY Act Over Trump Ties appeared first on CryptoPotato.

A federal judge has temporarily blocked Minnesota from enforcing a first-of-its-kind law that would have prohibited prediction markets in the state.

The latest decision hands a temporary legal victory to Kalshi, Polymarket, and the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

Early Court Victory

According to Reuters, US District Judge Katherine Menendez granted a preliminary injunction after finding that the state law, which was due to take effect on Saturday, is likely preempted by the federal Commodity Exchange Act. The ruling allows Kalshi and Polymarket to continue offering event contracts to users in Minnesota while the lawsuit proceeds.

The dispute began after Governor Tim Walz signed legislation in May that made it a criminal offense to operate, host, or promote prediction markets in the state. Unlike other states that have challenged companies such as Kalshi by arguing they were operating unlicensed gambling businesses under existing gaming laws, Minnesota enacted a law that aimed specifically at prediction markets.

Judge Menendez said several event contracts offered by Kalshi and Polymarket likely qualify as “swaps” under federal law. Because the CFTC regulates swaps, she found that federal law is likely to override Minnesota’s ban on prediction markets. Despite this, she noted that the court could narrow the injunction later if it determines that not every event contract listed on the platforms falls within that definition.

For now, however, she said preserving the status quo is appropriate while the court fully considers the merits of the case.

The decision was welcomed by both platforms. A spokesperson for Kalshi, Elisabeth Diana, for one, said the ruling confirms that states cannot prohibit activities outside their jurisdiction. Meanwhile, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said the state disagrees with the decision and will continue defending the law while arguing,

“Prediction markets are gambling, plain and simple, and Minnesota has every right to keep predatory gambling out of our communities.”

Compliance and Legal Battles

The latest ruling comes as Kalshi continues to face legal restrictions in Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada and Washington. Earlier this year, the company also stepped up enforcement of its own trading rules.

In April, it suspended three US political candidates after finding they had traded on contracts tied to elections in which they were running. The platform described the activity as political insider trading and said it violated its CFTC-approved rules. Minnesota State Senator Matt Klein and Texas candidate Ezekiel Enriquez each placed trades worth less than $100 on their own races and accepted fines and five-year suspensions.

Virginia candidate Mark Moran received a larger fine and a five-year ban after making multiple trades and refusing to settle. Moran said he placed the bets to test Kalshi’s enforcement process.

A month later, federal prosecutors charged Google software engineer Michele Spagnuolo, known online as “AlphaRaccoon,” with allegedly using confidential Google search data to make about $1.2 million by trading on Polymarket. Authorities said he accessed nonpublic “Year in Search 2025” rankings before they were released and placed bets on a related prediction market.

The post Minnesota’s Prediction Market Ban Hits Legal Roadblock After Federal Court Ruling appeared first on CryptoPotato.

After several months of underperforming, the self-proclaimed Dogecoin killer finally posted a decisive rebound over the weekend. However, the pump was short-lived as the bears quickly intercepted the move and dragged the price down.

The enthusiasm faded, while a well-known analytics platform outlined when the next buying opportunity might emerge.

Retail Attention Arrived Late

Just a few days ago, Shiba Inu recorded a sudden 35% price jump to reach a two-month high of around $0.00000582 (per CoinGecko). Some potential factors that may have acted as catalysts for the significant revival include a whale that has resumed accumulating after more than half a year of inactivity, as well as the notable resurgence of the burning mechanism.

The bulls, though, lost momentum, and SHIB currently trades at roughly $0.000004631, representing a nearly 20% decline from the local high. The analytics platform Santiment noted that amid the rally, there were 52 whale transactions in a single day, the most since March 31.

“Activity strongly suggests larger holders took profits into strength,” it added.

On the other hand, retail investors joined the party too late and chased the excitement near the top, “giving whales the liquidity needed to reduce their exposure.”

According to the entity, the smart approach with meme coins is to cash out when retail FOMO spikes, and re-enter once the crowd turns hostile and calls the token a scam.

It seems like X user Crypto King had followed these rules. On July 26, the trader noted the double-digit price increase, the whales’ accumulation, the exploding burn rate, and rising volume to open a short position.

“These euphoric pumps have a habit of trapping late buyers… but the market loves proving people wrong,” they said.

What Comes Next?

As mentioned above, SHIB lost its traction, while the broader cryptocurrency market flashed in red again, which could lead to a further downfall for the meme coin in the near term.

The rising amount of tokens stored on exchanges serves as another warning. CryptoQuant’s data shows that the figure has been constantly rising over the past several days, reaching a two-week high of around 86.7 trillion units. Such a development suggests that many investors have abandoned self-custody and flocked to centralized platforms, thus increasing immediate selling pressure.

The stalled activity on Shibarium is also worth mentioning. The layer-2 scaling solution, designed to foster the advancement of Shiba Inu’s ecosystem, was once considered among the primary catalysts that could trigger a price increase for the meme coin. However, after an exploit in September last year, the protocol saw a sharp decline in usage, dropping to merely hundreds or thousands of daily transactions.

The post Shiba Inu (SHIB) Drops 20% From Its Recent High: Is It Time to Buy? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

After showing signs of strength earlier Monday, Bitcoin reversed course shortly after. The crypto asset fell by 3% in the last 24 hours and briefly touched the $63,000 mark.

Even as the price weakened, larger holders of the crypto asset have continued accumulating.

Supply Shift

Santiment found that wallets holding between 10 and 10,000 BTC have added a combined 19,696 units over the past eight days. On the other hand, wallets holding less than 0.01 BTC have shown weaker dip-buying activity during the same period, which indicates that retail demand is cooling.

This comes at a time when Bitcoin ETFs attracted a little over $222 million in inflows so far in July. The analytics firm said that these factors together point to a “constructive” market setup and demonstrate that the crypto asset’s supply is “shifting toward stronger hands.”

Zooming out, Swissblock said BTC remains in its consolidation, or “Bullish Transition,” phase, although the window for a recovery is gradually narrowing. During the previous bullish transition, the firm observed that Bitcoin consolidated for 40 days before moving into a recovery phase. The current cycle has lasted 30 days so far.

According to the analysis, the market now needs to sustain its bottom signal before it can advance into recovery. Swissblock added that such transition periods often test investors’ conviction and shake out impatient participants before a recovery begins.

Quiet Accumulation

While Bitcoin is trading roughly 50% below its October 2025 high of $126,200, on-chain data also shows that BTC held on exchanges has fallen by around 78,000 units over the past six months, dropping from 2.783 million to 2.705 million and nearing the lowest levels of the current cycle. CryptoQuant noted that during a typical capitulation, investors send BTC to exchanges to sell.

However, investors kept moving Bitcoin into self-custody throughout the current correction. This is a sign of long-term holding and not distribution. Lower exchange supply could amplify future price gains if demand strengthens. But a sustained rise in the netflow 7D MA would signal renewed distribution and intensify the risk of a retest of $58,000.

Additionally, BSCN reported that two newly identified institutional-scale wallets withdrew a total of 6,765 BTC, worth approximately $441.34 million, from Binance in a coordinated move on Monday. According to the update, both transactions took place within the same hour. These transfers, BSCN said, point to a migration of spot liquidity from Binance’s reserves into private cold storage.

The post Why Bitcoin’s Current Setup Looks ‘Constructive’ Despite the Pullback appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Flare has introduced Smart Accounts version 1.3 to simplify how XRP holders access decentralized finance (DeFi) without changing their existing wallet. The update also removes the need to create separate wallets, manually bridge assets, or manage gas tokens before using DeFi services.

According to a press release sent to CryptoPotato, users now need only a single wallet signature to access DeFi. Previously, the process required two separate approvals.

How Smart Accounts Version 1.3 Works

Under the new version, users approve a single transaction from their XRP Ledger wallet. The system then converts their XRP into FXRP and automatically deposits it into a selected yield vault.

The Flare Data Connector verifies the XRP Ledger transaction before a smart contract completes the remaining steps. Flare said the original XRP remains locked on the XRP Ledger at a one-to-one ratio throughout the process.

This setup allows users to retain control of their assets while removing the need for manual bridging or obtaining gas tokens on another blockchain. The simplified process comes as FXRP activity across decentralized finance platforms continues to expand.

Since February, the amount of FXRP deployed across DeFi applications has grown by nearly 75%, rising from 82 million to 144 million. Flare also reported that more than 40 million XRP is currently earning through Smart Accounts across nearly 24,000 accounts.

New Vaults and Broader Wallet Integration

Commenting on the update, Chief Product Officer Filip Koprivec said millions of XRP holders had wanted access to DeFi, but the experience had been too complex. He said version 1.3 lets users move from XRP to yield with a single wallet signature while remaining fully non-custodial.

The version also expands the available yield options with two vaults offering different approaches. Users can continue using the Monarq vault or choose the new Clearstar Flare XRP Yield Vault, which uses on-chain lending and liquidity strategies.

According to the company, the Clearstar vault distributes FXRP across protocols including Avant and Euler while keeping all positions publicly visible. Flare added that Clearstar has previously managed more than 33 million FXRP through earlier deployments.

The update also expands wallet support to Ledger, Xaman, Joey Wallet, WalletConnect, including Bifrost, and D’CENT. Joey Wallet has integrated the Smart Accounts interface directly into its application, allowing users to complete the process without leaving the wallet.

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