Tencent's Hy4 model testing signifies China's escalating AI competition, potentially reshaping global tech dynamics and innovation leadership.

The post Tencent spotted testing Hy4 model in Yuanbao app as expert-level model appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Enhanced security measures in programmable agent wallets mitigate financial risks, ensuring AI agents operate safely as economic actors.

The post Virtuals Protocol addresses evolving prompt injection threats to agent wallets appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The NPS's exceptional returns highlight the volatility and potential risks of heavy reliance on domestic equities amid market corrections.

The post South Korea’s National Pension Service posts 27% return in first half as domestic stocks double appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The ECB's vigilance against inflation could stabilize the eurozone economy, but aggressive measures may risk stifling growth and employment.

The post European Central Bank must act to prevent inflation from taking root, says Kazaks appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Yotta's capital market entry could significantly boost India's data infrastructure, positioning it as a key player in the global AI economy.

The post Yotta Data Services plans to access capital markets amid AI demand appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Genius Group Sets $2B Dual Treasury Target Months After Liquidating Bitcoin Holdings

Genius Group has announced a new plan to buy bitcoin — just months after selling its entire stash. 

The NYSE-listed AI-powered education company said in a Thursday statement that it was aiming to build parallel AI and bitcoin treasuries worth a combined $1.6 billion, with total company assets targeted at $2 billion by fiscal year 2031. 

Just in April, Genius Group sold its entire bitcoin reserves to repay $8.5 million in debt. The sale came as a number of digital asset treasuries were struggling due to a drop in crypto prices. 

“Every dollar of preferred capital deployed into our bitcoin and AI Treasury that generates returns above the preferred dividend rate flows directly to our ordinary shareholders’ net asset value,” Genius Group CEO Roger James Hamilton said. 

Genius Group first adopted a “Bitcoin first” strategy in late 2024, building a position that grew to 440 BTC by February 2025. 

That effort was disrupted when a court order blocked the company from raising funds or issuing shares, forcing a series of sales that reduced its holdings — including roughly 86 BTC sold in a single month, leaving about 84 BTC by February 2026. 

The company has now sold its remaining bitcoin entirely, using the proceeds to eliminate $8.5 million in debt. The liquidation reportedly came at a loss, leaving Genius Group with no crypto reserves.

Against that backdrop, the company is now proposing to rebuild a bitcoin treasury — this time alongside a similarly sized AI treasury — funded not through equity sales but through a new preferred stock offering.

Genius Group intends to draw on its $1.2 billion SEC-cleared shelf registration to issue Perpetual Preferred Securities, targeting an initial $12.5 million raise. Proceeds would be split between the AI treasury, the bitcoin treasury and a cash reserve covering about 18 months of dividend payments. 

The plan mirrors moves by the biggest corporate holder of bitcoin, Strategy. The company has raised over $16 billion via perpetual preferred stock for its bitcoin holdings. Nasdaq-listed Strive Asset Management has raised more than $150 million similarly. 

Genius Group says preferred capital will become its primary funding tool going forward, reducing reliance on its ordinary share ATM program.

This post Genius Group Sets $2B Dual Treasury Target Months After Liquidating Bitcoin Holdings first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Japanese Bitcoin Industry Unveils ‘Aurora’ to Let Global Anime Fans Support $2 Trillion Yen Space

Japan Bitcoin Industry Co., Ltd. has debuted a self-custodial Bitcoin payments platform designed to help Japanese companies sell to international fans who are often shut out by traditional payment systems.

Using this week’s Bitcoin Asia conference in Hong Kong to introduce the product, JPI dropped Aurora — aiming to reach an audience that could not be serviced before. 

The pitch is simple: anime, manga, games, and other Japanese content have a massive global following, but the payment rails supporting that content haven’t kept pace. 

Aurora aims to close that gap by letting international customers pay in Bitcoin over the Lightning Network, while giving Japanese merchants a simple point-of-sale and API layer to manage invoicing, payment tracking, and integrations.

According to JBI, the market for Japanese anime content outside Japan reached ¥2.17 trillion in 2024, up 26% year-over-year — yet many overseas fans still struggle to pay for streaming subscriptions, digital merchandise and limited-access drops due to geographic payment restrictions.

The platform’s core design principle is that JBI never touches the money. Each merchant runs its own self-custodial Lightning node, receiving Bitcoin directly from customers. 

JBI says this setup gives businesses cleaner regulatory footing, since the company isn’t acting as a custodian, while still handling the harder operational lift — node uptime, liquidity, accounting and auditing, and conversion to fiat — that has historically kept enterprises from adopting Bitcoin payments on their own.

JBI says aurora draws on lessons from its existing consumer business, UseBitcoin.jp, which has let customers buy digital gift cards — including au PAY, V-Preca and Kyash cards — using Lightning payments for the past two years.

The company is inviting media, prospective merchants and wallet providers to connect with the team at Bitcoin Asia 2026 in Hong Kong.

This post Japanese Bitcoin Industry Unveils ‘Aurora’ to Let Global Anime Fans Support $2 Trillion Yen Space first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Again Flirts With $81,000 Ahead of Fed’s Jackson Hole Meeting 

Bitcoin again closed in on the $81,000 mark on Thursday before dropping again as its stellar week continued. 

The leading cryptocurrency was recently trading for $80,236 after notching as high as $80,793 earlier in the day in New York. 

Bitcoin is now up more than 2% over the past day after gaining 10% in a week. The coin’s rise comes ahead of Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh’s keynote on Friday where he is expected to talk about digital payments — including crypto. 

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

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

It will be Warsh’s first major speech as chairman of the Federal Reserve. Warsh, who has made pro-Bitcoin statements in the past, has been reluctant to lower interest rates; President Donald Trump, who nominated Warsh, has since last year pushed for borrowing costs to come down. 

Bitcoin in the past has done well in a low interest rate environment. 

Bitcoin’s run started last week when it sustained its biggest run in years following positive regulatory news and an announcement from the U.S. Treasury. 

But recent positive regulatory news has helped the coin. While a vote on the long-awaited crypto Clarity Act has been delayed until September, President Donald Trump last week said that the bill was a “very, very powerful” piece of legislation, and urged lawmakers to get it over the line. 

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

And U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also last week announced the department would double the size of its long-dated bond buybacks. 

The news sent yields down lower; lower long-term yields reduces the opportunity cost of holding non-yielding assets like bitcoin and gold, and generally supports risk-on sentiment. 

This post Bitcoin Again Flirts With $81,000 Ahead of Fed’s Jackson Hole Meeting  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

No Fork Required: Bitcoin’s First Quantum-Safe Transaction Just Happened

Should fund managers dealing in Bitcoin be worried about the threat of quantum computing? 

The short answer is yes — but there’s time to prepare and solutions are already being found.

One of them? Post-quantum Bitcoin transactions on the mainnet. And the first one happened this week thanks to the Starknet Foundation. 

Speaking at Bitcoin Asia in Hong Kong on Thursday, Damian Chen, VP of growth at the Starknet Foundation, demonstrated how funds vulnerable to future quantum attacks can be secured without requiring a network-wide fork, thanks to the company’s latest solution. 

“This is a monumental moment,” Chen said. “This is the first post-quantum-resistant Bitcoin transaction on bitcoin mainnet today. It required no soft forks; it required no hard forks; it required no core protocol upgrades, and it’s live today.”

The transaction happened using a method created by StarkWare researcher Avihu Levy. It works like this: Bitcoin transactions sit briefly in a public queue before confirmation. During that window, they expose cryptographic material that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could use to forge a signature and steal the funds before the transaction is confirmed.

But rather than accepting the first valid signature, his method generates millions of signature candidates until it finds one with a specific structural property that doesn’t expose that vulnerable material while waiting in the mempool. 

This “signature grinding” is deliberately computationally expensive — a single transaction takes hours to produce — but that cost is what makes it resistant to quantum shortcuts.

Touting Quantum safe Bitcoin transactions — dubbed “QSB” — to institutions, Chen said that even if attackers have a fund’s private keys, they couldn’t make a fraudulent transfer. 

“QSB introduces a new hash authorization, and so an attacker with a sufficiently capable computer, even if they have your exposed public key, even if they derive your private key from your public key, even if they try to use that to authorize a spend to move your coins out of your wallet, those things are not enough for them to do so,” he said. 

It’s worth noting that ordinary Bitcoin nodes currently don’t recognize this non-standard transaction format, so it couldn’t go into the public mempool and instead had to be handed straight to a miner willing to accept it — with mining company MARA’s Slipstream service being the one that mined the QSB transaction. 

Quantum researchers have warned that a time will come when Bitcoin’s software — which underpins the biggest and strongest computer network in the world — will need to be upgraded to deal with quantum computing. 

While some crypto VC firms have urged action, top Bitcoin developers have argued that many of today’s quantum computers have limited capabilities, and have only demonstrated trivial computations. 

Still, they have noted that their development could arrive unexpectedly — just like advances with artificial intelligence — and have started developing some solutions. 

Chen added: “The question to me has never been when will quantum arrive. We all know quantum will arrive at one stage, but the question to me has always been, how long will it take for you to be ready when quantum does arrive?”

This post No Fork Required: Bitcoin’s First Quantum-Safe Transaction Just Happened first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Asia: Binance’s CZ Says $1M Bitcoin Is Coming — and Gold Won’t Keep Up

Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao has said that Bitcoin will hit $1 million dollars per coin sooner than we think — and eventually surpass gold’s market value. 

Speaking at this year’s Bitcoin Asia on Thursday, the crypto entrepreneur also said that Bitcoin is “dangerous” for countries that don’t use it. 

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

“I think for Bitcoin hitting a million dollars would be a good thing — it will happen,” CZ said. “You think we need 25 years for that to happen? No, I actually don’t think we need 25 years, I think it’s going to happen much quicker.”

CZ continued: “Bitcoin will, for sure, become more important than gold,” adding that large counties would over the years realize that the leading cryptocurrency is a “much better asset.” 

Bitcoin’s price started surging last week on news that the U.S. Treasury would at least double the size of its liquidity-support buyback operations. The announcement last week hurt the dollar but non-yielding assets like Bitcoin and gold have benefited.   

The price of Bitcoin has jumped nearly 12% over the past seven days, touching as high as $81,160 this week before dropping again to its current price of $80,520. 

Bitcoin’s $1.6 trillion market cap is still well below gold’s $32.2 trillion value. 

Regarding nation state adoption, CZ said that countries that don’t end up adopting Bitcoin will lose out — just like with other emerging technologies, such as AI. 

“If you think about AI, which country doesn’t want to hold the AI technology itself? Not investing in AI technology, not promoting the AI industry in your country, is dangerous for you,” he said. 

“Many countries view Bitcoin as this dangerous thing — it’s not. Bitcoin is much more dangerous if you don’t use it: you’re missing out.”

He added that countries making the move to shift into Bitcoin would take time but would eventually happen. 

This post Bitcoin Asia: Binance’s CZ Says $1M Bitcoin Is Coming — and Gold Won’t Keep Up first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

MANTRA Chain restored mainnet block production on v8.4.0 six days after a security incident forced a chainwide halt. The promised technical account remains unpublished, leaving the exploitation of the upstream dependency and the activity inside two project-managed wallets unexplained.

The official incident timeline says mainnet resumed at approximately 05:30 UTC on Aug. 22. The chain said there was no rollback or state change between the halt and restart, user balances were not altered, and token holders did not need to take action.

The team behind the chain marked the incident resolved on Aug. 24 but again said a postmortem would arrive in the coming days. Its current status page and official announcement channel contained no link to that report when checked on Aug. 27.

MANTRA said its analysis found that the incident affected two MANTRA-managed wallets and that no user, exchange, or partner funds were affected. The public account stops short of identifying the wallet addresses, transaction hashes, amounts, or technical exploit steps.

When the halt was reported on Aug. 21, patch testing was still underway. The network's return resolves that operational question while leaving the attacker's method and MANTRA's containment assessment unexplained.

For node operators, the public code record has an immediate implication: identify which v8.4.0 build is running. The current release page points to full commit 5c08d7bd9e2619952707dae1258d2a30bf024721, while MANTRA warns that the tag was re-pushed during recovery and tells operators to re-pull it.

The release changelog lists an intermediate MANTRA EVM fork bump from v0.6.0-v8-mantra-3 to v0.6.0-v8-mantra-4. The final tagged go.mod replaces the dependency with the chain's v0.6.2-v8-mantra-1 fork.

The final upgrade handler blocklists one address and disables three Cosmos vesting-account creation messages through the circuit breaker. Those changes describe the deployed mitigation while leaving the attack path undisclosed.

Why the March ICS20 flaw remains only a theory for MANTRA users

A March Cosmos Labs advisory described a critical ICS20 precompile flaw, said known affected chains had mitigated or upgraded, and named Mantra among remediation collaborators. Its timeline ends with the March disclosure, leaving the August incident outside its documented scope.

Users can verify the restart, the exact final code, and stated impact. Wallet addresses, transaction hashes, amounts, and a technical explanation remain necessary to trace the disclosed wallet impact from MANTRA's public account and determine whether the incident repeated the earlier ICS20 bug.

The post MANTRA Chain is back online, but silent code changes spark developer concerns appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Ethereum's next attempt to expand base-layer throughput includes contracts and transactions that create persistent state, which would cost far more gas for new accounts, storage slots, and deployed bytecode.

The Ethereum Foundation said the candidate Glamsterdam schedule is designed to support roughly three times more base throughput by aligning gas charges with the network resources each operation consumes.

The two proposals are scheduled for Glamsterdam, yet EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 both retain formal Review status. Ethereum's official roadmap plans the upgrade for the fourth quarter of 2026, with fixed Sepolia, Hoodi, and mainnet fork dates still unannounced.

That leaves builders a testing window before the candidate parameters and deployment schedule harden.

Higher throughput moves the bill to state creation

Every new account, storage slot, and byte of contract code expands the persistent state that nodes retain and serve. EIP-8037 says the state portion of a Geth database was about 390 GiB in January 2026.

After Ethereum's gas limit rose from 30 million to 60 million, average new state created each day increased from roughly 105 MiB to 326 MiB, an annual pace of about 116 GiB.

The proposal takes that post-increase rate and scales it proportionally to a deliberately severe 200 million gas-limit scenario. The result is roughly 387 GiB of annual growth, enough to cross a cited 650 GiB performance threshold within a year from the 390 GiB starting point.

The EIP describes the earlier 30 million-to-60 million response as non-linear, making 387 GiB a motivating extrapolation rather than a measured forecast.

Its proposed control is a common cost of 1,530 gas for every byte of new state and a separate state-gas dimension. At a reference block limit of 150 million, that parameter targets average growth of 120 GiB a year.

The proposal lists 160 GiB a year as the worst case at a 200 million limit after repricing.

At the transaction level, users pay for both execution and state gas. The split preserves room for computational work while placing a separate ceiling on permanent additions to network state.

EIP-8038 tackles access to and writes of existing state, raising selected account and storage costs from client benchmarks conducted against a state snapshot comparable to mainnet in March 2026.

Together, the proposals use the roughly threefold throughput figure as an engineering support target. Activation would create headroom for higher limits rather than guarantee an immediate tripling of mainnet capacity.

A 929.7 million-transaction replay separates higher-limit fixes from code changes

The public repricing impact dashboard covers 929,731,274 transactions in 4 million blocks from Dec. 3, 2024, through June 15, 2026.

Each transaction was replayed independently against its canonical pre-transaction state under the existing schedule and one candidate schedule. Researchers first used the transaction's original gas limit, then allowed a ceiling up to 10 times that limit.

The comparison covered success, gas consumption, logs, output, and execution traces.

Under EIP-8037, 174,473,898 transaction replays failed at their original limit but succeeded with more gas, while 2,687,652 entered the potentially broken group. Under EIP-8038, 84,708,228 were fixable with a higher limit, and 3,036,537 were potentially broken.

Repeated activity from a busy application can dominate the count, so the figures do not describe millions of separate contracts at risk.

The dashboard defines potentially broken as a baseline-successful transaction that the candidate schedule failed to rescue at the tested 10-times ceiling.

That group includes out-of-gas cases and transactions that reverted for another reason after the new costs changed execution behavior. It is a counterfactual risk classification: users, wallets, contracts, builders, and fee markets can adapt before mainnet.

The much larger fixable cohort chiefly shifts work to frontends, bundlers and infrastructure providers, which must submit limits that reflect the new schedule. The harder cohort exposes assumptions that more top-level gas cannot cure, including fixed 2,300-gas stipends, hardcoded gas forwarded to internal calls, logic that branches on gasleft() and presigned transactions with fixed limits.

A public outreach report prioritizes versions of the eth-infinitism ERC-4337 EntryPoint and related smart-account stacks, including ZeroDev and Alchemy. It also identifies recurring counterfactual failures involving Across, Socket/Bungee, CoW Protocol, and 0x.

Immutable contracts make the toughest cases operationally expensive. A durable response can require a new EntryPoint, account, factory, or validator implementation followed by user migration. Other systems may be repaired through routing, batching, or gas-accounting changes.

ERC-4337 bundlers also need to distinguish the two classes: better simulation and higher submitted limits can resolve fixable failures, while a validation guard or internal gas assumption still reverts when the outer transaction receives more gas.

Who must update before Glamsterdam

Wallets, RPC providers, indexers, node tooling, and gas estimators must incorporate the new rules, while frontends and bundlers need to stop relying on cached constants or limits calibrated to the old schedule.

Both EIPs require eth_estimateGas and related logic to account for the new costs. The Platåberget testnet announcement also warns that tools built around a hardcoded maximum gas limit or a single gas dimension will break.

A plain ETH transfer to an existing account can still use 21,000 gas. Sending value to an account that does not yet exist adds a state-creation charge at runtime, so software that assumes every transfer fits the old constant needs revision.

Regular users can keep familiar workflows if wallets and infrastructure update correctly. Meanwhile, developers carry the immediate burden of resimulating transactions, reviewing fixed stipends and internal call limits, and testing affected paths against the candidate schedule.

The Glamsterdam fork was scheduled for Aug. 20 and was reported live with the repricing schedule by Aug. 24. The published sequence moves from stable devnets to the long-lived Sepolia and Hoodi public testnets, then to mainnet, with the 2026 roadmap target still subject to testing.

Ethereum can price its way toward more throughput, but builders that encoded yesterday's gas assumptions now have a limited window to prove their contracts and tools can survive tomorrow's schedule.

The post Ethereum’s plan to triple network speed could silently break millions of existing smart contracts appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Matt Corallo followed up on an earlier post on Aug. 25, addressing what stablecoin users increasingly see: apps routing around ETH, SOL, and other non-stablecoin tokens.

A wallet can let someone receive and send USDC without displaying a native-token balance. Behind that interface, an app, paymaster, sponsor, or infrastructure provider still settles the network fee in the asset the chain accepts.

The native-token demand debate turns on who funds execution, manages the fee balance, and absorbs volatility after the user-facing requirement disappears.

The scale of the stablecoin rail makes that question more than a user-experience footnote. Visa's Onchain Analytics dashboard showed about $1.3 trillion in adjusted stablecoin volume and 230.3 million adjusted transactions over the 30 days viewed on Aug. 27.

Before adjustment, the same window contained about $6.8 trillion and 1.75 billion transactions.

Visa and Allium's adjusted methodology uses probabilistic labels for more than 3 million addresses, counts only the largest stablecoin transfer within a single transaction, and filters unlabeled addresses that exceed 1,000 transactions or $10 million in rolling 30-day volume.

The data still includes exchange, decentralized exchange, lending, mint-and-burn, and ramp activity. Visa's “retail-sized” bucket logged about $7.6 billion across 158.8 million adjusted transactions below $250.

Gasless is a change of payer, Ethereum makes the example

Fee abstraction separates three roles that conventional wallets often bundle together: the user authorizes an action, an intermediary funds its execution, and the network charges its native fee.

“Gasless” can be accurate for the customer's wallet while still being misleading about chain economics.

Ethereum's documentation notes that reads can be performed without gas, while state-changing contract writes cost gas. Ethereum denominates gas in ETH, burns the protocol-set base fee, and sends the priority fee to the validator.

Under ERC-4337, which introduced account abstraction, users submit operations that a bundler packages into an Ethereum transaction. A paymaster can cover an operation instead of the smart account, but it must maintain a native-currency deposit at the EntryPoint contract. EntryPoint checks whether that deposit can cover the operation's maximum cost and charges the actual cost against it.

No universal “enough ETH” balance exists for a paymaster. The requirement moves with the operation's gas limits, maximum fee settings, transaction volume, and the buffer an operator maintains for service continuity.

Coinbase's ERC-20 gas-payment flow can quote a fee in USDC while the paymaster covers native gas, while Alchemy's Gas Manager fronts gas and bills separately. The user can remain economically inside the stablecoin while the provider funds and manages native-fee capacity.

At the retail layer, the design reduces the need for users to maintain ETH balances. At the execution layer, it replaces that scattered requirement with managed payer accounts or services whose operators replenish balances and recover costs through token, fiat, or service billing.

Solana changes the signer

Solana's fee documentation states that every transaction requires a fee paid in SOL. The base fee is 5,000 lamports per signature, split evenly between burning and the validator, while an optional priority fee can raise the total and goes to the validator.

By default, the fee payer is the first signer, but an app can name a sponsor instead. The user signs to authorize the stablecoin transfer and the sponsor signs to authorize the SOL fee.

Solana's fee-abstraction guide makes the resulting requirement explicit: the sponsor needs SOL for fees, though it does not need to hold the token being transferred. Kora packages that primitive into a service that can fully sponsor fees or accept payment in an SPL token such as USDC.

The user may therefore experience an all-dollar transaction while the Solana transaction fee is still paid in SOL by the sponsor or Kora operator.

The 5,000-lamport base fee also shows why transaction count alone cannot establish large SOL demand. Signature counts and priority fees affect the bill, while service volume and the operator's funding buffer determine how much SOL a sponsor needs.

Solana's fee sponsorship, like Ethereum's paymasters, changes who holds the fee balance. It gives the application control over when the user pays, which asset the user sees, and whether the app subsidizes the cost.

For a sponsor, the user-facing payment asset changes the recovery leg rather than the network leg. The service still needs a funded SOL fee-payer account before submission, while its USDC billing or subsidy policy operates around that requirement. A larger stream of sponsored transfers therefore increases the number of fees the operator must fund, even though signatures and priority settings determine each transaction's SOL cost.

Native-token demand becomes wholesale

With sponsorship, an app or provider can aggregate the requirement that each active user needs a native-token balance. It may replenish a managed ETH or SOL balance and recover the cost in USDC, fiat, or a service charge.

That architecture can shift operational exposure toward fewer payers as stablecoin adoption grows. Sponsors must manage fee funding, pricing, and abuse controls even though their customers never see a gas balance.

Representative Coinbase, Alchemy and Kora implementations establish how the architecture works, while leaving its market-wide distribution unresolved. Any claim that a handful of providers already dominate Ethereum or Solana gas demand would require payer-level onchain analysis beyond these sources.

Aggregation can also reduce the need for every user to hold a dormant native-token balance. Managed services can replenish balances as needed and recover costs through their own billing models.

Native-asset demand also depends on how many transactions settle, the fees attached to them, execution efficiency, and the balances payers maintain. Value capture depends on what is burned, what validators receive, and whether activity moves to cheaper environments.

Solana activity can grow while SOL value capture remains limited, particularly when stablecoin users need little SOL beyond fees. Ethereum can host a large stablecoin economy while base-chain revenue remains comparatively thin.

Fee abstraction changes the customer for the native asset. ETH and SOL can disappear from the user journey while remaining mandatory at the network layer. The gas bill moves upstream to the companies making stablecoin payments feel like ordinary money, concentrating operational responsibility even as the effect on aggregate token demand remains unmeasured.

The post Ethereum and Solana are hosting trillions in dollar volume, yet their native tokens risk losing direct consumer demand appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Stacks founder Muneeb Ali said on Aug. 27 via X that HashKey Cloud will deploy Bitcoin in Stacks, making the Asian infrastructure provider the second institution announced for the network’s Genesis Bond pilot.

HashKey will time-lock BTC on Bitcoin, retain the keys, and pair the position with STX worth roughly 5% of the committed Bitcoin.

Retaining custody of the principal does not make the yield native to Bitcoin. Stacks targets about 3% annualized from BTC committed by its miners, so payouts depend on STX and Stacks miner economics and are therefore variable.

HashKey’s allocation was not disclosed, while the total BTC committed is expected to become visible on-chain when the bond begins around Sept. 10.

BTC stays on Bitcoin while the return depends on Stacks

Under the native-BTC protocol bond, a participant places Bitcoin in a time-locked output on Bitcoin's base layer and retains the keys. The asset stays outside a lending agreement, wrapper or third-party custody arrangement. It remains immobile during the bond unless the participant uses the early-exit path.

An early exit returns the BTC principal and ends the remaining yield, and the paired STX stays locked for the full term, so the two asset legs carry different liquidity constraints.

The bond requires STX worth roughly 5% of the BTC position, and that amount determines the participant's Bitcoin capacity and leaves the position exposed to STX price movements for about six months.

Stacks miners commit BTC as they compete to produce blocks and receive STX block rewards. Protocol-bond holders receive their target return first from that BTC pool.

Across 24 reward cycles, a roughly six-month bond would deliver about 1.44% of locked BTC if the target is realized, and the payouts can vary with miner economics.

The BTC available for rewards depends on the economics of mining Stacks, which in turn depend on STX block rewards, fees and network activity. Excess miner revenue can build a reserve. Under a sustained shortfall that depletes the reserve, Stacks says returns would compress first for STX-only stakers and later for protocol-bond holders.

The design therefore separates principal custody from return generation. Bitcoin keys remain with the participant, while the yield carries STX market exposure and Stacks protocol risk.

The first bond operates inside a managed bootstrap rather than an open auction. During PoX-5, the Stacks Endowment sets each bonding period's capacity, target yield, BTC-to-STX ratio and allocation.

A future PoX-6 proposal is intended to replace those managed settings with an algorithmic, permissionless auction. Until then, Genesis tests the product within boundaries chosen by the Endowment.

On-chain commitments can show the amount of BTC institutions place in the bond, weekly distributions can show whether miner revenue supports the target, and reserve data can show the buffer available when revenue falls short.

HashKey's name alone establishes participation. Its disclosed allocation and the bond's realized payouts will determine how much weight that participation carries as evidence of institutional demand.

Self-custody leaves contract and reward risk

PoX-5 activated at Bitcoin block 960,230 on July 30. Stacks said the codebase was audited by Trail of Bits and Clarity Alliance, with additional review by Asymmetric Research.

An open medium-severity issue in the official stacks-core repository identifies a flaw in the bond rollover path. Near the end of a bond, a participant moving into a later bond can remain credited with old reward shares after withdrawing the collateral behind them. Other participants could then receive a smaller share of the final-cycle reward.

The issue leaves the native Bitcoin under the participant's keys and does not establish a failure in ordinary Genesis Bond enrollment. The 4.0.1 PoX-5 contract source still contains the affected behavior, making a public fix or mitigation important before that rollover window arrives.

The Genesis Bond reduces reliance on a borrower or custodian, then adds STX exposure, miner-funded payout risk, managed program settings and new contract code. Block 966,350 will begin putting numbers to the test.

The post HashKey Cloud backs Stacks’ Genesis Bond to prove institutional appetite for native Bitcoin yield appeared first on CryptoSlate.

KuCoin has expanded sanctions screening to indirect crypto transfers across 17 crypto platforms, including Justin Sun-linked HTX.

Under an Aug. 27 compliance notice, KuCoin said Shelbit, Aban Tether, A7 Nigeria, A7 Africa, PilotFinance, Rapira, Aifory Pro, ABCeX, WhiteBird, NoOnecrypto, Tradex, Monease, BitPapa, Exnode, Exnode Pay, EXMO and “HTX (Huobi Global SA)” are covered by the restrictions.

The policy means users can face held or rejected transactions even when they do not transact directly to one of the listed platforms. KuCoin said it may screen the source of funds, originating and destination addresses, and intermediary service providers for connections to the affected entities.

Transactions attempted to these platforms may undergo enhanced review or trigger temporary wallet and account restrictions. KuCoin said repeated or serious violations could ultimately lead to suspension or withdrawal of its services from the user.

The controls broadly track recent US and European sanctions actions, but their reach extends beyond direct counterparties.

KuCoin has not disclosed how many transaction hops it traces or what level of on-chain attribution is sufficient to establish an indirect connection.

HTX faces growing isolation from major exchange rails

HTX is the most consequential name on KuCoin’s list by scale and is already facing similar restrictions elsewhere.

Binance stopped processing transactions involving HTX and 10 other platforms from Aug. 23 as part of its own sanctions-compliance measures. This narrows the routes through which HTX-linked funds can move across major exchanges even as HTX itself remains operational.

HTX continues to dispute the sanctions-related allegations and the corporate identity behind the designation. The EU regulation names “HTX (Huobi Global SA),” a label also used by KuCoin.

However, HTX said in May that Huobi Global S.A. is distinct from the online HTX exchange.

Meanwhile, the Justin Sun-linked exchange said it is pursuing legal and compliance discussions with authorities in the UK and EU as some users report funds being frozen on third-party platforms, including Kraken.

HTX said it has submitted materials relating to 17 Kraken user freeze cases to the courts and is working to reduce disruptions affecting customers.

Molly, HTX’s head of markets, said the exchange processed more than 100,000 deposit and withdrawal transactions over two days without identifying new cases of indiscriminate freezes.

She also said HTX recently upgraded its wallet infrastructure and introduced a withdrawal-address rotation mechanism. The exchange described the changes as a security measure intended to reduce disruption from third-party risk controls and on-chain labeling.

For users, the practical effect is increasingly clear. Funds linked to HTX or another listed provider can face restrictions before they reach KuCoin, depending on the transaction path and the intermediaries involved.

That pushes sanctions enforcement beyond direct counterparties and deeper into transaction provenance, with exchanges increasingly assessing where funds originated, where they are headed, and which services they touched along the way.

The post KuCoin can block your crypto transactions even if you never sent it to these 17 sanctioned platforms appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Anyone who sets out to send crypto and picks the wrong network along the way will as a rule lose the balance for good. The exchange executes the withdrawal correctly, the chain confirms it, and still nothing arrives at the other end. Kraken puts this in its own withdrawal guide without softening it: a withdrawal to an unsuitable network can lead to the permanent loss of the funds.

How large that risk is across the market is a question nobody had counted out. We have. Of the 100 largest crypto assets by market capitalisation, 51 exist on two or more blockchains at the same time, 22 of them on five or more. For every one of those 51, the network selector in the withdrawal form is not a detail. It is the decision over whether the money arrives. cryptoticker.io compiled this analysis itself on August 26, 2026; the method and its limits are set out openly further down.

The timing is no coincidence. Several transfer deadlines are running out at once in these weeks, and tens of thousands of accounts have to move holdings that sat untouched on an exchange for years. Anyone who rarely transfers meets the network question for the first time at exactly the moment when the pressure is greatest.

Sending Crypto: What Technically Happens With the Wrong Network

A withdrawal consists of two entries that have to match each other: the destination address and the network the exchange sends over. Both are asked for separately, and the exchange checks only the form of the address, not where it belongs.

That is the core of the problem. An address beginning with 0x is valid on Ethereum, on BNB Smart Chain, on Arbitrum, on Base, on Polygon and on a dozen further chains. All of these chains use the same address format. The withdrawal form therefore has no way of recognising that you have entered an address belonging to an account on a chain other than the one being sent over.

The transfer then goes through cleanly. A valid transaction to a valid address comes into being on the chosen chain. It is just that nobody controls that address there, or it belongs to an exchange that accepts no deposits for this token on this chain at all. The balance is visible on the chain and out of reach all the same.

Why Nobody Retrieves the Transfer

A confirmed transaction on a blockchain cannot technically be reversed. Whoever holds the private key to the receiving address can move the balance. Whoever does not hold it cannot. There is nothing in between.

In a share of cases an exchange controls the key, because the address belongs to its deposit system. A way back then exists in theory, but it runs through support, takes weeks, costs fees and is expressly voluntary. Several large providers rule out recovery outside a list of supported chains from the outset.

Network, Chain and Layer 2: What These Terms Mean for a Transfer

Three terms turn up in the withdrawal form and are regularly confused with one another. A brief clarification, because the rest does not hold without it.

A network, in the withdrawal form, is the transfer route over which the exchange sends your coins. A blockchain, or chain, is the independent ledger on which that transfer is recorded. A layer 2 is a chain of its own that passes its results to a larger chain for security, but appears in the withdrawal form as its own entry and carries a balance of its own.

A wrapped token is an issue of a crypto asset on a foreign chain, backed by the original on its home chain. It often carries the same name and, in case of doubt, the same ticker, yet it is a different asset with a contract address of its own.

For a transfer this yields a single rule, and Kraken writes it into its guide in exactly those terms: always choose the same network your receiving wallet uses. Not the cheapest, not the fastest, not the preselected one.

Our Own Analysis: 51 of the 100 Largest Crypto Assets Sit on Several Chains

To put a figure on the risk, on August 26, 2026 we retrieved two public data sets from the CoinGecko programming interface and set them against each other. The first supplies the 100 largest crypto assets by market capitalisation, the second the complete list of all crypto assets held there, together with the chains on which they are recorded as a contract. On the day of collection that list ran to 18,684 entries. Both retrievals answered with HTTP 200.

For each of the 100 assets we evaluated how many different chains carry a contract entry. All 100 could be matched, and there was no gap. The result:

• 51 crypto assets are recorded on two or more chains.
• 22 of those on five or more chains.
• 10 of those on ten or more chains.
• 23 crypto assets sit on exactly one chain.
• 26 crypto assets carry no contract entry at all, because they run a blockchain of their own. Among them are Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Solana, Litecoin and Monero.

Ethereum appears most often as the host chain: 57 of the 100 largest crypto assets are recorded there. BNB Smart Chain follows with 25, Solana with 23, Arbitrum with 19 and Base with 16.

What the Numbers Do Not Say

The analysis measures how many chains record a crypto asset as a contract. The count does not measure which networks a particular exchange actually offers for withdrawing that asset. An exchange can support considerably fewer chains than there are contract issues, and precisely that gap is a source of error in its own right: the token exists on the destination chain, but your exchange does not send there.

Second, the figure is a snapshot from August 26, 2026. New issues on further chains are added continuously.

Third, we did not check whether every recorded contract actually carries trading volume. For the question of whether a misdirected transfer is possible, that plays no role, because an address on a chain accepts a transfer even when nobody trades there.

Chainlink, USDC and Tether: The Crypto Assets With the Most Chains

The top of the analysis shows how far a single crypto asset can spread. Chainlink leads the field with contract entries on 87 different chains, well clear of USDC with 34 and Ethena USDe with 30. Then come Ethena with 19, Aave with 15, Ondo US Dollar Yield with 14, Uniswap with 13 and Tether with 11 chains. Cosmos Hub and PancakeSwap reach ten each.

The stablecoins on this list deserve a look of their own, because they are moved most often. Withdraw USDC or Tether from an exchange and you are choosing from a dozen chains or more, and the balances on those chains are entirely separate. A Tether holding on Tron does not exist for a wallet that knows only Ethereum.

Why Bitcoin and Ethereum Are Special Cases in This Count

The 26 assets without a contract entry are the point at which the numbers are easily misread. These assets run a blockchain of their own, which is why the database lists no host chain for them. That does not remotely mean the network question fails to arise for them.

With Ethereum the opposite is true. Withdraw ether from an exchange and you will usually be choosing between Ethereum mainnet, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism and further layer 2 networks. All of them carry genuine ether, all use the same address format, and the balances are separate. That choice does not show up in our count, because these are not contract issues.

With Bitcoin there are additionally wrapped issues on foreign chains, which the database keeps as entries of their own and which therefore also fall outside the count. In practice that means the 51 is a lower bound. The number of cases in which the network choice decides between arrival and loss is higher.

Withdrawal Deadlines When an Exchange Closes: Why the Network Choice Counts Right Now

Misdirected transfers pile up when many people transfer at the same time and under time pressure. That is exactly the situation in August 2026. On August 20 Binance announced that it would end trading in ICON, Secret and Storj on September 3 at 03:00 UTC; deposits will no longer be credited after September 4, withdrawals remain possible until November 3, after which the exchange automatically converts residual holdings into stablecoins. Several trade publications reproduced this schedule independently of one another from the announcement.

Further transfer deadlines are running in parallel. Our own reporting has documented them one by one, most recently on August 22 on the withdrawal cut-off at OKX for MAJOR and J and on August 11 on the Kraken forced liquidation of 56 tokens. Anyone clearing several accounts faces the network decision repeatedly in short order, and each time in a different form with a different default.

On top of that comes a cost effect that tempts people into the wrong decisions. The fee differs between networks by a factor of a hundred in some cases, as we broke down in our overview of withdrawal fees at crypto exchanges. The cheapest chain is tempting, but it only serves if the receiving side carries it too. If you do not yet have a suitable destination address, it is better to look for one beforehand among the regulated crypto exchanges with EU authorisation, or to set up a wallet of your own, rather than improvising under deadline pressure.

The Reflex That Costs the Most

Under time pressure many people reach for the preselected chain, because the form suggests it anyway. That default follows what is favourable for the exchange, not what your receiving address accepts. This preselection is the most common starting point of a misdirected transfer.

Checking the Address Format: How to Recognise the Right Chain

The receiving side dictates the chain, not the sending side. Every withdrawal therefore begins with you having your wallet or the destination exchange display the deposit address for exactly this crypto asset and exactly this network. Most wallets name the network directly above the address.

The address format gives a first indication, but it does not replace the check. An address with the prefix 0x and 42 characters belongs to the Ethereum family and therefore to dozens of possible chains. Bitcoin addresses begin with 1, 3 or bc1. Solana addresses are a longer character string with no fixed prefix. Tron addresses begin with T.

What is practically useful above all is the direction of exclusion: if the format does not fit, the chain is certainly wrong. If it does fit, the chain may be right. With all addresses in the Ethereum family, the only remaining route is to look the network up explicitly in the receiving wallet.

Three Entries That Have to Match

Before sending, you reconcile three things: the crypto asset, the network and the address. All three appear both in the exchange's withdrawal form and in the receiving wallet. If one of them fails to match, you break off. This check takes a minute and is the only step that reliably prevents a misdirected transfer.

Sending a Test Amount: When It Pays Off and What It Costs

A test amount is a small advance transfer over the same route, with which you play through the whole path once before the main amount follows. It costs the network fee a second time, and that is exactly why many people do without it.

The arithmetic is unambiguous all the same. With a fee in the range of a few euros and a holding in the four- or five-figure range, the price of the insurance lies in the per-mille range. It pays off whenever you are using this route for the first time, whenever you have newly created the destination address, or whenever the crypto asset exists on several chains according to our analysis.

What matters is that the test amount lies above the other side's minimum deposit. Many exchanges do not credit amounts below their threshold, and then you have no misdirected transfer but no confirmation either. Wait for the credit as well, not merely the confirmation on the chain. Only the credit proves that the receiving side really carries the chain.

Anyone taking their holding off the exchange anyway should think a step further at this point. A transfer to a wallet of your own does not dissolve the network question, but it moves it into your hands; which devices and programs come into consideration for that is covered in the hardware wallet comparison and in the software wallet comparison.

Memo and Tag: The Second Common Source of Error in a Transfer

Not every misdirected transfer goes back to the network. With some crypto assets the receiving side additionally requires a second entry, called a memo, a tag or a destination tag depending on the chain. That entry assigns the transfer to your account within the exchange, because many customers there share the same deposit address.

If the entry is missing, the balance does land on an address the exchange controls, but with no assignment to you. The way back then runs through support and is an application, not an entitlement. Affected assets include XRP, Stellar and Cosmos Hub, along with some exchanges on deposits to their own chains.

Caught by the Wrong Network: Which Routes Are Left

Once the transfer has gone out, everything turns on who holds the key to the receiving address. That yields three situations whose prospects differ markedly.

If the address belongs to your own wallet and that wallet also handles the chain the balance landed on, the case is harmless. You add the network in the wallet, along with the token's contract where necessary, and the holding appears. To move it on you then need some of that chain's fee currency.

If the address belongs to an exchange, everything hangs on its recovery procedure. Some providers offer one for a fee, many only for a limited list of chains, and some not at all. The application belongs submitted immediately in any case, with the transaction identifier, the time, the chosen network and the destination address.

If the address belongs to nobody who can be reached, there is no route. All that remains then is documentation. Record the process in full regardless, because for tax purposes a loss can only be presented with supporting evidence; how that looks in combination with a forced sale is something we described in our article on the forced sale at a crypto exchange.

What You Should Secure Immediately

Secure the transaction identifier, the screenshot of the withdrawal form showing the chosen network, and the exchange's confirmation email. You need these documents both for a recovery application and for the tax file. Anyone closing an account anyway should take the complete history along while access still exists.

When the Exchange Itself Closes: Order Before Haste

In a closure two deadlines come together that are often confused: the end of trading and the end of withdrawals. Depending on the provider, hours or weeks lie between them. For the network question it is the withdrawal cut-off that counts, because the transfer has to be initiated by then.

A fixed order makes sense. First you settle where the holding is to go and create the deposit address there. Then you check which networks both sides carry and look for the overlap. Only after that do you send the test amount, and last of all the remainder. What happens when this order can no longer be kept is something we described in the article Crypto Exchange Shutting Down: What to Do Now; for holdings with no remaining trading venue, what stands in the article on transferring delisted tokens applies in addition.

One special case deserves attention: some providers require proof that the destination address belongs to you before the withdrawal. That costs additional time, which is missing when a deadline is tight. We gathered the requirements for it in the article on proof of ownership for your own wallet.

What the Network Choice Means for Tax

A transfer between your own addresses is not a sale and triggers no tax in itself. The holding period runs on. That applies regardless of the network you send over.

Two points remain to be observed all the same. The network fee is not to be treated identically for tax purposes in every case; we broke the question down in the article on sending bitcoin between wallets. And a switch between an original and its wrapped issue on another chain is not mere transport, because a different asset comes into being in the process. Anyone taking that route should settle the classification beforehand rather than at the tax return.

For record-keeping the same applies in both cases: every movement needs a date, an amount, an address and a network. Anyone using several chains loses that overview quickly, and a portfolio tracker with a tax function takes the assignment off your hands.

Sending Crypto Without a Misdirected Transfer: What to Take Away

1. Before every withdrawal, check whether your crypto asset exists on several chains. For 51 of the 100 largest that is the case, and the network selector in the form then decides between arrival and loss. If you lack a reliable destination address, set one up beforehand, for instance at one of the regulated crypto exchanges with EU authorisation.
2. Look the network up in the receiving wallet and send a test amount. The receiving side dictates the chain, and only the credit proves that the route carries. Anyone taking a holding into their own custody will find the matching devices in the hardware wallet comparison.
3. Document every movement with the network and the transaction identifier. You need those entries for a recovery application just as much as for the tax file. The running assignment across several chains is handled by a portfolio tracker with a tax function.

To place our own analysis in context: the basis was the public data sets of the CoinGecko programming interface, retrieved on August 26, 2026. The network rule itself stands in Kraken's withdrawal guide, which expressly names the permanent loss that follows from an unsuitable network.

(As of August 26, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

The deadline that Cardano's self-governance is hanging on right now does not fall on September 1. It falls on September 6, 2026, at around 21:45 UTC. By then a governance action has to be ratified on chain that fills four of the seven seats on the constitutional committee. If that does not happen, the committee shrinks to three members and drops below the minimum size the protocol requires. From that moment on it can no longer confirm any governance action. This piece sets out what is actually happening, where the vote stands, and what you as an ADA holder can genuinely do in the days that remain.

Cardano Constitutional Committee: What Really Expires on September 6, 2026

Every governance action on Cardano has a fixed lifespan. The protocol parameter govActionLifetime is set to six epochs: if an action is not ratified within that window, it lapses with nothing to replace it, and the 100,000 ADA deposit returns to the submitting address.

The action at issue here is of the type NewCommittee. It was submitted in epoch 646 and carries epoch 653 as its expiry mark. An on-chain query of our own through the public Koios interface on August 27, 2026 at 00:38 UTC shows it still open: neither ratified_epoch nor enacted_epoch nor expired_epoch carries a value.

The exact window can be calculated from the chain tip. Epoch 651 began on August 22, 2026 at 21:44:51 UTC, and an epoch on Cardano lasts exactly five days. That places epoch 653 between September 1, 2026, 21:44:51 UTC, and September 6, 2026, 21:44:51 UTC. The deadline is therefore a piece of chain mechanics that runs down on its own. No editorial calendar governs it, and nobody can move it.

Four of the Seven Seats Expire: What the Constitutional Committee on Cardano Actually Does

The constitutional committee is a body of elected members whose only task in a governance action is to check whether a proposal is compatible with the Cardano constitution. It does not comment on the merits of a proposal; its sole yardstick is constitutionality.

On-chain governance means that the rules of self-governance sit in the protocol itself and every decision is recorded as a transaction on the blockchain. On Cardano that has applied to all governance actions since the move into the Conway era. There is no parallel body that could decide around the chain.

The committee is therefore the third chamber alongside the delegated representatives and the stake pool operators. Most governance actions need the approval of two or three of these groups, and the committee is involved in almost all of them.

The current line-up can be read straight off the chain. It lists eight entries, one of them marked resigned, meaning that member stepped down voluntarily. Of the seven remaining active members, four carry expiration epoch 653 and three carry expiration epoch 726. That is the figure at issue: four of the seven seats expire in the same epoch in which the renewal action lapses.

Why the Reports Say September 1 and What the Chain Says

Practically every German-language report on this subject names September 1 as the cut-off. That is understandable but imprecise: September 1 is the start of epoch 653, not its end. Anyone going by that date gives away five days.

The difference is not academic. Five days is a full epoch on Cardano, and the movement in the vote count over the past week shows that double-digit percentage points can accumulate in that span. Give up on September 1 and you give up an epoch too early.

One qualification belongs here, and I am not smoothing it over: what I measured was the expiration field of the governance action together with the epoch boundaries taken from the chain tip. Whether the ledger discards an action at the beginning or at the end of its expiration epoch is a question of ledger semantics that I have not worked through myself. The window between September 1 and September 6 is certain; the later date is the conservative reading.

Governance Standstill Explained: What Happens if the Committee Falls Below Five Members

The protocol parameter committeeMinSize is set to five. That figure has the standing of a hard ledger rule, not of a recommendation.

CIP-1694, the underlying standard, spells out the consequence unambiguously: if the number of non-expired committee members falls below the minimum size, the constitutional committee can no longer ratify governance actions. Only those actions that manage without committee votes can still proceed.

Governance standstill therefore does not mean the blockchain halts. Blocks continue to be produced, transactions confirmed, staking rewards paid out. What comes to a stop is the administration of the network: parameter changes, treasury withdrawals and the initiation of a hard fork all require the committee's approval.

Two types of action manage without it, and both are aimed at the committee itself: the no-confidence motion and the action that installs a new body. That is the built-in emergency brake. The way out of a standstill therefore runs through the very same vote that is currently not getting through, only under time pressure and by way of a fresh submission with a fresh deposit.

The On-Chain Vote Count: 51.68 Percent Among DReps, 18.16 Percent Among Stake Pool Operators

The figures below come from a query of our own on the Koios interface on August 27, 2026 at 00:38 UTC, epoch 651. They shift with every vote cast; anyone who wants to look them up runs the same query again.

The direction is right, the pace is an open question. The trade publication CryptoSlate still reported 32.46 percent approval among DReps for August 17. An on-chain measurement by this desk on August 24 produced 39.52 percent. On August 27 the chain shows 51.68 percent. That amounts to roughly 19 percentage points in ten days.

Whether that will be enough cannot responsibly be forecast, and both readings are defensible. The optimistic calculation sees an accelerating pace and around fifteen points still missing with ten days to go. The sceptical one looks at the stake pool operators: more than thirty points are missing there, and that group has moved considerably more slowly so far.

The 67 and 51 Percent Thresholds: How a Governance Action Is Ratified on Cardano

Both thresholds sit on the chain as protocol parameters and can be read off it. For a committee change under normal conditions, dvt_committee_normal stands at 0.67 and pvt_committee_normal at 0.51.

Stake pool operators are the operators of the nodes that produce blocks on Cardano. In governance they form a chamber of their own with a threshold of their own; their voting weight follows from how much stake is delegated to them.

Both thresholds have to be cleared at the same time. An action that would sail through among the delegated representatives while staying below 51 percent among the stake pool operators is not ratified. That second threshold is the larger one at present.

The count works in voting power, not in heads. A DRep with a great deal of ADA delegated to them weighs more heavily than one with little delegation. That is how 115 votes in favour against 3 votes opposed can still add up to no more than 51.68 percent.

What Delegating to Always Abstain Does to Your Voting Power

Always abstain is a predefined delegation option. Give your voting power to it and you remain registered for staking rewards, but under CIP-1694 your ADA expressly do not count towards active voting power.

The ADA token carries two functions at once: it is the means of payment on the network and at the same time the weight by which governance is counted. Anyone who holds the cryptocurrency automatically holds voting power, whether they use it or not.

And this is where the real obstacle to this vote lies. Around 9.75 billion ADA of voting power sits on always abstain among the DReps. At the stake pools, a further 10.51 billion ADA from 563 pools sit passively on the same option.

These amounts are not missing from the count; they have been taken out of it. The percentages above refer to active voting power, which is to say to whatever is left. Move your delegation from always abstain to an active DRep and you enlarge the denominator, which shifts those percentages.

The second option belongs in the picture as well: delegating to always no confidence does count towards active voting power, but it automatically casts a no to everything except a no-confidence motion. That is a deliberate vote against rather than an abstention.

What You as an ADA Holder Can Do Right Now

The honest answer first: if your coins are sitting on an exchange, you have no vote. Voting power attaches to the stake address in your own wallet, not to an account balance with a provider. Anyone who wants a say needs a wallet in self-custody.

Step 1: Check where your voting power is delegated

The common Cardano wallets have a governance section of their own. It shows whether your voting power points to a named DRep, to always abstain or to always no confidence. The community's official governance explorer carries the same information along with each DRep's voting record.

Step 2: Check whether your DRep is still active at all

The parameter drepActivity is set to twenty epochs, roughly a hundred days. A DRep who has not voted for that long counts as inactive, and the voting power delegated to them no longer counts towards active voting power. That is the most common quiet reason for a delegation running into the void.

Step 3: Change your delegation if that is what you want

Re-delegating costs network fees in the cent range and changes nothing about your staking: vote delegation and stake delegation are two separate processes. Your rewards carry on unchanged while you move your voting power. If you want to know how rewards are put together in the first place, the basics are in the comparison of staking platforms.

Becoming a DRep yourself is possible too, but it costs a deposit of 500 ADA. For most holders, delegating to an active representative is the more practical route.

Dijkstra Upgrade and Hard Fork: What a Standstill Means for Cardano's Next Upgrade

Cardano currently runs on protocol version 11, which can be read off in the epoch parameters. That version comes out of the van Rossem hard fork and is the basis the next set of rules builds on. The next major upgrade goes by the name Dijkstra and is meant to lift the network to protocol version 12 in a first phase, together with the Ouroboros Linear Leios scaling method. The development teams involved name the fourth quarter of 2026 as their target and point out expressly that this is a target corridor and not a fixed date.

The connection to the constitutional committee is direct: a hard fork on Cardano is initiated through a governance action of the type HardForkInitiation, and that action needs committee votes. A body below the minimum size cannot confirm it. The same applies to the parameter change through which the Dijkstra parameters are to be written into the constitution.

A governance standstill from September onwards would therefore reach beyond procedure and hit the network's upgrade schedule as well. How long it would last depends solely on how quickly a new renewal action is submitted and ratified.

Putting the Governance Risk in Context: What This Means for Staking and Custody of Your ADA

For the everyday life of an ADA holder, a standstill changes little at first. Staking carries on, rewards continue to be paid out, transactions are confirmed. What does change is the network's ability to react to problems: fee parameters, block sizes and treasury withdrawals are then fixed in place.

For assessing this cryptocurrency as an investment, this is one governance risk among several, and a different one from the risk of a technical fault. If your question is about the current valuation, the arguments are laid out in our stocktake, Is Cardano a Good Buy at Current Prices?

What this piece deliberately does not contain is any statement about how the market will react to one outcome or the other. The chain data says something about procedure and deadlines. About prices it says nothing.

Cardano Constitutional Committee: What to Take Away

1. Remember September 6, not September 1. The renewal action can still be ratified up to the end of epoch 653. Anyone holding ADA in self-custody should look into the governance section of their wallet during this period; the hardware for it is covered in the hardware wallet comparison.
2. Check where your voting power sits. If it rests on always abstain or with a representative who has been inactive for more than twenty epochs, it does not count. Re-delegating costs a matter of cents and leaves your staking rewards untouched, as the comparison of staking platforms shows.
3. Keep procedural risk separate from the price question. A governance standstill blocks upgrades and treasury withdrawals, not block production. If you are drawing conclusions from it for your own choice of provider, work with the comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.

The rules at issue here are publicly available to read: the Cardano constitution in its German version and the governance standard CIP-1694, the source of the rule on the committee's minimum size.

(As of August 27, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Solana traded at $109.41 on 27 August at 17:08 UTC, its highest level of the year. Bitcoin was hovering just below $80,000 at the same time. For the first sustained stretch in months, the larger asset is not setting the pace. The timing is not a coincidence. Solana's first formal on-chain governance vote closed at roughly 15:30 UTC on 27 August, at the end of epoch 1023. SOL cleared $109 within about two hours of that deadline, taking out the $102.70 level that had rejected it a day earlier.

How far has Solana actually run?

$SOL has gained roughly 46% since mid-August, rising from near $75 to above $109.

The move has three distinct phases visible on the chart. Through late July and the first half of August, SOL held a tight range around $75, drifting slightly lower into the 7 August low. From 9 to 18 August it ground upward to about $78, still without much conviction. Then on 19 August the character of the move changed completely: an almost vertical leg carried SOL from the high $70s into the $90s within days.

That third phase is what most traders are reacting to. The 7-day gain sat at 31.87% as of 25 August, with a 30-day move near 35.6%. Both figures are now higher after today's push.

It is worth being precise about what got broken. SOL briefly touched $102.88 on 26 August and was immediately rejected, falling back to the mid-$90s while leveraged longs took $17.51 million in liquidations in a single day. Resistance around $102.70 marked a 13-week high. Today's move through $109 is the second attempt at that level, and this time it held.

Is Solana really outperforming Bitcoin?

Yes, on both the weekly and monthly view, though the gap is narrower than it feels.

Over the seven days to 25 August, Solana rose about 27% against Bitcoin's 23%. On 26 August, SOL gained 1.5% while $Bitcoin lost 0.2% and slipped back below $79,000. Today's move widens that spread further.

The nuance worth holding onto is that this is not capital leaving Bitcoin for Solana. On 24 August, US-listed Bitcoin, Ether, Solana and Hyperliquid products drew nearly $192.6 million in combined demand. Bitcoin ETFs alone took $208.9 million that day, following roughly $1.6 billion the previous week. Both assets are absorbing inflows at the same time.

That distinction matters for how you read the ratio. A genuine rotation means money moving out of one asset and into another. What is happening here looks more like fresh capital arriving across the board, with Solana capturing a disproportionate share of it relative to its size. The outperformance is real. The rotation framing is not, at least not yet.

What did the governance vote actually decide?

Three proposals went to a stake-weighted vote between 22 and 27 August, two of which would tighten SOL supply meaningfully.

This is the substance behind the price move, and it is the part most of the commentary is skipping.

• SGP-0001, the Solana Constitution. Ratifies a canonical governance framework and activates Solana's on-chain governance system, svmgov.
• SGP-0002, faster disinflation. Doubles the annual disinflation rate from 15% to 30%. Under SIMD-0550, this would cut future issuance by roughly 18.9 million SOL over six years, worth around $1.7 billion at current prices.
• SGP-0003, fee restructuring. SIMD-0553 proposes a fixed inclusion fee of 2,500 lamports per transaction, with a resource component scaling to computational demand and burned rather than paid out. This could lift daily burns from roughly 648 SOL toward 9,000, close to a fourteenfold increase.

Two caveats deserve more weight than they are getting. First, an approving vote only green-lights development. Technical implementation, testing and on-chain activation all follow separately through the SIMD process, so nothing changes about SOL's supply the moment the vote closes. Second, Solana Company, listed on Nasdaq as HSDT, backed the constitution but voted against both the faster disinflation and the fee changes. When a major stakeholder splits its vote that way, the supply-shock narrative is less unanimous than the price action suggests.

Do the three technical claims hold up?

Partly, and one of them cuts both ways.

Three claims are circulating alongside this move: that SOL/BTC hit a seven-month high, that RSI broke out of a five-year downtrend, and that SOL bounced from support held since 2021. All three come from chart reading rather than reported data, so treat them as one analyst's interpretation rather than established fact.

The SOL/BTC observation is directionally consistent with the price data. At $109.41 against Bitcoin near $79,000, the ratio sits around 0.00138, and SOL last traded above $100 in February 2026. Whether that constitutes a clean seven-month high depends on where you measure Bitcoin, and we have not independently verified the exact reading.

The support claim rests on a trendline drawn from 2021. SOL/BTC has been in a broad downtrend since mid-2021, so a bounce from a level with that much history would be meaningful if it holds. It also cannot be confirmed from reported data, and trendlines drawn across five years are unusually sensitive to where you place them.

The RSI claim is the one that needs care, because it points in two directions at once. A breakout from a long-term RSI downtrend is a momentum signal. But the same indicator on the 14-day timeframe recently read 84.31, and touched roughly 79 during the 26 August rejection. Both readings are deep in overbought territory. Anyone citing RSI as evidence of strength here should also be citing it as evidence of exhaustion, because it is the same number.

Is the ETF bid real money?

This is the most solid part of the case, because it is reported rather than inferred.

US spot Solana ETFs took $33.5 million on 24 August, the largest single-day inflow since December 2025 and the biggest of the year to date. That extended the streak to five consecutive sessions and pushed cumulative net inflows to a record $1.22 billion.

The on-chain picture supports it. Solana processed 4.2 billion transactions in July. Stablecoins on the network sit around $15.94 billion, with weekly DEX volume near $19.74 billion, and tokenized assets on Solana are approaching $4 billion. Galaxy Digital launched SOL-backed lending on 26 August, letting holders borrow against staked SOL without selling, which adds a channel for holding rather than rotating out.

Corporate treasury demand is present too. Forward Industries holds over 6.9 million SOL and runs its own validator.

What could break this?

The overbought reading, the gap between voting and shipping, and Bitcoin itself.

The most immediate risk is positioning. An RSI in the 80s after a 46% run is the textbook setup for a sharp unwind, and yesterday's $17.51 million in long liquidations showed how quickly it happens when a breakout fails. The first attempt at $102.88 was rejected within hours.

The second risk is the gap between a vote passing and supply actually changing. If traders bought a supply shock that will not touch circulating SOL for months, the catalyst is spent while the fundamentals are unchanged. Votes that only authorise development are the easiest kind to overprice.

On the downside, the levels to watch are $94.42, the 23.6% Fibonacci retracement, then $88.18, and the 200-day EMA near $81.15 below that.

The third risk is the one nobody controls. Bitcoin needs to hold the $75,000 to $76,000 zone. High-beta assets that have run 46% do not fall proportionally when the market turns, they fall harder, and SOL currently carries elevated funding. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh delivers his first Jackson Hole keynote on 28 August, which puts a macro event directly in front of a heavily positioned market.

Solana is outperforming Bitcoin, and unlike most claims of that kind this month, it has identifiable reasons behind it: record ETF demand, genuine network usage, and a credible supply argument. Whether the outperformance survives contact with an overbought chart and a governance process that has only just begun is a separate question.

Bitcoin has just closed out its strongest stretch of 2026. The price climbed from roughly $62,800 in early August to above $80,000 on 25 August, a gain of about 22% in a single week and close to 28% across the month. It was Bitcoin's best weekly performance since 2023.

Momentum came from several directions at once. The US Treasury doubled the size of its bond buyback operations, renewed movement behind the Clarity Act lifted risk appetite, and roughly $2.7 billion in short positions were force-closed on the way up. Spot Bitcoin ETF inflows, negative for the year at one point in 2026, turned positive again through July and August.

One thing worth keeping in perspective before anyone calls this a new bull market: Bitcoin peaked at $126,198 in October 2025 and fell to a 21-month low near $59,300 in June 2026. At $80,000 the asset is still roughly 37% below its record. This is a recovery, not a breakout to new highs.

Is the entire crypto market up, or just Bitcoin?

The whole market is up, but $Bitcoin is still taking the larger share, and that gap is where the opportunity sits.

The total crypto market capitalisation now sits near $2.75 trillion. The altcoin market excluding Bitcoin, tracked as TOTAL2, added roughly $215 billion between 19 and 22 August and pushed back above $1 trillion. CryptoQuant analyst Darkfost found that 56% of Binance-listed altcoins have reclaimed their 200-day moving averages, a sharp reversal from the months when 80 to 85% traded below that line.

So altcoins are participating. What they are not doing is leading.

Bitcoin dominance climbed to around 61% during the week before easing back to roughly 59%, near its highest level of the year. In a genuine rotation, dominance falls as capital moves down the risk curve. Here it rose. CoinMarketCap's Altcoin Season Index reads in the mid-40s, up sharply from 33 a week earlier but still well short of the 75 mark that defines an actual altcoin season.

The result is a market where a handful of names ran extremely hard and the rest went nowhere. Over the seven days to 25 August, $XRP gained 43.7%, $Ethereum 28.6% and Solana 25.6%, all beating Bitcoin's 22.6%. Chainlink added more than 30%. Zcash rose roughly 75% and Aave more than 60%. Below that top tier, plenty of established projects posted single-digit weeks.

How were these five altcoins selected?

Each coin underperformed Bitcoin over the past week, the past month, or both, and each has an identifiable catalyst rather than just an oversold chart.

Three filters were applied:

1. Clear underperformance versus Bitcoin's 22.6% weekly gain, its 28% monthly gain, or both.
2. A real reason to reprice, meaning a shipped upgrade, a regulatory shift, a structural supply change, or measurable business growth.
3. Sufficient liquidity to enter and exit without moving the market against yourself.

Meme tokens and projects with no independent development activity were excluded. The list is ordered by market capitalisation, not by conviction.

Why is BNB the largest altcoin still trailing Bitcoin?

BNB gained 15.4% over the week against Bitcoin's 22.6%, making it the only top-five asset to materially underperform during the rally.

$BNB trades near $700. Every other major, Ethereum, XRP and Solana included, beat Bitcoin over the same seven days. BNB did not, and it did so while carrying one of the cleanest fundamental profiles in the sector.

The case rests on structure. BNB's quarterly burn mechanism removes supply on a fixed schedule regardless of sentiment, which is a rare thing in an asset class where most tokens face unlock pressure rather than contraction. BNB Chain continues to carry high transaction throughput, and the token retains direct utility across the largest exchange ecosystem in crypto.

The case against is concentration risk, and it is not a small one. BNB's value is tied to the fortunes of a single exchange operator and to whatever regulatory posture the US and EU adopt toward it next. That link cuts in both directions. It has powered the token through past cycles and it is precisely why some institutional allocators will not touch it.

For a September position, BNB is the lowest-volatility name on this list. It is unlikely to triple. It is also the least likely to go to zero.

Can Hedera (HBAR) turn enterprise adoption into an actual price move?

$HBAR trades around $0.068 with a market cap near $3 billion, still roughly 22% below its 200-day EMA, despite regulatory clarity and a live US spot ETF.

The gap between Hedera's institutional footprint and its chart is the widest of any asset here.

On the adoption side, the Hedera Governing Council has grown to 31 members including FedEx, Google, IBM, Boeing, Standard Bank, NVIDIA and ServiceNow. Each member operates a node. Archax has facilitated tokenized UK gilts and money market funds on Hedera, and Lloyds Banking Group has used tokenized Hedera assets as FX collateral.

On the regulatory side, HBAR was included among 16 major crypto assets formally classified as digital commodities in a joint SEC and CFTC interpretive rule in March 2026, removing them from stricter securities oversight. The Canary HBAR ETF launched on Nasdaq in October 2025, making HBAR the third cryptocurrency to obtain US spot ETF status, and it has recorded steady inflows since. Hedera also added full EVM compatibility in July 2026, letting developers build with standard Ethereum tooling.

So why is the price flat? Two reasons. Scheduled treasury releases add continuous dilution pressure, which absorbs demand that would otherwise show up as price. And Hedera has a long track record of announcing enterprise partnerships that do not convert into sustained token demand. HBAR broke a daily descending trendline on 21 August with strong volume, but the structure only genuinely changes on a decisive close above $0.082.

Is Avalanche (AVAX) cheap enough for the discount to matter?

$AVAX trades around $7.50, down roughly 70% over the past year and more than 90% from its 2021 high, while its DeFi ecosystem has been expanding.

Avalanche is the deep-drawdown name on this list, and drawdown alone is never a thesis. What makes AVAX interesting in September is that the ecosystem activity has diverged from the price.

Aave deployed its V4 on Avalanche and launched Stable Vaults, a product that lets fintechs offer stablecoin yield without building DeFi infrastructure in-house. That matters because it routes institutional-adjacent flow through Avalanche rather than around it. The chain's subnet architecture also remains one of the more credible answers to the tokenized real-world asset question, a sector that crossed $36 billion on-chain in 2026.

The counter-argument is straightforward and it has been correct for two years running. Avalanche has repeatedly attracted high-quality integrations without translating them into token demand, because subnets can use the technology while accruing limited value to AVAX holders. This is the same value-capture problem that has hollowed out several Layer-1 tokens, and nothing has definitively resolved it.

Treat AVAX as a bet that the RWA narrative eventually rewards the chains doing the work. That is a thesis, not a certainty.

Does Uniswap (UNI) finally have a value capture story?

$UNI has been one of the weakest large-cap DeFi tokens of the summer, falling 18.5% in the week to 18 August while the sector rallied around it.

Uniswap remains the dominant decentralised exchange by volume, and UNI remains a token that historically captured very little of that. This is the single most-discussed value-accrual problem in DeFi.

The reason to look at it now is that the debate over routing protocol fees to token holders has moved from perennial forum discussion toward something closer to a live governance question, helped by a US regulatory environment that is materially friendlier than the one that froze the issue for years. If a fee mechanism is ever ratified, the repricing would be mechanical rather than narrative-driven.

The reason for caution is that this has been the bull case for UNI since 2021 and it has not happened yet. Governance tokens that might one day capture revenue trade at a persistent discount to ones that already do, and that discount is rational. Uniswap also faces genuine competitive pressure from newer venues and from perpetuals platforms that have taken share of on-chain volume.

UNI belongs on this list because the outcome is binary and the market is currently pricing only one side of it. That also makes it the name most likely to keep going nowhere.

Why is Polkadot (DOT) still lagging after shipping so much?

$DOT sits far below its cycle highs despite an ambitious architectural roadmap, making it the most contrarian entry on this list.

Polkadot's problem has never been engineering output. It has been that the engineering output does not reach the token.

The forward case centres on the JAM upgrade, a rearchitecture of the relay chain into a more general compute environment, plus continued work on making parachain deployment cheaper and less capital-intensive than the original auction model. If Polkadot succeeds in becoming infrastructure that other chains rent, DOT's role changes from a staking-and-governance asset into something with recurring demand.

The case against is the same one that has held for three years. Inflation continues, parachain demand has been well below early projections, and developers can build with Substrate without needing DOT at all. Polkadot has consistently ranked among the highest in development activity while ranking among the worst in price performance, which tells you the market does not currently pay for that.

Include DOT only if you accept it as a bet on tokenomics and go-to-market execution rather than on technology. The technology was never the bottleneck.

Which of these five altcoins carries the most risk?

All five carry meaningfully more risk than Bitcoin, and buying laggards is a strategy that fails at least as often as it works.

There is a specific trap in laggard investing worth naming plainly. A coin can lag because the market has not got to it yet, or because the market has already examined it and concluded it is not worth more. Being early and being wrong look identical right up until they do not. Uniswap and Polkadot in particular have been the cheap-looking option for several years running.

Three risks apply to the whole list in September. First, this rotation is unconfirmed: the Altcoin Season Index in the mid-40s is an improvement, not a signal. Second, Bitcoin needs to hold the $75,000 to $76,000 area. If it breaks, overbought altcoins carrying high funding rates unwind faster than Bitcoin does. Third, the macro calendar is dense. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh delivers his first Jackson Hole keynote on 28 August, and his guidance since taking office in May has been deliberately sparse, which leaves considerable room for a surprise in either direction.

A final note on mechanics rather than markets. Rapid price increases create exactly the conditions in which people make their worst security decisions. Fake wallet promotions and seed-phrase phishing become far more effective when attention returns to crypto. If you are moving size, move it carefully.

Pump.fun (PUMP) changes hands at $0.004564 at the time of writing. That is roughly 47 percent below the twelve-month high of $0.008619 set on 16 September 2025, and almost four times the twelve-month low of $0.001196 from 26 June 2026. After a gain of 42 percent in seven days and 126 percent in thirty, the question facing anyone looking at the token today differs from the one that applied in June: is Pump.fun a good buy at current prices, or does the price already reflect what the platform delivers?

cryptoticker.io collected the price data behind this analysis on 27 August 2026. The source is market data from CoinMarketCap, retrieved through the numerical asset ID rather than the ticker, because the symbol PUMP is carried by several unrelated tokens. The method is standard: daily closing prices across 365 days, from which we calculated the 200-day and the 50-day exponential moving average, the 14-day relative strength index and the twelve-month extremes.

Pump.fun price analysis: where the PUMP price stands and which levels matter

At $0.004564 the token holds a market capitalisation of about 1.81 billion dollars and ranks 42nd by that measure. Both averages that define the medium-term picture sit far below that quote: the 200-day average at $0.002349, the 50-day average at $0.002717. Price is therefore around 94 percent above its 200-day line and about 68 percent above its 50-day line, a configuration that says the advance has been rapid rather than gradual.

Three price zones organise the chart. The upper reference is the twelve-month high of $0.008619 from September 2025, still roughly 47 percent away. The current zone runs between the round $0.004 mark and the $0.005 area. Beneath that, the first structural floor is the 50-day average at $0.002717, and below it the 200-day average at $0.002349 marks the boundary of the trend that began at the June low of $0.001196.

The gap between the current quote and those two lines is the central fact of this analysis. A pullback that merely returns the token to its 50-day average would cost around 40 percent from today's level. That is arithmetic rather than forecast, and it defines the risk an entry at $0.004564 accepts.

Is the Pump.fun downtrend broken or only interrupted?

From the September 2025 high of $0.008619 to the June 2026 low of $0.001196, PUMP lost about 86 percent. Since that low the price has recovered roughly 282 percent, and over the full twelve months it stands about 57 percent higher than a year ago.

Technically, the downtrend is broken rather than merely interrupted. Price trades above both averages, and the 50-day average at $0.002717 sits above the 200-day average at $0.002349, the sequence trend followers read as a confirmed upward structure.

Two qualifications belong next to that reading. The token began trading in July 2025, so the entire data set covers a single market cycle. And a broken downtrend is a statement about direction rather than about valuation: the same chart that shows a recovery also shows a token that has moved 282 percent in nine weeks without a meaningful correction along the way.

What RSI and moving averages mean for a Pump.fun entry

The 14-day relative strength index stands at 70.2. Readings above 70 are conventionally called overbought, which does not mean a decline is due. It means recent daily gains have dominated recent daily losses to an unusual degree, and that new buyers are entering after the move rather than before it. In strong trends an RSI can remain elevated for weeks; what changes is the price paid for the same exposure.

The moving averages tell the same story in a different unit. An asset trading 94 percent above its 200-day line has stretched far from its own medium-term mean, and mean reversion in this segment tends to be abrupt rather than orderly. For a buyer, the practical consequence is the distance to the levels where support would first be tested: $0.002717 and, further down, $0.002349.

Broader sentiment points the same way. The CoinMarketCap Fear and Greed reading stood at 80 on 27 August 2026, in the extreme greed band, which says the market is positioned for continuation. Positioning of that kind has historically made pullbacks sharper when they arrive. The longer-dated view sits in our Pump.fun price prediction.

What trading volume reveals about Pump.fun demand

Turnover in PUMP amounts to about 288.5 million dollars over 24 hours, against a market capitalisation of roughly 1.81 billion dollars. Close to 16 percent of the float trading in a single day is high in absolute terms and typical for this segment.

The trend in volume matters more than the level. Average daily turnover over the past 30 days sits near 177.5 million dollars, while the 90-day average is about 105.2 million. Activity has expanded alongside the price, which is the pattern that gives a rally its confirmation. Advances on shrinking volume are the ones that tend to fail.

One detail argues for caution. Over the most recent 24 hours the token lost about 6 percent while turnover stayed above 288 million dollars. Falling prices on elevated volume are the signature of distribution, of holders selling into demand. A single day proves nothing, and it is worth watching whether the pattern repeats.

Which structural factors speak for Pump.fun: supply mechanics, usage and regulation

Supply is the first structural fact, and it cuts both ways. Of a maximum supply of 1,000,000,000,000 tokens, about 397,291,627,668 circulate today, close to 40 percent. Every market capitalisation figure quoted for PUMP therefore describes a minority of the eventual float, and the tokens still outside circulation are a supply overhang that a rising price does nothing to remove.

Usage is the second. Pump.fun operates as a token launch platform on Solana, and its revenue comes from fees charged on token creation and on trading activity across the platform. That gives the token an anchor that pure memecoins lack: platform activity is measurable, and it rises and falls with speculative appetite across the Solana ecosystem. It also makes PUMP a leveraged expression of that appetite rather than an independent one. The infrastructure it depends on is documented in the Solana developer documentation.

Regulation is the third. In the European Union, crypto asset service providers operate under the MiCA framework, and the classification of platform tokens carrying fee-linked value remains an area of active supervisory attention. The European Securities and Markets Authority publishes its guidance for the sector, and anyone building a position of size should follow that work rather than assume the status quo persists.

What speaks for buying PUMP at current prices

The first argument is trend structure. Price sits above both the 200-day average at $0.002349 and the 50-day average at $0.002717, with the shorter line above the longer one. Buyers who work with trend confirmation rather than with bottom fishing have their signal.

The second is the volume backing. A 42 percent weekly advance carried by turnover well above its own 90-day average of roughly 105.2 million dollars per day is better supported than a move on thin trading, and that depth lowers the cost of building or exiting a position.

The third is the distance to the record. At $0.004564 the token remains about 47 percent below its twelve-month high of $0.008619. For anyone who accepts the platform's revenue model as durable, that gap is the part of the case that has not yet been closed by the rally.

What speaks against buying Pump.fun at current prices

The first counterargument is the extension itself. Buying at $0.004564 means paying 94 percent above the 200-day average and 68 percent above the 50-day average, and accepting that a routine return to the shorter line would take roughly 40 percent off the position. An RSI of 70.2 says that entry happens after the crowd, not ahead of it.

The second is the supply overhang. With around 397,291,627,668 of 1,000,000,000,000 tokens in circulation, roughly 60 percent of the eventual supply has yet to reach the market. Tokens that enter circulation later meet whatever demand exists at that moment, and schedules of this kind have repeatedly capped recoveries in comparable assets.

The third is the thinness of the record. The price history covers a single cycle, from the July 2025 launch through the September 2025 high of $0.008619, the June 2026 low of $0.001196 and the current recovery. There is no second cycle against which to test how platform revenue behaves when speculative activity contracts for a prolonged period, and the concentration of that revenue in one ecosystem is a risk no chart displays.

How to buy Pump.fun (PUMP) at the current price: costs, custody and providers

PUMP is listed on a smaller set of venues than the large caps, so the first practical step is checking availability rather than fees. Where the token is offered, the cost consists of the trading fee, typically between 0.1 and 1.5 percent depending on venue and order type, and the spread, which in less liquid pairs frequently exceeds the visible fee. Limit orders are the standard defence against the second cost. Our exchange comparison sets the fee models side by side, and the reports on Kraken and Bitvavo cover deposit routes and account requirements.

Custody is the second decision. Positions held for months belong in wallets whose keys the holder controls, and the options are compared in our hardware wallet comparison. Leaving the token on the venue substitutes counterparty risk for key-management risk. For derivative exposure, our comparison of perpetual DEX platforms is the relevant reference.

Position sizing is the third. A token that has moved 282 percent in nine weeks and lost 86 percent in the nine months before belongs, if at all, in the part of a portfolio whose complete loss would not change the plan.

Is Pump.fun a good buy at current prices, short term and long term

Short term, the picture is a strong trend at a stretched price. Momentum, volume and sentiment point the same way, while an RSI of 70.2 together with a 94 percent premium over the 200-day average describes an entry with limited margin for error. The nearest reference for a failed continuation is the 50-day average at $0.002717.

Long term, the case rests on a question no chart answers: whether fee revenue from token launches on Solana proves durable across a full cycle rather than only in a phase of high speculative activity. If it does, the 47 percent discount to the twelve-month high of $0.008619 is the relevant framing. If it does not, the June low of $0.001196 shows what this token does when that activity dries up.

This is an assessment, not a recommendation, and it can be falsified. The constructive reading would be wrong if the price closed back below the 200-day average at $0.002349, if daily turnover fell durably beneath the 90-day average of about 105.2 million dollars while the price held, or if further supply entering circulation coincided with a persistent decline in platform activity. The cautious reading would be wrong if the token consolidated above the $0.004 area for several weeks while volume stayed elevated, letting the averages close the gap from below rather than the price closing it from above.

Buying Pump.fun (PUMP): What to Take Away

1. At $0.004564 the token trades far above both of its averages and about 47 percent below its twelve-month high, so the entry pays for a trend that is already established. The longer-dated view sits in our Pump.fun price prediction.
2. The supply schedule matters more than the chart: roughly 60 percent of the maximum supply has yet to circulate, which is the structural difference between this token and the large caps examined in our analysis of whether Bitcoin is a good buy at current prices.
3. PUMP is a leveraged expression of speculative activity on Solana, so the ecosystem view belongs with the token view, as set out in our assessment of whether Solana is a good buy at current prices.

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

(Last updated: 27 August 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices, fees and terms change; check them with the provider before every purchase. Crypto assets are subject to high price volatility and a total loss is possible.)

The transaction used Bitcoin’s existing rules to protect funds from a future quantum attack without requiring a network upgrade.

Google's new privacy standard scrambles the one field of a web request that still travels in the clear: the name of the site being opened.

Developer Craig Raw said an AI-assisted review produced most of the fixes in version 2.5.4, though none appeared likely to put users’ funds at risk.

OpenAI says the model never sees your password—but a signed-in session can persist across tasks, and you can step away while it works.

Deribit's Friday settlement covers nearly a fifth of the exchange's Bitcoin open interest, and max pain sits well below where BTC is trading right now.

Bitcoin has once again failed to decisively break above the $82,000 resistance zone, but veteran trader Peter Brandt says he remains long on the cryptocurrency.

The market is battling for momentum at this point in time as bears are finally ready to step up.

Ripple is recommending that the XRP Ledger community withdraw the long-running XChainBridge (XLS-38) amendment.

Bitcoin has climbed back above $80,000 as renewed demand for spot exchange-traded funds fuels a sharp recovery.

As XRP surges to $1.5, AI agents pivot to Ripple USD stablecoin, driving a 100% rise in volume to shield on-chain budgets from high volatility.

Key Highlights

• ENA’s price climbed 23% within 24 hours, reaching approximately $0.16–$0.17, with a 100% gain over the previous week
• The Ethena Foundation acquired locked tokens from early seed investors who had previously sold ENA during the past nine months
• The scheduled monthly venture capital unlock mechanism has been eliminated to reduce future market sell pressure
• A governance proposal is currently active to implement protocol revenue-based ENA token buybacks
• USDe achieved over $320 million in circulation on Robinhood Chain in just 8 weeks, representing 42% of the network’s total stablecoin liquidity

The ENA token from Ethena experienced a substantial 23% price increase on Thursday following the Ethena Foundation’s announcement of significant changes to its token structure. This surge coincided with a general uptrend in cryptocurrency markets, where Bitcoin climbed past the $80,000 threshold.

At press time, ENA was exchanging hands between $0.16 and $0.17. The digital asset has experienced a remarkable 100% price appreciation within slightly more than seven days.

The Foundation revealed it had purchased all locked token allocations from specific major seed investors who had been selling ENA throughout the previous nine months. These transactions targeted investors controlling over 0.25% of the total token allocation. All purchases were executed through over-the-counter arrangements during the preceding two-week period.

This strategic buyout addresses a persistent issue regarding monthly investor token unlocks that have historically created downward price pressure on ENA. By eliminating this systematic token release schedule, the Foundation seeks to substantially decrease the monthly supply entering circulation.

Core team token allocations remain unchanged. These tokens continue under their existing vesting arrangements without modification.

Protocol Revenue Buyback Mechanism Proposed

A new governance initiative is currently undergoing voting that would implement a “fee switch” mechanism. This proposal outlines using net revenue generated from all Ethena-branded business operations to systematically repurchase ENA tokens from the open market.

The buyback program would intensify as USDe’s total circulation reaches predetermined thresholds. When USDe circulation achieves $7.5 billion, the protocol would allocate 95% of net revenue toward ENA token acquisitions, while reserving 5% for ecosystem development initiatives.

Additionally, the Ethena Foundation and Ethena Labs have agreed in principle to a Master Framework Agreement. This arrangement would transfer virtually all intellectual property rights and economic value generated by the Ethena protocol to the Foundation and token holders, rather than equity stakeholders in the Labs entity. Full agreement details are scheduled for public release in October.

USDe Adoption Accelerates on Robinhood Chain

According to analyst Mesh, as reported by crypto intelligence platform Wu Blockchain, USDe’s rapid expansion on Robinhood Chain resulted from strategic infrastructure decisions and Steakhouse Financial’s selection of Ethena as the principal collateral provider for Robinhood Earn. Data indicates that approximately 62–65% of capital within the Steakhouse USDG Vault migrated into the USDe/USDG Morpho lending market.

Within only eight weeks of deployment, USDe has accumulated over $320 million in total value on Robinhood Chain, currently comprising 42% of all stablecoin supply on the network, based on Token Terminal analytics.

Notwithstanding this week’s impressive performance, ENA still trades more than 15% below its value at the beginning of the year. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) recently incorporated Ethena into its single-asset cryptocurrency benchmark indices earlier this week.

The post Ethena (ENA) Rallies 23% Following Foundation’s Strategic Buyback of Early Investor Tokens appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• SPCX stock gains 0.89% as SpaceX completes Ship 40 recovery from Australia
• SPCX holds $140 support as Ship 40 heads back to SpaceX’s Texas base
• SpaceX recovers Ship 40 after its first intact Starship ocean landing
• SPCX trades near $141 as SpaceX prepares for another Starship test
• Ship 40 recovery gives SpaceX valuable data for future Starship designs

SpaceX  (SPCX) closed at $140.87, gaining 0.89% as SpaceX completed the recovery of Starship Ship 40. The stock recovered from the $139 area and held above the $140 support level. Meanwhile, SPCX faces resistance between $141.00 and $141.50, keeping the focus on its next price move.

Space Exploration Technologies Corp., SPCX

SpaceX Completes Ship 40 Recovery

SpaceX moved Ship 40 toward Starbase after recovering the vehicle from waters near Christmas Island. The upper stage came from the company’s 13th Starship test flight, which launched from Texas. Subsequently, engineers loaded the vehicle onto a semi-submersible vessel for its journey to South Texas.

Before loading Ship 40, engineers inspected the vehicle in calmer waters near the Australian territory. They also collected heat-shield samples and examined damage from the flight. Therefore, the findings will support design changes for later Starship vehicles.

Ship 40 splashed down in the Indian Ocean on July 24 after launching from Texas. It became the first Starship upper stage to remain intact after a water landing. However, SpaceX had to use recovery vessels because the vehicle landed offshore.

Starship Recovery Provides Flight Data

Rough seas initially complicated the recovery operation and delayed efforts to secure Ship 40. The recovery teams eventually guided the vehicle near Christmas Island on August 18. Afterward, engineers began detailed inspections before preparing the ship for transport.

The recovery also gave SpaceX access to hardware that completed an actual spaceflight. Engineers examined the heat shield and other areas affected during atmospheric reentry. As a result, the company can use physical flight data when developing future Starship versions.

SpaceX plans to avoid ocean recovery during regular Starship operations. Instead, the company wants future vehicles to return directly to Texas after completing missions. The long-term goal is to catch returning vehicles with launch tower equipment.

SPCX Stock and Upcoming Starship Test

SpaceX has reported more than $15 billion in Starship development spending. The company spent about $3 billion on the program during 2025, according to disclosed figures. Additionally, SpaceX reported $1.08 billion in second-quarter space segment research and development expenses.

The next Starship flight test targets September as SpaceX continues development of the vehicle. However, the company expects the launch tower catch attempt to come several months later. The schedule therefore keeps the upcoming test focused on continued flight development.

SPCX remains above its $135 IPO price and below its $225 all-time high. Meanwhile, Stocktwits showed bearish retail sentiment during the previous 24 hours, with low message volume. SpaceX continues developing Starship for rapid reuse, lunar missions, Mars plans, Starlink expansion, and orbital computing.

The post SpaceX (SPCX) Stock: Gains as SpaceX Completes Ship 40 Recovery appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Highlights

• Three additional cryptocurrencies—Solana, Avalanche, and Chainlink—are coming to Charles Schwab’s digital asset platform
• The platform debuted in May 2026 with exclusive access to Bitcoin and Ethereum trading
• Each cryptocurrency transaction incurs a 0.75% fee through the platform
• The brokerage giant manages more than $13 trillion in client assets with approximately 40 million accounts
• A new S&P 500 prediction contract offering is in development through collaboration with Cboe Global Markets

Charles Schwab has revealed its intention to broaden its cryptocurrency trading services. The expansion will bring Solana, Avalanche, and Chainlink to the Schwab Crypto platform alongside its existing Bitcoin and Ethereum offerings within the next several months.

The financial services company introduced Schwab Crypto in May 2026, providing retail investors with straightforward access to Bitcoin and Ethereum markets. Users can access these trading capabilities via Schwab’s web portal, smartphone application, and thinkorswim trading platform.

According to Schwab, the new additions represent a calculated strategy to “thoughtfully expand” its cryptocurrency portfolio by incorporating well-established digital currencies that align with investor interest.

Joe Vietri, who leads Digital Assets at Charles Schwab, explained that this expansion provides investors with additional options for constructing a digital asset portfolio while leveraging the comprehensive investment and banking services Schwab already delivers.

A Deliberate Strategy for Crypto Integration

Charles Schwab’s approach has been notably more conservative compared to certain competitors. Platforms such as Coinbase and Robinhood provide trading access to dozens of cryptocurrencies, while Schwab initiated operations with only two tokens before growing to five.

The financial institution has not disclosed a precise rollout timeline for these additional tokens. Furthermore, Schwab has not indicated whether additional cryptocurrencies beyond these three are under consideration.

Transaction fees on the platform stand at 75 basis points, equivalent to 0.75% per trade. The service operates in most American states, with the notable exceptions of New York and Louisiana, and remains unavailable in US territories or foreign markets.

Charles Schwab Premier Bank maintains custody of Schwab Crypto accounts, while the connected brokerage handles specific operational responsibilities for the banking division.

By July 31, 2026, the company oversaw $13.04 trillion in total client assets distributed among 39.9 million active brokerage accounts.

During the second quarter, Schwab posted record-breaking net revenue totaling $7.1 billion alongside net income of $2.8 billion.

Prediction Contracts on the Horizon

The cryptocurrency platform expansion represents just one element of Schwab’s wider initiative to diversify its trading product lineup.

This past June, the Wall Street Journal disclosed that Schwab intends to introduce prediction contracts linked to S&P 500 performance. This initiative stems from a collaborative arrangement with Cboe Global Markets.

These financial instruments would enable investors to speculate on whether the S&P 500 index will finish trading sessions above or below predetermined thresholds. Unlike services offered by Kalshi and Polymarket, Schwab’s initial rollout would concentrate exclusively on stock index predictions.

Industry observers anticipate this product will become available within several months, although the company has not provided an official launch date.

Schwab’s expansion into cryptocurrency trading and prediction markets illustrates how established brokerage firms are increasingly challenging crypto-focused platforms and fintech startups for retail trading volume.

Given its substantial user base of nearly 40 million active accounts, Schwab’s platform could significantly increase mainstream investor access to these newly supported cryptocurrencies.

The post Schwab Crypto Expands: Solana, Avalanche, and Chainlink Coming Soon appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• The HYPE token reached a fresh all-time high of $84.80, representing approximately 5% gains over the previous day
• Hyperliquid Strategies boosted its HYPE holdings to 29.3 million tokens following a $646.6 million capital raise
• A new AQAv2 reserve yield initiative directs funds toward HYPE token buybacks, estimated at approximately $182 million yearly
• President Trump indicated Hyperliquid may soon become accessible to US traders, with CFTC developing compliance framework
• Technical analysis identifies resistance at $89.23, with the subsequent Fibonacci level positioned at $92.37

The HYPE token is currently changing hands around $85.33 following a peak of $84.80 reached on Thursday. This represents the second all-time high established within a single week.

This upward momentum comes after a substantial 40% weekly gain that pushed past the previous $77 resistance barrier. Since breaking through, HYPE has successfully maintained $77 as a floor level.

The Nasdaq-listed Hyperliquid Strategies, trading under ticker symbol PURR, disclosed its treasury now contains 29.3 million HYPE tokens. The firm secured $646.6 million through a committed equity arrangement throughout fiscal 2026.

Total deployment reached approximately $773.4 million, accumulating roughly 16.5 million HYPE tokens at a mean acquisition price of $46.77 each. Holdings increased significantly from the initial 12.5 million tokens held post-merger.

The fiscal year concluded with reported net income of $305.5 million. Unrealized appreciation on HYPE holdings contributed $709.9 million to this total.

Following the earnings announcement, PURR equity advanced 19.64% to close at $13.83.

Token Repurchase Initiative and Regulatory Developments

Hyperliquid implemented its AQAv2 reserve yield mechanism on August 26. Approximately 90% of cost-adjusted returns generated from $6.74 billion in USDC deposits will fund systematic HYPE token buybacks.

Assuming a 3% annual yield rate, this structure could generate approximately $182 million in annual buyback capacity. Initial distributions are planned for October 3.

Regarding regulatory matters, President Trump commented on August 20 that Hyperliquid may become available to American users in the near term. Sources indicate the CFTC is developing a regulatory-compliant framework for the platform.

Exchange-traded funds tracking HYPE have also experienced renewed capital inflows on Wall Street.

Platform Metrics and Chart Analysis

Hyperliquid currently commands approximately 63% of decentralized perpetual futures open interest and represents 9.4% of worldwide derivatives trading activity. Perpetual contract volume reached $19.4 billion on August 21.

HIP-3 open interest surpassed $4 billion during August, while real-world asset markets accounted for over half of weekly trading volume in July.

From a technical perspective, immediate resistance appears at the upper Bollinger Band level of $89.23. Beyond that barrier, the 1.272 Fibonacci extension target stands at $92.37.

The Money Flow Index currently registers 91.42, exceeding the standard overbought threshold of 80.

Market analyst Crypto Patel shared his perspective on August 26, stating the macro timeframe structure appears concerning. He characterized the current formation as a possible setup designed to attract retail long positions before significant distribution occurs. He identified $79 as critical support, cautioning that a breakdown could trigger liquidity sweeps toward $69, $62, and potentially $58.

A substantial $1.2 billion token unlock event is scheduled for August 29, with an additional unlock planned one month thereafter.

The post Hyperliquid (HYPE) Surges to Record $84.80 as Treasury Swells Past 29M Tokens appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Highlights

• Cardano’s price declined more than 7% over the past week, hovering around $0.210 by Friday’s session
• Large wallet addresses purchased 160 million ADA tokens throughout the recent price decline starting Sunday
• Trader sentiment remains bearish with a long-to-short ratio of 0.74
• The Leios testnet demonstrated throughput capacity six times greater than the current mainnet during its 41-day trial
• Conflicting on-chain signals and derivatives metrics create uncertainty about ADA’s immediate price trajectory

The Cardano (ADA) token is currently changing hands near $0.210 on Friday following a weekly decline exceeding 7%. This downturn has brought ADA beneath the $0.220 threshold, capturing significant interest from market participants and blockchain analytics experts.

While the price action remains weak, large wallet holders have actively acquired tokens during this downturn. According to Santiment’s analytics, addresses containing between 10 million and 100 million ADA have added 160 million tokens to their holdings since the beginning of the week. This activity demonstrates persistent confidence from major stakeholders, although it hasn’t yet provided enough support to halt the downward momentum.

The derivatives landscape presents contrasting signals. CoinGlass reports ADA’s long-to-short ratio currently stands at 0.74, marking one of its lowest readings in more than 30 days. When this metric falls below the one-to-one mark, it indicates a greater number of market participants are positioning for additional price weakness.

Conversely, Thursday saw the funding rate flip positive, registering 0.0013% by Friday’s close. This positive reading means long position holders are compensating short holders, suggesting a portion of the market maintains bullish expectations.

CryptoQuant’s analytics further complicate the outlook. While futures markets display substantial whale-sized orders, sell-side pressure continues to prevail. Additional indicators remain in neutral territory.

Critical Price Zones Under Observation

ADA has successfully recaptured its 50-day and 100-day exponential moving averages, positioned at $0.190 and $0.197 respectively. This development provides a moderately constructive short-term framework, though the token faces formidable resistance levels above current prices.

The Relative Strength Index is declining toward the upper-50s range while the MACD histogram shows signs of compression. These technical indicators suggest waning bullish momentum. Immediate resistance barriers are located at $0.213, $0.231, and $0.236. The 200-day EMA at $0.246 marks the primary overhead resistance area.

Should prices decline, initial support emerges around $0.195, followed by $0.173. A decisive breach below this support cluster might expose the $0.150 level to testing.

Market analyst Sssebi shared insights on X, noting that a weekly candle closing above a crucial resistance trendline would indicate the beginning of a substantial upward movement. The analyst emphasized the significance of this weekly timeframe close as the catalyst for ADA’s next major rally.

Leios Testnet Demonstrates Impressive Performance

Beyond market price dynamics, Cardano’s technical development team announced impressive outcomes from the inaugural public Leios testnet deployment. The experimental network achieved throughput levels six times greater than the existing mainnet throughout the 41-day evaluation period. During peak stability, Leios managed 54% of total network traffic, executing 18 times the transaction volume of actual mainnet activity and processing 3.3 times the data volume.

All challenges identified during the testing period originated from implementation code rather than fundamental protocol design flaws. The development team addressed these issues through consistent weekly public software releases.

The Leios architecture functions as an additional layer above Cardano’s established Ouroboros Praos consensus mechanism. It introduces endorser blocks positioned between Praos blocks to enable parallel transaction processing at greater scale. The subsequent testing iteration, designated Water, has already commenced operations and incorporates incentive mechanisms for stake pool operators.

The post Cardano (ADA) Price Faces 7% Weekly Decline as Large Holders Accumulate 160M Tokens appeared first on Blockonomi.

Evernorth said on August 27 that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had declared its registration statement effective, moving its proposed merger with Armada Acquisition Corp. II closer to completion.

The development puts the XRP treasury company one step closer to a Nasdaq listing, although shareholders still need to approve the deal before it can close.

Evernorth Moves Closer to Nasdaq

The company announced that Armada Acquisition Corp. II shareholders will vote on the proposed business combination on September 30, 2026. Closing remains subject to that vote and other customary conditions.

Evernorth CEO Asheesh Birla said the company plans to enter public markets as blockchain utility grows, adding that it expects institutional finance to increasingly be built on-chain. “Evernorth is designed to accelerate XRP’s role in that work,” he noted in the announcement.

The effective registration statement follows a process that started publicly in March when Evernorth filed its Form S-4 in connection with its planned combination with Armada II, a special purpose acquisition company sponsored by Arrington Capital.

As CryptoPotato reported at the time, the filing provided the first detailed look at Evernorth’s plan to give public-market investors exposure to XRP through an actively managed treasury. The company said then that it had raised more than $1 billion in gross proceeds from institutional and strategic investors, including Ripple, SBI Holdings, Pantera Capital, Kraken, and Arrington Capital.

The latest filing moves the transaction beyond the SEC review stage, but it does not mean the merger has already closed. If shareholders approve the deal and the remaining conditions are satisfied, the combined firm is expected to become publicly traded on Nasdaq under the ticker XRPN, subject to exchange approval.

What the SEC Decision Changes

The registration statement becoming effective removes one major procedural hurdle, but as pointed out before, the shareholder vote remains ahead.

Evernorth’s March filing described the proposed transaction as a combination involving it, Armada II, and Ripple. Under the agreement, holders of company units and Armada stock would receive shares in the resulting public company, subject to the terms and limitations set out in the transaction document.

The proposed structure is also different from simply launching an XRP-focused fund. Evernorth is being organized as a public company whose strategy centers on holding and managing XRP. That gives investors exposure through corporate equity rather than direct ownership of the underlying token.

For XRP holders, the more interesting question may come after the merger. Evernorth, as said earlier, has raised more than $1 billion for its treasury strategy and has said it wants to build what it expects to be Nasdaq’s largest publicly traded XRP treasury company, and the community will be waiting to see whether that translates into sustained XRP demand or meaningful activity on the XRP Ledger.

At the time of writing, the fifth-largest cryptocurrency was trading just above $1.40, up almost 10% over one week and nearly 32% in the last 30 days.

The post XRP Treasury Giant Evernorth Moves Closer to Nasdaq Debut After SEC Milestone appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin’s latest rally appears to be driven partly by short covering rather than fresh leveraged positions, according to QCP Research. Open interest has fallen as BTC advanced, while strong spot ETF inflows have provided additional demand, the firm noted.

Spot demand is also strengthening, with QCP noting that ETF inflows are nearing the 95th percentile of the past year. However, the firm warned that the rally could become more fragile if short covering loses momentum and new demand does not replace it.

Strategy Raises Cash Without Adding Bitcoin

The market structure comes as Strategy raised more than $1.9 billion without adding Bitcoin to its holdings. The company reported 840,447 BTC for a second consecutive week, leaving its BTC reserve unchanged.

Strategy raised $2.01 billion through an at-the-market equity sale between August 17 and 23. It also built a $1.59 billion flexible cash reserve, bringing its total dollar assets to $6.69 billion.

The latest financing points to liquidity management rather than immediate accumulation. Strategy’s average purchase price remains $75,385 per BTC, with QCP viewing its cash reserve as support for preferred stock and post-dilution flexibility.

Macro Signals Keep Markets on Edge

Broader macroeconomic signals have also added uncertainty to the market. Minutes from the July Federal Open Market Committee meeting showed a 9-3 vote, with three officials preferring a 25-basis-point rate hike.

Attention now turns to Kevin Warsh’s appearance at Jackson Hole on Friday, although no specific policy guidance has been promised. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also announced plans to double the maximum size of long-term Treasury buybacks to $4 billion per operation from September 9.

The announcement pushed Treasury yields lower and the US dollar to a three-month low. QCP called the buyback plan a liquidity overlay, while the weaker dollar and elevated long-term yields could support Bitcoin and gold amid ongoing fiscal concerns.

Energy markets add another layer of uncertainty. Tensions around Iran and the Strait of Hormuz are raising supply concerns as tanker crossings decline and reserves fall below 300 million barrels.

With jobless claims due Thursday and Warsh speaking Friday, several near-term catalysts remain in focus. Bitcoin could remain range-bound into the September Federal Reserve meeting as markets assess whether current demand can sustain the rally.

The post Bitcoin Rally Could Lose Steam as Short Covering Fades: QCP appeared first on CryptoPotato.

A bizarre error that mistakenly credited Bithumb customers with roughly 620,000 BTC is now producing victories for the South Korean exchange in court.

The Seoul Central District Court has ordered one customer to return about $140,400 (194 million won) after they sold BTC mistakenly credited to their account. The court ruled Thursday that the proceeds constituted unjust enrichment.

Specifically, the ruling concerns the cash from those sales, not any Bitcoin the customer may still hold. The exchange filed the claim in March to recover the money linked to the February error.

How the Bitcoin Credit Error Happened

The case is Bithumb’s second court victory in two days after the same court awarded it $3,620 (5 million won) on Wednesday. Two other claims remain pending, involving $10,700 (14.8 million won) and $362,000 (500 million won).

Together, the four claims total about $517,000 (714 million won), with some filings served by public notice. Thursday’s ruling resolves only one part of a broader recovery effort stemming from the February 6 error.

That error occurred during a random-box promotion for small cash prizes. A staff member entered Bitcoin instead of Korean won, causing internal records to show roughly 620,000 BTC across hundreds of accounts.

Notably, the figure was far above Bithumb’s actual holdings of about 40,000 BTC. Trading continued for roughly 40 minutes, with about 1,788 BTC reaching the order book before the exchange halted activity.

Recovery and Regulatory Fallout

The miscredit sent the BTC/KRW pair down about 17%. The exchange reversed most of the false credits that day and said by March 10 that it had recovered 99.7% of the Bitcoin involved in the broader miscredit. It later sought to freeze a few outstanding coins, while some affected traders received 110% compensation.

The incident also drew scrutiny from South Korean regulators, who treated it as a control failure and began an emergency review the next day. Financial regulators examined the case, while lawmakers opened an urgent inquiry.

That review led to wider concerns about how exchanges handle mistaken balances. The Financial Supervisory Service said the balances could qualify as unjust enrichment, supporting Bithumb’s recovery efforts. Authorities later required licensed exchanges to reconcile customer ledgers with actual holdings every five minutes, while the Bank of Korea considered a market circuit breaker.

The post Bithumb Wins Lawsuit After Mistakenly Crediting Users With 620,000 BTC: Report appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Machi Big Brother proposed a $1 million buyout of Friends.Tech on August 27, offering to acquire the stalled project from Racer and Paradigm and relaunch its FRIEND token.

The proposal sent FRIEND sharply higher, but the move also revived questions about Machi’s own heavy losses on the token and whether his plan can bring the project back to life.

Machi Offers $1M as FRIEND Trading Activity Explodes

In a post on Wednesday, Machi Big Brother wrote that Friend.Tech was trading at less than $300,000 in market capitalization before making his offer.

“I’m offering a 1 mil usd buyout offer to Racer and @paradigm. We can CTO relaunch $FRIEND,” he wrote.

The proposal quickly changed the token’s trading activity, with CoinGecko data showing FRIEND up more than 1,600% over 24 hours at the time of writing, with the token trading near $0.06. It had traded as low as $0.0025 during the previous 24 hours and reached roughly $0.10 at its high. In addition, trading volume had climbed to about $5.3 million over 24 hours, a 94,831% increase from the previous day.

Moves across other timeframes were even bigger, with the asset jumping by more than 2,600% from where it had been a week ago and almost 3,400% in 14 days. Across one month, it had gained nearly 3,300%, although the numbers are bound to change given ongoing volatility.

Machi’s offer comes with a sizable personal history involving FRIEND. According to Lookonchain, he previously spent about 5,200 ETH, worth $16.7 million at the time, to acquire aroud 11 million FRIEND. Those tokens had been worth only $500,000 when Lookonchain posted, leaving Machi with a loss exceeding $16 million.

There was another detail. Lookonchain noted that Machi had transferred the 11 million coins to wallet 0x3205 five days before announcing his $1 million offer. However, the crypto trader rejected any suggestion that he had sold the tokens, and described the receiving address as his “new fomo wallet.”

Friend.Tech’s Collapse Left FRIEND Vulnerable

Friend.Tech launched on Base on August 2023 and initially drew users with a system that allowed people to trade access to influencers’ feeds. But activity weakened considerably after its early success.

As CryptoPotato reported in September 2024, the development team then transferred control of Friend.Tech’s smart contract to Ethereum’s null address, preventing future changes to fee or functionality. The decision came as platform revenues had fallen dramatically, with reported fees reaching as little as $71.

FRIEND also suffered heavily during that decline, and even reached a new all-time low. Wednesday’s rally therefore needs to be viewed against a much larger collapse, as even that move still leaves the token over 98% below its all-time high.

Machi’s proposal now puts the project in an unusual position: a token that had almost disappeared from traders’ attention suddenly has millions of dollars in daily turnover, while the person proposing its revival has already lost millions on a past investment. Whether the bid becomes an actual acqusition remains to be seen.

The post FRIEND Explodes Over 1,600% After Machi Big Brother Proposes $1M Takeover appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Solana’s native token has posted an 8% increase over the past 24 hours, prompting analysts to make highly bullish bets for the near future.

At the same time, some remain cautious, projecting potential double-digit declines, while certain factors reinforce the pessimistic thesis.

SOL’s Bullish Targets

Just a few hours ago, the asset’s price briefly exceeded $105, marking the highest point since early February. Currently, it trades at around $104, which translates into a solid 42% pump on a monthly scale.

SOL’s strong performance appears to stem from a blend of bullish factors working together. The most obvious one is the broader market resurgence driven by monetary policy changes in the US, among other reasons. Another element is the rising institutional interest, with spot SOL ETFs registering seven consecutive green days: something last observed in May this year.

Next on the list is the return of some of the big players. Analytics platform Lookonchain revealed that a smart trader (who has been inactive in the past two years) has purchased almost 96,000 SOL for nearly $10 million. The analytics resource noted that the market participant has previously completed two Solana swing trades, buying low and selling high both times, ultimately making $4.95 million in total profit. Of course, this has led to speculation that the player might know something the rest of us don’t.

For his part, X user Sweep disclosed that a whale opened a $14.8 million long position in Solana, stating that the investor previously made $1.1 million trading the asset with a 100% win rate.

Many analysts applauded SOL’s revival, expecting further short-term gains. X user Daan Crypto Trades argued that everything “looks good” as long as the price remains above $98.

SKYLINE opined that it is only a matter of time before SOL rises beyond $150, whereas Fuel projected an eventual explosion to $1,000. It is important to note that the higher target seems a bit far-fetched, but yet again, nothing is impossible in crypto.

Going South?

Unlike the aforementioned bulls, Sweep outlined a rather cautious forecast. He thinks SOL could nosedive to $70, giving investors a chance to hop on the bandwagon at lower prices. “After that, Solana will go parabolic,” he added.

The asset’s exchange net flow backs the theory of a short-term decline. According to CoinGlass, investors have been moving aggressively from self-custody to centralized exchanges, which in turn boosts immediate selling pressure.

The post Solana (SOL) Reclaims $100: Is It Time for a Parabolic Rally? appeared first on CryptoPotato.