China's recapitalization of state banks and insurers may stabilize financial systems but could increase sovereign debt, impacting future fiscal policies.

The post China to inject $54B into state banks and insurers in massive recapitalization push appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The US troop withdrawal from Iraq may shift regional power dynamics, impacting security and economic opportunities in the Middle East.

The post United States to complete troop withdrawal from Iraq by September 30 appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Zcash's dramatic rise highlights growing institutional interest in privacy-focused cryptocurrencies, potentially reshaping market dynamics.

The post Zcash surges over 6,300% from 2024 lows as first US spot ETF fuels institutional frenzy appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Vitality's reliance on stand-ins like jL highlights the challenges of maintaining competitive consistency amid roster changes and personal leaves.

The post Vitality evaluates Justinas ‘jL’ Lekavicius’ performance as stand-in appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

A failed Senate vote could delay crypto regulation, impacting market stability and leaving regulatory uncertainties unresolved until 2027.

The post Traders bet $2M against CLARITY Act ahead of Senate vote on September 15 appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Hargreaves Lansdown Reverses Course, Rolls Out Bitcoin Trading 

British financial services firm Hargreaves Lansdown is letting retail investors buy bitcoin — nearly one year after it said the cryptocurrency was “not an asset class.” 

The Bristol, UK-based investment firm’s website said it was offering bitcoin and other crypto exchange-traded notes to investors. ETNs are investment funds which trade on stock exchanges and track the prices of digital assets. 

It comes after the firm, which manages nearly £173 billion (over $233 billion) in assets, last year warned customers about buying bitcoin. 

“While longer-term returns of Bitcoin have been positive, Bitcoin has experienced several periods of extreme losses and is a highly volatile investment — much riskier than stocks or bonds,” the firm said at the time. 

“The HL Investment view is that Bitcoin is not an asset class, and we do not think cryptocurrency has characteristics that mean it should be included in portfolios for growth or income and shouldn’t be relied upon to help clients meet their financial goals.” 

Now, a number of ETNs tracking the price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are available. The firm warns users that “crypto ETNs are considered high-risk and may be volatile.”

U.S. regulator the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2024 approved bitcoin exchange-traded funds for investors after a decade of saying no to the products. 

The funds had the most successful debut in the history of ETFs as investors previously unable to buy exposure to the asset class rushed in to buy the products. 

Run by top asset managers and banks like BlackRock, Fidelity, and Morgan Stanley, the investment vehicles now collectively manage over $100 billion in assets. 

This post Hargreaves Lansdown Reverses Course, Rolls Out Bitcoin Trading  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Trezor Breach Worse Than Reported: Another 67,000 US Customers Exposed

Hardware wallet manufacturer Trezor has said that a data breach first announced last month is worse than originally reported. 

The Prague, Czech Republic-based company said Friday that an additional 67,000 U.S. customers had their names, emails, phone numbers, shipping addresses and order numbers leaked. The leaked data came from orders made between November 2019 and August 2021, according to Trezor. 

Trezor first announced in August that data from 11,742 customers from the U.S., UK, Sweden, Colombia, Brazil, Italy, and Portugal had been exposed — with names, emails, phone numbers and shipping addresses leaked. 

Another 1,947 customers just had their names, cities and emails exposed in the breach. 

In Friday’s announcement, Trezor said that its third-party fulfillment partner, ShipMonk, had falsely reassured the company about deleting customer data. 

“Throughout our entire relationship with ShipMonk, we repeatedly requested and received written assurance confirming the deletion of the data, in line with our contract, data policy, and past communications,” Trezor wrote. 

“We are very disappointed that, despite receiving this confirmation, the data was not deleted in their systems.”

Neither Trezor nor ShipMonk immediately responded to Bitcoin Magazine’s questions. 

Trezor first announced in August that the data had been leaked because ShipMonk experienced “unauthorized access to their systems containing customer data.” 

The company added that it had directly emailed all customers involved in the breach. Trezor’s parent company, SatoshiLabs, told Bitcoin Magazine last month that it was investigating the incident. 

Trezor is one of the most popular Bitcoin hardware wallet solutions, and also has support for storing other cryptocurrencies. 

Bitcoiners’ personal data has been targeted by cybercriminals in the past: back in 2020, an unauthorized party accessed popular hardware manufacturer Ledger’s e-commerce and marketing database, leaking over 1 million email addresses and the personal contact data of nearly 10,000 customers. 

At the start of this year, customers reported receiving emails from Global-e, Ledger’s payment partner, that a data breach at its cloud systems leaked sensitive customer data. 

This post Trezor Breach Worse Than Reported: Another 67,000 US Customers Exposed first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

El Salvador Isn’t Buying Bitcoin With Public Money, Says IMF 

El Salvador has not used public funds to accumulate bitcoin since the International Monetary Fund’s last review of its loan program, the fund said Thursday. 

In a report Thursday, the body said that the Central American country had instead received bitcoin from private donations, citing documentation from the government. It added that “no further Bitcoin accumulation beyond the documented donations is expected.”

El Salvador made headlines in 2021 when it became the first country in the world to make bitcoin legal tender. Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele in 2022 said the country would buy one bitcoin per day but it was never clear where the money was coming from — or if he was actually buying at all. 

“Documentation has been provided verifying that Bitcoin accumulation since the first review reflects private donations and that no public resources were used,” the IMF release said. 

“Understandings were also reached on steps to modernize the legal, regulatory, and supervisory framework for digital assets and to further strengthen the governance and risk-management arrangements for public-sector crypto-asset holdings. Going forward, no further bitcoin accumulation beyond the documented donations is expected.”

The report added that public participation in the government-sponsored bitcoin wallet has been largely wound down, with majority ownership and operational control handed to a private operator. 

El Salvador in 2021 debuted a state-sponsored wallet called Chivo for its citizens as part of its plan to increase bitcoin adoption in the country. 

“IMF staff thank the Salvadoran authorities for the constructive discussions and excellent collaboration,” the report added. 

The IMF El Salvador entered a $1.4 billion loan agreement at the end of December but the fund asked for the country to scale back certain aspects of its bitcoin strategy. 

Institutions like the World Bank and the IMF have long criticized President Bukele’s Bitcoin law, which also asked businesses to accept the cryptocurrency if they had the technological means to do so. 

President Bukele in 2024 admitted that Salvadorans weren’t using the cryptocurrency to buy things as expected, but always boasted that the government was still stacking sats. 

Since launching a crime crackdown to tackle the country’s notorious crime gangs, murder rates in El Salvador have plunged. The country was once the most dangerous place in the Americas but President Bukele is now trying to turn it into a tech hub. 

Crypto companies like Tether have since relocated to its capital, San Salvador. 

This post El Salvador Isn’t Buying Bitcoin With Public Money, Says IMF  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Dips Below $80,000 on Strong US Jobs Report

Bitcoin slid Friday after a better-than-expected labor report showed that the U.S. job market accelerated in August. 

The leading cryptocurrency was recently trading for close to $79,764 after dropping as low as $78,706 earlier in the morning in New York. It’s currently down over 1% over a 24-hour period. On Thursday, the coin soared above $82,000. 

The Federal Reserve is typically more likely to raise interest rates when the labor market is strong, because more people employed means more spending, and more spending can push inflation up. 

Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh last week gave his first major speech as head of the U.S. central bank and said he had “more work to do” to fight inflation. Bitcoin has typically done well in a low-interest rate environment. 

Traders currently view a U.S. Federal Reserve interest rate hike at the upcoming September 15–16 policy meeting as roughly a 50% to 60% probability. 

But U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday demanded the Federal Reserve slash interest rates. 

Writing on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump said: “Lower the interest rates because the U.S.A. is a much stronger credit than it was just a short time ago!”

He added: “We should have the LOWEST RATE of any country in the World, like ‘the old days.'”

Bitcoin has decoupled from stocks recently as investors have renewed concerns around dollar debasement. 

The cryptocurrency started surging last month, after the U.S. Treasury Department said it would more than double the size of its government debt repurchases. The coin had its best run in three years and third best August ever.  

The much-talked about debasement trade is back in the spotlight, and bitcoin has been trading in lockstep with gold, according to analysts. The so-called debasement trade is when investors buy an asset as a way to hedge against a currency losing value. 

News dropped last month that U.S. public debt exceeded $40 trillion for the first time too. Excessive debt also undermines confidence in the dollar, making assets like bitcoin and gold attractive. 

This post Bitcoin Dips Below $80,000 on Strong US Jobs Report first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

National Sheriffs’ Association Drops Opposition to Clarity Act

The National Sheriffs’ Association this week dropped its opposition to the crypto Clarity Act, after having previously warned that the proposed bill could help criminals. 

Writing Thursday to Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the association said it was changing its stance to neutral given how complex the issue is. 

A number of lawmakers were hoping to vote on the Clarity Act in August. After a delay, a vote will now go ahead this month. The bill 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. 

“Given the complexity of the legislation and the number of important details that remain under consideration, the NSA is changing its position on the Clarity Act to neutral,” the letter from NSA President Sheriff Troy Wellman and Executive Director Justin Smith read. 

“At this time, we believe the most appropriate course is to step back and allow the legislative process to proceed to establish a clear, effective, and much needed regulatory framework.”

The NSA had previously warned that the bill could create regulatory and anti-money laundering loopholes by exempting certain crypto developers and infrastructure providers from money transmitter rules.

Despite being passed in the house of representatives last year with strong bipartisan support, the Clarity Act has been in a deadlock for much of 2026. The banking lobby raised concerns over stablecoin yield and some lawmakers have said improvements need to be made surrounding ethics. 

An updated bill of the Clarity Act was introduced in July that addressed some of these concerns — banning government officials and their families from issuing or promoting crypto. 

Pro-crypto senator Cynthia Lummis wrote on Friday that the “bipartisan bill” gives “law enforcement real tools to fight the illicit finance crimes hurting hard working Americans.”

Major financial institutions, lawmakers and companies have said they support the latest draft of the new bill, but some Republicans have accused Democratic lawmakers of deliberately playing politics and holding the bill back. 

This post National Sheriffs’ Association Drops Opposition to Clarity Act first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

At 14:59:59 UTC, Bitcoin perpetual futures look like any other electronic market, with prices flickering and orders flowing from traders around the world.

But when the clock turns to 15:00:00, the market instantly becomes busier: more trades go through, more money turns over, and prices cover more ground during the next ten seconds, even though nothing has given anyone a fresh reason to trade.

The same pulse returns at 15, 30, and 45 minutes past every hour. A smaller version appears at five-minute boundaries and at the start of every minute, but the top of the hour still produces the strongest burst, as though crypto's continuous market has been divided into thousands of tiny sessions by the software used to trade it.

Korean policy researcher Chan Kim and Peter Reinhard Hansen of the University of North Carolina documented the pattern in an August 2026 study of crypto futures. They examined records of completed trades in six Binance futures markets from Jan. 1, 2021, through Oct. 31, 2024, covering Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Solana, Dogecoin, and Cardano across 1,400 full days of nonstop trading.

The contracts were perpetual futures, usually called perps, which let traders bet on whether an asset will move up or down and use borrowed exposure to make that bet larger.

While a conventional futures contract expires on a defined date, a perp can stay open as long as the trader has enough collateral, and recurring payments between long and short traders keep its price close to the underlying spot market.

When a perp trades above its spot index, traders betting on a higher price pay those betting on a lower one. When it trades below the index, the payment runs the other way.

Perpetual futures account for a large share of global crypto trading, which gives these brief bursts a much wider and deeper reach. Perp prices help guide arbitrage, hedging, and market-making across exchanges, so a pattern that begins in futures can feed into the Bitcoin market data and spot prices followed by everyone else.

Crypto found its opening bell(s)

The 15-minute pulse is easy to see when you draw an hour as a circle. The researchers' charts produce four points at minutes zero, 15, 30, and 45, creating a star-shaped pattern in trading volume and price movement, with most of each burst packed into the first ten seconds.

Across all six contracts, those ten seconds contained 26% more trades and 32% more dollar volume than the same ten-second window during ordinary minutes, while absolute returns were 26% larger.

Absolute return measures how far the price moved in either direction, so a 26% larger reading means a bigger move up or down during the quarter-hour window.

The pattern also crossed a wide gap in market size. Bitcoin averaged 1.54 million daily trades and $14.58 billion in contract volume during the sample, while Cardano averaged roughly 290,000 trades and $544 million in the same trading rhythm.

That consistency is the most important finding because it shows the convention is shared across trading systems rather than being a feature of one token.

Most trading apps turn a continuous stream of prices into candles covering one minute, five minutes, 15 minutes, or another familiar interval.

A 15-minute candle compresses everything that happened during that period into an opening price, a closing price, a high, and a low, giving humans a manageable picture of the market and giving software a standard block of data it can process.

At the end of each candle, technical indicators recalculate, and automated strategies receive fresh instructions from the same newly completed block.

Programs that divide a large trade into smaller pieces may release another piece on that boundary, while market makers can adjust their quotes for the flow they expect, and faster systems can trade in anticipation of both groups.

Once enough machines start following the same clock, a convenient way of displaying data becomes part of the market itself.

That's how an uneventful quarter-hour starts to look like a stock exchange opening. Traditional markets gather orders around a real opening bell because traders have spent hours waiting for the venue to reopen.

On the other hand, crypto creates a comparable rush through shared chart intervals and software defaults, repeating the process every 15 minutes while trading continues.

The machines have a tell

Binance's trade records show what was traded, how much, and at what price. However, they don't identify whether a human trader, a market-making firm, a liquidation engine, or another automated system initiated each transaction. Kim and Hansen looked for an indirect clue in trade size.

People tend to prefer round numbers because they are easier to choose and remember, so someone may trade 0.1 BTC or roughly $10,000 without calculating an awkward quantity to the final decimal place.

But algorithms usually start with a formula based on volatility, available capital, current exposure, or a target share of a larger order, which can produce quantities that look arbitrary to a human.

The researchers counted how often trade sizes ended in trailing zeros and found that round quantities were less common during the opening seconds of the recurring bursts.

They included only trades large enough to contain the number of zeros being measured, which kept tiny orders from being classified as irregular simply because the exchange's minimum increment made extra zeros impossible.

The decline grew with the importance of the boundary. Round quantities became slightly less common at the start of an ordinary minute, the gap widened every five minutes, and then again every 15 minutes, with the top of the hour producing the largest break from the usual pattern.

For Bitcoin trades that were eligible to end in at least two zeros, the round-size share fell by 0.04 standard deviations at an ordinary minute opening and by 0.20 at the top of the hour, making the hourly effect five times larger.

A standard deviation describes how far an observation moves from its usual range, so those numbers aren't the percentage of trades placed by machines. They show that the market moved farther from its normal preference for round quantities exactly when trading activity jumped, giving the authors a behavioral fingerprint of heavier automated participation.

Trade size still can't identify the source of every order. Large institutional executions and forced liquidations can produce irregular quantities, and funding arbitrage can do the same, so the paper uses roundness as indirect evidence associated with machine activity.

The authors ran several checks to see whether another recurring event was creating the pulse.

Binance processed funding payments at 00:00, 08:00, and 16:00 UTC during the sample, but removing those windows left the quarter-hour result largely intact, and the pattern at minutes 15, 30, and 45 survived when every top-of-hour observation was removed. A separate analysis of Bybit data produced a similar structure on another exchange.

Those checks describe a broad form of electronic coordination. Any trader can choose any interval, but exchange data, chart settings, and common indicators pull many systems toward the same boundaries, with the strongest concentration appearing at the clock points that receive the most shared attention.

A price forecast worth less than the trading fee

Once the researchers established that the pulse repeated, they asked whether data available before each quarter-hour could forecast the price move during its first ten seconds.

Their rolling model studied earlier quarter-hour returns alongside familiar price and volume indicators, then made a fresh out-of-sample forecast using information available at the time.

Across the six contracts, the model chose the correct direction 56.6% of the time. Its average out-of-sample R-squared was 3.4%, meaning it explained a small portion of the variation in those ten-second returns, while its area-under-the-curve score was 0.60 on a scale where 0.50 is a random guess, and 1.00 represents perfect classification.

In a market with enormous noise over ten-second intervals, those modest figures establish that the pattern contains repeatable information.

However, they don't establish an easy trading strategy because the predicted move was tiny. Trading in the model's chosen direction at every quarter-hour produced an average gross return of 0.51 basis points per trade before fees, equal to about 0.0051%, or roughly 51 cents on a $10,000 trade.

During the sample, Binance's base fee was 5 basis points for a taker order, which executes immediately against an existing quote, and 2 basis points for a maker order, which provides a quote for someone else to accept.

A $10,000 taker trade therefore cost about $5 to open and another fee to close, while the model's average gross return was roughly one-tenth of the first charge alone.

Given how small the gains are here, the most useful result from this dataset is the gap between statistical predictability and the money an ordinary trader can capture.

A pattern can repeat often enough to survive formal analysis while the expected move stays too small to cover basic trading costs, which is one reason highly automated markets can contain recognizable patterns without making any profits.

Market makers and large traders can still use the finding because they face a very particular problem.

If a company is quoting both sides of the market, it could demand a wider spread during those ten seconds or reduce how much it offers when one-sided flow becomes easier to anticipate, while a trader working through a large order may release pieces at less crowded points on the clock to reduce the price movement caused by its own activity.

The first ten seconds also carried information over a longer horizon. When buyer-initiated volume exceeded seller-initiated volume at a quarter-hour boundary, that imbalance was associated with returns over the next four to 12 hours, and the reverse relationship appeared when sellers dominated.

Order imbalance here means the difference between aggressive buying and aggressive selling relative to the total volume in that window, giving the researchers a way to measure which side was pushing harder.

At the four-hour horizon, much of the relationship came from earlier quarter-hour flow carrying into later boundaries. At eight and 12 hours, ordinary price and volume indicators explained more of it, which fits a market where algorithms use the quarter-hour as a shared moment to process information that has already been building across the wider market.

That longer-horizon result needs to be taken with a grain of salt because the four-, eight-, and 12-hour return windows overlap, allowing one market move to appear in several observations.

The authors used block-bootstrap methods designed for dependent data, though aggregate trade records still can't show whether the initiating orders contained private information, reacted to the same public inputs, or moved prices as market makers absorbed an uneven flow.

Nonetheless, the larger idea is easier to understand and eventually implement than the statistical machinery behind it.

Crypto removed the closing bell and made trading continuous, then its APIs, chart intervals, and automated strategies rebuilt miniature openings throughout the day.

Every 15 minutes, thousands of independent systems reach the same clock boundary, and for a few seconds a market designed to run without interruption behaves like a crowd pushing through the same door.

The post Inside the 15-minute trading pulse that moves $14 billion in Bitcoin perpetual futures appeared first on CryptoSlate.

A $4.5 billion US large-cap stock fund now has two crypto-sensitive companies at the top of its portfolio.

The Fundstrat Granny Shots US Large Cap ETF's Sept. 4 holdings snapshot ranked Bitcoin-treasury company Strategy (MSTR) first at 3.02% and retail financial platform Robinhood Markets (HOOD) second at 2.99%. Together they represented 6.01% of the portfolio. The fund, known by its ticker GRNY, reported $4.533 billion in assets and 42 holdings as of Sept. 3.

GRNY owns equities, not Bitcoin, and describes itself as an actively managed US large-cap fund. Yet its two largest holdings connect shareholders to crypto through public companies: Strategy through its Bitcoin treasury and Robinhood through a trading business that includes crypto.

The snapshot demonstrates one route by which crypto-linked volatility can reach investors in a generalist stock portfolio. One fund cannot establish that mainstream managers broadly are replacing direct crypto allocations with proxy stocks.

The ranking followed an equal-weight reset and an MSTR rally

GRNY's Aug. 21 rebalance notice said all holdings would be reset to equal weight. Strategy and Robinhood were already in the portfolio and remained there; neither was a new addition.

The reset added Freeport-McMoRan, Intel, Lockheed Martin, Micron Technology, SiriusPoint and Vertiv. It removed Air Products and Chemicals, American Express, Broadcom, Meta Platforms, Northrop Grumman, PNC Financial Services and Texas Pacific Land, according to the fund sponsor's full rebalance announcement.

With 42 positions reset to equal weight, a simple starting benchmark is about 2.38% per holding. MSTR rose from a $119.25 close on Aug. 21 to $144.82 on Sept. 3, a gain of about 21.4%, based on historical closing prices. That appreciation plausibly accounts for a substantial part of its rise above the equal-weight baseline and into first place.

The exact path is not public. ETF.com reported $334.82 million of net creations for GRNY on Aug. 20, one day before the reset, but that figure does not identify which securities absorbed the cash and is not a complete post-rebalance flow series. The available data cannot cleanly divide MSTR's current weight among purchases, fund creations or redemptions, and price appreciation.

The fund's governance also makes a singular “Tom Lee bet” an imprecise description. A June SEC filing says Lee and Ken Xuan are jointly and primarily responsible for day-to-day securities management, while Qiao Duan and Stephen Foy oversee trading and execution.

The record therefore supports a narrower reading: GRNY retained MSTR at an equal-weight rebalance, after which a sharp price increase helped push the stock to the top. It does not disclose enough to reconstruct every trade or assign the position to one individual.

Strategy and Robinhood transmit crypto risk in different ways and should not be treated as interchangeable proxies.

Strategy reported holding 845,050 BTC as of Aug. 30. Changes in Bitcoin's value are consequently central to the company's balance sheet. MSTR's price can also reflect leverage, financing terms, security issuance, its software business, and the premium or discount investors place on its treasury strategy.

Robinhood's connection is operational. The company reported $100 million of crypto transaction revenue in the second quarter, within total revenue of $1.31 billion. Crypto-market activity can affect its trading volumes and revenue, alongside equities, options, interest income, customer assets and the rest of its product mix.

The combined 6.01% is therefore not equivalent to a 6.01% Bitcoin allocation. It is exposure to two businesses whose sensitivity to crypto prices and activity arises through different channels and comes bundled with company-specific risks.

A direct spot-Bitcoin product is structurally different. BlackRock says the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF seeks to reflect the price of Bitcoin and holds Bitcoin as its portfolio asset. GRNY's shareholders instead hold operating-company stocks chosen by an active manager. Its net asset value can transmit some combination of Bitcoin moves, crypto-trading activity and equity-specific valuation changes even when an investor never buys a spot-Bitcoin fund.

Crypto beta can thus extend beyond dedicated crypto products because listed companies carry that sensitivity into broader equity portfolios. The exposure is disclosed, and GRNY has not changed its stated mandate. The wrapper changes the character of the risk: a spot product largely tracks its underlying asset, while MSTR and HOOD add management, financing, regulation, execution and stock-market valuation.

GRNY remains one example rather than proof of an industry-wide migration. Establishing a broader shift would require comparable holdings and flow data across active equity funds over time. The Sept. 4 snapshot establishes the more limited point: after an equal-weight rebalance and an MSTR rally, a generalist large-cap ETF's two biggest positions were crypto-sensitive companies. Its shareholders were absorbing part of their volatility whether or not crypto exposure was why they bought the fund.

The post Strategy and Robinhood now lead a $4.5 billion large-cap ETF that was not built for crypto appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bitcoin price forecasting has accumulated an unusually colorful collection of methods.

You have basic scarcity models that convert the halving schedule into a price, and run-of-the-mill on-chain models that turn address or transaction activity into value.

The highly contested power-law charts draw an ascending corridor through Bitcoin's history, and machine-learning systems feed market and macroeconomic data into incredibly complex software.

Each of those approaches enters the price-prediction contest against a very shallow, dumbed-down opponent: naive forecasts that use only current market information. A price forecast can use today's price, a return forecast can use zero, and a direction forecast can use a random walk.

Much of the academic literature has struggled to beat it once a model leaves the period in which it was designed.

A May 2026 preprint reviewing Bitcoin prediction research by Carlos Baquero of the University of Porto reached a pretty sobering conclusion: across the peer-reviewed record, no model had demonstrated durable superiority over the appropriate naive benchmark at horizons of one to six months across several market regimes.

The literature contains hundreds of papers, while Baquero selected 23 for close examination based on their methods, influence, or use of genuine out-of-sample evaluation. The review itself is still awaiting peer review, an important distinction when one of its central arguments is that forecasting claims need stronger evaluation.

Short-horizon order flow and daily return forecasts occupy a separate field, and some have produced real predictive value. Online discussions often blend them with longer-horizon price forecasts and valuation models, although each task asks for a different answer.

A formula describing Bitcoin's historical path tells us little about tomorrow's direction, while a daily direction model says little about the price six months from now.

The easiest rival in finance

Naive forecasting works because financial prices are persistent, so a model predicting $100,100 tomorrow when Bitcoin trades at $100,000 today can produce a tiny percentage error even when it has learned almost nothing about direction or return.

Today's price would have been nearly as accurate, and evaluating only the first model gives it credit for information the market had already supplied.

The benchmark becomes more demanding as the horizon expands because Bitcoin can move violently over a month, giving a forecaster room to add value, while the relationships the model learns decay as the market evolves.

A rule calibrated to the retail-led 2017 cycle encountered a different derivatives structure in 2021, and spot ETFs created another route for capital and price discovery in 2024. Each era supplies historical data from a version of the market that no longer exists in quite the same form.

This problem, known as non-stationarity, appears when the relationships between variables don't stay stable enough for past observations to describe the future.

Bitcoin's user base and liquidity have evolved over time, while regulation and access have changed who can trade it and how. A model can capture a relationship during one period and lose it when the market around the asset evolves.

Francesco Puoti, Fabrizio Pittorino, and Manuel Roveri reached a similar result in a study comparing statistical, machine-learning, and deep-learning forecasts. They applied 12 approaches to five major cryptocurrencies at one-day, seven-day, and 30-day horizons.

Simple naive models consistently produced better forecasts than ARIMA, Prophet, random forests, XGBoost, LSTM networks, and N-BEATS.

The result says more about the available information than the sophistication of each method. A complex model can add value when stable patterns exist for it to learn, and it can memorize noise when those patterns are weak or temporary.

Bitcoin offers enormous quantities of data, but the number of independent market cycles it went through is still quite small. Millions of minute bars keep repeating observations from the same 2018 bear market or the same 2020 liquidity shock.

How a backtest becomes a crystal ball for predicting Bitcoin price

Many Bitcoin models look strongest once their creators have seen the entire historical period used to build them. Researchers can try different variables and lookback windows, move the start date, or swap one architecture for another before publishing the best result.

The winner may have discovered a durable relationship, but it also could have won a large lottery conducted on the same price history, an outcome known as backtest overfitting.

David Bailey and his co-authors formalized the problem in their research on the probability of backtest overfitting. Trying more model variations raises the odds of finding an excellent historical result through chance. Selecting the winner and presenting its performance alone hides the number of failed attempts that made the winner possible.

A single chronological split offers little protection because a researcher can train through 2020 and evaluate the model in 2021, producing an apparently out-of-sample result that owes much of its performance to a single bull market.

Walk-forward evaluation is stronger because the model repeatedly retrains on past data and forecasts the next unseen period. Multiple non-overlapping holdout windows are stronger again because they force the same method to encounter bull markets, crashes, sideways periods, and different liquidity conditions.

Among the peer-reviewed papers Baquero examined, none evaluated the same approach across several non-overlapping holdout windows covering different regimes. The strongest papers used rolling or walk-forward evaluation over one continuous out-of-sample period.

Those methods provide real evidence, but a single aggregate error can still hide failure in one section behind success in another.

Information leakage can also lead to false confidence because a feature calculated with future data can give a model a faint view of the answer. You get the same problem when you normalize variables across the full sample, and overlapping return windows can carry future observations across the training boundary.

The error can be subtle enough to survive peer review, especially when a complicated architecture puts several transformations between the raw data and the reported forecast.

The metric itself can flatter the model when a 99% accuracy claim refers to how closely a predicted price level follows the actual price, a relatively easy task for a persistent series.

Traders care about the direction and size of the move, as well as the cost of acting on it. Models that predict $100,500 when Bitcoin moves from $100,000 to $99,500 have a small price error and still make the wrong trade.

The formulas that outlive their forecasts

Bitcoin's best-known valuation frameworks thrive because they turn what's obviously a very complicated asset into a nice, intuitive explanation.

For example, stock-to-flow says scarcity is what drives value, with each halving reducing new supply relative to the existing stock.

Metcalfe-style models say a network becomes more valuable as its user base expands.

The power law says Bitcoin's long history follows a stable mathematical relationship between price and time.

Each of these ideas contains plausible economic intuition, but its forecasting record depends on whether the fitted relationship survives new data and whether simpler explanations account for the same result.

Alexander Shelton's 2024 peer-reviewed examination of Bitcoin return prediction found that stock-to-flow and Metcalfe variables helped explain returns in-sample, but offered limited or zero predictive ability out of sample.

Once time effects entered the stock-to-flow regression, its statistical force disappeared. Bitcoin's supply ratio increases on a predetermined schedule, and its price also climbed for much of its history, making two time-linked series look economically connected.

We saw that weakness in the market long before it appeared in a formal review. The stock-to-flow model diverged from Bitcoin's price as the asset traded below its projected path for years.

Persistent divergence can be absorbed by redefining the output as long-term value or a cycle average, though each redefinition makes the original price claim harder to evaluate.

Metcalfe's Law faces a related identification problem because network activity and price can climb together when adoption raises value, when a higher price attracts users, or when both variables follow a common time path.

Savva Shanaev and his co-authors used instrumental variables across six proof-of-work assets in a study of mining costs, network activity, and crypto value. Once they addressed autocorrelation and the two-way relationship between activity and price, the positive effects attributed to hashrate and transaction count disappeared.

Power-law models are in a much more complicated position because their corridors have captured much of Bitcoin's historical path and provide a practical visual language for discussing where price lies relative to a long-run curve.

Reports on the Bitcoin power-law model have also shown how ETF-era market structure can alter the forces moving price within that corridor.

The academic issue lies in the strength of the inference. A high R-squared on a log-log chart establishes that a line fits the observed sample. Formal support for a power law also requires evidence about the distribution of residuals and comparisons with other time functions.

Researchers would then need to examine sensitivity to the starting date and performance on future observations. Baquero's review found that the current Bitcoin power-law literature had not yet completed that work.

An honest forecasting standard would publish the naive benchmark beside the model and report every market regime separately. Trading costs belong in the results, while public code and data let other researchers reproduce it.

The paper should also disclose how many variations were attempted, since that number determines how surprising the winning backtest really is. Valuation narratives need to be separated from point forecasts, and the reported range should reflect the asset's uncertainty.

Any correction term should allow a value of zero, letting the model conclude that today's price is its best forecast.

That conclusion will always struggle online because it offers no dramatic target and no date to circle. It has one advantage that the forecast bazaar rarely advertises: it tells us exactly how much the model knows beyond the price already visible to everyone.

The post From power laws to AI networks, why complex Bitcoin price models memorize market noise appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Hardware wallet maker Trezor says a breach at logistics provider ShipMonk exposed contact and order data for another approximately 67,000 U.S. customers after years-old records remained in the vendor's systems despite written deletion assurances.

The Sept. 4 update expands an incident Trezor initially said affected 13,689 people. The two disclosed groups imply a total of roughly 80,689, although Trezor has not issued a single combined figure or published underlying data showing whether the groups overlap. Its use of “another” indicates that it considers the new records additional to the original cohort.

The newly disclosed records cover U.S. orders from November 2019 through August 2021 and include names, email addresses, phone numbers, shipping addresses and order numbers. The data can connect an identifiable person and physical location with a hardware-wallet purchase, creating risks beyond a conventional email leak.

Old data outlived a 90-day policy

When Trezor first disclosed the breach on Aug. 13, it counted 11,742 customers with full exposure and 1,947 with partial exposure. Trezor's Aug. 13 account said older order data had already been deleted. An Aug. 14 clarification acknowledged that some partially exposed records included older orders.

The Sept. 4 update reverses that understanding. Trezor said it repeatedly requested and received written assurances that ShipMonk had deleted the data, yet records from 2019 to 2021 remained. Trezor's published delivery-data policy says customer details should be deleted from both its own and its fulfillment partner's systems after 90 days, with exceptions for ongoing order issues. The assurance letters and their dates have not been made public.

BleepingComputer reported that a ShipMonk notification attributed the original unauthorized access to a vulnerability in analytics platform Metabase. Metabase said the August zero-day could create a session tied to an administrator account and allow bulk table downloads. Once the provider incident was reassessed, the retained historical data expanded the number of Trezor customers known to be exposed.

The breach did not reach Trezor's wallet systems. The company said its systems, products and services were not compromised and its devices remained secure. The listed exposed fields were contact and order data, not recovery seeds, private keys or wallet funds.

The risk instead sits around the wallet. Trezor warned that the information could support convincing scam emails, fraudulent calls or letters and potential physical targeting. Its Sept. 4 update did not identify a confirmed downstream attack caused by this dataset, so those outcomes remain risks rather than documented consequences.

Trezor said it emailed every newly affected customer directly and that anyone who did not receive its incident notice was not affected. It urged customers never to share a wallet backup or enter it on a website.

For hardware-wallet owners, the episode shows that protecting keys does not erase the purchase trail created by fulfillment. A deletion policy offers little protection if a vendor's compliance is not verified.

The post Users exposed by Trezor breach grows sixfold after supposedly deleted shipping logs are found appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Compound is a crypto lending protocol governed by holders who delegate their COMP tokens, a setup known as a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO. It works like an online republic, with token holders debating proposals, voting, and letting software carry out the result.

In July 2024, that republic nearly sent a fortune to a small group of voters. Proposal 289 asked Compound to transfer 499,000 COMP, then worth about $24 million, into a yield-bearing vehicle they controlled. Two earlier versions had failed, and the third seemed headed the same way.

Then, during the final 34 minutes, supporting addresses cast 563,591 votes, equal to 82% of all support for the proposal. The last big block landed eight minutes before the deadline, and the measure passed by 682,191 votes to 633,636.

While this was extremely controversial and remains highly contested, there was no issue with the code, as it worked exactly as intended.

But that was the problem: the wallets had gathered enough COMP and delegated their voting power before the period closed, but Compound lacked an emergency authority that could pause the software. Several reasonable rules had combined into a convenient path for a treasury raid.

Compound reached a settlement that canceled the allocation and later added a veto role, placing a brake in the system built around automatic token-holder rule.

That captures the central DAO dilemma, because most defenses against rushed or hostile votes give somebody more control over participation or the final result.

Two 2026 studies from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam traced a similar problem across 48 large Ethereum DAOs. One examined how registration, staking, and delegation concentrate voting power, while the other mapped attacks that use valid governance rules.

The ballot has a velvet rope

Calling a governance token a vote isn't really correct. Depending on the DAO, a holder may need to register a wallet, lock tokens, delegate them, maintain a minimum balance, or pay for an on-chain transaction before they can actually cast that vote.

Proposals face obstacles of their own, because someone needs enough tokens or delegated support to introduce them in the first place, and the idea may pass through a forum and informal poll before a binding vote on the blockchain or through an off-chain service such as Snapshot.

Once the tally clears the quorum and approval formula, a smart contract, multisignature wallet, or named person carries the result into effect.

While each of these gates solves a real problem, it also favors a particular participant or type of participant.

Proposal thresholds discourage spam and malicious code, but they inadvertently reserve authorship for wealthy holders and established delegates. On-chain voting makes those results enforceable, but transaction fees favor people with enough money and conviction to use it. Free off-chain polls draw a wider crowd, then depend on a smaller group for execution.

The researchers found an even split: 24 DAOs used on-chain voting and 24 used off-chain systems.

Uniswap showed how different electorates can form inside the same organization: more wallets joined its free off-chain polls, while much larger blocks of voting power appeared during the paid on-chain phase that could make a proposal binding.

Turnout is only one small part of this, because a protocol may have thousands of token holders while a few addresses control proposals, votes, and execution. By the time the public tally appears, the rules have already picked the electorate.

The security rules pick the ruling class

DAOs often keep tokens in treasury contracts, and founding teams or investors may hold allocations that have yet to vest, so registration separates circulating tokens from balances that currently carry voting rights.

Among the 48 DAOs, 36 required some form of registration, and only four had registered more than half of their outstanding supply. Across those 36 organizations, the average registered share was 21%, meaning the practical electorate usually covered a small fraction of all tokens.

Much of the missing supply belonged to users whose coins were held by exchanges or deposited into DeFi protocols. Centralized exchanges held more than 10% of outstanding tokens on average across the sample, and DeFi contracts held another 3.5%.

In 14 registration-based DAOs, those intermediary wallets controlled more tokens than the entire registered electorate.

That creates a very strange and rather unique custody problem, because an exchange wallet can represent thousands of customers even though the blockchain sees one address with one giant balance.

Letting the exchange vote turns a custodian into a political heavyweight, while excluding it strips customers of governance rights attached to tokens they paid for. Most DAOs also let one wallet send all its power to a single delegate, which makes splitting votes among the underlying owners difficult.

Staking tackles a different vulnerability by making voting power expensive to build and slow to unwind. A would-be attacker can buy or borrow a large position, approve a favorable proposal, and sell once the vote ends, while a lock keeps that voter financially exposed to the result for longer.

Fifteen DAOs required staking, with a median of 27.4% of tokens locked. Some imposed a one- or two-week withdrawal wait, while Curve, Angle, and Frax offered stronger voting power for locks lasting up to four years. The system rewards patience and turns liquid wealth into a prerequisite for political influence.

Crypto soon produced middlemen for people who wanted influence and the freedom to trade. These services maintain long locks, issue tradable substitutes, and keep the original voting rights. The arrangement concentrated enormous voting blocs inside a few services, according to the researchers’ measurements:

Delegation works the same because most holders have limited appetite for forum arguments about collateral ratios. Handing votes to a professional participant makes sense, and repeated delegation builds durable political blocs.

The ten largest holders controlled more than half of voting power in 39 of the 48 DAOs, while delegated voting was usually more concentrated than direct voting.

Registration protects treasury balances, staking makes a quick attack costlier, and delegation gives passive holders a voice through someone who pays attention. Put them together, and the people with the most capital, time, technical fluency, or control over customer assets tend to run the place.

A legal DAO vote can still be a raid

The second paper defines a governance attack as an actor using the authorized process to win an outcome that harms the wider organization.

Among 28 DAO incidents, researchers classified 16 as attacks that a different mechanism could have prevented. Six involved contract bugs, while ten depended on buying or borrowing enough tokens to influence a vote.

Compound is the best example because the wallets associated with Proposal 289 gathered more than 680,000 COMP over four months.

Researchers traced 563,790 tokens through four centralized exchanges and another 118,089 borrowed through Compound itself, even though those addresses had held only 853 COMP before the buildup and had little history in the protocol's politics.

The late burst took advantage of a community that expected the third proposal to fail. Compound could have extended the vote when a large bloc appeared near the deadline, required longer staking, or allowed a trusted council to pause execution.

Every option would have moved power toward reactive voters, committed holders, locking services, or a small emergency body.

But Compound chose the emergency brake, and in the 2024 configurations researchers reviewed, seven other DAOs shared its exposure to readily available voting power and late vote accumulation: Uniswap, Radicle, Gitcoin, Silo, Ampleforth, Hop, and Cryptex.

Those systems can evolve through governance, so the list records a moment in 2024, while a current security rating would require a fresh review.

Decentralization needs a richer accounting than token distribution alone. A good governance report would show how much supply can vote, how much power the largest delegates control, which intermediaries hold staked tokens, and who can introduce, execute, or veto proposals.

Smart contract audits already ask whether governance code follows its specification, while a constitutional audit would ask where that specification sends authority.

DAOs can spread ownership across thousands of wallets and still funnel practical control toward a few dozen professionals, custodians, and large holders, with software that performs flawlessly all the way through.

The post DAOs are forcing crypto protocols to choose between code and emergency brakes appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bitcoin is trading at $79,985, up 0.36% in 24 hours and around 2.5% on the week. That flat number hides a violent five days. BTC touched $82,240 on Friday, its highest level since May, then lost more than 4% in the space of an hour. Everything now hangs on a single inflation print.

Where is the Bitcoin price today?

$BTC sits just above $79,900 with a market capitalisation of $1.6 trillion and 24-hour volume near $19.8 billion. The weekly gain of 2.5% makes Bitcoin one of the steadier large caps right now, but the year-to-date figure is still minus 8.6%.

That is the frame worth keeping. Bitcoin has recovered roughly 37% from its June low, and it is still deep in the red for 2026. This is a rebound inside a bear market until proven otherwise.

Why did the Bitcoin price fall after the jobs report?

Thursday set the trap. ADP employment came in at 38,000 against 47,000 expected, rate-hike expectations softened, and BTC broke $80,000 with roughly $93 million of short positions liquidated on the way up. It reclaimed the 200-day EMA for the first time since June. By early Friday in Europe it printed $82,240, a gain of 6.8% in 24 hours.

Then the August employment report landed. Nonfarm payrolls rose 162,000 against a consensus near 56,000, close to triple the estimate. Unemployment held at 4.1%, wage growth eased to 3.1% year on year, and June and July were revised higher by a combined 55,000 jobs.

$Bitcoin fell from $81,300 to $78,600 within minutes. CME FedWatch odds of a 25 basis point hike in September jumped from 49.4% to 58%. The ten-year Treasury yield sits at 4.73% and the thirty-year is at its highest level since 2007.

The logic is simple and it is not going away. Bitcoin pays no yield. When risk-free returns push toward 5%, holding a non-yielding asset costs more. A strong labour market is good news for the economy and bad news for anyone waiting on cheap money.

Are Bitcoin ETF inflows still supporting the price?

Yes, and this is the strongest argument for the bull case right now.

US spot Bitcoin ETFs took in a net $730.8 million on September 3, the largest single day since January, with BlackRock's IBIT accounting for $454 million of it. On the day of the selloff itself the desks bought again: $174.6 million net on September 4, a third straight session of inflows, taking the three-day total to roughly $1.01 billion.

The context matters. Spot Bitcoin ETFs have shed a net $4.83 billion across 2026 as a whole. August flipped positive and recovered a meaningful chunk. Institutions are not buying blindly anymore, they are buying weakness and trimming into strength. But the bid is real, and it absorbed a hawkish repricing without breaking the range.

What Bitcoin price levels matter this week?

On the three-hour chart the structure is intact. The 200 EMA sits at $74,971 and is rising, around $5,000 below spot. Bitcoin has held above it continuously since the vertical move from $64,000 to $77,000 between August 19 and 21.

Since then BTC has been boxed between roughly $76,000 and $82,200.

• First support: $78,670. The line directly beneath price, flipped from resistance to support in early September. It sits close to the $78,000 max pain level for the September 18 options expiry, which tends to act as a magnet into expiry week.
• Next support: $76,000 to $77,000. Losing this shelf opens the gap toward the EMA cluster at $74,971 and the $74,450 line.
• First resistance: $82,200. Friday's high at $82,178 was the fourth failed attempt at the top of the range.
• The level that changes the story: $85,000. A weekly close above it would be the first real evidence that this is more than a bear market rally. The band up to $88,000 is the next obstacle after that.
• Structural line: $58,000. Only relevant if the entire recovery fails.

RSI reads 55.48 against a 53.92 signal line. Neutral, no divergence, no exhaustion. The candles since Friday are tiny and coiling directly on $78,670, which is textbook compression ahead of a data release.

Which news could move the Bitcoin price next week?

Four dates, in order of importance.

• September 11: US CPI. The single most important number of the month. Fed Governor Christopher Waller has said he would consider a hike if August inflation runs hot, which turns this print into the decider rather than a data point. A soft number takes the September hike off the table and gives Bitcoin room to attack $82,200. A hot number puts $76,000 in play quickly.
• September 15: the Clarity Act. SEC Chair Paul Atkins expects a Senate vote and has urged lawmakers to pass the bill before the month ends. He also confirmed the SEC is drafting its own complementary crypto legislation. Regulatory clarity is a slower-burning catalyst than CPI, but it is the one that shapes institutional allocation into 2027.
• September 15 to 16: the FOMC decision. The first hike under serious consideration since the tightening cycle ended in July 2023. Markets price it at 58%. Note that a hike being priced is not the same as a hike being absorbed. If the Fed hikes and signals more, the reaction is not in the current price.
• September 18: September options expiry. Max pain at $78,000. Expect price to gravitate toward that area into Friday unless CPI overwhelms it.

One more for the calendar: the MultiversX Supernova hard fork goes live on September 10, cutting block time from six seconds to 600 milliseconds. Not a BTC catalyst, but a real event for anyone holding EGLD on an exchange.

Bitcoin Price Prediction: What does this mean Bitcoin price?

Bitcoin is caught between two forces that are both genuine. Institutional demand through the ETFs is steady and absorbed a hawkish shock without a breakdown. Rate expectations are moving the wrong way, yields are at multi-year highs, and oil above $90 is adding to the inflation problem that started this whole chain.

The chart has no opinion, which is the honest read. Neutral RSI, intact trend, compressed range. Direction gets decided by Thursday's inflation number, not by anything technical.

Practical takeaway: $78,670 holding through CPI keeps the recovery structure alive. A weekly close above $85,000 confirms it. A break below $76,000 means the August rally was the bounce, not the bottom.

On September 10, 2026, the MultiversX network switches over to the Supernova hard fork. For you as an EGLD holder, the most important answer is a reassuring one: if your coins sit in your own wallet, you have nothing to do. There is no token swap, no migration and no claim you would have to register. Addresses, private keys and balances remain backwards compatible according to the project. Anyone who prompts you to take action over the coming days is trying to defraud you.

There is still something to be done, and it concerns three places: balances on an exchange, staking, and running a node of your own. The hard fork halts the network for roughly 24 minutes, during which no new transactions are accepted. Anyone needing a withdrawal in that window is better off arranging it beforehand. If you intend to move your coins from the exchange into self-custody anyway, a network upgrade is a good occasion for it; which devices come into question is set out in our hardware wallet comparison.

This text answers the questions that have not been put in writing anywhere so far: when the fork really takes effect according to the round arithmetic, how far node migration has actually come today, why the staking unbonding period still takes ten days despite a tenfold increase in speed, and how to recognize the fraud pattern that accompanies dates like this one.

What exactly happens at MultiversX on September 10, 2026

Supernova is a hard fork. That is a protocol change all nodes in a network have to adopt at the same time, because the new rules are no longer compatible with the old ones. Anyone leaving the old software running computes differently from the majority from the switchover point on and drops out of the shared chain.

What Supernova changes is the core of block production. Until now MultiversX produces a block every six seconds. After the switch it is 600 milliseconds, a tenth of that. This becomes possible because the protocol takes transaction execution out of the critical path of consensus: validators vote on a block while execution continues in parallel, instead of waiting for it.

For you as a user this means in everyday terms: a transfer within the same shard is final in fractions of a second rather than in several seconds. The figures for the targeted finality within a shard range between 100 and 300 milliseconds depending on the source; for a transaction across shard boundaries the sources give roughly 1.8 to 2.4 seconds against around 18 seconds so far. That range appears this way in the documents and is not smoothed to a single value here.

Supernova explained: why block time drops from six seconds to 600 milliseconds

A shard is a self-contained section of the blockchain that processes its own transactions; MultiversX currently operates three of them plus a coordinating metachain. This very division has been the bottleneck so far: a payment from shard A to shard B needed three rounds, because the metachain first had to certify the sending shard's block before the receiving shard was allowed to accept it.

Supernova speeds up both sides of that calculation. The rounds get shorter, and the order changes: validators start executing a block as soon as the local check is through, and only vote afterwards. Final clearance across shard boundaries remains tied to the metachain, so that a cross-shard payment counts as arrived only once the block in the sending shard is demonstrably final.

The path to this point was no short-term decision. According to the project documentation, the change was adopted in an on-chain vote between January 8 and 18, 2026 and received 99.64 percent approval at a quorum of 33.63 percent of the voting stake. A public stress test ran between March 11 and 31, 2026, in which the network carried 120,000 transactions per second on the final day according to the project. An external security audit was completed in June 2026.

When does the hard fork actually switch? The activation round recalculated

The switchover hangs on a round rather than on a clock time. A round is the fixed cadence in which the network is allowed to produce a block. The mainnet configuration of August 31, 2026 gives round 32,157,661 in epoch 2233 as the activation point. An epoch is the cycle after which MultiversX redistributes validators across the shards; it lasts 24 hours.

That number can be translated into a clock time, and we did so ourselves instead of copying it. Querying the official mainnet gateway on September 6, 2026 at 00:36:48 UTC returns: current round 32,089,568, epoch 2228, round duration 6,000 milliseconds, 14,400 rounds per epoch, start of the current epoch at round 32,085,434.

From this it follows: 68,093 rounds are missing until the activation round. Multiplied by six seconds, that is 408,558 seconds or 113.5 hours. The switchover therefore falls on September 10, 2026 at around 18:06 UTC, so around 8:06 p.m. German time. By the same calculation, epoch 2233 begins at round 32,157,434 and thus at around 17:43 UTC; the activation round lies 227 rounds behind it. The statement "epoch 2233" from the reports therefore agrees with the chain data.

One qualification belongs with this: that is round arithmetic, not a commitment. If a round is missed because a block producer does not use its slot, the point in time moves back. In practice it is a matter of minutes to a few hours. What holds up is "around 6 p.m. UTC on September 10", not the second.

Roughly 24 minutes without new transactions: what the network halt means

The changeover does not run through during ongoing operation. Ahead of activation, the network stops accepting new transactions into the pool for roughly 240 rounds, in order to work through those already in flight. At the old cadence of six seconds per round, that is 24 minutes.

What happens to your transfer during that time matters more than the duration itself: nothing is lost in the process. Newly submitted transactions stay in the queue until Supernova processes them. What you do not get in that window is a fast confirmation. Anyone wanting to trigger a payment with a deadline at that moment, a margin call on a collateralized position for instance, should bring it forward.

EGLD in your own wallet: why self-custodians have nothing to do

This is the core point for most readers. MultiversX explicitly maintains backwards compatibility for addresses, keys and balances. Your seed phrase stays valid, your address stays the same, your balance stays where it is. There is no new token and no need to move anything.

What changes for you is something you will notice after the fork at most in that confirmations arrive faster. A wallet app that connects to the network picks up the new cadence by itself. A hardware wallet keeps signing the same transaction formats; it knows nothing of block time.

One duty of care remains: keep your wallet application up to date. Applications that derive time windows or fees from the old block time may show incorrect estimates after the switch. That is a display error and no risk of loss, but it is irritating.

No token swap, no claim: how to recognize the hard fork scam

Ahead of network changes of this kind, websites and direct messages regularly appear demanding a "token migration", a "snapshot" or a "wallet upgrade". With Supernova there is none of that. There is no swap, no claim and no registration.

Three features let you recognize such offers without needing technical background knowledge. First, no genuine protocol change ever asks for your seed phrase; whoever asks for it wants your money. Second, there is no deadline for holders, and so no reason for time pressure. Third, a project communicates through its official channels and not through a direct message that writes to you first.

This warning refers to no known incident around Supernova. The note stands here because the pattern recurs with every announced fork. How it looked at other chains is shown by our account of the Zilliqa hard fork and the ZIL migration, where, unlike here, a migration genuinely did take place, and by the look at the Mina hard fork with its network halt.

EGLD on an exchange: why you should check the withdrawal window beforehand

If your coins sit with a trading platform, you hold no key of your own and therefore have no decision of your own. During network changes, exchanges usually suspend deposits and withdrawals for a window while trading continues. That is routine and no warning sign.

The state of play we checked ourselves: on September 6, 2026 at around 00:40 UTC, the Binance announcement directories for listings, delistings and general news carried no notice on EGLD or Supernova. That does not mean none is coming. Experience says such notices appear one to three days before the date. It means you cannot rely today on knowing a withdrawal window.

A simple rule follows from this in practice: if you want to pull EGLD out over the coming days anyway, do it before September 10 and not on September 10. Anyone wanting to seize the occasion and change provider will find the terms in our crypto exchange comparison. How often such deadlines actually get tight is something we worked out in our count of the crypto deadlines and cut-off dates currently running.

Staking and delegation: the unbonding period stays at ten days

Delegation means assigning your EGLD to a staking provider, which uses them to secure the network and passes you a share of the rewards for it. If you want them back, you start an unbonding, and a fixed waiting time then runs before you can move the money.

This is where the biggest misunderstanding around this upgrade sits. A network that ticks ten times faster does not release balances ten times faster. The unbonding period stays at exactly ten days.

We looked this up in the network configuration itself as well, instead of assuming it. The configuration currently carries two values side by side: erd_unbond_period at 144,000 rounds and erd_unbond_period_supernova at 1,440,000 rounds. Convert both into time and both give the same value: 144,000 rounds at six seconds are 864,000 seconds, and 1,440,000 rounds at 0.6 seconds are likewise 864,000 seconds. In both cases that is ten full days. The numeric value multiplies by ten because the rounds get shorter; the waiting time behind it stays the same.

For you this means: an unbonding you start today ends at the same moment whether or not the fork falls in between. And an unbonding you start after September 10 takes just as long as before. If you are currently reviewing where your stake sits and what it brings in, our staking platform comparison helps with the sorting. The question was of a similar kind at the Solana upgrade, which we worked through in our text on Alpenglow and the consequences for staking.

84 percent instead of 4.6: how far node migration has really come today

Whether a hard fork runs smoothly is decided by how many nodes move to the new software in time. As of September 1, 2026, the finding was sobering: according to an evaluation of the public network data, 95.35 percent of 5,171 nodes were still running the old version v1.11.11.0 at that point. A good four percent had migrated.

We repeated this measurement on September 6, 2026 at 00:37 UTC, through the public endpoint api.multiversx.com/nodes/versions. The picture has turned around in five days:

• 83.02 percent of the nodes run on v2.0.6.0, another 1.24 percent on a version reported as v2.0.6. Together that is 84.26 percent.
• A further 13.6 percent still stand on the old v1.11.11.0.
• The remaining 2.14 percent are spread across older versions of the 1.11 series, down to v1.11.0.0.
• The total number of nodes stands at 5,176. In absolute figures that is roughly 4,361 updated nodes and roughly 704 nodes on the old main version.

This figure is the real leading indicator for September 10, and anyone can follow it up themselves: the endpoint is public and supplies share values per software version. Whoever wants to know whether the switchover is running in an orderly way takes another look there on the day before.

What happens if too few nodes migrate in time?

Before activation, old and new program versions can run alongside one another without anything happening. Only from the activation round onwards do the new processing rules take hold. A node with old software can then arrive at a deviating result for the same transaction and loses its connection to the majority chain.

For an individual operator that means downtime and forgone rewards. For the network it only becomes delicate once a large share is left behind, because block production is then spread across fewer shoulders. Going by today's level of roughly 84 percent updated nodes, nothing points to this scenario.

As an EGLD holder you need to derive nothing from it. There is no button you could press and no choice between two chains. The question is relevant for operators and for judging whether longer waiting times are to be expected in the switchover window.

Node operators: which software version is mandatory from round 32,157,661

If you run a validator or an observer node yourself, the fork means work. A version from v2.0.5.0 onwards is required; the chain currently reports v2.0.6.0 as the current marker. This value sits in the network configuration in the field erd_latest_tag_software_version and was set at the time of the query on September 6 at 00:36 UTC.

The migration itself is uncritical before the activation round, because both versions can exist side by side. After it, the migration is no longer optional. Whoever misses the date catches up afterwards and has to let the node resynchronize. A validator with a minimum stake of 2,500 EGLD should not let this situation come to it.

Smart contracts and dApps: why timestamps are no longer unique after Supernova

This point concerns you indirectly, but it is the most underestimated part of the whole upgrade. A smart contract is a program that sits on the blockchain and executes rules automatically, the interest on a deposit or the deadline of an offer for instance.

Many such programs compute with timestamps in seconds. As long as a block is created every six seconds, a second-level timestamp identifies exactly one block. After the switch, ten blocks fit into the same second, and the timestamp is no longer unique. The project documentation names the consequences openly and gives examples: checks along the lines of "the new point in time must be greater than the last one" can fail, limits of one action per block can be circumvented if they are measured in seconds, expiry deadlines become longer than intended, and reward calculations that use a time difference as a divisor can run into a division by zero.

For you as a user of a DeFi application on MultiversX this means: expect isolated display errors in the days after September 10, or applications that pause as a precaution. Affected are programs whose operators have not prepared for the change. A balance in your own wallet is untouched by it. If you have larger amounts sitting in an application from a small provider, a look at its announcements ahead of the date is the cheapest precaution there is.

What the hard fork is not: no deadline, no price statement

Three clarifications, so that no false expectation arises from this date.

It is no deadline for holders. Unlike a migration with an exchange window, nothing expires here. Whoever does nothing until September 10 has exactly the same coins afterwards as before.

It is no price statement. EGLD was quoted at $4.61 on September 6, 2026 at 00:34 UTC according to CoinGecko, or 3.97 euros, around three percent below the previous day and around 27 percent above the level of seven days earlier, at a market capitalization of about $141.5 million. These figures stand here as a snapshot and not as the basis for a forecast. Whether a technical upgrade shows up in a price cannot be stated seriously in advance.

It is no foregone conclusion. The switchover hangs on the migration of the nodes, and while that is going well, it is not yet complete as of September 6. The date can shift by minutes to hours, because it hangs on rounds and not on the clock.

The schedule up to September 10 at a glance

What sensibly happens in the remaining days, in the order in which it comes up:

1. Up to September 9: settle withdrawals from an exchange if you need them in these days. Keep an eye on your provider's announcements, because experience says they come at short notice.
2. On the morning of September 10: take another look at the version status of the nodes if you are interested in whether the switchover is running in an orderly way.
3. On September 10 at around 17:40 to 18:10 UTC: do not submit time-critical transactions. What you submit is not lost, but it will initially only be queued.
4. Afterwards: update your wallet application if it visibly misjudges deadlines or fees.

MultiversX Supernova: what you take away from this

1. Self-custody demands no action, but it does demand vigilance. There is no token swap and no claim. Every prompt to that effect is an attempted fraud, and the answer to it is always the same: no seed phrase, nowhere. If you take this occasion to move your coins from a provider into your own custody, you will find the devices in the hardware wallet comparison.
2. Check before September 10 whether you can reach your balance. Exchanges announce withdrawal pauses at short notice, and on September 6 no notice was in place yet. Whoever wants to switch or withdraw does it beforehand; the terms are in the exchange comparison.
3. Keep reckoning with ten days for staking. The faster chain does not shorten the unbonding period, even though the numeric value in the configuration now looks ten times larger. Where your stake sits and what it brings in is sorted out by the staking comparison.

(As of September 6, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Sources and evidence: the chain data come from the official network configuration of the MultiversX mainnet gateway; the activation round, the 24-minute window and the version status of September 1 come from the report by CryptoSlate of September 2, 2026.

When a stablecoin issuer freezes an address, your balance does not disappear. It is still recorded on the blockchain, every wallet displays it, and yet no transfer will leave it. That is precisely what happened to twenty Ethereum addresses within 84 seconds on August 24, 2026, and two more were added on September 2. We read the chain ourselves to establish it.

The occasion is a lawsuit filed on August 31, 2026 with the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, publicly accessible under docket number 1:26-cv-07400. Two Thai businessmen accuse USDT issuer Tether of having frozen roughly 42.4 million USDT across ten Ethereum addresses on October 30, 2025, and of doing so at the informal request of an investigator. According to the complaint, the corresponding seizure order was only issued on February 19, 2026, 112 days later. This is the account of one party to a lawsuit, and no court has confirmed it: the case has yet to be decided. The matter is undecided, and this article does not decide it either. It answers the question that sits behind it for you as an investor: which stablecoins even carry a switch that can shut down a single address, how often is it used, and how do you check your own address without having to take anyone's word for it?

What a USDT address freeze means technically

An address freeze is an entry in the stablecoin's contract that bars a specific address from making any transfer. The issuer writes the address into a list held in contract storage. From that moment on, the contract rejects every transfer sent from that address. The blockchain itself stays out of it: Ethereum processes the attempt, and the token contract refuses to execute it.

The gap between this and everything else investors usually understand by a freeze is considerable. An account freeze at an exchange concerns an account held with a company, and your balance sits in someone else's custody there anyway. An address freeze reaches into a wallet that belongs to you alone and whose key nobody but you knows. The key still works, the signature is valid, the network accepts the transaction. Only the token contract says no.

This is a deliberate property of the design. A stablecoin is a claim against a company, and that company is subject to supervisory law, anti-money-laundering rules and official orders. Without such a switch, an issuer could not comply with a seizure order at all. Anyone holding stablecoins therefore always carries the issuer's counterparty risk as well, and the freeze function is its most visible form.

Freeze, burn and reissue: the three stages in one sentence each

The three terms are often conflated even though their consequences differ.

Freeze

A freeze enters an address into the contract's blocklist and blocks every outgoing transfer with immediate effect. The holding stays on the address and remains publicly visible. A freeze is reversible: the same issuer can remove the entry again.

Burn

A burn permanently removes the frozen holding from circulation, with the contract setting the tokens on the address to zero. At USDT this second stage presupposes an existing freeze. After the burn, those tokens no longer exist.

Reissue

A reissue creates the burned quantity anew elsewhere, so that the stablecoin's overall backing remains unchanged. This process allows seized amounts to be passed on to investigating authorities or to injured parties.

For you as a holder, it is above all the order of events that counts. Time passes between the freeze and the burn, and during that time the holding is immobilized but still present. Our measurement further down shows that this gap can run to weeks in practice.

The New York case: two plaintiffs, 42.4 million USDT and a question of sequence

The complaint was filed on August 31, 2026; CoinDesk and Cointelegraph, among others, reported on it on September 2, 2026, each with its own account of the matter. The two plaintiffs state that 42.4 million USDT spread across ten Ethereum addresses were frozen on October 30, 2025. Their allegation targets the sequence: the freeze is said to have followed an informal request from a US investigating authority, while the court order was only handed down months later. Such an order, they argue, cannot retroactively legitimize an earlier freeze.

According to the available reports, Tether rejects the lawsuit as baseless. One account therefore stands against the other, no court has established anything, and everything beyond that would be speculation. The case is of interest to a German investor for a different reason: the plaintiffs had no contractual relationship with Tether. They had acquired the tokens on the secondary market, the way you do when you buy USDT on an exchange. The case thus touches on how far an issuer's reach extends over people who never opened an account with it.

That question is why engaging with the freeze function is worthwhile, quite apart from how the proceedings turn out. The switch exists, it is used, and the conditions of its use are hard for outsiders to inspect. What can be inspected without difficulty is the chain itself.

Our September 3 survey: 32 freezes, one unfreeze, two burns

cryptoticker.io compiled this analysis itself on September 3, 2026. We read the event logs of the USDT contract on Ethereum through a public access point, for the window from August 20, 2026, 02:49 UTC, to September 3, 2026, 03:59 UTC. That corresponds to blocks 25,793,449 through 25,894,249, so fourteen days. We evaluated the three events with which the contract reports a freeze, a reversal and a burn to the outside world.

Why 20 of the 32 freezes fell within 84 seconds

The result for those fourteen days reads: 32 addresses were frozen, a single address was unfrozen, and two addresses were emptied. What stands out is the way these numbers are distributed over time.

On August 24, 2026 at 20:47:47 UTC, nine addresses were frozen in a single block. Eighty-four seconds later, at 20:49:11, eleven more followed in a further block. Twenty of the 32 freezes in this period therefore fell within barely more than a minute. The remainder is spread across twelve individual events on nine different days, most recently two freezes on September 2, 2026 at 13:49 UTC.

One practical observation can be drawn from this pattern, and we claim nothing more here: freezes usually arrive in batches and rarely one at a time over the course of a day. Whoever works through a bulk action enters all the addresses concerned in one go. For you, that means a freeze is as a rule the consequence of a list your address ended up on for some reason, and only rarely an individual decision about you personally. The chain says nothing about the reasons, and so neither do we.

The second ratio in our measurement is just as clear: 32 freezes stand against a single reversal. That one reversal fell on August 20, 2026 at 16:41 UTC. A freeze can therefore be lifted, and it does happen, but within the measured period it remained the exception. Anyone counting on such a state resolving itself is counting against the observed frequency.

174,055 USDT burned: what can follow a freeze

In the same window we found two burns. On August 24, 2026 at 17:03 UTC, 10,002.73 USDT were deleted from one address; on September 2, 2026 at 14:58 UTC, a further 164,052.30 USDT. Together that comes to 174,055.03 USDT.

The revealing part sits in a detail that only emerges when both lists are compared: neither of the two emptied addresses was frozen within our fourteen-day window. Both freezes must therefore be older. More than a two-week span lies between the entry in the blocklist and the deletion of the holding. The burn is a separate, later decision that does not follow automatically from the freeze.

For assessing your own risk, that is the more important of the two figures. In the measured period a freeze hits considerably more addresses than are subsequently emptied. Over longer stretches, affected holdings sit in a state of being immobilized, and only a fraction of them is ever deleted.

Which stablecoins carry a queryable freeze function and which do not

The second half of our survey asks whether this switch is a peculiarity of USDT. For that we queried twelve stablecoin contracts on Ethereum directly: first their ticker symbol, to be sure we had hit the right contract address, then twelve common naming variants of an address check. If a contract answers one of these queries with a boolean value, the function exists; if it does not answer at all, it does not exist under that name.

Seven of the twelve stablecoins examined carry a publicly queryable address check: USDT under the name isBlackListed, USDC and EURC under isBlacklisted, PYUSD, USDP and EURCV, the euro stablecoin issued by a French banking subsidiary, under isFrozen, and FDUSD under frozen. Five contracts answered none of the twelve signatures: DAI, USDS, EURS, USDe and RLUSD. At RLUSD and FDUSD we additionally found a function able to halt the entire contract, which is a different matter from a single address.

Caution is called for here, and we therefore state the limit explicitly: having no queryable check function is not the same as not being freezable. A contract may hold a freeze under a name we did not test, store it in a structure that is not publicly readable, or add one later through a replaceable implementation. Our measurement answers exactly one question, namely whether the state of an address can be queried from outside. For seven out of twelve the answer is yes, and that is the decisive point for the check in the next section.

It is worth noting that the dividing line does not follow origin. Among the seven with a check function you find US issuers as well as a European euro stablecoin, and among the five without stand both the best-known decentralized representative and younger offerings from large providers.

How to check an address in two minutes through the contract

The check works without registration, without any tool, and without you having to believe anyone's claim. You ask the contract itself, and the contract answers true or false. For USDT on Ethereum this runs through the contract page of a blockchain explorer such as Etherscan, where the contract's read functions are listed.

In the list of read functions you look for the entry isBlackListed, enter the address you want to check, and read off the result. A false means the address was not on the blocklist at the time of the query. A true means the opposite. At USDC and EURC the function is called isBlacklisted; at PYUSD and USDP, isFrozen. The procedure is the same in every case.

We additionally cross-checked these instructions so that they do not rest on an assumption. For six addresses demonstrably frozen within our measurement window, the query returns true. For a known, unremarkable address it returns false. The check therefore does show what it is meant to show.

Two limitations come with it. First, the answer holds for the moment of the query and for nothing else. Second, it refers to exactly one token on exactly one blockchain: USDT exists on several networks, and each version keeps its own list. Anyone holding USDT on Tron or on a layer-2 network has to query the contract there.

When a check is worth doing at all

For the entirely ordinary case in which you buy stablecoins on a regulated exchange and leave them there, the check yields little, because the address belongs to the exchange anyway. It becomes interesting when you hold a balance on an address of your own, when you have received larger amounts from an unfamiliar counterparty, or when a transfer fails for no discernible reason. That last case is the usual route by which affected users learn of a freeze.

What the freeze means for balances on an exchange

If your stablecoin balance sits in an exchange account, it stands on a pooled address belonging to the provider. A freeze of that address would be an event affecting the entire trading venue, and at a supervised European provider it is no realistic everyday risk. The risk lies elsewhere: withdrawals run through a screening step, and that step can catch a receiving address which appears on a sanctions list or a blocklist.

This mechanism is the neighbor of the address freeze, and it takes effect one level earlier. We described it in a separate piece on the EU sanctions against crypto platforms. A second case, far more common in practice, is the account freeze for missing information; how it comes about and what helps against it is set out in our article on self-certification at a crypto exchange.

Self-custody protects against the account, not against the address freeze

For most risks in the crypto space, holding your own keys is the right answer. It protects against a provider's insolvency, against an account freeze and against the wind-down of a trading venue. Against the freeze of a stablecoin contract it explicitly does not help, because the blocklist knows no wallets, only addresses. Whether your key sits on a device in your drawer or in a provider's data center makes no difference to the entry in the contract.

From this follows a distinction that often gets lost in everyday use. Bitcoin and Ether carry no such switch, because there is no issuer behind them who could operate one. Anyone holding these assets on a hardware wallet has genuinely shed the counterparty risk. With a stablecoin it remains in place, and in full, because the backing and the freeze function sit at the same company. With stablecoins, self-custody therefore shifts which risks you carry; it does not remove them.

In practice this means: anyone using stablecoins as a parking position between two purchases carries this risk for hours or days and needs to give it little thought. Anyone holding a substantial part of their wealth permanently in a stablecoin should know that they hold a claim against a company which can halt the holding on their address. Splitting across two issuers reduces this concentration risk without eliminating it.

MiCA, authorities and the question of who may trigger a freeze

Since the European regulation on markets in crypto-assets has applied in full, issuers of asset-referenced tokens and e-money tokens in the EU need an authorization, and trading venues may only offer authorized stablecoins. For the freeze question, however, the regulation is no safety promise. What it governs is authorization, backing and redemption. Whether and when an issuer shuts down a single address depends, alongside that, on anti-money-laundering law, on sanctions law, and on the orders of the authorities in whose jurisdiction it falls.

This is exactly what the real point of contention in the New York proceedings hangs on. The power to freeze is not what is disputed there. The dispute is about the form the order must take on which an issuer relies, and about the sequence in which the two must occur. For now, a German investor can draw only one conclusion from this: the issuer of your stablecoin brings along the legal order it operates under, and at the largest providers that order is not the European one.

Anyone taking this point seriously will look at the next purchase to see where the stablecoin comes from and which authorization it carries. An overview of regulated trading venues shows which providers work under European supervision and which stablecoins are still tradable there at all.

Tax treatment: what a frozen position does in your return

For tax purposes, the treatment of private crypto transactions in Germany attaches to the private disposal transaction under Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act. What matters there is disposal within one year of acquisition, and for the sum of gains from such transactions an exemption threshold of 1,000 euros applies per calendar year.

A freeze on its own is neither a sale nor a swap. The holding remains attributed to you, it still stands on your address, and nothing flows in. No disposal transaction arises from the freeze, and the one-year period keeps running regardless. If a frozen holding is burned later, the classification is considerably less clear-cut, because an asset then disappears without any consideration in return. Whether and how such a loss can be claimed for tax purposes depends on the individual case and belongs in the hands of a tax adviser. This section sets out the legal position in outline and replaces no advice in an individual case.

More important in practice than the classification is the documentation. Anyone affected by a freeze should record the state of affairs while it is still verifiable: the date of the finding, the address concerned, the holding at that point in time, and the acquisition data of the position. These details can hardly be reconstructed later if a provider is no longer reachable or an account no longer exists.

How we collected the data and what we could not check

The survey consists of two parts. For the first, we retrieved the event logs of the USDT contract on Ethereum in sections of 2,000 blocks each and counted the three freeze, reversal and burn events; each section was repeated through a second access point whenever it failed, until the window of 100,800 blocks was covered without gaps. For the second part, we queried twelve stablecoin contracts with twelve possible designations of an address check each, so 144 individual queries in total, each additionally secured by the ticker symbol reported by the contract.

There are four things we could not check, and they belong in this text just as much as the results do.

First, the reasons. The blockchain shows that an address was frozen, and it shows when. It says nothing about why this happened, who initiated it, or whether an official order was in place. We therefore attribute nothing to any of the addresses concerned or to any person behind them.

Second, the other networks. Our count concerns Ethereum only. USDT and the other stablecoins examined also exist on Tron, on Solana and on several layer-2 networks, and each of these versions keeps its own list. The total number of freezes across all networks is therefore higher than 32, and our measurement does not say how much higher.

Third, the completeness of the function names. We tested twelve common designations. A contract carrying none of them may still possess a freeze capability that goes by a different name or is not readable from outside. All that follows from a missing hit is that the state of an address cannot be queried there by this route.

Fourth, the prior history of the two burns. We know from the comparison that the associated freezes are older than our window. How much older would have required an evaluation of the entire contract history, which we did not carry out for this article.

Nor did we do anything that would go beyond what was measured: no extrapolation to annual figures, no estimate of how many investors are affected, and no statement about the market shares of the stablecoins examined. Price figures do not appear in this article, because a contract query yields none.

Checking a stablecoin freeze: what you take away from this

1. Look up which stablecoin you actually hold and where. Seven of the twelve contracts we examined carry a queryable address check, and the issuer's legal order has a say in who can initiate a freeze. When you choose between two offerings at your next purchase, a look at our crypto exchange comparison helps you see which stablecoins are listed there and which supervision the trading venue works under.
2. Separate what can be separated. Against the address freeze of a stablecoin, self-custody does not help; against a provider's insolvency and against an account freeze, it very much does. If you want to hold the part of your portfolio that manages without an issuer yourself, you will find the suitable devices in our hardware wallet comparison.
3. Record your acquisition data before you need it. Date, quantity and acquisition cost of a position are the part that can no longer be reconstructed when it matters, and they are at the same time the basis of every later tax return. Ongoing tracking is taken off your hands by a tax and portfolio tool.

(As of September 3, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

If a letter reaches you demanding, in the name of the Federal Ministry of Finance, 19 percent VAT on your purchase of cryptocurrency, the answer is short: no such claim exists in German tax law, and the ministry does not send it. The Federal Ministry of Finance has listed this exact letter as a forgery on its warning page since September 1, 2026. Pay nothing, do not reply, click no link.

The case still deserves more than three sentences, because this wave is better built than the usual bulk emails. The perpetrators cite real transactions, they use official terminology, and they hit a nerve: since the start of 2026, trading platforms have been reporting user data to the tax authorities, and many investors are expecting mail from the authorities anyway. That expectation is exactly what the scam exploits.

Fake finance ministry letters on crypto VAT: what the ministry reported on September 1

On the page warnings from the Federal Ministry of Finance, as of September 1, 2026, the case is set out in spare words. In a forged letter, the ministry supposedly confirms that a company selling cryptocurrency, meaning a crypto exchange or a crypto broker, is authorised to collect 19 percent VAT on the acquisition of cryptocurrency. The letter refers to transactions that actually took place, and the accompanying email urges the recipient to get in touch as quickly as possible.

Three building blocks sit in that description, and each one works on its own. The first is the supposed authorisation, meant to explain why a trading venue rather than the tax office wants money. The second is the reference to a genuine purchase, which lends the letter a credibility no bulk email could ever have. The third is the demand to make contact quickly, because a conversation brings victims to pay faster than a form.

In the same warning, the ministry names further variants in circulation at the same time. They include invented special payments for the summer of 2026, for which recipients are asked to supply their tax identification number via a link, supposed investment offers in the name of the finance minister, and emails about refunds that allegedly could not be delivered. The crypto variant is therefore not an isolated case, but the part of a broader wave tailored to investors.

19 percent VAT on a crypto purchase: why German tax law knows no such claim

The core of the forgery is a tax assertion that can be refuted in a single sentence. Exchanging euros for Bitcoin and back is exempt from VAT. That is not a matter of interpretation, but has been settled for more than ten years.

What section 4 no. 8 letter b of the German VAT Act has to do with your purchase

On October 22, 2015, the European Court of Justice ruled in case C-264/14, known as the Hedqvist case, that exchanging conventional currencies for Bitcoin and vice versa is an exempt supply within the meaning of the VAT Directive. The Federal Ministry of Finance adopted that judgment into German administrative practice with its circular of February 27, 2018. Since then the position is: the exchange is a supply of services exempt under section 4 no. 8 letter b of the German VAT Act. Anyone using cryptocurrency as a means of payment likewise triggers no VAT.

A VAT charge of 19 percent on the acquisition of cryptocurrency would therefore not only be unusually high, it would contradict the applicable law on a point that has been in every tax handbook since 2018. A ministry does not authorise anyone to collect a tax that does not exist.

The one place where VAT really does appear

For the sake of completeness: the exemption applies to the exchange itself. VAT can arise on certain services around trading, for instance on services a platform bills separately. But that always runs through the provider's invoice or statement, in which the tax is shown openly. It is never claimed retrospectively through a letter from the ministry, and it never amounts to 19 percent of the purchase sum in any case. Anyone wanting to know which costs really arise with which provider will find the orderly overview in the comparison of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers, because record-keeping for the tax return is considered there as well.

Reference to real transactions: why this detail makes the letter so dangerous

The most dangerous sentence in the warning is the one about transactions that actually took place. Anyone opening a letter that names a purchase with an approximate amount and date loses their natural scepticism. The usual reflex, that fraudsters know nothing about you, does not apply here.

Where such details can come from cannot be said with certainty, and we do not claim otherwise. Several routes are known by which purchase and address data belonging to crypto customers have entered circulation: data leaks at service providers who process orders on behalf of companies, compromised support systems, and the resale of older customer lists. How such an address list ends up in a physical letter was described by cryptoticker.io on August 25, 2026, using the example of the phishing letters sent to wallet owners. The pattern is the same, only the target differs: there it was about the recovery phrase, here about a bank transfer.

For you, an uncomfortable but useful assumption follows. Assume that a sender may know your name, your address and rough details of a purchase, without that saying anything about their authenticity. The check therefore has to start somewhere else, namely with jurisdiction and with the route the demand takes.

Who sets taxes in Germany and how the assessment arrives

In its warning, the Federal Ministry of Finance formulates a rule that works as a test: only the tax offices set taxes, and as a rule they always do so by post. Neither the ministry itself nor the Federal Central Tax Office charges fees to citizens or sets taxes. None of these bodies sends text messages, messenger messages or emails to private individuals on their own initiative.

That yields a simple test that works without specialist knowledge. If a payment demand names a sender other than your competent tax office, something is wrong. If the demand arrives by email or messenger, something is wrong. If the money is meant to go to a company rather than a tax office account, something is wrong. And a tax assessment that genuinely exists always names a tax number, a tax office and a notice of appeal explaining your right to object.

550 euros for a supposed account release: the second forged ministry letter

Running alongside the crypto variant is a letter with the English title Formal Notice of Final Statutory Tax Clearance Requirement and Reinstatement Assurance. In it, recipients are told to pay 550 euros to have a supposed block on their bank account lifted. The Federal Ministry of Finance also lists this letter in its warning as a forgery and refers to the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority for details.

The English title is a giveaway in itself. German tax authorities correspond with private individuals in German, and they do not invent labels that sound like international compliance. A title that manufactures authority through a foreign language is a warning sign, not proof of authenticity. The same goes for the invented procedure behind it: an account is blocked by the bank or by court order, and it is not unblocked by a payment to a ministry.

Forged Federal Central Tax Office notices: file reference 120. G59 201 729 as the tell

A second authority has been affected for months. On June 30, 2026, the Federal Central Tax Office issued a warning about a renewed wave of deception attempts. According to it, perpetrators are sending phishing emails carrying the authority's official logo, with a forged notice attached.

The content of these notices varies. Sometimes it concerns a fine for failing to disclose turnover figures, sometimes the verification of an IBAN in connection with a SEPA direct debit mandate. According to the authority, one detail stays the same across all variants, namely the file reference 120. G59 201 729. Anyone finding that reference on a letter is holding a forgery, no matter how good the rest looks.

In the same notice, the Federal Central Tax Office names three features that hold beyond this one wave. Payment demands by email or text message are unusual, because the authority sends them by post. Letters with language errors point to an attempted fraud. And transfers to accounts abroad do not occur with a German tax authority.

ELSTER phishing with the subject line security verification: why you never log in via a link

The third trail targets the tax portal itself. The ministry's warnings list forged emails that pose as coming from ELSTER, with a title along the lines of security verification required, release tax credit. A refund of income tax is promised, and a one-off digital identity confirmation is demanded, for which you are supposed to log in to your own account via a link.

The sequence matches what crypto investors know from fake verification pages. First comes a plausible pretext, then a link, then a login mask that rebuilds the original. cryptoticker.io described this pattern on August 31, 2026, in relation to the fake AML check pages for wallets. The protection is the same in both cases and it is boring: call up the portal yourself, through your own bookmark or by typing the address. A certificate, a tax account or a wallet approval is never confirmed through a link in an incoming message.

A special case concerns people who trade actively. According to the ministry, bank details belonging to the federal treasury are currently being misused, particularly in connection with the trading activities of private companies: customers are asked to make payments in favour of the federal treasury that have no connection with it whatsoever. If a trading provider asks you to transfer a tax or fee to a government account before a payout, that is not a formality but the end of the matter.

IMF, ECB and AMLA as supposed senders: institutions that levy no taxes

In its warning, the Federal Ministry of Finance repeats a note from the police that is particularly important for crypto investors. Perpetrators repeatedly try to collect fees or taxes, for instance for a supposed inheritance or a crypto gain, in the name of the ministry or of international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank or the European anti-money-laundering authority AMLA.

This construction turns up regularly at the end of an investment fraud. A portfolio shows a large gain, the payout supposedly fails because of a levy, and the levy is meant to go to an authority whose name makes an impression. None of the institutions named charges fees to private individuals or sets taxes. AMLA supervises obliged entities under anti-money-laundering law, the European Central Bank runs monetary policy and banking supervision, and the International Monetary Fund has nothing to do with your tax return. If a platform demands such a payment before a payout, first check whether it is licensed at all. The overview of regulated crypto exchanges with a European licence is the quickest way in.

Crypto and the tax office: what the state really wants from you

The scam also works because many people do not know exactly what is coming their way for tax purposes. A quick comparison helps separate the real from the invented.

Income tax instead of VAT

Gains from selling cryptocurrency are, in Germany, a private disposal transaction under section 23 of the Income Tax Act. If more than a year lies between purchase and sale, the gain remains tax-free. Within the one-year period it is taxable as soon as the sum of all private disposal gains in the calendar year reaches the exemption threshold of 1,000 euros, which has applied since the 2024 assessment period. That is a threshold, not an allowance: once it is reached, the entire gain is taxable, not merely the excess. Swapping one cryptocurrency for another counts as a sale.

You declare this tax yourself in your income tax return. It is collected neither by an exchange nor by a broker, and it is certainly not demanded through a letter from the ministry. Anyone who has documented their purchases and sales cleanly can identify an invented demand as such within minutes, because they know their own figures.

The platforms' reporting duty and what it does not mean

The second real process is the reporting duty of providers. cryptoticker.io described it in detail on February 22, 2026, in its article on the reporting duty under DAC8: platforms transmit details about their users and their transactions to the tax authorities, and for that purpose they ask their customers for a tax identification number and a self-certification. How closely that request is now tied to deadlines and account restrictions is shown in our article of August 17, 2026, on the self-certification at the crypto exchange.

What matters is the difference in the sequence. Your exchange asks for data inside the logged-in account, or by a message sent from within the account. The tax office asks for nothing by email and demands no payment via a link. If you receive a demand supposedly from an authority that wants to collect tax data for your exchange, it has swapped the two roles. That is exactly where the forgery can be pinned down.

Five features that identify a forged tax letter about your crypto account

The following points come from the warnings issued by the ministry and the Federal Central Tax Office. These features hold regardless of how professionally a letter is designed.

1. The wrong sender for a tax demand. Only your competent tax office sets taxes. The ministry, the Federal Central Tax Office, the ECB, the IMF or AMLA do not.
2. The wrong route. Payment demands come by post. A payment demand by email, text message or messenger is a warning sign.
3. A recipient account that does not fit. Payments to a German tax authority never go to a foreign private or company account.
4. Time pressure and a demand for contact. The instruction to get in touch as quickly as possible is there to draw you into a conversation before you check.
5. A tax that does not exist. Nineteen percent VAT on the acquisition of cryptocurrency contradicts the applicable law.

If doubt remains, there is one route that always works: call your tax office on the number you look up yourself, not the number in the letter. Ask whether the case is known there. That costs ten minutes and settles the matter in the vast majority of cases.

If you have already paid or given away data: bank, police, tax office

For that case, the Federal Central Tax Office sets out a clear order. Anyone who has disclosed personal data or made payments because of a fraudulent message should inform the bank and the police immediately. With a transfer, speed decides whether the process can still be stopped, because a recall is only possible as long as the money has not been credited and passed on.

After that comes the report to the police, which you can also file online through your federal state's online police station. Keep everything you have: the envelope, the letter, the email with its full header, the transfer receipt. If you entered login details, change the passwords of the accounts concerned and check the two-factor settings of your exchange accounts. If tax data was involved, also inform your tax office, so that it knows your tax identification number may be in circulation.

One point remains unpleasant and should be said anyway: a transfer abroad that has already been executed is rarely recovered. That makes the step before it count all the more, namely checking before paying. Anyone who is unsure loses nothing by waiting a day, because a genuine tax demand does not expire overnight and does not become more expensive because you asked first.

Spotting forged ministry letters: what to take away

1. Check the sender and the route before you read the content. Only your tax office sets taxes, and it does so by post. Anyone documenting their purchases and sales cleanly anyway will spot an invented demand at once. The right tools for that are in the comparison of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers.
2. Clarify whether your provider is licensed at all. If a platform demands a tax or fee to an authority before a payout, that is a reason to break off. Which providers hold a European licence is shown in the overview of regulated crypto exchanges.
3. Keep your trading routes separate from your inbox. Log in to exchanges and to the tax portal only through bookmarks you set yourself, never through links in messages. Where to buy and which terms apply there is set out in the comparison of crypto exchanges.

(As of September 5, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

If you hold your own Bitcoin, the most important question in the quantum debate is not a question about the future. It is one you can answer today on a block explorer: has your address ever revealed its public key? That single fact decides whether a future quantum computer could attack your coins at all. Addresses that have never sent anything do not show their key. Addresses you have spent from show it permanently.

The occasion for this article is a paper that, at first glance, has nothing to do with cryptocurrencies. On September 3, 2026, the G7 Cybersecurity Working Group, chaired by France, published the joint statement "Preparing for the Post-Quantum Era: A Call to Action". The message: do not wait for the first capable quantum machine, but take stock of your own encryption now and start migrating. For you as a holder of Bitcoin, that is not an abstract matter for government agencies. The first European milestone for the switch expires at the end of this year, and the question of which of your addresses are exposed is a question of custody.

This article answers three things: what on a blockchain would actually be vulnerable, how you can check your own position in a few minutes, and which deadlines the regulators have set. No price forecast, no doomsday.

What the G7 statement of September 3, 2026 calls for

The G7 nations are urging public authorities and companies to begin the migration to post-quantum cryptography immediately. Post-quantum cryptography is the umbrella term for encryption and signature schemes that remain secure even once a sufficiently large quantum computer exists. The paper names five fields of action: raising awareness of quantum-related risks, developing national strategies, advancing research and practical adoption, strengthening cooperation between government and industry, and anchoring post-quantum methods in security requirements and procurement.

Not one of those points is addressed to retail investors. The direction they point in still concerns you: once banks, exchanges and wallet providers have to rebuild their signature schemes, the way your coins are secured will change over the medium term. What the statement explicitly does not say has a section of its own further down. That honesty belongs here, because several articles in recent days have read the paper as a warning aimed at the crypto industry.

Harvest now, decrypt later: why migration starts before the quantum computer

The technical term that explains the urgency appears verbatim in the G7 statement. Harvest now, decrypt later describes an attack in which data is captured and stored in encrypted form today, to be decrypted later with a quantum computer. The statement puts it this way: "In these attacks, threat actors collect encrypted data now, with the intention of decrypting it in the future using quantum computing capabilities."

For confidential communication, that is the core of the problem. For a public blockchain the case is different, and rather more uncomfortable: there, nobody needs to capture anything. Every transaction, every public key and every signature has been visible to everyone in the chain since the day it was created. An attacker does not need to collect the data, because it is already there in full. The only thing missing is the computing power.

How a quantum computer would get at a Bitcoin address

Bitcoin secures balances with a key pair. The private key is the secret number you use to sign spends; the public key is the counterpart derived from it, against which the network verifies the signature. Deriving the public key from the private one takes seconds. The reverse is considered practically impossible with classical computers, because it rests on the discrete logarithm problem over an elliptic curve.

It is exactly that reverse path a quantum computer would short-cut. Shor's algorithm is a quantum method that solves factorisation and discrete logarithms efficiently, and therefore makes today's common signature schemes RSA and ECDSA vulnerable. A cryptographically relevant quantum computer is a machine large enough and error-free enough to run that method against real key lengths. No such machine is publicly known to exist.

What matters is the second line of defence Bitcoin has had from the start: a classic Bitcoin address is not a public key, but its hash. A hash is a one-way function that turns an input into a fixed fingerprint from which the input cannot be recovered. As long as only the hash is known, even a quantum computer has nothing for Shor's algorithm to work on. The key becomes visible only when you spend from the address for the first time, because your transaction then supplies the public key for verification.

Which Bitcoin addresses already expose their public key

That leaves three groups, and only the first two are of interest for an attack on dormant balances.

First, P2PK. Pay-to-public-key is Bitcoin's oldest output format, in which the public key sits unwrapped in the script, with no hash in front of it. It was common in 2009 and 2010, above all for mining payouts, and is no longer used for new payments today. Anyone holding such coins has had the key exposed permanently without ever having spent anything.

Second, reused addresses. Every address that has sent at least once and holds a balance again afterwards has revealed its key. This group is the larger one, and the only one you can do something about directly. Address reuse means using the same receiving address several times instead of generating a new one for each incoming payment.

Third, Taproot. Pay-to-Taproot, recognisable by the bc1p prefix, puts the public key directly into the output by design, because the format is built on it. Taproot addresses therefore share the property of P2PK, but account for only a small share of all Bitcoin.

Not on that list are the common formats P2PKH (prefix 1), P2SH (prefix 3) and P2WPKH (prefix bc1q), as long as nothing has ever flowed out of them. With those, the chain sees only the hash. If your balance sits on a fresh address of that kind and you have never sent from it, you are in the group an attacker cannot reach with Shor's algorithm alone.

6.8 million Bitcoin on exposed keys: where the number comes from

The most frequently quoted estimate comes from the Bitcoin firm River and splits into two items: roughly 1.72 million BTC in P2PK outputs and a further 4.9 million BTC on reused addresses in other formats, together about 6.8 million BTC open to an attack with a long run-up. Other analyses arrive at slightly different figures, because they treat addresses without balances or dust amounts differently; the order of magnitude of roughly a third of the circulating supply is stable across the surveys.

A substantial part of that sits in the earliest mining payouts, untouched for a decade and a half, among them the holdings attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. Nobody can move those coins, because nobody moves the keys. That is precisely what fuels the debate over whether the network should one day freeze such outputs to keep them out of the wrong hands. What that proposal looks like and why it is contested is set out in our analysis of the possibly frozen 6.7 million Bitcoin from August 12, 2026.

For your own position, though, the large number is secondary. It does not tell you whether your coins are among them. You check that yourself, and here is how.

Checked in five minutes: is your address's key exposed?

For the check you need nothing but your receiving addresses and a block explorer. A block explorer is a website that makes the contents of the blockchain searchable; mempool.space and blockstream.info are widely used. You enter nothing secret there: an address is public, while your seed phrase and your private key never belong in a web form.

1. Read the address format. Open the receive function in your wallet and look at the start of the address. If it begins with bc1p, it is Taproot, and the key is visible. If it begins with 1, 3 or bc1q, the next step decides.
2. Look for outgoing transactions. Enter the address in the explorer and go through the transaction list. If it shows incoming payments only, the public key has not been published. If you find even a single outgoing transaction, it has been published for good, and nothing can undo that retroactively.
3. Match the balance. What counts is not whether the address was ever used, but whether anything still sits on it today. An exposed but empty address is not a risk.
4. Do not forget old holdings. Paper wallets from the early days, a long-retired wallet program or an inherited storage medium often contain exactly the formats at issue here.

Anyone with many addresses works with the xpub, the extended public key from which all addresses of an account can be derived. Some explorers accept it and show the entire history at once. Be aware that you are handing your complete payment history to the operator of the site. They cannot spend anything from it, but they can see everything.

Moving to a fresh address: what it gains you and what it costs

The only lever you hold as an owner is mundane and effective: move the balance from an exposed address to one that has never sent, and use a new address for every incoming payment afterwards. Modern wallets do this automatically, because they work as an HD wallet, deriving all addresses deterministically from a single seed phrase and moving on to the next one after each payment.

Three points deserve a sober look. First: during the migration transaction, your public key sits exposed in the mempool until the block is confirmed. The mempool is the waiting area for transactions not yet in a block. Against an attacker able to break a key within that window of a few minutes, no change of address helps; then again, such a machine would be a problem for the entire network anyway. Changing addresses protects against the slow attack on dormant balances, and that is the realistic case.

Second, the move costs network fees, and anyone consolidating many small amounts pays for every single input. When the network is busy, it can pay to wait for a quiet phase. Third, it remains an operation you should document cleanly: moving between your own addresses changes no owner, but a new transaction shows up in your records. Note down which address belongs to you, so the trail can be followed later and the attribution in your tax return does not fall apart; which tools take over that bookkeeping is shown in our comparison of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers.

If you are thinking about custody anyway: a device that never hands the private key to an internet-connected computer changes nothing about the quantum risk, but it lowers the risk that actually affects you today. How the various models perform is set out in our hardware wallet comparison.

What your seed phrase has to do with the quantum risk

A misunderstanding persists here. The seed phrase is the sequence of words from which your wallet derives all keys. That sequence of words is not itself a signature scheme, and is therefore not directly affected by Shor's algorithm. What would be vulnerable are the public keys derived from it, once they are in the chain.

For hash functions there is a second quantum method, Grover's algorithm, which speeds up searching a data set quadratically. It halves the effective security level of symmetric schemes, turning 256 bits into 128 bits on paper. That remains beyond anything searchable in the foreseeable future. The same applies to mining: SHA-256 does not lose its value to quantum computers; at best it becomes somewhat faster to attack, and the effort stays astronomical.

So you do not need to replace your 24 words. The only thing you can change is which addresses hold your balance.

Coins on an exchange: the question you can put to your provider

If your holdings sit with a trading venue, you have no access to the addresses. The exchange manages its own wallets, usually with a few large pooled addresses that have long been exposed by their very nature. In return, it has staff who can carry out the rebuild as soon as quantum-safe methods are available in the protocol.

Two questions are worth putting to support: is there a published roadmap for post-quantum migration, and are customer holdings kept on addresses whose keys are not already exposed? Answers are rare at present, and the question itself is a usable selection criterion: a provider that can say nothing about its own custody technology says something about itself too. If you are putting the provider to the test anyway, the regulatory key data is in our overview of crypto exchanges.

For most investors the point still stands: the quantum risk is not a reason to switch exchanges today. Access and insolvency risks are the more immediate reasons to look into self-custody.

The deadlines in plain terms: end of 2026, 2030 and 2035

Behind the G7 appeal are dates that have long been set. In its roadmap for the transition to post-quantum cryptography, the European Commission has stated that all member states should begin the switch by the end of 2026. For critical infrastructure the rule is: as early as possible, and by the end of 2030 at the latest. By 2035, the transition should be completed as far as is practically feasible.

Technical standardisation is running in parallel. The US standards body NIST published the first three standards on August 13, 2024: FIPS 203 for key exchange, FIPS 204 as the primary signature scheme and FIPS 205 as a hash-based fallback. In its transition paper, RSA and today's common curve cryptography are deemed deprecated from 2030 and disallowed from 2035. That puts a date on the table from which the schemes underpinning Bitcoin signatures may no longer be used in government systems.

For Germany, the Federal Office for Information Security frames the rebuild. The BSI notes that "the question of whether or when quantum computers will exist is no longer the central one", and recommends a gradual switch: "Post-quantum methods should where possible be used only in combination with classical methods, in other words hybrid." A hybrid scheme combines an established method with a new one, so that security is preserved if one of the two turns out to be weak.

None of these deadlines obliges you to do anything. But the dates set the pace at which banks, payment service providers and custodians will work, and they show that the authorities consider the window to be limited.

What the G7 statement explicitly does not say

A caveat belongs here, because it gets lost in the coverage: the G7 statement does not mention cryptocurrencies, blockchain or the financial sector at all. The paper is addressed to state bodies and companies in general. Anyone turning it into a call to action for the crypto industry is putting words in the source's mouth.

The connection between the two is nevertheless substantive, just indirect: both sides rest on the same mathematics. If curve cryptography falls, it falls for government certificates as much as for Bitcoin signatures. The difference lies in how easily each can be changed. A public authority swaps out its software; an open network with millions of participants first has to agree on what it wants to swap out at all.

BIP-360 and BIP-361: Bitcoin's own way out of the signature problem

That agreement is already under way, in the form of improvement proposals. A BIP is a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal, a formalised proposed change to the protocol that is discussed in public and implemented only with broad support.

BIP-360 describes a new, quantum-resistant output format into which holders could voluntarily move their coins in future. The proposal was added to the official repository in early 2026. BIP-361 builds on it, going further and providing for an orderly exit from the old signature types. The consequence would be that coins on exposed keys could no longer be spent after a transition period, effectively freezing them to keep them away from an attacker.

That is exactly what ignites the sharpest dispute in the Bitcoin world: on one side stands the argument that a theft running into the millions would destroy trust in the scarcity of the money. On the other stands the objection that a network able to freeze balances breaks its central promise. How the camps argue is set out in our assessment of the security debate from March 2026. Neither proposal has been adopted to date.

Ethereum and other chains: why migration works differently there

On Ethereum the same question arises with a different sign. Account addresses are likewise derived from a public key that becomes visible on the first send. Unlike Bitcoin, however, rules can be changed through scheduled network upgrades at shorter intervals, and the Ethereum Foundation's research agenda has listed quantum-safe signatures as a separate item for some time.

For you as a holder, nothing follows from that beyond what applies to Bitcoin: a balance on an address that has never sent is better off. Anyone working through smart contracts does not have that choice anyway, because every interaction exposes keys. What matters is the perspective that no major chain currently signs in a quantum-safe way. That is not a distinguishing feature of Bitcoin and not an argument for switching between chains.

When will the cryptographically relevant quantum computer arrive?

Estimates diverge widely here, and the only serious approach is to show both sides. In its recommendations, the BSI works on the assumption that such machines may be available in the 2030s, and concludes that systems with a long service life have to be migrated today. NIST's standardisation planning points in the same direction with its reference years of 2030 and 2035.

Against that stand experts who point to the gap between laboratory records and the number of error-corrected computing units required: today's systems work with a few hundred to a few thousand physical qubits, while estimates for an attack on real key lengths run into the hundreds of thousands. On that view, the danger is a matter of decades, not years. What is striking is that both camps give the same practical recommendation: start early, because a rebuild of that size takes years and because data captured today can be decrypted later.

What you take away from this dispute is modest and robust: changing addresses costs you a transaction fee and makes sense regardless, because it also improves your privacy. Everything else is reading the future.

The "quantum upgrade" scam: how to spot the fraud

Every major security debate attracts fraudsters, and this one in particular, because it combines fear with technology. The pattern is always the same: an email, a direct message or a fake wallet alert tells you to "migrate your balance to quantum safety", and leads to a page that asks for the seed phrase or requests an approval for your tokens.

Three features expose that reliably. There is no quantum-safe Bitcoin address you could move into today, because the format has not been agreed. No genuine protocol upgrade ever asks you to enter your word list. And no wallet you own sends you deadlines by message. If you want to be sure, type in the address of your wallet's website yourself and, in case of doubt, check with the manufacturer. The clipboard scam works along similar lines, and we described it in our guide to the unnoticed address swap.

Bitcoin and the quantum computer: what to take away

1. Check your addresses before you do anything else. Read the address format, look for outgoing transactions in the block explorer, match the balance. Only where a balance sits on an exposed address today is there anything to do at all. How best to store your keys while doing so is shown in our hardware wallet comparison.
2. Stop reusing addresses. Move affected holdings to fresh addresses during a quiet fee phase, and let your wallet generate a new one for every incoming payment from now on. That lowers the quantum risk and improves your privacy along the way.
3. Ask your custodian for its roadmap. Anyone holding funds on an exchange cannot choose the addresses and should know how the provider is handling the switch. The key data for the major trading venues is in our overview of crypto exchanges.

(As of September 5, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

At least four more decade-old wallets moved a combined $15.7 million between Aug. 29 and Sept. 4, with one batch of coins sent to Coinbase in a likely sign of a sale.

Robinhood Chain is an Ethereum layer-2 network built with Arbitrum technology for tokenized assets, crypto apps, and on-chain financial products.

The update fixes a high-severity flaw in Chrome’s V8 engine, but Google has not revealed who is using it or whom they targeted.

Anthropic says Claude spent 11 days turning Fermat's Last Theorem into 13 million lines of code a computer can check itself, no human trust required

Nearly 30 banks backed the rare unsecured facility as TikTok’s parent company spends heavily on AI chips, models, and overseas data centers.

Shiba Inu’s recovery faces a new test as roughly 75 billion SHIB moved toward exchanges, potentially increasing near-term selling pressure.

Inside Binance's hot new dual listing from BNB and Robinhood chains as one token eyes a $1 billion market cap.

Arbitrum has surged more than 120% from its late-August lows, with Robinhood Chain’s rapidly growing revenue emerging as the main catalyst.

The market witnesses a substantial increase in selling pressure after Bitcoin came closer to $80,000.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says a new generation of transaction formats could lay the groundwork for major Ethereum scaling gains by separating transaction execution from the conditions that must be verified beforehand.

Key Points

• NBA superstar LeBron James shared a teaser video on Instagram and X announcing his collaboration with Polymarket
• A representative confirmed a comprehensive football-centered campaign will debut in the coming week
• James’ previous partnership with DraftKings has concluded
• His offseason team decision earlier this year drove more than $273 million in trading volume on prediction market platforms
• The announcement sparked criticism from supporters concerned about gambling promotion

NBA legend LeBron James revealed a forthcoming partnership with prediction market company Polymarket via a brief teaser video shared across his social media channels on Saturday.

The 14-second promotional clip depicts James walking into a modern Polymarket headquarters. The footage concludes with Polymarket’s branding and a “COMING SOON” message displayed prominently.

“Welcome to Polymarket HQ. Coming soon,” James captioned the post. He included: “In partnership with @Polymarket.”

A representative from James’ team informed The Block that this video serves as a preview for a more extensive marketing initiative launching next week. The upcoming campaign will center around football betting markets. James’ earlier sponsorship arrangement with DraftKings has now ended.

Within sixty minutes of the video’s release, Polymarket shared it on their official account. The company responded to James’ announcement with “thanks for swinging by our HQ” accompanied by a goat emoji.

The specific nature of James’ role—whether as a paid spokesperson, brand partner, or equity stakeholder—remains undisclosed at this time.

Prediction Market Sector Experiences Rapid Expansion

This partnership announcement arrives during a period of explosive growth for the prediction market industry. According to Dune Analytics, nine prediction market platforms collectively processed $49.9 billion in notional trading volume during June, primarily fueled by World Cup wagering. Volume climbed to $56.4 billion in July and maintained momentum at $50.7 billion through August.

Polymarket and Kalshi dominated market share throughout these three months. Both organizations now carry multi-billion dollar valuations.

James himself has become a significant figure within prediction market communities. His summer free agency saga generated over $273 million in trading activity across various platforms, per Legal Sports Report data. The majority of market participants incorrectly predicted his destination. The Philadelphia 76ers carried approximately 9% odds before James ultimately joined them on a two-year, $8 million contract.

Social Media Users Express Disapproval

The announcement received mixed reactions from James’ fanbase. On X, one of the most popular responses accumulated over 11,000 likes and stated: “Don’t do this Bron.” Instagram’s top comment questioned: “My glorious king why are you promoting evil sports gambling,” attracting approximately 4,500 likes.

Several critical responses actually generated higher engagement metrics than James’ initial announcement.

This marks another venture into digital finance for James. In 2022, both he and the LeBron James Family Foundation entered into a multi-year agreement with Crypto.com. During that announcement, James stated blockchain technology was “revolutionizing our economy, sports and entertainment.”

Complete details regarding the Polymarket collaboration are anticipated to emerge during next week’s campaign rollout.

The post LeBron James Reveals Upcoming Polymarket Collaboration for Football Season appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• UK investor “Chris” purchased bitcoin in 2011 via Britcoin exchange, which became Intersango before shutting down
• Initial purchase totaled approximately £1,500 ($2,000) when bitcoin traded below $4 per coin
• Intersango ceased operations in late 2012 and disappeared entirely by early 2014
• CEL Solicitors employed blockchain tracing technology to locate a wallet containing over 5,500 BTC connected to Intersango customers
• The investor successfully reclaimed assets currently valued at roughly $4.5 million

An investor from the United Kingdom has successfully reclaimed bitcoin holdings valued at approximately $4.5 million after being locked out of his account for over thirteen years.

The individual, identified only as “Chris” to protect his privacy, made his initial bitcoin purchase in December 2011 using Britcoin, a British cryptocurrency platform that subsequently rebranded as Intersango. When the exchange ceased operations at the conclusion of 2012 and completely vanished by early 2014, Chris found himself unable to retrieve his digital assets.

At the time of purchase, he invested approximately £1,500, equivalent to about $2,000. Bitcoin was trading at less than $4 per coin during this period.

Watching Bitcoin’s Meteoric Rise From the Sidelines

Throughout the subsequent years, Chris observed bitcoin’s extraordinary price appreciation while convinced his investment had been permanently lost.

“The most painful part was watching Bitcoin’s value skyrocket and realizing what that money could have meant for my family,” he explained.

At the moment access was lost, his holdings had appreciated to approximately $5,400. He characterized the experience as financially crushing during that period.

“We had young children, had just purchased our home, and it represented funds we desperately needed,” he recalled.

The Road to Recovery

Legal practice CEL Solicitors, collaborating with its affiliated entity The Crypto Tracing Experts, deployed specialized blockchain analysis software to track down the missing assets. The firm discovered a digital wallet presumed to contain funds belonging to previous Intersango customers, holding in excess of 5,500 bitcoin—currently representing approximately $421 million in value.

Chris successfully recovered his share of these holdings. With bitcoin currently trading near $76,500, his retrieved funds amount to roughly $4.5 million.

Ryan Sweetnam, who directs financial litigation at CEL, explained that successful recovery demanded comprehensive documentation spanning nearly fifteen years, including banking statements verifying the initial transaction.

The recovery procedure proved complex. Claimants were required to present conclusive evidence establishing their ownership.

According to CEL Solicitors, additional former Intersango customers may qualify to reclaim their assets, assuming they can substantiate their ownership of bitcoin held on the platform.

Chris indicated plans to allocate a portion of the recovered funds toward helping his son eliminate mortgage debt and settle his own outstanding obligations.

He mentioned his intention to retain some bitcoin holdings, while expressing apprehension about market volatility and the cryptocurrency sector’s regulatory uncertainties.

“Part of me wants to hold onto some Bitcoin in case it appreciates further, but that also makes me anxious about potential losses,” he admitted.

This recovery demonstrates that cryptocurrency assets lost through defunct early exchanges may remain recoverable through advanced tracing technology and appropriate legal representation.

The post British Investor Recovers $4.5M in Bitcoin Lost Since 2011 Exchange Collapse appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Most of Bitcoin’s yearly price appreciation occurs within a small number of trading sessions
• Eliminating the top 10 performing days typically converts profitable years into losses
• The impact of missing peak days has decreased as Bitcoin’s volatility moderates
• Systematic investment approaches like dollar-cost averaging help investors avoid timing pitfalls
• Data indicates holding periods exceeding three years reduce loss probability to under 1%

Bitcoin exhibits a surprising characteristic that catches most market participants off guard. The overwhelming majority of its annual returns materialize during an exceptionally brief window, and being absent from the market during these critical moments can transform profitable positions into losses.

Analysis examining Bitcoin’s performance from 2010 through 2026 demonstrates this trend has persisted throughout most of its existence. Consider 2026: Bitcoin declined approximately 9% across the entire year. However, excluding its five strongest trading sessions would have amplified that decline to 36%.

What the Data Reveals

Across 11 of the previous 18 years, eliminating merely the 10 strongest trading days converted positive annual returns into negative territory. Take 2019 as an example: Bitcoin appreciated 94% that year. Strip away its 10 best-performing days and the result becomes a 40% decline.

According to Andre Dragosch, head of research at Bitwise Europe, this behavior represents Bitcoin’s fundamental nature. “The bulk of returns typically materialize within a limited number of days, whereas the asset predominantly trades sideways and consolidates during extended periods,” he explained.

Two notable outliers exist in the dataset. During 2013 and 2017, Bitcoin maintained positive returns even after stripping out its 20 strongest days. These years featured sustained, broad-based rallies rather than concentrated price spikes.

This pattern presents a genuine challenge for active traders. Capturing Bitcoin’s most explosive days requires maintaining market exposure before those sessions occur. Exiting positions even briefly—perhaps for just a week—frequently means forfeiting nearly the entire upward movement.

Adam Haeems, who leads asset management at Tesseract Group (overseeing more than $500 million), highlighted February 2026 as a compelling illustration. Bitcoin plummeted 14% on February 5, then surged 12% the following trading day. Investors who liquidated positions had merely 24 hours to re-enter.

The Evolution of Price Swings

Bitcoin’s daily price fluctuations have diminished considerably through time. Back in 2010, its strongest single-day performance registered a staggering 294% gain. In contrast, recent years have seen the best individual sessions range between 9% and 12%.

Haeems attributes this shift to market maturation, encompassing expanded futures markets, spot exchange-traded funds, and corporate treasury adoption of Bitcoin.

Reduced volatility also translates to smaller penalties for missing peak performance days. In 2010, being absent during the top trading sessions meant forfeiting roughly 98% of potential returns. Currently, that figure has contracted to approximately one-third.

Paul Howard, senior director at OTC trading platform Wincent, observed that institutional investors face heightened challenges during these compressed rallies. Market depth can evaporate rapidly when Bitcoin experiences sharp movements, complicating large-scale trade execution at favorable prices.

For beginner investors, industry professionals recommend allocating 70% to 90% of cryptocurrency holdings to Bitcoin and Ethereum. Dollar-cost averaging—deploying fixed amounts at regular intervals—helps investors sidestep purchasing at market tops.

Historical data shows that maintaining Bitcoin positions for a minimum of three years has consistently reduced the probability of realizing losses to below 1%, Dragosch notes.

The post Why Holding Bitcoin Long-Term Beats Trying to Time the Market appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Highlights

• The HYPE token currently trades near $85, recovering from a $50 low following a massive 240% surge from initial entry levels.
• An unidentified major holder acquired 343,000 HYPE tokens valued at $29M and has staked the entire position.
• A coalition of 30 institutional players, including UBS, Jane Street, and Bank of Montreal, collectively holds $75M in Hyperliquid ETF positions.
• The token secured its debut in a U.S. crypto ETF through Hashdex’s Nasdaq Crypto Index, representing a 3.4% allocation.
• Market participants are monitoring $105 as the next critical resistance level.

The Hyperliquid HYPE token is currently hovering around the $85 mark, bolstered by significant whale accumulation, expanding institutional participation through ETF vehicles, and positive technical momentum. After rebounding sharply from its $50 floor, market focus has shifted to whether the token can break through the $105 threshold.

Crypto market analyst Hov pointed out that an early position established at $26 has delivered a remarkable 240% return, while a subsequent entry around $55 has generated gains exceeding 50%. These performance figures underscore the persistent buying activity surrounding the asset.

From a technical perspective, HYPE maintains a position above all primary exponential moving averages—the 20 EMA is positioned at $78.29, while the 50, 100, and 200 EMAs are aligned below in a textbook bullish configuration. Additionally, the MACD indicator confirms that buyers maintain market dominance.

Major Whale Demonstrates Long-Term Conviction

Blockchain analytics platform Lookonchain identified that the wallet address “0x6436” acquired an additional 343,000 HYPE tokens in a transaction worth approximately $29.09 million. This major holder’s total position now stands at 3.24 million HYPE tokens with a current valuation of roughly $252 million.

Particularly noteworthy is the fact that this whale has staked the entire allocation, indicating a long-term investment strategy rather than short-term speculation. Such substantial commitment typically removes tokens from active circulation and demonstrates strong confidence in the project’s future prospects.

Traditional Finance Firms Amass $75M in ETF Positions

James Seyffart, an ETF analyst at Bloomberg, analyzed 13F regulatory filings revealing that 30 identified institutional investors maintained a cumulative $74.9 million in Hyperliquid ETF holdings as of the June 30 reporting date.

Wu Blockchain disseminated Seyffart’s findings on X, noting that Wealth High Governance Asset Management topped the rankings with $23.9 million in exposure, trailed by OLP Capital Management with $10.5 million, UBS holding $7.5 million, Bank of Montreal with $6.7 million, and Jane Street maintaining $4.4 million. The top five firms alone represent more than 70% of all reported institutional exposure.

Currently, three HYPE ETFs trade on U.S. exchanges: 21Shares introduced THYP on May 12, Bitwise subsequently launched BHYP, and Grayscale debuted HYPG in June. Collectively, these funds manage $480.86 million in total net assets and have attracted $356.58 million in cumulative net inflows since their respective launches.

Additionally, HYPE secured inclusion in the Hashdex Nasdaq Crypto Index US ETF with a 3.4% weighting, positioning it as the fifth-largest component following Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, and Solana.

Friday’s trading session saw ETF inflows totaling $10.52 million, with the entire amount directed to Bitwise’s BHYP product.

The post Hyperliquid (HYPE) Gains Momentum as UBS and Jane Street Join $75M Institutional Push appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Fed Treasury bill purchases of up to $2.122 billion next week form part of a broader $17 billion reinvestment schedule through September 14.
• The New York Fed lists no reserve-management purchases for the August 14 to September 14 period, separating the program from new stimulus.
• Bitcoin recovered toward $80,000 after a move below $77,000 triggered roughly $150 million in long liquidations across derivatives markets.
• Reinvestment can affect reserve flows, but these scheduled purchases do not represent a fresh $17 billion expansion of the Fed balance sheet.

Fed Treasury bill purchases will total up to $2.122 billion next week, market commentator Jordan Kerridge reported. The operation sits within roughly $17 billion of scheduled activity running from August 14 through September 14. Bitcoin traded near $80,000 after previously sliding below $77,000 and triggering about $150 million in long liquidations. 

The rebound renewed attention on liquidity and Treasury operations. Still, the purchase structure matters. The New York Fed classifies the monthly program as Treasury reinvestment, not a fresh reserve-management operation. Traders must separate routine portfolio maintenance from policy stimulus when judging any Bitcoin liquidity response next week.

Fed Treasury Bill Purchases Form Part of Reinvestment Plan

The New York Fed plans approximately $17 billion in reinvestment purchases during the window. Its schedule covers August 14 through September 14. It lists no reserve-management purchases for this period. Kerridge says the remaining Fed Treasury bill purchases can reach $2.122 billion next week.

The distinction shapes how markets read the operation. Reinvestment uses principal payments from the Fed’s agency securities holdings to buy Treasury bills. This changes portfolio composition while replacing assets that are paying down. In practice, this does not equal a new $17 billion expansion.

The Federal Open Market Committee directs the New York Fed’s trading desk to conduct these transactions. Purchases occur in the secondary market through primary dealers. Settlement typically takes place one business day after each operation.

The desk allocates bill purchases across two maturity sectors. Bills with one to four months receive about 75% of purchases. Securities with four to 12 months receive 25%. The desk excludes bills with four weeks or less until maturity.

Fed Treasury bill purchases differ from reserve-management purchases. Reserve-management activity grows securities holdings to keep banking reserves ample. Reinvestment purchases replace principal received from agency debt and mortgage-backed securities. The schedule includes only the second category.

That detail tempers claims about a liquidity surge. The transactions can support orderly reserve conditions and maintain the balance sheet’s composition. Nevertheless, they do not confirm broad monetary easing. Interest-rate policy, reserve levels, Treasury cash flows, and credit demand also affect financial conditions.

Why Bitcoin Traders Are Watching Changes in Dollar Liquidity

Bitcoin often attracts stronger demand when dollar liquidity expands and financing conditions ease. More available cash can increase investor capacity for risk assets. Lower short-term yields can also reduce the appeal of cash-like instruments. Neither outcome follows automatically from Fed Treasury bill purchases.

Kerridge linked the scheduled operation with a possible positive Bitcoin response. Recent price action explains that focus.  BTC price fell below $77,000 before recovering part of the decline. The move forced leveraged long positions to close, exposing fragile positioning across derivatives markets.

Liquidations can amplify losses because exchanges automatically sell collateral when margin falls below required levels. A recovery after such an event may reflect short covering, spot demand, or reduced selling. It does not prove that Treasury reinvestment caused the move.

Traders can assess Bitcoin liquidity through several measures rather than one purchase schedule. Bank reserves, stablecoin supply, exchange inflows, funding rates, open interest, and Treasury General Account changes provide broader context. Bond yields and the dollar can also shape crypto demand.

Fed Treasury bill purchases may influence short-term market expectations before settlement. Their direct effect depends on counterparties, reserve movements, and other balance-sheet flows occurring simultaneously. A Treasury cash increase can drain reserves, while federal spending can return cash to banks.

The $2.122 billion figure therefore serves as one scheduled input, not a standalone Bitcoin signal. Market participants will watch whether Bitcoin holds $80,000 after its recovery. They will also track leverage rebuilding after the earlier liquidation wave. The next operation results will show accepted purchase amounts, dealer submissions, and the bills acquired.

The post Fed Treasury Bill Purchases Draw Focus Toward Bitcoin Liquidity appeared first on Blockonomi.

As with most previous weekends, this one is also quite sluggish for bitcoin, which continues to fight for $80,000 without making any major moves.

The same cannot be said for some altcoins, though. ZEC, for example, has skyrocketed by 17% daily, while ARB has stolen the show with a massive 42% surge.

BTC Fights for $80K

The primary cryptocurrency closed August (on Monday) in the green for the first time in a bear market, surging by over 25% for the month. This came even after its early Monday retracement from $79,000 to $77,000 as the US and Iran resumed the strikes against each other.

Bitcoin rebounded to $79,000 rather quickly, but it was rejected on Tuesday and driven south to under $76,500 by Wednesday. That’s when the bulls returned in full force, initiating a major leg up that drove the asset to $82,400. This became BTC’s highest price tag since mid-May.

However, the strong US jobs report from Friday led to a major decline, as bitcoin slipped by three grand as the odds for the Fed to hike the rates skyrocketed. Nevertheless, BTC managed to rebound from the drop to $78,600 and jumped to around $80,000, where it spent most of the weekend, even though the amount of bearish news that should push it south has risen significantly in the past week.

Its market capitalization is back at $1.6 trillion on CMC, while its dominance over the alts has declined slightly to 59.1%.

ZEC, ARB on a Roll

Ethereum has neared $2,500 again after a 1.75% increase daily. BNB, which touched $770 yesterday, is below $760 now, while XRP has defended the $1.40 support. SOL is well above $100 once again, and similar gains are evident from the likes of HYPE, DOGE, RAIN, XMR, LINK, and ADA.

Uniswap’s UNI has jumped to $7 after a 10% increase, while ZEC is close to $1,200 for the first time in almost a decade following a major 17% jump. Arbitrum’s native token has stolen the show, surging by 42% to over $0.19.

The total crypto market cap remains at just over $2.7 trillion on CMC after a 0.8% increase since yesterday.

The post Arbitrum (ARB) Rockets by 42% Daily, Bitcoin (BTC) Fights for $80K: Weekend Watch appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin tried and failed on several occasions to decisively break above the crucial $80,000 level, but perhaps the more important question is why it hasn’t dumped much further.

After all, the macro landscape is anything but bullish given the renewed attacks between the US and Iran, the hawkish Fed, and the surprisingly strong jobs data.

BTC Should Be Hurting

The latest geopolitical developments arrived this weekend as the two warring parties exchanged fresh attacks after Iran’s Revolutionary Guard launched ballistic missiles against two US Navy vessels. The US subsequently struck three Iranian crude oil carriers, while the Middle Eastern country also targeted tankers and US-linked vessels in waters around the Strait of Hormuz.

The escalation matters far beyond geopolitics as Brent crude climbed toward $100 per barrel again amid renewed concerns about energy supplies. Higher oil prices can directly feed into inflation, making the Federal Reserve’s decision next week even harder.

The US central bank has become another issue for BTC. Chair Kevin Warsh adopted a distinctly more hawkish tone at Jackson Hole last week, emphasizing that inflation remains too high and that the Fed could still have “work to do.”

The odds for a September rate hike jumped after the speech and went even higher after Friday’s jobs report. It showed that the US economy added 162,000 jobs in August, almost triple expectations of 56,000, while unemployment remained unchanged at 4.1%.

Although that’s good news for the economy, risk assets do not benefit as the hope for easier monetary policy fades given the higher inflation.

September rate hike odds jumped to 65% at their peak. The two-year Treasury yield reached its highest level since January 2025, the greenback strengthened, and stocks came under pressure.

Bitcoin dropped by $3,000 initially, but rebounded swiftly.

Absorbing Bad News

All of the above creates an atmosphere highly unfavorable for risk-on assets like BTC. Yet it remains at $80,000 even during the weekend when the attacks in the Middle East resumed, and it’s up roughly 25% over the past month.

Part of the explanation for why the cryptocurrency has performed so well comes from the ETF performance. The funds continue to attract significant amounts, with Thursday being a prime example. Over $730 million entered the ETFs, the highest single-day level since January.

What’s even more impressive is that gold has lost a significant portion of its gains charted after the mid-August rally, while BTC holds strong. However, this doesn’t guarantee that BTC cannot fall. In fact, there are two major threats in the next 10 days or so.

First, it’s the CPI, which arrives on September 11. A hotter-than-expected inflation reading, especially after the rise in oil prices, could push expectations for a rate hike even further.

Then it’s the conclusion of the FOMC meeting on September 16. An increase in the rates combined with hawkish guidance from Warsh could finally push BTC through key support levels, as discussed yesterday.

The post Bitcoin at $80K Is Stronger Than It Looks: BTC Is Surviving a Perfect Storm of Bearish News appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The correlation between the leading cryptocurrency and the largest financial asset, gold, has climbed to its highest level since the 2020 pandemic, while its relationship with the Nasdaq has weakened significantly.

The shift comes as concerns about debt, deficits, and currency debasement return to the spotlight after the latest developments in the US.

Closer to Gold

The change started to occur following the mid-August rally, which was propelled by the US Treasury Department’s announcement that it would at least double the maximum size of liquidity-support buybacks for longer-dated government debt, going from $2 billion to $4 billion per operation.

BTC rocketed from under $65,000 to over $80,000 within days, while the bullion went from $4,350/oz to $4,700/oz before it was rejected.

The analysts at the Kobeissi Letter argued that BTC’s increasing correlation with the precious metal accelerated following the Treasury’s move, with investors increasingly treating both as protection against currency debasement, even though gold has lost a major chunk of its gains.

Grayscale’s Head of Research, Zach Pandl, supported this narrative, noting recently that the bitcoin-gold correlation has climbed from near zero at the beginning of the year to over 50%. At the same time, the Nasdaq relationship has moved in the opposite direction.

US federal debt going past $40 trillion, persistent government deficits still existing, and concerns about the long-term purchasing power of fiat currencies have brought the so-called “debasement trade” back into focus.

Both BTC and gold have limited supply characteristics that can make them attractive under that thesis, despite the cryptocurrency’s infamous volatility.

Further Away From Nasdaq

The other part of the equation could be equally important since BTC’s 90-day correlation with the Nasdaq 100 has fallen from over 60% to around 30%-33%. This is a major change from earlier periods, when the cryptocurrency frequently behaved like a high-beta tech asset, jumping alongside growth stocks when financial conditions eased and vice versa.

The August rally was a striking example of the opposite, with BTC gaining over 20% in days, while US equities struggled. As previously reported, bitcoin had underperformed the S&P 500 on roughly two-thirds of trading days over the preceding three months before it suddenly reversed that trend.

This divergence suggests investors are increasingly valuing bitcoin for its scarcity and monetary properties rather than simply treating it as a speculative risk asset.

However, this substantial trend change does not mean that the relationship with equities has fully flipped. The Friday reaction to the strong US jobs report hinted at a higher correlation between the two as both asset classes slipped.

The post Bitcoin’s Link to Gold Hits a 6-Year High as Tech Correlation Fades: Why It Matters appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The monetary landscape in the United States changed in the past week or so, first after the hawkish stance taken by the current Federal Reserve Chairman, Kevin Warsh, and then following last Friday’s strong US jobs report.

As such, the expectations have changed, with investors and experts pricing in a potential rate hike for the next FOMC meeting scheduled to take place on September 15-16. After answering how this could impact BTC, we turned our focus to XRP, whose case was described as “arguably more interesting than bitcoin’s,” by ChatGPT.

What Happens to XRP Then?

With the current odds on prediction markets at well over 50% for a rate hike in September, the warning signs for risk-on assets are fully flashing. This was felt on Friday briefly after the jobs report, with BTC dropping by $3,000 and XRP slumping from $1.45 to under $1.40, where it found support.

ChatGPT estimated that the cross-border token is likely to react “more violently to a Fed hike” even though it has two cushions: strong ETF demand and the CLARITY Act process. The initial reaction to a 25 bps increase on September 16 would be a 4%-8% decline, the AI predicted. From the current levels, this would materialize in a dip below $1.30.

The situation could worsen in the following days and weeks, with $1.20 emerging as the first major support to be tested. If Warsh takes an even more hawkish approach in his post-FOMC meeting speech, XRP could “fall further toward $1.05-$1.15.”

One of the cushions mentioned above, the CLARITY Act, has not made any real progress lately. It was delayed once again in early August, and its September vote, scheduled for just a day before the conclusion of the FOMC meeting, is no longer guaranteed after the latest developments. As such, XRP could be primed for even more painful performance in case of a rate hike.

The Dark Horse

ChatGPT believes that the spot XRP ETFs could be the silver lining for the underlying asset, as they have remained relatively solid even during market distress, and their performance has picked up after the August rally. The cross-border token could quickly bounce after the initial shock if the Fed signals no immediate second hike and the ETF demand is still intact.

If that’s the case, $1.50-$1.60 will come into focus as this level has halted many of XRP’s previous breakout attempts. However, if the Fed surprises the market and raises rates by 50 bps, while Warsh goes fully hawkish, the altcoin’s future could quickly deteriorate, with another leg down to and even below $1.00, ChatGPT warned.

The post Fed Rate Hike Could Hit XRP Hard: ChatGPT Reveals How Low Ripple’s Price Could Go appeared first on CryptoPotato.

A Bank for International Settlements (BIS) working paper tests the XRP Ledger (XRPL) as a proof-of-concept for verifying official statistics on-chain, recording cryptographic fingerprints of public datasets that publish in three to five seconds and verify in one to two.

The Working Paper No 1374 essentially asks how statistical agencies can give users an independent way to check the origin and integrity of published data without changing their existing dissemination systems.

International organizations (the BIS among them) rely on the SDMX standard to exchange official statistics, and the prototype binds each SDMX dataset to its source by hashing it and writing a single summary value to the ledger.

Though only the fingerprints reach the chain, never the underlying numbers, so confidential data stays off-ledger, and the method extends to formats such as XBRL. The BIS has tested public blockchains before, including Project Mariana, which trialed wholesale central bank digital currency settlement on a public chain with the central banks of France, Singapore, and Switzerland.

The system normalizes each file with Canonical XML 1.1, hashes it with SHA3-512 at the whole-file and per-series level, and collapses those hashes into one Merkle root written to the Memos field of an XRPL Payment transaction. Each file also carries a W3C Verifiable Credential in its header, signed by the publisher’s identity keys.

Cost and Simplicity

The memo approach needs no smart contracts, so the authors avoided gas costs and contract risk, and XRPL’s base fee of 10 drops, or 0.00001 XRP, put anchoring close to free. Batching compounds that.

A single ledger entry can cover thousands of datasets, dropping the on-chain cost to a fraction of a cent each. The paper also cites the ledger’s fast consensus finality and the published technical analysis of its consensus protocol.

XRPL has taken on other institutional workloads this year. CryptoPotato reported on a pilot that linked the ledger to interbank rails with JPMorgan, Mastercard and Ondo, which settled tokenized Treasury bills in under five seconds, and Ripple has published an institutional roadmap adding compliance credentials and permissioned trading. The BIS tests ran on XRPL’s DevNet, a test network.

It notes that DevNet shares the mainnet’s transaction format and close cadence, so the latency figures carry over, and mainnet fees stay in the sub-cent range.

A Few Firm Limits

The paper also describes the build as an experimental proof-of-concept, stating a production service would need hardware-backed signing, pinned validator nodes and formal load testing.

Though keep in mind the ledger certifies only what was published, by whom and when, so the paper reaches no adoption decision and gives no endorsement of XRP, and the authors attribute the views to themselves, not to the BIS or its member central banks.

The post BIS Tests XRP Ledger to Anchor Official Statistics On-Chain in Proof-of-Concept Paper appeared first on CryptoPotato.