OpenAI's push for AI-native devices could redefine human-computer interaction, but faces challenges in execution, competition, and legal hurdles.

The post Sam Altman wants OpenAI to build the computer that comes after the smartphone appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Nscale's massive contracted revenue highlights the escalating demand for AI infrastructure, potentially reshaping the tech investment landscape.

The post Nvidia-backed AI company Nscale reveals staggering $103B contracted revenue ahead of IPO appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

EIP-8141's frame transactions enhance Ethereum's scalability, enabling efficient multi-step operations and fostering broader dApp innovation.

The post Ethereum advances scaling with EIP-8141, a new transaction type that splits one tx into up to 64 frames appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Institutional interest in Hyperliquid ETFs signals growing acceptance of decentralized finance products, potentially boosting market liquidity.

The post 30 institutions hold $75M in Hyperliquid ETF exposure: 13F data appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Intel's AI growth potential is overshadowed by immediate financial challenges, highlighting the volatility and uncertainty in tech valuations.

The post Mizuho cuts Intel target to $92 despite AI-driven growth potential 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.

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.

A Federal Reserve staff note published Sept. 4 sketches a route for regulated payment stablecoins to enter M1 or the broader M2 money supply. Its accounting framework requires adjustments before gross circulation could enter either measure.

Payment stablecoins are excluded from the US monetary aggregates today. The new note makes future treatment depend on economic use, alongside adjustments for reserve assets already counted elsewhere and the separation of US circulation from global activity. Otherwise, a larger money-supply figure could partly reflect a new wrapper around dollars the system already measured.

The distinction matters for anyone using M1 or M2 to judge dollar liquidity. A statistical increase driven by reclassification says little about newly created purchasing power.

The note is independent staff research, reflects only its authors' views, and is not part of a Federal Reserve policy deliberation. Existing definitions remain unchanged, and the analysis presents conditional possibilities.

How stablecoins could fit, and what could be counted twice

M1 is the narrowest official US money measure. It contains currency and highly liquid balances that households and businesses can use for transactions. M2 includes M1 plus less liquid savings-type assets, including small-denomination time deposits and retail money market funds.

The Fed authors apply that functional split to payment stablecoins. If the coins are used predominantly as a stable store of value or as liquidity for crypto trading, non-M1 M2 may be the better fit. If they become a common medium of exchange for household and business payments, their immediate transferability could support an M1 classification.

The framework remains conditional. The GENIUS Act requires permitted issuers to maintain at least 1:1 identifiable reserves and publish monthly reserve information, and leaves M1 or M2 assignment to a separate statistical decision. The Fed says standardized circulation data and a reporting chain suitable for monetary-statistics compilation would still be required.

The central stock-measurement problem sits on the reserve side. Under GENIUS, permitted reserves can include bank deposits, Treasury instruments, and government money funds. The Fed note says some bank deposits and money-fund net assets are already captured in M1 or M2.

If an issuer receives dollars, places part of them in a bank deposit or money fund, and issues stablecoins against that reserve, counting the tokens at face value could add a new line to the aggregate while part of the backing remains in another counted component. That is the same-dollar problem.

Only reserve assets already represented in M1 or M2 create overlap. The overlap depends on the backing composition and the statistical treatment of each reserve asset. The Fed note says the extent must be assessed before any adjustment is chosen.

USDC shows that a single headline number answers only part of the reserve question. Circle says most of its reserve is held in the Circle Reserve Fund, an SEC-registered government money market fund that can hold cash, short-dated US Treasuries, and overnight US Treasury repurchase agreements. Its July assurance also lists Treasury securities outside the fund, alongside cash held at regulated financial institutions.

Circle's latest active monthly assurance on the transparency page covered July 31. It reported 71.826 billion USDC in circulation and reserve assets with a fair value of $71.904 billion. Those figures document backing at a point in time. A net addition to M1 or M2 requires a separate consolidation calculation.

A defensible net estimate would have to match the reported reserve categories against the exact money-stock components already counted, remove only genuine overlaps, and preserve backing assets outside the aggregates. The current sources leave that increment unquantified.

The data gaps behind a national money measure

Geography is a separate problem from reserve overlap. A dollar stablecoin issued by a US-regulated company can move globally on a public blockchain, while transaction records generally lack enough geographic information to identify the portion that belongs inside a US measure.

The Fed note says GENIUS applies to US-regulated issuers without distinguishing domestic from international circulation. Additional reporting may therefore be needed to isolate US circulation from global activity. An issuer's total outstanding tokens map imperfectly onto US-held money.

Economic use requires a separate dataset. The Fed's functional test asks whether stablecoins behave more like transaction money or savings. Raw blockchain transfer counts are insufficient because a single smart-contract transaction can emit several transfer events.

A Bank for International Settlements working paper published in June analyzed more than 593 million event logs from 141 million Ethereum transactions executed in 2025 involving USDT, USDC, and PayPal USD. Roughly one third of the transactions generated multiple steps or event logs, while nearly 60% of transfer events occurred inside complex transactions.

Those bundles can combine trading, lending, arbitrage, liquidity provision, and settlement. Treating every emitted event as a standalone payment can exaggerate both activity counts and the apparent payment role of stablecoins.

The 60% statistic describes event structure alone. Functional classification under the Fed staff framework requires separate evidence about economic use.

The scale makes these distinctions consequential. CryptoSlate's Sept. 4 market snapshot listed the global stablecoin category at $292.1 billion across 73 assets. Its USDC market page showed about $74.5 billion of market capitalization and 74.51 billion tokens in supply.

Those global market figures say nothing about US-resident ownership or usage. They also differ in date and purpose from Circle's July 31 assurance, so the values should not be treated as interchangeable observations.

For comparison, FRED reported seasonally adjusted US M2 at $23.218 trillion for July 2026, updated Aug. 25. That establishes the scale of the official aggregate while leaving the required stablecoin net-addition adjustment unresolved.

The Fed staff framework therefore points to three different accounting jobs before any classification change: determine how the tokens function, consolidate reserve assets already represented in the aggregates, and isolate the circulation relevant to the United States. Transaction-level analysis informs the first job; reserve and residency data remain essential for the other two.

Stablecoins could eventually make M1 or M2 more complete. Skipping those adjustments would blur already-counted balances with genuinely new dollar liquidity.

The post Fed stablecoin research exposes how the same dollar could count twice in M1 or M2 appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Eligible Solana token-account owners can reclaim excess SOL previously needed to keep their token accounts open after the network's first rent reduction went live Sept. 3. For businesses funding new accounts, the same change lowers the upfront capital required to create them.

The full plan would change how account growth translates into SOL held against storage. If Solana completes its proposed 90% reduction, total persistent account state, including each account's storage overhead, would have to grow tenfold to require the same minimum SOL reserves as before the rollout. Adoption could expand substantially while the minimum SOL needed for this reserve channel falls.

The Solana Foundation's tracker confirms that only the first reduction, approximately 9%, is live on mainnet. The tenfold comparison applies to the conditional final target, while the initial cut already lowers reserve requirements.

Solana rent reduction and the 10× hurdle

Solana's “rent” is a balance held against account storage. It is generally recoverable when an account closes, rather than an ongoing bill paid to validators. Reducing the required balance lets new accounts begin with less SOL and can leave existing accounts holding more than their minimum.

At epoch 1028 on Sept. 3, Solana lowered the reserve parameter from 6,960 to 6,333 lamports per byte. The five-stage plan's final target is 696.

Under SIMD-0437, the rent-reduction specification, that minimum equals the account's data size plus 128 bytes of overhead, multiplied by the current lamports-per-byte parameter. A standard token account has 165 data bytes, making its effective size 293 bytes.

Applying that formula to one million identical standard token accounts gives the following illustration:

These are calculated minimum requirements for a fixed account population, not measured withdrawals. The final row assumes all five reductions activate. Different account sizes would produce different totals.

The million-account example illustrates operating capital, but it cannot establish a network-wide supply effect. Its conditional final reduction of 1,835.352 SOL represents about 0.000314% of the approximately 585.36 million circulating SOL shown in CryptoSlate's Sept. 5 market data. The actual aggregate reserve channel requires a broader account inventory, with account sizes, balances and reclaimability taken into account.

The tenfold threshold follows from the same relationship. At one-tenth the original reserve rate, ten times as many rent-bearing bytes would be needed to keep the aggregate minimum unchanged. It measures the total stock of persistent state, including per-account overhead. User counts, transaction counts and SOL prices are separate measures; the tenfold comparison describes storage requirements.

The live first step sets a smaller hurdle: about 9.9% more rent-bearing state would preserve the original minimum requirement at 6,333 lamports per byte. Both comparisons concern required reserves. Actual account balances can remain above those floors.

For payments, this reserve demand arises mainly when accounts are opened. The Foundation's July account-state study explains that an associated token account normally serves a particular wallet and token mint. Once it exists, later payments in the same token do not require another account-creation deposit. More payments through existing accounts therefore need not produce a proportional increase in storage reserves.

Withdrawal authority decides who gets the capital

The immediate benefit is access to capital already on-chain. The Foundation's Sept. 3 reclamation guide describes an instruction called WithdrawExcessLamports that moves SOL above the current minimum without closing a token account or changing its token balance. The Token-2022 program offers the same instruction.

For a token account, its owner must authorize the withdrawal. For a mint, authorization comes from the mint authority, or from the mint account itself signing if that authority has been revoked. Accounts owned by custom programs need the owning program to provide withdrawal logic and check the relevant authority.

That makes control of the account economically significant. A payments provider that funded a customer's token account cannot assume that paying the original deposit gives it the right to reclaim the excess. The party entitled to authorize the withdrawal may be different from the party that supplied the SOL.

Moving a surplus balance requires an authorized transaction that leaves the minimum intact. It transfers existing SOL between accounts while conserving the total; it does not issue new tokens. The guide provides no aggregate measure of completed withdrawals or subsequent sales.

For future onboarding, the benefit is more direct: whoever funds an account needs less SOL upfront. Providers can potentially support more customer accounts with the same capital, even when customers themselves do not purchase SOL. Whether existing surplus can be redeployed depends on the authority and program arrangements above.

How long those accounts survive will determine the continuing reserve requirement. Gross account creation can give a very different impression from state that remains on-chain.

In his July 20 analysis, Solana Foundation researcher Umberto Natale found that 75.5% of account-creation events in the analyzed cohort closed within the same transaction. The observations were not deduplicated by address: repeated creation and closure could count as separate events.

Those workflows can generate activity while leaving little persistent account storage behind. The finding does not predict how users will respond to September's reduction. The study also cautions that its weak, unstable correlations between SOL prices and account activity are descriptive, rather than a causal estimate of how cheaper rent changes demand.

A useful test of the policy will therefore track persistent account bytes and their associated minimum reserves alongside activity. Counting new accounts alone cannot establish whether the network has absorbed the lower reserve rate.

SOL demand extends beyond account reserves

Other uses of SOL also continue. Under Solana's fee rules, transactions require SOL: half the base fee is burned and half goes to the validator, while the entire priority fee goes to the validator. Fee payments are a separate demand channel from refundable account reserves. More activity could increase fee use, but throughput alone does not establish the amount users pay or the balances they retain.

SOL holders can also delegate stake to validators to help secure the network and become eligible for rewards. Reclaimed capital could be staked or used to fund more accounts. The cited material does not establish either outcome as a result of the cut, so these possibilities provide no quantified offset to lower reserve requirements.

CryptoSlate's recent analysis of activity and fee economics examined a related distinction: network usage and token economics can move differently. Rent reduction adds a specific reason why growth can require less SOL per unit of persistent state.

As of Sept. 5, the second reduction, to 5,080 lamports per byte, is on testnet, with mainnet expected in mid-September. The last three steps are expected with Agave 4.4 in November. Each activation remains subject to review of state growth, and a fallback can restore the original parameter.

The next gates will determine how far the capital saving goes. Persistent state growth and actual reclamation will then show how much of that saving becomes new account capacity, reusable working capital or reduced SOL held against storage.

The post Solana’s plan to cut account deposits by 90% could weaken a reason to hold SOL appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Zcash broke above $1,000 on Sept. 4, pushing the asset value of Grayscale’s recently listed ZCSH ETF past $400 million less than two weeks after its debut.

ZEC registered an intraday high of $1,050.70, up roughly 20% over 24 hours and nearly 100% over the past month.

The move lifted ZCSH’s assets to $414.7 million as of Sept. 3, compared with about $304.6 million when the fund began trading on NYSE Arca on Aug. 25.

ZCSH inherited assets from the Grayscale Zcash Trust, and the sharp appreciation in ZEC accounts for much of the increase.

Still, the fund’s ZEC holdings rose from 387,849 at launch to 428,613 by Sept. 3, while shares outstanding increased to 5.35 million.

The Sept. 4 breakout came as Bitcoin surpassed $82,000 and ETH reclaimed $2,500, but Zcash’s move was considerably larger. Roughly $40 million of ZEC shorts were liquidated in 24 hours, adding fuel to a rally that had already gathered momentum before the latest market-wide advance.

Leverage has expanded with the price. CoinGlass data showed that Zcash futures open interest crossed $2 billion for the first time, while 24-hour futures volume climbed above $6 billion for the first time since mid-August.

The combination suggests traders are committing substantially more capital to ZEC derivatives as the token tests levels it has not sustained in years.

The scale of the repricing is particularly stark over a longer horizon. ZEC was trading around $40 a year ago and has now returned to the top 10 largest cryptos by market cap for the first time since 2018.

That ascent has also brought increasingly aggressive forecasts. Cryptographer Arjun Khemani said characterizing the token's rally solely as a privacy-coin understates the case being made for Zcash.

He pointed to its fixed 21 million supply, Bitcoin-like emissions schedule, decade of distribution, work on quantum recoverability, plans for substantially higher transaction throughput and efforts to formally verify its shielded pool against undetectable inflation bugs.

Khemani said that “privacy is just one property of Zcash,” arguing that the larger bet is whether ZEC can develop into a form of sovereign money.

Grayscale sees AI opening a crack in Bitcoin’s dominance

The price move has revived a broader question around Zcash: whether its latest gains can translate into a lasting challenge to Bitcoin’s dominance of the digital-currency market.

Bitcoin accounts for about 93% of the market capitalization of Grayscale’s Currencies Crypto Sector, a level of dominance that alternatives such as Litecoin have failed to seriously disrupt. Zcash remains worth less than 1% of Bitcoin even after rising roughly 19-fold over the period covered by Grayscale’s latest research.

Grayscale argues Zcash has a better chance than previous challengers because it combines Bitcoin-like monetary properties with features that have become more relevant as the crypto market has matured.

Privacy is central to that thesis.

Bitcoin transactions are permanently recorded on a public ledger. Once an address is linked to an offchain identity, its balances and transaction history can potentially be reconstructed.

Grayscale argues advances in artificial intelligence could make that process faster, cheaper, and more widely accessible by improving address labeling and blockchain activity analysis.

The asset manager sees that technological shift as the beginning of a third major wave of concern over financial privacy, following the computerization of financial records in the 1970s and the growth of the internet in the 1990s.

Zcash approaches the problem differently. Its shielded transactions use zero-knowledge cryptography to conceal sending and receiving addresses and transaction amounts, allowing users to retain Bitcoin-like scarcity without making every transfer permanently visible.

Grayscale argued that distinction could become more valuable as AI makes surveillance of transparent blockchains increasingly sophisticated.

Its case extends beyond privacy. Grayscale describes Zcash as having several “second mover” advantages, including active development against emerging cybersecurity risks and cross-chain connectivity through intent-based technology that could allow wallets or AI agents to move value across networks while using Zcash as a private settlement layer.

Those features underpin the asset manager’s argument that Zcash could capture market share from Bitcoin even without reproducing Bitcoin’s merchant adoption or liquidity.

The same privacy architecture also presents one of Zcash’s largest obstacles. Shielded transactions can complicate sanctions screening, anti-money laundering controls, and efforts to trace illicit funds, creating regulatory and compliance concerns that have historically weighed more heavily on privacy-focused cryptocurrencies than on Bitcoin.

Bitcoin also retains advantages that are difficult to replicate. Its liquidity, infrastructure, brand recognition, and more than 15 years of network growth continue to reinforce its position at the center of the digital-currency market.

That leaves Zcash with a considerable gap to close.

Nevertheless, the move above $1,000 has made Grayscale’s thesis more consequential, as it puts greater weight on whether privacy and technological differentiation can produce durable market-share gains once the momentum behind the current rally cools.

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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.)

You are entitled to take part in the Zcash vote on NU7 if, on 24 August 2026 at around 19:00 UTC, you held spendable shielded ZEC in the Ironwood pool of a wallet of your own. Anyone who had nothing there at that moment can no longer change it before the voting window closes on 14 September at 19:00 UTC, however much Zcash (ZEC) they buy today. There is a relief in the other direction that many overlook: anyone who was eligible on the cut-off date may move, sell or reallocate their coins afterwards without losing the right to vote. In the words of the organisers: "If you have spendable funds in Ironwood at that height, your ZEC is eligible even if you move your funds after the snapshot."

That is the practical core of a process on which almost nothing has been written in English so far. On 22 August we explained what ZEC holders are voting on. The question that has arisen since is a different one: who is allowed to vote and how it works technically. The text below answers it step by step, names the points where the primary source and the trade press contradict each other, and draws the line beyond which the vote no longer changes anything.

Who may take part in the Zcash vote: the three conditions at the snapshot block

The eligibility rule sits in a single English clause, and that clause contains three conditions that had to be met at the same time: "spendable shielded funds in Ironwood at Mainnet block height 3459350". In plain terms:

Spendable

A shielded note is the protected equivalent of an account entry at Zcash: an encrypted record in the blockchain that only the holder of the matching key can read and spend. "Spendable" means these notes were actually available to spend on the cut-off date, meaning confirmed and not tied up in a transaction still in flight. Funds that were in transit at the snapshot moment do not count.

Shielded

Zcash has two types of address. Transparent addresses work as they do at Bitcoin: amount, sender and recipient sit openly in the blockchain. Shielded addresses hide that information behind a zero-knowledge proof. Only shielded balances count for the vote. Anyone holding ZEC on a transparent address was not eligible to vote on 24 August, not even with six-figure amounts.

In the Ironwood pool

A shielded pool is the technical generation a shielded address belongs to. Zcash has introduced four of them one after another, and only the most recent one counts for the vote. More on that shortly, because this point excluded most holders.

The cut-off date itself can be measured without having to believe any announcement. The public chain statistics from Blockchair showed block height 3,467,063 on 31 August 2026 at 12:37:46 UTC. The snapshot at 3,459,350 is therefore 7,713 blocks back, which at a target block time of 75 seconds works out to roughly 160 hours, just under seven days. It is irrevocably past.

Why ZEC on an exchange has no vote: self-custody as a precondition

This is the point at which most retail investors drop out without knowing it. If your ZEC sits at an exchange, the private key belongs to the exchange rather than to you. Your position there is a claim against the house, not a shielded balance in a Zcash pool. That is precisely why reporting notes that ZEC "kept on exchanges or other networks needs to be transferred into Ironwood's self-custody" in order to be eligible to vote.

In practice that means governance at Zcash is tied to self-custody. Anyone who wants a say has to withdraw their coins from the custodial account and put them in a wallet whose keys they control themselves. With that they also take on responsibility for the seed phrase, the sequence of words from which a wallet can be restored if it is lost. For newcomers the transition is the real hurdle, rather than the vote itself. If you are taking that step for the first time, our software wallet comparison is worth a look, and for larger holdings the hardware wallet comparison is worthwhile, because the key never leaves the device there.

In the other direction, the note this text opens with applies: after the snapshot the tie is released. You do not have to leave the coins untouched until 14 September; the balance may go back to an exchange, into another wallet or into a sale, and the voting right stays attached to the snapshot moment. So anyone who withdrew their ZEC only for the vote may long since have moved it back. Which trading venues come into question for the return trip is covered in our exchange comparison.

Ironwood, Orchard, Sapling, Sprout: only one shielded pool is eligible to vote

Zcash has developed its shielded addresses across four generations. Sprout was the first, from 2016, Sapling followed in 2018, Orchard in 2022, and Ironwood went live with the upgrade of the same name on 28 July 2026. Each generation is a separate pot with its own cryptography, and funds do not migrate from one to the next on their own.

For the NU7 vote, Ironwood alone counts. Balances in Orchard, Sapling and Sprout were as mute on the cut-off date as transparent addresses. That is no formality, and it has a measurable effect on participation: the migration out of the sealed Orchard pool into Ironwood was only around 85 percent complete at the end of August, with roughly three percent of the total supply still sitting in Orchard. Every one of those balances was worthless for the vote on 24 August, even though it was shielded and belonged to the right person.

So if you read in July or August that you should "shield" your ZEC, that was only half the advice. What mattered was which pool. Anyone who postponed the migration to Ironwood because it costs fees and takes time gave up their voting right unintentionally in doing so.

Which wallets support the Zcash vote: primary source and press contradict each other

Precision is worth it here, because a mistake costs you your vote. The organisers' announcement names two applications explicitly: "We have confirmed that Vizor and Zodl will support the voting process." Two names, and the primary source confirms no more than that.

The trade press additionally lists Zashi, Zkool and the hardware wallet Keystone as supported, the latter with the note that users can take part "without removing their keys from the device". That divergence deserves naming rather than smoothing over: between "confirmed by the organisers" and "named in the press" lies a practical difference for you. If your wallet does not show the voting function, that is not a fault in your device but possibly simply missing support.

In the Zcash community forum, at least one participant confirms the route via Zodl with the words "Voting with Zodl worked well". That is a user report rather than a vendor commitment, but it matches the primary source.

What to check before you try

Open your wallet and see whether it offers a voting function. If you cannot find one, the detour via one of the confirmed applications is the safe route. Your shielded notes stay where they are; you do not need a transfer to cast your vote.

How to cast your vote with Zodl or Keystone

The procedure is short and works without a transaction to any third-party address. The application describes it in five steps:

1. Open settings in Zodl or on the Keystone device.
2. Select "Beta: Coinholder Polling" to see the polls under way.
3. Read the proposals and the linked ZIPs. A ZIP is a Zcash Improvement Proposal, the formal document in which a protocol change is spelled out technically. Anyone who knows only the headline is voting on a text they have not read.
4. Cast your shielded vote. The vendor notes: "Votes are private. Your funds never leave your wallet."
5. Track open, completed and closed polls, all in one place.

Two things regularly cause confusion here. First: your wallet has to be fully synchronised with the blockchain, otherwise it does not know the position as at the cut-off date. With shielded addresses that reconciliation takes noticeably longer than with transparent ones, because the wallet has to decrypt every note itself. Second: your vote weighs as much as your shielded balance at the snapshot block, rather than as much as your account balance today. Buying more after 24 August does not increase the weight.

The five questions ZEC holders decide on for the NU7 upgrade

The ballot comprises five separate questions, each with an abstention option. You do not have to answer them all.

Question 1: issuance smoothing under the NSM

The Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM) is the proposal to govern the issuance of new ZEC via a smooth curve instead of abrupt halvings. The options are the smooth curve, keeping the halvings, dropping this point from NU7, and abstention.

Question 2: start date for reissuance

Reissuance means returning previously burned transaction fees to future block rewards. Options: as early as possible, February 2027, February 2031, abstention.

Question 3: shutting down Sprout

The oldest shielded pool is to be dropped from the protocol. Options: immediately with NU7, one year after the vote, set no date, abstention.

Question 4: shorter block time

Block time is to fall from 75 to 25 seconds, so transactions would be confirmed faster. Options: yes, no, abstention.

Question 5: scope and readiness of NU7

If individual features are not ready by 30 September: ship and drop the unfinished parts, wait until everything is in place, reject the plan, abstention.

Questions 1 and 2 are the economically weightiest, because they concern the future issuance of new coins. Circulating supply stood at around 16.91 million ZEC on 31 August against a cap of 21 million (CoinGecko). The price on the same day was 829.90 US dollars, or 715.72 euros, with a market capitalisation of 14.05 billion US dollars, after a decline of around two percent within 24 hours.

The quorum of 1,000,000 ZEC and the size of the Ironwood pool

For the result to count as representative, at least 1,000,000 ZEC have to take part in at least one of the five questions. That figure sounds abstract until you measure it against the eligible supply.

The Ironwood pool had taken in more than 3.7 million ZEC by the end of August, according to the trade press. The quorum therefore corresponds to a good quarter of the entire eligible holdings. By comparison: measured against the circulating supply of 16.91 million ZEC it would be just under six percent. Both figures describe the same threshold, but only the first describes the actual hurdle, because Ironwood alone counts.

If the quorum is missed, the vote is not invalid in a legal sense. The result then counts as unrepresentative, and for the developers who are meant to evaluate it that is a considerable difference. For you as a holder it means this: an abstention that is cast as a vote also feeds into participation, while doing nothing lowers it.

An advisory signal rather than a protocol change: what the coinholder vote does not do

This is where the text becomes uncomfortable, but without this part it would be wrong. The vote does not change the Zcash protocol. The procedure collects an opinion that developers can subsequently take into account, or not.

In the community forum, one post reduces it to the formula "a poll, not a vote", and the developer Daira notes there: "There is no ZIP that approves making Zcash protocol decisions by vote." So there is no formal document that provides for protocol decisions by vote at all. Several participants have stated that they would need extraordinary grounds to override a clear vote by holders. That is not a binding commitment, but a voluntary undertaking without an enforcement mechanism.

Approved proposals then have to be written up as a ZIP, developed, reviewed and rolled out via a network upgrade. Between the result on 14 September and a visible change to block time or the issuance curve, then, lie months, and in the case of the reissuance options even years.

Anyone who nonetheless takes the process seriously does so for a different reason: a coinholder vote with high participation is the strongest signal that governance without a foundation majority can produce. It is coordinated by the Valar Group and Project Tachyon, which have built their own coinholder voting chain for it. This voting chain is a separate chain purely for the count and takes the place of Zcash's previous governance procedure. Zcash co-founder Sean Bowe has accompanied the launch.

Two votes, one closing date: coinholder vote and the Zcash Foundation's ZCAP poll

Anyone searching for "the Zcash vote" actually finds two procedures running in parallel that end on the same day at the same minute. Confusing the two is the most common source of error.

The coinholder vote is the coin-weighted part this text is about. It runs from 25 August to 14 September, 19:00 UTC, and your weight is your shielded Ironwood balance at the snapshot block.

The ZCAP poll is the Zcash Foundation's survey of the Zcash Community Advisory Panel. It opened on 27 August and likewise closes on 14 September at 19:00 UTC. The Foundation runs it as an SIV poll, in full a single iterative vote; that is its own survey format for panel consultations and has nothing to do with the coin-weighted count of the coinholder vote. Only members of the panel, who receive their instructions by email, may take part there; holding ZEC alone confers no entitlement. The Foundation places the procedure itself: "Though advisory in nature, these votes play a vital role in informing decisions across the ecosystem." Both procedures address the same five substantive questions from different angles, once weighted by capital and once by people. The questions are not new: the Foundation had already surveyed the scope of NU7 earlier in 2026 in a sentiment poll and published its results. The current procedure is meant to settle the points left open after that.

How homomorphic encryption keeps your vote secret

Homomorphic encryption is a technique in which encrypted values can be added together without decrypting them first. For a vote that is the decisive property: the count can run without anyone seeing an individual vote.

In the NU7 vote, both the chosen answer and the associated ZEC amount are processed in encrypted form. All that becomes visible at the end is the total per answer option. In addition, each vote is split into 16 ballots that cannot be linked to one another, so that no conclusion about the size of an individual balance can be drawn from voting behaviour.

The count itself rests with a distributed election authority of at least ten validators, each holding only part of the decryption key. The overall result can be reconstructed only when two thirds of those validators agree. This means no single operator can tap interim results and influence the course of the vote. For a privacy coin this design is less an optional extra than a requirement, because an open list of votes would have put every participant's balance in the shop window.

What this additionally means for European holders

The vote falls in a phase in which European investors have to think about the custody of their privacy coins anyway. What role the planned EU rules play in that, and what happens to holdings on regulated platforms from July 2027, we have written up in a separate article. Anyone moving their ZEC into self-custody in any case settles both questions with the same step.

Zcash vote: what to take away

1. First check whether you are eligible to vote at all. Open your wallet, let it synchronise fully and see whether spendable shielded funds sat in the Ironwood pool on 24 August. If they sat at an exchange, in Orchard, Sapling, Sprout or on a transparent address, the vote is out of reach this time round. For the next attempt the choice of wallet is decisive: the hardware wallet comparison shows which devices support shielded Zcash addresses at all.
2. Vote while the window is open. Until 14 September, 19:00 UTC, the route runs via settings and "Beta: Coinholder Polling" in a supported application. Read the linked ZIPs before you click, and use the abstention option on questions you have no view on. If you first have to withdraw funds from a custodial account for that, you will find the candidates for the later return trip in the exchange comparison.
3. Do not expect an immediate change from the result. The vote is advisory, not a protocol decision. Treat it as a sentiment reading rather than a date for a price reaction, and separate the custody question from the voting question: you need a suitable storage arrangement regardless of how NU7 is scoped in the end. The software wallet comparison offers a way in.

The primary source with the full wording of the announcement, the five questions and the eligibility rule is in the Zcash community forum. The parallel survey of the advisory panel is documented in a separate forum post by the Zcash Foundation.

(As of August 31, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Anyone holding Humanity or Beldex balances at the crypto exchange Kraken has to withdraw them by 25 September 2026 at 14:00 UTC. After that, Kraken liquidates whatever remains itself, between 28 September and 2 October. The exchange states in its own notice that proceeds may fall well below recently seen prices and, in individual cases, may be minimal or zero. Four tickers are affected, although only two projects are involved: $H and $HUMANITY on one side, $BDX and $BELDEX on the other.

The reason for the duplicate positions goes back months. Both projects were attacked in June 2026, both responded by rolling out a new token contract, and Kraken credited the replacement to customer accounts automatically. Anyone who held Humanity or Beldex at Kraken in June has had two lines in their portfolio ever since, without doing anything to get them. Both lines expire on the same day at the same minute.

What actually happens at Kraken on 25 September 2026 at 14:00 UTC

Kraken has published one support notice for each project, and both carry the same sequence of dates. Trading and deposits are already permanently disabled for all four tickers; the only remaining function is withdrawal, meaning a transfer to an address outside the exchange. That withdrawal window closes on 25 September 2026 at 14:00 UTC. From 28 September to 2 October 2026 the liquidation phase then runs, during which Kraken sells any remaining balances without involvement from the account holder.

For you that means there is exactly one action left that changes anything, and one date on which it ends. A sale through the exchange order book is no longer an option, because trading stopped long ago. Letting the deadline pass does not convert your tokens into cash; it hands Kraken the timing and the price.

Why two positions suddenly sit in the account: snapshot, airdrop and a new contract

Both cases follow the same pattern. An attacker exploits a weakness in the project's bridge infrastructure, unbacked tokens are created, the project then retires the old contract and publishes a new one. To make sure nobody is expropriated, the project falls back on a record of balances taken before the attack and distributes the new token against it at a one-to-one ratio. Kraken handled that distribution for its customers and credited the new tokens directly.

The order of events matters, and it often gets reversed: the cut-off date lies before the attack, not after it. For Humanity it is 8 June 2026 at 17:25 UTC, for Beldex 10 June 2026 at 23:36 UTC. Anyone holding a balance at that moment is eligible. Anyone who bought later is not, under the rules of both projects.

Snapshot, airdrop and forced liquidation: three terms in one sentence each

A snapshot is a record of all balances on the blockchain at a fixed moment in time; it decides who is entitled to something later. An airdrop is the allocation of a token without consideration to the addresses in that record, here at a one-to-one ratio. Forced liquidation, called "liquidation" in Kraken's notices, refers to the sale of remaining customer balances by the exchange after a deadline expires, at a price neither you nor the exchange knows in advance. And a delisting is the permanent removal of an asset from the trading venue, which here has already taken place.

The Humanity case: what Kraken says about $H and $HUMANITY

According to Kraken's notice as of 26 June 2026, the old $H has been delisted, trading and deposits are permanently disabled, and withdrawals remain open. The exchange lists the new token under its own ticker $HUMANITY, to keep the two distinguishable in the account. The airdrop ran automatically on 1 July 2026 at 14:00 UTC, without any customer action. The new token is also scheduled for delisting at Kraken and supports withdrawals only.

On the incident itself: according to the crypto.news report of 16 June 2026, an attacker drained roughly 141 million H from the bridge on Ethereum and minted additional tokens on the BNB Smart Chain. Damage estimates diverge: crypto.news cites 36 million US dollars, while our own report of 9 June 2026 on the Humanity Protocol price crash cited 31 million. The project attributes the incident to stolen credentials and explicitly not to a flaw in the contracts themselves. Who is behind the attack has not been conclusively established.

The Beldex case: what Kraken says about $BDX and $BELDEX

Kraken's second notice, as of 9 July 2026, describes the same sequence with different dates. The snapshot is dated 10 June 2026 at 23:36 UTC, the airdrop of the new $BELDEX ran on 10 July 2026 at 14:00 UTC, and both tickers support withdrawals only. Kraken refers to the trigger briefly as "an incident" and gives no further detail.

The project supplies those details itself. In a blog post dated 16 June 2026, the Beldex team writes that on 12 June it identified an unauthorised minting of BDX tokens on the BNB Smart Chain, caused by a problem in its own bridge infrastructure. The preliminary assessment puts the figure at roughly 38.2 million tokens created without authorisation. The team dates the first related transactions to shortly after 10 June 2026 around 23:36 UTC, the start of selling to 11 June at around 23:10 UTC, and the bridge was halted in the early hours of 12 June. The native Beldex blockchain, according to the team, was not affected; the incident was confined to the bridge environment.

Zero trading pairs: what we measured on Kraken's public trading API

That "withdrawals only" really means what it says can be verified without an account. On 5 September 2026 we queried Kraken's public trading API. In the asset directory, all four tickers, $H, $HUMANITY, $BDX and $BELDEX, are still listed individually. In the directory of trading pairs, which held 1,446 entries at that point, there is not a single pair for any of these four tickers.

That is the measurable evidence for the situation: the balances still exist in the account and can be moved, but there is no market left on which you could exchange them for euros or dollars at Kraken. We describe a similar combination of halted trading and a later withdrawal deadline for a different case in our piece on the trading halt for 21 Kraken tokens; there, trading is still due to end, while here it stopped long ago.

If you bought after the snapshot: a claims process at Humanity, none at Beldex

This is where the two cases part ways, and for those affected the difference is the most important part of the whole process. On Beldex, Kraken states explicitly that anyone who acquired $BDX after the snapshot is not eligible, and that there is no claims portal and no other route. Those holders own a token their own project has replaced, and they do not receive the replacement.

With Humanity it works differently. In its notice, Kraken points to a project portal through which affected parties can file a claim themselves, while making clear that the exchange is not involved in that process and cannot assist with it. The portal itself names three groups it is intended for: balances that sat in liquidity pools or contracts at the cut-off date and cannot be assigned to a person, balances from certain integrations with other protocols, and buyers who acquired after the snapshot and still hold the token. According to the project, identity verification is a prerequisite. All other holders, the portal stresses, need do nothing.

This is a declaration of intent by the project and not a guaranteed payout claim. How large any compensation would be, when it would flow and by what procedure it is decided has not been published as far as we can tell. And one practical note that is unfortunately necessary: only ever open such a portal via the link in your exchange's official notice, never via an address from a direct message, a comment or a forwarded screenshot.

Why selling at Kraken is not a way out, and what remains instead

In most delisting cases trading continues for a while, and the most convenient route is a sale through the order book. That route is closed here. Anyone wanting to keep the four tickers has to transfer them to an address of their own; anyone wanting to turn them into cash needs a different trading venue where the new token is listed, and still has to withdraw the tokens first. Both cases begin with the same action, and it ends on 25 September.

Whether a second trading venue exists at all, and how deep its order book is, determines what a sale ultimately yields. With assets of this size, neither can be taken for granted. If you are checking where a token remains tradable after withdrawal, our crypto exchange comparison is the starting point; the asset listings of trading venues change constantly, though, and deserve a fresh check of your own before any transfer.

Withdrawing step by step: where the tokens belong before 25 September

The procedure is the same in both cases. First, check in your Kraken account which of the four tickers actually show a balance for you; because of the automatic crediting, there may be two lines where you expect only one. Next, set up a withdrawal address that you control yourself, on the network Kraken offers for the token in question. Then carry out the withdrawal, ideally with a small test amount first, and keep the confirmation.

If you have not set up your own custody for this step, you have to set it up now, and there is less time for that than it looks: a hardware wallet has to be ordered, delivered and set up before it can supply an address. Which devices are worth considering and how they differ is covered in our hardware wallet comparison. A software wallet will also do for this purpose, as long as you record the recovery words securely.

The ticker deceives: why the new token still carries the same name on chain

For both projects, Kraken points out that the new token may still appear under the old name outside the exchange. On the blockchain and on some platforms, the new Humanity token is still called $H; the ticker $HUMANITY is Kraken's own invention, meant to keep the two lines in the account apart. The same applies to $BELDEX versus $BDX.

The only reliable way to distinguish the old token from the new one is therefore the contract address. For Humanity, Kraken gives the old contract as 0xcf5104D094e3864CfCBDa43B82e1cEFD26A016eB and the new one as 0xE76c5b78f93909d34404E9eb4C1f19e7582a5dE1; for Beldex the old one as 0x6ad12E761b438beA3EA09F6C6266556Bb24C2181 and the new one as 0x9d10a1ec41Fe7878429BB457e31F9b050D38c633. Anyone checking their wallet after withdrawal, or buying more somewhere, should compare these strings and not rely on the displayed name.

What "minimal or no proceeds" means in practice in a forced liquidation

Both Kraken notices contain the same warning, and it is unusually blunt for an exchange document: liquidation prices could be significantly below recently seen reference prices and could, in individual cases, result in minimal or no proceeds, because there is not enough market liquidity at the time of execution. In the same paragraph, Kraken recommends acting before the deadline rather than relying on the liquidation.

The sentence describes a simple mechanism. When an exchange puts all remaining balances of a barely traded token onto the market at once on the cut-off date, a large supply meets a thin order book. What comes out of it depends on the accident of the execution moment. That is why proceeds from a forced liquidation are not a figure you can plan with.

Tax documentation: why the airdrop and the withdrawal belong in your own file

For a tax return, two events matter here and deserve to be kept apart: the inflow of the new token via airdrop in July, and the later withdrawal or sale. For both events, record the date, time, quantity and origin, along with the account statements from the exchange and the transaction IDs of the withdrawal. A forced liquidation is also an event that belongs in the documentation, even if you did not trigger it yourself.

How these events are to be classified in an individual case depends on circumstances only you and your tax adviser know. No article can take that classification off your hands, and this one does not attempt to. What you can do yourself is secure the records while they are still retrievable in the account, because after a delisting they do not stay available indefinitely.

What is documented in this case and what remains open

Documented are the dates, the tickers, the contract addresses and the eligibility rules: all of it appears verbatim in the two Kraken support notices linked below. Also documented is the course of events at Beldex, as far as the project describes it itself, along with the existence and purpose of the claims portal at Humanity, which we opened ourselves on 5 September 2026. The figure of 1,446 trading pairs without a single entry for the four tickers is our own measurement from the same day.

Three things remain open. First, the scale of the damage at Humanity, for which 31 to 36 million US dollars are cited depending on the source. Second, the size, timing and procedure of any compensation via the portal; we have no publication on that. Third, the question of who is responsible for the attacks: attributions are circulating that we cannot verify, and for that reason we do not name them here. Holders do not need these answers for their decision anyway, because the deadline stands regardless.

Kraken withdrawal deadline on 25 September: what to take away

1. Look in your account today, not shortly before the deadline. Check whether you have one position or two, and add both together. If you are going through your portfolio anyway: which exchange suits the rest of your holdings can be checked against our crypto exchange comparison.
2. Set up the destination address before you start the withdrawal. Without a wallet of your own there is no target for the transfer, and delivery times for a device are part of the deadline. The selection is in the hardware wallet comparison, including the question of when a software wallet is enough.
3. Withdraw and document the process instead of waiting for the liquidation. Kraken itself advises this and justifies it with potentially minimal proceeds. Record the date, quantity and transaction ID of the airdrop and the withdrawal; which tools handle that for you is covered in our comparison of tax tools and portfolio trackers.

The two authoritative notices in full: Kraken's update on Humanity (H) and Kraken's notice on Beldex (BDX).

(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.)

Bitcoin spent the first half of 2026 falling apart and the second half quietly putting itself back together. After bottoming near $58,000 in late June, its lowest level in 21 months, $BTC has clawed its way back to roughly $80,000. That is a gain of around 37% off the floor in a little over two months.

It is a real recovery. It is also nowhere near a victory lap. Bitcoin is still about 37% below the $126,200 record it set in October 2025, and Friday's US jobs report was a reminder that the macro backdrop has not turned friendly yet. Here is what is actually driving the market this month, and the five coins worth having on your screen.

Why Did The Bitcoin Price Rally From $58,000 To $80,000?

Three things did most of the work.

First, the June low was deep enough to bring buyers back. Glassnode's cycle indicators hit their coldest reading since the FTX collapse, long-term holders stopped selling, and roughly 844,000 BTC had already been accumulated in the $60,000 to $70,000 band earlier in the year. That range became a floor rather than a trapdoor.

Second, ETF money started returning. Spot Bitcoin ETFs shed a net $4.83 billion across 2026, but August flipped positive and recovered a chunk of it. Bitcoin ETF inflows in late August were the strongest since January.

Third, bond yields eased through August, which loosened financial conditions just enough for risk assets to breathe.

What Does The Macro Picture Mean For Crypto In September 2026?

This is where the story gets uncomfortable, and where a lot of the commentary this week is getting it wrong.

The August US jobs report, released Friday, was a blowout. Nonfarm payrolls rose 162,000 against a consensus of roughly 56,000. Unemployment held at 4.1%. Average hourly earnings rose 3.1% year on year. July's previously reported 23,000 job loss was revised up to a 21,000 gain, and June was revised higher too.

Strong labour data is good news for the economy and bad news for anyone hoping for cheap money. Odds of a Federal Reserve rate hike at the September meeting jumped to 59% from 52% immediately after the print. Treasury yields rose, the dollar firmed, and Bitcoin dropped from above $81,000 to under $80,000 in a single five-minute candle, with roughly $200 million in long positions liquidated inside the first hour.

So the honest framing for September is this: the supportive factors are structural, not monetary.

What is genuinely supporting the market:

• Regulatory clarity is arriving. On 2 September the SEC and CFTC launched a joint initiative on rules for leveraged and margined crypto transactions. The SEC separately proposed its first transfer agent overhaul in 40 years, a 421-page document that directly addresses blockchain-native fund administration.
• The ETF complex has broadened well beyond Bitcoin. Solana and XRP products both entered September with assets near the $1.5 billion mark.
• Post-halving supply dynamics continue to work quietly in the background.

What is working against it:

• The Fed under Kevin Warsh has held at 3.50% to 3.75% for five straight meetings and has not cut once in 2026. The median 2026 dot sits at 3.8%, which points to tightening rather than easing.
• Inflation is still running above target, and energy prices remain elevated.
• Bitcoin's correlation with rate-sensitive assets is higher than it has ever been, so Fed repricing hits crypto directly now.

Two dates matter: the August CPI print on 11 September, and the FOMC decision in the middle of the month. A soft CPI would do more for crypto than anything else on the calendar.

Which Are The Top 5 Cryptos To Watch This September?

1. Bitcoin (BTC)

Around $80,000, up roughly 37% from the June low, still down heavily from the October 2025 peak. The levels to watch are clean: $78,000 is where the 18 September options expiry has its max-pain level, $75,000 to $77,000 is the near-term support shelf, and $58,000 remains the structural line in the sand if the recovery fails. On the upside, a weekly close above $85,000 would be the first real evidence that the rebound is more than a bear market rally. $Bitcoin is on this list because it is currently setting the direction for everything else.

2. Ethereum (ETH)

Trading in the $2,400 to $2,500 area and lagging Bitcoin badly. Ethereum ETFs have seen outflows in most months of 2026, with May the worst at roughly $541 million, and money returning to Bitcoin during the summer lows largely skipped ETH. Prediction market traders still put high odds on ETH revisiting $2,250 before the year ends. The interesting question this month is whether ETH funds finally follow Bitcoin's flows back to positive. If they do not, the underperformance is likely to continue.

3. Solana (SOL)

Around $100, and this is the sharpest split in the market. Solana's on-chain activity has collapsed, with total value in Solana apps falling from about $11.5 billion in August 2025 to roughly $5.5 billion, and memecoin trading fees drying up with it. Yet Solana ETFs have recorded net outflows in only a single month since launching in October 2025, with cumulative inflows past $1.16 billion. Institutional demand and network usage are pointing in opposite directions. One of them is wrong.

4. XRP

Around $1.35 to $1.45, and the worst performer among the majors this year. Spot XRP ETFs have pulled in $1.51 billion since launching last November, which is not the problem. The problem is legislative: the CLARITY Act, which would give XRP permanent commodity status under federal law, has stalled in the Senate. That bill is the single catalyst institutions have been waiting on. Any movement on it in September would matter far more to XRP than anything on the chart.

5. Hyperliquid (HYPE)

The outlier, and the only major asset having a genuinely good year. HYPE set an all-time high of $88.04 on 3 September and is trading in the mid-$80s with a market cap around $21.8 billion, having outperformed BTC, ETH and SOL over recent weeks. The protocol is generating real revenue, roughly $2.8 million in fees over a recent 24-hour window. The catch is supply: a 9.92 million token unlock on 6 September releases about 1% of total supply to core contributors, worth around $820 million at current prices. How the market absorbs that unlock is the most informative single event in crypto this week.

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.

Zcash rose above the landmark $1000 price point as a sharp rally forced short traders out of leveraged positions.

Solana is strengthening its position in the rapidly expanding real-world asset (RWA) sector, attracting $348 million in fresh capital.

Recent buying pressure has reinforced a major on-chain support floor for Dogecoin, where almost 35 billion DOGE were previously traded.

AI agents continue to use XRP and RLUSD to pay for services directly onchain, with transactions on the verge of 4 million.

Robinhood Chain has unlocked a new level in its 24-hour DEX volume, as activity across its DeFi market continues to grow and adoption intensifies.

TLDR:

• Bitcoin’s 90-day correlation with gold reached +0.50, more than doubling from early 2026 levels.
• Bitcoin’s Nasdaq 100 correlation fell to about 0.30, marking its lowest level in one year.
• The correlation surge accelerated after Treasury debt buybacks doubled to at least $4 billion.
• Gold and Bitcoin are drawing attention as scarce assets amid currency and fiscal concerns.

Bitcoin and gold are moving closer together as investors shift toward scarce assets amid growing fiscal and currency concerns. The 90-day correlation between Bitcoin and gold has reached +0.50, more than doubling since the start of 2026.

At the same time, Bitcoin’s correlation with the Nasdaq 100 has fallen to about 0.30, marking a one-year low. The divergence signals a sharp change in how BTC has traded alongside traditional markets this year.

Bitcoin Gold Correlation Reaches +0.50

The Kobeissi Letter reported that Bitcoin’s 90-day correlation with gold now stands at +0.50. The figure nearly matches the record reached during the 2020 pandemic.

The current reading has more than doubled from the start of 2026. After the 2022 bear market recovery, Bitcoin’s 90-day correlation with gold reached only +0.30.

Bitwise and Bloomberg data through August 31 also put the Bitcoin gold correlation at +0.50. The data shows the relationship has strengthened considerably in recent months.

The shift accelerated after the US Treasury announced changes to its long-dated debt buyback operations. On August 19, the Treasury said it would double buybacks from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation.

Bitcoin Correlation With Nasdaq Falls to One-Year Low

Bitcoin’s relationship with the Nasdaq 100 has moved in the opposite direction. The 90-day correlation has declined to roughly 0.30, according to the Kobeissi Letter.

That marks Bitcoin’s lowest correlation with the Nasdaq 100 in one year. The divergence puts greater focus on BTC’s relationship with gold and other scarce assets.

Investors increasingly view both Bitcoin and gold as potential hedges against currency debasement. US debt has reached about $40 trillion, adding to concerns surrounding long-term fiscal pressures.

Gold has also attracted central-bank demand amid geopolitical uncertainty. The Netherlands, for example, moved 86 tonnes of gold to London, reflecting continued activity around the traditional reserve asset.

Crypto Tice separately argued that gold’s recent pause could precede greater attention toward Bitcoin. Its analysis points to previous periods when profits from gold shifted toward BTC after gold reached new highs.

Gold currently trades near $4,430 per ounce, while Bitcoin hovers around $81,000. The two assets now show a much closer 90-day price relationship than earlier this year.

The post Bitcoin Gold Correlation Climbs to 0.50 as Nasdaq Link Hits Yearly Low appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• SEC ISS action seeks court enforcement after the firm declined to fully satisfy a July subpoena.
• The SEC says missing ISS records have hindered its securities-law examination and oversight work.
• ISS faces scrutiny over proxy influence as regulators pursue documents tied to federal securities laws.
• Comments from Balchunas and Sigel broaden attention toward concentration among major proxy advisers.

Institutional Shareholder Services faces an SEC enforcement action over its refusal to provide documents requested by the regulator. The Securities and Exchange Commission filed the action on September 4, 2026, in federal court.

The case seeks to compel ISS to comply with an administrative subpoena issued in July. The dispute puts renewed regulatory attention on the proxy advisory firm’s operations.

SEC ISS Action Targets ISS Subpoena Compliance

The SEC filed its application in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. The agency seeks an order requiring Institutional Shareholder Services to produce outstanding records.

According to the SEC filing, agency examination staff initially made routine information requests to ISS. The firm declined to fully comply with those requests, according to the regulator.

The SEC later issued an administrative subpoena on July 21, 2026. The agency says ISS has continued refusing to provide all requested materials.

The subpoena seeks documents connected to an investigation into ISS’s compliance with federal securities laws. The SEC said the missing records have slowed its examination and enforcement work.

ISS operates as an investment adviser registered with the SEC. The regulator described itself as the firm’s primary regulator in the court filing.

The SEC said the requested records relate directly to its statutory oversight responsibilities. The agency also linked the investigation to its investor protection duties.

ISS Proxy Recommendations Draw Regulatory Attention

ISS has faced broader scrutiny over its influence on corporate shareholder votes. Eric Balchunas recently reported the SEC action and pointed to the firm’s market position.

Balchunas described ISS as controlling about half of the proxy voting outsourcing market. He also referenced recent criticism surrounding the firm’s approach to environmental, social, and governance issues.

Matthew Sigel separately discussed the wider scrutiny facing proxy advisory firms. He pointed to Glass Lewis recommendations involving gender-diversity targets for corporate boards.

Sigel also described a policy at VanEck requiring portfolio managers to explain overrides of Glass Lewis recommendations. His comments placed ISS and Glass Lewis within the same broader debate.

ISS and Glass Lewis remain prominent names in proxy advisory services. Their recommendations can influence how shareholders approach corporate voting decisions.

Elon Musk previously criticized the influence of proxy advisers and passive fund structures. Balchunas referenced those earlier comments while discussing the latest SEC action.

The current case centers on subpoena compliance rather than the merits of any specific proxy recommendation. The SEC now seeks judicial enforcement of its outstanding information request.

The post SEC ISS Subpoena Action Puts Proxy Advisor Under Regulatory Scrutiny appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• RedSonic Vault lost 9.25 ETH after an attacker exploited a dual-asset pricing flaw entirely.
• A permissionless registerErc20 function let the attacker add a second, conflicting stETH share class.
• The attacker flash-loaned 1,139 WETH from Balancer and needed zero starting capital of their own.
• ExVulSec traced the full exploit, including the Curve swap and the final loan repayment step.

A flash loan attacker drained 9.25 ETH from Ethereum’s RedSonic Vault in a single transaction. Blockchain security firm ExVulSec identified the exploit and published a full technical breakdown. 

The attacker manipulated a permissionless asset-registration function to double count the same underlying collateral. On-chain records show the entire operation executed inside one self-contained transaction.

How the RedSonic Vault Exploit Unfolded

The attacker flash-loaned 1,139 WETH from Balancer to fund the entire operation. No upfront capital of their own was required.

RedSonic’s vault prices its rsvETH shares through a function called getTotalAssetBalance. For the Lido position, that function reads the vault’s raw stETH balance directly.

That design choice became the exploit’s foundation. Share prices tied directly to a raw balance can shift if that balance changes unexpectedly. No corresponding shares need to be minted or burned.

The vault’s registerErc20 function carried no access restrictions, according to ExVulSec. Anyone could register a brand new asset class inside the vault.

The attacker registered stETH as a second asset, creating a class called rsvstETH. Both share types then drew from the exact same underlying stETH balance.

The exploit contract self-destructed once execution finished. Security researchers note that self-destructing contracts often complicate later on-chain tracing efforts.

Flash loans let borrowers access large sums without posting collateral, provided the loan gets repaid within the same transaction. Attackers commonly use this mechanism to fund exploits that would otherwise demand substantial capital.

RedSonic Vault Exploit Exposes a Dual-Asset Flaw

The attacker deposited 1,130 ETH first, acquiring close to 99% of all outstanding rsvETH shares. That position set up the rest of the exploit.

Next, the attacker deposited 9.34 stETH directly into the vault. That single deposit inflated the stETH balance without minting any new rsvETH shares.

Because rsvETH pricing reads the raw stETH balance, the extra deposit pushed the share price higher artificially. The attacker’s existing rsvETH holdings gained value instantly as a result, without any new rsvETH being issued.

The attacker then redeemed rsvETH for 1,139.5 ETH, according to ExVulSec’s transaction analysis. That single redemption produced the full 9.25 ETH profit.

The same attacker also redeemed the rsvstETH shares for stETH separately. The identical underlying collateral effectively paid out twice from one shared, pooled vault balance.

ExVulSec reported that the recovered stETH was swapped for ETH on Curve. The attacker repaid the Balancer flash loan within that same transaction.

Etherscan data lists the attacker’s wallet as 0x70f2333d21Ed7E7D105F6578227A9A747687982C. The RedSonic Vault contract itself sits at 0x4315990d9eeaffdfafd49958b4851f203fa1126f.

The attack transaction carries the hash 0xe3cba90e865c6cba950ebce36a52607f51f1fd33cd9fb920c78803f19b57791a. It remains publicly viewable on Etherscan for anyone verifying the exploit’s details.

The post RedSonic Vault Exploit Drains 9.25 ETH in Ethereum Flash Loan Attack appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• The XRP price prediction places $3.66 as the decisive monthly resistance that buyers must break before the projected path toward $60 becomes active.
• XRP dropped to $1.41 after strong employment data and long liquidations, although elevated spot volume suggests traders remain active.
• United States spot XRP ETFs attracted $110.49 million during the week ending August 28, lifting cumulative inflows beyond $1.66 billion.
• RLUSD growth and planned XRPL lending features could expand network activity while XRP tests support near $1.30 and resistance around $1.70.

XRP trades near $1.41 after losing 2.83% over 24 hours, following stronger United States employment data and heavy long liquidations. The latest XRP price prediction centers on $3.66, a resistance level that has capped the token for years. Analyst Ali Martinez says a monthly close above that barrier would confirm an ascending triangle breakout. 

His chart places the long-term technical target near $60. The projection is conditional, while nearer levels still determine whether buyers can regain control. Rising spot activity, exchange outflows, ETF demand, and growth across Ripple’s ecosystem provide a backdrop for the contested technical setup.

XRP Price Prediction Depends on a Close Above $3.66

The latest decline followed a United States jobs report showing 162,000 new positions. That figure exceeded market expectations, while unemployment held at 4.1%. The release pressured risk assets by strengthening expectations for tighter monetary policy.

XRP briefly fell toward $1.33 during the sell-off. Liquidations reached about $14.82 million, with long positions representing 95.8% of the total. Forced closures added selling pressure before the token recovered toward $1.41.

Trading activity nevertheless stayed elevated during August. Binance processed about $7.28 billion in XRP spot volume, while Upbit recorded roughly $4.68 billion. Around 500 million tokens also left Binance during the month. Lower exchange balances can reflect transfers into self-custody, although they do not guarantee immediate price gains.

Martinez’s XRP price prediction draws on an ascending triangle visible on the monthly chart. XRP has produced higher lows while repeatedly meeting resistance near its previous record zone. A monthly close above $3.66 would provide stronger confirmation than a brief intraday move.

The projected path does not send XRP directly to $60. Martinez’s chart identifies possible stages near $9.49 and $15.60, followed by a potential pullback. Higher extensions appear around $31.87 and $60 if the long-term structure continues.

Nearer resistance remains more relevant for current traders. XRP must first reclaim $1.70, then clear potential targets around $1.90, $2.13, $2.80, and $3.40. Failure to hold the $1.30 area could expose the broader $1.10 to $1.38 support zone.

XRP Price Prediction Gains Support From ETF Demand

Fundamental developments provide a second part of the XRP price prediction. United States spot XRP ETFs attracted $110.49 million during the week ending August 28. Total net inflows surpassed $1.66 billion, showing continued institutional demand despite short-term price weakness.

Ripple USD has also expanded across the ecosystem. RLUSD supply rose 51% during the past 30 days to a record $2.4 billion. About $1.1 billion of those assets now sit on the XRP Ledger, alongside growth in holders and transaction volume.

Meanwhile, XRPL developers are testing a Lending Protocol and Single Asset Vaults. The upgrades could bring more lending, yield products, and institutional activity onto the network. Greater usage may support demand, but adoption will depend on liquidity, security, and participation.

Regulation provides another potential catalyst. A United States Senate cloture vote on the CLARITY Act is scheduled for September 15, 2026. The procedural vote requires 60 votes and would determine whether the bill advances.

Short-term chart readings remain divided. One bearish view treats the latest rebound as a three-wave corrective move rather than a confirmed trend reversal. Under that interpretation, XRP has not established a durable bottom within the $1.10 to $1.38 region.

The daily chart offers a firmer bullish signal. XRP trades above its 200-day exponential moving average and has held support near $1.3093. A bullish flag also points to $1.6975, the August high, as the first major test. Only sustained closes above nearby resistance would strengthen the larger breakout case and bring Martinez’s $3.66 trigger into focus.

The post XRP Price Prediction Targets $60 From Decade Long Chart Pattern appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Shiba Inu exchange outflows surged 121.26%, although faster inflow growth reduced the bullish impact of the withdrawal increase.
• SHIB exchange inflows climbed 182.3% to about 1.68 billion tokens, leaving significantly more liquidity available on trading platforms.
• Shiba Inu price remains focused on the $0.00000500 support area after rebounding nearly 6% from its recent August weakness.
• Shytoshi Kusama changed his X location to “close” and bio to “Polish,” but no confirmed announcement explains those updates.

Shiba Inu exchange outflows jumped sharply during the latest measured period, but heavier inflows limited the bullish impact for SHIB. CryptoQuant data showed the seven-day average outflow rising 121.26% to roughly 579 million tokens. However, exchange inflows increased much faster, climbing 182.3% to about 1.68 billion SHIB. 

That imbalance left a positive net flow of 86.53 billion SHIB across monitored platforms. Rising reserves can keep more tokens available for sale if demand weakens. SHIB still traded 1.14% higher over 24 hours and remained almost 6% higher for the week. The rebound followed volatile trading after stronger August U.S. employment data.

Shiba Inu Exchange Outflows Rise as Inflows Accelerate

Shiba Inu exchange outflows often attract attention because withdrawals can reduce immediately tradable supply. Traders usually view sustained withdrawals as constructive when tokens move into private wallets. That pattern can signal lower near-term selling pressure and stronger holder conviction.

This time, however, the broader flow picture remained less supportive. SHIB exchange inflows climbed far faster than withdrawals during the same measured window. The seven-day average inflow reached about 1.68 billion tokens, compared with roughly 579 million leaving exchanges.

The difference matters because stronger deposits can raise the amount of SHIB available near current market prices. A positive exchange net flow means more tokens entered platforms than left them. That can create nearby supply even when headline outflow growth appears strong.

Cryptoquant data showed a positive net flow of 86.53 billion SHIB across monitored exchanges. Higher reserves do not guarantee immediate selling, since users may deposit tokens for several reasons. Still, the balance leaves traders watching whether buyers can absorb available liquidity without losing support.

Shiba Inu exchange outflows therefore offer only a partial bullish signal. The faster rise in SHIB exchange inflows weakens the case for a supply squeeze. Traders may need a sustained reversal in net flows before reading withdrawals as a stronger accumulation signal.

Shiba Inu Exchange Outflows Keep Price Support in Focus

Price action remains equally important while exchange activity stays mixed. SHIB recently recovered from an August thirty-day low near $0.00000488. The token gained almost 6% during the week and rose 1.14% over the latest 24 hours.

The recovery keeps $0.00000500 as an important support area for short-term traders. Holding that level could help buyers preserve the recent rebound. A break below it may expose lower price zones if exchange liquidity remains elevated.

Momentum still appears fragile because stronger inflows can place more inventory near the market. Buyers must absorb that supply to keep the rebound intact. Without stronger demand, rising reserves could limit upside even while withdrawals continue increasing.

Community attention has also shifted toward Shytoshi Kusama after subtle changes to his X profile. The Shiba Inu lead ambassador changed his listed location to “close” from an earlier project-related description. His bio also changed to the single word “Polish.”

Prominent community members noticed the edits, but Kusama has not explained their meaning. The changes may point to project development, though no confirmed announcement has followed. Any direct link to a launch would remain speculative without additional communication.

Kusama previously discussed an AI-powered relationship platform during a February 2026 livestream. The project aimed to help couples identify behavioral patterns, friction points, and possible compatibility risks. His earlier profile language referenced final beta work and bug checks.

Shiba Inu exchange outflows will remain one useful indicator, but traders are also watching inflows and price structure. The next directional move may depend on whether exchange deposits slow and buyers defend $0.00000500. Kusama’s profile activity adds community interest, but on-chain liquidity remains the more measurable market signal.

For now, reserve growth keeps immediate selling risk firmly visible across major exchanges. A deposit slowdown could improve that market balance.

The post Shiba Inu Exchange Outflows Jump 121% as Selling Pressure Grows appeared first on Blockonomi.

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.

The largest meme coin by market cap has soared on Saturday evening to $0.094, hitting a two-week high. The move is rather unexpected given the typically calm nature of the weekends.

However, there were certain signs about a potential rally, even though DOGE has slipped from its local high to $0.09 as of press time.

CryptoPotato outlined yesterday the three major signals that flashed for DOGE, including the TD Sequential. Analysts quickly determined that the OG meme coin is primed for another leg up.

However, that didn’t transpire at first, as the asset was rejected at $0.088 and slipped back down to $0.084 as the entire market bled following the strong US jobs report, which was considered bearish for risk-on assets.

Nevertheless, DOGE exploded on Saturday evening, gaining 12% from its low yesterday to the two-week high at $0.094. Popular analyst CW noted that the meme coin has reached the first major sell wall on its path forward, which is too solid to be broken now. If it falls, though, the next such wall sits all the way up at $0.14.

Fellow analyst Alex Marzell believes DOGE did “exactly what it needed to,” as it rebounded from the Friday lows to reclaim a key resistance.

$DOGE did exactly what it needed to.

Friday’s jobs print dumped it back to the $0.083 base, six flat 4H candles held it, and today one 4H candle ripped $0.0876 to $0.0952 straight back through $0.088.

Old resistance is the new line. Hold $0.088 and I think $0.095 goes next and… pic.twitter.com/y7hW91yCek

— Alex Marzell (@MarzellCrypto) September 5, 2026

Max Crypto also weighed in on DOGE’s impressive move and even suggested that its breakouts have been the “best indicator” for the start of an Altseason.

The post Dogecoin (DOGE) Suddenly Pumps by Double Digits as Analysts Declare the Start of Altseason appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Standard Chartered extended its deliverable Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) spot trading to institutional clients in the United Arab Emirates on September 3, becoming the first Global Systemically Important Bank (G-SIB) to offer the service in the country.

The offering runs through Standard Chartered DIFC, the bank’s arm in the Dubai International Financial Center (DIFC), which said it is the only global bank currently providing institutional digital asset spot trading in the region.

Built on the UK Launch

The launch adds trade execution to a custody service the bank already runs in the UAE. The trades are deliverable, so clients take possession of the underlying Bitcoin and Ether at settlement, and they can settle through a custodian of their choice, including Standard Chartered’s own digital asset custody solution that went live in September 2024.

Trades run through the bank’s electronic channels and sit inside its existing platforms, letting clients access the two assets through the same FX interfaces they already use. Standard Chartered DIFC is regulated by the Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA).

“The UAE has developed a clear digital assets regulatory framework that supports institutional participation and innovation,” said Rola Abu Manneh, Chief Executive Officer for the UAE, Middle East and Pakistan at Standard Chartered. She said pairing execution with custody, governance, and the bank’s global connectivity gives clients a more integrated way to participate in digital asset markets.

Standard Chartered first introduced institutional Bitcoin and Ether spot trading through its UK branch in July 2025, the first G-SIB to offer deliverable spot crypto trading to institutional clients.

“DIFC provides an established platform for international financial institutions to deploy global capabilities across markets,” said Christopher Parsons, Senior Executive Officer at Standard Chartered DIFC. He said the arrangement combines the bank’s global markets network with a regulated base for serving clients across the region.

A Wider UAE Digital Asset Push

The trading service sits inside a broader digital asset strategy that spans custody, trading and tokenization through Standard Chartered’s Corporate and Investment Bank, with its ventures ecosystem reaching into Zodia Markets and Libeara.

The bank already lets institutional clients mint and redeem USDC directly through its DIFC platform, a service it built with Circle. SC Ventures, its innovation arm, has backed a $100 million digital asset joint venture in the UAE with Japan’s SBI Holdings that targets market infrastructure, compliance tools, DeFi and tokenization.

The post Standard Chartered Extends Institutional Bitcoin and Ether Spot Trading to the UAE appeared first on CryptoPotato.

CryptoQuant data shows that bitcoin investors started realizing major profits after the explosive August rally, disposing of roughly 110,000 BTC in just a few weeks.

Such highly concentrated profit-taking developments have historically been followed by substantial price correction for the underlying asset, the analysts warned. Moreover, several demand indicators have weakened, which could add to the selling pressure.

110K BTC Profit Taken

The major run that began on August 19 at prices of under $65,000 drove the leading cryptocurrency to almost $80,000 in just two days. According to CQ’s latest weekly report, holders realized net profits of 23,000 BTC on that day alone (August 21), which became the largest single-day profit realization this year.

The asset indeed dipped in the following days as it felt almost inevitable after such a gigantic jump, but went on the offensive once again in the following week or so. It rocketed past $82,000 on Friday before it was rejected following the US jobs report, and now sits below $80,000.

The report described the major profit-taking as a classic characteristic of a bullish cooldown, but warned that if they continue at such a rapid pace, the asset’s price could be primed for another correction. Historical occurrences have shown that BTC tends to dump hard after a major rally if investors are not convinced about its potential.

“It is a hallmark of a bullish cooldown: bullish because it happens into strength, cautionary because concentrated realization can cap near-term upside,” reads the report.

Cooling Demand

CryptoQuant outlined another reason why BTC could be primed for a more profound correction, even though it already slipped from $82,400 to $79,600. Its apparent spot demand briefly expanded by 43,000 units, marking its fastest growth pace of the year. However, that metric has lost its momentum and is now back in contraction.

US investors’ demand has weakened as well. The most used metric for this, the Coinbase Premium, measuring the price difference between the asset on the leading US exchange and other trading platforms, has returned to slightly negative territory at -0.05.

The analysts said similar periods of soft US spot demand have capped the cryptocurrency’s rallies three other times this year alone.

Nevertheless, the short-term picture does not necessarily mean that BTC’s run is over and that it will return to a bearish phase. The Bull Score currently stands at 70, which is above the 60 threshold historically associated with sustainable bull markets.

” This keeps the broader picture constructive: Bitcoin remains in the early phase of a new bull market even as short-term momentum cools. The “official” bull market begins once price closes above its 365-day moving average,” they added, outlining that this key MA is located at around $83,000 – the level that stopped BTC in May.

The post Bitcoin Holders Just Cashed Out 110,000 BTC in Profits: Is a Bigger Price Drop Coming? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin remains locked in a post-breakout consolidation phase, but the latest rejection from the upper end of the structure shows that buyers are still struggling to generate sustained momentum above $80K. The broader trend remains constructive, although the current range leaves BTC vulnerable to further liquidity-driven swings before its next directional move.

Bitcoin Price Analysis: The Daily Chart

Bitcoin’s daily structure remains significantly stronger than it was before the August breakout. The asset is holding well above the former $72K-$74.5K resistance zone and both moving averages, preserving the broader bullish shift despite the recent loss of momentum.

However, BTC has repeatedly encountered selling pressure inside the $80.5K-$82.5K resistance zone. The latest attempt briefly pushed toward $82K before being rejected, sending the price back below $80K. This inability to establish acceptance above the resistance area suggests that supply remains active at higher prices.

At the same time, the asset continues to trade within a gradually ascending channel. Its lower boundary currently sits around the $76K-$77K region, making this the most important nearby structural support. As long as BTC remains above this area, the ongoing price action can still be interpreted as consolidation following the sharp rally rather than a confirmed bearish reversal.

A decisive breakout above the $80.5K-$82.5K zone would strengthen the continuation scenario. Conversely, losing the channel support around $76K-$77K could trigger a more substantial correction, with the former $72K-$74.5K breakout zone becoming the next major area of interest.

BTC/USDT 4-Hour Chart

The 4-hour chart highlights the market’s current indecision more clearly. BTC rallied from the lower boundary of the ascending structure near $76.5K-$77K and quickly tested the $81K-$82K area, only for sellers to reject the move once again.

Price subsequently dropped toward $79.5K and has entered a tight short-term consolidation. This creates a notable contrast between the rising channel structure and the repeated failures near its upper boundary. Buyers are still defending higher lows, but they have yet to demonstrate enough momentum to convert the $80.5K-$82.5K supply area into support.

The $76.5K-$77.5K region therefore remains crucial. Another test of this zone could determine whether the ascending structure survives. A strong reaction would keep a renewed push toward $81K-$82K in play, whereas a breakdown would indicate that the consolidation is transitioning into a deeper corrective phase.

Sentiment Analysis

The one-week BTC liquidation heatmap shows substantial liquidity on both sides of the current price, which supports the possibility of continued choppy trading and liquidity sweeps.

Above the market, notable liquidation concentrations appear around $81K-$82K and extend toward approximately $84K. These clusters could attract price if buyers regain momentum.

However, the downside liquidity is particularly relevant following the latest rejection. A broad and comparatively dense concentration is visible below the market, especially around the $76K-$78K region. This aligns closely with the lower boundary of the ascending technical structure.

As a result, a downside liquidity sweep toward $76K-$78K remains a plausible near-term scenario before another recovery attempt. Such a move would not automatically invalidate the broader bullish setup, but a sustained breakdown beneath this region would increase the probability of a deeper retracement toward the $72K-$74.5K support zone.

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