Bitcoin's appeal as a hedge against fiscal instability grows, potentially reshaping institutional investment strategies and portfolio diversification.

The post BlackRock’s Robert Mitchnick says Bitcoin’s macro case strengthens amid fiscal concerns appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Increased tensions in the Strait of Hormuz could disrupt global oil supply, impacting energy markets and escalating geopolitical conflicts.

The post Tanker hit by unknown projectile in Strait of Hormuz, UKMTO reports appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Investor caution amid inflation concerns and Fed policy uncertainty highlights the delicate balance between tech optimism and economic realities.

The post Wall Street indexes close lower as investors await Nvidia earnings appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Global oil supply disruptions may lead to increased prices, impacting economies and prompting strategic shifts in energy policies worldwide.

The post Conflicts disrupt 45M barrels/day of oil supply, global rationing ensues appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Rising US inflation and Treasury yields may continue to pressure gold prices, affecting its appeal as a safe-haven asset and investment strategy.

The post Gold drops 1% to $4,590 as US inflation boosts dollar, Treasury yields appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Coinkite’s Coldcard Bug Exposed Single-Sig Risk. Multi-Vendor Multisig Is the New Bitcoin Custody Baseline

In the wake of Coldcard’s catastrophic entropy bug, self-custody advocates and experts have begun recommending a new standard, multi-vendor multisignature wallets, an approach that looks to minimize —among other threats— dependency on any single hardware wallet manufacturer.

The Coldcard entropy bug that went undiscovered since at least 2021 has taught a hard lesson to the Bitcoin self-custody advocates and users. No matter how legitimate or competent a wallet provider might seem, how well recommended and reputable, a major bug may be possible. As a result, Bitcoiners are questioning old recommendations and assumptions, including many declaring the ‘death of single sig’ the popular self-custody method of trusting the private key pair generation to one wallet alone. 

The Threat Model

Self-custody by any measure is an advanced practice in Bitcoin. Advocates recommend it as a way to protect user funds from exchange malfeasance like that seen in the cases of FTX and MtGox, among many others. But recent events have driven a revaluation of custody practices, with many bitcoin owners moving coins to exchanges — at least temporarily — while others upgrading or changing their self-custody setups altogether. Nick Neuman, CEO of Casa, claimed that 233k bitcoins moved to safety in reaction to the Coldcard hack.

To understand when self-custody makes sense and for whom, it is essential to understand your personal threat model. A threat model is the careful analysis of threats to an individual, for the purpose of designing security practices and structures ahead of time. 

A simple threat model practice can be to take a step back and think about all the possible things that worry you about self-custody, and add them to a list. Then think about all the things that advocates caution users about, and append them to that same list. Next, sort or rate items on that list based on which are most likely to happen to you, and which are most likely to happen in general. Finally, you can rank each item in the list by how catastrophic it would be if it occurred; can your current setup and plans survive the realization of that threat? 

Two of the most likely causes of loss of funds in Bitcoin self-custody are user error related to backups or forgotten passwords, and of course theft. Many of the wallets believed to be lost bitcoins that have not moved come from bad backups of private keys in the early days, resulting in data loss after a computer failed. Others simply used passwords too difficult to brute force, and then forgot them, encrypting their private keys forever.

On the theft dimension, bad entropy attacks likely rank among the most successful attacks on self-custody to date, with Coldcard joining a significant list of other wallets that have suffered bugs of the sort, intentional or otherwise, such as Trust Wallet, and many lesser-known and possibly malicious mobile wallets. In some cases, fake wallets like the iOS Sparrow Wallets simply stole user funds by keeping a copy of the user-generated private keys and sweeping the funds once deposited. In all of these examples, more thoughtful user behavior before trusting random software with your life savings is the solution. 

Once users have a clear threat model in place and a good enough understanding of the technology, designing security practices becomes more a science than an art. And while every individual has specific circumstances they need to take into account, some structures have emerged as the most resilient to most threats. One such practice becoming widely recommended and adopted among long-term self-custody Bitcoin holders is a carefully formed multisig setup. 

Multi-vendor Multisig

The term “Multi-vendor Multisig” is relatively new in the self-custody niche. The term “multisig” has nevertheless gone viral in 2026, clearly triggered by the Coldcard hack that saw the loss of over 100 million dollars worth of bitcoin, mostly from single seed wallets. Most single-seed Coldcard users appear to have generated their private keys on the device without adding an extra passphrase, extra words that add custom entropy to the private keys, nor without extra dice rolls, which do the same in a different format. 

The weak entropy from the Coldcard firmware — which users had no reason to distrust, given the company’s strong brand — in turn made guessing the related private keys easy, with a bit of custom work, which hackers eventually figured out. 

The resulting viral interest in multisig is warranted. Multisig Bitcoin wallets protect users from such hardware manufacturer errors by letting users construct a Bitcoin address that requires signing from multiple private keys and thus multiple devices, in what is known as a Bitcoin script.

Bitcoin scripts are contracts of sorts that set spending conditions for a bitcoin wallet. All Bitcoin wallets can be thought of as having some kind of script involved, with the simplest and most popular being that anyone who can sign a valid transaction can spend all or any funds therein. Multisig scripts instead require a threshold of valid signatures from different keypairs to result in a valid withdrawal. These scripts are enforced by the Bitcoin consensus rules.

Multi-vendor multisig theory posits that users should make sure every keypair used to construct a Bitcoin multisig is generated from a different wallet vendor. 

One example that is likely popular today might be the use of a Trezor Safe 7 hardware wallet with one key, a second key generated by a Ledger Nano, and a third key generated by a multisig wallet provider, considered a recovery key. A script of this sort would require any 2 valid signatures out of the three possible signatures in the setup.

By using two different hardware wallet providers, the user minimizes trust in any single wallet vendor, protecting them from an entropy failure like the one seen in Coldcard. 

Other Multisig setups can add more keys, with a 3-of-5 threshold also being common and a standard offering of a multisig-specialized wallet like Casa. It is at this point that the terminology commonly used and understood to describe Bitcoin spending software starts to break down, and as a result merits clarification.

Wallets like Casa are software interfaces that let users combine partially signed transactions from different private key pairs. In this scenario, it becomes more useful to describe ‘hardware wallets’ like Trezor or Ledger as ‘key signers’ since no single keypair in the set holds enough of the key material to spend all the Bitcoin held in the Multisig script address. 

So Casa is a Multisig wallet that lets you use a threshold of hardware signers to secure and send bitcoin funds. Fundamentally, they help users interact with Bitcoin script and create consensus-valid transactions easily. Other examples of such multisig wallet providers include Nunchuck, Sparrow desktop wallet and Unchained Capital. 

In cases like Casa and Unchained, the wallet provider offers users a recovery key controlled by the company, which some users find useful. Nunchuck and Sparrow, on the other hand, are designed for full user autonomy in this regard, though Nunchuck does offer a premium recovery key-related plan as well. 

The Upsides of Multivendor Multisig

Another benefit of a multisig wallet is its potential resistance to the infamous wrench attacks. Countries like France, which make Bitcoin and crypto ownership a matter of public record as a consequence of tax filings, have become focal points for crypto theft-related kidnapping. Self-custody or not, targets of this kind of crime are vulnerable to theft, particularly when the funds can be moved in full quickly, be it from a custodial exchange the user can access from their phone, or some self-custody setup.

Advanced forms of multisig, like multi-jurisdictional or time-locked multisig, make it so that users have to travel, ideally through an airport, in order to reach other key signers needed to construct a valid bitcoin transaction. Or perhaps the recovery key involved in the multisig has the condition that it will not sign for two weeks after the user submits the request and corresponding transaction data. The result is the removal of the final central point of failure in Bitcoin custody: the user’s own willingness to send the bitcoin, particularly when under duress.

While best practices in the case of wrench attacks broadly try to avoid ending up in that situation in the first place, making it difficult to spend your coins actually protects users from a wide range of attacks as well, including phishing schemes and other forms of social engineering that use pressure tactics to fool users into sending funds quickly. 

Multisig has also begun to enable novel forms of Bitcoin insurance, as demonstrated by AnchorWatch, a multisig wallet and insurance company that offers bitcoin theft protection denominated in BTC. The company’s services today are primarily offered to Americans through the Lloyd’s of London insurer. 

The Downsides of Multisig

One critical downside of Multisig is that the user does not only need to have access to the threshold key material needed to sign, be it two hardware wallets as in our example, or one of the hardware wallets and a recovery key from the wallet company. The user also needs to store a copy of the Multisig script or template, so that they can recreate the smart contract and thus the valid withdrawal conditions for spending. Most Multisig wallets store this information for clients, but they will also send a copy to users so they can recover independently of the Multisig wallet, should it one day go offline. 

This post Coinkite’s Coldcard Bug Exposed Single-Sig Risk. Multi-Vendor Multisig Is the New Bitcoin Custody Baseline first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

Bitcoin Magazine

Billions Pour Into Bitcoin ETFs as Rally Rolls On

Bitcoin exchange-traded funds have continued their winning streak, attracting billions of dollars in new investment over the past week. 

U.S. investors have thrown $2.56 billion since last Monday, according to Farside Investors data, helping push the leading cryptocurrency’s price higher. 

And this week alone, nearly $652 million in fresh cash has hit the products managed by the likes of BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, and Fidelity. 

Bitcoin was recently trading for $78,302 after jumping nearly 25% over a seven-day period. The coin touched as high as $81,160 on Monday. 

Bitcoin’s rise comes after a sluggish June and July when it mostly traded below $65,000. 

The cryptocurrency has benefited from news that the Treasury would at least double the size of its liquidity-support buyback operations. The announcement last week hurt the dollar but non-yielding assets like Bitcoin and gold have benefited.  

Bloomberg Intelligence ETF Analyst Eric Balchunas wrote on X Wednesday that the debasement trade was back.

“Gold and Bitcoin ETFs have combined for +$7b in flows in past week, by far a record for a 5-day period as debasement trade steals spotlight from AI,” he said. 

The debasement trade is when investors buy an asset to hedge against a currency losing value. Investments like Bitcoin and precious metals have done well as part of the trade as they cannot be endlessly printed.  

Last year, the investment strategy was much talked about but then went quiet as investors focused more on buying artificial intelligence-related equities.

Investors now are fretting over U.S. borrowing, a weak dollar and efforts to contain long-term yields.

Bitcoin ETFs had their best week since October last week, with nearly $2 billion in inflows. 

Positive regulatory coming out of the White House has also spurred the flurry of trading activity. President Donald Trump held a meeting with crypto executives earlier last week before urging lawmakers to get the long-awaited crypto Clarity Act over the line.

This post Billions Pour Into Bitcoin ETFs as Rally Rolls On first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Forget the Trump Bump — Bitcoin Would Be Fine Under Democrats, Says VanEck 

President Donald Trump may be the most crypto-friendly leader the U.S. has had so far — but what would happen to Bitcoin if the Democrats were to get back in power? 

Well, it wouldn’t necessarily be bad, according to asset manager VanEck’s Head of Digital Assets Research, Matthew Sigel. 

Speaking on CNBC Wednesday, the analyst also said that contrary to what many believe, ex-President Joe Biden wasn’t anti-Bitcoin. 

Republicans have repeatedly blasted Democrats as anti-crypto. Regulators under ex-president Joe Biden cracked down on digital asset companies, filing various lawsuits.  

“Biden was actually okay for Bitcoin,” Sigel said. “It’s the rest of cryptos that might have a problem [if Democrats get back in power].” 

He added: “With the ascendant socialist wing of the Democrat Party, I can tell you here in New York City that there are plenty who are reminded of why there is value in a decentralized, scarce asset that can’t be printed and spent on nonsense.”

President Trump campaigned on a ticket to help the digital asset industry and has passed a number of pro-crypto executive orders, including setting up a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve. 

The price of Bitcoin surged off the back of Trump’s 2024 victory and notched a new record last year. Despite some sluggish months in 2026, the leading digital asset began to rise again last week after the president urged lawmakers to get the long-awaited crypto Clarity Act over the line.

Bitcoin has jumped nearly 24% over the past seven days, touching as high as $81,160 this week before dropping again to its current price of $78,438. 

Pro-crypto lawmakers had hoped to pass the Clarity Act before Congress broke for August recess, but the vote slipped to September after Democrats balked at the latest draft. 

Some Republican senators have accused Democrats of deliberately holding the legislation back. 

The Clarity Act aims to create a legal framework classifying digital assets as securities, commodities or payment stablecoins, and determining which regulator oversees each.

Sigel’s comments echo those of Coinbase’s Chief Policy Officer, Faryar Shirzad, who said in July that crypto was “maybe the most bipartisan issue in Washington.”

Speaking about the delay in a vote on the Clarity Act, Shirzad said that while some lawmakers were holding back the long-awaited legislation, younger Democrats were for the framework. 

“A lot of the opposition is generational — so it is Democrats who oppose it — but I think younger members who understand the technology, understand that money is transforming how we should engage financially, how we need to adapt, and so it’s really a generational shift,” he said on The Hill’s Rising show. 

This post Forget the Trump Bump — Bitcoin Would Be Fine Under Democrats, Says VanEck  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Coinbase and Better Mortgage Announce General Availability of Bitcoin-Backed Mortgages 

Coinbase and Nasdaq-listed Better Mortgage have announced the availability of Bitcoin-backed mortgages for Americans. 

The crypto exchange and lender said Wednesday that the service was designed in accordance with the Federal National Mortgage Association, or Fannie Mae. 

Coinbase and Better announced the funding of the first Bitcoin-backed mortgage in June. The service now hopes to cater to younger wannabe homeowners who have Bitcoin holdings. 

“In 2025, high interest rates, record home prices, and limited inventory pushed the median age of a first-time homebuyer to 40,” Chief Technology Officer at Better Mortgage, Ziggy Jonsson, said. 

“Coinbase counts millions of monthly users worldwide, and by allowing Coinbase One members to pledge crypto as collateral without selling their holdings, we’re opening a new path toward homeownership for a generation of borrowers whose wealth increasingly lives onchain.”

Ben Shen, head of financial services and loyalty products at Coinbase, added: “By enabling borrowers to pledge their digital assets in the mortgage underwriting process, we are allowing crypto to be more useful and powerful in the real-world — expanding the pathways to homeownership while preserving long-term investment positions.”

The announcement added that Coinbase One members will be eligible for a rebate equal to 1% of the mortgage value, up to a maximum of $10,000.

The debut loan by Coinbase and Better was closed by a married Michigan couple, Joe and Amy, in June. The couple used their Bitcoin holdings as collateral to fund their down payment rather than liquidating their position, the companies said at the time. 

Crypto-backed lender Milo said earlier this year that it had surpassed $100 million in digital asset mortgages, including a record $12 million loan, as more high-net-worth and institutional clients were using Bitcoin as collateral for home financing.

Bitcoin-backed loans are still a niche product but one of the biggest lenders in the space, Ledn, has released research claiming that the space could grow from its current size of $3 billion to $1 trillion in the next 10 years. 

This post Coinbase and Better Mortgage Announce General Availability of Bitcoin-Backed Mortgages  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

SEC Sends Proposal to White House To Modernize Crypto Custody

The Securities and Exchange Commission has sent a proposal to the White House aiming to “clarify the framework for the custody of crypto assets” for investment advisers and companies. 

In a rule change sent Tuesday, the regulator said it wanted to “improve and modernize the regulations” surrounding custody for the crypto space.

The proposal comes after a vote was delayed on the long-awaited Clarity Act. Despite the delay, regulators like the SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission have said they will still proceed with trying to shape crypto policy. 

“This rulemaking would clarify the framework for the custody of crypto assets for investment adviser and investment companies, as well as make other modernizations needed to remove burdens from certain outdated provisions that are no longer needed to provide investor protection given the evolution in the markets and security trading and holding practices,” the proposal read. 

Pro-crypto lawmakers had hoped to pass the Clarity Act before Congress broke for August recess, but the vote slipped to September after Democrats balked at the latest draft. 

Some Republican senators — like Senator Cynthia Lummis — accused some of deliberately holding it back. 

Still, pro-crypto regulators want to press ahead. CFTC Chairman Michael Selig has said he will proceed with rulemaking whether or not the Clarity Act is enacted, aiming to finalise rules before the administration’s term is out.

And earlier this month, the SEC proposed its own framework to allow token issuers to raise money in the U.S. without falling foul of securities laws.

President Donald Trump campaigned on a ticket to help the crypto industry and received major backing from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Since taking office, regulators have taken a remarkably different approach to watchdogging the digital asset space. 

The president last week urged lawmakers to get the Clarity Act over the line. SEC Chair Paul Atkins has said he is “committed to supporting Congress in advancing” the bill. 

This post SEC Sends Proposal to White House To Modernize Crypto Custody first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Crypto price oracle Pyth Network missed its documented 16:00 UTC cutover deadline on Aug. 26, adding a new requirement for developers who call its Hermes price-delivery service directly: their requests now need an API key.

Under Pyth's migration guide, people who use a protocol that already integrates the oracle don't need to take direct action.

Pyth documented that the existing hermes.pyth.network address would redirect to its upgraded backend, with authentication required after the deadline. Developers could also move directly tohttps://pyth.dourolabs.app/hermes, passing the key as a bearer token or SDK access token.

Pyth said the routes and response shapes did not change.

Where incomplete Pyth migrations can fail

Pyth's upgraded Hermes endpoint serves payloads intended for the upgraded Pyth Core contract. The guide warns that changing the endpoint without changing the contract generation, or doing the reverse, can leave an application unable to verify price updates.

An application without the required key may not complete authenticated Hermes requests, while one with mismatched endpoint and contract settings can receive data that its on-chain integration will not verify.

In a pull-oracle design, either problem can stop the application's price-update transaction from completing until the configuration is corrected.

Sui integrations didn't have the automatic package-swap path because applications reference the Pyth package by object ID, which the Pyth DAO couldn't replace for them. In practical terms, Sui developers had to update both the client used to fetch price data and the on-chain Move package dependency.

Pyth's Sui-specific guide required them to point SuiPriceServiceConnection at the upgraded Hermes endpoint with an access token and move the oracle dependency in Move.toml to the new package revision.

It also said clients whose constructor could not accept an accessToken were outdated.

A live DefiLlama oracle table mapped Pyth to 316 protocols and about $2.7 billion in total value secured.

That figure is dynamic, and the selected view includes borrowed values and settings that can count the same exposure more than once, serving as a proxy for value inside protocols that depend on Pyth.

As of that post-deadline check, there was no confirmed outage, stale-price event, loss of funds or official confirmation that every redirect and migration had completed cleanly.

The immediate test was whether direct callers could authenticate and whether their endpoint, SDK, and on-chain contract generation matched.

The post Pyth Network’s API overhaul threatens to freeze unpatched smart contracts across 300 DeFi protocols appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Ethereum developers have opened an early proposal to make the staking deposit system flexible enough to accept future quantum-resistant validator keys, and it would also give a later network upgrade a one-way switch to stop new deposits using today’s BLS format.

The change would affect how new validators enter Ethereum, creating an entry path for future credential formats. Yet, those formats and the rules for verifying them still have to be designed and adopted separately.

Pull request #12235 was opened Aug. 24 and remained an unmerged Draft as of Aug. 26, with its working file still using the placeholder number 9999. An Ethereum EIPs editor suggested assigning 8394, but the proposal has not been published or accepted as EIP-8394.

How the deposit switch would work

Ethereum’s staking deposit contract is the entry point that receives a prospective validator’s funds and credential data. The current path expects public keys and signatures in fixed BLS12-381 formats.

The draft specification instead adds a scheme identifier and variable-length fields for the public key and credential metadata, each capped at 8,192 bytes.

Ethereum’s execution layer can record a deposit while its consensus layer decides whether the credential is valid and can create or update a validator. Under the proposal, the contract would carry non-BLS credentials as opaque data, meaning it would transport the bytes without checking the new cryptography.

The draft defines three contract modes: disabled, BLS enabled, and BLS retired. Those transitions only move forward, and once a protocol-controlled system call activates the retired mode, the new contract would reject BLS deposits and could not later switch BLS onboarding back on.

The proposal says deposits that entered the pending queue before the retirement boundary would remain eligible for normal processing under the current consensus framework.

A future credential-scheme proposal would still need to define signature validation, validator-state representation, top-ups, duplicate handling, uniqueness, and key replacement. Activating the deposit path would itself require a coordinated execution- and consensus-layer fork.

Ethereum’s post-quantum roadmap pairs the hash-based validator signature scheme leanXMSS with leanVM, which is intended to aggregate much larger post-quantum signatures efficiently, and separates key registration, signature verification, attestations, and full aggregation into staged milestones.

Ethereum says no quantum computer can threaten its cryptography today, and its approximately 2029 target is a planning goal.

The deposit proposal is one piece of migration infrastructure, specifying how the network could eventually admit new validator-key formats and close BLS onboarding for good.

The post Staking Ethereum could soon look entirely different under a new deposit proposal appeared first on CryptoSlate.

AI-directed bank accounts could move deposits rapidly among banks, weakening a funding advantage that helps finance long-term credit, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas analysis published Aug. 25.

Although customers can withdraw demand deposits at any time, balances tend to remain at banks for years, and deposit rates usually rise by less than market rates. That makes deposits behave partly like long-duration funding.

The Dallas Fed approximates their effective duration as weighted average life multiplied by one minus the deposit beta, which measures how responsive deposit rates are to short-term rates.

Instant settlement would let yield-sensitive customers switch banks quickly, while programmable rules and agentic AI could automate the move. In June 2026, The Clearing House announced an initiative to develop 24/7, interoperable tokenized commercial-bank money, including automated and agentic-commerce uses.

Using commercial-bank balance sheets as of July 15 and its own duration assumptions, the Dallas Fed estimated about $7 trillion of asset-side interest-rate exposure in 10-year equivalents. Roughly $5.84 trillion was supported by the duration characteristics of deposits other than large time deposits.

In plain terms, those stable funding characteristics help banks hold assets whose values are sensitive to interest-rate changes.

In one sensitivity case, what the authors describe as a 10% increase in deposit price sensitivity, assuming a four-year weighted average life, reduced aggregate duration-risk appetite by about $700 billion in 10-year equivalents.

A separate 10% reduction in weighted average life cut modeled maturity-transformation capacity by about $580 billion.

A 10-year equivalent converts an exposure into the interest-rate risk of a comparable position in 10-year Treasuries, but the credit effect would depend on how banks adjust their assets and funding.

Banks could issue more term debt to keep lending composition closer to unchanged, but the Dallas Fed said wholesale funding would likely raise borrowing costs for consumers and businesses. They could also hold more reserves and Treasuries against faster, less predictable outflows, leaving less room for illiquid credit.

A 2025 Central Bank of Brazil paper found that heavier use of the Pix instant-payment system increased liquid-asset holdings and reduced liquidity transformation, evidence that instant payments can alter bank liquidity behavior even though Pix is not a direct comparison with US tokenized deposits.

Tokenized deposits remain early in development, the magnitude is uncertain, and the authors said their views should not be attributed to the Dallas Fed or the Federal Reserve System.

The post Smart AI deposits could soon force banks to raise loan rates for everyday borrowers appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Cardano and Solana are testing two competing approaches to on-chain governance, with one exposing the cost of voter absence and the other shifting more power to default representatives who may have their own economic interests.

Cardano’s constitutional committee renewal requires separate approval from delegated representatives, or DReps, and stake pool operators. Solana instead allows validators to cast governance votes using the active stake delegated to them unless individual stakers override that choice.

The distinction is becoming visible in simultaneous votes on both networks.

Cardano faces the more immediate risk. An Aug. 26 snapshot showed support for its committee renewal below the required thresholds among both DReps and stake pool operators, creating the possibility that four committee terms expire without replacements.

Solana reduces that kind of participation bottleneck by making validators default voting agents. But its current governance vote shows the tradeoff: stakers who do nothing effectively allow validators to exercise governance weight associated with their delegated stake, even when those validators may have financial interests affected by the proposal.

Both systems therefore confront the same underlying problem from different directions. Cardano leaves inactive voters silent. Solana lets an existing delegate speak for them.

Cardano’s governance risk is already measurable

A DRepTalk snapshot accessed Aug. 26 showed Cardano’s Update Constitutional Committee 2026 proposal with 43% DRep support, below the required 67%, while stake pool operator support stood at 15.1% against a 51% threshold.

Each group must independently clear its requirement. Stronger participation by one cannot offset a shortfall in the other.

The vote carries a fixed consequence because four committee terms expire at epoch 799, while the maximum allowable term length means replacements must be enacted in epoch 653. Published material identifies Sept. 1 as the relevant deadline.

If the proposal fails, Cardano would be left with three active constitutional committee members, below the reported five-member minimum required for committee-dependent governance actions.

That would not stop block production or freeze the entire network. It would, however, leave the committee unable to ratify actions that require its approval until governance restores sufficient membership.

Intersect has warned that such a disruption could affect the timing of the Dijkstra upgrade, though that does not automatically cause a delay.

Cardano’s design makes the cost of inaction explicit. Its governance system requires two separate constituencies to express enough support, preserving each group's independence while also creating two opportunities for insufficient participation to block continuity.

Solana reduces turnout risk, then inherits an agency problem

Solana’s model lowers the participation burden by allowing validators to vote with the stake already delegated to them.

Eligible stakers can override a validator’s choice for an individual stake account. When they do, that stake is removed from the validator’s effective tally and applied directly to the staker’s own selection.

That mechanism was active during SGP-0002, a proposal seeking support for faster SOL disinflation.

An Aug. 26 Validator Info snapshot showed 83.66 million SOL voting For, 12.01 million Against, and 8.32 million Abstain. Among decisive votes, support stood at 87.45%.

Direct delegator overrides were visible but small compared with the roughly 104 million SOL represented in the tally. Validator Info listed 308 delegator voters, with only a fraction of the overall voting weight directly reassigned.

The override mechanism is therefore being used. The current vote does not yet show whether large numbers of passive delegators would intervene when they disagree with their validator.

That question becomes more significant when validators have an economic stake in the policy under consideration.

Solana Company, a publicly traded SOL treasury firm, said it opposed SGP-0002 on timing and policy-stability grounds. Its second-quarter filing showed $2.512 million in staking revenue out of $2.526 million in total revenue, meaning staking accounted for about 99.4% of quarterly revenue.

The proposed policy would accelerate annual disinflation from 15% to 30%, reducing projected issuance by about 18.9 million SOL over six years and bringing the network to its 1.5% terminal inflation floor in roughly 2.8 years instead of 5.7 years.

Those facts establish an economic exposure, but they do not prove misconduct or that financial incentives determined the company’s vote. Stakers also retain the ability to override validator choices.

Solana’s rule conflict adds another layer of uncertainty

The Solana vote is complicated further by conflicting public descriptions of what constitutes passage.

The Solana governance FAQ says one-third of network stake must participate and two-thirds of participating stake must vote For. The governance proposal repository instead says there is no quorum requirement and that For must receive two-thirds of For plus Against, excluding Abstain.

Under the repository rule, the observed vote clears the support threshold. Under the FAQ and Validator Info display, participation remained below the one-third line.

That leaves the same tally open to two different interpretations and makes the result difficult to assess until the applicable rule is reconciled.

Even a favorable result would not immediately change SOL issuance. SGP-0002 would establish policy direction, while the underlying SIMD-0550 proposal would still need to move through implementation before any consensus-affecting change could be activated.

Both systems relocate the cost of voter apathy

The current votes show that delegation changes the form of participation risk rather than removing it.

Cardano bears the cost directly when voters fail to show up. Its immediate danger is concrete: two constituencies remain below required thresholds ahead of a fixed deadline, with committee capacity at stake.

Solana reduces that risk by allowing validators to represent passive holders, but the model shifts more responsibility toward oversight. Delegators must monitor the agents voting with their stake and intervene when their preferences diverge.

Cardano therefore faces a clearer near-term governance threat, while Solana raises a longer-term question about representation and incentive alignment.

The next results will sharpen that contrast. Cardano must determine whether DReps and stake pool operators can mobilize before the committee deadline, while Solana still needs to establish which voting rule governs SGP-0002 and how much weight delegator overrides ultimately carry.

Both systems arrive at the same unresolved question from opposite directions: whether on-chain governance can remain effective when most tokenholders prefer not to participate.

The post Cardano and Solana just exposed crypto governance’s biggest weakness appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Solana’s mainnet is producing blocks faster after its first staged slot-time reduction moved the network’s target from 400 milliseconds to 350 milliseconds.

Faster slots shorten block-level feedback and confirmation thresholds measured in slots, while throughput depends on a separate set of limits.

The Solana Foundation confirmed the mainnet change after the feature gate activated at slot 440,208,000, the first slot of epoch 1019. A feature gate is the switch validators use to coordinate a protocol change, and under the one-epoch delay required by SIMD-0525, the new timing applied when epoch 1020 began on Aug. 21.

A slot is the window in which a designated validator can produce a block, while an epoch is a fixed period of 432,000 slots.

Trillium, a Solana validator-telemetry provider, measured a slot-weighted mean of 365.4ms across 431,505 timed slots in post-change epoch 1021. Its view of pre-change epoch 1015 recorded a 420.7ms mean.

The same dataset recorded 331 skipped slots in epoch 1021, or 0.077%, compared with 1,890 skips and 0.438% in epoch 1015. The lower post-change reading offers an early stability signal across those two epochs, though the comparison cannot establish that the timing cut caused the change.

What faster slots change

Shortening the slot window reduces the wall-clock time for confirmation thresholds measured in slots. It also cuts the four-slot leader window from a nominal 1.6 seconds at 400ms to 1.4 seconds at 350ms, narrowing the period one block producer controls.

The proposal keeps four slots per leader and 432,000 slots per epoch. It scales per-slot compute, account-write, vote, data, and shred limits down with each shorter target. Blocks arrive more frequently and carry smaller budgets, leaving approximate work capacity per second broadly unchanged.

The 365.4ms telemetry reading measures observed spacing between slots, and it also supports faster block-level feedback, while finality remains a separate metric.

Solana’s official upgrade roadmap calls for distinct steps to 300ms, 250ms, and eventually 200ms. Each feature gate carries a one-epoch delay so validators can apply the timing and reduced shred limits together.

The 300ms stage remained pending as of Aug. 26. Solana Compass reported that Anza CEO and SIMD author Brennan Watt said it was intended to become effective at epoch 1024, around Aug. 28.

Solana’s roadmap says the network can pause between stages if skipped-block rates climb, making the 350ms stage a live test of how much validator timing can tighten before the path to 200ms continues.

The post Solana takes its first step toward sub-second speed by cutting block confirmation times across the network appeared first on CryptoSlate.

If your account at a crypto exchange is frozen without warning, it may have nothing to do with you. Between August 17 and August 24, 2026, Kraken received almost 12,000 tiny deposits from wallets that analytics firms attribute to the sanctioned exchange HTX. The amounts mostly ranged from a few cents to a few dollars. That was enough for the exchange's automated sanctions screening: affected accounts were temporarily frozen until the checks were complete. Kraken has since restored access and is holding back only the flagged funds. What you should take from this is set out in three steps further down, and the most important one is this: do not touch small amounts of unknown origin.

Dust Attack on Kraken: What Happened Between August 17 and 24

Within eight days, Kraken customers received almost 12,000 transfers that nobody had requested. Several trade publications consistently report amounts in the range of a few cents to a few dollars per transfer. The blockchain analytics service Arkham Intelligence attributes the sending wallet to the exchange HTX, which formerly traded under the name Huobi.

Kraken has classified the events as an attack rather than an accident. A spokesperson for the exchange told Bloomberg that it did not know who was behind it; the senders were probably counting on sanctioned funds in a customer's account triggering a full account freeze and thereby disrupting operations for many users at once. HTX denies any involvement and says it is examining whether faulty address attribution, an internal process error or the actions of third parties lie behind it. The two accounts stand side by side; what is documented so far is the attribution of the wallet by an analytics service, not the question of who initiated the transfers.

What a Dust Attack Is and Why It Freezes Other People's Accounts

A dust attack is the mass sending of tiny amounts to other people's addresses, either to contaminate their transaction history or to trigger screening routines at the receiving providers. The name comes from the word for dust: these are sums that are worthless in themselves. The damage is done not by the amount but by its origin.

Originally the method served to de-anonymise users. Anyone who sends dust to thousands of addresses and watches which of those amounts are later spent together with other holdings can group addresses together and draw conclusions about individual users. The Kraken case shows a second application: if the sender is on a sanctions list, the recipient becomes a problem for the compliance department without having done anything at all.

For you as an investor the difference matters. In a hack you lose funds. In a dust attack you initially lose only access, and you lose it because your provider is meeting a legal obligation.

Sanctions Screening at the Exchange: Why the Freeze Is Automatic

An exchange licensed in the EU screens incoming payments against sanctions lists on an ongoing basis. When a match comes in, the check bites immediately and without a prior human decision. That is not a matter of goodwill but the core of the anti-money-laundering regime. This automation is precisely what a dust attack is aimed at.

In practice that means the account is restricted while the check runs. How long that takes depends on the individual case. Kraken released access again once the checks were complete, without naming the number of customers affected or the duration of the freezes. What happens legally during that period, and why your provider often may not even tell you the reason, is something we set out in crypto exchange account frozen.

Anyone who keeps their holdings exclusively with providers licensed in Europe gets these checks just the same, but gets them within a framework where a supervisory authority is responsible and a complaints route exists. Which providers those are is set out in the overview of regulated crypto exchanges.

HTX on the EU Sanctions List: The Legal Background Since August 23

The timing of the attack coincides with a cut-off date. With Regulation (EU) 2026/1848, the Council of the European Union added the entry "HTX (HUOBI GLOBAL SA)" to Annex XLV of the Russia sanctions regulation. The annex gives August 23, 2026 as the date of application. From that date, transactions with the platform are prohibited for persons and companies in the EU.

The United Kingdom moved earlier. There, Huobi Global S.A. was listed on May 26, 2026 under the Russia (Sanctions) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019, according to consistent reports the first designation of a crypto exchange by name by the British government. These two legal acts are the reason a payment of a few cents can trigger a freeze at all.

We have already written about the ban itself and the platforms affected: on HTX on the EU sanctions list and on the blocking of fourteen platforms from August 23. This article deals with the consequence that was not yet foreseeable there: that sanctioned funds end up with customers of entirely different exchanges.

$4.2 Million Frozen: What Happens to the Flagged Funds

According to reports from several trade publications, Kraken continues to hold back around $4.2 million from the episode, while the accounts themselves have been released. The exchange has not publicly confirmed this figure, and at least one of the reporting newsrooms expressly flags it as not independently verified. Treat the number as an order of magnitude, therefore, not as an audited balance sheet item.

The separation is the point that really matters: account access and flagged funds are handled separately. The remaining balance stays tradable, the marked portion does not. In the worst case that means for you that a freeze does not automatically affect your entire wealth, but also that the marked portion can lie idle indefinitely as long as the legal position is unresolved.

Dust in Your Wallet: Why You Should Not Move the Tiny Amounts

If an unexplained tiny amount turns up in your own wallet, one simple rule applies: leave it alone. The dust does no damage as long as it stays untouched. It becomes dangerous the moment you spend it together with the rest of your holdings, because the blockchain then permanently links the origin of the dust to your other funds.

With Bitcoin that comes down to the design of the network. Every bitcoin payment is assembled from individual, clearly delimited pieces of balance known as UTXOs. A UTXO is a single, not yet spent incoming payment that your wallet manages as a self-contained building block. If you inadvertently include the dust UTXO when paying, its history travels into the new transaction.

There are two things you should refrain from doing in this situation. Do not click any link that turns up alongside an unexpected token in your wallet, and do not try to "send the amount back". Both are common patterns that turn a harmless contamination into a real loss.

Coin Control and UTXO Selection: How to Isolate Contaminated Amounts

Good wallet software lets you choose which pieces of balance a payment may use. This function is called coin control. Coin control is the manual selection of the inputs from which a transaction is built. It lets you keep a marked amount permanently away from your other holdings without having to delete it. Deleting is not possible anyway, because what is on the blockchain stays there.

In practice that means marking the dust input in your wallet as unspendable and leaving it there. On an account at an exchange you do not have that option, because the exchange manages the keys and makes the selection itself. That is one of the reasons larger holdings belong in self-custody; which devices are suitable is set out in the hardware wallet comparison.

Getting the order right matters here: self-custody does not protect you from receiving dust. Any public address can receive something at any time, and that is not a weakness but how the system works. Self-custody only gives you control over what happens to what you have received.

Account Frozen: Which Documents Shorten the Review

If your account really is restricted, the quality of your documentation decides how long that state lasts. Proof of the source of funds for the affected holdings is worth having: purchase confirmations from the exchange, bank statements for the transfer, and for transfers from your own wallet the transaction IDs.

For the unsolicited incoming payment itself, one thing helps above all: the transaction ID of the inflow in question, together with a note that you did not request it and have not moved it on. Anyone who has already moved the dust on should state that openly too. The reviewer sees the chain anyway, and an omission costs more time than it saves.

Set yourself a realistic expectation. A sanctions review is not a customer service matter that pressure speeds up. The review ends when the assessment is settled.

Holdings at a Sanctioned Platform: The Authorisation Route Under Article 5ad

One special case concerns everyone who still has holdings sitting at HTX or another listed platform. The regulation provides a narrowly drawn exception for that. Under the newly added paragraph 4 of Article 5ad, the competent authorities of a member state may authorise transactions that are strictly necessary to withdraw funds or close accounts.

The text ties this authorisation to conditions, and you should know them before you make plans:

• Eligible are nationals of a member state, of an EEA state or of Switzerland, as well as natural persons holding a temporary or permanent residence permit there.
• The transaction must be necessary in order to terminate the contractual relationship with the listed entity.
• The application must be filed no later than three months after the date of application named in the annex. For HTX that date of application is August 23, 2026.
• The funds must be transferred to a financial or credit institution established or registered under the law of a member state.

Each authorisation is granted for a maximum of three months. The authority of your member state is responsible, not the exchange, and the decision lies within its discretion; the law gives you no entitlement to a particular outcome.

Regulated or Not: What Your Choice of Exchange Changes About This Risk

The case is easy to read the wrong way. Kraken did here what sanctions law requires. An exchange that does not screen incoming funds from listed wallets in the first place is the more dangerous place for you. There the problem grows quietly until a supervisory authority picks it up.

What you can steer is the distribution. An account holding your entire wealth turns every review into a total outage. Two providers and your own storage turn it into an inconvenience.

Our Own Analysis: The Regulation Checked in Full Text

For this article we read the governing legal act ourselves rather than taking it second hand. cryptoticker.io compiled this analysis itself on August 27, 2026.

Method: the German Official Journal version of Regulation (EU) 2026/1848 was retrieved in full HTML text via EUR-Lex the same day, stripped of its markup and searched for the entries on HTX and for the amendments to Article 5ad. Exactly two passages of the legal act were checked, each in full: the entry in Annex XLV and the newly added paragraph 4 of Article 5ad.

Result: the annex lists "HTX (HUOBI GLOBAL SA)" with a date of application of August 23, 2026. Paragraph 4 of Article 5ad contains verbatim the four conditions named above, together with the maximum duration of three months per authorisation and the member state's duty to inform other member states and the Commission within two weeks.

What we could not check belongs in the picture too. First, how an individual national authority actually decides such an application, because the provision expressly grants it discretion. Second, the British designation, which we could document only through reporting; the official full text was not available to us for that. Third, all the details of the attack itself, meaning the number of transfers, the period and the amount held back, which come from reporting and were not counted by us.

What to Watch Over the Coming Weeks

Two developments will decide whether this episode remains a one-off. The first is the question of authorship: as long as it is open who initiated the transfers, it also remains open whether the pattern repeats. The second concerns the other European providers. Kraken is the exchange where the episode became public; that says nothing about whether other platforms received nothing from the same source.

For you nothing dramatic follows from that, but something concrete does: over the coming days, check the incoming lists of your accounts and wallets for amounts you cannot place, and leave them untouched.

Dust Attack and Account Freeze: What to Take Away

1. Do not move tiny amounts of unknown origin. Go through the incoming payments on your wallets and accounts, mark inflows you cannot explain and do not spend them together with the rest of your holdings. Where you want to make the selection yourself, you need your own keys, and the devices for that are listed in the hardware wallet comparison.
2. Check where your funds sit and who is responsible for them. A European-licensed exchange freezes accounts just the same, but it does so within a framework that has supervision and a complaints route. You will find the overview of licensing and registered office among the regulated crypto exchanges.
3. Spread your holdings instead of putting everything in one account. Anyone using two providers is not left unable to act while a review runs. Which platforms lend themselves to that and what they cost is shown in the comparison of the best crypto exchanges.

You can read this article's two sources yourself: the text of Regulation (EU) 2026/1848 on EUR-Lex and the account of the episode at crypto.news.

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

The third income tax advance payment of the year falls due on September 10. For most crypto investors the date carries no meaning, because the tax office never set an advance payment for them in the first place. That is exactly the point at issue here: anyone who realised meaningful gains on crypto assets in 2026 owes income tax on them, yet will probably not pay the tax office a single cent this year. The bill arrives only with the assessment notice, and from a certain date onwards it costs extra in interest.

This article sets out which dates the law fixes, from what point an advance payment is set at all, when the interest period for the 2026 tax year begins, and which application lets you shrink your later interest bill yourself. The basis is four provisions that we retrieved and analysed in the official full text on August 27, 2026.

Advance Tax Payment on Crypto Gains: What Falls Due on September 10

An income tax advance payment is an instalment on the current year's tax that the tax office sets up front and later credits against the final liability. The statute names four fixed dates in the year: March 10, June 10, September 10 and December 10. Each payment covers the tax you are expected to owe for the current year.

September 10, 2026 is therefore the third of four dates for the 2026 tax year. Anyone holding an advance payment notice should pay on that day. Anyone holding none needs to do nothing, but is accumulating a tax debt that later falls due in a single sum.

The timing is no quirk of this year; it is the statutory default. What makes it interesting in 2026 is the market backdrop: according to consistent market reports, bitcoin briefly traded above $81,000 in late August after the price had risen a good twenty percent within a week. Anyone who closed positions in that move that had been held for less than twelve months has realised a taxable gain. However the bitcoin price prediction develops from here changes nothing about the tax already incurred on those sales.

Checking Your Advance Payment Notice: How to Tell Whether This Affects You

The first step takes five minutes. Search your files or your Elster mailbox for a notice that expressly sets advance payments. This assessment often sits at the end of the previous year's income tax notice and names four amounts with the four due dates listed above.

If you find such a notice, the rule is simple: the amount stated there is payable on September 10, regardless of how your year has developed since. If you find none, you belong to the group this article was really written for. Because a missing advance payment is not an advantage, only a postponement.

400 Euros a Year and 100 Euros per Date: When the Tax Office Sets Anything at All

The law draws a clear floor. Advance payments are only to be set if they come to at least 400 euros in the calendar year and at least 100 euros for a single advance payment date. If the expected tax falls below that, no assessment is made.

Separate thresholds apply to raising an assessment that already exists. An increase is only made if the additional amount reaches at least 100 euros per advance payment date. For a subsequent increase that hits only the final advance payment of the year, the threshold is 5,000 euros. That second figure explains why a late adjustment is rare in practice and only comes into play for larger amounts.

Why Your Advance Payment Usually Contains No Crypto Gains at All

The measurement basis is the decisive point. Advance payments are measured in principle by the income tax that resulted from the last assessment, that is, by your most recently processed tax year. The tax office is projecting the past forward.

A gain from selling crypto assets fits that pattern badly. It arises irregularly, often in a single year and on a scale that did not occur the year before. For an employee whose wage tax is withheld as they go, the last assessment usually produces no meaningful closing payment at all. So the tax office sets nothing, even though a substantial tax liability is building up in the current year.

The result is a lag of two to three years between the sale and the payment. During that period the money sits with you, and that is precisely why the interest rule covered in the next section bites. If your portfolio is spread across several venues, pull all the accounts together for your estimate; a look at your holdings on the regulated crypto exchanges helps you avoid overlooking a partial sale.

Late Payment Interest Under Section 233a AO: When the Clock Starts Running for 2026

Late payment interest is interest on the amount by which the assessed tax exceeds the withholding amounts and advance payments already made. This interest is not a penalty and requires no fault. The claim arises automatically as soon as enough time has passed between the tax arising and its assessment.

The interest period begins 15 months after the end of the calendar year in which the tax arose. Income tax for 2026 arises at the close of December 31, 2026. For every crypto gain you realised this year, the interest period therefore begins on April 1, 2028. It ends with the close of the day on which the tax assessment takes effect, that is, with the notice.

Two details belong here, because they are often confused. First, advance payments themselves do not bear interest; the provision expressly excludes their assessment. Second, only full months count, and part months are left out of account. A notice that takes effect on the 20th of a month therefore brings no further interest for that month. You can read the wording in Section 233a of the German Fiscal Code.

0.15 Percent a Month: What 1.8 Percent a Year Means in Euros

Since the reform covering periods from January 1, 2019, the rate has stood at 0.15 percent for each month, expressly quantified in the statute as 1.8 percent for each year. The amount that bears interest is first rounded down to the next amount divisible by 50 euros.

A worked example built solely from those two retrieved figures: assume your 2026 sales produce an additional payment of 6,000 euros and the notice takes effect in October 2028. The interest period begins on April 1, 2028 and therefore covers six full months. Six times 0.15 percent gives 0.9 percent, so 54 euros on 6,000 euros. If processing drags on into autumn 2029, that is eighteen full months and 162 euros.

The order of magnitude stays manageable as long as the additional payment stays small and the notice arrives promptly. Both together let the amount grow. With an additional payment in the five-figure range and a processing time of two years after the interest period starts, the interest quickly reaches four figures. More important than the absolute number is that this item is the only one in the whole bill you can influence by acting during the current year.

Shrinking the Difference Amount: How a Higher Advance Payment Cuts the Interest

The lever sits in the calculation formula. What counts for the interest charge is the assessed tax, reduced by the creditable withholding amounts and by the advance payments set before the interest period begins. That remainder is called the difference amount, and only it bears interest.

The effect is therefore clear: every euro set as an advance payment for 2026 by April 1, 2028 reduces the difference amount by the same euro and drops out of the interest calculation. Anyone who applies for an advance payment during the current year, or has an existing one raised, is swapping a later interest-bearing debt for an earlier interest-free payment.

Whether that pays off is a plain comparison: on one side stand the 1.8 percent a year you save, on the other the return the same money would have earned elsewhere until the tax fell due. Everyone can only make that judgement for themselves, and it comes out differently with high overnight deposit rates than with low ones.

Applying for an Adjustment: The Deadline Section 37 EStG Sets the Tax Office

The adjustment is provided for by law. The tax office may adjust advance payments to the income tax that is expected to result for the assessment period. It has a deadline for that: the end of the 15th calendar month following the assessment period. For 2026, that window runs until March 31, 2028.

The date coincides with the start of the interest period for a reason. The two provisions are aligned with each other: until the last day on which an advance payment can still be adjusted, no interest runs, and from the first day after that it does. Anyone wanting to use the adjustment therefore has a clearly bounded period, and it by no means ends on September 10, 2026.

In practice it works through an informal application to your local tax office, setting out your expected income for the current year. The evidence comes from your exchange tax report, which you should pull separately for every venue you use. If the increase is decided late in the year and hits only the final advance payment, the additional amount is payable within one month of the notice being served.

Adjusting Downwards: What Applies If 2026 Brings Losses Instead of Gains

The adjustment works in both directions. Anyone with a running advance payment whose basis has fallen away can apply for a reduction. That affects everyone whose last assessment was shaped by a good year while the current year is running distinctly worse.

For crypto investors this is the mirror image of the rest of this article, and it is by no means rare, because winning years and losing years sit close together in this market. The offsetting logic matters here: losses from private disposal transactions do not reduce any tax at will, but initially only gains of the same kind. What is deductible in the event of a total loss and what is not therefore helps decide whether a reduction can be justified at all.

A forced sale belongs in that calculation too. When an exchange liquidates residual holdings itself after a deadline expires, that creates a taxable event you did not trigger; you should know the consequences of such a forced sale on a crypto exchange before you submit your estimate for the current year.

Holding Period and Allowance: Which Crypto Gains Belong in the Calculation

Before you apply for anything, you need a number. Only what is actually taxable belongs in the estimate. Two rules narrow it down.

The first is the holding period. Gains from selling crypto assets that were held for more than a year stay outside the tax net; the details are set out in our overview of the holding period for cryptocurrencies. Positions sold in the 2026 upswing that had been held for less than twelve months, by contrast, fall inside it.

The second is the allowance. Gains stay tax-free if the total gain from private disposal transactions in the calendar year came to less than 1,000 euros. The German term Freigrenze is to be taken literally: once the threshold is reached, the entire gain is taxable and not merely the excess. Why that produces the most common mistake in thinking about crypto gains is something we have written up separately.

What the Exchanges' Reporting Duty Changes About This Calculation

Since January 1, 2026, crypto service providers in the EU have automatically reported user and transaction data to the tax authorities. For the advance payment that changes nothing directly, because the reporting goes into the tax administration's data stock and not into your advance payment account.

Indirectly it changes the starting position all the same. The likelihood that a realised gain goes unnoticed falls, and the request to file a return may come early. Which documents should be on hand for that is set out in our summary on the crypto tax return.

Our Own Analysis: Four Provisions Checked in Full Text

cryptoticker.io compiled this analysis itself on August 27, 2026. Method: we retrieved the four relevant provisions in the official full text on gesetze-im-internet.de the same day, each with HTTP status 200, stripped the text of its markup and counted the dates, monetary thresholds, deadlines and interest rates named there sentence by sentence.

Exactly four provisions were checked, each in full: Section 37 EStG with the advance payment dates, the measurement basis, the adjustment deadline and the minimum amounts; Section 233a AO with the start of the interest period, the exception for advance payments and the calculation of the difference amount; Section 238 AO with the interest rate and the rounding; and Section 23(3) EStG with the allowance.

We name three limits of this analysis expressly. First, it is a snapshot of the law as it stood on August 27, 2026; future changes are not included in it. Second, it says nothing about how an individual tax office will decide an adjustment application in a specific case, because the law grants discretion there. Third, we evaluated no administrative instructions and no case law, only the wording of the statute; you will find the full version in Section 37 EStG in the official full text.

Checking Your Crypto Advance Tax Payment: What to Take Away

For most crypto investors, September 10 is not a payday. It is a fitting occasion to work through your own position once, while the window for an adjustment still stands wide open.

1. Pull your numbers together. Export the annual report for every account and separate the sales inside the one-year period from those outside it. Anyone using several venues will struggle without a tool; our overview of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers shows which programs read which exchanges.
2. Estimate the tax and decide on the application. If the expected additional payment is well above 400 euros a year, weigh 1.8 percent annual interest on the amount from April 1, 2028 against the return the same money would bring until then. If the sum favours the application, file it informally with your tax office. If you still have to close positions to do so, you will find the venues' terms in the comparison on selling bitcoin.
3. Put the money aside if you do not adjust. Without an advance payment the tax stays your money until the notice arrives, but it stays a debt. A separate account stops the amount disappearing into the next purchase; which venue suits that and where the fees sit is covered in our comparison of the best crypto exchanges.

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

NEAR Protocol changes hands at $1.89. That is 40.7 per cent below the twelve-month high of $3.18 set on 19 September 2025, and 96.5 per cent above the twelve-month low of $0.96 from 12 February 2026. The token has climbed a long way off the February floor without coming close to reclaiming last autumn's level. Anyone weighing an entry today is buying neither a discount to the lows nor a confirmed breakout, which is precisely what makes the question worth working through: is NEAR a good buy at current prices?

cryptoticker.io collected the price data behind this analysis itself on 26 August 2026. The source is market data from CoinMarketCap; the method is daily closing prices across the past 365 days, from which the moving averages, the relative strength index and the twelve-month extremes were calculated with standard formulas. Every level cited below comes from that data set and can be checked against it.

NEAR price analysis: current price, support and the 200-day mark

At $1.89, NEAR sits above both of the averages that matter most to trend followers. The 200-day exponential moving average stands at $1.81, the 50-day exponential moving average at $1.79. The gap is thin in both cases, which is another way of saying the token hovers on top of its own trend lines rather than running clear of them.

That geometry sets out the levels to watch. The zone between $1.79 and $1.81 is the first place a pullback would be tested, because both averages converge there and short-term traders tend to treat such a cluster as a single line. Below it, the next reference is the region the price held through much of the spring, closer to $1.50. Above, the twelve-month high at $3.18 is a long way off; the nearer hurdle is the $2.20 to $2.40 band where the summer rallies stalled.

The 24-hour move shows how thin that footing is. NEAR gave back 5.35 per cent in a day while still holding an 18.15 per cent gain over seven days.

Is the NEAR downtrend broken or only interrupted?

The honest answer is that it is interrupted rather than broken, and the time frames disagree in a way that is worth spelling out. Over 30 days NEAR is up 2.16 per cent, over seven days up 18.15 per cent. Over 90 days it is down 21.70 per cent, and over the full twelve months it is down 21.30 per cent. The short horizon is positive, the medium and long horizons are negative.

A downtrend is generally considered broken once the price sets a higher high and then holds a higher low. NEAR has managed the second half of that pattern since February, lifting the floor from $0.96. It has not managed the first: the $3.18 high from September 2025 remains unchallenged, and each rally this year has stalled below the previous one.

What has changed is the position relative to the 200-day average. For much of the first half of 2026 NEAR traded below it, and the average acted as a ceiling. Trading above it, even by four cents, moves the token out of that regime. Reclaiming a long-term average is a necessary step toward a trend reversal without being sufficient evidence of one.

What RSI and moving averages mean for a NEAR entry

The 14-day relative strength index reads 62.4. That places NEAR in the upper half of its range without reaching the 70 mark conventionally read as overbought. For an entry decision this is an awkward middle: the token is neither washed out nor stretched. A reading in the low sixties after an 18 per cent week suggests buyers have been active without exhausting themselves.

The relationship between the two averages adds a second signal. The 50-day average at $1.79 sits below the 200-day average at $1.81, which means the shorter trend has not yet crossed above the longer one. Chart technicians call that pending crossover a golden cross, and its absence is the cleanest single argument that the recovery is young. The two lines are two cents apart, so the crossover is close, but a signal that has not triggered is not a signal.

Read together, the indicators describe a market in transition. An entry at $1.89 sits just above a support cluster a few cents below, so the level at which the thesis would be wrong is easy to define.

Wider sentiment is running hotter than NEAR's own chart. The CoinMarketCap Fear and Greed reading stood at 81 on 26 August 2026, in the extreme greed band. Elevated sentiment readings have historically coincided with local tops more often than with durable bottoms, though they gauge the mood of the whole market rather than forecasting any single token.

What trading volume reveals about demand for NEAR

NEAR turned over $262.8m in 24 hours against a market capitalisation of $2.46bn. That ratio, close to 10.7 per cent, is healthy for a token of this size and indicates that positions can be opened and closed without the order book being the binding constraint. Liquidity is not the weak point in the NEAR case.

The composition of that volume is harder to read, and this is where caution belongs. A high turnover ratio during a week that produced an 18 per cent gain can reflect fresh buying, or leveraged traders cycling in and out of the same positions. The 5.35 per cent single-day decline leans toward the second reading. What would count as confirmation is volume holding up on advancing days and falling away on retreating ones, sustained across several weeks. That is observable in public data rather than something an investor has to assume.

Which structural factors speak for NEAR Protocol

NEAR ranks 35th by market capitalisation at $2.46bn. That places it below the large-cap tier and above the long tail, a band where projects trade cleanly but stay sensitive to the general direction of the market.

The supply mechanics deserve attention because they cut both ways. Circulating supply stands at roughly 1.30bn NEAR, and CoinMarketCap records no maximum supply for the token. According to the project's own documentation, the network issues new tokens at a fixed annual rate to pay validators and burns a portion of transaction fees, so net issuance depends on how heavily the chain is used. An investor is therefore taking a view on adoption outpacing issuance, which is a different bet from the fixed-cap thesis that applies to Bitcoin.

On the technical side, NEAR's pitch has centred on sharding for throughput and on an account model that uses readable names instead of raw addresses. Whether that translates into durable fee revenue is an open question.

Regulation is the third structural input, and for European buyers it has become more concrete. The MiCA framework, supervised in part by ESMA, sets licensing requirements for the platforms through which most retail investors reach a token like NEAR. That affects where and how you can buy far more than it affects the protocol itself.

What speaks for buying NEAR at current prices

Three arguments carry weight at $1.89. First, the price has reclaimed both the 200-day average at $1.81 and the 50-day average at $1.79 after spending much of the first half of the year beneath them. The regime that treated those lines as a ceiling has ended, and that is a genuine change rather than a matter of interpretation.

Second, the entry sits close to a level that would invalidate it. With support only a few cents below at the average cluster, the distance between the entry and the point at which the thesis fails is small and easy to define. Positions whose failure point is nearby are easier to size sensibly than positions whose nearest reference is far away.

Third, the recovery from $0.96 to $1.89 has been built on a sequence of higher lows rather than one vertical move. A floor lifted repeatedly over six months reflects buyers returning at successively higher prices.

What speaks against buying NEAR at current prices

Three arguments cut the other way, and they are not weaker than the ones above. First, the twelve-month trend is still negative: down 21.30 per cent over the year and down 21.70 per cent over 90 days. The seven-day gain of 18.15 per cent is a rally inside a downtrend until the $3.18 high is threatened, and $3.18 is 40.7 per cent away.

Second, the golden cross has not happened. The 50-day average at $1.79 remains below the 200-day average at $1.81. Buying ahead of that crossover means buying on an expectation rather than on a completed signal, and crossovers that look imminent fail often enough to matter.

Third, the market backdrop is warm. A Fear and Greed reading of 81 means the broader market is priced for optimism, and a token ranked 35th tends to fall harder than the majors when that optimism drains. Buying a mid-cap into extreme greed carries a timing risk that has nothing to do with NEAR's own merits.

How to buy NEAR at current prices

NEAR is listed on most large regulated venues, so availability is rarely the constraint. Cost usually is. Spot fees at established exchanges typically run between about 0.1 and 0.5 per cent per order, while the spread and any conversion charge on a euro deposit can quietly exceed the headline fee. Our exchange comparison sets the venues side by side, and the overview of regulated exchanges narrows the field to platforms licensed in the EU.

Individual reviews go deeper on details that surface only after you open an account. Our reports on Kraken, Bitpanda and Bitvavo cover fee schedules, deposit routes and withdrawal handling. Check the current terms with the provider before you buy, since fees and conditions change.

Custody is a second decision, separate from the purchase. Leaving NEAR on an exchange is convenient and exposes you to that platform's solvency and security; moving it to your own wallet hands you responsibility for the recovery phrase instead. Our hardware wallet comparison covers the trade-off, and for a longer holding period the question deserves an answer before the purchase.

Is NEAR a good buy at current prices, then?

The short-term and the long-term readings point in different directions, and collapsing them into one verdict would hide the useful part.

Over a horizon of weeks, the setup is finely balanced. NEAR is above both averages, the RSI at 62.4 leaves room before overbought territory, and liquidity is ample. Against that, the price sits barely above the support cluster at $1.79 to $1.81, the market is in extreme greed at 81, and the 24-hour loss of 5.35 per cent shows how quickly gains reverse. A short-term entry is a bet on momentum continuing, and the level at which that bet fails is the average cluster a few cents below.

Over a horizon of years, the question stops being about the chart. It becomes whether the network's throughput and account design attract enough usage for fee burn to offset an issuance schedule with no fixed cap. On-chain activity and fee revenue answer that over time; a price of $1.89 does not.

The case set out here would be refuted by a weekly close back below $1.79, which would put the token under both averages again and restore the regime that held for the first half of the year. It would be strengthened by the 50-day average crossing above the 200-day average on rising volume, followed by a move through the $2.20 to $2.40 band that has capped every rally this year. Both observations are checkable in public data. None of this is investment advice, and the twelve-month range from $0.96 to $3.18 is a reminder of how wide the outcomes have been.

Buying NEAR: what to take away

1. NEAR at $1.89 has reclaimed its 200-day average at $1.81 and its 50-day average at $1.79, but sits only a few cents above both. The NEAR price prediction puts that position in a longer context.
2. The twelve-month picture is still negative at minus 21.30 per cent, with the high of $3.18 some 40.7 per cent away and the low of $0.96 well below. Entry costs and venue matter at these levels, which our exchange comparison lays out.
3. An RSI of 62.4 and a market at extreme greed argue for staging an entry rather than committing at once, and for settling custody first via our hardware wallet comparison.

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

(As of 26 August 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices, fees and conditions change; check them with the provider yourself before every purchase. Crypto assets are subject to high price volatility, and a total loss is possible.)

Bittensor (TAO) changes hands at 228.10 US dollars, which leaves the token 54.2 percent below its twelve-month high of 497.94 US dollars from 2 November 2025. Measured from the other end of the range the picture reads differently: the price stands 56.6 percent above the twelve-month low of 145.64 US dollars, dated 12 February 2026. Between those two poles sits the question: is Bittensor a good buy at current prices, after a recovery that has already run for six months?

cryptoticker.io collected the price data for this analysis on 25 August 2026, with market data from CoinMarketCap. The moving averages, the relative strength index and the distances to the twelve-month extremes were calculated in-house from 365 daily closing prices covering 25 August 2025 to 24 August 2026, plus the current quote, using standard formulas (exponential moving averages, RSI according to Wilder).

Bittensor price analysis: where the TAO price stands today

At 228.10 US dollars, Bittensor carries a market capitalisation of 2.57 billion US dollars and ranks 34th among all crypto assets. Circulating supply stands at 11.27 million TAO against a hard maximum of 21 million, so a little over half of all tokens that will ever exist are in the market.

Three marks frame the current zone. The 200-day average sits at 239.76 US dollars and runs 4.9 percent above the spot price, which turns it into the nearest overhead barrier. The 50-day average at 207.63 US dollars lies 9.9 percent below the price and has served as the floor of the summer advance. Below that, the twelve-month low of 145.64 US dollars is the level that would have to give way before the recovery could be called a failure.

The last 24 hours cost the token 5.8 percent, a normal daily swing at this size. Over seven days TAO is up 19.7 percent and over 30 days 15.8 percent, which shows that the price already carries a good deal of recent enthusiasm. Where the price bands could run from here is laid out in the Bittensor price prediction.

Is the Bittensor downtrend broken or only interrupted?

Over twelve months Bittensor is down 36.9 percent, and over 90 days it is still down 16.3 percent. Those two numbers describe the trend that has been in force since November 2025. The seven-day and 30-day gains describe something newer and much shorter.

The technical test for a broken downtrend is straightforward: a market that has genuinely turned trades above its long-term average and holds there. Bittensor does not do that yet. At 228.10 US dollars the price sits below the 200-day average of 239.76 US dollars and has been below that line for most of the year. What has changed is the medium-term picture, where the 50-day line at 207.63 US dollars now runs beneath the price and has been rising since the February low.

The honest reading sits in between. The move off 145.64 US dollars is strong enough to be more than noise and not yet strong enough to be a trend reversal. A weekly close above 239.76 US dollars would be the first evidence that the twelve-month downtrend has ended. Until then the advance remains a counter-trend rally inside a larger decline, and it should be sized accordingly.

What RSI and moving averages mean for a TAO entry

The relative strength index over 14 days stands at 62.7, in the upper half of the scale without reaching the 70 mark conventionally read as overbought. For a buyer this is the least comfortable region of the indicator: momentum is clearly positive, so the cheap prices are gone, and there is no exhaustion signal that would argue for waiting either.

The relationship between the two averages carries more information than the RSI right now. The 50-day average at 207.63 US dollars remains 13.4 percent below the 200-day average at 239.76 US dollars. The bearish crossover from the winter has not been undone, and reversing it would take weeks of price stability above the current zone. Anyone buying Bittensor today is buying a chart whose long-term structure still points down and whose short-term structure points up.

The practical consequence is one of method. Staggered buying across several weeks captures the 50-day zone around 207.63 US dollars if the price returns to it, and it avoids committing a full position 4.9 percent below a barrier that has held all year.

What trading volume reveals about demand for Bittensor

Bittensor turned over 229.4 million US dollars in the past 24 hours, roughly 8.9 percent of its market capitalisation. That is a healthy ratio at this rank and means an ordinary position can be entered and exited without moving the price.

The trend in volume is the more useful signal. The seven-day average of 236.0 million US dollars stands well above the 30-day average of 139.2 million and above the twelve-month median of 163.8 million. Rising prices on rising volume indicate a rally with real buyers behind it rather than a thin drift upwards on an empty order book.

Elevated volume works in both directions. The same liquidity that carried the price 19.7 percent higher in a week is available to sellers, and the wider mood is stretched: the Fear and Greed Index stood at 80 points, in extreme greed territory, when this analysis was written. Such readings describe the present rather than forecasting the future, and they tend to accompany the later stages of a move.

Which structural factors speak for Bittensor

The supply mechanics are the clearest structural argument. TAO is capped at 21 million tokens and issued on a halving schedule, the design logic that the Bitcoin white paper set out for a predictable, declining rate of new issuance. With 11.27 million tokens in circulation, the share still to be released shrinks with every halving period, and steady demand meeting a slowing issuance rate is arithmetically favourable to holders.

The second factor is what the network is for. Bittensor organises subnets in which participants supply machine-learning work and are compensated in TAO according to how the network rates their contribution. The token therefore has a use inside the system beyond being traded. How much real demand that generates is an open question and should be treated as one.

The third factor is regulatory clarity in Europe. Under the EU crypto-asset regime supervised by ESMA, exchanges serving European customers need authorisation, and the disclosure and custody rules that come with it apply to TAO as to other crypto assets. That framework does nothing for the price, and it removes one category of risk that used to sit between European buyers and smaller tokens.

What speaks for buying Bittensor at current prices

Three arguments carry weight at 228.10 US dollars.

The price is still 54.2 percent below its high. An entry at this level is not an entry at a peak. If the 497.94 US dollar area is ever revisited, the distance from here is substantial, and the risk of buying into the last leg of a completed advance is lower than it was in November 2025.

The medium-term trend has turned. The 50-day average at 207.63 US dollars is rising and sits below the price, the twelve-month low of 145.64 US dollars is 56.6 percent away, and volume has expanded alongside the move. Those three conditions together are what a recovery looks like in its early phase.

The supply side is predictable. A hard cap of 21 million tokens with a halving schedule removes the dilution risk that affects assets with open-ended issuance. The AI narrative that drives interest in the sector can be volatile, and the issuance schedule underneath it does not change with sentiment.

What speaks against buying Bittensor at current prices

Three arguments cut the other way, and none is weaker than those above.

The long-term trend is intact and it points down. TAO is 36.9 percent lower than a year ago and 16.3 percent lower than three months ago. The price remains below the 200-day average of 239.76 US dollars, and the 50-day average is still 13.4 percent beneath that line. Buying here means buying against the dominant trend and expecting it to change.

The move is already well advanced. A 19.7 percent gain in seven days and 15.8 percent in 30 days means the recovery has been priced in to a considerable degree. With the RSI at 62.7 and the market mood at 80 points on the Fear and Greed scale, the probability of buying shortly before a consolidation is higher than it was at 180 or 190 US dollars.

The valuation rests on a narrative that can reprice quickly. Interest in AI-linked tokens has driven the sector this summer, and such narratives have historically compressed as fast as they expanded. If capital rotates away, a market capitalisation of 2.57 billion US dollars would be tested against network revenue rather than expectations.

How to buy Bittensor (TAO) at current prices

TAO is listed on most large exchanges, though not on every European broker, so the venue question is worth settling first. Regulated European platforms such as Bitpanda or Kraken cover the usual payment routes; fee structures differ enough to matter for a staggered purchase, and the exchange comparison sets them side by side. Buyers who want authorisation status as a filter can start from the overview of regulated exchanges.

Costs come in three parts: the trading fee, typically between 0.1 and 1.5 percent depending on venue and order type, the spread between bid and ask, which is modest for a token with 229.4 million US dollars in daily turnover, and the withdrawal fee if the tokens leave the exchange. Limit orders instead of market orders remove much of the second cost.

Custody is the decision that outlasts the trade. Tokens meant to be held for months belong in a wallet whose keys you control, and the devices for that are compared in the hardware wallet comparison. TAO uses its own network addresses, so confirm that a device supports the chain before buying one.

So is Bittensor a good buy at current prices?

For a horizon of a few weeks, the data argue for caution rather than urgency. The price stands 4.9 percent below the 200-day average of 239.76 US dollars, the RSI at 62.7 leaves limited room before the overbought zone, and the seven-day gain of 19.7 percent has already collected much of what a quick move had to offer. A pullback towards the 50-day average at 207.63 US dollars would be an ordinary event.

For a horizon of a year or more, the case looks different. An entry 54.2 percent below the twelve-month high, into an asset with a capped supply of 21 million tokens and a functioning use inside its own network, has a plausible risk profile provided the position is sized for a further decline to the 145.64 US dollar area. That is roughly 36 percent below today's price and it is the level the recovery started from.

Two conditions would falsify the constructive reading. A weekly close below 207.63 US dollars would put the 50-day support in question and turn the summer advance into a failed rally. A drop under 145.64 US dollars would mark a new twelve-month low and end the recovery case entirely. Conversely, a weekly close above 239.76 US dollars would be the first technical evidence that the twelve-month downtrend has ended, and it is the single number worth watching.

Buying Bittensor: what to take away

1. The 200-day average at 239.76 US dollars decides the trend question. Above it the downtrend is over, below it the move from 145.64 US dollars remains a counter-trend rally. The possible price bands from here are set out in the Bittensor price prediction.
2. Momentum argues for staggering rather than a single purchase. An RSI of 62.7 and a 19.7 percent weekly gain are poor conditions for committing a full position at once, and fee differences compound across several tranches. The exchange comparison shows where staggered buying costs least.
3. Settle custody before the purchase, not after it. Anything intended to be held beyond a few weeks does not belong on an exchange account permanently. Suitable devices are listed in the hardware wallet comparison.

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

(As of 25 August 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices, fees and conditions change; check them with the provider before every purchase. Crypto assets are subject to large price swings, and a total loss is possible.)

AAVE trades at $128.38 on August 26, 2026. That is 61.8 percent below the twelve-month high of $336.27 set on August 27, 2025, and at the same time 110.7 percent above the twelve-month low of $60.93 from June 7, 2026. Both figures describe the same coin within a single year. The question that follows is this: is AAVE a good buy at current prices?

cryptoticker.io collected the price data for this article itself on August 26, 2026. The source is market data from CoinMarketCap. Daily closing prices for the past 365 days were evaluated; the moving averages, the RSI(14) and the high and low come from standard formulas applied to exactly that daily series. All figures quoted here refer to that date.

AAVE Price Analysis: Where the Price Stands and Which Levels Matter Now

The current price of $128.38 sits above both important average lines. The 200-day moving average stands at $111.95, the 50-day average at $96.25. AAVE has therefore reclaimed two levels below which the coin spent much of the year. The distance to the 200-day average is about 15 percent, the distance to the 50-day average about 33 percent.

That names the nearest support clearly. If the price falls back, the zone around $111 to $115 is the first stop, because the 200-day average runs there. If it does not hold, the next serious floor lies only around $96, where the 50-day average is catching up. Above the current price the ground is thinner: between here and the area around $170, the market spent little time over the past year, which can accelerate moves in either direction.

For the wider picture, the market capitalisation of roughly $1.98 billion matters, placing AAVE 39th in the overall market. How that starting position translates into medium-term price ranges is set out in the continuously updated AAVE price prediction from cryptoticker.io.

Is the AAVE Downtrend Broken or Merely Interrupted?

Over twelve months AAVE stands at minus 59.7 percent. The coin began the period at $318.27 and trades today at $128.38. That is one half of the calculation. The other: over 90 days it is up 59.6 percent, over 30 days up 27.5 percent, over seven days up 46.5 percent. From the twelve-month low of $60.93 the price has more than doubled.

Technically, there is a good deal to suggest the downtrend has at least been interrupted. A price above the 200-day average of $111.95 counts in the classical reading as a change of trend, and the 50-day average at $96.25 is now rising rather than falling. Both are marks of a bottoming process that lies behind the coin.

What argues against declaring the danger over is the speed. A gain of 46.5 percent in seven days is a surge that can be given back just as quickly. In our view the change of trend is disproved once AAVE falls back below the 200-day average at $111.95 on a daily closing basis and stays there for several days. Until then, the return to the twelve-month high of $336.27 remains a distance of roughly 162 percent.

What RSI and Moving Averages Mean for an AAVE Entry

The RSI(14) stands at 74.5. Readings above 70 count as overbought. That is neither a recommendation to sell nor a signal of an imminent setback, because in strong upward phases the RSI can stay above this mark for weeks. It is an indication that a large part of the short-term move has already happened.

The arrangement of the averages reads more favourably. The price of $128.38 sits above the 200-day average of $111.95, which in turn sits above the 50-day average of $96.25. This ordering typically emerges after extended bottoming phases and counts as constructive.

In practice, the combination of an overbought RSI and an intact structure of averages means that purchases at the current price carry a worse ratio of opportunity to risk than purchases during a pullback. Market sentiment supports caution: the CoinMarketCap Fear and Greed Index stands at 81 points, within the range of extreme greed.

What AAVE Trading Volume Reveals About Demand

Trading volume over the past 24 hours came to roughly $299 million. For comparison: the average over the past 30 days is about $263 million, the average over the past 90 days about $238 million. Current volume sits above both reference points, though not dramatically so.

More revealing is the peak reached during the advance. At the high point of the past trading week, some $641 million changed hands in a single day, more than twice the 30-day average. A rise carried by a jump in turnover of that size has more substance than a move on thin trading.

Volume has since fallen back to less than half that peak. That is normal after a surge, but it means demand is no longer at the level that produced the advance. For the buying decision this reads as follows: the move was real, its continuation is not thereby established.

Which Structural Factors Speak for AAVE

AAVE is the governance token of the lending protocol of the same name, through which users deposit crypto assets and borrow against collateral. The token serves to vote on protocol parameters and is used in the protocol's safety module. Its value therefore depends in part on how far the protocol is used, and not on general market sentiment alone.

The supply mechanics are tightly bounded. Around 15.42 million AAVE are in circulation, with total supply at 16 million according to CoinMarketCap. More than 96 percent of supply is therefore already on the market. Unlike projects with long unlock schedules, there is no large stream of team or investor allocations waiting to dilute existing positions.

The third factor is the technical base. The protocol is anchored on Ethereum and additionally runs on several second-layer networks. How that base develops is described by the official Ethereum roadmap. In regulatory terms the field operates in Europe under the MiCA regulation; supervisory practice is documented by the European Securities and Markets Authority, ESMA. For decentralised lending protocols the European legal position remains open in parts, which we flag as an assumption and not as a settled forecast.

What Speaks for Buying AAVE at Current Prices

First, the distance to the upside. At $128.38 the price sits 61.8 percent below the twelve-month high of $336.27. Should the market return to a phase in which lending protocols are in demand again, the arithmetic road upward is long. That is not a price target but a description of the room available.

Second, the technical starting position. The price stands above the 200-day average of $111.95 and above the 50-day average of $96.25. The coin did not have this arrangement for almost the whole of the past year. It also supplies a clearly defined level at which a failure can be recognised.

Third, the supply side. With around 15.42 million tokens in circulation against a total supply of 16 million, supply is almost fully distributed. Price advances here do not have to run against ongoing unlocks.

What Speaks Against Buying AAVE at Current Prices

First, the timing. An RSI(14) of 74.5 after a weekly gain of 46.5 percent describes a market that has already run. The Fear and Greed Index at 81 points points the same way.

Second, the annual balance. Minus 59.7 percent over twelve months is the result of a long downtrend from $318.27 to $60.93 at its lowest. A price above the averages is a beginning and not yet evidence that this trend has ended.

Third, the business risk of the protocol. Lending protocols carry risks that a pure payment coin does not: liquidation cascades in fast downward phases, dependence on price oracles, and the possibility of errors in the program code. These risks are known and documented, but they cannot be ruled out.

How to Buy AAVE at Current Prices

AAVE is listed on the major European trading venues. Which exchange suits you depends above all on three points: on fees, on regulation, and on whether you want to hold your balances yourself. An overview of costs and terms is given by our comparison of the best crypto exchanges; if European supervision matters to you, the overview of regulated crypto exchanges takes you further. Detailed assessments of individual providers are available for Bitpanda and for Kraken.

On costs it pays to look at the spread and not only at the stated order fee. Particularly with coins outside the top ten ranks, the gap between buying and selling price often matters more than the fee itself. Check both with the provider before you buy, because terms change.

On custody: smaller amounts can stay on the exchange, larger holdings belong in a wallet only you can access. Which devices are suitable is shown by our hardware wallet comparison. Anyone who wants to put AAVE to work in the protocol itself should check the conditions of the safety module beforehand: in an emergency, part of the stake there can be drawn on to cover losses.

So Is AAVE a Good Buy at Current Prices?

In the short term the starting position is unfavourable. After 46.5 percent in seven days and with an RSI of 74.5, you are buying into an overheated move. A decline into the zone around the 200-day average at $111.95 would be normal from a technical standpoint and no break of trend. Anyone thinking in terms of weeks gets the better ratio of opportunity to risk on a pullback.

In the long term the answer depends on whether you credit the lending protocol with a lasting role. The supply side, with 15.42 million of 16 million tokens in circulation, is settled, the distance to the twelve-month high of $336.27 is large, and the price stands above both average lines again. Anyone who reads that positively finds at $128.38 an entry with a defined exit point.

The constructive reading is disproved if AAVE falls back below the 200-day average of $111.95 on a daily closing basis and settles there, or if trading volume sinks lastingly below the 90-day average of roughly $238 million. Either would be a sign that the rise from the twelve-month low of $60.93 was a recovery within a downtrend and not a turn. This is an assessment of the data, and not a recommendation to buy or sell AAVE.

Buying AAVE: What to Take Away

1. The level on which everything turns is the 200-day average at $111.95. Above it the recovery stays intact, below it the downtrend returns. The medium-term price ranges are set out in the AAVE price prediction.
2. The timing of an entry weighs more heavily here than the question of the coin. With an RSI of 74.5 and a weekly gain of 46.5 percent, staggered buying is the calmer option. Which venue carries the lowest costs is shown by the comparison of the best crypto exchanges.
3. Anyone planning to hold for longer settles custody before buying. Suitable devices and how they differ are set out in the hardware wallet comparison.

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

(As of August 26, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy. Crypto assets are subject to sharp price swings and a total loss is possible.)

The operation promoted a purported Israeli think tank that published copied scholarship under academics’ names and circulated pro-Russian analysis across social media.

Gates is calling for AI tokens and robots to be taxed so firms think twice before swapping out workers, plus a bracket of "human reserved" roles that stay off-limits to automation.

The chipmaker doubled quarterly revenue while disclosing $366 billion in future commitments and up to $108.5 billion in guarantee exposure.

Bitcoin's monster rally just hit its first real test. Here's why each catalyst matters and how they could move the price from here.

GalaxyOne clients can borrow cash against Bitcoin, Ethereum, and staked Solana at 8.99% APR without selling a coin.

Core Lightning developers have issued an urgent security warning to Lightning Network node operators.

The explosive growth on the market stabilized and now turned into a battleground between bulls and bears for the future momentum.

The U.S. government has moved a small amount of Bitcoin seized from Alameda Research accounts on Binance.US.

Major banks are reconsidering their long-held opposition to stablecoins as crypto firms and major technology companies expand in the payments market.

Mastercard has joined an upcoming XRP Ledger hackathon in New York as a sponsor.

Quick Overview

• Five defense contractors have been chosen to deploy nuclear microreactors at U.S. military installations, with initial operations slated for September 2028.
• Federal investment totals up to $2.2 billion for a minimum of 20 microreactor units across five strategic locations.
• Selected firms include BWX Technologies, Westinghouse, General Atomics, Radiant Industries, and Antares Nuclear.
• The small modular reactor sector is attracting significant venture funding, exemplified by Valar Atomics’ $1 billion raise at $6 billion valuation.
• Skeptics question commercial viability due to substantial security requirements and regulatory hurdles.

The United States Army has finalized contracts valued at up to $2.2 billion with five private sector companies to construct nuclear microreactors at military facilities nationwide. The initial unit is scheduled to become operational by September 2028.

This initiative, dubbed the Janus Program after the Roman deity symbolizing transitions and beginnings, was established last year. Its primary objective is to equip military installations with autonomous power generation capabilities independent of civilian electrical infrastructure.

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll emphasized the strategic importance of energy autonomy. “We are developing the energy independence required to maintain combat readiness worldwide, eliminating dependence on potentially compromised external power networks,” he stated.

The chosen contractors will deploy reactors at designated installations. Antares Nuclear receives Fort Bragg in North Carolina. BWX Technologies is assigned to Fort Campbell in Kentucky. General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems will develop Fort Hood in Texas. Radiant Industries secured Fort Benning in Georgia, with an agreement potentially worth $750 million for up to 15 units. Westinghouse Government Services will construct at Fort Drum in New York.

Power output from individual reactors ranges from 1 to 20 megawatts, varying by technological design. Military installations will maintain grid connectivity. These reactors will supplement rather than replace existing power infrastructure.

Strategic Military Rationale

Currently, the Army depends on diesel generators for emergency power. During military operations, transporting fuel to isolated positions presents significant logistical challenges. Nuclear microreactors operate for extended periods without refueling, offering a strategic advantage for defense applications.

In contrast to conventional nuclear facilities, microreactors are manufactured in controlled factory environments and shipped to deployment sites. Construction costs are substantially lower than traditional reactors, which often exceed $10 billion per unit and require up to ten years to complete.

Several innovative designs, including those developed by Radiant and Valar Atomics, employ helium gas cooling systems rather than conventional water-based methods. This approach enhances safety margins and minimizes catastrophic failure risks.

Venture Capital Enthusiasm Builds

Private investment is tracking government commitments closely. Radiant has secured over $500 million from prominent backers including Andreessen Horowitz and holds a $1.9 billion valuation. Valar Atomics completed a $1 billion funding round this month at a $6 billion valuation. Antares raised $370 million last month.

Several microreactor developers have already entered public markets. Nano Nuclear commands approximately $1 billion market capitalization. Terra Innovatum trades at $625 million. Deep Fission approaches $400 million.

Investment firms anticipate that successful military deployment will validate the technology and create commercial opportunities, particularly among AI data center operators requiring substantial power capacity on accelerated timelines.

Skepticism remains widespread. Detractors argue that security expenses alone render remote commercial deployment financially impractical. Nuclear facilities mandate continuous armed protection, which functions efficiently on military property but becomes prohibitively expensive at civilian locations. Regulatory compliance costs present additional obstacles.

The Army projects that private sector capital will reach billions of dollars, complementing federal appropriations.

The post Pentagon Commits $2.2B to Nuclear Microreactor Development Across Five Military Installations appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Highlights

• Shares of Halfords surged approximately 12% to reach 268.85p, marking the highest valuation since March 2022
• FY27 underlying profit guidance increased to £55m-£65m range, exceeding analyst expectations of £52.6m
• Robust performance driven by strategic execution and exceptional summer temperatures boosting cycling and outdoor segments
• Favorable weather conditions anticipated to contribute mid-single-digit millions to bottom line
• Company elevated to FTSE 250 index on August 4 after demonstrating improved operational results

Shares of British motoring and cycling specialist Halfords (HFD) experienced a remarkable rally on Thursday, advancing nearly 12% following the announcement of an upwardly revised annual profit outlook that propelled the stock to levels not seen since late March 2022.

Halfords Group plc, HFD.L

The retailer’s shares advanced 11.56% to close at 268.85 pence, significantly outperforming the FTSE 250 index, which remained largely unchanged throughout the trading session.

Management announced revised expectations for FY27 underlying profit before tax in the range of £55 million to £65 million. This guidance substantially exceeds the prevailing analyst consensus of £52.6 million, which previously ranged from £48.9 million to £55.1 million.

The enhanced outlook follows better-than-anticipated performance during the initial months of the current financial year.

Management attributed the positive momentum to two primary factors: successful implementation of strategic priorities and unseasonably warm summer conditions that stimulated consumer demand for cycling equipment and outdoor merchandise.

According to company guidance, the favorable weather patterns alone are projected to contribute mid-single-digit millions of pounds to profitability.

Earnings Profile and Investment Plans

Management indicated that FY27 profit generation will be disproportionately concentrated in the first six months of the fiscal year.

This earnings profile is partially attributed to planned increases in technology infrastructure and marketing expenditure during the latter half. Leadership emphasized that this elevated investment represents a calculated long-term growth strategy rather than any indication of deteriorating business fundamentals.

Consequently, market participants are weighing the improved profit trajectory against anticipated increases in capital allocation throughout the remainder of the year.

The revised guidance builds upon solid FY26 performance. Comparable sales increased 4.8%, underlying profit before tax reached £45.4 million, and gross profit margin improved by 210 basis points.

The company generated £25.3 million in free cash flow and concluded the fiscal year with £19.1 million in reported net cash position.

Strategic Transformation Initiative

Halfords has been executing a comprehensive transformation under its “Fit for the Future” strategic framework, designed to establish a more durable, service-oriented business model. The upgraded financial guidance indicates this initiative is beginning to deliver tangible results.

Management reported that recent operational performance has consistently exceeded internal projections as strategic priorities gain momentum.

The retailer secured inclusion in the FTSE 250 index on August 4, a recognition of enhanced financial performance and successful strategy implementation. This promotion increases the stock’s exposure to institutional investment capital.

Company officials emphasized that the current profit revision reflects both cyclical seasonal dynamics and sustained advantages from the strategic repositioning effort.

The post Halfords (HFD) Stock Soars to Four-Year Peak on Upgraded Earnings Outlook appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Highlights

• The GPU giant delivered quarterly revenues exceeding double last year’s figures, projecting fiscal 2028 growth at approximately 70% versus analysts’ 44% consensus
• European semiconductor manufacturers including ASML, STMicroelectronics, Infineon, and BE Semiconductors climbed 2-4% following strong chip earnings
• The benchmark Stoxx Europe 600 index declined 0.1%, while Britain’s FTSE 100 fell 0.4% and the French CAC 40 dropped 0.2%
• Consumer confidence in Germany showed improvement approaching September, reaching -26.6 points
• Brent crude oil declined 0.5% to reach $87.40 per barrel, extending its losing streak to four sessions as diplomatic efforts in the Middle East advanced

Thursday’s trading session saw European semiconductor equities gain momentum following impressive results from Nvidia, while the broader continental markets maintained a cautious stance as investors balanced artificial intelligence enthusiasm with macroeconomic concerns.

The California-based technology giant posted quarterly revenues that surpassed last year’s figures by more than 100%. Management provided current-quarter guidance exceeding Street expectations and projected approximately 70% revenue expansion for fiscal 2028. The analyst community had anticipated just 44% growth.

Nvidia equity climbed as high as 5.6% during extended trading hours. This marked the company’s first upbeat market response following earnings in multiple quarters.

NVIDIA Corporation, NVDA

Continental Semiconductor Sector Rides Momentum

The robust performance rippled across European chip-related companies. ASML advanced approximately 2.5%. STMicroelectronics, Infineon Technologies, and BE Semiconductors each posted increases ranging from 2% to 4%.

These enterprises provide manufacturing equipment and critical components for chip production. With major technology firms ramping up capital expenditure on artificial intelligence systems, their product demand trajectory appears favorable.

While semiconductor stocks rallied, broader market sentiment remained subdued. The Stoxx Europe 600 retreated 0.1%. Germany’s DAX index held steady. France’s CAC 40 declined 0.2% while London’s FTSE 100 dropped 0.4%.

Higher-than-anticipated US inflation readings maintained market uncertainty. The figures strengthened speculation that the Federal Reserve might implement rate increases before year-end.

Germany’s Consumer Confidence Registers Improvement

Economic indicators showed German consumer sentiment advancing toward September. The NIM and GfK composite index climbed to -26.6 points. Higher income projections and improved economic outlook balanced persistent spending hesitation.

The reading indicates Germany’s household consumption may gradually strengthen as wage increases compensate for previous inflationary pressures.

Market participants monitored French producer price index and jobless figures, alongside Eurozone lending activity statistics. The European Central Bank’s Monetary Policy Meeting Accounts awaited scrutiny for interest rate trajectory insights.

In company developments, French beverage conglomerate Pernod Ricard announced sales expansion expectations at the bottom of its projected band for upcoming years. Management attributed this to persistent softness in the crucial American market.

Oil prices extended their retreat. Brent crude decreased 0.5% to $87.40 per barrel, recording a fourth consecutive session decline. Intelligence that Qatar’s prime minister was heading to Tehran for renewed US-Iran negotiations helped diminish concerns about supply interruptions via the Strait of Hormuz.

Euro Stoxx 50 futures advanced 0.3% in preliminary trading, suggesting a marginally optimistic opening for European exchanges.

The post Nvidia (NVDA) Earnings Spark Rally in European Semiconductor Sector appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• Bill Gates released an extensive 6,000-word analysis warning of severe economic upheaval from AI advancement
• The Microsoft co-founder predicts job losses across white-collar and blue-collar sectors will outpace employment creation
• Gates advocates for establishing fresh national and global oversight organizations to handle AI-related workforce changes
• A proposed taxation system on AI computational tokens and robotic systems aims to decelerate human job replacement
• Despite concerns, Gates acknowledges AI’s capacity to address critical challenges including healthcare and environmental issues

Bill Gates has issued a stark assessment: society lacks adequate preparation for the workforce upheaval artificial intelligence will trigger. In an extensive piece released Wednesday on his blog, the technology pioneer cautioned that humanity’s shift toward an AI-dominated economy represents an unprecedented period of transformation.

The Microsoft co-founder characterized AI’s development pace as “mind-blowing.” Unlike historical technological revolutions that allowed gradual workforce adjustment, Gates contends AI’s velocity eliminates that luxury.

“AI will assume responsibilities in legal services, client relations, healthcare, programming, and production facilities,” Gates explained. “These sectors will experience disruption quickly, within ten years instead of multiple generations.”

Professional positions in sales departments, support services, coding roles and legal assistance could face early impact. Gates noted that businesses already leverage AI for responsibilities including information processing, diminishing human workforce requirements.

Manual labor positions aren’t immune either. Gates forecasts that advanced robotic systems will challenge human workers in physical industries like building trades and service sectors before 2030.

Younger generations entering employment markets will encounter shrinking opportunities, according to Gates. He outlined a concerning “vicious cycle” scenario where organizations deploy AI and automation for cost reduction, compelling industry rivals to follow suit.

Gates’ Taxation Proposal

Among Gates’ recommendations is implementing levies on AI processing units and automated machinery to moderate workforce displacement speed. He highlighted how existing tax structures favor automation: employing humans triggers payroll obligations, while purchasing a [[LINK_START_1]]robot[[LINK_END_1]] qualifies as an immediate business deduction.

“Our current tax framework incentivizes substituting people with technology,” he stated.

Gates additionally proposed designating specific occupations, such as elderly care provision, exclusively for human workers. He drew parallels to environmental conservation efforts, where communities deliberately preserve certain elements from replacement.

Advocating for International Coordination

According to Gates, nations acting independently cannot effectively address AI-related challenges. He urged establishment of dedicated national coordination agencies alongside a complementary international governing body.

These frameworks could mirror existing protocols such as nuclear armament verification systems, global aviation standards, and atmospheric protection treaties.

Gates disclosed his ongoing financial connections to the technology sector. Simultaneously, he emphasized AI’s promising applications for advancing sustainable energy solutions, agricultural productivity, and eliminating diseases.

“I’m convinced we require preparation time,” Gates emphasized. “Those requiring the most time possess the least access to it.”

This analysis represents a notable tonal departure from Gates’ earlier characterization of AI as “the most significant technological development of my entire life.”

The post Bill Gates Sounds Alarm on AI-Driven Job Losses Without Safety Net appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• HPQ shares plunged 9.3% after hours to $27.68, even after surpassing earnings and revenue projections.
• The company delivered EPS of $0.83 versus analyst expectations of $0.66, while revenue reached $15.7B against the $14.34B forecast.
• Unit volumes in personal systems contracted 16%, with consumer segment volumes declining 19%.
• Ongoing memory chip supply constraints, referred to as “RAMageddon,” are hampering PC and laptop demand.
• The company increased its fiscal year EPS guidance to a range of $3.19-$3.29, up from the prior $2.90-$3.10 projection.

Shares of HP Inc (HPQ) tumbled 9.3% during after-hours trading Tuesday, sliding to $27.68, following the release of the company’s third fiscal quarter financial results covering the period through July.

HP Inc., HPQ

The decline caught many observers off guard, particularly since HP exceeded expectations on both the top and bottom lines. Earnings per share reached $0.83, topping Wall Street’s $0.66 projection by $0.17. Meanwhile, quarterly revenue totaled $15.7 billion, significantly surpassing the $14.34 billion consensus forecast.

Shares had finished regular trading at $30.52 before the extended-hours decline commenced.

The company’s personal systems segment, which primarily encompasses laptop products, powered the revenue outperformance. This division generated $11.8 billion compared to analyst projections of $10.6 billion.

The printing division contributed $3.9 billion in revenue, aligning closely with expectations though modestly trailing the $4.0 billion recorded during the comparable quarter last year.

Tariff-related refunds also provided an earnings lift. HP disclosed that these refunds contributed a favorable 11-cent per-share impact. However, even accounting for this benefit, the company’s core performance exceeded analyst forecasts.

Volume Metrics Paint a Darker Picture

While revenue figures impressed, unit volume metrics revealed underlying weakness. Personal systems unit volumes contracted 16% year-over-year during the quarter. Consumer segment volumes experienced an even steeper decline of 19%.

This represents a significant acceleration in the downturn compared to the previous quarter, when personal systems volumes fell 7% and consumer volumes decreased 8%.

Print hardware volumes declined 7%, showing marginal improvement versus the prior quarter’s 8% contraction.

The primary driver behind these challenges is the phenomenon market observers have dubbed “RAMageddon.” Artificial intelligence data centers are absorbing memory chip inventory at unprecedented rates, constraining availability for PC manufacturers like HP. Since memory represents a substantial cost component in laptop and desktop production, reduced supply has tightened availability and elevated prices.

Given that HP’s PC and laptop operations account for approximately 70% of consolidated revenue, the memory supply squeeze delivers a particularly painful blow to the business.

Analyst Community Grows More Reserved

Wall Street sentiment toward HPQ has cooled considerably. Just 2 of the 19 analysts monitored by FactSet currently maintain Buy ratings on the stock. This represents a decline from 7 of 19 analysts holding Buy ratings two years earlier.

CFRA analyst Brooks Idlet had expressed caution before the earnings release, stating the firm anticipated “a worsening decline in FY27 as memory costs increase.” He observed that continued PC price increases could render HP’s offerings “harder to justify” for potential customers.

The company has implemented price increases to compensate for elevated memory expenses, while enterprise demand for Windows 11 and AI-enabled systems has offered some support. However, this favorable trend appears to be losing momentum.

On a brighter note, HP elevated its full-year earnings guidance. The company now projects fiscal 2026 EPS between $3.19 and $3.29, representing an increase from the previous $2.90 to $3.10 range. The analyst consensus had been positioned at $3.04.

Year-to-date, HP’s stock has advanced approximately 10%, though it remains roughly 20% beneath its 2024 high near $38 per share.

Over the past 90 days, HP has received 8 upward EPS revisions and 2 downward adjustments, while maintaining a “good performance” Financial Health rating according to InvestingPro.

The post HP Inc (HPQ) Stock Plunges 9% Despite Strong Q3 Earnings – What Went Wrong? appeared first on Blockonomi.

Bitcoin got its first known quantum-resistant transaction on mainnet today, mined through MARA’s private Slipstream mempool using a method called Quantum Safe Bitcoin, built by StarkWare’s Avihu Levy.

It closes a real gap in how Bitcoin protects funds in transit, without asking the network to change a single consensus rule, though even the people behind it call it a stopgap rather than a fix.

How Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Closes the Mempool Gap

Bitcoin held behind a hashed address, the P2PKH format most wallets use, is already considered safe from quantum attacks. The problem shows up the moment someone spends it.

Sending Bitcoin means revealing the wallet’s public key, and that key sits exposed in the mempool for roughly the ten minutes it takes to confirm, exactly the window a quantum computer could exploit.

Levy built Quantum Safe Bitcoin to close that window without touching consensus rules. The scheme modifies Binohash, a technique from BitVM creator Robin Linus, wrapping each transaction in a proof-of-work puzzle whose security rests on hash functions believed to resist quantum attacks rather than on the signature itself.

Levy first published the approach in an April paper, putting its security at around 118 bits under Shor’s algorithm, roughly half that under Grover’s, with an estimated extra cost of a few hundred dollars in GPU time.

It fits inside Bitcoin’s existing script limit, so no soft fork is needed, though it does require a non-standard transaction format that only private mempools like Slipstream will accept. MARA Foundation head Isabel Foxen Duke framed the mining of the transaction as a stopgap rather than an endorsement of private mempools long-term.

“We don’t believe private mempools are an appropriate long-term solution for Bitcoin quantum resistance,” she said, adding that MARA is willing to keep supporting Slipstream for break-glass cases while the network works toward a consensus-level change.

Levy credited StarkWare’s Tom Giladi with finishing the execution, building on earlier work from Linus and Ethan Heilman, but was careful to call the result “a research quirk and not the straightforward way for Bitcoin to become” quantum-ready.

Why the Rest of the Industry Is Racing on This

The urgency traces back to a Google paper from earlier this year, which found that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could break the private keys behind Ethereum’s 1,000 richest wallets in under nine days, as CryptoPotato reported in March.

Researchers at Project Eleven flagged the same mempool-stage vulnerability Quantum Safe Bitcoin is targeting, warning that funds could be intercepted from a transaction before it even clears. But Bitcoin developers have their own fix in the works too, including a proposal called BIP-361 that would freeze old, quantum-vulnerable addresses in stages, starting with new deposits and eventually blocking withdrawals.

Blockstream has taken a different route, running post-quantum signatures on its Liquid sidechain since April so users can opt into protection without waiting on Bitcoin’s own upgrade path.

The post First Quantum-Resistant Bitcoin Transaction Confirmed on Mainnet Without Protocol Change appeared first on CryptoPotato.

A recent update from the XRP Ledger Foundation welcomed the TradFi giant, which has a long history with Ripple, to a hackathon taking place just ahead of the major conference, Ripple Swell.

Meanwhile, 21Shares’s XRP ETF has changed how it prices the underlying token amid renewed inflows into all such funds.

Mastercard Joins

The XRP Ledger Foundation said it was “thrilled” to welcome the global technology behemoth in the payments industry as a sponsor of the XRP Ledger Hackathon, scheduled for late October. It’s a 36-hour pre-event to the Ripple Swell 2026 conference, which runs from October 27 to October 29, while the hackathon is open on October 24-25.

“With a decade of proven robustness and architecture, the XRP network is ideally suited for payment use cases. Register, build, and connect with industry leaders like Mastercard. It’s your time to shine,” said the team.

This announcement comes just a few months after Mastercard expanded its relationship with the broader Ripple ecosystem, as well as other crypto giants. As reported in March, the TradFi firm enlisted several industry companies, such as Binance, Gemini, PayPal, Paxos, Circle, and Ripple, in a new partnership program aiming at connecting blockchain with its own vast global payments infrastructure.

In June, Mastercard took it a step further, expanding the blockchain integration with new support assets like Ripple’s own stablecoin, RLUSD, and Circle’s USDC.

ETF Changes to TOXR

An SEC filing showed that 21Shares has switched the pricing of the underlying assets for its XRP ETF (TOXR), moving from the CME Group to the new FTSE XRP Index, effective today.

The other notable change to their financial vehicle means the sponsor will be paid once every three months instead of every week. More importantly, the sponsor will be paid in XRP.

21Shares XRP ETF ($TOXR) just switched how it prices XRP moving from CME to the new FTSE XRP Index starting Aug 27.

They also changed how the sponsor gets paid now once every 3 months instead of every week, and paid in $XRP. https://t.co/I1dHswlJ9t pic.twitter.com/U6oHwAVlzi

— 𝗕𝗮𝗻𝗸XRP (@BankXRP) August 26, 2026

Meanwhile, the spot XRP ETFs have extended their impressive streak of net inflows, attracting $13.82 million on Monday, $24 million on Tuesday, and just over $28 million on Wednesday.

TOXR, however, remains the only XRP ETF in the red, with cumulative net flows of -$20.06 million. In contrast, Bitwise’s XRP ETF remains the largest of the bunch, currently holding $575 million in cumulative net inflows.

The post 2 Major Ripple (XRP) Updates: Mastercard Gets Involved, ETF Changes Announced appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Revolut began rolling out EURR, its first euro-denominated stablecoin, opening the token to what the company called a “select group of customers” in Denmark, Poland, and Portugal ahead of a wider European Economic Area (EEA) launch expected later this year.

The token is issued by Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure firm Stripe acquired for $1.1 billion in 2025, and sits inside Revolut’s retail app as what Revolut describes as a “euro-denominated, on-chain rail” between euros and crypto.

Support For More Networks

Bridge Building S.A., the issuer’s Luxembourg entity, holds the reserves and redeems EURR at €1.00 per token under the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework, a register that grew to 14 stablecoin issuers and 39 licensed service providers in its early months.

Bridge announced its own electronic money institution license and MiCA authorization covering all 27 EU member states on July 2.

“EURR connects 80 million Revolut customers directly to on-chain finance,” said Emil Urmanshin, Head of Crypto and New Bets at Revolut, adding that the combination of scale and licensed banking infrastructure is “unlocking real-world stablecoin utility that no traditional bank or crypto native can match.”

The public offer opened on August 20 on Ethereum and Polygon, according to the company’s blog post, which names Revolut Digital Assets Europe Ltd as sole distributor and lists Revolut X, the firm’s standalone exchange, as a second distribution channel. Support for Solana, Arbitrum, Optimism, Avalanche, Injective, TON, and Sui is planned.

Revolut’s token also shares its ticker with an existing MiCA-authorized euro stablecoin from StablR, which CoinGecko lists under the same EURR symbol.

Revolut Queues More Currency Tokens

Revolut said additional currency-denominated stablecoins are in development through separate regulatory pathways, and the broader EEA rollout of EURR remains subject to regulatory, operational, and product readiness.

“Revolut initially eliminated hidden fees and friction in currency exchange. EURR completely removes the pain of moving on and off-chain, becoming a new seamless and instantaneous bridge between fiat and crypto,” noted Iman Olya, product owner of stablecoin at Revolut.

Revolut began rolling out its UK bank after the Prudential Regulation Authority removed the limits on its banking license in March, also starting with a small group of customers. Circle’s EURC, the largest regulated euro stablecoin by market capitalization, held about €394 million in circulation today, per CoinGecko.

The post Revolut Launches First Euro Stablecoin EURR: Here’s Where It’s Available appeared first on CryptoPotato.

XRP briefly surged past $1.7 before stabilizing near $1.4. While the token appears to have hit a wall after a massive rally, whale withdrawals from Binance have surged to their highest level in six months.

According to the latest findings by CryptoQuant analyst Darkfost, more than 231 million XRP have moved off the exchange by large holders.

Whale Accumulation

The withdrawals totaled more than $335 million in a single day, far above the 90-day average of roughly $40 million. Darkfost described the move as both sudden and powerful compared with the recent trend, while pointing to a significant change in behavior among large XRP holders.

The surge in whale outflows comes as the crypto asset’s market capitalization increased by $25 billion over the past week, during which the token gained more than 40%.

According to the analyst, this trend has potentially helped fuel XRP’s strong market performance and renewed attention. If this accumulation trend continues, Darkfost said the asset could potentially test the $2 level within a relatively short period.

This week, Ali Martinez flagged a major jump in XRP network activity, after active addresses rose to 356,070 from 47,180. That represents a surge of well over 654%, a level of activity that typically suggests increased participation and can coincide with sharper price swings.

Trouble Ahead?

But the derivatives market showed short-term pressure for XRP after the token cleared liquidity around resistance and moved back toward a major support zone. Long liquidations were recorded at approximately $4.66 million, a 31.82% daily increase, while short liquidations stood near $1.13 million after rising 61.61%.

Despite the stronger percentage increase in short liquidations, the total volume of long liquidations is nearly four times larger. This indicates that the pullback following the recent rally forced a significant number of leveraged long positions out of the market, meaning that the sell-off was driven by both spot selling and the liquidation of leveraged positions.

While this confirms the current bearish pressure, the clearing of leveraged positions could eventually provide room for a healthier rebound, CryptoQuant explained.

Meanwhile, XRP’s Money Flow Index (MFI) has fallen to 35.89 from around 60, which points to a significant weakening in the buying pressure that supported the earlier price move. However, the MFI remains above 20, which means that the crypto asset has not yet entered technically oversold territory and could still face further downside.

The post Ripple (XRP) Whales Are Pulling Millions Off Binance: The $2 Level Is Back in Focus appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The world’s leading cryptocurrency exchange warned its users that certain operations will be temporarily halted later this week.

Prior to that, it revealed the delisting of three altcoins, which will take effect at the start of September.

What Binance Users Need to Know

The company announced that it will briefly suspend deposits and withdrawals on the Ethereum network on August 27 to support wallet maintenance. The process is expected to take about one hour, after which operations will resume.

As usual, Binance assured that it will handle all technical requirements involved for all affected users and said that trading of tokens on the aforementioned network will not be impacted.

Upgrades of this type are routine and typically carry no significant complications for clients. The company supported wallet maintenance on the Ethereum blockchain in May this year, and months later it temporarily paused TRX deposits and withdrawals to perform a similar process. There were no reports of issues, and operations were quickly restored.

Besides backing such upgrades, Binance is known for thoroughly reviewing all digital assets listed on its platform and removing those that fail to meet the necessary criteria, including the team’s commitment to the project, network stability against attacks, community engagement, trading volume, liquidity, and other factors.

As a result of its latest analysis, it decided to terminate all services with ICON (ICX), Secret (SCRT), and Storj (STORJ). The delisting is scheduled for September 3, when all spot trading pairs of the aforementioned tokens will be removed.

The announcement came less than a week ago, and since then the involved coins have been charting painful declines. SCRT, for instance, has registered another 25% collapse in the past 24 hours alone.

Similar Effect in the Past

Price slumps following such news shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, Binance remains the biggest crypto exchange, and withdrawing support results in shrinking liquidity, diminished availability, and reputational damage.

A similar thing happened at the start of August when the company said goodbye to Across Protocol (ACX), Hashflow (HFT), PIVX (PIVX), Vulcan Forged PYR (PYR), Vanar (VANRY), and Viction (VIC). Back then, PIVX and PYR took the biggest blow, both nosediving by approximately 20% in a single day.

Double-digit declines were observed with Alchemix (ALCX), Ardor (ARDR), NFPrompt Token (NFP), and Marlin (POND) in June, when Binance delisted them as well.

The post 2 Important Binance Updates Concerning ETH and Other Altcoin Traders appeared first on CryptoPotato.