Amkor's strategic positioning in AI infrastructure and advanced packaging could significantly influence semiconductor industry dynamics.

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The EU's scrutiny of Meta's platform design could set a precedent for global tech regulation, emphasizing user safety over engagement tactics.

The post European Commission in dialogue with Meta over addictive platform design commitments appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Manchester United's Champions League return could boost team morale and global brand visibility, impacting future recruitment and revenue.

The post Noussair Mazraoui excited for Champions League return with Manchester United appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Internal GOP conflicts over economic policy could weaken their electoral prospects, risking control of Congress amid economic uncertainty.

The post Republicans divided over pre-election stimulus push as economy slows appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Hugging Face's expansion into affordable robotics could democratize access to AI-driven hardware, fostering innovation in education and development.

The post Hugging Face debuts $399 Microduck waddling robot 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.

Bitcoin price is trading near $78,900, close enough to $80,000 to revive the old treasury-company pitch on paper: higher Bitcoin should lift the value of corporate holdings, pull the shares back above net asset value, and reopen common-stock issuance as a source of fresh coins.

That sequence did not return. At Strategy, Twenty One Capital, and Metaplanet, three listed companies built around corporate Bitcoin treasuries, common market capitalization remained well below the gross value of reported Bitcoin holdings. Yet the apparent discount was not uniform, and it did not amount to directly redeemable, cut-price Bitcoin. Debt, preferred stock, pledged coins, cash balances, warrants and different share-count conventions all changed what was left for common shareholders.

The result is a funding problem, not just a valuation puzzle. If common stock no longer trades at a reliable premium, issuing it can dilute Bitcoin per share. Debt and preferred stock avoid immediate common-share dilution but move value and risk toward senior claims. Retained operating cash is the only recurring route that adds neither, but Metaplanet's disclosed cash generation was nowhere near the scale of its recent Bitcoin purchases.

Bitcoin treasury premiums: three mNAVs, three different answers

BitcoinTreasuries' Aug. 27 snapshot put Bitcoin at roughly $78,900 and produced the following rounded comparison. The figures are a same-day analytical snapshot, not a perfectly synchronized market close: U.S. overnight quotes and a delayed Tokyo quote were observed at different times, and the dataset displayed different holding dates for the companies.

Those ratios are not interchangeable. Basic mNAV compares basic common market capitalization with gross Bitcoin value. Diluted mNAV expands the share denominator. Enterprise mNAV adds debt and preferred stock and subtracts cash before comparing enterprise value with the Bitcoin stack.

That is why “market cap below Bitcoin value” is an incomplete claim. A share is a residual interest in a company, not a withdrawal ticket for its coins. Common holders sit behind creditors and preferred investors, absorb future dilution, and remain exposed to operating costs, taxes, governance decisions and restrictions on assets. The table's own disagreement is the warning: Twenty One screened at 0.64x on basic mNAV but 1.20x on the dataset's diluted measure.

Strategy's $2 billion sale bought liquidity, not Bitcoin

Strategy offers the clearest test of the old equity flywheel because its enterprise value had recovered to roughly parity with gross Bitcoin value, while both common-equity measures remained near 0.74x.

The company nevertheless sold 18.26 million MSTR shares from Aug. 17 through Aug. 23 for $2.0065 billion of net proceeds. Its Aug. 24 filing reported no Bitcoin purchase for the week. Instead, Strategy allocated $136.4 million to repurchase STRC preferred stock, $300 million to its USD Reserve and the remainder to USD Cash.

By Aug. 23, Strategy reported 840,447 BTC, a $5.10 billion USD Reserve and $1.59 billion of USD Cash. The cash figures included expected proceeds from shares sold but not yet settled.

That choice matters. Common issuance did not mechanically increase Bitcoin per MSTR share; it reinforced liquidity and managed a senior security. Strategy's June-quarter filing showed about $6.75 billion of debt principal, with a carrying value near $6.71 billion. Its June digital-credit framework estimated about $1.76 billion of annual preferred dividends and debt interest combined.

The reserve reduces near-term pressure to fund those obligations from Bitcoin sales, but it also explains why common investors do not own the gross coin stack free of claims. Strategy can still sell shares for corporate purposes when the stock screens below gross Bitcoin value. What it cannot do at that price is assume that every dollar raised and converted into Bitcoin will increase Bitcoin value per old common share.

Common issuance only lifts Bitcoin per share when the coins bought per new share exceed the pre-issue ratio. Fees, cash retained for obligations and differences between basic and diluted share counts all raise that hurdle.

Twenty One's collateral shows why gross holdings overstate flexibility

Twenty One Capital presents a different capital structure. It reported 43,514 BTC at June 30 and 346.8 million Class A shares, alongside 215.7 million Class B shares. Its basic mNAV was deeply below 1x in the Aug. 27 snapshot, while diluted mNAV was above 1x.

The company's second-quarter filing supplies the missing bridge. Twenty One had $486.5 million of convertible-note principal, with a carrying value of about $484.5 million. Approximately 16,116 BTC, or 37% of the reported stack, were pledged to secure the notes and were unavailable for general liquidity while pledged.

The pledge creates no automatic sale signal. It does make gross holdings and unencumbered financial flexibility different quantities. A common investor valuing all 43,514 BTC as freely deployable while ignoring the convertible claim is not buying the same exposure measured by enterprise mNAV.

Twenty One also reported a $1.273 billion net loss for the first half. About $1.249 billion came from a fair-value decline in Bitcoin, so it was not an equivalent cash drain. Even so, the filing illustrates why accounting equity, cash liquidity and Bitcoin per share must be kept separate. A fair-value loss can dominate earnings without consuming cash, while collateral restrictions and note principal can limit choices without changing the reported coin count.

Debt can still fund more Bitcoin without issuing common shares today, but it creates a senior claim, interest or conversion exposure, and sometimes encumbers the asset being accumulated.

Metaplanet built the mNAV gate into its financing

Metaplanet reported 43,000 BTC and 1.281 billion issued common shares at June 30. The Aug. 27 dataset valued the coins at about $3.39 billion and the common equity at $2.2 billion, but the company's warrant structure makes a basic-share comparison especially fragile.

Its effective diluted-share KPI includes outstanding options and funded convertibles, while excluding several stock-acquisition-right series until exercise proceeds are received. An April disclosure listed 15.9 million potential shares in the 25th series, 107.4 million in the 26th and 100 million in the 27th, plus 210 million combined in two suspended series.

Metaplanet said mNAV remained below 1x for most of the first half. It did not conduct a company-initiated common-share third-party allotment in the second quarter, although rights exercises still issued shares. Crucially, the 27th-series rights may be exercised only when mNAV is at least 1.01x. The company has therefore written a version of the funding constraint into the instrument itself, although fees, market slippage and denominator differences mean the gate alone does not guarantee accretion.

Operating revenue does not yet replace the market-access engine. Metaplanet generated ¥349 million of operating cash in the first half against ¥99.782 billion of Bitcoin purchases. Retained cash can add Bitcoin without a new senior claim or new shares, but those figures show the scale gap.

Metaplanet's planned Super League investment had been signed but had not closed at the snapshot. Subject to approvals, it would contribute 2,100 BTC and $2.5 million for common stock, warrants and strategic preferred stock, and Super League was expected to become a consolidated subsidiary. The coins should therefore remain in the current 43,000-BTC snapshot rather than be treated as sold; under the group's current policy, they are expected to remain consolidated and fair-valued, with a minority portion attributable to non-controlling interests.

The surviving engine is smaller and less automatic

Each alternative to premium-priced common equity carries a tradeoff.

Retained operating cash is the cleanest route because it adds neither dilution nor a financing senior claim, but it is currently too small to sustain acquisition at the recent pace. Existing cash can be converted into Bitcoin, though that swaps one corporate asset for another rather than creating new net value.

Premium-priced common equity is the scalable route that avoids a new senior claim, but only when net issue proceeds clear a consistent per-share Bitcoin-value threshold and are used to buy coins. A basic mNAV below 1x is a warning, not a complete test; the relevant hurdle must include dilution, cash and senior obligations.

Debt and preferred stock can preserve the common share count initially, but coupons, dividends, conversion rights and collateral transfer part of the economics to senior investors. A cash-funded buyback mechanically raises gross Bitcoin per remaining share while reducing cash. A Bitcoin-funded buyback reduces total coins and raises Bitcoin per share only when the repurchase price is below pre-buyback gross Bitcoin value per share. Neither route accumulates new Bitcoin. Strategy's $1 billion MSTR repurchase authorization remained unused through Aug. 23.

Bitcoin's rally repaired the numerator. It did not repair the financing terms. Until these companies generate much more operating cash or regain a defensible common-equity premium, the next Bitcoin purchase will depend less on the size of the treasury than on who funds it, what claim they receive and whether the transaction actually leaves existing common holders with more Bitcoin per share.

The post Bitcoin hit $80,000 but failed to restore BTC treasury premiums at Strategy, Twenty One Capital, or Metaplanet appeared first on CryptoSlate.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is the Pump.fun downtrend broken or only interrupted?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What trading volume reveals about Pump.fun demand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What speaks for buying PUMP at current prices

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

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

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

What speaks against buying Pump.fun at current prices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you buy US stocks through a crypto exchange, nobody withholds German capital gains tax on your behalf. Dividends and sale proceeds are credited to you gross, and the settlement with the tax office runs entirely through your income tax return. This is no grey area and no negligence on the provider’s part; it follows directly from where the securities account is held.

Since August 18, 2026 the question has become practical for considerably more people. That was the day Kraken opened US stock trading to customers in the European Economic Area. Anyone who previously held only Bitcoin and a few altcoins on the platform can now buy Apple, Nvidia or Tesla shares there as well. For tax purposes they land in a body of rules that has nothing to do with crypto and that many investors encounter for the first time.

Kraken brings 7,000 US stocks to the EEA: what applies since August 18

According to the exchange’s own announcement, eligible customers in the EEA have been able to trade more than 7,000 US stocks since August 18, 2026, alongside more than 600 crypto assets and more than 700 so-called xStocks. Trading in the shares is commission-free; in the small print the exchange states expressly that further costs such as spreads and currency conversion charges can arise. Trading is offered through the app and through Kraken Pro.

According to consistent trade reporting, Germany was among the first markets in which the offering ran in a limited pilot phase, together with France and the Netherlands. The go-live on August 18 completed that roll-out across the entire economic area. The exchange itself names no list of countries in its announcement and refers throughout to eligible customers in the EEA.

Decisive for everything that follows is one sentence from the legal section of that same announcement: the investment services are provided by Payward Europe Digital Solutions (CY) Limited, an investment firm authorised under the European markets in financial instruments directive and supervised by the Cypriot securities regulator CySEC. Your securities account therefore sits in Cyprus.

Domestic or foreign securities account: how to tell the difference

A foreign securities account is one held by an institution domiciled outside Germany, even when the app speaks German, you deposit in euros and the provider is regulated in the EU. The domicile of the custodian institution decides, not your address and not the language of the interface.

The difference is invisible in daily use and highly visible in the tax return. A German institution deducts the tax directly on every dividend and every sale at a profit, pays it over to the tax office and sends you a tax certificate at year end in which everything has already been offset. A foreign institution does none of that. It credits you the full amount and leaves the rest to you.

How to spot it without turning lawyer: look in the contract documents or in the footer of the trading platform for the name of the company providing the investment service, and for the competent supervisory authority. If a foreign regulator is named there, you hold a foreign securities account. At Kraken that is the Cypriot CySEC and the Payward company named above. If you are losing track of several accounts, our overview of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers lists programs that consolidate accounts and wallets and prepare the annual figures for the return.

Why a Cypriot investment firm withholds no capital gains tax

The Income Tax Act governs automatic withholding not through the question of how well a provider is regulated but through a very narrow definition. Under section 44 paragraph 1 of the Income Tax Act, the paying agent, meaning whoever has to carry out the deduction, is in the cases relevant here the domestic credit, financial services or securities institution that holds or administers the securities.

The paying agent is, in tax law, the body that pays out your investment income and is therefore obliged to withhold the tax for you. The word domestic in that provision is the whole difference. An investment firm domiciled in Cyprus is no domestic institution, so the obligation does not apply to it. The firm may not withhold the German tax and consequently does not.

The same holds for providers from Ireland, the Netherlands or Malta, and it holds regardless of whether the provider carries a MiCA licence for its crypto business. Regulation and tax withholding are two separate questions that are frequently confused. A European authorisation protects your securities account and gives you a supervisory route; it does not make the provider a German paying agent.

Anlage KAP becomes mandatory: what section 32d paragraph 3 EStG requires

Because nobody withholds the tax, the law shifts the duty onto you. The wording is short and leaves no room: taxable investment income that has not been subject to capital gains tax must be declared by the taxpayer in their income tax return. And the following sentence states that in this case an assessment is to be carried out, irrespective of the other rules on who has to file a return at all.

In plain terms that means two things. First, the income from the foreign account belongs in Anlage KAP, the schedule of the German income tax return for investment income. Second, anyone who would otherwise not have to file a return at all is obliged to file by this income. An employee with no other income who has never submitted a return slips into mandatory assessment.

The tax rate does not change as a result. Income tax on investment income is 25 percent under section 32d paragraph 1 of the Income Tax Act, plus the solidarity surcharge of 5.5 percent on that amount, which together gives 26.375 percent, plus church tax where applicable. Only the route is different: instead of a deduction at source, the tax office sets the amount in the assessment notice and you pay it afterwards.

The saver’s allowance without an exemption order: how to claim the 1,000 euros

The saver’s lump-sum allowance is 1,000 euros under section 20 paragraph 9 of the Income Tax Act, or 2,000 euros for spouses assessed jointly. You do not lose it in a foreign account. The usual route to it, however, is blocked.

An exemption order takes effect only towards whoever is obliged to withhold. Since the Cypriot investment firm is under no such obligation, it cannot accept an exemption order either. There is simply no form for it in this account, and anyone looking for one is looking in vain.

You claim the allowance through the tax return instead. That works reliably, but it has a side effect that costs money in practice: if you also run a German securities account and have an exemption order there for the full 1,000 euros, the allowance is already used up before the foreign income even enters the calculation. Anyone using both in parallel should reduce the exemption order at the German provider accordingly and keep the remainder for the assessment.

Loss offsetting in a foreign account: why the bank’s loss pots are missing

A loss pot is an account that a German institution runs for you and in which it collects your losses during the year in order to offset them against later gains. Under section 43a paragraph 3 of the Income Tax Act, the paying agent offsets negative investment income in the current calendar year up to the amount of the positive income; whatever remains it carries forward to the following year automatically. On request it issues a loss certificate instead, and the irrevocable application for it must reach the agent by December 15 of the current year.

This entire apparatus does not exist for your Cypriot account. There is no loss pot there, no automatic carry-forward and no loss certificate, because all of it is tied to the duties of a domestic paying agent. You offset losses from share sales only in the assessment, and subject to the relevant restrictions: losses from the disposal of shares may be offset only against gains from the disposal of shares, not against dividends or interest.

In practice that means you have to keep the books yourself. The platform supplies you with transaction lists but no annual statement prepared for tax purposes under German law. Anyone who also holds crypto assets already has a record-keeping duty and knows the drill; anyone who has only ever had a German securities account has to learn it. An overview of brokers and trading venues together with their tax treatment helps in deciding whether the effort is worth it for you or whether a German provider with automatic withholding is the quieter choice.

US withholding tax on dividends: what the W-8BEN form changes

Withholding tax is the tax retained by the state from which the income originates, before the money reaches your account. On dividends from US companies the US side deducts that amount. For investors who have filed no W-8BEN form it is high; with the form on file, the lower rate from the double taxation treaty between Germany and the United States applies.

The W-8BEN form is a self-declaration to the US tax authority in which you confirm that you are resident for tax purposes outside the United States. Brokers usually ask for it when the account is opened, and it is time-limited. After opening, check in the account area whether it is on file and still valid. The specific rates and the handling in an individual case could not be verified on the platform side; they are set out in the provider’s contract documents and in the statements for each individual dividend.

Tax paid abroad is not lost. Under section 32d paragraph 5 of the Income Tax Act, foreign tax assessed and paid is credited against the German tax, though at most 25 percent of foreign tax on each individual item of taxable investment income. This crediting too happens exclusively in the assessment with a foreign account, because in a domestic account the bank would already have taken it into account at the point of deduction.

Real share or xStock: why two tax regimes run in the same account

Kraken advertises the combination expressly: real shares and tokenised shares side by side in one account. An xStock is a token that tracks a US share and, according to the exchange, is backed one to one by the underlying share. The legal annex to the announcement states that the xStocks are issued by Backed Assets (JE) Limited, domiciled in Jersey, and offered through Payward Digital Solutions Ltd, licensed in Bermuda, and that they are not registered with any local securities regulator and will not be registered.

What looks convenient is a fork in the road for tax purposes within the same account. Whether a token that tracks a share is treated for tax like a share or like another asset is the decisive question, and it depends on the legal form of the token. We covered it in detail in our piece on tokenised shares and their taxation in Germany; anyone using both product types should record them separately and not mix them in a joint annual statement.

A second point concerns backing. In June 2026 we described a case in which the backing of an xStock on a paper with no available trading inventory began to slip; the details are in our analysis of the shortfall on an xStock. For the tax question that changes nothing; for the risk question it does.

Our own analysis: what the statutes actually say

cryptoticker.io compiled this analysis itself on August 27, 2026. Method: on the same day we retrieved the four relevant provisions of the Income Tax Act as well as the surcharge rate of the Solidarity Surcharge Act in the official full text on gesetze-im-internet.de and analysed the governing paragraphs in their wording. Five provisions were examined, each in full.

• Section 44 paragraph 1 EStG: the paying agent that has to carry out the deduction is, in the cases relevant here, the domestic credit, financial services or securities institution. The word domestic appears in the statutory text.
• Section 32d paragraph 3 EStG: investment income that has not been subject to capital gains tax is to be declared in the income tax return, and an assessment is to be carried out.
• Section 32d paragraph 5 EStG: foreign tax is credited, at most 25 percent on each individual item of taxable investment income.
• Section 43a paragraph 3 EStG: loss offsetting and loss carry-forward are duties of the paying agent; the application for a loss certificate must reach it by December 15 of the current year.
• Section 20 paragraph 9 EStG and section 4 SolzG 1995: saver’s lump-sum allowance of 1,000 euros, or 2,000 euros on joint assessment; solidarity surcharge of 5.5 percent of the assessment base.

What we could not check belongs here just as much. First, we hold no account with the provider and could therefore not look at which statements and annual summaries the platform actually issues. Second, the statement that Germany was among the pilot markets rests on trade reporting and not on a statement by the exchange. Third, the specific withholding rates in an individual case depend on how the account is set up, which we cannot verify without access to a real dividend statement.

Information exchange: why the tax office learns of your foreign account anyway

The notion that an account abroad stays undetected has been out of date for years. For securities accounts at foreign financial institutions, the automatic exchange of information on financial accounts applies, in which Cyprus participates like every EU state. For crypto assets, the European reporting obligation for crypto-asset service providers has applied since 2026, with the first data deliveries expected the following year.

The two channels are separate and concern different types of assets, but they arrive at the same place. Anyone holding shares and crypto assets at one provider is reported through two routes. That is no reason for nerves but a reason to make your own return complete: discrepancies between what the tax office receives and what you declare now show up automatically. How this interacts across the individual asset classes is something we worked through using the taxation of stablecoins as an example.

Records for the tax return: which documents to collect from now on

Because nobody issues you a German tax certificate, your own filing becomes the basis of the return. It makes sense to secure the documents continuously rather than once in April of the following year, because trading platforms shorten export periods and make accounts available only to a limited extent after closure. The BitMEX case showed in 2026 how quickly access to a platform can become tight.

These are the records you need:

1. All purchase and sale statements with date, quantity, price and currency, from which acquisition costs and disposal proceeds can be derived.
2. All dividend statements showing the foreign withholding tax retained, because without that disclosure no crediting is possible.
3. The conversion rates on the relevant date where settlement was in US dollars.
4. Proof of the W-8BEN form on file and its period of validity.
5. An annual overview of all positions, separated into real shares and tokenised paper.

A note on our own account: this text places the legal position in context and replaces no tax advice. With larger amounts, with losses across several years or with a mixture of shares, tokenised paper and crypto assets, a trip to a tax adviser is the cheaper option.

A securities account at the crypto exchange: what to take away

1. Check where your account is held. Look in the contract documents for the company providing the investment service and for the competent supervisor. If a foreign authority is named there, you hold a foreign account and have to declare the income yourself. Which providers work with a European authorisation is shown by our overview of regulated crypto exchanges.
2. Set up your document filing before the first purchase goes through. Download statements monthly and file them separately by real shares and tokenised paper. A tool from our comparison of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers takes the consolidation off your hands.
3. Weigh the effort against the price advantage. Commission-free trading is cheaper only once spreads, currency conversion costs and your own declaration work are counted in. If you do not want that effort, the comparison of crypto brokers lists providers where the tax is paid over automatically.

You can look up the governing provisions yourself: section 32d of the German Income Tax Act covers the tax rate, the filing obligation and the crediting of foreign taxes in one place. The exchange’s product announcement with the legal annex is in the Kraken blog of August 18, 2026.

(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.)

On September 6, 2026, Hyperliquid’s unlock calendar lists a tranche of roughly 9.92 million HYPE for the core contributors. At the August 27 price of $81.42 that is nominally about $808 million. The short answer to how much of it actually reaches the market: very probably a fraction. The same 9.92 million stood in the calendar in March, and 173,217 HYPE were claimed, or 1.75 percent of the announced amount.

That gap between schedule and claim is why coverage of the date has so far named the day without doing the arithmetic. Anyone who wants to treat September 6 as a price risk has to keep three things apart: what the schedule releases, how much of that is claimed, and how much of that can ultimately be sold. This piece works through all three against the numbers of August 27, 2026.

What the Hyperliquid unlock actually releases on September 6

A token unlock is the point at which previously locked units of a token become transferable under a fixed timetable. The timetable itself is called the vesting schedule. At Hyperliquid the allocation to the core contributors, meaning the team around Hyperliquid Labs, runs on linear vesting: a total allocation of roughly 238 million HYPE spread evenly across 24 monthly tranches. 238 million divided by 24 gives 9,916,667 HYPE per month, and that is the figure every calendar carries as 9.92 million.

The September 6 tranche is therefore no exception but the regular monthly step in that series. It goes to a single group of recipients. That sets it apart from the date a week earlier, which serves three groups at once and picks up the bigger headlines.

Release or claim: why the tranche is an entitlement and not a forced payout

This is where most unlock headlines lose their precision. The calendar value of a tranche describes an entitlement, not an automatic transfer. According to reporting by Forbes, the Hyper Foundation announces around the 6th of each month how much was actually claimed, and by that same source the figure has come in well below the 9.92 million in the schedule every time.

The difference is no detail. An entitlement that goes unclaimed raises neither the circulating amount nor the tradable supply. It stays locked and reappears the following month. Converting the calendar figure one to one into selling pressure assumes an action that has not taken place in recent months.

How wide the gap between unlock schedule and claim was in March

The most solid single number on that gap comes from March 2026. The calendar showed 9.92 million HYPE. 173,217 HYPE were claimed. That is 1.75 percent of the planned amount, a factor of around 57 between announcement and reality.

Converted to the August 27, 2026 price: a nominal $808 million became roughly $14.1 million at the March rate. That is still money, but it is a different order of magnitude from the number in the headlines. Estimating a token’s dilution from the calendar figure is off by more than fiftyfold in this case.

One caveat belongs with it: a single monthly reading is no law. Forbes describes the pattern as consistent but spells out only the March figure. Claims can rise at any time, for instance if recipients assert their allocation in a batch. The historical value serves as an order of magnitude; it is no forecast.

August 29: 14.17 million HYPE to insiders, the community and the Hyper Foundation

The larger date falls a week before the core contributor tranche. On August 29, according to Decrypt, 14,175,778 HYPE are released, around 1.4 percent of the total supply. At the August 27 price that is nominally about $1.15 billion. The split: 46.6 percent to insiders and early investors, 46.3 percent to the community through community grants, community rewards and airdrops, 7 percent to the Hyper Foundation.

The insider share works out at roughly 6.61 million HYPE, or $538 million at the August 27 price. That group is the only one of the three where a sale on the market is the immediate prospect. Community allocations land to a considerable extent with users who stay active in the protocol, and the foundation share moves into a treasury that itself appears as a buyer.

For placing September 6, that means the nearer date is the larger one. Rolling the two into a single number gives roughly $1.96 billion nominal across nine days and loses precisely the distinction that matters.

Cliff, float, vesting: the terms around a token unlock

Four terms decide whether you read an unlock report correctly. All four appear in the unlock calendars, and none of them is explained there.

• Cliff: a lock-up period at the end of which a large amount becomes free in one go. A cliff unlock is accordingly a single cut-off date with a step change in supply. With the HYPE token that applies to the allocations to investors, not to the monthly tranche for the core team.
• Linear vesting: the counterpart, an even distribution across many dates. The allocation for the core contributors runs exactly that way, in 24 equal steps.
• Float: the share of a token that is genuinely freely tradable. The float is usually smaller than the circulating supply, because part of the circulating amount stays permanently staked or tied up in contracts.
• Genesis distribution: the initial distribution when a token launches. For the Hyperliquid token it took place on November 29, 2024 and set out which groups would later be served through which unlock events.

The practical use of that distinction shows up on September 6: because this is linear vesting rather than a cliff, the tranche is predictable, recurring and long since known to the market. A cliff comes as a surprise; a monthly step does not.

How much HYPE is in circulation at all? Two sources, two answers

To work out dilution you need the circulating supply, the amount of tokens freely tradable in circulation. This is where it gets awkward, and most write-ups pass over it. Two measurements from August 27, 2026 give two different answers.

• Hyperliquid’s own info interface reports a circulating supply of 298,676,567 HYPE at 06:40 UTC, a total supply of 998,987,823 HYPE and a reserve for future emissions of 412,064,183 HYPE.
• CoinGecko puts circulation at 222,445,714 HYPE for the same hour, alongside a market cap of around $18.1 billion and an FDV of around $77.7 billion. FDV stands for fully diluted valuation, the market value a token would carry if the entire maximum supply were already in circulation.

Around 76 million HYPE lie between the two values, a good third of the smaller one. Both figures are collected transparently; they simply count different things. Data providers frequently strip out holdings in foundation and team addresses, while the protocol itself counts differently. A serious calculation therefore quotes a range.

Applied to the September 6 tranche: 9.92 million HYPE are 3.3 percent of circulation on the protocol measurement and 4.5 percent on CoinGecko. For August 29 the same values read 4.8 and 6.4 percent. The range is wide enough to tip an assessment and narrow enough to leave the direction unambiguous.

What the Hyper Foundation buyback takes back out of supply

On the other side of the calculation sits a source of demand that most tokens do not have. The data service Tokenomist recorded on August 14 that one in seven tokens on the HYPE unlock path is bought back, which corresponds to around 14.3 percent. It is funded out of the protocol’s fee income, earned as a perpetual DEX with running revenue.

That leaves two quantities facing each other: the part of a tranche that is claimed and sold, and the part of total supply taken back out of the market through buybacks. As long as the claim rate stays in the region of the March figure, the second item is the larger. If claims rise sharply, the ratio flips.

How to calculate the dilution from a token unlock yourself

The calculation is simple enough to run for any date yourself, and it protects you from headlines built on the nominal figure. You need five values.

1. Tranche size from the project’s unlock schedule.
2. Circulating supply on the reference date, ideally from two sources so that you see the range.
3. Claim rate at previous dates, where the project publishes it.
4. Offsetting items such as buybacks, staking lock-ups or holding periods for recipients.
5. Trading volume of the token, because an amount that disappears into daily volume moves the price differently from one that exceeds it.

Applied to September 6: 9.92 million divided by circulation gives the theoretical dilution of 3.3 to 4.5 percent. Multiplied by the March claim rate of 1.75 percent, what remains is an actual supply expansion of around 0.06 to 0.08 percent. We worked through the same approach step by step for the LayerZero unlock, there without a buyback mechanism and with a correspondingly different result.

What earlier HYPE unlocks did to the price

The past supplies no clean pattern, and that is a finding in itself. On the reactions collected by Decrypt, HYPE lost around 7 percent after the July tranche, gained around 1 percent after the June date and fell 14.1 percent after the May release. Three dates, three different directions.

The price stands at $81.34 on August 27, or 69.79 euros, after an all-time high of $83.53 on August 26. Over seven days HYPE is up around 14 percent. A token that marks an all-time high a week before a large unlock is not behaving like one whose market fears the release.

Bull and bear case for the September 6 tranche

Both sides can be argued from the same numbers, which is why they stand side by side here rather than as a recommendation.

Bear case: August 29 distributes 14.18 million HYPE, 46.6 percent of it to insiders and early investors who are in profit after almost two years. If the price falls after that date, the core contributor tranche a week later can meet an already weakened market. The reserve for future emissions of 412 million HYPE, a good 41 percent of the maximum supply, also remains a supply overhang that will last for years.

Bull case: the claim rate has lately been in the low single-digit percentage range, the buyback takes around one in seven tokens back out, and part of the released supply moves into staking. According to the official documentation, the staking yield at 400 million HYPE locked runs at about 2.37 percent a year, funded from the same emission reserve. Tokens that are tied up are no selling pressure.

What you cannot derive from this is a price direction. Analyst quotes on HYPE price targets circulate in abundance; they belong to those who utter them and not in a calculation. If you are assessing Hyperliquid as a position, the appraisal at the current price is the more suitable entry point than an unlock date.

Where to check the Hyperliquid unlock schedule yourself

On dates, do not rely on secondary sources that carry figures forward. Three routes lead to verifiable values.

First, Hyperliquid’s own info interface: a call against api.hyperliquid.xyz/info with the type tokenDetails returns total supply, circulating supply, the futureEmissions field and the largest non-circulating holdings. The Hyperliquid token is held on HyperCore, the order book layer of the chain, which is why the numbers come from the protocol itself and not from a model. Second, unlock aggregators such as Tokenomist or DefiLlama, which carry the date and amount per recipient group; they are convenient, but they partly model rather than measure. Third, the Hyper Foundation announcement around the 6th of each month, the only source that names the actual claim.

A practical note on the data: the genesis distribution of HYPE can be traced on chain, and the core team launched the token on November 29, 2024. Around 1.01 million HYPE have been burned since, which is why total supply at 998.99 million sits below the maximum supply of one billion. Anyone holding positions spread across several exchanges and a wallet of their own loses sight of these details quickly; a portfolio tracker with tax reporting takes the consolidation off your hands.

Hyperliquid unlock: what to take away

1. Do the arithmetic on the tranche instead of adopting the headline. 9.92 million HYPE are 3.3 to 4.5 percent of circulation, and the March claim rate of 1.75 percent turns that into a real supply expansion in the per-mille range. Which venues export the holdings data you need cleanly is shown by the crypto exchange comparison.
2. Keep August 29 apart from September 6. The earlier date is the larger one and the only one with a meaningful insider share. If you use Hyperliquid as a trading venue and do not merely hold the token, the alternatives are in the perpetual DEX comparison.
3. Document purchases and sales around unlock dates immediately. In Germany the holding period per purchase decides the tax liability, and it is precisely that allocation which gets lost in volatile weeks. The tools for it are in the comparison of tax and portfolio tools.

(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.)

Bitcoin tax return in Austria: when an assessment is needed despite a crypto exchange

Ever since Austrian crypto service providers began applying capital gains tax to certain Bitcoin profits automatically, many investors assume the tax is settled. In plenty of standard cases it is: where an Austrian party obliged to withhold capital gains tax is involved and the tax has been withheld correctly, the private income concerned is in principle already covered by that deduction.

A crypto exchange does not, however, make the income tax return redundant as a matter of course.

Foreign exchanges: often no Austrian capital gains tax withheld

The most important case is foreign crypto platforms.

If no Austrian capital gains tax is withheld there, an investor liable to tax in Austria generally has to declare their taxable crypto income themselves. The special tax rate of 27.5 percent continues to apply to crypto income in principle.

The location of the exchange therefore does not automatically change the Austrian tax rate. What matters is whether an Austrian withholding agent has already paid the tax over.

Offsetting losses between exchange and bank requires an assessment

Even with entirely Austrian providers, a tax return can be advisable or necessary.

An automatic offset between crypto income and other investment income is not permitted. Anyone who books a Bitcoin loss at a crypto exchange and a share gain at their bank, for example, has to carry out that cross-provider loss offset through the income tax assessment.

That can result in a refund of capital gains tax already withheld.

Incorrect or flat-rate tax data

An assessment can also become relevant if the crypto service provider did not have the correct acquisition costs at the time of sale.

That applies, for example, to Bitcoin that:

• were transferred from a foreign exchange,
• sat on a hardware wallet for years,
• came from earlier crypto-to-crypto swaps,
• were not fully documented.

If the tax was withheld on an incorrect or flat-rate basis, the actual tax calculation can differ from the exchange statement.

The standard taxation option is another route

Crypto income is in principle subject to the special tax rate of 27.5 percent. Taxpayers can, however, exercise a standard taxation option where the statutory conditions are met.

That can be attractive above all where the personal average income tax rate is lower.

Such a decision should not be taken in isolation on the basis of a single Bitcoin gain, though, because it can pull in other investment income.

Tax reporting as the basis

For income accruing from the 2025 calendar year onwards, Austrian parties obliged to withhold capital gains tax must produce comprehensive tax reporting on request.

The document sets out income, losses and capital gains tax paid over, among other things, and can be used for the income tax assessment.

It is particularly useful for investors who use several banks and crypto service providers.

Typical cases for a Bitcoin tax assessment

An income tax return can become relevant in particular where:

• Bitcoin was sold through a foreign exchange,
• no Austrian capital gains tax was withheld,
• crypto losses are to be offset against share gains or dividends,
• several providers are involved,
• the acquisition costs held by the provider were incorrect or incomplete,
• there is foreign investment income,
• the standard taxation option is to be used.

Conclusion

An Austrian crypto exchange can simplify taxation considerably, but it does not make the tax return redundant in every case.

Where capital gains tax has been withheld correctly, income tax on private Bitcoin gains is often already settled in principle. As soon as foreign exchanges, cross-provider losses or incorrect tax data come into play, however, an income tax assessment can be necessary or financially worthwhile.

(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.)

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.)

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TLDR

• The SEC sent its “Amendments to the Custody Rules” proposal to the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs on August 25, 2026.
• The rule would change how investment advisers and funds hold crypto assets for clients under federal securities law.
• The proposal is not yet public and must clear White House review before the SEC can vote on releasing it for comment.
• The move is part of a wider push tied to the Trump administration’s digital asset agenda.
• It comes as the CLARITY Act market structure bill remains stalled in the Senate, with a cloture vote expected in September.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission is working on a rule change that could reshape how crypto is held for clients. The agency sent the proposal to the White House for review on August 25, 2026.

The rule is called “Amendments to the Custody Rules.” It was submitted to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a part of the White House Office of Management and Budget.

This office reviews federal rules before they move forward. It can request changes before sending the rule back to the SEC.

The proposal covers investment advisers and investment companies. These are firms that manage money on behalf of clients, including funds.

What the Rule Would Change

The SEC is looking at changes under the Investment Advisers Act and the Investment Company Act. Both laws set rules for how client money and assets are handled.

The new rule would address how these firms can hold crypto assets for clients. Right now, there is uncertainty about how firms should do this while following SEC rules.

The SEC has said the goal is to clear up that uncertainty. Firms have asked for clearer guidance on crypto custody for years.

The proposal has not been made public yet. It still needs to clear White House review first.

Once that happens, it goes back to the SEC. The commission would then vote on whether to release it for public comment.

Bloomberg first reported on the proposal’s progress through this process. The outlet described it as part of the SEC’s broader work on crypto policy.

This effort connects to the current administration’s digital asset agenda. Regulators have been pushing several crypto related initiatives through different agencies.

One of those efforts is the CLARITY Act, a market structure bill in the Senate. That bill has been stalled for months.

Lawmakers are expected to return from the August recess in September. A cloture vote on the bill is expected after they return.

SEC’s Shift From Enforcement to Rulemaking

The SEC has changed its approach to crypto since Paul Atkins became chair in 2025. The agency has moved away from enforcement actions.

Atkins has said the SEC should set crypto policy through formal rulemaking instead. He has criticized the agency’s past approach of using lawsuits to set rules.

That past approach was often called “regulation through enforcement.” Companies said it left them guessing about what was allowed.

In 2025, the SEC dropped several cases against crypto companies. This included its lawsuit against Coinbase.

The custody rule proposal fits into this shift. It uses the formal rulemaking process rather than a court case or an enforcement action.

For now, the proposal remains under White House review. There is no set timeline for when it will move back to the SEC.

The next step will be the OIRA review process. After that, the SEC will decide whether to open it up for public comment.

The post SEC Sends Crypto Custody Rule to White House for Review appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Altcoins captured up to 65% of Binance trading volume, the highest share in two years.
• Bitcoin and ether held volume shares of 21% and 13.6% during the same stretch.
• Altcoin market capitalization rose by about $135 billion.
• The wider crypto market gained roughly $500 billion, reaching near $2.74 trillion.
• The Altcoin Season Index sat at 37, showing the rally has not turned into a full altcoin season.

Altcoins took over trading activity during the latest crypto market rally. Their share of Binance volume reached the highest level seen in two years.

The data comes from an analysis published by Cryptoquant on August 25. It shows how trading turned toward smaller coins as the broader market moved higher.

At the peak of the rally, altcoins made up 65% of Binance trading volume. Bitcoin held 21% and ether held 13.6%.

The shift followed a strong run for bitcoin. The coin crossed $81,000 on August 25 after gaining close to 30% during the rally period.

Bitcoin’s shrinking share of trading activity shows that altcoins produced far more turnover as the rally grew. Traders moved quickly into smaller tokens as prices climbed.

Market Cap Gains

Altcoin market capitalization increased by about $135 billion over the same period. This happened alongside a larger recovery across the whole crypto market.

The total crypto market added close to $500 billion. That brought its combined value to nearly $2.74 trillion during the third week of August.

Some altcoins gained close to 100% during the rally. Ether rose 31.2% over seven days.

Many tokens still remained far below their previous record prices. Short-term gains did not erase earlier losses for most assets.

Altcoins cover a wide range of tokens outside of bitcoin. This includes stablecoins, utility tokens, governance tokens, privacy coins, and memecoins.

Smaller coins can see sharper price and volume swings than bitcoin. Liquidity, ownership, and use cases vary widely between them.

Volume Surge Falls Short of Confirming Altcoin Season

High trading volume shows more market activity, but it does not prove new money entered the market. Market cap can rise simply because prices go up.

Volume measures how much value changed hands. It does not confirm that funds moved directly from bitcoin into altcoins.

A separate market tracker backs this up. The Blockchaincenter Altcoin Season Index stood at 37 on August 26.

That index needs 75% of the top 50 coins to outperform bitcoin over 90 days before conditions count as an altcoin season. The current reading falls well short of that mark.

This latest volume jump stands in contrast to Cryptoquant’s outlook from two months earlier. That report found bitcoin-to-altcoin rotation had mostly disappeared, with volume tied to BTC pairs at its lowest point since 2021.

Regulators have flagged risks tied to fast-moving crypto markets. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has warned that virtual currency spot markets can see flash crashes, limited oversight, and weak customer protections.

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s investor education office has also flagged risks tied to certain crypto asset securities. These include volatility, illiquidity, and concentrated ownership among holders.

As of August 26, the Altcoin Season Index remained at 37, confirming the current rally has not yet met the threshold for a full altcoin season.

The post Altcoin Trading Volume Hits Two-Year High as Market Cap Gains $135 Billion appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• XRP fell back below its 50-week EMA (~$1.54) after briefly hitting $1.70.
• Analyst ChartNerdTA calls the weekly close below the EMA a “major caution signal.”
• $1.30-$1.29 is now the key mid-term support zone to watch.
• XRP Ledger active addresses jumped 654.71% in two weeks, per Ali Martinez.
• Binance’s XRP leverage ratio hit its highest level in over seven months.

XRP pulled back after a sharp August rally. The token fell below its 50-week exponential moving average, near $1.54, after briefly reaching $1.70.

Chart analyst ChartNerdTA posted on X that the weekly close below the 50-week EMA is a “major caution signal” for XRP. The analyst said reclaiming $1.54 would invalidate the bearish setup.

ChartNerdTA’s chart also showed XRP had cleared its 20-week EMA near $1.23 during the rally. The 50-week EMA has proven harder to break above.

The rejection followed a roughly 49% weekly gain for XRP. That surge pushed the token from below $1 to near $1.70 in a matter of days.

XRP Support Levels to Watch

ChartNerdTA’s chart marks $1.30 to $1.29 as the first mid-term support zone. A break lower could bring $1.18 to $1.10 into play.

A deeper decline could test $1.00 to $0.98. TradingView data placed the 10-day EMA near $1.33 and the 200-day EMA near $1.35, both close to the current price.

XRP traded around $1.36 on Bitstamp, down about 4.85% on the day. Moving averages still leaned bullish, with 13 buy signals against one sell and one neutral reading.

The 14-period RSI sat near 65, cooler than rally highs. The MACD stayed positive, though the 10-period momentum reading turned to a sell signal.

Network Activity and Leverage Rise

On-chain data tracked by analyst Ali Martinez showed XRP Ledger active addresses jumping 654.71% in two weeks. The count rose from 47,180 on August 10 to 356,070 on August 24, according to Santiment figures shared in the post.

The increase lines up with XRP’s climb toward $1.70. More addresses transacting suggests wider participation, though it does not set price direction on its own.

Derivatives data added another layer to the picture. CryptoQuant, in a post on X, said Binance’s XRP leverage ratio climbed to about 0.213, its highest reading in over seven months.

The leverage ratio compares futures open interest with XRP held on the exchange. CryptoQuant noted rising leverage alongside price gains can point to fresh positions and trader confidence.

Higher leverage also raises liquidation risk if price moves against crowded positions. CoinDesk reported XRP futures volume near $6.4 billion over 24 hours, more than five times spot volume.

Open interest stood near $3.45 billion, and long positions outnumbered shorts on major exchanges, per the same report. That skew makes both the $1.54 resistance and $1.30 support levels relevant to positioning.

A move back above $1.54 would weaken the bearish setup ChartNerdTA flagged. Continued rejection would keep $1.30 to $1.29 as the level to watch, with $1.18 to $1.10 next in line if support fails.

The post XRP (XRP) Price: 50-Week EMA Rejection Puts $1.30 Support in Focus appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Ethereum price could reach $2,650 in August, according to Kalshi prediction market data.
• Spot Ethereum ETFs pulled in $179.8 million on August 25, led by BlackRock’s ETHA.
• ETH traded at $2,451.51 on August 26, down 0.44% on the four-hour chart.
• A close above $2,500 could open the door to $2,600 and $2,800.
• A rejection near $2,500 may push ETH back down toward $2,350 support.

Ethereum’s price could climb to $2,650 before the end of August. That is the forecast shown on prediction platform Kalshi, based on trader positioning.

The prediction follows a 20% weekly jump that pushed Ether above $2,400. Gains have slowed since then as traders take profits.

The wider crypto market fell 1.95% over the past day, dropping to $2.61 trillion. Bitcoin stayed near $78,000, just below the $80,000 mark.

XRP settled at $1.44 after a 5% pullback over two sessions. That drop follows a strong rally the week before.

On Kalshi, the forecast chart shows a $2,650 target with a rise of 585.4 points. This shows traders are leaning toward continued short-term gains for Ethereum.

Ethereum ETF Inflows Rise

Spot Ethereum ETFs brought in $179.80 million in net inflows on August 25. The data comes from SoSoValue.

BlackRock’s ETHA led all funds with $146.44 million in inflows. Fidelity’s FETH followed with $25.75 million, and BlackRock’s ETHB added $7.61 million.

Combined, Ethereum ETFs now hold $14.88 billion in assets. That figure equals 5.06% of Ethereum’s total market cap.

Daily trading volume across these funds reached $980.49 million. Total historical net inflows for Ethereum ETFs have grown to $12.45 billion.

ETHA remains the largest fund with $8.23 billion in assets, though it dipped 0.46% recently. Grayscale’s ETHE has seen $5.35 billion in net outflows but still holds $1.87 billion in assets.

Price Levels to Watch

Ethereum traded at $2,451.51 on August 26, down 0.44% on the four-hour candle. The price has held above the $2,350 support level despite the slowdown.

The four-hour RSI fell to 55.57, a neutral reading after recent overbought conditions. The MACD line sits below the signal line, with a negative histogram.

A close above $2,500 could open the path toward $2,600 and $2,800. That is the next resistance zone traders are watching.

A second rejection near $2,500 could send Ethereum back to the $2,350 support area. A break below that level could bring $2,000 into view, with $1,800 as a further downside target.

The post Ethereum (ETH) Price: Kalshi Traders Predict $2,650 Target This Month appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• A UK judge rejected Manpreet Kohli’s challenge against extradition to the United States.
• Kohli faces charges tied to an alleged scheme to manipulate the Saitama token.
• Prosecutors say Kohli made about $20 million from the alleged scheme.
• Kohli remains free on £200,000 bail and can still appeal the ruling.
• The case links to a wider 2024 investigation called Operation Token Mirrors.

A British judge has ruled against former Saitama chief executive Manpreet Kohli in his fight to avoid extradition to the United States.

Judge Samuel Goozee made the decision on August 19. The case now moves to the U.K. government, which will decide whether to approve the U.S. extradition request.

Kohli has not been convicted of any crime. He can still appeal the ruling, so the extradition is not final yet.

He remains free on bail set at £200,000, which is about $272,400.

What Kohli Is Accused Of

U.S. prosecutors have charged Kohli with wire fraud and market manipulation. He also faces related conspiracy charges and a charge for operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business.

The charges focus on Saitama, a token built on the Ethereum network. At its peak, Saitama reportedly reached a market value of $7.5 billion.

Prosecutors allege that Kohli and others coordinated to inflate the token’s trading activity. They claim this was done through paid market makers and repeated trades across multiple wallets.

This kind of activity is known as wash trading. It involves buying and selling the same asset over and over to create the appearance of real demand, when little or none exists.

The Mental Health Argument

During the extradition hearing, Kohli argued that U.S. authorities could not properly manage his mental health needs. He raised concerns about his risk of suicide if held in custody.

Judge Goozee reviewed this argument closely. He found that safeguards in place during Kohli’s transfer, and within the U.S. prison system, could reduce that risk to an acceptable level.

This ruling followed another setback for Kohli earlier this month. A federal judge in Boston rejected his attempt to have the indictment thrown out.

Kohli had argued that the Saitama token should not be treated as a security under U.S. law. The judge did not agree with that argument.

Attorneys for Kohli did not respond to a request for comment.

A Wider Investigation

Kohli’s case is connected to a larger effort by U.S. authorities to crack down on alleged crypto manipulation. On October 9, 2024, just two days after Kohli’s arrest in London, the Justice Department announced charges as part of an investigation called Operation Token Mirrors.

That investigation led to charges against 18 individuals and entities. Prosecutors say the group used coordinated token purchases and paid two firms, ZM Quant and Gotbit, to carry out wash trading on several exchanges.

According to the Justice Department, the executives publicly denied selling their token holdings. At the same time, prosecutors allege they were privately selling for millions of dollars.

Kohli is accused of making around $20 million through the alleged scheme.

One of the firms involved, Gotbit, later admitted to manipulating token prices and volumes for clients, including Saitama. In June 2025, Gotbit was ordered to forfeit $23 million.

The company’s founder, Aleksei Andriunin, was sentenced to eight months in prison as part of that case.

Kohli’s extradition process is ongoing, and no final decision has been made on whether he will be sent to the United States to face trial.

The post Crypto CEO Loses UK Extradition Fight Over $20 Million Token Scheme appeared first on Blockonomi.

Bitcoin is on the move again in the right direction, jumping by over $2,000 since yesterday’s low and inching closer to the $80,000 resistance.

Solana has emerged as today’s top performer among the larger caps, surging by 8% to its highest price tag since late January at $105.

BTC Aims at $80K

It was just over a week ago when bitcoin’s major rally commenced, when the asset broke out of the $65,000 resistance and surged to $70,000 within hours. The bulls kept the pressure on, driving the cryptocurrency to $75,000 on Thursday and to a multi-month high at almost $80,000 on Friday morning.

However, it couldn’t breach that level on its first attempt and slipped to $75,500 during the weekend. Nevertheless, the bulls stepped up once again and defended that level. Moreover, BTC started to climb as the new business week progressed and surged past $80,000 and $81,000 on Tuesday morning for the first time since mid-May.

This meant that it had added over $16,000 in value in less than a week. However, it was stopped and couldn’t climb any higher. The next leg down drove it to just under $78,000, but it reacted well in the past few hours and jumped to $80,000 as of press time.

Its market capitalization has risen past $1.6 trillion on CG, while its dominance over the altcoins stands at over 58%.

SOL Hits New Local High

Most larger-cap alts have turned green today as well. ETH has seemingly reclaimed the $2,500 level finally after a 3% surge to over $2,550. BNB is above $710, while XRP defended the $1.40 support and is back to $1.45 as of now.

SOL is today’s top performer from this cohort of assets. A 7% pump has driven it to $105 for the first time since January 31. LINK and DOGE are also well in the green, and so are TAO and ENA.

The total crypto market cap has added around $50 billion in a day and is up to $2.780 trillion on CG.

The post Solana (SOL) Rockets to 7-Month High, Bitcoin (BTC) Taps $80K Again: Market Watch appeared first on CryptoPotato.

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.