UBS's partial relief on capital rules may enhance its competitive edge, impacting global financial dynamics and Switzerland's financial reputation.
The post UBS wins partial relief as Swiss lawmakers back AT1 compromise on capital rules appeared first on Crypto Briefing.
Warsh's quieter Fed strategy may increase market volatility and reliance on real-time data, impacting both traditional and crypto markets.
The post Federal Reserve adopts quieter communication strategy under Warsh appeared first on Crypto Briefing.
A lighter regulatory approach could boost US competitiveness in the crypto market, reducing offshore dominance and fostering innovation domestically.
The post Former SEC, CFTC officials urge lighter touch for crypto trading appeared first on Crypto Briefing.
Broadcom's earnings will gauge AI infrastructure demand, influencing tech sector sentiment and testing the sustainability of AI investments.
The post Broadcom earnings on September 2 expected to reveal $16B AI semiconductor quarter appeared first on Crypto Briefing.
The EU's classification of ChatGPT as a search engine underlines the evolving regulatory landscape for AI, impacting future AI governance.
The post ChatGPT classified as Very Large Online Search Engine by EU Commission appeared first on Crypto Briefing.
Bitcoin Magazine

Russia’s Sberbank Estimates $46.4B Trading Volume in First Year of Crypto Buildout
Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, has said it expects trading volume with its new crypto rollout to hit 4 trillion rubles ($46.43 bln) in the first year, according to reports.
Volumes are also expected to hit 7.5 trillion rubles ($87.06 bln) by 2029, Sberbank Deputy Chairman of the Executive Board Anatoly Popov was quoted saying, as reported by Tass on Saturday.
The forecast was deemed “conservative” according to the news report. Sberbank in July revealed plans to debut a Bitcoin and crypto wallet as well as digital asset custody by December. The Bank of Russia in July published draft regulations for crypto trading, and the State Duma is preparing the comprehensive regulation of digital assets.
And in a Friday report, Tass quoted Sberbank Deputy Chairman Anatoly Popov saying that the bank was planning to accept Bitcoin — and other cryptocurrencies — as collateral for loans.
Russia is fast moving ahead with regulating digital assets in the country. Russian President Vladimir Putin this month signed a law to set in stone the regulation of digital currencies and digital rights in the country.
The new law reportedly allows only registered entities to operate as exchanges, and puts limits on the amount of crypto retail investors can use.
Still, despite the rollout, using digital assets as a means of payment or legal tender within Russia is still banned. Using crypto as a form of payment has been prohibited in Russia since 2022.
President Putin has appeared to praise Bitcoin in the past, once saying that the leading cryptocurrency can’t be stopped.
Since the U.S. and European governments cut Russia off from the SWIFT payments system after it invaded Ukraine in 2022, Russian companies have been using Bitcoin to skirt around the penalties.
But the Russian state keeps a tight grip on what its citizens can do with crypto: authorities have been cracking down and arresting people operating unregistered crypto exchanges.
And the amounts involved barely matter — a nuclear engineer in Sarov was sentenced to 18 years for sending about $13 from his crypto wallet to groups the state designates as terrorist organizations.
This post Russia’s Sberbank Estimates $46.4B Trading Volume in First Year of Crypto Buildout first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.
Bitcoin Magazine

Strategy Resumes Bitcoin Buying After 10-Week Hiatus
Bitcoin treasury Strategy resumed its bitcoin buys last week, snapping up nearly $370 million in the leading cryptocurrency, according to a Monday announcement from the company.
A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows that Strategy bought 4,603 bitcoins for $369.7 million between August 24 to August 30. Each coin was bought at an average price of $80,318, according to the filing.
The buy comes after Strategy paused its bitcoin buys in June, instead focusing on building a cash buffer, buying back its stock and even sometimes selling some of its holdings.
“Strategy is evolving from one-way capital issuance to active capital management,” Strategy CEO Phong Le said in June. “We intend to move between issuing securities when capital is attractive and repurchasing securities when our instruments trade at levels that make buybacks accretive. This flexibility is designed to create shareholder value, improve corporate performance, and strengthen the quality and market standing of Strategy’s securities in the eyes of investors.”
Strategy now has $5.1 billion in its USD Reserve and $1.61 billion its new USD Cash reserve — which was announced last week.
The company holds 845,050 bitcoins worth $65.8 billion at today’s prices.
Software company Strategy — formerly MicroStrategy — began buying bitcoin in August 2020 as a treasury strategy to boost shareholder returns during the pandemic.
It has since spent more than $63.7 billion on buying bitcoin and remains by far the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin in the world. Its approach spawned a wave of copycat companies that have since adopted similar crypto-treasury strategies of their own.
Chairman and Strategy founder Michael Saylor has said that the company is now focusing on creating digital credit: high-yield products, such as its preferred equity, STRC, which are backed by its bitcoin holdings.
Strategy’s stock (NASDAQ: MSTR) was trading slightly higher on Monday morning in New York. Year-to-date, its price has dipped nearly 20%.
Bitcoin was trading for $77,821 on Monday morning in New York after hitting a high last week of $81,281. Over a 24-hour period, the coin now sits unmoved, but over a 30-day period, it has jumped by more than 24%.
This post Strategy Resumes Bitcoin Buying After 10-Week Hiatus first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.
Bitcoin Magazine

What Is Worth Preserving: Rupture on Remains, Decay, and the Collector’s Dilemma
In 1915, Kazimir Malevich hung a black square on a gallery wall and called it the zero point of painting – the end of the image, presented as an image. A little over a century later, the black square returns in Remains, but this time as consequence rather than statement. If the collector of one of these works by artist Rupture does nothing, the on-chain response is to produce the black square for them, one pixel at a time, one block at a time, until nothing is left of the image.
Remains is a series of four hybrid works in which a painting and a related ordinal are structurally bound. Each inscription contains exactly 210,000 pixels – the number of blocks mined in a bitcoin halving epoch. Beginning at the next halving in April 2028, the inscription begins to decay in real time: one pixel dies for every block the network mines. The only way to stop it is hidden beneath the surface of the physical painting – a unique alphanumeric code, retrievable only by destroying a meaningful portion of the work, which must then be inscribed as a “child” of the ordinal to permanently halt the decay. Preserve the painting, and the image on the blockchain is consumed. Save the inscription, and the painting is wounded forever. The collector cannot remain passive. Inaction is itself a choice, and the Bitcoin blockchain makes both outcomes permanent.
Art history is full of destruction deployed as a gesture. Robert Rauschenberg erased a de Kooning drawing in 1953 and framed the absence. Banksy fed Girl with Balloon through a shredder hidden in its own frame the moment the auction concluded at Sotheby’s. And in 2016, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu caged an industrial robot at the Guggenheim and gave it a single task: sweep the blood-red fluid endlessly pooling around its base back toward itself, a futile act of self-maintenance it performed for three years, slowing visibly, until it stopped. Can’t Help Myself may be the saddest machine ever built. It is also a close ancestor to Remains: both works run on a clock, and both make the audience watch something decay in real time. But where the robot’s fate was sealed by its programming, Remains leaves the outcome unwritten. Destruction here is not a spectacle performed by the artist. It is stewardship demanded of the collector.

Rupture (b. 1993, Switzerland) is a self-taught artist based in Mexico City. Within the digital art space, he has produced one of the most widely collected artist-made bodies of work on Bitcoin, the Persona series (750 works, 2024–2025), alongside earlier work on Ethereum; he was also among the first artists to release work on Solana. The physical practice reaches back further: exhibiting internationally since 2016, with presentations at Museum Halle Saint-Pierre in Paris, Art Basel Miami, the 2nd Triennial of Self-Taught Visionary Art in Belgrade, and a nomination for the Prix Suisse d’Art Brut, figurative painting built on dense, obsessive mark-making and an insistence on the irreversible. Remains is where the two paths collide: painting and blockchain bound into single objects, each incomplete without the other.
Bitcoin is the most consequential permanence system produced in the digital age. Its architecture assumes that what is recorded cannot be lost. Remains takes that assumption seriously enough to test it — and in doing so forces a reckoning with a fundamental asymmetry between physical and digital culture: one forgets by nature, the other records permanently regardless of intent.
I sat down with Rupture ahead of the exhibition to talk about decay as a medium, the collector as an unwilling participant, and what it costs to save anything.
BMAG: Let’s start with the mechanism, because it’s the basis of the whole series. Each digital component contains exactly 210,000 pixels – the number of blocks in a Bitcoin halving epoch – and beginning at the April 2028 halving, one pixel dies for every block the network mines. Discuss how you arrived at that structure. Did the concept come first and the math followed, or did the number 210,000 suggest the work?
Rupture: The concept was there before any of the pieces existed. I was thinking a lot about permanence, especially in relation to digital mediums. Bitcoin is seen as the most permanent and unchangeable record humanity has built, and Ordinals were marketed on exactly that thesis – a truly permanent storage layer, unlike NFTs on other chains with their broken links and files sitting on someone’s server. Persona, my first series on Ordinals, embraced that promise. With Remains I wanted to turn it on its head.
I think there is something beautiful about impermanence. We live in a moment where movements like transhumanism want to engineer it away, and I understand the impulse, but I’d argue the opposite: life would lose its meaning if it were eternal. The same applies to art. Tibetan monks spend weeks building a sand mandala and then sweep it away – the dissolution becomes part of the work.
So I set out to make a digital work that would be consumed by Bitcoin’s own metabolism. From there the structure basically assembled itself. The closest on-chain analogue to a pixel dying was a block being mined – a discrete, irreversible event that happens roughly every ten minutes, forever. So I linked them one to one. An epoch is 210,000 blocks, which meant the image had to be 210,000 pixels. The math followed the concept.

BMAG: The “kill switch” is hidden beneath the paint on the physical painting. To retrieve the code that stops the decay, the collector has to destroy a meaningful portion of the physical work – and then inscribe it as a child of the Ordinal. Did you paint these differently knowing the surface is also a type of vault? It’s very taboo to touch (or cut) a painting (outside of Lucio Fontana).
Rupture: I tried to approach these the way I would approach any other painting. The only real difference is that I had to start with the code. Each one was written on paper, laminated, and sealed at the center of the panel under layers of molding paste and gesso. Only then could the painting begin. So the secret is literally the first layer. Everything else sits on top of it.
As for the taboo – I think most of us, me included, are conditioned to ascribe a much higher value to the physical object. The painting feels irreplaceable in a way the inscription doesn’t, even when the inscription is the scarcer thing. That conditioning is what makes the concept work. The taboo gives the act of destruction its emotional weight, and that weight is what the collector has to sit with.
I deliberately left it open-ended. I’m not telling anyone what the right choice is. The collector confronts the question of value and permanence and answers it for themselves – publicly, and only once.
BMAG: There’s a lineage of destruction in art – Rauschenberg erasing de Kooning, Tinguely’s self-destroying machine at MoMA, Banksy’s shredder at Sotheby’s. And more recently, the “burn a physical to mint a digital” gesture that flared up during the initial NFT boom. Remains feels like a response to that last one in particular: in your work, destruction isn’t a spectacle the artist performs – it’s a responsibility the collector inherits. Where do you place yourself in that lineage, and what do you think the burn-to-mint era got wrong?
Rupture: I like to think of destruction as integral to creation. Jasper Johns destroyed nearly everything he made before 1954 so he could start over. Agnes Martin did the same, more than once. So artists questioning the preciousness of the art object is nothing new. And I think that preciousness is inherited – art objects have absorbed the aura that used to belong to relics. Now that commodities are the closest thing we have to a religion, cutting open a painting might be our version of desecration. Which is exactly why it carries weight.
The burn-to-mint mechanic treats the physical as a husk. You burned the painting to “upgrade” it into a token, the destruction was filmed, and the spectacle was the marketing. What it got wrong, I think, is that nothing was actually at stake. You destroyed something to get something the market valued more. That’s more of a transaction than a sacrifice.
In Remains there’s no version where you come out ahead. The collector already owns both halves, and destruction doesn’t produce anything new, it only decides which loss to accept. The loss runs on Bitcoin – a system built for remembering, repurposed as an engine of forgetting.

BMAG: The press text says the collector cannot remain passive – that inaction is itself a choice. That’s a strong tenet of the bitcoin idea. Self-custody works the same way: hold your own keys, and doing nothing is perhaps the best outcome. Did you set out to build a custody parable of some kind, or did the parallel arrive after? Artmaking can sometimes be nonlinear and we don’t see the connections in order.
Rupture: The parallel only occurred to me after the work existed. And funny enough, Remains actually inverts the rule. In self-custody, doing nothing is the safe move, while for Remains, doing nothing is what kills half the work.
But the deeper thing is the same in both. You’re on your own. There’s no institution behind you, no support line, no one to make the decision for you or undo it afterwards. The system just records what you do, and there are no exceptions.
Most people have never owned anything under those conditions. Bitcoiners have. I think that’s why they tend to understand this work faster – they know what it feels like to be the only one responsible for something that can’t be undone.
BMAG: At the next halving, the decay clock starts for any un-rescued work. Anyone can watch the inscriptions on-chain as they change. Is a completed black square a failed Remains, or the most honest version of the work?
Rupture: It definitely isn’t a failed Remains. It’s the piece brought to one of its logical outcomes. The work was never meant to be just the image – it’s the image plus the decision, and a black square is what one of those decisions looks like. It means the collector chose the painting, whether out of conviction or paralysis, and the chain holds the receipt: 210,000 confirmations of a single choice, applied one block at a time over four years. I don’t know of another artwork that documents its owner’s decision at that resolution.
And then there’s the Malevich analogue, which you opened with. He declared the zero point of painting. Remains arrives at the black square instead of starting from it – block by block, with an exit available the entire time. I don’t know which of the four pieces will end there, if any. That’s the one part of the work I can’t determine.

BMAG: For someone standing in front of these four paintings at the exhibition – someone who knows bitcoin as a price ticker but has never thought about what permanence actually costs – what do you want them to walk away thinking about?
Rupture: How permanence is never free. Nothing survives by default. Every object in every museum is there because someone paid for it to be – in money, in labor, in space, in other things thrown away to make room. History isn’t just what happened. It’s what someone decided was worth keeping. What persists does so because something else was set aside or destroyed. We just rarely see the other half of the equation.
Remains by Rupture debuts September 2–8, 2026 at PRIV.Y Gallery, 46 Hester Street, New York, presented by BMAG and running parallel to NFT.NYC. The opening reception is September 2. RSVP at luma.com/cckjg9kl.
BMAG is also running a bounty on X: enter for a chance to win Memory Theatre VI, an original work by Rupture. Full details and entry at shop.museum.b.tc/items/memory-theatre-vi.
Remains is now available to preview at https://shop.museum.b.tc/preview/remainsbyrupture. For acquisition inquiries, DM @BMAG_HQ on X or email bmag@btcmedia.org.
Follow Rupture on X @RuptureNFT.
The Bitcoin Museum & Art Gallery (BMAG) is the curatorial and cultural programming division of BTC Inc and the Bitcoin Conference. Learn more at museum.b.tc.
This post What Is Worth Preserving: Rupture on Remains, Decay, and the Collector’s Dilemma first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Dennis Koch.
Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Cools Off After $3 Billion ETF-Driven Surge
Bitcoin slid Friday afternoon, cooling down after a phenomenal run following huge investment from U.S. ETF buyers.
The leading cryptocurrency was trading for $77,379 on Friday afternoon in New York after dropping more than 3% over a 24-hour period.
Bitcoin hit a high this week of $81,281 but slowed down after Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh gave his first major speech as head of the central bank — saying on Friday that he had “more work to do” to fight inflation.
The Bitcoin price has in the past dropped when the Federal Reserve thinks inflation is too high because it means less chance of a rate cut; the leading cryptocurrency typically does better in a low-interest rate environment.
Bitcoin started surging last week after the U.S. Treasury would at least double the size of its liquidity-support buyback operations. The announcement last week hurt the dollar but non-yielding assets have benefited.
Exchange-traded funds, managed by the likes of BlackRock, Fidelity, and Grayscale have received net positive inflows for nine days in a row, according to Farside Investors data. Last week was their best week since October — when bitcoin hit a new all-time high — and that run has continued into this week.
Since August 17, investors have thrown over $3 billion at the funds. BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust received the lion’s share of the investment, but Morgan Stanley’s new Bitcoin Trust — which debuted this year — also experienced significant inflows.
Analysts have said that the so-called debasement trade — when investors buy an asset as a way to hedge against a currency losing value — was leading investors to eye-up bitcoin again.
Investors taking part in the trade think that bitcoin, gold and other precious metals are a good way to protect themselves from excessive government spending.
Total U.S. debt crossed $40 trillion for the first time this month.
This post Bitcoin Cools Off After $3 Billion ETF-Driven Surge first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.
Bitcoin Magazine

Debasement Trade Is Here Thanks to Government Debt — And Bitcoin Will Benefit: Grayscale
The debasement trade is back — and will benefit bitcoin.
That’s according to asset manager Grayscale’s crypto research team, who wrote in a note this week that the U.S. government debasing its currency would lead to cash hitting digital assets.
“Unchecked government debt growth undermines the credibility of fiat currencies and drives investors to seek out alternative stores of value like physical gold and certain cryptocurrencies,” the note by the firm’s head of research, Zach Pandl, read, adding that primarily bitcoin would benefit.
The so-called debasement trade is when investors buy an asset as a way to hedge against a currency losing value. The trade was hot last year, and helped bitcoin’s run, but the digital asset’s run lost steam after October as traders turned their attention to stocks related to artificial intelligence.
But since last week, bitcoin has benefited from news that the U.S. Treasury would at least double the size of its liquidity-support buyback operations. The announcement last week hurt the dollar but non-yielding assets have benefited.
“That buybacks are needed at all is the problem: heavy growth in government debt is driving up the cost of borrowing,” the note continued. “The Treasury is treating the symptoms (rising bond yields) because they cannot cure the disease (structural deficits).”
The note added that on the same day last week as the buyback announcement, the Treasury also said the U.S. public debt exceeded $40 trillion for the first time.
As debt and interest payments grow, the government needs to either raise taxes, cut spending, or issue more debt.
Bitcoiners see the more politically likely path as expanding the dollar supply — which is ultimately bad for the dollar, and good for scarce assets like bitcoin.
After bitcoin started surging last week, the dollar had its worst week of August and was trading at a three-month low.
Bitcoin was trading for $77,493 on Friday afternoon in New York after hitting a high this week of $81,281. Over a 24-hour period, the coin now sits unmoved, but over a 30-day period, it has jumped by more than 20%.
This post Debasement Trade Is Here Thanks to Government Debt — And Bitcoin Will Benefit: Grayscale first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.
Leveraged funds held a 41,252 BTC-equivalent net short across CME Bitcoin futures, including standard and Micro contracts on Aug. 25, while the CFTC snapshot showed the same category net long just 151 BTC in Coinbase's nano Bitcoin perpetual-style contract.
For the next forced unwind, the important distinction is scale rather than an evenly matched directional split. The report showed 118,267 BTC-equivalent of open interest across the two CME products, compared with 2,322 BTC on Coinbase. CME was about 51 times larger by that measure, and its leveraged-fund net short was roughly 272 times the magnitude of Coinbase's net long.
A standard CME Bitcoin futures contract represents 5 BTC and a Micro Bitcoin futures contract represents 0.1 BTC, according to CME's specifications. Leveraged funds were net short 8,114 standard contracts, or 40,570 BTC, and 6,821 micro contracts, or 682.1 BTC.
Each Coinbase nano perpetual-style contract represents 0.01 BTC. The category's 15,162-contract net long therefore equaled 151 BTC, which is the residual between 1,195 BTC-equivalent of gross longs and 1,043 BTC-equivalent of gross shorts.
CME positioning also became materially more net short during the week. From Aug. 18 to Aug. 25, the standard-contract net shifted 3,295 BTC further short and the micro net moved 777 BTC further short, a combined bearish change in net positioning of 4,072 BTC.
That change still cannot safely be called an outright bearish wager. The CFTC's category notes do not connect reported futures accounts to spot Bitcoin, exchange-traded fund holdings, or cross-venue hedges. Without matched Aug. 25 readings for CME basis and Coinbase funding, the snapshot cannot distinguish directional shorts from cash-and-carry trades or other hedges.
If CME shorts are uncovered directional positions, a squeeze would force futures buying through a pool far larger than Coinbase's current net long. If they are basis trades, closing them would pair futures buying with the sale of spot Bitcoin or ETF exposure, the same two-legged structure described in cash-and-carry analysis. That sale could offset part of the price effect even as the reported short contracts.
Coinbase can still generate venue-specific liquidations, a risk built into perpetual-style markets, but the 151 BTC net figure reveals neither gross leverage nor liquidation thresholds. Its small size cannot counterbalance the much larger CME position by itself.
ETF flows reinforce the timing limit. Farside data show US spot Bitcoin ETFs absorbed $1.12 billion from Aug. 24 through Aug. 27, then lost $201 million on Aug. 28. The five sessions remained net positive by $924 million, but the CFTC snapshot was fixed on Aug. 25 and cannot reflect the later inflows or Friday's reversal.
A clearer unwind signal would combine the next CFTC position change with matched CME basis, Coinbase funding, and ETF flows. Until then, the mismatch shows where the larger exposure sits, not whether it is a naked bet or one leg of a hedge.
The post Massive Bitcoin derivatives gap between CME and Coinbase threatens violent position shakeout appeared first on CryptoSlate.
Bitcoin is on track to log its best August performance since 2017, demonstrating remarkable resilience against back-to-back macro shocks as escalating US-Iran hostilities and a hawkish pivot from the Federal Reserve test the durability of the digital-asset rebound.
Data from CryptoSlate shows that the largest cryptocurrency is trading near $78,400 as of press time, bringing its monthly advance to more than 24%. This represents its strongest August rally in nine years and its biggest single-month gain since November 2024, per CoinGlass data.
The advance comes even as crude oil jumped above $90 a barrel following American airstrikes on Iranian targets and Tehran's subsequent retaliation against US military positions in Jordan, unleashing a fresh wave of risk aversion across global equity and bond markets.
Yet, rather than retreating under the weight of geopolitical instability and renewed inflation anxieties, Bitcoin has preserved its monthly gains, suggesting that a shift in internal market mechanics may be shielding the token from traditional cross-asset contagion.
The resilience on display following the Middle East military flare-up marks the second time in less than a week that digital assets have absorbed severe macro headwinds.
Last Friday, Bitcoin briefly dipped below $77,000 after Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh delivered an unexpectedly hawkish debut address at the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium.
At the event, Warsh explicitly challenged market expectations of monetary easing, warning that progress on lowering inflation has stalled well above the central bank’s 2% target and emphasizing that policymakers’ primary focus must remain on price stability.
Warsh also dismantled the Fed’s traditional forward-guidance framework, cautioning that excessive verbal commitments risk creating a “hall of mirrors” between policymakers and financial markets.
The Fed Chair pointed to resilient corporate investment, much of it tied to AI infrastructure, alongside unemployment near 4.1% and consumer spending growth above 2%, as evidence the economy can withstand tighter policy.
The remarks sent Treasury yields higher and lifted the market-implied probability of a 25-basis-point rate hike at the Fed’s September policy meeting to 60%.
While traditional risk assets buckled under the prospect of prolonged monetary tightness, Bitcoin staged a rapid weekend recovery, reclaiming the $78,000 handle just before geopolitical headlines broke.
The renewed outbreak of fighting in the Middle East has introduced a secondary inflation impulse that threatens to further complicate the Fed’s policy path.
Over the weekend, US forces struck two Iranian rocket launchers on Larak Island in the first direct American military action against Tehran in more than a month.
US Central Command confirmed the operation, noting the launchers were reportedly preparing to deploy naval mines into the Strait of Hormuz. In an X statement, the authorities said:
“[US] took limited, precise action against IRGC minelaying forces posing an imminent threat in the Strait of Hormuz. In essence, Iran created the threat, and the US military eliminated it to protect civilian mariners, commercial shipping, and the free flow of global commerce.”
Iran retaliated by targeting American installations in Jordan, where Jordanian air defenses intercepted eight inbound missiles.
The clashes pushed Brent crude up more than 3% to around $91 a barrel on Monday, bolstered further by signals from Washington that the US plans to intensify secondary sanctions on Iranian oil exports.
The transmission mechanism from the Persian Gulf to digital assets is direct: higher oil prices reignite headline inflation risks, reinforce the Fed's higher-for-longer rate posture, and reduce broader dollar liquidity.
However, commodity strategists caution that the geopolitical risk premium in crude is facing structural limits.
Ole Hansen, head of commodity strategy at Saxo Bank, said:
“These developments have once again reduced the prospects of bringing the conflict to an end.”
Yet Hansen noted that catastrophic supply disruptions remain unlikely in the immediate term, pointing out that an estimated 6 million to 8 million barrels per day of crude continue to flow uninterrupted through the Strait of Hormuz, capping upside risk for global benchmark prices.
By keeping the energy shock contained, the steady maritime flow has prevented a broader liquidity panic, giving Bitcoin room to consolidate rather than capitulate.
Beyond the macro backdrop, Bitcoin's internal market structure has strengthened after months of weakness.
Fidelity Investments Director of Global Macro Jurrien Timmer said Bitcoin's recent price action suggests the corrective phase may have matured.
Timmer said Bitcoin has held the lower boundary of his power-law curve while spending enough time correcting to satisfy what he describes as the time component of a mild four-year-cycle winter.
Under Timmer's framework, Bitcoin's recent cycle low near $59,572 remained above power-law support around $58,237, leaving the cryptocurrency within roughly 2.3% of the model's lower boundary before rebounding.

We can't, however, assume from the framework that Bitcoin has definitively completed its correction, nor does Bitcoin's historical four-year cycle guarantee future price behavior.
Timmer's analysis instead suggests the latest downturn has met both the price and duration conditions for a cyclical correction to have matured.
That more constructive long-term setup is being tested against weaker evidence of fresh capital entering the market.
Analysts at market analytics firm Bit Official said growth in aggregate stablecoin market capitalization, a widely followed gauge of deployable crypto liquidity, has remained largely stagnant. While Circle's USDC has recorded modest supply growth, Tether's USDT has shown little material expansion.
That contrasts with the expansion between August 2024 and October 2025, when USDT grew from $120 billion to $196 billion, and USDC climbed from $35 billion to $75 billion.
Without a sustained resumption of fiat-to-stablecoin creation, market watchers warn that the current advance may rely too heavily on derivatives positioning rather than durable spot accumulation.
Bitcoin's improving derivatives positioning is running ahead of activity in the underlying spot market, leaving the strength of the August rebound still short of full confirmation.
Bit Official said Bitcoin's options skew has flipped positive for the first time since October 2025, reflecting stronger demand for call options relative to downside-protective puts. September implied volatility surged from 33.8% to 41.1% before moderating to 38.5%, while traders have rolled shorter-dated calls into October and December expirations or sold calls against existing Bitcoin positions.
However, BTC's spot trading tells a less convincing story.
CryptoQuant data shows exchange volumes remained near levels last seen in September 2023 despite Bitcoin's sharp August advance, extending the subdued activity recorded in July. The divergence suggests the price recovery has yet to draw the kind of trading participation that accompanied previous market peaks.

The contrast is particularly stark against October 2025, when Bitcoin reached its previous market top. Monthly spot volume on Binance has fallen to about $44 billion from $198 billion, while Gate's volume dropped to $14 billion from $53.4 billion and Bybit's declined to $17.4 billion from $41.2 billion.
That amounts to an average decline of roughly 70% across the three exchanges.
However, early signs suggest the contraction may be stabilizing. Binance's August volume was about $1.6 billion higher than in July, while overall activity across the major exchanges remained broadly around the previous month's levels rather than deteriorating further.
CryptoQuant said the stabilization could indicate that investor disengagement reached an extreme during the summer. A sustained recovery in volume alongside rising prices would provide stronger evidence that Bitcoin is entering another expansionary phase.
That leaves the price itself facing an equally important test.
Bitcoin is negotiating overhead resistance between $78,214 and $82,139. Bit Official said a decisive break and hold above $82,000 would strengthen the bullish thesis, while $70,973 remains an important level for preserving the broader uptrend.
Barring a sharp reversal, Bitcoin will close August with its strongest performance for the month since 2017. But the next leg of the rally may require something largely absent so far: a meaningful return of spot trading activity.
A sustained move through $80,000 and $82,000 accompanied by rising exchange volumes would provide stronger confirmation that the rebound is broadening beyond price momentum alone.
The post Bitcoin on course for best August since 2017 despite renewed US-Iran hostilities appeared first on CryptoSlate.
The SEC’s proposed Regulation Crypto Assets offers a $75 million fundraising ceiling. A Senate market-structure framework starts with a greater-of-$50-million-or-10% formula. Those numbers look comparable, but they attach to different legal mechanisms.
The SEC proposal would create exemptions by rule for certain crypto-asset offerings. Section 103 of the Senate’s version of the CLARITY Act would create a statutory exemption for certain transactions involving ancillary assets sold pursuant to an investment contract. The distinction changes which issuers and instruments qualify, what buyers receive, and how the two paths could interact.
Neither route is currently available. The SEC proposal remains subject to public comment through Oct. 20, 2026, while the congressional framework remains unfinished legislation.
The SEC proposal describes two routes. A limited “startup” exemption would allow up to $5 million over a four-year period. A separate offering-and-reporting exemption would permit up to $75 million in a 12-month period, paired with disclosure and continuing-reporting duties.
The Senate text takes a different approach. Its Section 103 would exempt qualifying transactions in “ancillary assets” sold under an investment contract. The annual amount would be the greater of $50 million or 10% of the total dollar value of the issuer’s outstanding ancillary assets, measured during a four-year period. An issuer could not exceed $200 million in aggregate sales under the exemption.
That 10% alternative means the congressional route is not necessarily a $50 million ceiling. For an issuer whose outstanding ancillary assets are valued above $500 million, 10% would exceed $50 million, although the separate $200 million aggregate limit would still matter. The calculation also depends on a category, ancillary assets, that is not identical to the covered assets and transactions contemplated by the SEC proposal.
| Issue | SEC proposal | Senate Section 103 |
|---|---|---|
| Current status | Proposed agency rules | Pending statutory text |
| Covered object | Qualifying crypto-asset offerings under proposed exemptions | Qualifying ancillary-asset transactions under an investment contract |
| Main limits | $5 million over four years; or $75 million in 12 months | Greater of $50 million annually or 10% of outstanding ancillary-asset value during four years; $200 million aggregate |
| Issuer access | Depends on the conditions of the chosen SEC exemption | Depends on the statutory ancillary-asset and transaction conditions |
| Retail rule | Proposed purchaser limits apply under the larger SEC route | No matching purchaser-cap structure appears in Section 103 |
| Resale | No general holding period in the larger proposed SEC route | Special conditions apply to specified related persons and coordinated-control holders |
| Timing | Would apply only after adoption and effectiveness | Would apply only after enactment and the statutory implementation period |

The practical choice would therefore turn on more than the amount an issuer wants to raise. Counsel would first need to identify the asset, the transaction, the issuer’s eligibility and any affiliate or control relationships. A token sale that fits one route might not fit the other.
Under the SEC’s proposed $75 million route, purchaser limits would generally restrict how much an investor could buy, using a 10% financial-capacity formula. The proposal would require offering disclosures, audited financial statements for the larger tier, and annual, semiannual and current reports. It also says there would be no general resale restriction under that route and proposes federal preemption of state registration and qualification requirements for covered offerings.
The SEC proposal would not erase federal anti-fraud law. Its release also presents the exemptions as nonexclusive, meaning an issuer could rely on another available exemption if the facts and conditions support it.
The Senate framework offers a different package. Section 103 requires an initial filing after the first sale and semiannual disclosures while the conditions apply. The bill text preserves specified federal liability provisions, including Securities Act Section 12(a)(2), Exchange Act Section 10(b) and Rule 10b-5. It also preserves private rights of action rather than replacing them with a bespoke remedy.
At the same time, the Senate text says that failure to satisfy the exemption does not, by itself, determine whether the ancillary asset is a security. That clause separates compliance with the transaction exemption from the broader legal classification of the asset.
Resale treatment also differs. The SEC’s larger proposed route does not impose a general holding period. The Senate text instead places conditions on sales by related persons and holders acting as a coordinated group to control the network. Those rules could matter most for founders, insiders and concentrated holders, even when ordinary downstream trading looks less constrained.
Federal preemption is another fault line. The SEC proposal expressly addresses state registration and qualification for its covered offerings. The Senate text would operate through a federal statutory exemption and related market-structure provisions, but its preemption consequences must be read from the enacted text as a whole.
If Congress enacted provisions that directly conflicted with an SEC rule, the agency would have to administer its rules consistently with the later statute.
The current texts leave room for coexistence. The SEC proposal says its exemptions would be nonexclusive, while the Senate bill creates a targeted statutory route for transactions in ancillary assets. An issuer could potentially assess both, provided it independently met every condition of the route used. A final law could also direct, narrow or supersede portions of the SEC framework, and later SEC rulemaking could modify the proposal before adoption.
Timing reinforces the uncertainty. The SEC must first complete notice-and-comment rulemaking. The Senate text contains its own effective and implementation provisions, including a period tied to enactment and required rulemaking. Transition provisions address some offerings and reporting obligations, but they do not make an unfinished bill operative now.
Congressional versions also remain a moving target. The Senate Banking Committee advanced one text in May, a reported Senate version appeared in June, and an updated discussion text was released in July. Any legal conclusions will need to be checked against the version that ultimately advances, not treated as fixed by an earlier draft.
The headline $25 million difference is therefore the least reliable guide. The SEC route pairs a fixed 12-month ceiling with purchaser caps, audited financials and continuing reports. The Senate route uses an asset-value alternative, a four-year framework and a $200 million aggregate ceiling, while preserving a different liability and disclosure structure. For issuers and investors, the operative divide is the legal object and the attached rights, not the first number in each proposal.
The post Why the SEC’s $75 million crypto path is not the same deal Congress is offering appeared first on CryptoSlate.
Malicious actors exposed two decentralized finance (DeFi) lenders to over $84 million in losses over four days, using variations of a price-manipulation strategy previously targeted by US regulators.
The larger incident hit Tectonic on the Cronos blockchain, where security firm GoPlus estimated roughly $75 million was affected.
Three days earlier, Moonwell’s MAMO lending market on Base was left with about $9.1 million in residual debt following another attack involving an illiquid token.
The Tectonic attacker appears to have exploited the protocol’s treatment of TONIC, a relatively thinly traded token that could be deposited as collateral and used to support borrowing.
GoPlus described the incident as a price-manipulation and over-borrow attack in which the attacker repeatedly looped collateral and borrowing positions while pushing TONIC sharply higher within minutes.
Tectonic assigned TONIC a collateral factor of about 20%, meaning every $100 of collateral recognized by the protocol could support roughly $20 in borrowing.
As TONIC’s market price climbed, the value assigned to the attacker’s position increased automatically. GoPlus estimated that the manipulated holdings eventually represented about $375 million in collateral value, translating into roughly $75 million of potential borrowing capacity.
The attacker then used that expanded credit line to withdraw USDT and other liquid assets.
The trade exploited a fundamental imbalance. A token trading in a shallow market can sometimes be moved substantially with comparatively little capital, while lending contracts may use that elevated price to calculate borrowing limits against pools holding significantly more valuable assets.
Once the buying pressure disappears and the manipulated token falls, the collateral backing those loans can be worth substantially less than the assets already withdrawn.
Cronos halted block production to contain the incident, though about $6 million had already been bridged to Ethereum and swapped into roughly 2,600 ETH. The halt prevented the remaining affected assets from moving across the network.
As of Monday morning, Cronos said the blockchain remained halted while it investigated the Tectonic exploit with assistance from security teams across the industry. The network has not disclosed when operations will resume, while Tectonic has yet to publish a final accounting of the losses.
Notably, Moonwell faced a related problem only three days earlier.
The Aug. 27 attack targeted its MAMO market on Base. The attacker began with about $1.95 million in USDC and accumulated more than 94 million MAMO tokens.
The attacker then transferred about 53 million MAMO directly into Moonwell’s mMAMO collateral contract without minting additional shares. That maneuver increased the amount of underlying MAMO represented by each existing share by roughly 3.7 times.
At the same time, MAMO’s market price surged from about $0.0106 to $0.4313.
Those two movements sharply increased the value Moonwell recognized for the attacker’s collateral. The attacker subsequently completed 18 borrows totaling roughly $11 million in cbBTC, WETH, USDC, and wstETH.
Liquidations began just 32 seconds after the final borrow, but Moonwell was left with about $9.1 million in residual borrower obligations. Security firm SlowMist separately estimated losses at roughly $8.7 million and identified reliance on pricing from a thin MAMO market as the root vulnerability.
While the mechanics of the two attacks were not identical, they followed a broader strategy of using an illiquid asset to manufacture collateral value, then convert that inflated valuation into borrowing power against deeper pools of capital in DeFi strategies.
The most prominent precedent came in October 2022 with Mango Markets.
Avraham Eisenberg built positions linked to MNGO before aggressively buying the thinly traded token on exchanges feeding prices into the platform. MNGO’s reported value rose more than 13-fold in about 30 minutes.
Eisenberg then used the inflated value of those positions as collateral to withdraw more than $110 million in digital assets from Mango Markets.
US regulators pursued the conduct in early 2023. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) described the operation as a “manipulative and deceptive scheme” and said the case was its first involving a strategy commonly referred to as oracle manipulation on a decentralized digital-asset platform.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a parallel action, alleging Eisenberg artificially increased MNGO’s price and used the resulting collateral valuation to borrow and withdraw about $116 million.
More than three years after those enforcement actions, Tectonic and Moonwell show that variations of the same economic attack remain viable.
The recurring weakness lies in lending systems that allow thinly traded assets to support borrowing limits far greater than the liquidity required to move their prices.
When those limits adjust automatically as collateral prices rise, a manipulated market can quickly become a gateway into much larger pools of liquid assets.
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USBC has registered a block of already-issued shares equal to almost its entire outstanding common stock for potential resale, creating a potential market overhang alongside a balance sheet that relies heavily on Bitcoin.
The company’s August 27 amended preliminary prospectus covers up to 359,815,000 shares held by selling stockholders. That equals about 92.7% of the 388,144,429 common shares outstanding as of August 24. USBC would receive no proceeds from any sale or other disposition by those holders.
No transaction is disclosed. The covered shares already exist, and the selling stockholders may dispose of all, some or none of them. The filing creates a route to market for a very large ownership block while leaving the current share count and control position unchanged until transactions occur.
| Risk layer | Latest disclosed figure | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Registered resale shares | 359.815 million | About 92.7% of common shares outstanding; resale proceeds go to selling holders |
| Payward loan | $18 million at 8.5% | Matures July 28, 2027 and is secured by approximately 478 BTC |
| Loan sensitivity | 37.9% decline as of Aug. 24 | Company-modeled drop in pledged BTC value to the 130% collateral-call ratio, assuming no repayment or added collateral |
| Options-trading pledge | 34.1% of treasury BTC | Separately disclosed; the filing does not say whether it overlaps with Payward collateral |
| Cash and equivalents | $2.982 million | June 30 balance, excluding $660,000 of restricted cash |
Most of the covered shares belong to Goldeneye 1995 LLC. USBC issued Goldeneye approximately 357.8 million shares in August 2025 in exchange for 1,000 BTC and $15 million in cash. Another 2 million registered shares are held by J3E2A2Z LP.
Goldeneye’s position is economic and corporate. The filing says it held about 92.2% of USBC’s voting power when it approved a proposed reverse stock split by written consent in June. That concentration allowed the holder to act without a special stockholder meeting.
A registration statement changes what the holder can do with the position. Ownership and voting power change only when shares are actually sold, transferred, pledged or otherwise disposed of, or when future issuances dilute the stake. The preliminary prospectus is subject to completion, and the covered shares cannot be sold under it until the registration statement becomes effective.
The filing therefore creates two distinct investor exposures. The first is potential supply: up to 359.815 million shares have a registered route to resale or other disposition. The second is control: Goldeneye retains its voting position unless transactions or dilution change it. A future sale could affect both, depending on its size and buyer, while a registration with no follow-through would affect neither the share count nor voting ownership.
The company receives no cash from selling-stockholder transactions even if they occur. That separates this registration from a primary offering that funds the issuer. Any liquidity created by a resale accrues to the selling holder; USBC continues to fund operations through its own cash, treasury activity and financing arrangements.

USBC’s latest loan disclosure showed $18 million of principal outstanding under its credit facility with Payward Interactive. The borrowing carries an 8.5% annual interest rate, matures July 28, 2027 and was secured by approximately 478 BTC as of August 24.
The company modeled that pledged Bitcoin collateral could lose about 37.9% of its value from that dated snapshot before coverage reached the 130% collateral-call ratio, assuming USBC made no repayment and posted no additional collateral. It reported no collateral calls, mandatory repayments or liquidation events as of August 24.
That percentage describes a company sensitivity at one point in time. It moves with the collateral value, accrued fees, loan balance and amount of BTC posted. It provides a measure of room to the call ratio, not a forecast or an immutable Bitcoin price at which Payward must act.
The master loan agreement sets a rapid response once the cushion is exhausted. At the collateral-call ratio specified in the applicable term sheet, USBC has 24 hours to add collateral or repay enough loaned currency to restore the required margin. At or below the liquidation ratio, Payward may liquidate collateral without notice, charge a 1% liquidation fee and hold USBC responsible for any remaining shortfall.
Higher Bitcoin collateral values improve the ratio mechanically. Payward’s enforcement rights remain embedded in the contract, and the pledged BTC remains outside USBC’s unrestricted pool while it secures the loan.
The treasury disclosure adds another layer. USBC reported approximately 1,029.25 BTC in total holdings as of August 24. It separately reported approximately 478 BTC pledged to Payward and about 34.1% of its Bitcoin treasury pledged for options trading, with the options counterparty controlling the relevant private keys.
The filing provides no reconciliation between those two figures. The 478 BTC and the 34.1% cannot be added to calculate total encumbered Bitcoin because some or all of the pools could overlap. The disclosures establish multiple collateral and control arrangements tied to the treasury; they leave the aggregate amount unavailable for a reliable calculation.
That uncertainty changes the risk analysis. If the pools overlap, adding them would exaggerate encumbrance. If they are separate, substantially more of the treasury is committed than the loan figure shows on its own. Either structure leaves counterparty terms, margin requirements and asset control relevant to how much balance-sheet flexibility USBC retains during stress.
USBC’s June quarter filing showed $2.982 million of cash and equivalents at June 30, plus $660,000 of restricted cash. During the first half, it used $15.225 million of net cash in operating activities and received $15 million from loan draws.
The financing inflow nearly matched six months of operating cash use. Period-end unrestricted cash covered only a fraction of that first-half outflow. Those figures connect the Payward facility directly to USBC’s operating liquidity and explain why collateral availability matters beyond day-to-day Bitcoin volatility.
The $46.343 million first-half net loss included large accounting items. It incorporated a $29.710 million unrealized loss from changes in digital-asset fair value, $11.212 million of stock-based compensation and a $2.531 million credit-loss provision, partly offset by an $11.976 million deferred-tax benefit.
USBC also reported $2.228 million of net derivative income. The cash-flow statement removed that amount as a negative adjustment in reconciling net loss to operating cash flow. The line records income from the treasury strategy; it does not equal $2.228 million of unrestricted cash available at June 30.
The financial statements answer four separate questions. Net loss describes reported profitability. The operating cash-flow statement measures cash consumed by operations. Derivative income captures results from the options strategy. The balance sheet shows the cash available at the period end.
Together, the filings show risk moving across three connected channels. The August 24 collateral snapshot gave USBC room before a Payward call. The resale registration made a controlling holder’s stake ready for potential market disposition without raising cash for the company. First-half cash use remained dependent on financing secured by treasury assets, while another portion of the treasury supported options trading under an unreconciled collateral arrangement.
Bitcoin price strength can widen the loan buffer. It leaves the registered share supply, control concentration and operating cash requirement in place. The next changes that matter are actual selling-stockholder dispositions, repayments or new draws under the loan, movements in pledged BTC and a clearer reconciliation of the treasury committed to each counterparty.
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Around 15.5 million WFLOW drained from the lending market More Markets on August 31, 2026, worth roughly $9.3 million according to the security firm Blockaid. The attacker needed no stolen keys and no gap in the blockchain underneath. They used two building blocks that are wired into almost every larger lending market: a liquid staking token as collateral, and the so-called E-Mode, which treats both sides of a loan as equivalent.
That is precisely why this incident can concern you beyond one small chain. If you have borrowed against staked Ethereum somewhere, or one stablecoin against another, your position is very likely running in the same mode. This article sets out what is established as of today, what remains open, how E-Mode works, and which four details you can look up in your own lending market.
More Markets is a non-custodial lending market from More Labs that builds on the Aave V3 codebase and runs on Flow EVM. Users deposit assets there to earn interest, or post them as collateral to borrow against. WFLOW and ankrFLOW are among the supported markets.
According to Blockaid, the incident began on August 31, 2026 at 07:58 UTC. 15.5 million WFLOW disappeared from the reserve labelled mFlowWFLOW. Blockaid explicitly described the figure of roughly $9.3 million as detected impact and not as a final loss figure; the definitive amount is not yet settled, because the transactions are still being traced. The security firm made the incident public first through its channel on the short-message service X, from where several trade outlets picked it up the same day.
More Markets commented briefly on the same day, saying its own team was investigating the reports of an attack and would share its findings. A full post-mortem of the incident is not available at the time of writing. Everything this article says about the sequence of events therefore comes from the security firm's observation and not from the protocol's own analysis.
Blockaid's brief description is that the attacker used a bonded liquid staking token from Ankr together with E-Mode to empty the WFLOW reserve. Put at greater length: the value of the deposited ankrFLOW holdings was set higher in the protocol than it actually was. Against that overvalued collateral, the attacker borrowed real WFLOW and cleared out the reserve with it.
What matters just as much is what that description does not say. Blockaid did not describe either Ankr itself or the Flow blockchain as compromised. On this account, only the More Markets application running on Flow EVM was affected. Whether the weakness sat in the More Markets implementation, in the way the Ankr asset was handled, in the pricing assumptions, or in the interplay between those parts, has not been established so far.
In the two incidents of the past week, the lever lay in the price of a thinly traded token each time. That can be observed and read off the price chart after the fact, as our analysis of the Moonwell exploit on Base on August 30 describes. The route sketched out here is a different one: it does not necessarily require a market price to be driven upwards. It is enough for a protocol to derive the value of collateral from a rule that, under certain conditions, no longer matches reality.
E-Mode, written out as Efficiency Mode, is a setting in Aave V3 that permits considerably higher borrowing limits for closely correlated assets. The idea behind it is obvious enough. Anyone posting Ethereum as collateral and borrowing Ethereum carries almost no price risk between the two sides, because it is the same good. Anyone posting staked Ethereum and borrowing Ethereum carries almost no price risk either, because both values normally move in lockstep.
Aave turns this into categories of its own. Each category sets its own values for the assets it contains: the borrowing limit, the threshold at which liquidation kicks in, and the bonus a liquidator receives. The difference is substantial. According to Aave, ordinary borrowing against Ethereum permits around 80 percent of the deposited value, while E-Mode with staked Ethereum as collateral and Ethereum as the loan allows up to 93 percent.
Those thirteen percentage points sound unremarkable, but they change the arithmetic fundamentally. At 80 percent, a fifth of the collateral value remains as a buffer. At 93 percent, seven percent is left. A price drop that would pass without consequence in ordinary mode leads to liquidation in E-Mode. Aave describes the setting in its own documentation on Efficiency Mode and names the underlying assumption there as well: the mode assumes that correlated assets stay correlated.

A liquid staking token is a tradable receipt for a deposited staking position. Anyone staking a cryptocurrency locks it up for a certain period. A liquid staking provider accepts the deposit, takes over the staking, and issues a token in return that can still be traded, lent and posted as collateral. With Ethereum, stETH and rETH are the best-known examples; with Flow it is the ankrFLOW involved here.
The decisive point for any lending market is this: that token is not the same thing as the underlying asset. Its value is derived from a position that can only be unwound after a waiting period. How a protocol sets that derived value is a decision each protocol makes for itself. Some query a market price. Others calculate the value from the ratio of deposited quantity to issued receipts. Both have advantages and drawbacks, and both can come under pressure.
Anyone interested in the yield side of these products will find the providers and their terms in our overview of the best staking platforms. For this article the other side counts: a liquid staking token serving as collateral ties together two risks that were previously separate. The staking risk and the lending market risk then hang on the same position.
As of the afternoon of August 31, 2026, the incident breaks cleanly into three parts. The on-chain movement is established: 15.5 million WFLOW left the reserve, and Blockaid named both the triggering transaction and the onward transfers of the funds that followed. The security firm's assessment is likewise established, namely that a bonded liquid staking token and E-Mode together opened the route.
The figure of roughly $9.3 million is flagged as an estimate. Blockaid marked it as detected impact, which means the sum may come out above or below the final number, depending on where the funds went and how much of that can be recovered.
The cause remains open. Nobody has yet evidenced whether the fault lay in More Markets' adaptation of the Aave code, in the parameters of the E-Mode category, in the price source for ankrFLOW, or in some combination of these. Anyone naming an unambiguous cause today is going beyond what is publicly known. That restraint is more than a formality: in the incidents of recent weeks, the first explanation offered has shifted several times once the post-mortem arrived.
A large share of today's lending markets are copies of an established protocol placed on a different chain and fitted out with their own values, rather than independent designs. The technical term for that is a fork. More Markets is one such offshoot of Aave V3.
For you as a user, that produces a difference which is barely visible in the interface. The code may be the same; the numbers are not. Borrowing limits, liquidation thresholds, caps on the borrowable quantity and the choice of price source are set by each offshoot itself, and it does so for a market that is often considerably thinner than the original's. The same setting that is defensible on a deep market can be dangerous on a shallow one.
On top of that comes the question of who is allowed to adjust those values at all, and how quickly that works. The Ajna incident of August 29 showed the opposite pole: there the protocol was immutable and had no governance, which is why there was no pause button. Almost all lending markets sit somewhere between those two ends, and where exactly a protocol stands determines what is possible at all in an emergency.
This is where the incident turns practical. If you have an open position in a lending market, there are four things you can look up today, and you need neither programming knowledge nor special tools for it. All four appear in the interface of the protocol concerned or in its documentation.
First: is your position running in E-Mode? The setting is usually a toggle in the account view and carries labels there such as E-Mode, Efficiency Mode or Correlated Assets. If it is active, the higher limits of the relevant category apply to you.
Second: how far is your position from the liquidation threshold? Most interfaces show a health factor for this. If it sits close to one, a small movement is enough. The buffer in E-Mode is narrower by construction, so the same numeric value is less reassuring there than in ordinary mode.

A depeg is the drifting apart of two values that are meant to move in lockstep. With a liquid staking token, that means the receipt is worth less on the market than the position it represents. It happens when many holders want to exit at once while unwinding the staking position takes time.
In ordinary mode, drift of that kind is uncomfortable. In E-Mode it can end the position, even though nothing has been lost to you economically. Your collateral still represents the same quantity of the underlying asset, but the price the protocol applies has fallen, and the narrow buffer no longer absorbs it. Aave names exactly that as the principal risk of this setting.
Anyone wanting to see the yield side and the risk side of lending markets next to each other will find the providers and their terms in the comparison of crypto lending platforms; we took apart the underlying mechanics of interest and risk in our article on the interest and risks in crypto lending from August 16, 2026.
Bad debt describes a loan that no longer has sufficient collateral behind it and can no longer be covered by liquidation either. That gap does not disappear; it travels. In a lending market it hits the depositors of the reserve that was borrowed from first.
On More Markets, the reserve concerned is the WFLOW reserve. Anyone who deposited WFLOW there to earn interest is tied to an event they took no part in and made no decision about. That is the most uncomfortable feature of incidents of this kind, and it repeats: in the incident on Base mentioned above, the open gap hit depositors who had never touched the token that triggered it.
Third in the series of details you can look up: which market exactly is your deposit sitting in? Many protocols separate a core market, in which several assets share a common liability, from isolated markets, in which a shortfall stays contained. This distinction determines whether a shortfall in an entirely different asset can reach you.
Fourth: where does the protocol source the price of your collateral? The answer is in the documentation, usually under headings such as Oracle or Price Feed. If a single trading venue is named there as the source and the asset is thinly traded, you know the weak point.
There is plenty of room between doing nothing and exiting entirely. You can switch E-Mode off if your buffer allows it, and fall back to the ordinary limits. You can add collateral and widen the distance to the threshold. And you can move a position sitting on an offshoot with a thin market over to the protocol whose parameters are carried by broader oversight. Which of these routes makes sense for you depends on your position; none of them is a recommendation for everyone.
Regardless of whether this incident affects you, the same advice applies to every shortfall in a lending market: secure the evidence while it is still retrievable. That includes the address of your position, the transaction numbers for the deposit and the outflow, the balance before and after the event, and a dated printout of the protocol interface.
Whether and how a loss of this kind has tax consequences is a question of the individual case and the circumstances, which a tax adviser has to assess. What you can influence yourself is the evidence. Protocol interfaces tend to disappear quickly after incidents, and what you can still download today may be out of reach in a few weeks.
Because reports about incidents often take on a life of their own in circulation, the boundary belongs here explicitly. On Blockaid's account there was no indication that Ankr itself was affected, and none that the Flow blockchain or its infrastructure were impaired. What was described is an incident in a single application running on Flow EVM.
This distinction is no quibble. For you it marks the difference between a chain whose balances are in question and a chain on which one of many applications has taken damage. If you hold assets on Flow that have nothing to do with this lending market, no action is required on what is publicly known so far. How that looks once a full post-mortem is available remains to be seen.
There is a reason why this kind of incident does not occur in supervised offerings: there a provider makes the decisions about collateral and borrowing, and is liable for them. In an open lending market, that assessment sits with you. It is the price of direct access, and anyone unwilling to pay it will find the supervised alternatives and their terms in the overview of regulated crypto exchanges. For an understanding of the prices such positions run against, a look at our Ethereum price prediction helps, because most E-Mode categories ultimately hang on that value.
The number of incidents in lending markets has been strikingly high in recent days, and all of them followed different routes. Deriving a pattern from that would be premature, because the post-mortems are still outstanding. What can be said is more modest and useful all the same: the building blocks taken apart here are present in many protocols, and their values can be looked up.
The incident was picked up by several trade outlets the same day; the fullest account, including Blockaid's figures, is at crypto.news.
(As of August 31, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
The Mina network will temporarily suspend operations on Thursday, September 3, 2026. Between 10:00 and 18:00 UTC, a transaction stop, a full network halt and a restart under new protocol rules follow one another. Anyone holding MINA is affected in three places: transfers submitted too late will not make it onto the chain. Exchanges will suspend deposits and withdrawals. And anyone who has delegated their holdings will receive no block rewards for the duration of the pause, because no filled blocks are produced during that time.
The upgrade is called Mesa. The development company o1Labs has published the timetable with exact times, along with an overview of what users, exchanges and node operators can expect. Both documents are publicly available and form the basis of this article. The deadline is three days away, and the only preparation the vast majority of investors need takes five minutes.
Mesa is a hard fork, meaning a change to the protocol rules that is not backwards compatible. A hard fork requires every node on the network to switch to the same new software at the same time, because the old version would no longer recognize the new blocks as valid. At Mina, this switch does not happen while the network keeps running. The chain is halted on schedule, brought into a defined final state, and then restarted under the new version.
The date was prepared in several stages. The rule changes were confirmed in an on-chain vote that ran from December 8 to December 15, 2025; voting power was determined by a snapshot date of November 22, 2025. A dedicated testnet and dry runs with node operators followed. On August 19, 2026, Mesa was first rolled out on the Devnet testnet before the mainnet date was set.
For you as an investor, the governance history matters in one respect only: it shows that the date is a planned event rather than an emergency measure after an incident. That sets Mesa apart from the chain halts that have followed attacks recently. Knowing the difference between a planned halt and a forced one makes reports about stalled blockchains far easier to read calmly.
The o1Labs timetable names four markers, all on September 3, 2026 and all in UTC. Central European Summer Time runs two hours ahead, so 10:00 UTC is 12:00 in Berlin.
In practice this means the decisive moment for you is 10:00 UTC, and not 15:00 UTC. From the late morning onwards the chain is already dead for transfers, even though it is still technically writing blocks. Anyone who initiates a withdrawal at 14:00 UTC has missed the train, without any error message saying so.
A blockchain is a shared ledger without a central authority. For thousands of computers to arrive independently at the same result, they have to apply the same rules. When those rules change, there are two routes. Either the new version is built so that old nodes continue to accept the new blocks, which is called a soft fork. Or the change goes deep enough that the old and the new version reject each other, and then it is a hard fork.
For Mesa, Mina takes the orderly route through a defined halt. The network agrees on a final valid state, freezes it, and restarts from that state. The advantage is that two competing chains cannot emerge, as has happened with contested hard forks in the past. The price is the downtime you will feel on September 3.
What that looks like in practice can be read off a second date in the same week: Zilliqa is carrying out its hard fork as early as September 2, with its own swap mechanism for the tokens. We described that case in Zilliqa Hard Fork on September 2, 2026. The Pasteur hard fork at BNB in August followed the same pattern. The comparison is worth making, because it shows how differently the networks handle the same underlying problem.

The stop-transaction slot is the point from which submitted transfers no longer feed into the state that survives the upgrade. The wording in the timetable is unambiguous: transactions submitted after the stop-transaction slot are not present on the chain after the upgrade.
This is not a loss of your balances. Your holdings remain where they were before 10:00 UTC. The movement is what disappears; the money stays put. So anyone sending MINA from an exchange to their own address at 11:00 UTC has to expect that the transfer simply did not take place and will have to be initiated again after the restart.
It gets awkward wherever a payment is tied to a deadline. If you are settling an invoice in MINA, want to post collateral for a position elsewhere, or have a deadline to meet with a third-party provider, take September 3 out of your planning altogether. The calmest route is to get everything necessary done on September 1 or 2 and treat Thursday as a public holiday.
The vast majority of investors hold MINA on a trading venue and not in their own wallet. For this group the message is clear: MINA deposits and withdrawals will be suspended during the downtime window. No individual exchange is choosing this. It follows inevitably from a chain that processes no transfers at all during that period.
Trading on the exchange itself can carry on unaffected. Buying and selling take place in the provider's own books and never touch the blockchain. Anyone who only wants to trade may notice nothing at all. Anyone who wants to move MINA in or out on that day stands in front of a locked door. Which trading venues come into question, and how they differ on deposits and withdrawals, is shown in our comparison of the best crypto exchanges.
Every provider announces pauses of this kind in its own notification area, usually under headings such as Announcements or System Status. Two points matter here. First, the exchanges' windows rarely start and end exactly at the protocol's times; most providers add a safety buffer before and after. Second, the absence of an announcement says nothing about whether the pause is coming. It is coming regardless, because the chain has stopped. The announcement only tells you how generous the buffer is.
If you have a withdrawal firmly scheduled and find no notice by the evening before, asking support is the faster solution than trying your luck on the day itself. A stuck withdrawal is laborious to resolve, as our article on transfers that do not arrive shows with a different example.
This is where the two o1Labs publications diverge, and the difference deserves to be named openly. The timetable with the exact times puts the network halt at 15:00 UTC and the first new block at 18:00 UTC, which comes to three hours. The accompanying overview speaks instead of roughly eight hours of expected downtime during the upgrade window.
Both figures can be reconciled once you separate what each one measures. The three hours are the period in which no blocks are produced at all. The eight hours cover the entire window from 10:00 UTC, during which the chain is already unusable for transfers even though it is still writing empty blocks. For you as a user, the second number is the more honest one, because a chain that no longer accepts your transfer has come to a standstill as far as you are concerned.
Plan with the larger figure. If the upgrade runs faster, you lose nothing. If it is delayed, which happens regularly with hard forks, you have already built the buffer into your plans. During a coordinated halt, delays are routine as long as the developers communicate the current status.
Mina works with delegation. Anyone who does not run a block producer themselves transfers their voting weight to an external node and receives a share of that node's rewards in return. These rewards come from blocks that are produced, and that is exactly where the upgrade intervenes.
The timetable states that no block rewards are generated during the upgrade phase, because the blocks remain empty. For delegators this means a shortfall in earnings for the duration of the window. Measured against an annual yield, the amount from a few hours of downtime is small, but it is real, and it hits every delegator equally.
An empty block is a block without transactions. It formally keeps the chain running, but carries no fees and, in this phase, no reward either. Anyone calculating their yield across the year should book windows of this kind as part of routine network maintenance. Anyone calculating with day-by-day earnings, for example because they hold a position on borrowed money, should show the shortfall in their figures.
A second point concerns the choice of block producer. A node that sleeps through the upgrade will produce nothing at all after the restart. Delegators have no direct influence on that, but they can check after September 3 whether their node is delivering blocks again, and switch if in doubt. How providers differ on yield, fees and availability is set out in our comparison of staking platforms.
Anyone running a Mina node themselves has real work to do before September 3. The timetable distinguishes two routes. Those using the automated operating mode, Automode, install the stable version 4.0.0. Those updating by hand install the stop-slot version 3.5.0 first and switch to the Mesa version 4.0.0 once the packages have been released.
For block producers there is an additional requirement that is easily overlooked: at least one node has to keep running continuously until after the stop-network slot. Shutting your node down early because nothing is happening anyway withdraws capacity from the network in its most sensitive phase. The task is therefore to update in good time and to leave the node running afterwards instead of switching it off early.
The upgrade itself runs automatically under Automode as soon as the packages are available at 16:30 UTC. Anyone working by hand should have that time in their calendar and should not count on catching it in passing.

An archive node is a node that holds the full history of the chain in a database instead of only checking the current state. Block explorers, tax tools and exchanges fall back on archives of this kind when they have to evidence old transfers.
These operators face a requirement of their own: the database schema migration has to be complete before the stop slot. Anyone who misses it ends up after the restart with a database that no longer fits the new chain, and has to catch up while everyone else is already running again.
Even if you do not run an archive yourself, there is something in this for you. When archives lag behind after a hard fork, explorers and analysis tools temporarily display incomplete histories. If you pull a tax report during that period and wonder about the gaps, repeat the export a few days later before passing it on to the tax office. Which tools are suitable for that is shown in our overview of crypto tax tools.
Mesa bundles four improvement proposals, which are tracked in the Mina ecosystem as Mina Improvement Proposals. A Mina Improvement Proposal is a formalized request to change the protocol, which holders vote on before it is implemented.
For investors with no interest in development work, one thing above all is relevant here: all four points target capacity and the applications that are meant to run on Mina. Whether that actually translates into more usage will only be decided in the months after the upgrade. Anyone trading the date as a price event is trading an expectation, with no proven effect behind it.
A hard fork is one of the few moments when custody stops being a question of principle and becomes a question of logistics. Both routes have a visible drawback on September 3.
On an exchange you depend on its buffer. If the buffer is generous, you may already be unable to withdraw on September 2 and have to wait until September 4. In return, you do not have to concern yourself with node versions and timings. In your own wallet you keep control, but your transfer fails just the same if you miss the window, and nobody catches the mistake for you.
The sober answer is therefore that the place of custody is secondary for this one day, while the timing is what counts. Anyone already thinking about pulling larger holdings off an exchange should do it before September 1 and not in the week of the upgrade. Which devices come into question for that is set out in the hardware wallet comparison.
Every announced upgrade attracts fraud attempts, because it supplies a credible reason for urgency. The pattern is always the same: a message warning of an alleged loss, a link to a page dressed in the project's visual identity, and a request to connect your wallet or enter your recovery phrase.
With Mesa the situation is unambiguous. For holders of MINA no action on the wallet is required: no swap, no migration, no confirmation. Anyone claiming otherwise is after your holdings. The only addresses that count for this date are the project's official channels and the notification areas of the trading venues.
A second note concerns the time after the upgrade. If a transfer does not arrive after the restart, the first place to look is the block explorer, and not a help page that a search engine puts at the top of its results. Fake support offers live off exactly this moment of uncertainty.
The date is manageable as long as you know about it. Three steps are enough to prepare.
The sources for this article are the o1Labs timetable with the times for the upgrade day and the accompanying overview of what users, exchanges and operators can expect. Both can be read here: Timetable for the Mesa upgrade and What to expect from Mesa.
(As of August 31, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
Cosmostation is shutting down its wallet. From September 1, 2026, a single function will remain reachable in the app: the export of the recovery phrase and of the private key. Everything else will be wound down in stages, according to the provider. If you manage holdings from the Cosmos ecosystem through Cosmostation, you still have time today for the step that matters: secure your key material and check in another wallet whether it shows the same addresses and the same balances.
Nothing is lost in the process. Cosmostation is a non-custodial wallet, and your holdings sit on the respective blockchains, not in the app. That is precisely the point at which shutdowns of this kind become expensive: anyone who never wrote the recovery phrase down, or can no longer find it, loses access along with the interface. This article sets out what ends on September 1, what you should export before then, and where a migration fails in practice.
Cosmostation announced the discontinuation of its wallet on August 14, 2026, through its own @IBCwallet account on X. The wording of the notice is brief: „After careful consideration, we have decided to discontinue Cosmostation Wallet.“ The iOS app, the Android app and the Chrome extension are affected, which covers every route through which users have operated the wallet so far.
September 1 is not a switch-off date in the sense of a hard ending, but the start of a wind-down. From that date on, only the export of the recovery phrase and the export of the private key remain operable; the remaining functions will be dismantled in stages, according to the provider, until the applications disappear entirely. Cosmostation has not published a timetable for those stages, and the company has not commented on the reasons for the decision either. Crypto Briefing, among others, reported on the announcement.
For you, that staged logic means one thing above all: September 1 is the last date on which you can still rely on a complete set of functions. Whether a transaction, the unbonding of a staking position or a change of validator will still work on September 5 or on September 20 has not been promised. Anyone who waits is waiting on an interface whose range of functions is shrinking.
A non-custodial wallet is a program that holds your private keys on your device and signs transactions with them. The holdings themselves sit on the respective blockchain and are tied to an address that is derived from the key. The provider therefore custodies nothing and cannot pay anything out to you; it supplies an interface and a connection to the networks.
From this follows the good news of this shutdown. Your ATOM, and everything else you managed through Cosmostation, stays exactly where it is. There is no deadline by which you would have to „withdraw“, as would be the case with an exchange, and there is no provider with control over your balance. What you lose is the keyring manager, not the key.
But the uncomfortable side follows from it as well. There is nobody you can write to if you no longer have your recovery phrase. A custodial exchange has customer support, an identity check and, in case of doubt, a procedure. Here there is none of that. This is why the order matters: export first and verify the export, then take the app off your device.
The recovery phrase, often also called a seed phrase, is the sequence of words from which all keys and addresses of a wallet account can be derived. The private key, by contrast, belongs to exactly one account. Cosmostation will continue to offer both exports after September 1, and both are important for a simple reason: the recovery phrase brings you to the same state in another wallet, while a single key rescues only one account.
In practice that means: write the recovery phrase down on paper or in metal, not as a screenshot, not in a notes app and not in cloud storage. A screenshot ends up in the photo gallery and therefore often in an automatic backup that more programs can reach than you are aware of. How to solve storage permanently, what role an additional passphrase plays and when splitting it across several places is worthwhile is described at length in our guide to storing your seed phrase safely.
If you have created several accounts in the app, check each one individually to see whether it derives from the same recovery phrase. Wallets allow you to import a single key or a second phrase on top. Accounts like these are not attached to the main phrase and simply will not show up after a restore. A list of all accounts with their addresses, drawn up before you delete anything, costs ten minutes and saves you a long search in case of doubt.
An export is only worth something once it can be loaded back in. Install a second wallet that supports the Cosmos ecosystem, import the recovery phrase there and compare the addresses with those in Cosmostation. If they match and the new wallet shows the same balances, the migration is technically done and you can remove the old app. Which software wallets are suited to which purpose, and how they differ in handling and supported networks, is shown by our software wallet comparison.
Run this test while Cosmostation is still fully operational. Only then can you place both interfaces side by side and see the differences. If the old app has already lost functions, you have no benchmark, and in case of doubt you will not know whether a missing position is down to the new wallet or to the dismantled old one.

A recovery phrase on its own does not yet determine which addresses a wallet calculates from it. That is what the derivation path does. This path contains a number that designates the network, and for Cosmos that number is 118. It is recorded in the SLIP-0044 registry, in which the common networks register their identifying numbers.
That sounds technical but has a very practical consequence. If you load your recovery phrase into a wallet that uses a different path for the Cosmos ecosystem, you will see correct but empty addresses. The balance is not gone; the wallet is simply looking in the wrong place. Anyone unaware of this takes the migration for a failure and falls into exactly the panic in which mistakes happen.
The countermeasure is unspectacular. Before the import, check whether the new wallet supports the Cosmos path, and then compare the first address character by character with the one from Cosmostation. Many wallets also let you state the path explicitly during the import. If the address is identical, all further accounts from the same phrase are reachable too.
If you have delegated ATOM, you are not managing a position in the app but an entry on the chain. The delegation is tied to your address and remains in place no matter which wallet you use. The accrued rewards do not disappear when Cosmostation shuts down either. As soon as your new wallet holds the same key, you will see the same delegations and can carry on managing them there.
The order is what matters. Do not unbond a delegation in a panic shortly before the deadline just to „be on the safe side“. The Cosmos Hub provides for an unbonding period of 21 days for ATOM, held as a parameter in the chain’s staking configuration. During that time the balance earns no rewards, cannot be transferred, and remains exposed to the validator’s slashing risk. An unnecessary unbonding therefore costs you three weeks of yield without making anything safer.
The sensible route runs through the key and not through the position: export the key material, load it into another wallet, check the delegations there, done. If you are thinking about where your holdings should generate returns in future anyway, it is worth a look at the overview of staking platforms before you dissolve an existing delegation.
The unbonding period is the reason why a wallet migration and a change of staking strategy do not belong in the same week. A migration concerns only the management of your keys and is done in half an hour. A reallocation in staking ties up your balance for three weeks. Anyone who mixes the two ends up with a new wallet and a locked balance, and cannot react to price movements during that time.
To gauge how far the wind-down has already progressed, on August 31, 2026 at 06:59 UTC we checked eight hostnames belonging to the provider: for each one the name resolution on the network and, where a record existed, a retrieval over HTTPS with the response code noted. Seven addresses in the cosmostation.io space were checked, along with the Mintscan blockchain explorer operated by the same company. cryptoticker.io collected this survey itself on August 31, 2026.
The result is mixed. The provider’s main site answers with code 200, as does the version with a leading www and the Mintscan explorer. Four further hostnames, by contrast, could no longer be resolved at all, among them the address of the web wallet, the address of the guides section and the address of the blog. A fifth address in the documentation area still resolved but no longer returned an answer.
These figures say nothing about whether the apps on your phone still work today; applications do not run through these hostnames, and we were unable to check either the app stores or the extension marketplace reliably. What the measurement shows is something else: parts of the environment have already vanished, and they did so before the announced date. Anyone looking for a manufacturer guide today will no longer find it at its previous address. That is a good reason not to push the export back to the last day.
A shutdown is a good occasion to rethink your own custody, because you are holding the recovery phrase in your hands anyway. With a software wallet the key sits on a device that goes online; with a hardware wallet it sits in a separate element that never releases it and displays transactions for confirmation on a screen of its own. The difference becomes noticeable precisely when your computer or your phone has been compromised without your noticing.
For the migration itself that means an additional consideration. If you want to use a hardware wallet in future, generate a new recovery phrase on the device and move your holdings in a regular transaction. Simply loading the old phrase into the device would be convenient, but it spent years stored on an ordinary phone and carries that whole history with it. Which devices come into question, and how they differ in handling, supported networks and price, is shown by the hardware wallet comparison.
Anyone staying with software should at least take the separation along: one account for small amounts and everyday use, a second for holdings that stay untouched for a long time. This split costs nothing and limits the damage if an approval ever falls into the wrong hands.

Cosmostation is not the first departure of this year. Leap Wallet, likewise geared towards the Cosmos ecosystem, ceased operations on May 28, 2026, and back then also called on its users to export the recovery phrase or the private key. Within a few months, two providers from the same ecosystem that had been standard tools for years have therefore closed down.
For you as an investor, a rule can be derived from this that reaches beyond this case: the wallet is a tool with a limited lifespan, your key material is not. If you keep your backup in a way that works independently of any particular app, the next shutdown will hit you as a scheduling matter and not as an emergency. Anyone who has never given the recovery phrase a thought, because the app was running, ends up under time pressure with every new announcement.
A second point belongs to the assessment. Cosmostation has not commented on the reasons for the decision, and we are not speculating about them here. All that can be established is the sequence: announcement on August 14, start of the wind-down on September 1, and parts of the web environment had already vanished beforehand, according to our measurement today.
If you transfer your balance from one wallet to another and both belong to you, the beneficial owner does not change. Such a transaction is not a disposal, and in particular it does not start a new holding period. The acquisition date of the individual holdings remains the date on which you acquired them.
The case is different as soon as the migration turns into a swap. Anyone who takes the opportunity to swap one token for another in order to hold it more conveniently in the new wallet has, for tax purposes, carried out a sale and a purchase, with all the consequences for the holding period and the calculation of gains. How quickly that line is crossed in practice was shown by Phantom Wallet dropping Sui and Monad, where of the two routes offered only one remained free of tax consequences.
In practical terms, for the Cosmostation case that means: document the plain migration with the date, the sender and recipient address and the transaction identifier, and keep the records. If you hold balances across several wallets, a portfolio tool helps to carry acquisition dates and holding periods cleanly across the change; which programs manage that is set out in our overview of crypto tax and portfolio tools. For questions of doubt about your own tax assessment, your tax adviser remains responsible; this text is no substitute for advice.
Announced shutdowns are a template for fraudsters, because they supply a genuine deadline on which pressure can be built. The pattern is always the same: a message in the provider’s name, a reference to the upcoming date, a pointer to a supposed migration tool and the request to enter the recovery phrase there or to connect the wallet.
Two sentences are enough to fend that off. First: no reputable provider ever asks for your recovery phrase, in no form and in no conversation. Whoever asks for it wants your balance. Second: a migration between wallets needs no tool on the web. You load your phrase locally into an application that you selected yourself and installed from the official source.
More dangerous than the crude request is the variant that only wants to move you to a confirmation. A token approval that has been granted keeps working even after you have long closed the window, and it cannot be withdrawn without action on your part. What happens technically with a confirmation of this kind, and how to collect old approvals back in, we described in our article on wallet drainers and signature approvals.
(As of August 31, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
The nominal staking yield of Solana (SOL) stands at around 5.25 percent a year today. In three years it will be roughly 2.25 percent, according to the calculation of the asset manager 21Shares. The decision behind it was taken on August 28, 2026: in the network's first binding vote, validators doubled what is known as the disinflation rate. A start date for the reduction still does not exist.
That is the short answer. The longer one matters more, because two things were decided on the same night and only one of them appears in the German-language reports. The cut to new issuance has been approved. The fee reform, which was meant to cushion the loss of income on the other side of the equation, failed. Anyone reading only the first half will consider the matter half as serious as it is for stakers.
The staking yield is the annual return in percent that you receive for depositing your SOL in the network and thereby supporting the security of the blockchain. This return is usually quoted as APY, the effective annual rate including compounding.
The asset manager 21Shares put a figure on the path after the decision, quoted at Decrypt: from around 5.25 percent today to roughly 2.25 percent within three years. Intermediate steps lie at approximately 4.34 percent in the first year and 3 percent in the second. These numbers are one provider's projection, not a guaranteed quantity: what ends up in your stake account also depends on your validator's commission, its uptime and MEV earnings.
What matters for understanding this is where the yield comes from. The return stems almost entirely from newly issued SOL and only to a small extent from users' transaction fees. When the network prints fewer new tokens, the pot from which all stakers are paid shrinks. That is exactly what has been decided.
The disinflation rate is the annual pace at which new SOL issuance shrinks. The figure therefore describes the speed of the decline, not the level of issuance itself. Solana had set it at 15 percent a year so far; the proposal SGP-0002 doubles it to 30 percent.
Technically this is implemented by proposal SIMD-0550, submitted by engineers of the infrastructure company Helius. The consequence: according to the figures in the proposal, Solana reaches its fixed inflation floor of 1.5 percent as early as 2029 instead of 2032. Over the next six years this means around 18.9 million fewer SOL will come into existence than would have under the old schedule.
For holders who simply leave their SOL untouched this is good news: less new supply means less dilution. For stakers it is a cut to their ongoing income. Both sides sit inside the same decision, and whoever stakes feels the cut first.
The second economic proposal of the same evening was called SGP-0003, technically SIMD-0553, submitted by the research firm Temporal. It would have split the transaction fee on Solana into two parts: a base fee for inclusion in a block, which continues to go to validators, and a new resource fee measured by a transaction's computational cost, which would have been burned outright.
Burning here means that the coins disappear from circulation permanently. According to the figures in the application, this would have raised the daily burn from about 650 SOL to as much as 9,000 SOL, twelve to fourteen times as much. That would have been the counterweight to the reduced issuance, because a higher burn tightens supply without any intervention in staking rewards.
The proposal failed and ended at 53.9 percent approval: 142.84 million SOL in favor, 50.15 million against and a heavy 72.03 million abstentions. That was not enough for the required two-thirds majority. What is notable is that the proposal had already passed the code review of both client teams, Anza and Firedancer, on July 20. The vote was not about technical maturity, only about switching it on.
It is precisely this split that is missing from the German coverage of August 27 and 28, which describes both proposals as a single package. Anyone reading them as a package assumes that the cut and the compensation arrive together. Only the cut arrived.

SGP-0002 cleared the two-thirds hurdle of 66.67 percent with 67.0 percent approval. In absolute numbers: 176.29 million SOL in favor against 66.19 million opposed, spread across 1,326 votes at a turnout of 60.7 percent. The on-chain analysis by Solana Compass puts the result at 67.001 percent and the margin at 0.334 percentage points.
A custodian tipped the balance. The exchange Kraken, whose voting weight stood at 8.92 million SOL, voted against throughout the entire count and only withdrew that vote shortly before the close. Kraken's co-chief executive Arjun Sethi justified the step publicly with the line that custodians should be conduits and not votes. The asset manager Galaxy had initially abstained, which counts like a rejection under this method, and likewise changed its position in the final hour.
For comparison, the third proposal of the same evening: SGP-0001, the Solana constitution, passed with 86.0 percent approval, 193.65 million SOL in favor against 4.63 million opposed across 1,153 votes. It governs how votes will be held in future. The network was divided only on the two proposals with money attached to them.
Institutional holders also pulled in different directions. The listed Solana Company voted for the constitution and against both economic proposals, arguing that the timing was wrong for institutional stakers, who need a plannable yield. DeFi Development Corp voted the other way and subsequently bought 19,000 SOL for $1.86 million.
Here is the point that no German-language report has named so far: the disinflation rate has not changed yet. No date for it has been published.
SIMD-0550 is implemented through a feature gate, a switch in the network that arms an already shipped change for everyone simultaneously at a set moment. It takes effect at an epoch boundary. An epoch is Solana's settlement period, at the end of which staking rewards are distributed; it currently lasts a good two days. All epochs up to the flipping of the switch settle under the old schedule, all following ones under the faster one.
A hard precondition stands before that switch. The two productive validator clients on mainnet, Agave and Firedancer, must deliver bit-for-bit identical results in every reward calculation. Those results feed into the bank hashes through which validators agree on the state of the chain. If one client's calculation deviates even in the last digit, that is a consensus failure.
Floating-point arithmetic cannot guarantee this, because the same operation can produce different results on different hardware and with different compilers. That is why SIMD-0607 has to be merged first: it replaces the floating-point calculation in the reward computation with deterministic integer mathematics and targets client version Agave v4.4. The associated pull request is open and awaits sign-off from one representative each of the Anza and Firedancer teams. Anza has named the order itself in a thread: the implementation is a single permanent feature gate, one precondition is under review, and the switch can be scheduled after that.
In practice this means for you: your yield does not fall on a known cut-off date. The decline sets in as soon as this technical chain has been worked through, and then runs down in steps over years. Anyone who gives you a date has made it up. How such an activation date comes about at Solana is something we wrote up using the Alpenglow upgrade as an example in our article on the Solana upgrade and your SOL staking.
Solana works on the proof of stake method: whoever deposits tokens may help decide on the order and validity of transactions and is paid for it. The machines that do this are called validators. As an ordinary holder you do not run your own validator but delegate your stake to one. Your SOL do not leave your control in the process.
Three quantities matter for the payout. The commission is the share of the reward your validator keeps as an operating fee. Uptime describes how reliably it is online and confirming blocks; one that fails often earns less for its delegators. MEV stands for additional income from the ordering of transactions within a block, which some validators pass on to their delegators and others do not.
Because the reward comes from new issuance, the decision affects every route through which you stake in the same way. A better validator can soften the decline; none can stop it.
A worked example, deliberately rough and without any price assumption for the future. Anyone staking 100 SOL receives around 5.25 SOL a year at 5.25 percent. At 2.25 percent it is 2.25 SOL. The quantity of new coins flowing to you each year therefore falls by about 57 percent once the end point of the reduction is reached.
Measured against the price of $102.55 per SOL on August 31, 2026 at 06:40 UTC according to CoinGecko data, that would be roughly $538 a year compared with around $231. Price performance is expressly not included in this calculation, and it can completely override the figure in either direction. The point of the example is solely the order of magnitude of the cut, not a yield forecast. If you want to know how the return differs between providers, a look at our comparison of staking platforms helps, where commission and payout mode stand side by side.

With native staking you create your own stake account in your wallet and delegate it to a validator of your choice. The keys stay with you. Activation and deactivation each take effect only at the next epoch boundary, so your stake is not immediately available for around two days.
With liquid staking you hand your SOL to a protocol and receive a tradable token that represents your share including accrued rewards. JitoSOL is one of these instruments, and in the vote it was more than an investment product: according to the analysis by Solana Compass, JitoSOL stakers outvoted their validators. The price of that flexibility is an additional smart contract risk, because your claim hangs on the protocol's code.
With staking through an exchange the provider handles everything. That is convenient and costs you custody: the coins sit with a third party, and in case of doubt that third party votes on the rules of the network, as the Kraken case showed that evening.
The most common worry is whether the stake itself can be lost. With native staking your deposited amount is not automatically seized if your validator performs badly or is temporarily offline. What you lose during that time are rewards, not the stake itself.
The real risks lie elsewhere. Price risk is the largest: a yield of 5 percent does not carry a price decline of 30 percent. Added to that is custody risk when a third party holds your coins, along with smart contract risk in liquid staking. And there is an availability risk, because your stake is tied up until the next epoch boundary and you cannot sell immediately in a fast-moving market.
Since August 28 a planning risk has been added: the yield you are counting on today is a falling quantity with no known schedule. Anyone budgeting firmly for staking income should adjust that number downwards.
The vote ran according to the voting weight of the deposited stake. By default the validator you delegated to votes on behalf of your share. You can, however, cast that vote yourself and thereby replace your validator's vote for your share. That is exactly what happened in this vote, when JitoSOL stakers outvoted the position of their validators.
A practical consequence follows from this that reaches beyond this single vote. If your provider holds custody for you, you effectively surrender that vote. Anyone who wants a say in future proposals needs their own stake account and has to keep an eye on the voting period. The decision here came down to a margin of 0.334 percentage points, and single votes the size of a custodian's tipped it.
Staking rewards are other income in Germany under section 22 number 3 of the Income Tax Act. They are taxable at the moment of receipt, valued at the market price at that time. An exemption limit of 256 euros a year applies. Exemption limit means: if the amount is exceeded by even one cent, the entire amount is taxable and not merely the excess.
If you sell the coins you received later, the one-year holding period for private disposal transactions applies. Under the prevailing administrative view, staking does not extend that period to ten years. The authority here is the Federal Ministry of Finance circular of March 6, 2025 on individual questions in the taxation of crypto assets, which also describes the record-keeping obligations. Because every single credit has to be valued, clean record-keeping of the rewards is the actual work; suitable tools are listed in our comparison of crypto tax tools. For your specific case, a visit to a tax adviser remains the safe route.
One side effect of the cut is notable at this point: anyone who was just above the 256-euro exemption limit may slip below it as the yield falls. That is no cause for celebration, but it is a point for your tax planning in the coming year.
The decision is the provisional end point of a debate that has been running for weeks. For context on the price move around the vote and on the relationship between SOL and Bitcoin, we described the situation in our article on the SOL/BTC breakout, which still lists the two proposals as an ongoing vote. The result is now in, and it is split.
For you as a holder, the combination of an approved cut and a failed fee reform means that the argument about a supply squeeze stands on one leg. Fewer new SOL really are coming. The additional burn that many observers had factored in is not coming for now. Whether and when a revised version of SIMD-0553 will be put to a vote again is open.
The sources for this text: the voting result with all vote counts at Decrypt and the technical precondition for activation in the analysis by Solana Compass.
(As of August 31, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
Anyone who is tax-resident in Austria and sells bitcoin through a foreign crypto platform does not escape Austrian taxation by doing so. The decisive difference from many domestic providers lies rather in the fact that often no Austrian capital gains tax is withheld automatically.
Taxable bitcoin gains must then, as a matter of principle, be recorded by the investor personally through the income tax assessment. For private crypto income the special tax rate of 27.5 percent continues to apply in principle.
Austria taxes income from cryptocurrencies as income from capital assets. This covers both certain ongoing income and realized increases in value. A taxable sale exists in particular where bitcoin is disposed of for euros or another legal currency. Using it to purchase goods or services can also constitute a realization.
Example:
At 27.5 percent this results in principle in a tax of 8,250 euros.
The fact that the platform is based outside Austria does not, in principle, change this calculation.
Where a domestic crypto service provider is involved, an obligation to deduct capital gains tax applies to certain crypto income. The provider withholds the tax and remits it to the tax office. With a foreign platform, such an Austrian withholding agent is often absent.
The investor must then, in particular, do the following personally:
The tax is not levied on the entire sale proceeds but, in principle, on the gain. Where several purchases of bitcoin of the same kind have been made on the same relevant wallet or address, the moving average price applies in principle to new assets.
Particular care should therefore be taken in documenting:
Foreign platforms do not necessarily supply reporting that corresponds exactly to Austrian tax rules.
An advantage of the assessment can arise where a bitcoin loss for tax purposes was realized on the foreign platform. Crypto losses can in principle be offset against certain other capital income. A loss offset across providers is not carried out automatically, however; it takes place through the income tax assessment. Reliable transaction data is particularly important for that.
Austrian investors must in principle pay tax on taxable bitcoin gains even where the sale takes place through a foreign crypto platform. The essential difference lies in the procedure: without an Austrian capital gains tax deduction, the investor regularly has to determine their taxable income themselves and declare it through the income tax assessment. The tax rate for private taxable crypto gains remains in principle 27.5 percent.
(As of August 31, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
With the Clarity Act stuck in recess limbo, the agencies are pressing ahead on crypto derivatives and custody, as former officials warn that overly burdensome rules will keep a $90 trillion perps market offshore.
The largest cryptocurrency is on track for its best month since 2017, holding above $78,000 even as a hawkish Fed and renewed Middle East conflict drag on stocks and lift crude.
The PlayStation maker is fighting a California class action over "Buy Now" buttons, and has asked the judge to send the case to arbitration.
The purchase lifts Bitmine's stash to 5.9 million ETH—4.9% of supply—as chairman Tom Lee points to crypto's strong third quarter.
Three consortia will run the service, sharing up to 512 Nvidia B200 chips supplied by the state, with beta testing due in September.
Bitwise’s XRP ETF has surpassed $500 million in assets under management just nine months after launching.
SHIB token is up 20% this quarter but faces its worst historical month under a huge price wall.
Michael Saylor has finally purchased Bitcoin again after about a two-month break, now adding 4,603 Bitcoin to its holdings amid market criticisms.
A setback in the action could create a governance bottleneck at an important time for the Cardano network, with a major upgrade at risk.
Bitcoin may be gearing up for another move higher after holding key support despite a sharp intraday sell-off.
Broadcom launched TrueSource, a new enterprise portfolio focused on secure and commercially supported open source software. The platform combines verified software builds, security tools, deployment support, and engineering oversight across several major ecosystems. Broadcom stock traded at $370.64, up 0.50%, after recovering from an earlier intraday decline.
Broadcom Inc., AVGO
TrueSource combines Spring Enterprise, Trusted Artifacts, and Data Services under one enterprise open source security framework. Broadcom designed the portfolio around verified builds, direct remediation, security visibility, and support from experienced engineers. The company targets organizations that depend heavily on open source software across applications and infrastructure.
Broadcom engineers select libraries against reference architectures before building and verifying them for enterprise deployment. The company also contributes fixes upstream, keeping maintainers involved in remediation and long-term software support. Meanwhile, automated tools scan customer repositories and recommend lower-risk paths for applying security updates.
Eligible customers can also receive early remediation for vulnerabilities that have not reached public disclosure. Critical infrastructure organizations can access dedicated patch insights and mitigation guidance through a separate program. Broadcom presents the approach as an alternative to relying entirely on automated patch generation.
Spring Enterprise provides curated Spring releases from the team responsible for maintaining the widely used Java framework. Broadcom combines automated vulnerability scanning with manual engineering review before releasing security fixes to customers. The service also supports maintained release lines, helping organizations address vulnerabilities without unnecessary software changes.
Coverage extends beyond Spring into more than 5,000 verified Java libraries across supported dependency trees. Those dependencies include Apache Tomcat, Kotlin, and other components used across enterprise Java applications. Broadcom also prepares fixes across supported Spring versions before public vulnerability disclosures become available.
Customers can receive security-only patches without adopting broader point releases that may require additional testing. This option can shorten remediation cycles when teams need one security fix without unrelated application changes. Broadcom expanded this work as Spring reported a sharp increase in monthly security advisories.
TrueSource Trusted Artifacts expands Broadcom’s secure build model across Java, Python, Node.js, and container software. The service uses clean-room builds and includes hardened container images from the Bitnami Secure Images catalog. Broadcom applies internal engineering processes to scan, fix, and maintain commonly used open source packages.
TrueSource Data Services extends the portfolio to PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, MySQL, and Valkey enterprise data engines. Broadcom combines validated distributions with deployment automation, operational support, and security visibility for those workloads. The service also covers related extensions, Operators, and Helm Charts used in enterprise deployments.
Broadcom has increased its software supply chain security focus as businesses expand open source adoption. The company uses automated scanning while keeping engineers responsible for final patches, reviews, and validation. Spring Enterprise, Trusted Artifacts, and Data Services are available through tiered site licensing options.
The post Broadcom (AVGO) Stock: New TrueSource Portfolio Targets Secure Open Source Software appeared first on Blockonomi.
Paramount Skydance Corporation extended key debt offers tied to its planned Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition through September 11, 2026. The company aims to align the debt settlement process with the proposed transaction’s closing schedule. PSKY traded at $11.02, gaining 1.33% after recovering from earlier weakness during the session.
Paramount Skydance Corporation Class B Common Stock, PSKY
Paramount moved the expiration deadline for its tender and exchange offers to 5:00 p.m. New York time on September 11. The offers cover selected notes issued by Discovery Global Holdings and Discovery Communications. Paramount may extend the deadline again if the acquisition timetable requires a later settlement.
The company currently expects settlement to occur during the third quarter of 2026. However, Paramount intends to match settlement timing with the WBD acquisition closing or a date immediately afterward. Eligible noteholders may withdraw valid tenders before the extended expiration deadline.
Paramount had already extended the offers several times between June 12 and August 24. Those extensions gave noteholders more time while the acquisition process continued toward closing. The latest move keeps the debt restructuring process linked to Paramount’s wider transaction plan.
By August 28, holders had tendered about 66.28% of eligible tender offer notes. Meanwhile, holders had tendered about 75.48% of eligible exchange offer notes by the same deadline. Paramount said ongoing extensions could change the final participation levels before the offers close.
The tender offer includes Discovery Communications’ 3.950% senior notes due in 2028. It also includes Discovery Global Holdings’ 3.755% senior notes due in 2027. The exchange offers cover several additional debt series with maturities ranging from 2029 through 2052.
Eligible dollar-denominated notes total several billion dollars across the listed series. The program also includes euro-denominated Discovery Global Holdings notes due in 2030 and 2033. Paramount plans to issue new notes to qualifying holders who participate in the exchange offers.
Paramount launched the debt offers as part of preparations for its proposed Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition. The company designed the offers to address selected WBD issuer debt before the transaction closes. That process could simplify portions of the combined company’s financing structure after completion.
Paramount alone makes the offers, while WBD and its debt issuers do not manage them. Each offer operates separately, and Paramount may amend, extend, terminate, or withdraw individual offers when conditions allow. The company can also waive certain offer conditions within applicable legal requirements.
The exchange offers rely on exemptions from federal securities registration requirements. Only qualified institutional buyers and eligible non-U.S. persons may participate after completing required eligibility procedures. Paramount continues to manage the debt process as it works toward completing the proposed WBD acquisition.
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Intercontinental Exchange has signed agreements with tZERO to build infrastructure for a planned NYSE-affiliated tokenized securities platform. The deal covers digital transfer-agent and broker-dealer systems designed to support on-chain settlement.
ICE will also invest in tZERO’s latest funding round. In exchange, ICE gains a license to tZERO’s blockchain patent portfolio.
The two firms signed a memorandum of understanding covering tZERO’s role as a design partner.
tZERO will help shape transfer-agent and broker-dealer infrastructure for ICE’s Digital Trading Platform. That platform is being developed under ICE’s NYSE affiliation to support tokenized securities trading and settlement. The arrangement positions tZERO as an early technical partner rather than a simple vendor.
ICE’s investment in tZERO comes as part of the company’s latest financing round. Terms of the investment were not disclosed in the announcement.
Alongside the funding, ICE receives a license to use tZERO’s patent portfolio across the Digital Trading Platform and other applications. That license extends beyond the platform itself to future blockchain use cases at ICE.
tZERO’s patent holdings span 23 patent families and 103 individual patents. They cover compliance-aware transfer logic and upgradeable smart contract frameworks.
The portfolio also includes tools for corporate-action handling and broker-dealer identity interoperability. Those components are meant to support the full lifecycle of a security token, from issuance through settlement.
Michael Blaugrund, ICE’s vice president of strategic initiatives, said tZERO’s regulated infrastructure experience supports the exchange’s digital transfer agent program.
Alan Konevsky, tZERO’s chairman and chief executive, called the partnership a step forward for the firm’s infrastructure-as-a-service business. He described the tie-up as an extension of years spent building regulated tokenization technology.
Under the memorandum, ICE plans to consult with tZERO on standards for digital transfer agents and tokenization agents. Those standards would also apply to broker-dealer subscribers operating on the Digital Trading Platform.
Regulatory and technology requirements still need to be met first. ICE has not set a public deadline for finalizing those standards.
tZERO is expected to seek designation as an approved digital transfer agent for the platform. That designation would also cover its role as a subscriber, pending regulatory sign-off. No timeline for approval was included in the announcement.
Approval would let tZERO operate directly within ICE’s new tokenized trading infrastructure.
ICE and tZERO will separately evaluate using tZERO’s tokenized assets for collateral management. That use case would extend across ICE’s clearing houses and other affiliated entities.
The companies did not specify which asset classes are under consideration. Collateral use would mark a further application of tokenized assets beyond trading and settlement.
The agreements mark tZERO’s deepest tie yet to a major exchange operator. tZERO has spent years building regulated infrastructure for tokenized securities markets.
The ICE partnership extends that infrastructure toward public equities trading. Both companies framed the deal as an early step rather than a finished product.
The post NYSE Parent ICE Taps tZERO for Tokenized Stock Infrastructure appeared first on Blockonomi.
Markets opened the week with notable individual stock movements and heightened geopolitical developments affecting energy commodities.
Nvidia has committed $3.5 billion to MediaTek via convertible bonds. This arrangement grants MediaTek’s client base access to Nvidia’s advanced NVLink Fusion platform.
The partnership extends across multiple sectors including AI-powered personal computers, automotive applications, and data-center semiconductor solutions.
This move represents Nvidia’s continued effort to diversify beyond its core GPU business. Through strategic alliances, the company is constructing a comprehensive AI infrastructure that extends its technological influence.
The collaboration underscores the accelerating integration of AI capabilities across diverse hardware categories and computing environments.
Oil prices experienced significant gains after U.S. military operations targeted Iranian installations on Larak Island. Brent crude advanced over 2%, pushing back above the $90 threshold.
Market focus immediately shifted to potential supply disruptions through the Strait of Hormuz, a critical chokepoint for global petroleum shipments.
Supply constraints in this region could drive energy costs substantially higher. Elevated crude prices present headwinds for manufacturing and logistics sectors, while potentially complicating the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy decisions regarding interest rate reductions.
PG&E experienced a dramatic decline of roughly 18% during Monday’s session, marking one of the most significant individual stock selloffs.
The sharp downturn followed heightened investor anxiety over potential wildfire-related liabilities throughout California. Utility providers face substantial financial exposure from major fire incidents through litigation and insurance claims.
The selloff created ripple effects across the utilities sector more broadly. Market observers are monitoring developments regarding PG&E’s actual financial risk exposure from recent fire activity.
GameStop projected second-quarter revenues ranging from $780 million to $800 million. This represents a significant decrease from the $972.2 million recorded during the comparable period in the prior year.
The revenue contraction stems from ongoing retail location closures and the company’s withdrawal from the French market.
Counterintuitively, shares appreciated following the announcement. Market participants responded positively to management’s plan to deploy cash reserves toward retiring a portion of a $1.4 billion debt restructuring. This strategic move could minimize future equity dilution concerns.
Investors are preparing for two consequential market catalysts. Broadcom will release quarterly earnings, while Friday delivers the August employment situation report.
Broadcom attracts significant attention due to its central position in AI infrastructure development, spanning custom accelerator chips and advanced networking solutions. The company’s financial performance will offer critical insights into whether technology sector AI capital expenditures maintain momentum.
Economic forecasters anticipate approximately 55,000 net job additions for August, following July’s unexpectedly weak performance. Robust employment growth could reinforce expectations for additional Federal Reserve rate hikes. Conversely, disappointing figures might diminish those concerns.
These upcoming developments are positioned to influence market sentiment through week’s end.
The post Market Movers Today: Nvidia (NVDA), PG&E (PCG), GameStop (GME), and Crude Oil Rally appeared first on Blockonomi.
On Monday, OpenAI announced that its advertising division within ChatGPT has achieved a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate. The firm positioned this achievement as evidence of revenue diversification as it approaches a potential public market debut.
This advertising vertical has been operational for approximately 200 days. It complements the company’s existing revenue channels, which include enterprise licensing agreements, direct consumer subscriptions, and pay-as-you-go API services.
The company initiated ad testing within ChatGPT across the United States in February. This strategic decision attracted scrutiny from competitor Anthropic, which featured OpenAI’s advertising strategy prominently in its inaugural Super Bowl marketing effort.
The ChatGPT advertising platform has expanded its presence to over 40 countries worldwide. This week, OpenAI activated its self-service advertising infrastructure for marketing professionals across India, European markets, the Middle East, and North African territories.
OpenAI introduced advertising capabilities in India during the previous week, targeting one of ChatGPT’s most significant user bases. The initial launch featured fifty brand partners, supported by major agency collaborations with WPP and Omnicom. Indian advertisers will gain access to a self-service ad management platform on September 4, requiring a minimum daily investment of approximately $7.60.
Promotional content surfaces for individuals using the no-cost tier and those subscribing to the Go membership level. The company emphasized that advertisements carry clear identification and do not influence ChatGPT’s response generation process. Marketing organizations cannot access users’ confidential conversation histories.
Earlier this year, the organization implemented cost-per-click payment structures. This pricing innovation provides advertisers with an alternative billing mechanism that charges exclusively for user clicks, supplementing the established cost-per-thousand-impressions framework. OpenAI simultaneously eliminated its $50,000 minimum spending threshold when democratizing access to its self-service Ads Manager platform for all American businesses.
OpenAI has established an advertising revenue objective of $2.5 billion for the present fiscal year. The organization maintains momentum toward surpassing $40 billion in total annualized revenue, representing approximately double its performance rate from late 2025.
During Q2 2026, OpenAI generated $6.7 billion in revenue, marking an increase from the previous quarter’s $5.7 billion.
The organization recorded a $38.5 billion net loss during 2025 against $13.07 billion in revenue. Currently advancing toward its scheduled 2027 initial public offering, the company faces mounting expectations to validate its $852 billion valuation before potential investors.
OpenAI outlined that upcoming initiatives will deliver advertising capabilities to additional geographic markets while introducing innovative ad formats, purchasing mechanisms, and analytics capabilities. The organization indicated plans to develop additional pathways for commercial entities to engage with users throughout the ChatGPT platform.
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Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has accused “entrenched incumbents” of lobbying against the CLARITY Act, arguing that established financial players are trying to stop crypto companies from competing in US financial services.
His comments frame the fight over the bill as a contest between traditional firms protecting their position and crypto businesses seeking clearer rules.
Armstrong said the Trump administration came to power after millions of Americans felt “disenfranchised” by the previous administration’s approach to crypto.
He pointed to Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign promise to remove former SEC Chair Gary Gensler, recalling the reaction when Trump said at a Bitcoin conference that he would fire Gensler “on day one.”
He then ran through what he sees as progress since Trump took office: an executive order calling for clearer crypto rules, the appointment of SEC Chair Paul Atkins and CFTC Chair Mike Selig, and passage of the GENIUS Act for stablecoins. The CLARITY Act, Armstrong said, is the next piece.
“Make no mistake, there are people out there actively fighting against this,” Armstrong said. “There are entrenched incumbents who don’t want competition from crypto companies that would provide better financial services.”
He went further, alleging that some of those firms are “actively lobbying against it, trying to kill it.” The Coinbase chief also singled out Senator Elizabeth Warren, saying she is among those seeking to stop the legislation. His argument comes as the bill approaches a September 15 Senate vote on a motion to proceed.
As CryptoPotato reported previously, Armstrong had earlier said on August 21 that regulatory clarity was coming either through Congress or through action by the SEC and CFTC. He pointed to September 15 and 16 as possible dates for that development.
The Senate needs 60 votes for cloture, while Republicans hold 53 seats. That means if all of them support the measure, it would still leave them needing at least seven additional votes from Democrats or independents.
Furthermore, the bill still faces disputes over ethics rules, anti-money laundering provisions, and whether crypto companies can offer rewards on customer stablecoin holdings.
The banking industry’s concerns over stablecoin rewards sit close to Armstrong’s competition argument. The provision has drawn resistance from traditional lenders, who say such products could pull deposits away from banks.
That dispute helps explain why the CLARITY debate is about more than deciding which regulator handles crypto. The legislation would establish federal rules for digital assets, including how tokens are classified and where SEC and CFTC responsibilities begin and end.
With all that going on, Armstrong’s message is direct: the bill should pass because consumers and crypto firms need clearer rules, while established financial companies should not be able to block competitors through lobbying.
“It’s time to get the Clarity Act, which will protect consumers, over the finish line,” he wrote on X. “There’s something in it for everyone: banks, law enforcement, crypto companies, and most importantly the American people.”
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Solana’s native token remains the best-performing cryptocurrency (at least among the top 10 club) on a weekly scale, while certain factors suggest a much more significant rally may be coming next.
An additional ray of hope comes from September, a month that has historically been highly favorable for the asset.
Currently, SOL is worth around $103 (according to CoinGecko), translating into a 9% rise over the past week. X user Ash Crypto noted that the asset ended the previous week at roughly $102.80, the highest close in the last seven months.
“Bullish for Solana holders,” the analyst added.
Another major achievement for the token is the growing institutional appetite. SoSoValue’s data show that spot SOL ETFs have experienced nine consecutive green days, the longest streak since May this year.

The well-known entities offering such financial products include Bitwise, Fidelity, Grayscale, VanEck, Franklin Templeton, and others. Bitwise’s product BSOL is by far the most popular one in the pack, and it recently surpassed the $1 billion milestone in assets under management.
Crypto X has been buzzing with users making SOL predictions following the asset’s positive price performance. Carl Hawley recently claimed that if momentum holds, $120 could be the next important level to watch in the coming weeks. For their part, The Black Bull argued that SOL is a $1,000 token trading at $102, envisioning a “massive pump” on the way.
The approaching September suggests that the asset may indeed experience a further surge. The month has historically been highly beneficial for the asset, with its price finishing in the green on five of the past six occasions. The only red September was in 2020, when SOL crashed by almost 40%.

Other analysts, like Crypto with Harris ₿, made somewhat pessimistic predictions (at least in the near future). The X user claimed that closing the week above the $98-$100 range (as it happened) is “a very strong sign that the recent move is more than just a short-term pump.” He forecasted a jump to $120, which could be followed by a drop towards $80.
“One thing is clear: the bottom is not in,” the analyst added.
The post 2 Major Achievements for Solana (SOL): Is the Price Ready to Fly? appeared first on CryptoPotato.
Ethereum is consolidating after a sharp breakout from the $1.9K area, with ETH currently trading below $2.5K. The technical structure has improved considerably, while the continued decline in exchange reserves provides a supportive backdrop.
However, ETH’s $2.5K resistance zone is a meaningful one, and a breakout or rejection from this level is key to determining whether the recovery can extend or the recent price surge was just a bull trap.
The daily chart shows a significant structural improvement over the past several weeks. ETH broke above the descending channel that had contained the price throughout the past few months, subsequently reclaiming the $1.9K region and then accelerating sharply higher.
The breakout also pushed ETH through the $2.1K resistance zone before the asset surged toward the current $2.5K area. The move also brought ETH above both the 100-day (~$1.9K) and 200-day (~$2.05K) major moving averages. These moving averages are also now sloping upward, which suggests that the broader bearish structure is losing momentum and a structural bullish shift might be occurring.
As already mentioned, ETH is now trading inside a resistance zone around $2.45K-$2.55K. This area has repeatedly attracted selling pressure in recent sessions, with several candles failing to establish a decisive breakout above $2.5K. A daily close above this region would strengthen the bullish continuation scenario and could expose the next major resistance around $3K and potentially higher.
On the downside, the first important support is around $2.1K. This zone is particularly significant because it previously acted as resistance and was decisively reclaimed during the latest rally. A pullback that holds this area would therefore keep the bullish breakout structure intact.
Below it, the $1.9K zone represents another important support region and serves as the initial point of the breakout. Therefore, a sustained move back below it would weaken the current bullish structure and raise the risk that the recent breakout was just a failed recovery preceding a deeper decline.

The 4-hour chart provides a clearer view of August’s price action and the current consolidation. Following the vertical breakout from $1.9K, ETH initially pushed above $2.3K and continued toward $2.5K. Since then, the price has been moving sideways within a relatively tight range, with the $2.5K level acting as the upper boundary.
This consolidation can be interpreted constructively as long as ETH continues to hold the higher levels established during the breakout. The market is effectively digesting a very aggressive upward move rather than immediately giving back the entire rally.
Therefore, the immediate resistance remains around $2.5K. A decisive 4-hour breakout and sustained trading above this zone would provide confirmation that buyers are regaining control and could open the way toward higher daily-chart resistance.
Looking below, the first notable support lies around $2.2K-$2.3K. This zone coincides with a bullish order block, where the latest acceleration higher began, and could therefore attract buyers if ETH undergoes a deeper retracement.
The next support is around $2.05K-$2.1K, and holding this area would be particularly important, as a drop below it would also lead to a decline below the $2K psychological level and could quickly damage market sentiment.
Meanwhile, the 4-hour RSI has pulled back from overbought territory and is hovering around 50. This is consistent with a cooling-off phase following the breakout rather than an outright momentum breakdown. A renewed move above the $2.5K area while RSI expands again would strengthen the continuation setup, but this scenario will likely materialize after further consolidation or correction, as the market seems over-extended in the short-term.

The exchange-reserve chart provides a notably constructive signal for Ethereum. ETH held on exchanges has declined steadily from above 21M ETH in 2025 to approximately 14.9M ETH at the latest reading shown on the chart. The decline has even become steeper over the past couple of months.
At the same time, ETH’s price has recovered from $1.5K to approximately $2.4K. The divergence is important because the declining exchange reserve suggests that a smaller quantity of ETH is sitting on exchanges and potentially immediately available for selling. While exchange reserves alone cannot determine future price direction, sustained withdrawals can reduce readily available sell-side supply if the trend reflects longer-term accumulation or movement into self-custody and other non-exchange venues.
The chart also shows that the decline in exchange reserves has persisted even through periods of significant price volatility. This makes the current supply-side backdrop more constructive than if reserves were rising alongside the latest rally.
As a result, the technical and on-chain pictures are currently aligned. ETH has broken its longer-term descending trend, reclaimed the key $2K area, and is consolidating near the next resistance while exchange reserves continue to fall. This shrinking supply might just need a slight demand push from the spot or the futures market to result in a breakout and a further rally.

The post Ethereum Price Prediction: What’s Next for ETH After Massive Rally From $1.9K to $2.5K? appeared first on CryptoPotato.
Ripple’s XRP is undergoing a corrective phase after its explosive breakout from the $1 region. While the broader structure has improved substantially, fading momentum below the $1.45-$1.55 resistance zone suggests the market may need a deeper pullback or additional consolidation before attempting another sustained advance.
On the daily timeframe, XRP’s breakout represented a major structural shift, with the price escaping the prolonged descending channel and surging through both moving averages. However, the rally encountered substantial selling pressure inside the $1.45-$1.55 resistance zone, while the long upper wick toward $1.70 highlights the rejection of higher prices.
The token has since retraced toward $1.37, with the sequence of lower highs and lower lows following the rejection indicating that short-term momentum has turned corrective.
The first important support is the $1.27-$1.34 zone. This area also overlaps with the higher moving average shown on the chart, strengthening its technical significance. A successful reaction from this region could allow XRP to stabilize before another attempt at the $1.45-$1.55 resistance zone.
However, a daily breakdown below $1.27 would weaken the post-breakout structure and increase the probability of a deeper correction. In that case, the lower moving average around $1.15 could become relevant before the broader $0.93-$0.97 demand zone comes back into consideration.

The 4-hour chart shows XRP consolidating after the initial rally from approximately $0.99 to $1.70. The subsequent rejection from the $1.43-$1.55 supply zone has gradually pushed the price back toward the 0.5 Fibonacci retracement at $1.34.
This makes the $1.33-$1.34 area an important near-term decision point. The asset has already tested this level and produced a modest reaction, but buyers have yet to generate a convincing recovery. Holding above it could lead to continued sideways consolidation and potentially another attempt at the $1.43-$1.55 resistance zone.
If the $1.34 level fails, however, the correction could extend toward the next Fibonacci levels. The 0.618 retracement at $1.26 sits inside the first notable pullback zone, while the 0.702 level near $1.20 provides another support reference. A more substantial correction would bring the 0.786 retracement at $1.14 and the broader $1.09-$1.14 support zone into focus.
For now, the short-term structure remains corrective below $1.43-$1.55. A sustained reclaim of this resistance zone would be needed to shift momentum decisively back toward the bulls and reopen the possibility of challenging the $1.70 high.

The post Ripple Price Analysis: XRP Hits Critical Decision Point as Key Support Comes Under Pressure appeared first on CryptoPotato.
Strive CEO Matt Cole took it to X to announce that the company has accumulated another 1,800 BTC for $143 million at an average price of $79,431 per unit. Thus, the firm’s total holdings have grown to 23,156 BTC.
From a USD perspective, the firm’s cryptocurrency stash is now worth $1.760 billion, given the asset’s price of $78,000 as of press time.
Strive acquired an additional 1,800 BTC for $143M at an average cost of $79,431 per bitcoin, bringing total holdings to ₿23,156.$ASST $SATA pic.twitter.com/6ztKhC4PFF
— Matt Cole (@ColeMacro) August 31, 2026
Strive has accelerated its bitcoin purchases lately, including adding another 1,110 BTC last week, as reported. Cole published a chart yesterday on X highlighting all of the firm’s acquisitions completed in the past year or so, and the graph clearly shows a growing number of buys completed since March this year.
This is the third major crypto acquisition announced by big names today. It all started with Strategy, which, after a two-month pause, finally resumed its bitcoin purchases by splashing $370 million to acquire 4,603 BTC.
Bitmine followed suit. The former BTC miner acquired 53,501 ETH as its entire Ethereum stash surged past 5.9 million. It now owns 4.8% of the asset’s entire circulating supply.
Meanwhile, if you are interested in finding out more about the latest Strategy moves or the overall market state, check out our video below.
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