Cointelegraph

Blockstream co-founder and CEO Adam Back has a reputation as a quantum computer skeptic who believes the technology is so immature the threat won’t materialize for decades.
Which makes it all the more fascinating that his company is one of the leaders in researching practical solutions to the issue. Back told Cointelegraph earlier this year “the safe thing” is to prepare for the threat well in advance.
Blockstream has already proven its experimental post-quantum signature scheme called SHRINCS works in production on its Liquid sidechain and a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal for SHRINCS was published earlier today.
Blockstream Research’s Jonas Nick called it “the first concrete proposal for a post-quantum signature scheme designed specifically for Bitcoin.” But he added that “SHRINCS is not intended to be Bitcoin’s ‘final’ signature scheme, and it is not optimal along every axis.
”I do think it is a very good trade-off among the options we have now,” he said.
Source: Jonas Nick
While the timeline is hotly debated, scientists agree that sufficiently advanced quantum computers will be able to reverse engineer private keys from public keys, thereby undermining Bitcoin’s security and enabling the theft of billions. That’s why the race is on to develop ways to upgrade Bitcoin to make it safe from attack.
Shrinking the size of post quantum signatures
One of Blockstream’s most promising areas of study has been in optimizing post-quantum signature schemes for Bitcoin’s requirements to enable the blockchain to keep more of the existing properties Bitcoiners hold dear.
The current crop of post-quantum secure hash and lattice-based signature schemes endorsed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology are between 38 and 123 times larger than Bitcoin’s existing ECDSA and Schnorr signatures.
Deploying any of them in Bitcoin could slow the blockchain down to a fraction of 1 TPS. Ethereum’s post-quantum team plans to deal with this issue by aggregating signatures using a tiny zero-knowledge proof for each block. That’s under consideration for Bitcoin too, and if implemented, it would see Bitcoin actually run faster than it does today, as a single proof takes less blockspace than a bunch of signatures. But in the Bitcoin world, adding zero-knowledge proofs would be a fairly radical change and face a steep uphill battle to garner enough support for activation.
Blockstream is considering that option too, but has wisely separated the proposal from the much more palatable option of figuring out how to shrink the size of NIST-approved hash based post-quantum signatures by around 13.23 times.
Related: Bitcoin’s quantum dilemma — Bigger blocks or STARK proofs?
Bitcoin optimized small(er) signatures
In December 2025, Blockstream researchers Jonas Nick and Mikhail Kudinov unveiled the SHRINCS signature scheme, and the opcode proposal was published in May. It’s a hash-based post-quantum signature scheme that has a minimum size of 548 bytes (plus the 48 byte public key) but can grow as large as 4,619 bytes.
“SHRINCS is the most Bitcoin-native post-quantum signature design anyone has produced,” explains Marin Ivezic, author of PostQuantum.com and founder of Applied Quantum.
“[It has] full BIP-39 seed recovery, and security resting on the same SHA-256 assumptions Bitcoin mining already depends on.”
He tells Magazine the scheme is still at an early stage and hasn’t been audited, nor has it benefited from the years of public cryptanalysis the NIST signatures have weathered.
But he says even at this early stage, it’s a serious contender.
“It is real code that has signed real transactions on Liquid mainnet, and I rate it the strongest answer yet to going post-quantum without wrecking Bitcoin’s block economics.”
Despite being much smaller than most post-quantum signatures, SHRINCS will still be around nine times larger than Bitcoin’s existing Schnorr signatures, which are 64 bytes, or the older ECDSA signatures, which are 70 bytes.
It might seem logical to assume that a signature nine times larger than the current ones would require Bitcoin’s block size to increase nine times to compensate, but Ivezic explains that’s not the case due to Bitcoin’s Segregated Witness.
“Under SegWit, signature bytes fit in the witness and take a quarter as much as other transaction data,” he says.
According to estimates published in Blockstream’s earlier research (using slightly different parameters), Bitcoin could run at 6.5 transactions per second if everyone used Taproot’s Schnorr signatures (about 80% of people don’t). The blockchain’s speed would drop to 0.5 TPS if Bitcoin used the NIST-approved lattice-based signature ML-DSA and to just 0.36 TPS using the NIST-approved hash-based signature SPHINCS+.
But employing SHRINCS, the blockchain could run at 3 TPS, which is similar to today.
SHRINCS was tested in production on the Liquid sidechain in March this year — they even included a copy of the Bitcoin white paper. So if it works in production, everything is fine and Bitcoin’s quantum problems are solved, right?
Source: Blockstream
SHRINCS sounds great: What’s the catch?
As the BIP warns, “a security proof is TODO” meaning that the research is promising but it is not yet a cryptographically mature proposal that has been fully validated.
It also introduces additional complexity to Bitcoin.
Every signature uses a new one-time key, and one of the reasons SPHINCS+ is so large is because it wraps all of those one-time keys in a multi-layer hash tree structure that makes the scheme stateless.
SHRINCS does away with all of that to save on space, and just stores used keys on your device (which is known as stateful) so it can quickly check keys aren’t being reused. The drawback is that signatures get larger by 16 bytes each time they are used, and if you lose your device, it requires a very large “stateless fallback” transaction around 5,777 bytes to recover.
Yoon Auh, founder of BOLTS Technologies, says in reducing the size, SHRINCS’ designers added “statefulness, compact signing paths, fallbacks, assumptions about how many times a seed is initialized, and rules for when devices must switch to larger stateless signatures.”
“That may be pragmatic engineering, but it is also complexity and fragility introduced largely to maximize throughput and minimize computation cycles. In Bitcoin, every new consensus rule becomes a permanent maintenance obligation, and every wallet-side assumption becomes a possible user failure mode.”
Refining SHRINCS and adding SHRIMPS
Blockstream has been researching and optimizing the scheme throughout 2026. Just last week it demonstrated that SHRINCS, and a range of other post quantum signature schemes, can effectively run on common hardware wallets. The BIP carries the warning however that some of the complexities associated with running this on low powered hardware wallets are not without risk:
SHRINCS keys generated using hypertree pruning for the stateless component are not compatible with SHRINCS implementations which do not support hypertree pruning. In fact, importing a key across such incompatible implementations may result in lost funds.
In March, the lab published a companion scheme called SHRIMPS, which would be used in conjunction with SHRINCS to enable backup devices initialized from the same seed to be able to sign transactions. It’s not clear from the draft BIP if the scheme will be incorporated.
Blockstream has also been experimenting with lattice-based signature schemes, which are generally smaller than hash-based schemes but are seen as less proven and less reliable. It’s also considering the use of ZK proof aggregation of signatures. It estimates that if ZK proofs are used in conjunction with SHRINCS, Bitcoin’s speed could double to 6.7 TPS.
Blockstream has wisely separated the choice of signatures from questions around increasing the block size or adding ZK proof aggregation, as considering them together could sink the adoption of SHRINCS. Every post quantum upgrade to Bitcoin will be controversial and hard to gather enough support to activate.
“The binding constraint in Bitcoin’s quantum migration isn’t cryptography, it’s governance,” says Ivezic. “Between BIP-360, BIP-361, SHRINCS and STARKs, the engineering menu is filling up fast. What Bitcoin lacks is a mechanism for choosing from it before the clock runs out.”
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Virtu Financial, M1X Global and Tradeweb completed an onchain repo transaction using a sovereign digital bond as collateral, with the full transaction settling on the Canton Network.
The transaction used USDM1, a US dollar-denominated sovereign bond issued onchain by the Republic of the Marshall Islands and backed 1:1 by short-term US Treasurys. The bond pays a coupon while being used as collateral and is structured under New York law as a fully collateralized sovereign obligation.
Both companies said it was the first repo to combine natively issued sovereign collateral with fully onchain atomic settlement. Executed between regulated counterparties on Tradeweb, the full repo and repurchase cycle was completed in under 10 minutes.
The transaction puts tokenized sovereign debt to use as collateral in an institutional financing transaction, rather than solely as an asset for issuance or trading, though it remains an early-stage example and it is not yet clear whether the model will see broader adoption across institutional repo markets.
USDM1 is available through electronic trading platform Tradeweb, with institutional custody provided by Anchorage Digital, BitGo and tZERO, according to the release.
Canton Network sees flurry of institutional activity
Canton is a blockchain network designed for institutional finance, with privacy and permissioning features aimed at regulated transactions and tokenized assets.
Thursday’s repo follows a July transaction in which Tradeweb facilitated the real-time transfer of a tokenized US Treasury from Franklin Templeton to Virtu Financial on Canton, settling the transaction against USDCx.
Network activity accelerated in August. FalconX and Interstice launched a cross-chain swap engine connecting Canton with Ethereum, Solana and Robinhood Chain, while World Liberty Financial launched its USD1 stablecoin natively on Canton.
Digital Asset and the American Idea Foundation, founded by former US House Speaker Paul Ryan, also announced plans this month for a 2027 pilot that would use Canton to distribute state-administered benefits across three US states.
Magazine: SHRINCS BIP published: Quantum-secure Bitcoin comes with a catch

The nonprofit consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen reported that US President Donald Trump “left investors at least an estimated $4.7 billion underwater” since 2022 through his and his family’s digital asset ventures.
According to Public Citizen, investors lost billions of dollars through the Trump family World Liberty Financial governance token, the president’s nonfungible token (NFT) trading cards launched in 2022, his memecoin Official Trump (TRUMP) and Trump Media’s digital asset treasury.
The bulk of the estimated losses, according to the organization, came from investors in the TRUMP memecoin, with $3.2 billion lost, while buyers of World Liberty Financial‘s USD1 stablecoin “haven’t suffered major losses.” Public Citizen said that in the case of the memecoin, the losses represented “wealth transferred to a small group of early buyers rather than money that simply vanished.”
Estimated losses for investors in Donald Trump’s crypto ventures. Source: Public Citizen
According to Public Citizen, amid the $4.7 billion in investor losses, Trump earned $7.2 million from the NFT licensing fees and royalties, more than $600 million from World Liberty token sales and selling an equity stake, $635 million in licensing fees for his memecoin and $197 million in revenue from capital contributions to World Liberty. This did not reflect the stakes in companies and ventures he continues to hold. Some of the figures were included in the president’s 2025 disclosures, reporting $1.4 billion in earnings tied to crypto.
Cointelegraph reached out to the White House for comment but did not receive an immediate response. Spokesperson Anna Kelly has repeatedly said in response to questions on Trump’s crypto investments that there were “no conflicts of interest.”
Crypto bill still weeks away from potential vote
Amid the crypto ventures and more “potentially on the way” from Trump, the group renewed calls for ethics provisions in a cryptocurrency market structure bill, the Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act, claiming that “the president’s policy choices and personal portfolio cannot be separated” and any legislation should require a US president and his family to divest from projects in the industry.
Trump met with crypto company executives last week, calling for a “fair version” of the CLARITY Act to pass once the Senate returns to session next month. The bill is scheduled for a cloture vote on Sept. 15, which will require votes from at least 60 senators to advance.
Magazine: SEC’s proposed crypto rules probably won’t spark new ICO boom

South Korean financial group Mirae Asset plans to build a 150 trillion won ($109 billion) digital asset business around Digital X, the crypto exchange formerly known as Korbit, according to The Korea Times.
The report said Digital X will focus on crypto, stablecoins, real-world assets and security token offerings, with plans to tokenize physical assets including gold, silver and electricity.
The expansion plans follow Mirae Asset Consulting’s acquisition of a 97.15% stake in Korbit in July for a cumulative 141.4 billion won. The exchange was subsequently rebranded as Digital X, marking the first time an affiliate of a South Korean financial group acquired control of a domestic crypto exchange.
Founded in 2013, Korbit was South Korea’s first cryptocurrency exchange. Despite its long history, the exchange accounted for just 0.5% of South Korea’s cryptocurrency trading market in 2025, according to the country’s Fair Trade Commission.
Mirae Asset founder and chairman Park Hyeon-joo outlined the plans at a Digital X employee event in Seoul on Wednesday. “Our initial goal is to make Digital X a core pillar of ‘Mirae Asset 3.0,’” he said, according to The Korea Times.
On Monday, Digital X began waiving trading fees across all won-denominated assets, with the zero-fee policy set to run through Aug. 24, 2027.
Magazine: Bitget CEO isn’t buying the Bitcoin rally — She’s waiting for $50K

Zcash could emerge as a meaningful challenger to Bitcoin’s dominance among digital assets as the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence puts a premium on financial privacy and fuels concerns over AI-powered surveillance, according to Grayscale.
In a new research report, Grayscale head of research Zach Pandl said Zcash (ZEC) has “second mover advantages” that could help it challenge Bitcoin’s (BTC) entrenched network effects, something previous alternatives such as Litecoin (LTC) have failed to achieve.
Central to Pandl’s argument is financial privacy. Zcash can shield transaction information, which Grayscale argues could become increasingly valuable as AI systems become better at analyzing financial activity at scale.
The report comes after ZEC’s roughly 19-fold increase over the past year. Despite those gains, Zcash remains valued at less than 1% of Bitcoin’s market capitalization, a disparity Grayscale sees as evidence of further upside if Zcash can capture market share.
Pandl acknowledged that Bitcoin’s liquidity and entrenched network remain powerful defenses of its dominant position. Grayscale also warned that Zcash remains a high-risk investment and that any further gains could be volatile and uneven.
Zcash could be valued at more than $4,000 if its market capitalization reached 5% of Bitcoin’s. Source: Grayscale
Zcash ecosystem attracts institutional capital
Interest in the Zcash ecosystem is broadening alongside ZEC’s strong price performance. As Cointelegraph recently reported, Nasdaq-listed privacy technology company Cypherpunk Technologies expanded its Zcash exposure by acquiring a mining fleet from Winklevoss Capital in a $33.33 million equity-based transaction.
The operation is already online across US facilities, producing about 4.2 GSol/s of Equihash hashrate, or roughly 18% of the Zcash network’s total computing power. Cypherpunk said the deal made its mining arm the network’s largest active fleet.

Bitcoin (BTC) rebounded toward $81,000 around Thursday’s Wall Street open as Nvidia earnings boosted US stocks.
Key points:
Bitcoin reclaims $80,000 as $96.2 billion Nvidia earnings provide a boost to crypto and US equities.
Expectations are running high ahead of Fed chair Kevin Warsh’s keynote speech at the Jackson Hole economic symposium on Friday.
Bitcoin analysis sees sell-side pressure lessening above $82,000 ahead of the $6.6 billion August options expiry.
Nvidia earnings beat sends stocks, crypto higher
Data from TradingView showed new local highs of $80,808 for BTC/USD, with bulls again seeking to cement the $80,000 mark as support.
BTC/USD one-hour chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView
Nvidia surprised to the upside after Wednesday trading, posting Q2 earnings of $96.2 billion — nearly $4 billion more than expected. On Thursday, its stock surged more than 9% and its market cap gained over $400 billion, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index 1% higher at the time of writing.
“Nvidia is now on track to post the 3rd largest single-day market cap gain by a stock in history,” trading resource The Kobeissi Letter wrote in a reaction on X.
Nvidia stock one-day chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView
Markets are now turning to the US Federal Reserve’s Jackson Hole economic symposium, already underway, ahead of chair Kevin Warsh’s keynote speech on Friday. Hopes are that Warsh, known for being tight-lipped on future policy shifts, will nonetheless tame market uncertainty amid mixed US inflation data and volatile government bond yields.
“Chairman Warsh’s address is poised to be extremely key given the jump in long-term interest rates and high uncertainty over the path of inflation and Fed’s reaction function going forward,” Nationwide chief US economist Kathy Bostjancic said, quoted by CNBC.
Analyst sees Bitcoin sell wall thinning ahead of options expiry
Crypto liquidations edged higher at around $417 million over 24 hours, per data from CoinGlass, after Bitcoin buyers chipped away at an area of significant ask liquidity.
Previously, Cointelegraph reported that this zone extended up to $86,000, creating friction for further price upside.
Crypto liquidation history (screenshot). Source: CoinGlass
Commenting, analyst David Eng described this liquidity wall as “weakening” ahead of Friday’s $6.58 billion (81,700 BTC) August options expiry event on crypto exchange Deribit.
“BTC is compressed under resistance just as the derivatives structure holding it there is about to weaken. Break $82K and the path to $85K+ gets much cleaner,” he told X followers.
Bitcoin options open interest by expiry date. Source: Deribit
Bitcoin options expiry events are when options contracts end, allowing traders to buy or sell BTC for a specific price. This can spark increased market volatility, with price gravitating toward a particular strike price.

US financial services giant Charles Schwab plans to add Solana (SOL), Avalanche (AVAX) and Chainlink (LINK) to its crypto trading platform in the coming months, expanding its direct cryptocurrency offering beyond Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH).
Schwab Crypto began rolling out to retail clients in May, initially offering direct Bitcoin and Ether trading alongside traditional investments through Schwab’s website, mobile app and thinkorswim platform.
The brokerage said it planned to add more cryptocurrencies and digital assets over time, though it did not specify which assets it is considering or provide a timeline beyond the three newly announced tokens.
Schwab charges 75 basis points, or 0.75%, on the dollar value of each crypto trade. The service is available in all US states except New York and Louisiana and is not offered in US territories or internationally.
The Schwab Crypto accounts are offered through Charles Schwab Premier Bank, with affiliated brokerage Charles Schwab & Co. performing certain operational functions on the bank’s behalf.
Schwab expands into prediction markets
Schwab’s crypto expansion comes as the financial services firm moves into other new trading products. In June, The Wall Street Journal reported that Schwab plans to offer prediction contracts tied to the S&P 500 index through a partnership with Cboe Global Markets.
The contracts would allow clients to wager on whether the S&P 500 will close above or below a specified level, with the product reportedly expected to launch within months. Unlike platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket, Schwab’s planned offering would initially be limited to index outcomes.
As of July 31, Schwab held $13.04 trillion in client assets across 39.9 million active brokerage accounts, according to the company. Schwab reported record second-quarter net revenue of $7.1 billion and net income of $2.8 billion.
Magazine: SHRINCS BIP published: Quantum-secure Bitcoin comes with a catch

Bitcoin’s August rally has revived some of the mining sector’s most beaten-down stocks, reversing a trend that has favored miners pivoting toward artificial intelligence and high-performance computing and suggesting investors may once again be rewarding direct exposure to Bitcoin.
In its latest Miner Weekly newsletter, BlocksBridge Consulting reported that Bitcoin’s (BTC) roughly 23% rally over the past week outpaced most AI-linked infrastructure stocks.
Three beaten-down Bitcoin mining companies — Canaan, American Bitcoin and Cango — gained between 41% and 67%. By comparison, CoreWeave rose about 21%, Nebius gained 17% and IREN advanced 15%, while some miners with heavier exposure to AI and HPC were flat or declined.
Blocksbridge pointed to three catalysts behind Bitcoin’s rally. The first was the US Treasury Department’s Aug. 19 announcement that it would at least double the size of its liquidity-support buybacks for longer-dated Treasury securities.
The second was renewed regulatory optimism following a White House meeting with crypto executives, where US President Donald Trump urged Congress to pass a “fair version” of the CLARITY Act, a stalled crypto market structure bill.
The third was a sharp short squeeze following Bitcoin’s breakout, with more than $1.6 billion in crypto positions liquidated over 24 hours.
Bitcoin mining-focused stocks outperformed companies that pivoted toward AI and HPC. Source: Miner Weekly
Related: Strategy’s $66B Bitcoin machine hinges on capital markets, not BTC price: Report
BTC price still drives miners despite AI pivot
BlocksBridge’s findings echoed earlier Cointelegraph reporting that Bitcoin’s rally had lifted crypto-related stocks, including Bitcoin miners. The gains underscore how strongly Bitcoin’s price can still influence mining stocks, even as many miners have increasingly shifted their focus toward AI and HPC infrastructure in recent years.
Separate recent BlocksBridge analysis found that publicly traded Bitcoin miners have invested roughly $15 in AI data centers for every $1 in AI-related revenue generated. Nine public miners generated $341.2 million in AI and HPC revenue so far in 2026, compared with $5.11 billion in capital expenditures on the technology.

The United Kingdom’s tax reporting agency said that 240 people claimed more than 1 million British pounds ($1.4 million) in capital gains from digital assets in the previous tax year.
According to data from HM Revenue and Customs released on Thursday, 240 people reported about $975 million combined from capital gains tied to cryptocurrency in the 2024 to 2025 tax year, with each reporting more than $1.4 million. This data included 17,600 individuals who reported digital asset gains over the same period, amounting to $1.9 billion, and $18.7 billion in “disposal” from selling or trading assets.
“Taxes are due on cryptoasset gains just like any other gains, and we want to make sure people making gains from crypto know about what taxes they owe,” said James Murray, Financial Secretary to the UK Treasury and Paymaster General.
Under the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD’s) Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework, onchain crypto activity expected to be taxable totaled $457 billion globally in 2025. The UK will require crypto asset service providers to report data on crypto gains and losses under the framework that might not have otherwise been declared by taxpayers.
The data came after the UK agency reportedly sent more than 81,000 letters to individuals suspected of underpaying taxes as part of efforts targeting crypto investors.

Ripple Prime, Ripple’s multi-asset prime brokerage business, launched a Delta One service for institutional investors, expanding into US equity derivatives.
The offering allows clients to execute total return swaps linked to US-listed equities, indexes and digital assets, Ripple said in a Thursday announcement.
Total return swaps provide exposure to an asset’s returns without requiring ownership of the underlying asset.
The service targets hedge funds, asset managers and other financial institutions. Ripple said clients can use a single counterparty and cross-margin exposures across the supported asset classes around the clock.
“The launch of our Delta One business is an important development for Ripple Prime and a natural extension of the platform we’ve built,” Ripple Prime President Noel Kimmel said.
Ripple Prime’s existing prime brokerage, clearing and financing services cover foreign exchange, derivatives, fixed income and digital assets. Ripple said the business has more than $1 billion in regulatory net capital.
Ripple Prime was created after Ripple completed its $1.25 billion acquisition of Hidden Road in October 2025 and rebranded the business.
Earlier in August, Ripple Prime closed a $275 million private placement of senior unsecured notes to support its growth. In May, Ripple Prime secured a $200 million debt facility from funds managed by Neuberger Specialty Finance to expand its lending capacity for institutional clients.

The UK is moving to put stablecoins at the center of a new Bank of England mandate aimed at supporting innovation in digital payments.
The government plans to give the Bank of England, the UK’s central bank, a secondary objective to support innovation in payment systems and emerging forms of digital money, HM Treasury announced on Thursday.
The mandate will cover payment systems that use digital settlement assets such as stablecoins, while financial stability will remain the BoE’s primary objective.
The proposal comes as the UK steps up its work on stablecoins through regulatory changes, payment experiments and closer coordination with the US.
BoE innovation mandate faces September debate
The new responsibility would extend an existing approach used to regulate central counterparties (CCPs) and central securities depositories (CSDs), which help clear, hold and settle financial assets.
Under the proposed change, the central bank would report annually to Parliament on its progress toward the payments innovation objective.
“Developments in digital payments technology, including tokenisation and DLT [distributed ledger technology], have the potential to transform financial markets across the globe,” City Minister Lucy Rigby said.
The government expects to implement the objective through amendments to the Financial Services and Markets Bill, which is scheduled for further debate in the House of Lords on Sept. 7 and 9.
Stablecoin rules still face industry concerns
The new mandate’s impact may depend on how BoE uses its annual reporting requirement, Maksym Sakharov, co-founder and CEO of on-chain banking infrastructure provider WeFi, told Cointelegraph.
“The objective is secondary to financial stability, so it overrides nothing, but the bank will have to publish an annual account of its innovation efforts in payments and digital money,” Sakharov said. This requirement could put greater public scrutiny on stablecoin rules the central bank finalized in June.
Sakharov pointed to requirements for systemic stablecoin issuers to hold at least 30% of their backing assets in non-interest-bearing deposits at the central bank.
“The reserve split is the first thing to fix,” he said, adding that the requirement could determine whether a stablecoin business is commercially viable.
UK steps up stablecoin push
The new mandate follows increasing UK efforts involving stablecoins, or crypto assets designed to maintain a stable value by tracking assets such as the US dollar.
In August, a group participating in the Bank of England’s Digital Pound Lab began testing whether a stablecoin and a simulated digital British pound could work together in a cross-border trade payment. The experimental platform does not use real customers or money.
In mid-July, the UK and US published a joint statement on stablecoins, with the governments saying they “intend to enable the use of stablecoins in cross-border finance” and calling for greater alignment of their regulatory frameworks.
BoE also previously dropped plans to limit stablecoin holdings to 20,000 British pounds for individuals and 10 million pounds for businesses, replacing them with a temporary 40 billion pound ($52.9 billion) issuance cap for each systemic stablecoin.
Magazine: MiCA cracks down on USDT in Europe... but no one else cares

Bitcoin (BTC) has struggled to flip $80,000 into support in recent days, but bulls’ real challenge is still to come, new research says.
Key points:
Bitcoin long-term holders add to BTC price resistance below $86,000, Glassnode reveals.
Buyer demand must overcome this area as Bitcoin struggles to advance beyond $80,000.
Multiple key trend lines sit around spot price, increasing the implications of an eventual loss or reclaim.
Glassnode: Key overhead liquidity structures sit between $81,000 and $86,000
In the latest edition of its regular newsletter, The Week Onchain, crypto analytics platform Glassnode flagged multiple pools of coins that could be released into the market below $86,000.
Of particular interest are long-term holders (LTHs) — wallets holding BTC without selling for at least six months.
“Above, the first heavy structure is $83K-86K, and effectively all of it is long-term holder supply that has sat through the entire drawdown,” it wrote, predicting that reaching $83,000 would test the resolve of the LTH cohort not to sell at breakeven.
BTC supply distribution by wallet cohort. Source: Glassnode
In the same zone, new ask liquidity has appeared on exchange order books. Its owners, Glassnode notes, may not intend for their orders to be filled, instead aiming to stay above spot price should it rise further.
“The re-laddered asks join a stack of independent structure pointing at one zone. The first self-custody cost-basis shelf begins at $80.8K, dealer gamma flips negative at $82.3K, the surviving liquidation shelf runs to $86K, and the patient-supply wall fills $83K-86K,” it continued.
“Every overhead structure we track now sits between $81K and $86K; that band is where the recovery’s demand meets its test.”
BTC spot order-book heatmap. Source: Glassnode
Trend lines converge on a narrow BTC price corridor
The area around $80,000 has also seen multiple price trend lines converge, strengthening its status as a resistance hurdle.
Bitcoin’s 50-week and 100-week exponential moving averages (EMAs) currently sit at $77,353 and $78,485, respectively, per data from TradingView. Additionally, Bitcoin’s 365-day volume-weighted average price (VWAP), a moving average that factors in volume, sits around $82,600.
BTC/USD one-day chart with 50-week, 100-week EMA; 365-day rolling VWAP. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView
Previously, Cointelegraph reported on the skepticism of market participants over whether Bitcoin’s rapid rebound would endure. With regular bear market timing due to continue until the end of 2026, trader and analyst Rekt Capital stressed that price needs to hold the 50-week EMA for longer before a meaningful trend change can be considered.

Bitfinex Securities has completed a record $50 million tokenized capital raise for metals company Alkemya, marking the platform’s largest raise to date as it expands its offering of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs).
The raise involved ALKN, a tokenized security representing limited partnership interests in Luxembourg-based Alkemya Metacore SCSp, the companies said in an announcement shared with Cointelegraph on Thursday. The partnership owns about 7 million meters of 99.99% pure nickel wire, which the companies said was independently valued at about $1.64 billion.
Bitfinex Securities told Cointelegraph that the $50 million raise surpassed its previous record of $30 million for USTBL, a tokenized US Treasury product issued under El Salvador’s Digital Asset Law. The platform has completed seven capital raises and listed 16 assets to date.
An Alkemya spokesperson said that ALKN marks the company’s first tokenization project. The token gives investors fractional, digitally transferable interests in the partnership, allowing Alkemya to raise capital against its nickel asset base.
Alkemya plans to use the proceeds to commercialize engineered nickel products for applications including semiconductors. Additional ALKN tokens will remain available to eligible investors through Bitfinex Securities until Oct. 15. Secondary trading will not begin until at least the completion of the next fundraising tranche.

South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb has reportedly won first-instance rulings in two lawsuits against its users to recover proceeds from Bitcoin it mistakenly credited to their accounts.
The Seoul Central District Court ruled for Bithumb on Wednesday and Thursday in two of four lawsuits against users who sold Bitcoin mistakenly credited to their accounts, according to a Chosun Biz report.
Thursday’s ruling concerned a claim for 194 million won ($140,000), while Wednesday’s covered a claim for 5 million won ($3,600). Two other lawsuits seeking about 14.8 million won ($10,700) and 500 million won ($362,000) remain pending.
Both cases proceeded through service by public notice because court documents could not be delivered to the defendants through ordinary methods, the report said.
The reported rulings advance Bithumb’s efforts to recover funds from its February error, when the exchange mistakenly credited 620,000 BTC, worth more than $40 billion at the time.
Bithumb goes after Bitcoin sale proceeds
Bithumb said the error occurred during a promotional event on Feb. 6, 2026, when it planned to distribute 620,000 won, or about $420 at the time, in rewards to 249 users. An employee mistakenly selected Bitcoin instead of Korean won as the payment unit and credited customer accounts with 620,000 BTC.
The exchange subsequently said it recovered 618,212 BTC, or 99.7% of the mistakenly credited amount. However, some users had already sold 1,788 BTC worth of the credited balances before Bithumb froze the affected accounts.
Bithumb filed four unjust enrichment lawsuits in March against users who sold the mistakenly credited Bitcoin and did not return the proceeds. The company was reportedly seeking cash from those sales rather than Bitcoin.
FSS begins sanctions process over Bithumb error
South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) investigated Bithumb over the Feb. 6 Bitcoin error, focusing on how the exchange could credit customers with Bitcoin it did not hold. The regulator reportedly sent Bithumb an inspection opinion in early August, formally beginning sanctions proceedings, but no final penalty has been announced.
Cointelegraph approached South Korea’s Financial Services Commission (FSC), which oversees the FSS, for an update on the investigation and potential sanctions against Bithumb but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
Bithumb has faced other legal scrutiny this year. South Korean police raided its offices in June as part of an unrelated investigation into alleged hiring favoritism involving lawmaker Kim Byung-ki, while the company is challenging a separate six-month partial business suspension over Anti-Money Laundering violations. A Seoul court stayed the suspension in April pending a ruling in Bithumb’s challenge.
Magazine: Korean bank taps Ripple for payments, Pakistan opens crypto licensing: Asia Express

Core Lightning, an open-source implementation of Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, has confirmed multiple vulnerabilities and urged node operators to install a forthcoming security update.
On Thursday, Core Lightning said it had been assessing a high volume of AI-generated Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) reports and found that several are real. The project told operators not to shut down their nodes completely, but to restart them with “--offline,” which prevents payments from entering, leaving or routing through the node.
In a subsequent post, Core Lightning clarified that upgrading is its primary recommendation, while restarting with --offline is an alternative for operators who have not upgraded.
The guidance gives operators an alternative for protecting their nodes until they upgrade, without shutting down the underlying software entirely. Core Lightning has not disclosed the nature or severity of the vulnerabilities, published CVE identifiers or reported any related exploitation or losses.
Core Lightning said keeping the daemon active allows it to follow the Bitcoin blockchain and respond if a counterparty force-closes a channel, which a stopped node cannot do. Operators using --offline were advised to remove it after upgrading or their nodes will remain disconnected.
The newly confirmed flaws are separate from remote denial-of-service vulnerabilities disclosed in May and July, which were patched in earlier releases.

US-listed spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) drew $232.1 million in net inflows on Wednesday, slowing from the previous day while extending their inflow streak to eight trading days.
The latest inflow was down about 26% from Tuesday’s $314.4 million and marked the smallest daily total since Aug. 18, according to SoSoValue data.
The eight-session streak has attracted about $2.8 billion, cutting year-to-date net outflows to about $2.03 billion. Cumulative net inflows rose to $54.6 billion, while total net assets reached $98.6 billion.
Daily inflows in US spot Bitcoin ETFs since Aug. 17. Source: SoSoValue
The slowdown came as Bitcoin stalled after briefly climbing above $80,000 on Tuesday. Bitcoin traded at about $78,759 at publishing time, down 0.3% over the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko.
Despite Bitcoin’s stalled price action, crypto market sentiment strengthened on Thursday. The Crypto Fear & Greed Index rose to 71 from 65 a day earlier, remaining in “Greed” territory, according to Alternative.me.
The Crypto Fear & Greed Index. Source: Alternative.me
Among altcoin funds, US spot Ether ETFs also recorded an eighth consecutive day of inflows on Wednesday, attracting $192.4 million.
US-listed spot XRP ETFs attracted $28.1 million on Wednesday, their biggest daily inflow since Jan. 5, according to SoSoValue. Cumulative net inflows reached $1.62 billion.

Tokenized deposits could make bank funding less stable and raise credit costs for US households and businesses, according to an analysis by two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
Economists Rosie Levy and Srini Ramaswamy said instant settlement could allow depositors seeking higher yields to switch banks more quickly. They said programmable deposit tokens and agentic artificial intelligence could automate the transfers, shortening the time deposits remain at individual banks and making them more sensitive to interest rates.
The economists estimated that if deposits became 10% more sensitive to interest rates, banks’ capacity to hold long-term loans and other assets could fall by about $700 billion. In a separate scenario, deposits remaining at banks for 10% less time could reduce that capacity by about $580 billion. Both figures are expressed in 10-year equivalents and do not represent direct reductions in lending.
The calculations are scenarios rather than forecasts and do not represent dollar-for-dollar reductions in bank lending. They come as US banks build shared blockchain networks designed to move tokenized deposits around the clock while keeping customer funds within the regulated banking system.
Banks develop networks for tokenized deposits
On Tuesday, thirty-nine US state banking associations formed the BankChain Alliance to develop a nationwide network supporting tokenized deposits, stablecoins and automated settlement. The Clearing House is developing a separate network backed by JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citi, BNY and Wells Fargo.
Banks have also begun connecting tokenized-deposit systems across institutions. On Aug. 20, Standard Chartered and HSBC completed a live cross-border transaction through Swift’s blockchain ledger, which linked the banks’ separate systems and recorded their resulting obligations before settlement through existing payment infrastructure.
Levy and Ramaswamy said banks could respond to more volatile deposits by holding larger portfolios of highly liquid assets, including reserves and US Treasurys. They said banks could also rely more heavily on term debt to maintain their lending portfolios, although funding loans through wholesale debt would likely increase credit costs for consumers and businesses.
The authors cited Brazil’s Pix instant-payment system as a potential comparison, while noting that it is not identical to tokenized deposits. A 2025 study found that heavier Pix use increased banks’ holdings of liquid assets and reduced credit intermediation.
Magazine: SEC’s proposed crypto rules probably won’t spark new ICO boom

StarkWare researcher Avihu Levy has tested an experimental quantum-resistant transaction on the Bitcoin mainnet, in what the company described as the first transaction of its kind.
According to StarkWare, the transaction was confirmed Wednesday in Bitcoin block 964,199. Onchain data shows that it spent a 10,000-satoshi output protected by Levy’s Quantum Safe Bitcoin (QSB) scheme, with MARA Pool mining the block after receiving the transaction through its Slipstream service.
Levy’s paper and code repository said QSB combines hash-based one-time signatures with computational searches that bind an authorization to a specific transaction. The construction is intended to prevent forgery even if a quantum computer breaks the elliptic-curve cryptography Bitcoin uses.
The test moves Levy’s April proposal from theory to an onchain demonstration, showing that Bitcoin’s existing consensus rules can accommodate one form of quantum-resistant spending without a protocol change.
Quantum-resistant Bitcoin method remains costly
In March, Google researchers estimated that a sufficiently capable quantum computer could theoretically derive a Bitcoin private key nine to 12 minutes after its public key becomes visible. Google said that could allow an attacker to replace a pending transaction during Bitcoin’s confirmation window.
Levy then introduced QSB in April, estimating at the time that generating a transaction would require between $75 and $150 in GPU computation. He described it as a last-resort measure rather than a replacement for protocol-level protections.
StarkWare spokesperson Nathan Jeffay told Cointelegraph that the completed transaction cost “low hundreds of dollars,” estimating the expense at around $150 to $200. StarkWare’s release said the process took hours of computation.
Levy’s repository also classifies QSB transactions as nonstandard under Bitcoin Core’s default relay policies. StarkWare said ordinary nodes therefore would not propagate the transaction before confirmation, requiring it to be submitted directly through MARA’s Slipstream service.
QSB applies to individual Bitcoin transactions rather than upgrading cryptography across the network. “A soft fork should happen, and I believe it will,” StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson said, adding that QSB provides a safety net while protocol-level protections are developed.
Bitcoin developers are separately considering proposals including BIP-360, a proposed soft fork that would introduce a Pay-to-Merkle-Root output type while removing Taproot’s quantum-vulnerable key-path spend.
Magazine: Supply absorption ‘key question’ as Bitcoin fails to reclaim $80K: Analysis

After what feels like a lifetime in the making, the SEC’s proposed new Regulation Crypto Assets rules could finally make public token sales easier in the United States.
The proposal would allow qualifying issuers to raise up to $75 million during any 12-month period, and potentially allow projects to return to investors to raise more funds year after year as they build out their networks.
That could create a new, staged model for token fundraising, and potentially make early allocations more attractive to investors betting on higher valuations later.
But before you put the champagne on ice, it’s unlikely to bring back the freewheeling initial coin offering mania of 2017, according to Lee Reiners, a Duke University lecturing fellow and financial regulation expert. He tells Magazine:
“My initial view is that the $75 million exemption could make public token offerings more feasible, but it is unlikely to produce a return to the ICO boom.”
Could projects raise $75M every year?
The Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposal, unveiled Aug. 18, creates two exemptions for certain investment contracts involving crypto assets.
SEC Proposes New Regulation Crypto Assets. Source: SEC
The first is a one-time exemption for startups for offerings of up to $5 million over four years, and the second is a larger fundraising exemption allowing up to $75 million in each 12-month period.
The latter is modeled in part on Regulation A and comes with disclosure and ongoing reporting requirements.
Does the rolling nature of the $75 million limit mean a project could simply raise $75 million, build for a year, then come back for another $75 million?
The answer appears to be yes.
Drew Hinkes, partner at Winston & Strawn, tells Magazine the 12-month limitation would allow for “serial raises” of $75 million every 12 months, “provided they are actually distinct offerings.”
So what’s the catch?
Lilya Tessler, partner and leader of Sidley’s Global FinTech and Blockchain group, says that while “nothing prevents an issuer from relying on the exemption more than once,” each raise “isn’t automatic.”
Subsequent raises would require filing a new offering statement and undergoing an SEC staff review, and issuers would have to keep filing annual and semiannual reports. They would also need to “disclose what the issuer raised under the exemption in the prior 12 months so the cap can be verified,” Tessler says.
Still, the proposed rules offer a substantial upgrade from the status quo. A project seeking $225 million in total, for example, could potentially raise the funds in chunks and return to investors later with a more developed network — and a higher valuation.
Could a cap create ICO-style FOMO?
That raises another obvious question. Could the $75 million ceiling make early token allocations more sought-after, unleashing a frenzy of get-rich-quick-induced FOMO in the first round?
Possibly. Reiners says that’s one potential outcome:
“If investors expect a successful issuer to conduct later offerings at a higher valuation, an initial allocation may become more attractive precisely because it is limited.”
However, that’s not dissimilar to how many token and equity sales are currently structured. SpaceX sold fewer than 5% of its total equity during the recent IPO. “Scarcity in both token sales and exempt securities offerings of traditional securities long predate this proposal — issuers have always been able to limit round sizes and can continue to do so,” says Tessler.
Non accredited investors also won’t be able to go “all in” on any one token sale like they have in the past. Tessler says the SEC’s proposal limits them to buying “10% of the greater of their income or net worth,” regardless of which round they participate in.
Why this probably won’t be 2017 all over again
There are other reasons not to expect 2017 to return — not least because a generation of crypto investors have been burned by the extravagant promises and terrible tokenomics of previous ICOs. Up to 90% of projects funded via ICOs between 2017 and 2019 ended up failing. Reiners points out that fundraising markets are “shaped by investor appetite, token economics, liquidity, custody, and the reputational damage left by the last ICO cycle.”
The SEC estimates that around 130 offerings would use the two new exemptions each year, and around 475 issuers will potentially use the broader investment contract safe harbor. That’s less of a tsunami and more of a steady trickle.
SEC proposed long-awaited regulation for primary token issuance. Source: Galaxy.
But the SEC proposal is still very positive for token issuers trying to navigate a legal minefield around securities laws in the US — the kind Tezos and Telegram would have chewed their right arms off after their multimillion-dollar US securities-law battles.
Rather than force issuers to self-evaluate whether their offerings fit within existing securities law frameworks, the SEC is proposing an explicit regulatory pathway for raising capital. As crypto lawyer Jake Chervinsky says, “not one day too soon.”
What happens when the token starts trading?
There are some potential minefield though. The SEC’s proposal says the investment contract associated with a crypto asset can continue to transfer to subsequent purchasers in secondary market transactions until the crypto asset separates from the issuer’s representations or promises.
In other words, if the team selling a non-security token suggest that investors in the secondary market can reasonably expect to profit from essential managerial team efforts, then it could become subject to an investment contract.
Hinkes sees that creating a potential problem:
“If a transaction of a non-security covered crypto asset causes the transfer of the investment contract from cryptoasset seller to cryptoasset buyer, there is a risk that the sale of the crypto asset would be viewed as a securities transaction.”
That could become a problem for exchanges and other trading venues.
A new route for fundraising — but old risks remain
SEC moves forward with Reg Crypto. Source: Jake Chervinsky
The potential for tokens to fall into a no man land between security and non-security also worries Reiners. He says that projects could learn how to operate within the new framework without addressing the underlying investor protection concerns:
“A public offering exemption could become a vehicle for regulatory arbitrage [...] A token issuer may satisfy the formal conditions for an exempt sale while continuing to market an asset whose value depends heavily on the issuer’s managerial efforts.”
That would leave retail investors in the same grey area as a decade prior, exposed to “opaque disclosures, concentrated insider holdings, and aggressive promotion.”
Magazine: Bitget CEO isn’t buying the Bitcoin rally — She’s waiting for $50K

Potentially taxable onchain crypto activity reached at least $457 billion globally in 2025, while international reporting rules may capture only a fraction of it, according to a new Chainalysis report.
The US accounted for an estimated $112.6 billion of the total, while North America led all regions with $134.6 billion, followed by the European Union at $125.1 billion.
The estimates include realized gains, income from activities such as mining, staking and lending, and crypto-denominated payments across six major blockchains, but exclude trading and other activity conducted within centralized exchanges.
Chainalysis said transactions covered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF) account for just 14% of the onchain taxable activity it identified. The remaining 86% includes activity on decentralized exchanges, peer-to-peer transfers, onchain income streams and payments.
CARF, developed by the OECD in 2022, requires covered crypto service providers to report customer transaction data to tax authorities.
CARF covers only 14% of potentially taxable onchain crypto activity.
Source: Chainalysis
CARF’s limits on onchain tax reporting
CARF data collection began on Jan. 1, 2026, in 48 jurisdictions, including the United Kingdom and European Union, requiring covered crypto platforms to collect additional customer and tax residency information.
Under CARF, in-scope crypto providers collect customer and tax residency information and report transaction data to domestic tax authorities, which can then share that information across borders.
CARF framework. Source: OECD
CARF’s focus on crypto intermediaries also helps explain the gaps highlighted by Chainalysis. Colby Mangels, a former OECD adviser who worked on CARF, told Cointelegraph in January that the framework was designed around intermediaries that facilitate crypto transactions as a business.
Much of decentralized finance therefore remains outside the reporting perimeter, as there may be no centralized operator or custodial relationship on which to impose reporting requirements.
That could change as regulators develop rules for decentralized platforms. Mangels said tax authorities are watching developments in anti-money laundering regulation, including efforts to determine when DeFi platforms or their operators should be treated as regulated crypto service providers.
Magazine: SEC’s proposed crypto rules probably won’t spark new ICO boom