Cointelegraph

Nomura Group’s digital asset subsidiary, Laser Digital, received authorization to operate as a crypto asset exchange service provider under Japan’s Payment Services Act (PSA)
A list issued by Japan’s Financial Services Agency (FSA) on Friday showed that Laser Digital received the country’s first crypto exchange license in four years. The last platform to receive FSA authorization was Binance Japan in October 2022.
Japan’s crypto market is entering a “new phase of maturity,” creating a need for “trusted counterparties and infrastructure” as “institutional investors increase their interest in this asset class,” Jez Mohideen, co-founder and CEO of Laser Digital, said in a Friday press release.
In July, Japan’s parliament passed revisions that classify crypto assets as financial assets under Japan’s Financial Instruments and Exchange Act (FIEA).
The revisions will move regulation of crypto transactions away from the PSA, where digital assets are currently treated primarily as payment instruments, and introduce insider trading rules and stronger oversight for crypto businesses. The crypto provisions will take effect on a date set by Cabinet order within one year of the amendments’ July 23 promulgation.
Japanese Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama signaled the intent to bring crypto under the same umbrella as traditional finance assets in January, to ensure that citizens will “benefit from digital and blockchain-based assets.”
Magazine: How Hong Kong is turning tokenized bonds into real market infrastructure

Binance employees detained in the United Arab Emirates were cleared and released after providing statements about third-party fund flows through a company client money account, a spokesperson for the exchange told Cointelegraph.
The New York Times reported Thursday that two Binance employees were detained after being stopped at airports in the UAE amid police inquiries into possible financial crimes involving the exchange.
The employees were not the targets or subjects of what Binance described as “routine inquiries.”
“Cryptocurrency and the mechanics of institutional client money accounts remain emerging concepts in many jurisdictions; we are working constructively with Dubai Police and authorities across other Emirates to establish clear, appropriate coordination procedures,” the spokesperson said.
In 2024, Nigerian authorities detained Tigran Gambaryan, then Binance’s head of financial crime compliance, for eight months while he faced money laundering charges.
By October 2024, the Nigerian government had dopped all charges against Gambaryan.
Magazine: How the EU’s crypto tax rules are expected to work for users and platforms

Bitcoin may move toward its all-time high of $126,000 before the end of the year, with the recovery potentially accelerating after Oct. 6, according to Geoff Kendrick, global head of digital asset research at Standard Chartered.
Kendrick said in a Friday note shared with Cointelegraph that the latest rally has been driven largely by short liquidations, while inflows into spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds have also started to recover. He said low open interest could leave room for more investors to return as prices rise.
“For the first time this year there is now a risk my end year forecast (of USD100k) is too low,” Kendrick wrote.
In a Feb. 12 report, Kendrick cut Standard Chartered’s year-end Bitcoin target to $100,000 from $150,000 and its Ether target to $4,000 from $7,500. At the time, he expected Bitcoin to fall to around $50,000 and Ether to $1,400 before recovering during the rest of the year.
Other industry watchers have also pointed to signs that the bear market may be nearing an end. Swan Bitcoin CEO Cory Klippsten said Bitcoin may bottom in October, while 10x Research founder Markus Thielen said an August close above $63,000 could confirm a bear-market bottom.
Magazine: How Bitcoin and gold reacted differently to the Iran war shock

Coinkite released a new security upgrade to strengthen seed phrase generation by requiring user-supplied entropy mixed with improved device randomness.
Coinkite announced firmware 5.6.1 for Coldcard Mk4 and Mk5 devices and 1.5.1Q for the Coldcard Q in a Thursday blog post.
The release requires newly generated seeds to include user-supplied entropy through at least 65 keypresses with unpredictable timing, 50 rolls of a six-sided die or 128 coin flips. That input is combined with randomness from multiple device sources, including its secure elements and hardware random-number generator (RNG).
The combined randomness is used to create the wallet’s seed phrase and is intended to keep its private keys unpredictable even if one of the device’s entropy sources fails.
Coinkite told users to upgrade immediately, emphasizing that existing seed phrases remain vulnerable even after upgrading and must be replaced with new seeds before migrating funds.
Confirmed losses from the Coldcard exploit reached 1,778 Bitcoin (BTC), worth about $112 million, according to an Aug. 14 report by Galaxy Research. This makes the Coldcard hack the third-largest cryptocurrency exploit of 2026, according to data aggregated by DefiLlama.
Coldcard adds transaction and USB safeguards
The company’s July 31 firmware update had already fixed the seed-generation failure for newly created wallets. Thursday’s release follows three weeks of broader security review and also adds safeguards around USB data handling, transaction signing and hardware randomness.
Coinkite said the update addresses a theoretical attack involving a compromised computer USB port by re-verifying transactions immediately before signing. The firmware also introduces additional hardware RNG checks and a boot-time test designed to verify that the wallet is using its intended hardware path.
Other changes restrict USB downloads to the device’s most recent output and require an encrypted session, while certain Bitcoin signature hash modes that allow transaction outputs to remain modifiable are now blocked by default.
Coinspect launches weak-seed detection tool
Other companies are also launching software to identify wallets potentially exposed by weak seed generation.
Blockchain security company Coinspect revealed Unlukey, a free public tool for identifying wallet addresses generated from weak seed phrases. The first iteration of the tool aims to reproduce known weak seed generation and check whether public addresses belong to the affected dataset, Coinspect said in a Friday X post.
Weak seed phrase generation was one of the main vulnerabilities that led to the Coldcard exploit. TRM Labs said that a firmware bug from March 2021 weakened seed randomness on some Coldcard wallets, reducing key strength from 128 bits to 40 bits and making them “brute-forceable without physical access.”
Magazine: Inside the ‘fake police raid’ that forced a $1M Bitcoin transfer

Bitcoin (BTC) hit $77,000 on Friday as business intelligence company Strategy’s corporate treasury returned to profit.
Key points:
Bitcoin reaches its highest level since May 26 as it revisits $77,000.
Price returns above the cost basis for Strategy’s BTC corporate treasury at $75,385.
Around 11% of the BTC supply constitutes a new band of support below $68,000.
Strategy out of the red with Bitcoin at highest since May
Data from TradingView showed new local highs above $77,400 prior to the week’s final Wall Street open.
BTC/USD one-day chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView
Now up around 20% in 48 hours, BTC/USD saw little by way of consolidation as it reclaimed a key level for Strategy, the world’s largest corporate Bitcoin treasury company. Data from monitoring resource BitcoinTreasuries puts the cost basis for Strategy’s holdings of 840,447 BTC at $75,385, currently with a year-to-date gain of approximately $450 million.
Strategy Bitcoin treasury cost basis data. Source: BitcoinTreasuries
As Cointelegraph reported, between Aug. 3 and Aug. 9, Strategy opted to sell a small portion of its treasury worth 1,690 BTC to repurchase 1.15 million shares of its STRC preferred stock for $108.6 million. The move represented the company’s fourth Bitcoin sale of 2026.
Concerns over the long-term viability of the company’s Bitcoin investment thesis accompanied the sales, something that the subsequent BTC price run-up should help alleviate, independent crypto analyst William Clemente suggested.
“Not only should Saylor/Strategy fears have been abated for a while once he showed that he was willing to sell BTC to rebuy STRC, but now after this price impulse they are even more over-collateralized by their BTC holdings,” he wrote on X, referring to former CEO Michael Saylor.
In an interview with Fox News earlier in August, current CEO Phong Le stated that Strategy would return to buying Bitcoin before the end of the year.
New BTC buy wall sits below $68,000
Amid misgivings over the durability of Bitcoin’s volatile upside move, analysis from onchain analytics platform Glassnode revealed a new safety net forming below $70,000.
Some 3.44 million BTC now have an onchain cost basis, also known as realized price, between $58,000 and $67,000. Of this, 2.23 million BTC — equal to around 11% of the total supply — was added over the past 11 weeks.
“It’s the densest cost-basis cluster below spot — a key potential support zone on any retracement,” Glassnode cofounder Rafael Schultze-Kraft commented on X.
Bitcoin UTXO realized price distribution data. Source: Rafael Schultze-Kraft on X.com
BTC/USD broke through several key resistance levels this week, including its 200-day simple moving average (SMA) at $68,967, a key target to reclaim to end the long-term BTC price downtrend.

US spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) drew $608.3 million in net inflows on Thursday, lifting weekly inflows above $1.6 billion, while spot Ether ETFs logged their largest single-day intake since October.
The Bitcoin funds extended their positive streak to four straight sessions after attracting $297.6 million on Monday, $189.3 million on Tuesday and $517.2 million on Wednesday,SoSoValue data shows.
August net inflows reached $2.07 billion through Thursday, already surpassing April’s $1.97 billion, the previous monthly high for 2026, with seven trading sessions remaining. Cumulative net inflows stood at $53.4 billion.
The inflows accompanied a continued rally in crypto markets as Bitcoin traded at $75,133 at the time of writing on Friday, up 7.9% over the previous 24 hours, according to CoinGecko. Ether gained 4.6% to about $2,357.
Spot Ether ETFs attracted $220.8 million on Thursday, their largest daily net inflow across 203 trading sessions spanning 296 calendar days. The funds last recorded a larger intake on Oct. 28, 2025, when they drew about $246 million.
The funds have taken in approximately $512.2 million across four trading sessions this week, lifting their August net inflows to about $754.9 million. Total net assets reached $13.58 billion.

A group of South Korean lawmakers has introduced a bill to amend an existing financial law and expand the Financial Intelligence Unit’s (FIU) authority to investigate unregistered crypto businesses.
On Thursday, People Power Party lawmaker Eom Tae-young and nine other lawmakers filed the bill, which aims to add a new provision to the Act on Reporting and Using Specified Financial Transaction Information.
Under the proposal, anyone could report suspected violations of the law to the FIU. The agency could investigate and analyze alleged violations, file complaints with the relevant authorities, request criminal investigations or provide information to investigators.
The bill remains at the introduction stage and must pass the National Assembly before it can amend the existing law.
Under the current system, the FIU identifies suspected unregistered operators but relies on police and other authorities to pursue investigations.
Police suspended investigations or preliminary inquiries into 23 of 25 unregistered virtual asset service providers referred by the FIU between August 2022 and August 2025, according to Yonhap. The companies and related individuals were reportedly based overseas.
Crypto companies serving South Korean customers must register with the FIU. The regulator said in June that 28 providers were registered and that it had referred 40 suspected illegal operators to investigative authorities.

MANTRA’s native token sank 18.5% from its 24-hour high to a record low shortly before MANTRA Chain stopped producing blocks and its team announced a precautionary halt over an unexplained incident.
According to CoinGecko, MANTRA fell from $0.005060 to an all-time low of $0.004126 around 11:00 pm UTC on Thursday. It later recovered to about $0.0044 but remained down roughly 10% over 24 hours, while trading volume climbed nearly 600% to $24 million.
MANTRA said Friday it was “aware of an incident affecting MANTRA Chain” and had halted the network as a precaution while it investigated. “We don’t have a root cause or timeline to share yet,” the project said, adding that all endpoints and transactions were frozen.
The halt prevents assets from moving on MANTRA Chain and has prompted affected exchanges to pause deposits and withdrawals, with no timeline given for either service to resume.
MANTRA’s 24-hour price chart. Source: CoinGecko
MANTRA Chain remains halted as investigation continues
MANTRA’s status page classified the incident as a full outage affecting public endpoints, validators, bridge migration operations and MANTRA-managed Inter-Blockchain Communication relays. The team said it would not restart the network until it was confident it was safe.
The network’s public RPC listed block 17,449,398, produced at 11:13 pm UTC on Thursday, as its latest block. MANTRA posted its initial incident notice at 11:44 pm, while CoinGecko showed the token reaching its low around 11:10 pm.
MANTRA has not said whether the price movement was related to the incident or whether any assets were lost or placed at risk.
Cointelegraph contacted the MANTRA team for additional information but did not receive a response by publication.
The latest decline follows the April 2025 collapse of MANTRA’s former OM token, which plunged more than 90% from about $6.30 to below $0.50 and erased more than $5 billion in market value.
In June, Inveniam Capital Partners announced plans to acquire MANTRA after investing $20 million in the project in 2025. The acquisition followed January layoffs and restructuring after CEO John Patrick Mullin described 2025 as the project’s most challenging year.
Magazine: 200,000 fake AI ‘victims’ deployed to scam bait online fraudsters

Trading platform and contracts for difference (CFD) broker Capital.com plans to offer spot crypto services to clients in the United Arab Emirates after its affiliate, Capital Vault, secured a virtual-asset license from the country’s Capital Market Authority (CMA).
According to an announcement sent to Cointelegraph, the license allows Capital Vault to deal in virtual assets as an agent or matching principal and provide custody on behalf of clients.
Once the service goes live, UAE clients will be able to buy and hold actual crypto through the Capital.com app, with Capital Vault providing execution, custody and settlement. This differs from Capital.com’s CFDs, which provide price exposure without ownership of the underlying crypto.
Capital Vault operates as a separate regulated entity, with its governance, custody and risk arrangements separated from Capital.com’s other businesses. The affiliate has opened an office in Abu Dhabi and is building a local virtual-asset team.
The approval follows the CMA’s introduction of a virtual-asset regulatory framework in April, which expanded the number of regulated activities from three to eight. The framework also established requirements covering business conduct, alternative trading systems, anti-money laundering controls and prudential standards.

Europe’s crackdown on Tether’s USDT is entering a new phase.
When Revolut told European users it would delist USDT after Aug. 31, it became another in a long line of European platforms restricting access to the world’s largest stablecoin as firms adapt to the requirements of the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation.
MiCA’s stablecoin rules have been phasing in since 2024, and the EU-wide transition period ended on July 1, putting further pressure on platforms to drop tokens that don’t meet the rules.
Yet according to Artemis Analytics, Tether being squeezed out of a major market has shown little sign of triggering a major shift in USDT activity. Alex Weseley, research and data, tells Magazine:
“The data does not indicate any noticeable change in USDT supply or demand attributable directly to MiCA coming into effect in Europe… MiCA didn’t trigger a major venue or chain migration.”
So why is demand for Tether holding up so well?
Stablecoins become financial infrastructure
One reason USDT demand is proving resilient is that dollar stablecoins are being used for more than trading or saving in other regions of the world.
In Argentina, for example, a country long obsessed with stuffing dollars into mattresses and storing wealth outside the traditional financial system, stablecoin activity has continued to grow even though restrictions on accessing actual US dollars have eased.
USDT supply share by chain at MiCA milestones. Source: Artemis.
Lemon, an Argentine crypto and financial services platform, processed $9.3 billion in total volume in 2025, up 60% from the previous year. Transactional users grew 70% to nearly 1.8 million and stablecoin volume grew 45% year-on-year.
Related: Why Argentina is blocking Polymarket despite its global growth
That suggests stablecoins are doing more than simply filling a gap created by restrictions on access to dollars; they’re becoming part of the way people move and spend money.
Ignacio Gimenez, Lemon’s business and planning manager, tells Magazine:
“The role of USDT and other dollar stablecoins is evolving. What we’re seeing is a shift from stablecoins as a store of value to stablecoins as financial infrastructure.”
He says stablecoin activity is “increasingly driven by payments, cross-border transfers and global financial services rather than only by savings,” adding that Argentine users can pay in Brazil through PIX using pesos, receive dollars or euros from overseas and have them credited as USDC, or move between bank dollars and digital dollar balances.
That makes stablecoin demand harder to measure by simply looking at which tokens are available on regulated exchanges.
MiCA is changing the European gateway
Lemon’s experience highlights a shift in user behavior in one of Latin America’s biggest economies, and there are signs that emerging markets are beginning to follow the trend.
Artemis data shows the number of daily users on Binance Smart Chain rose from about 318,000 in June 2024 to 1.56 million by July 2026, while daily users on Tron increased 44% to around 908,000. These chains are favored by day to day stablecoin users for their low fees. Weseley says:
“That looks like expanding global and emerging market usage rather than a Europe-specific migration, and there’s no clear MiCA-timed break in the chain data.”
That doesn’t mean MiCA is irrelevant: it is certainly changing which stablecoins regulated European platforms can offer, and reshaping the stablecoin market inside the bloc.
USDT daily active addresses by chain at MiCA milestones. Source: Artemis.
Maksym Sakharov, chief executive and co-founder of WeFi, a crypto financial infrastructure company, says that regulation is primarily changing how users access dollar stablecoins, rather than removing the underlying demand, whether it’s for trading, payments, or cross-border transfers. He tells Magazine:
“Users do not choose a stablecoin only because it is available on one regulated platform. They choose it because counterparties use it, liquidity is deep, and it works across many markets.”
For some platforms, the shift began well before the MiCA deadline. Chief executive of OKX Europe, Erald Ghoos, says OKX has not offered USDT to European users for around two years, so the latest MiCA deadline did not make much material difference.
Europe’s alternatives have a dollar problem
Perhaps the bigger question in Europe is what European users will embrace instead. Dollar-denominated stablecoins have a powerful advantage since the crypto market has always treated the greenback as its primary benchmark.
USDT transfer volume share by chain pre vs. post MiCA. Source: Artemis.
While Ghoos doesn’t expect that to change globally any time soon, he says that institutional interest in euro-denominated stablecoins is picking up. He says:
“What we are seeing from institutional players is interest in creating more EUR-denominated stablecoins, which is worth watching as it develops.”
For retail users, euro-denominated stablecoins could also make practical sense by removing additional friction, like currency conversion, from transactions. But while MiCA may determine which products are available through regulated European gateways, it cannot change the dollar’s role in global crypto markets.
Magazine: El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment turns 5: ‘It was for us, not them’

Bitcoin’s latest rally has pushed the cryptocurrency above a key long-term technical indicator for the first time in about nine months, offering a potential signal that its broader downtrend is losing momentum.
Charting platform Barchart highlighted on Thursday that Bitcoin’s (BTC) price had crossed above its 200-day moving average for the first time since November 2025, roughly a month after BTC reached an all-time high above $126,000.
The 200-day moving average is widely used to gauge longer-term market trends, with moves above the indicator often viewed as a sign of bullish momentum. A sustained break above the level could therefore suggest that Bitcoin’s months-long downtrend is beginning to weaken.
The move came as Bitcoin climbed to nearly $73,000 on Thursday, according to TradingView data.
Source: Barchart
Bitcoin has gained more than 13% since Wednesday, when the US Treasury Department announced it would at least double the size of liquidity-support buybacks for longer-dated Treasury securities, raising the maximum from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation beginning Sept. 9.
The operation aims to improve liquidity at the long end of the Treasury market and initially pushed long-term yields lower, helping bolster risk appetite across financial markets.
Following the Treasury’s announcement, Standard Chartered’s Geoff Kendrick said the move could help fuel a broader Bitcoin rally toward $100,000 by year-end.

Michael Selig, who chairs the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), signaled that the agency would not be idle while Congress continued to debate provisions in a cryptocurrency market structure bill.
In prepared remarks for the inaugural meeting of the CFTC’s Innovation Advisory Committee on Thursday, Selig said that the commission would move forward on crypto regulations even in the absence of the Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act being passed by lawmakers, adding it would “help [Donald Trump] deliver if Congress will not.” According to the chair, he had already directed staff to allow registered and non-registered entities to offer “crypto asset trading on a leveraged or margined basis” and explore developer protections.
“We’re going to give CLARITY its breathing room for a vote, but if the Democrats cannot support a bipartisan work product, which reflects compromises from both sides of the aisle, and ultimately send a fair version of the bill to the President’s desk, then rest assured, I will direct CFTC staff to move swiftly to propose these new rules for the industry,” said Selig.
The market structure bill is effectively paused until the US Senate returns to session in September, when Majority Leader John Thune is expected to hold a cloture vote on the legislation. CLARITY would need 60 votes to pass the chamber and return to the House of Representatives, whereupon it could go to Trump’s desk for final approval or a veto.
Selig’s remarks came just a day after the CFTC chair stood alongside Trump and other crypto industry leaders at a White House meeting. The president urged Congress to pass a “fair version” of CLARITY to keep the country “ahead of China.”
Many Democrats in Congress have been calling for stronger ethics provision in the market structure bill specifically to address the Trump family’s crypto investments, which netted the president $1.4 billion in 2025. Although Trump said on Wednesday that a “lot of Democrats” approved of CLARITY, it’s unclear whether enough lawmakers will support the bill to meet the 60-vote threshold to pass the Senate.
The CFTC chair’s agenda echoed that of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which on Tuesday released proposed rules for digital asset regulation. The securities regulator said the rules could provide crypto companies with a safe harbor policy from tokens being treated as “investment contracts” and certain exemptions for issuers.
CFTC still lacks a full panel of commissioners
Selig spoke alongside Innovation Advisory Committee Chair Walt Lukken and the body’s Designated Federal Officer Michael Passalacqua on Thursday. As the only Senate-confirmed commissioner at the CFTC in a leadership panel expected to consist of a bipartisan group of five members, Selig has been solely responsible for directing the agency’s agenda since December.
The CFTC committee also discussed issues related to artificial intelligence and prediction markets on Thursday. Under Selig, the agency has claimed that it has “exclusive jurisdiction” over prediction markets due to event contracts on the platforms being considered “swaps.” The chair has directed the commission to file lawsuits against state-level authorities challenging this position in cases involving companies like Kalshi and Polymarket.
Magazine: Here’s why the CLARITY Act’s ethics deal may be so hard to reach

Binance has launched Agent OS, a developer platform that allows AI agents to access market data, monitor user accounts and execute crypto trades on the exchange.
According to a company announcement, the platform supports AI tools including ChatGPT, Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor, allowing users to authorize agents to view account information and place trades within configured permissions and limits.
Users can assign agents to dedicated subaccounts to separate funds and trading activity, configure their permissions and revoke access at any time. Binance said it can monitor trades placed through Agent OS but cannot see an agent’s external information sources, interpretation or decision-making, which occur within the user’s chosen AI application.
Agent OS also connects agents to Binance’s payment and onchain tools, allowing them to make payments and interact with wallets and other onchain services.
Crypto exchanges move deeper into AI agents
Binance joins a growing group of crypto exchanges opening their trading infrastructure to AI agents.
Coinbase launched Coinbase for Agents in June, allowing AI models including ChatGPT and Claude to connect to user accounts and autonomously execute crypto trades and strategies. The tool also supports agent-driven payments through Coinbase’s x402 protocol.
Source: Coinbase
Other exchanges have taken different approaches to AI autonomy. In July, Kraken unveiled an AI-powered investing assistant that monitors markets and recommends trades based on users’ financial goals and risk preferences, but requires user approval before executing a trade.
The push has extended beyond trading. OKX launched a beta marketplace where AI agents can find work, transact autonomously and hire other agents for tasks, using stablecoin payments and an onchain reputation system.
Several crypto industry leaders, including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire, have argued that AI agents could soon account for a significant share of onchain activity. Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao has expressed a similar view, describing cryptocurrency as the “native currency” of AI agents.
Magazine: 200,000 fake AI ‘victims’ deployed to scam bait online fraudsters

As US federal debt tops $40 trillion for the first time, there is renewed debate over whether mounting government borrowing could strengthen Bitcoin’s case as a scarce, non-sovereign asset.
Interest costs have also climbed, surpassing Medicare to become the federal government’s second-largest budget expense behind Social Security in the first 10 months of fiscal 2026, according to Reuters.
The debt milestone coincided with a Treasury move to calm a bond selloff that’s pushed long-term yields to their highest levels since 2007. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Wednesday the department would double buybacks of 10- to 30-year debt to at least $4 billion per operation, initially pushing yields and the US dollar lower as Bitcoin (BTC) and gold rallied.
Bitcoin is continuing to surge, trading around $72,600 on Thursday morning, up roughly 6% over the past 24 hours and 15% over the past week, according to CoinGecko data.
Source: Yahoo Finance
Treasury buybacks add another potential Bitcoin catalyst
While Bloomberg and others attributed elements of Bitcoin’s rally to optimism over friendlier US crypto policy following President Donald Trump’s meeting with industry executives at the White House on Wednesday, market analysts pointed to the Treasury and broader fiscal conditions as additional factors.
TrendLabs founder and chartered market technician JC Parets pointed to the Treasury’s move to increase purchases of longer-term government bonds, which he said bond-market participants viewed as an effort to push back against rising long-term rates. Parets said:
If the market believes the government is going to push back against rapidly rising long-term rates, that can change the math for everything else investors own. Including Bitcoin.
Bitunix analyst Dean Chen offered another view, saying that the debt milestone is not inherently bullish for Bitcoin. While Treasury buybacks temporarily lowered long-term yields and weakened the dollar, persistent deficits and growing financing needs could eventually push borrowing costs higher again.
Chen said Bitcoin’s near-term direction will depend more on broader financial conditions, pointing to US dollar strength, long-term Treasury yields and inflation expectations as key variables to watch.
Analysts at DeFi protocol Yield Basis took a longer-term view, telling Cointelegraph that continued growth in US debt could strengthen demand for Bitcoin as a hedge against currency debasement because of its fixed supply and lack of a sovereign issuer. They said:
Whether it will actually become a new reserve asset remains to be seen, but as concerns around fiat currency debasement grow, it will definitely stand out more as a straightforward protective instrument (alongside more traditional assets like gold).
Magazine: MiCA cracks down on USDT in Europe... but no one else cares

Bitcoin mining company Bitdeer’s artificial intelligence (AI) division, Bitdeer AI, signed a five-year customer deal covering about 50% of the capacity of its A102 Malaysia facility before its energization.
The deal was signed with an undisclosed customer of “high credit quality” and is expected to bring approximately $400 million in total revenue, Bitdeer revealed in a Wednesday announcement.
Revenue and associated costs are expected to begin in the first quarter of 2027 when services commence. Bitdeer AI is targeting 350 megawatts of AI cloud data center capacity by the first quarter of 2028.
Bitdeer is among the Bitcoin miners that expanded into AI infrastructure and high-performance computing to diversify revenue streams. Earlier in August, Bitdeer signed a 16-year lease valued at $4.7 billion for 121 megawatts of AI computing capacity in Norway.
Other Bitcoin miners that expanded into AI infrastructure include MARA Holdings, TeraWulf, Hut 8 and IREN.
Bitdeer’s stock price rose 7% on Wednesday and nearly 6% in pre-market trading on Thursday, changing hands at $10.2 a share as of 12:16 pm UTC, according to Yahoo Finance data.
Magazine: Bitcoiners turn to dice throws as self-custody setups are re-evaluated

Public Bitcoin miners are spending billions chasing artificial intelligence and high-performance computing revenue, though returns have yet to keep pace, underscoring the massive upfront investment required to diversify beyond Bitcoin mining.
In its latest Miner Weekly newsletter, BlocksBridge Consulting reported that a group of 15 Bitcoin miners and AI data-center companies spent a combined $30.7 billion on capital assets in their latest 2026 reporting periods, already 42.6% more than the $21.53 billion they spent throughout 2025.
Among Bitcoin miners specifically, the gap between capital spending and AI revenue remains significant. Nine comparable miners spent $5.11 billion on capital assets during the first half of 2026 while generating just $341.2 million in directly reported AI and HPC revenue — a roughly 15-to-1 capex-to-revenue ratio.
BlocksBridge calculated capital spending based on cash purchases and allocations to hardware, property, equipment and other productive assets, after accounting for proceeds and refunds from asset sales.
Despite the gap, AI and HPC revenue is accelerating. The nine miners generated $205.8 million from those businesses in the second quarter, up 52% quarter-on-quarter, with Core Scientific, TeraWulf and Bitdeer among the companies reporting gains.
Bitcoin miners’ capital expenditures are vastly outpacing AI and HPC revenue so far. Source: Miner Weekly
The steep cost of pivoting to AI
AI and data centers have been touted as a way for Bitcoin mining companies to diversify amid challenging conditions in the mining sector, but BlocksBridge’s data shows that the pivot comes with substantial upfront costs.
“Power contracts and available land may give miners a starting advantage, but converting those assets into AI-ready capacity requires substations, buildings, cooling systems, networking equipment and, in some business models, GPUs,” BlocksBridge said.
It remains to be seen whether Bitcoin’s latest price recovery will provide relief for companies that still maintain sizable mining operations.
Bitcoin has surged more than 13% this week and climbed back above $72,000 after the US Treasury said it would at least double the maximum size of its long-term bond buybacks to $4 billion per operation, a move aimed at improving liquidity in the Treasury market that initially pushed yields lower and boosted risk appetite.
In a sign of the pivot to AI and HPC, Coinshares this week announced a change in strategy for its industry tracking exchange-traded fund.
Now branded the CoinShares Bitcoin Mining and Digital Power ETF (WGMI), with $222.4 million in assets under management, the fund’s universe includes 29 holdings drawn from bitcoin miners, data center operators, AI semiconductors, power generation, and HPC, which Coinshares describes as “the businesses powering the digital economy.”

Blockchain Optimism’s governance has approved a proposal to repurpose 546.9 million OP tokens previously reserved for user airdrops to support ecosystem growth and institutional adoption.
OP currently has a market cap of roughly $214 million, with a circulating supply of about 2.29 billion tokens, according to CoinGecko data.
The new Strategic Ecosystem Fund will support partnerships with chains, protocols and institutions, as well as incentives to increase activity and liquidity on OP Mainnet and grow OP Enterprise.
The decision drew pushback from some delegates who argued the tokens had been promised to users and questioned how the foundation would measure returns from the fund. Supporters said the allocation would be better used to compete for enterprise deals and drive growth.
Optimism vote to repurpose 546.9M OP. Source: Optimism
Optimism said it has no additional airdrops planned after distributing 269.1 million OP across five rounds, contending that airdrops were better suited to an earlier phase focused on broad user acquisition than its current institutional push.
Optimism is an Ethereum (ETH) scaling project behind OP Mainnet and the OP Stack, the blockchain framework used by networks including Base, Unichain, Kraken’s Ink and Sony’s Soneium. More than 30 OP Stack chains currently contribute revenue to Optimism, according to the project.
OP rebounds 11% but remains 93% below record high
OP traded around $0.09 on Thursday, up roughly 11% over the past 24 hours amid a broader crypto market rally. Despite the rebound, the token remains more than 93% below its all-time high.
At OP’s current price, the 546.9 million-token allocation is worth around $50 million, equivalent to nearly a quarter of the token’s roughly $211 million market capitalization.
Source: CoinGecko
In July, Cointelegraph reported that the blockchain had signed a a memorandum of understanding with Viva Republica, the operator of South Korea-based mobile money transfer app Toss, to on a three-month proof-of-concept to test a Korean won-based stablecoin infrastructure for institutional payments.
Magazine: MiCA cracks down on USDT in Europe... but no one else cares

Bitcoin (BTC) saw multimonth highs after Thursday’s Wall Street open while stocks dipped and bond yields rebounded on US-Iran war nerves.
Key points:
Bitcoin builds on its highest levels in 11 weeks to hit $72,500 on Bitstamp.
US bond yields see volatility after president Donald Trump threatens “economic warfare” with Iran.
Bitcoin market participants question whether the rally has staying power.
US bond yields reverse higher after Trump pledges “economic warfare” with Iran
Data from TradingView showed BTC/USD retesting $71,000 before hitting new 11-week high of $72,505 on Bitstamp, up by more than 4% on the day.
BTC/USD one-day chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView
US equities opened lower after US president Donald Trump threatened Iran with the “most crushing economic operation ever taken against any country,” calling it “Economic D-Day.”
“This will be economic warfare and isolation on an unprecedented scale,” he wrote in a post on Truth Social amid frustration over the lack of a deal with the US on the Strait of Hormuz oil route.
WTI crude oil reached $87.69 per barrel on the day, its highest since July 24.
CFDs on WTI crude oil one-day chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView
The comments further appeared to cause a rebound in US government bond yields, which had fallen sharply the day prior after the US Treasury announced that it would at least double the size of its bond-market liquidity interventions from September.
The 30-year yield traded as low as 5.179% on the day before rebounding to 5.266% — an increase of 9 bps, which nearly erased the previous downside. The 10-year bond yield also reversed the previous day’s drop.
US 30-year bond yields one-day chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView
The Kobeissi Letter cast doubt on whether the intervention would be sufficient to calm markets.
“It’s going to take a lot more intervention to tame this beast,” it wrote in a post on X. The Treasury confirmed in its announcement that it would revisit the size of debt buyback operations on Nov. 4.
US 10-year bond yields chart. Source: The Kobeissi Letter on X.com
Analysis: Too early to call Bitcoin bull-market comeback
After gaining nearly $10,000 over four days, Bitcoin left market participants skeptical about the durability of its newfound strength.
In ongoing X coverage, trader and analyst Rekt Capital argued that BTC/USD would need to sustain its gains to challenge the grip of the bear market.
“Bitcoin will need to rally a lot more than what it has produced thus far if price is to invalidate the ‘weakening support’ idea. At the moment, technicals are pointing to $60k as a weakening macro support,” he wrote on Thursday.
A further post noted that four-year BTC price cycle patterns would allow for a new macro BTC price low until the end of 2026.
BTC/USD one-month chart. Source: Rekt Capital on X.com
Continuing, Ki Young Ju, CEO of onchain analytics platform CryptoQuant, flagged the return of positive demand for Bitcoin on both spot and derivatives markets — a phenomenon not seen since October 2025, when BTC/USD saw its most recent all-time high of $126,200.
“The scale remains modest, but if this holds for another month, it would be reasonable to conclude that the bear market is over and a new bull cycle has begun,” he told X followers.
Previously, Cointelegraph reported on the lack of spot demand as a key missing catalyst for a sustainable crypto market reversal.
Bitcoin demand growth data. Source: Ki Young Ju on X.com

A new poll conducted by Reuters/Ipsos found that a majority of respondents in the US believed it was not “appropriate” for US President Donald Trump and his family to earn through cryptocurrency investments while in office.
According to the results of the poll of 1,166 people between Aug. 14-17, 63% of the respondents said it wasn’t appropriate for Trump and his family to earn money from crypto. Notably, 69% of Republicans polled said it was appropriate, while an overwhelming majority of Democrats, 92%, responded negatively.
Source: Reuters
A June report from the US Office of Government Ethics disclosed that Trump had earned $1.4 billion from investments related to crypto in 2025, including through his family’s World Liberty Financial company and his memecoin, Official Trump (TRUMP). White House spokesperson Anna Kelly has repeatedly said in response to requests for comment on Trump’s crypto investments that there were “no conflicts of interest.”
Several lawmakers have called for investigations and additional information from government agencies over World Liberty and the Trump family investments. In July, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said he had introduced legislation to create an agency focused on addressing corruption at the federal level, calling out the president’s “various, and extremely lucrative, cryptocurrency ventures.”
On Wednesday, Trump spoke about crypto at a White House press conference attended by many C-suite executives and industry leaders. The president and others pushed lawmakers in the Senate to pass the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, a bill expected to establish clear roles for US regulatory agencies to oversee digital assets. The legislation is scheduled for a cloture vote on Sept. 15.

Cybersecurity firm Rapid7 unveiled a new cryptocurrency phishing campaign known as Operation Asterix, targeting roughly 885,000 phone numbers from several countries to steal cryptocurrency investors’ assets.
The phishing campaign led to 5,576 accounts matched to users on crypto exchange Binance, which were queued for attack, while the recovered logs also showed fake emails impersonating Crypto.com, according to a Monday report by Rapid7.
Of the 885,000 phone numbers, the largest file included 316,002 German mobile numbers, with additional directories covering Hong Kong, Bulgaria, the UK, the US, Canadian fintech companies and additional Ledger-related lists.
Phishing attacks and social engineering scams drove the majority of the crypto industry’s losses in the first quarter of the year, accounting for $306 million out of the total $482 million lost, according to blockchain security company Hacken.
As part of the Asterix phishing campaign detailed by Rapid7 analysts Anna Sirokova and Jan Recinsky, attackers drove victims to fake apps impersonating Ledger, Trezor, and Exodus, seeking to steal their seed phrases. Attackers reached out to victims through fake support emails and phone inquiries.
Operation Aseterix kill chain from acquisition to exfiltration. Source: Rapid7.
Cointelegraph has contacted the analysts for further comment on what they found regarding target filtering, hardware wallet spoofing and self-custody vulnerabilities. We will update this article when they reply.
Earlier in August, wallet provider Trezor reported a breach of personal data affecting about 14,000 users through its shipping provider, ShipMonk.
In July, a crypto investor lost nearly $1 million after signing a malicious phishing token approval transaction on Ethereum.
In November 2023, a fake Ledger Live app on the Microsoft Store resulted in the theft of $588,000 across 38 transactions.
Asterix phishing campaign boasts 13% “hit rate”
Attackers matched 43,066 accounts to cryptocurrency users with exchange accounts, validated from the larger German dataset of over 316,000 phone numbers, meaning that the campaign has a “hit rate” of approximately 13.6%, according to Rapid7.
The report also identified a checker for Kraken, which sought to bulk-validate phone numbers against accounts from the cryptocurrency exchange. The cybersecurity company said that the recovered artifacts showed that artificial intelligence tools were used as a significant part of the phishing campaign.
Phishing attacks are a long-standing headwind for the crypto industry, as they enable attackers to exploit human behavior rather than the code of a protocol.
On May 25, onchain analyst “b-block” warned that scammers used Google to deploy malicious phishing ads impersonating decentralized exchange Uniswap, reportedly stealing more than $400,000 from victims.
Leading crypto industry figures, including Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao, have previously called for better wallet security measures to avoid phishing scams, after an investor lost $50 million in an address poisoning scam in December 2025.
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