BeInCrypto Global

Polymarket has opened prediction markets on Pokemon card prices, letting traders wager on whether individual cards and sealed products gain or lose value.
The contracts track ungraded prices from Collectr, a collectibles pricing app. More than a dozen Pokemon markets now trade on the platform, and fresh ones keep arriving as older contracts settle.
Why Polymarket Is Chasing the Pokémon Card Boom
The Squirtle market shows how the format works. Traders buy Up or Down on whether the ungraded Mega Evolution Promos card, numbered 039, closes above $28.23 on August 31. Odds currently sit at 39% for Up, down 11 points since the contract opened near even.
Polymarket announced the lineup on X.
🚨 NEW POLYMARKET: Squirtle Price Up/Down on August 31?https://t.co/MMhzRl7iVe
— Polymarket (@Polymarket) August 16, 2026
Similar contracts cover Charizard ex, Pikachu ex, Mega Gengar ex, and Bulbasaur. Sealed products feature too, including booster boxes and the Celebrations Ultra Premium Collection.
Most of these markets lean bearish. Traders price Celebrations at 22% for a gain, while Bulbasaur stands out at 64%. Meanwhile, the Mega Gengar ex contract leads on activity with roughly $2,300 in volume.
The timing tracks a cooling secondary market. Several contracts reflect trader expectations of further price cuts, after buyer attention rotated toward newer sets through late July and early August. That churn gives the markets something to price.
Volumes stay small across the board. Most Pokemon contracts have drawn a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, a fraction of what record prediction market volume weeks produce on political and crypto events.
Pokémon Bet. Source: Polymarket Art Prediction Markets Move Deeper Into Pop Culture
Polymarket spent 2026 widening its catalog far beyond elections and token prices. The platform hosted a record World Cup wager in July, and its collectibles section already lists contracts on CryptoPunks floor prices, Pudgy Penguins, and Banksy street art.
Polymarket files the card contracts under its culture and art category. They sit next to markets on auction records and top-selling artists.
The logic behind the Pokémon markets is simple. Trading-card values change daily, are published transparently, and appeal to an audience that heavily overlaps with retail crypto traders. Therefore, they settle cleanly and generate repeat activity.
That reach carries regulatory cost, however. Analysts increasingly argue that prediction markets resemble stock trading rather than niche betting venues, and lawmakers have noticed.
Baltimore sued Polymarket and Kalshi on Thursday, alleging that both operate unlicensed sportsbooks. The New York City Council opened a separate probe into prediction platforms days earlier. Each new consumer-facing category widens the surface that regulators examine.
Whether collectors actually show up remains untested. Current volumes suggest curiosity rather than conviction, and Pokémon collectors already track prices through free apps. Polymarket asks them to take the extra step of funding a crypto wallet.
The early rounds will set the tone. If turnover builds as Pokémon contracts roll over, Polymarket gains a category that refreshes every few weeks rather than every election cycle.

Bitcoin (BTC) trades at half its record price. XRP (XRP) has lost roughly 73% from its own peak. Four events this week could decide whether either one escapes that range.
Both drifted lower again over the past seven days. Washington delivers a presidential crypto meeting, Federal Reserve minutes and a debut regulator panel. Japan adds two data prints.
Bitcoin and XRP Price Performance. Source: TradingView 1. Trump Meets Crypto Leaders at the White House on Wednesday
Trump is expected to attend in person. The heads of both US market regulators are also expected. Paul Atkins runs the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Michael Selig runs the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
🇺🇸UPDATE: Trump will personally attend Wednesday's crypto summit, joined by the heads of BOTH the SEC and CFTC.Executives from Coinbase, Ripple, a16z, Chainlink, Paradigm and Kalshi are expected in the room, per Semafor.The summit kicks off a two day stretch, with the CFTC…
— NodeWire (@NodeWire) August 14, 2026
Executives from Coinbase, Ripple, Kalshi and Polymarket are on the guest list. The last two run prediction markets, where users trade contracts on real-world outcomes.
One stalled bill sits under the whole agenda. The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act would settle which regulator polices which token.
The House passed it on July 17, 2025, by 294 votes to 134. No Republican opposed it, and 78 Democrats backed it.
That support has not carried to the Senate. The bill needs 60 votes there. Lawmakers broke for the August recess without scheduling one, pushing the decision to September.
XRP has tracked the bill more closely than any other major token. Its record high of $3.65 landed roughly ten minutes after that House vote.
The token has fallen about 73% since. It now holds the $1 level by a single cent.
2. Fed Minutes Could Reset the Rate Path for Bitcoin and XRP
Minutes from the July meeting arrive at 2 p.m. ET on Wednesday. They cover the session where the Fed left rates at 3.5% to 3.75%.
The vote was 9-3. Three officials wanted a quarter-point increase instead, which is a rare split for a single meeting.
The three Fed presidents who dissented in favor of a rate hike have arguably provided more of a rationale for their decision than the majority of the FOMC did in its statement on Wednesday or via the press conference.Here's Dallas Fed President Lorie Logan, essentially… pic.twitter.com/E2zYt0E5RU
— Nick Timiraos (@NickTimiraos) July 31, 2026
Traders are not convinced they will get one. Fed funds futures put the odds of a September hike near 32%.
Interest Rate Probabilities for the September Meeting. Source: CME FedWatch Tool
Minutes showing wider support for tightening would move that number. Higher rates pull money out of risky assets, and crypto sits at the far end of that queue.
A second read follows on Friday. S&P Global publishes flash surveys of US business activity at 9.45 a.m. ET, meaning early estimates built on partial responses.
Weak numbers would revive slowdown talk. Strong ones would back whatever hawkish signal the minutes carry.
3. The CFTC Opens Its First Crypto Panel on Thursday
The agency’s Innovation Advisory Committee meets at 1 p.m. ET in Washington. The session streams live and is the committee’s first.
.@ChairmanSelig Announces Agenda for August 20 Innovation Advisory Committee Meeting in Washington: https://t.co/JdOLTxPXEj
— CFTC (@CFTC) August 13, 2026
Its 35-member roster explains the stakes. Crypto chiefs from Coinbase, Ripple, Kraken and Gemini sit beside the heads of CME Group, Nasdaq and Intercontinental Exchange.
Ripple boss Brad Garlinghouse holds one of those seats. How the panel discusses digital commodities therefore feeds straight into XRP’s status.
That label is not casual. The SEC and CFTC sorted crypto into five buckets in March, and digital commodities was one of them. Tokens in that bucket answer to the CFTC rather than the SEC.
“For far too long, American builders, innovators, and entrepreneurs have awaited clear guidance on the status of crypto assets under the federal securities and commodity laws,” read an excerpt in the statement, citing Michael Selig, CFTC Chairman.
Both agencies acted without waiting for Congress. That precedent matters now, because it shows regulators can move while a bill sits still.
Bitcoin has less riding on Thursday. Regulators have treated it as a commodity for years, but the stakes are higher for XRP.
4. Japan Bookends the Week With Growth and Inflation Data
Japan reports second-quarter growth on Monday. ING expects 0.5% against the previous quarter.
July inflation follows on Friday. ING forecasts 2.0%, which would put Japan back at its central bank’s target.
Both prints feed one decision. The Bank of Japan raised its rate to 1% in June, the highest since 1995. It meets again on September 18.
Traders price roughly 80% odds of another hike, according to Reuters. That is more than double the odds they give the Fed.
Higher Japanese rates lift the yen. That squeezes the carry trade, where investors borrow cheap yen and buy higher-returning assets elsewhere.
The pattern has bitten before. Bitcoin fell between 20% and 31% after each recent BOJ hike.
Not everyone still buys the link. Apollo Global Management argues the old rule tying the yen to rate gaps has broken down. Bitcoin barely moved this month when the yen jumped more than 5% in two sessions.
What Would Have to Break
Bitcoin trades near $63,000, about half its October record of $126,080. XRP slipped below $1.00, sixth by market value. Both slipped over the past week. Bitcoin lost 3.2% and XRP 3.8%.
XRP Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto
Neither has escaped its range in weeks. Four catalysts now have five sessions to hand traders a reason.

Jeff Booth spent about 15,000 hours trying to kill Bitcoin. He failed. The Canadian entrepreneur says the attempt left him more convinced the network cannot be broken.
Booth is a founding partner at Ego Death Capital and a director at Core Scientific. He wrote the 2020 book The Price of Tomorrow. His conclusion is that he was the weak link, not the code.
Why a 20-Year Tech Veteran Set Out to Kill Bitcoin
Booth did not start as a believer. He co-founded the online building supplier BuildDirect in 1999 and ran it for 18 years. When his book landed in January 2020, Bitcoin (BTC) got a single paragraph.
The problem was not the math. It was the power he expected to come after it. At that stage he doubted the network could stay decentralized and secure against a determined state.
So he tried to break it. He ran a node. He modeled the attacks a government, a rival, or a large miner would use.
“I spent about 15,000 hours trying to say, ‘How do I kill Bitcoin? What does that look like?'” Booth said in an interview with the Wolf of All Streets, Scott Melker.
The timing of that verdict matters. BTC currently trades near $63,000 with a market value around $1.27 trillion. That is roughly 50% below the record $126,198 it set on October 6, 2025.
Bitcoin Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto
Booth argues price and security are separate questions. One moves daily. The other has not moved at all.
What 15,000 Hours of Attacks Actually Found
Every scenario ran into the same wall. Blocks kept arriving on schedule, and each one cost real energy to produce.
“…every 10 minutes there was a new block bounded by energy decentralized and secure and it would emerge exactly like the internet…”
The comparison is deliberate. Early internet protocols stayed narrow, so anyone could build on top without asking permission. Booth reads Bitcoin the same way.
The rulebook backs him up on one point. Roughly 24,000 reachable nodes enforce the same consensus rules today, and the 21 million supply cap survived another public round of debate this month after Adam Back rejected a proposal to lift it.
“Do I think Bitcoin is decentralized and secure right now? Yes, I do.”
His money follows the conclusion. Booth helped found Ego Death Capital in 2022, a fund that backs software companies built on Bitcoin rather than miners or tokens.
It closed a $100 million second fund in July 2025. He has also sat on the board of Core Scientific since the mining firm left Chapter 11 in January 2024.
The Risks Booth Still Names
He does not claim the network is finished or flawless.
“Mining pools are a risk. Centralization mining is a risk.”
Both risks are measurable. Three pools produced about 61% of all blocks over the past month. Roughly 80% of reachable nodes run one client, Bitcoin Core, which leaves a single codebase carrying most of the network.
Booth expects competition to grind those numbers down without any protocol change. His argument is that expensive miners simply go bust.
The math supports the pressure. Riot Platforms spent $90,631 per coin last quarter once depreciation is counted, far above the current market price. Hashrate has fallen about 22% from its October 2025 peak as miners leave the network or rent their power to AI tenants instead.
Core Scientific shows the shift in one line of accounts. It drew 83% of second-quarter revenue from colocation and only 13% from mining its own coins.
Where Other Voices Disagree
Not everyone reads the same data the same way. Venture investor Chamath Palihapitiya has called the energy shift toward AI a structural problem for miners rather than a healthy cleanout. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong disputes that reading.
Interesting point. The first one feels temporary.The second one more durable. But hash power or energy going to Bitcoin mining doesn't determine its price (the network difficulty adjusts if miners go offline to keep the same pace of block mining). Long term, Bitcoin price is…
— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) July 20, 2026
The governance fight is also live rather than settled. A group of developers pushed BIP-110, a temporary softfork that would have forced blocks to signal support or be rejected. The chain split at block 961,632 on August 8.
That breakaway BIP-110 fork has since found four blocks. Bitcoin has found more than 1,100. Mining pool OCEAN still runs a separate endpoint for the minority chain, carrying 1.15 exahashes per second against 19.22 on its main endpoint.
Users have taken real losses in the meantime. The Coldcard wallet hack and a BTCPay Server exploit both drained funds this summer. Neither touched consensus, which is the distinction Booth keeps drawing.
That leaves one failure case in his framework, and it is human rather than technical. Booth argues Bitcoin only fails if people collectively keep pouring their time and money into the system he says takes from them.
He still expects broad adoption, and he refuses to put a date on it.
“I think it’s inevitable. It’s just a matter of timeline.”
The next test arrives soon. BIP-110 backers have floated September 1 for a proof-of-work change and a separate coin. Whether anyone follows them will say more about Bitcoin’s governance than 15,000 hours of theory ever could.

A meme coin trader turned $120 into more than $205,000 within hours, according to on-chain data documented by the tracking account Lookonchain.
The story went viral, though most of that gain still exists only on paper. The trader might not be able to even sell the coins to realize the massive profit.
What can you do with $120?This guy made $205.8K with only $120, an 822x return!He spent $120 to buy 19.1M $牛来, then sold 9.1M $牛来 for $25.9K and still holds 10M $牛来 ($180.2K).Total profit: $205.8K.Wallet: 0x639cf6961b227d73fc4015380104249571c73da4 pic.twitter.com/TXH18kCy8B
— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) August 16, 2026
How the Trade Actually Unfolded
The meme coin is called Niu Lai. It runs on BNB Chain and draws from a low-budget Chinese animated film that went viral. The purchase landed at exactly the right moment. She acquired 19.1 million tokens for $120 when the project’s market cap was barely $6,270.
A partial sale followed shortly after. She liquidated 9.1 million tokens for roughly $25,900, locking in a real gain. The rest remains unsold. She holds 10 million tokens valued at nearly $180,200, a figure that fluctuates with every price move..
The combined return exceeds 822x the initial investment, totaling $205,800 across realized and unrealized positions. The trader identified herself on X as @saracrypto_eth. She explained that years of trading meme coins taught her to spot where money is flowing.
“Yes, that ‘trader’ is me. for a lot of people, making $200k sounds absolutely insane. but when you’ve spent enough time in this space, you start to understand where the money flows and how the game is played. that’s when you realize how many opportunities there really are…,” Sarah Milady said on X.
Her personal story amplified the reach. She described working double shifts at a restaurant years ago and now supporting her retired parents.
Follow us on X to get the latest news as it happens.
牛来 (Niu Lai) Price Performance. Source: CoinGecko What These Viral Stories Never Show
Token context explains the speed. Niu Lai launched in mid-August 2026, riding the film’s viral momentum across social platforms. The climb proved vertiginous. Market cap jumped from a few thousand dollars to peak near $20 million, according to CoinGecko data.
What these stories omit deserves equal attention. The vast majority of such tokens lose over 90% of their value within days or weeks. Risks extend well beyond volatility.
Liquidity problems, potential rug pulls, and price manipulation form standard features of the territory.
“100% insider or dev wallet. For every $120 lotto ticket like this, 999 people get rekt providing their exit liquidity,” one user noted.
Selling presents its own difficulty. Unwinding large positions without collapsing the market becomes nearly impossible in tokens with thin depth. That limitation applies directly here. The $180,200 she still holds could evaporate within minutes if the price collapses.
Survivorship bias completes the picture. Nobody posts screenshots of trades that went wrong, so only extraordinary wins circulate publicly.
For most participants, a total loss of capital remains the most likely outcome.
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Global bond yields have reached levels last seen in July 2008. Bitcoin (BTC) did not exist then. The asset has never traded through borrowing costs this high, and it is not benefiting now.
Gold rose 32% over the past year. Bitcoin fell 46%. Investors who expected a debt squeeze to lift a scarce asset backed the wrong one.
Bitcoin and Gold Price Performance. Source: TradingView Bond Yields Return to a Level Bitcoin Has Never Seen
A bond yield is what a government pays to borrow. Those costs are now the heaviest in almost two decades.
A Bloomberg gauge of long-dated government debt hit its highest yield since July 2008 in May. It tracks sovereign bonds maturing in 10 years or more.
🚨 BOND MARKET CRISIS IS HITTING THE ENTIRE WORLDThe Bloomberg Global Long Bond Index yield has surged to around 4.2%, its highest level since July 2008.Long term government borrowing costs are now back at levels last seen during the global financial crisis.With governments… pic.twitter.com/z8D28IloN0
— Bull Theory (@BullTheoryio) August 16, 2026
Bitcoin’s whitepaper appeared that October. The first block followed on January 3, 2009, six months after the peak.
Satoshi Nakamoto stamped that block with a newspaper line.
“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,” source, genesis block.
Bitcoin was built as an answer to failing government finances. Those finances are strained again. This time the answer is the asset falling.
The move is global, though not uniform. UK 10-year gilts pay 5.05%, the highest of the major markets. Germany sits at 3.21%, a high only since 2011.
Japan pays 2.88% after decades pinned near zero.
Six-panel weekly chart of 10-year government bond yields for the US, UK, Germany, Japan, Australia and France. Source: TradingView
“We’re seeing a broader repricing of duration driven by fiscal realities, persistent inflation risks and some political uncertainty,” Bloomberg reported, citing Barclays strategist Patrick Coffey, who named the driver when the gauge first broke out.
Why Elevated Real Yields Cap Bitcoin
Compare the two eras directly. The US 10-year paid 2.46% on January 2, 2009, per Treasury records. It now pays 4.69%. The long end moved further. The 30-year paid 2.83% in Bitcoin’s first week.
The Treasury sold $25 billion of the same bond on August 13 at 5.216%, the highest since 2001.
💰 The US Treasury just sold 10-year debt at the highest yield in nearly 20 years. Why are bond markets sending a different message from the Fed? Hear more on the Reuters Morning Bid podcast https://t.co/aOp9iaAbk2 pic.twitter.com/hTZaodXfrL
— Reuters (@Reuters) August 13, 2026
Demand was soft, part of the global bond selloff. Bids covered the auction 2.39 times against a 2.43 average. Dealers absorbed 11.6% instead of the usual 10.6%.
Real yields make the squeeze concrete. A real yield is what a bond pays after inflation. The 10-year real yield reached 2.41% on August 14. Two years earlier it paid 1.77%.
That is the bar Bitcoin has to clear. Investors can now beat inflation using government debt and take almost no risk. Bitcoin pays nothing. BTC traded at $63,072 with a market value of $1.27 trillion, down 46% in a year.
Bitcoin Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto
Foreign yields bite the same way. Japanese and European investors can now earn at home, which shrinks the global risk pool crypto draws on. Japanese government bond losses show the strain.
What Would Flip the Setup
Cause decides the outcome. Yields driven by growth punish Bitcoin. Yields driven by doubt over solvency should favor a scarce alternative.
Gold has taken that trade. The metal traded for $4,376 as of this writing, after a 32% year, even as U.S. debt interest costs keep climbing.
So watch auctions, not charts. Stronger demand for long-dated debt would ease the pressure on the Bitcoin price.
Until then the test is simple. Bitcoin was designed for a moment like this. It has never had to prove that at these yields.

A seed phrase can be replaced. A password can be reset. A home address cannot. The SafePal data breach disclosed Sunday exposed nearly 40,000 of them.
Three days earlier, Trezor leaked 13,689 more. Together the two hardware wallet makers put 53,487 customer records into the open. Neither company lost a single coin.
What the SafePal Data Breach Exposed
SafePal said 39,798 customers were affected. The leak covered names, emails, phone numbers, shipping addresses, and order details.
Dear community,While your SafePal wallet, seed phrase, and private keys are secure; we identified a flaw in the order-tracking plug-in that led to unauthorized access to information of a subset of customers.The issue has been fixed with additional security measures…
— SafePal – Crypto Wallet (@SafePal) August 16, 2026
The cause was a flaw in the plugin SafePal uses to track orders. In some cases, one customer could open another customer’s record.
Affected orders ran from March 2, 2025 to April 11, 2026. That window stayed open for more than 13 months.
Seed phrases, private keys, bank details, and card numbers were not touched. SafePal has patched the flaw and cut order data retention to 90 days, according to its disclosure.
SafePal Token (SFP) Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto
SafePal Token (SFP) barely moved on Sunday, trading near $0.23. That is the point. Nothing financial happened here.
Why Leaked Addresses Outlast Leaked Passwords
Trezor learned of its own customer data breach on August 10. Its shipping partner, ShipMonk, had been compromised.
Full details leaked for 11,742 Trezor buyers, according to the company’s notice. Names, emails, phone numbers, and home addresses all went out.
The two failures differ at the root. Trezor’s data left through a supplier. SafePal’s left through a system it ran itself.
However, both lists are worth the same to an attacker. Buying a hardware wallet suggests you hold enough crypto to move it off an exchange.
Differences and Similarities Between Trezor and SafePal Incidences
So these records are narrower than a typical exchange leak. They match a likely self-custody holder to a confirmed front door.
Prosecutors Have Already Seen This Playbook
In May, US prosecutors announced charges against three Tennessee men over a $6.5 million robbery spree across California.
#FBI CASE UPDATE: Three men have been indicted on robbery, kidnapping, and conspiracy charges related to a $6 million cryptocurrency robbery spree throughout the Bay Area and LA. Elijah Armstrong, Nino Chindavanh, and Jayden Rucker – all from Tennessee- were charged on Conspiracy… pic.twitter.com/mIQQKjS3K2
— FBI SanFrancisco (@FBISanFrancisco) May 11, 2026
The men posed as delivery people to reach victims inside their homes, the indictment says.
A leaked shipping record hands that script to the next crew. It names the buyer, gives the address, and says what arrived in the box.
Phishing is the smaller problem. SafePal has removed more than 30 fake websites and scam links tied to the stolen data.
Real notices came from security@safepal.com. Anything from another address should be treated as an attack.
Ledger shows how long this tail runs. Its 2020 breach exposed roughly 272,000 postal addresses, names, and phone numbers, per the company’s statement.
Six years on, Ledger still warns customers about phishing letters arriving by post. The company does not tie those letters to the 2020 leak.
Scam domains come down. Inboxes get filtered. Addresses do not expire.
Trezor now plans an anonymous delivery option, reaching the European Union in September and the US by year end. It arrives too late for the 53,487 records already in circulation.

DeFiLlama’s team loaded a wallet with real crypto, handed it to a counterfeit version of their own app, and watched the money vanish. Apple removed the scam listing days later.
Months of trademark and impersonation complaints had achieved nothing. Only documented theft moved Apple’s reviewers, according to a post from DeFiLlama developer 0xngmi.
How the Fake DeFiLlama App Drained a Real Wallet
DeFiLlama tracks capital locked across decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, and traders treat its dashboards as a reference point. That trust made the brand worth copying.
We had been trying to take down a fake DefiLlama app on apple’s store for months, telling Apple about trademark violations, impersonation…Then we loaded a small wallet, downloaded the app, got drained as expected and reported it to Apple.App was taken down in days after that
— 0xngmi (@0xngmi) August 15, 2026
The clone was crude. It simply asked users to enter their seed phrase—the 12 or 24 words that control a wallet—and then emptied whatever it found.
No legitimate wallet or analytics app ever requests that phrase. However, an App Store badge lends the kind of credibility a phishing website cannot buy, which is why iPhone wallet exploits keep paying off for attackers.
The operators also walked through Apple’s identity checks. They registered the developer account using a small shoe shop incorporated 40 years ago and long since dissolved, 0xngmi said. The same crew has targeted other major crypto brands.
So the team stopped filing reports and instead built a case. They funded a throwaway wallet, installed the fake app, entered the phrase, lost the coins, and sent Apple the evidence. The listing disappeared within days.
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Review Process Faces Growing Pressure
This case is not isolated. Kaspersky counted 26 fraudulent wallet apps on the App Store in April, with several impersonating Ledger, MetaMask, and Trust Wallet, according to its research.
Victims are rarely careless. In April, a fake Ledger app cost musician G. Love nearly 6 BTC after he trusted an App Store download. Copycat websites work the same way, and one Uniswap phishing clone took roughly $400,000 from traders in May.
Meanwhile, three Bitcoin holders sued Apple in late July over a counterfeit Sparrow Wallet listing they say cost them $1.8 million combined.
Therefore, the incentive gap looks stark. Brands absorb the reputational damage, users absorb the losses, and the store keeps collecting fees.
Security teams keep flagging the same weak point. Binance’s chief security officer recently argued that phishing and malware, not exotic cryptographic attacks, are what drain wallets today. Fake ads and spoofed sites, including a recent Trezor phishing campaign, reinforce that point.
DeFiLlama held back its own iOS release for months so no user would grab an imposter first. That caution cost the project time and momentum. Whether rival teams now copy the drain-yourself playbook says more about Apple’s process than about crypto.

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has published a free tool that removes Anthropic’s watermarks from Claude output. He named it Anthropies, a blend of Anthropic and herpes.
The project appeared on GitHub on Sunday, five days after Anthropic switched on invisible marking across every Claude product. Hoskinson shipped it under an Apache 2.0 license.
How the Anthropic Watermark Actually Works
Anthropic now marks Claude text at the model level. The rollout answers the European Union AI Act transparency code, which took effect on Aug. 2.
The mark is not a hidden character string. Instead, a secret key steers tournament sampling, a process that breaks ties between words fitting equally well.
Anthropies. Source: Hoskinson Github
Hoskinson’s repository splits the problem into three layers. The “Co-Authored-By” git trailer strips out cleanly. C2PA credentials on images disappear after a re-encode.
Prose is the hard layer. The tool therefore routes text through a model other than Claude, a step the repository calls a non-origin rewrite.
That design carries a blunt limitation. Running the rewrite inside Claude or Gemini would stamp the mark straight back on, so the skill refuses.
The repository ships three modes. Clean strips trailers deterministically, humanize rewrites prose elsewhere, and orchestrate blocks the job when the host model is Claude.
Code barely carries a signal at all. Syntax leaves almost no room for substitution, so the watermark has nowhere to sit.
The Apache 2.0 license matters here. It is a permissive open-source term that lets anyone copy, modify, sell, or bundle the code, provided they keep the original notices. It also grants a patent license, so Anthropic could not block forks on patent grounds.
“The mark is the wording. There is no separate payload to delete. Removing it means changing which words are there.”
Anthropies README
Diagram of the three Anthropic watermark layers. Source: Hoskinson Github The Legal Argument Behind the Tool
Hoskinson framed the release on X as a warning rather than a utility. He said the watermark and the Claude co-author line could cause issues down the road.
I'm creating a new skill that can be used with most LLMs to strip out the Anthropic watermark. I call it Anthropies (Anthropic Herpies). I've also included a legal argument about how watermarks and the co-authored by Claude can cause issues down the road https://t.co/6eNx4br1BZ
— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) August 16, 2026
Roughly half the repository is not code. Hoskinson attacks the assignment clause that assigns ownership of output to users, which applies “subject to your compliance with our Terms.”
He reads that phrase as a condition precedent, meaning a hurdle users must clear before ownership passes. A breach of terms could therefore mean ownership never transferred.
The git trailer draws separate fire. A published co-authorship line could later surface as evidence of joint authorship, he argues. He also flags a risk of false positives. An editor who runs human copy through Claude for a quick proofread may trip a detector months later.
AI defaults now arrive unasked, as Twitch showed when it opted creators into training. Anthropic has stayed quiet so far. The company is meanwhile preparing a listing above $2 trillion, and it has already withheld its strongest model from the public.
Hoskinson, for his part, has spent 2026 picking fights over technical credit, including a claim that Ethereum copied Cardano’s ledger design.
The repository counted four stars on Sunday morning. Adoption matters less than the question it poses. Who owns a sentence once the model has signed it?

Peter Thiel has bought close to 1% of Vista Energy, an Argentine oil producer. His fund paid roughly $76 million for about 1.2 million American depositary shares.
The purchase was disclosed in a quarterly filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Vista now ranks second among Thiel’s disclosed holdings.
Inside Thiel’s $76 Million Vista Energy Stake
Thiel Macro reported eight positions worth $418.7 million for the second quarter of 2026. Vista accounts for $75.9 million of that total, or 18.1%.
Thiel Macro also expanded fast. It listed a single holding a quarter earlier, then disclosed eight.
Only Amazon (AMZN) ranks higher at 28.2%. Meanwhile, three power companies absorb much of the rest. Vistra, American Electric Power, and DTE Energy together make up roughly 34% of the book.
Vista Energy Stock Gained 40% Year-to-Date. Source: Yahoo Finance
The shape of that portfolio reads as an energy bet, not a technology one. Thiel has pulled back elsewhere this year. In February, his Founders Fund exited an Ethereum treasury firm as digital asset treasury companies came under pressure.
His stock picks have also stumbled. In May, another Thiel-backed stock lost half its value after a Las Vegas debut fell flat.
The filing is dated Aug. 14 and covers positions held through June 30. Quarterly disclosures lag the market, so the fund may have changed its position since then.
Vista therefore stands out in Thiel’s book. It is the largest single wager outside Big Tech.
Thiel Macro Q2 2026 holdings. Source: Sensa Market, SEC 13F filing Why The Billionaire Is Betting on Vaca Muerta Oil
Vista drills in Vaca Muerta, a shale formation roughly the size of Belgium. The field holds the world’s second-largest shale gas reserves and its fourth-largest shale oil reserves.
Output reached 156,061 barrels of oil equivalent per day in the second quarter, a 16% rise from the first. Vista has committed more than $6.5 billion to Argentina, and it raised its production outlook in May.
Politics helps explain the timing. Thiel met President Javier Milei at the presidential palace in Buenos Aires four months ago. Milei later told local media that they discussed economic policy and a shared dislike of wealth taxes.
Since then, Argentina’s inflation under Milei has kept falling, though economists still doubt how durable the peso fix will prove. Thiel also bought a mansion in an upscale Buenos Aires neighborhood.
Tax policy runs through the story as well. Wealthy investors spent 2026 hunting lower-tax jurisdictions, and Milei courts that money openly.
For crypto readers, the rotation matters more than the ticker. Capital that once chased digital assets has drifted toward commodities and equities through this downturn. Thiel’s filing lands squarely in that trend.
Whether Thiel’s wager pays now depends on two things: Vaca Muerta output and Milei’s ability to keep his reform program intact.

Billionaire investor Mark Cuban says chips as an asset class will be the new crypto. The call arrives weeks before US markets open the first regulated futures on computing power.
Cuban added no elaboration. Chipmakers keep posting record demand; however, exchanges now move to standardize the market for processing power.
Why Chips as an Asset Class Echo Early Crypto
Cuban kept the argument to a single line.
Chips as an asset class will be the new crypto
— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) August 15, 2026
Scarcity drives the comparison. Advanced processors remain in short supply, while buyers bid hard for every available unit. Bitcoin built its early narrative on the same logic.
Cuban has grown cold on digital assets. He sold most of his Bitcoin in May, and Blockstream CEO Adam Back challenged Cuban’s Bitcoin data days later.
Meanwhile, he keeps pushing policy ideas around artificial intelligence. In May, Cuban floated a federal AI token tax and compared his critics to early crypto opponents.
The parallel has clear limits, though. Tokens settle on public ledgers and trade around the clock. Chips, by contrast, sit in data centers, wear out, and lose value as newer models are shipped.
Nvidia quarterly data center revenue. Source: BeInCrypto Wall Street Already Prices the Silicon
CME Group turns the idea into a live product on October 5. The exchange plans to list Silicon Data H100 and B200 rental index futures on NYMEX. Each contract covers one month of GPU rental costs.
Compute has become the currency of the AI age…our futures contracts will now turn compute into a standardized, tradable commodity.
Pete Keavey, CME Group global head of energy and environmental products, via CME
For now, hedging explains the early interest. AI developers and cloud operators face fluctuating rental bills, so a futures curve lets them lock in budgets months in advance.
Demand numbers support the thesis. Nvidia booked $75.2 billion in data center revenue for the quarter ending April 26, up 92% year over year. Traders now watch Nvidia’s next earnings report closely.
Total company revenue reached $81.6 billion over the same three months, an 85% annual jump. Chief executive Jensen Huang described the AI buildout as the biggest infrastructure expansion ever attempted.
Moreover, supply politics add another layer. Chinese exports jumped 23.9% in July as global chip demand surged. However, US export limits also pushed Beijing toward domestic memory chip champions.
Cuban’s comparison cuts both ways. Crypto delivered outsized returns, yet it also produced brutal drawdowns and heavy speculation. Whether chips repeat that arc may depend on how the October futures contracts trade.

Michael Saylor published a one-year performance chart on Sunday showing that Strategy Preferred Stock outpaced Bitcoin. STRC gained 9% while Bitcoin (BTC) fell 47%.
The comparison runs from August 14, 2025, through August 14, 2026. It measures four Strategy credit instruments against the single asset backing the entire company.
Why Strategy Preferred Stock Held Up Better Than Bitcoin
Strategy issues four preferred securities, each of which pays income rather than tracking Bitcoin directly. STRC, formally the Variable Rate Series A Perpetual Stretch Preferred Stock, currently pays 12% annually in twice-monthly cash dividends.
The company moves that rate up or down to hold STRC near its $100 par value. However, the security slipped under par this summer. Therefore, Strategy sold 1,690 Bitcoin in August to fund STRC share buybacks.
The other three instruments lagged STRC. STRD fell 8%, STRF lost 9%, and STRK dropped 27%. Still, every one of them beat Bitcoin by a wide margin. Cash dividends and distributions cushioned part of each decline.
MicroStrategy’s STRC Stock Lost Only 3% in a Year. Source: Yahoo Finance
STRK explains that spread. Each share converts into 0.1 shares of MSTR, so it tracks the common stock more closely than the others do. None of the four carry a claim on Strategy’s Bitcoin.
Critics question how long the company can carry that payout load. Arca Chief Investment Officer Jeff Dorman warned in May that a $15 billion preferred stack strains the Bitcoin flywheel.
Over the past year, $BTC fell 47%. Our Digital Credit instruments ranged from -27% to +9%, with $STRC up 9%. Financial engineering can transform volatile Digital Capital into instruments designed for income, stability, and reduced downside risk. pic.twitter.com/ZtiRoeIsBA
— Michael Saylor (@saylor) August 16, 2026
The Number Missing From Saylor’s Chart
The graphic leaves out MSTR, Strategy’s common stock. That omission matters. MSTR closed at $93.04 on August 14, roughly 75% below its level a year earlier, according to Yahoo Finance data.
Strategy Inc (MSTR) Stock Chart. Source: Yahoo
The stock touched $367.57 at its 52-week high. Today it changes hands near the floor of that range. Common shareholders absorbed the leverage, while preferred holders collected the income.
In contrast, Bitcoin’s current price sat near $63,072 on Sunday, still deep inside a bear market that began last autumn.
Strategy has also flipped into a net seller. The company added 37 Bitcoin across two months, then sold 1,638 coins in a single week. Meanwhile, its treasury now sits at a lower level than it did in May.
Saylor addressed the credit risk head-on last week. His new model publishes floor prices for creditors, naming the Bitcoin levels where each security breaks.
The engineering worked as advertised for over 12 months. It turned one volatile asset into four calmer income streams. Whether those streams hold through a second year of falling Bitcoin prices is the question facing holders now.

Changpeng Zhao says the world now holds more millionaires than Bitcoin has coins. The Binance founder argues that a full coin will soon be out of reach.
His remark followed a reader who pointed out that the United States alone counts 23.6 million millionaires. Bitcoin will never exceed 21 million coins.
Bitcoin is Scarcer Than the World’s Millionaire Count
The Binance founder took to X with a supply update. Miners have produced 20.07 million coins so far. Therefore, only 4.4% of the total supply remains to be mined.
Those final 930,000 coins will not arrive quickly. Halving cuts the block reward every four years, and the last one should surface around 2140. He calls the result a deflationary asset.
Analyst Quinten François then ran the comparison. The United States counts roughly 23.6 million millionaires, according to the UBS Global Wealth Report 2026. Globally, the total reaches 57.5 million.
Those figures outnumber every coin ever mined by almost three to one. Split evenly, the mined supply leaves each millionaire with about 0.35 BTC. The reply came in a single line.
Soon, millionaires won't be able to afford 1 full Bitcoin. 🤷
— CZ 🔶 BNB (@cz_binance) August 15, 2026
Debate over that ceiling has grown louder this year. In July, a Zcash founding scientist proposed scrapping Bitcoin’s 21 million cap in favor of 4% annual issuance. Most of the Bitcoin community rejects any such change.
Why Lost and Dormant Coins Shrink the Float Further
Mined supply overstates what buyers can actually reach. The crypto billionaire, who recently argued that exchanges are safer than self-custody, puts the share of lost or unrecoverable coins at 10% to 20%. Consequently, the tradable float may sit nearer 17 million.
Millionaire count compared with Bitcoin coins mined and still usable, Source: BeInCrypto
Meanwhile, careless transactions lead to massive losses for users. One user recently wasted 1.6 BTC on a costly Bitcoin fee mistake and ended up moving nothing at all.
Additionally, long-term holders lock away even more. He made that point when a follower pressed him on real usable supply.
The float looks thinner still up close. Roughly 2.67 million coins sat on exchanges in early 2026, while more than 14 million were ranked as illiquid. Spread across 57.5 million millionaires, that trading float works out to 0.046 BTC each, or roughly $2,925.
“Yeah, many long term holders don’t move/spend their coins at all. Can’t buy those.”
Changpeng Zhao, founder of Binance, on X
Prices, however, tell a different story right now. Bitcoin trades near $63,030 after a 46% slide over the past year, and analysts still debate whether the current bear market bottom has been reached.
That gap matters for the affordability math. At the record of $126,080 set in October 2025, one coin cost roughly 12.6% of a seven-figure net worth. Today it costs about 6.3%.
Nothing prices millionaires out yet, in other words. The warning describes a future in which demand meets a supply that cannot grow, while skeptics counter that fractional ownership already solves the problem. His own dollar-cost-averaging advice points in that direction, toward buyers who collect slices rather than whole coins.

MicroStrategy (now Strategy) founder Michael Saylor has a new way of explaining Bitcoin: think of money like food, and Bitcoin like a freezer.
In an essay published on August 15, Saylor argues that money stores the value created by your time and work. The real test, he says, is how much of that value survives over decades.
Why Saylor Thinks Bitcoin Stops Money From “Melting”
Cash is easy to spend, but inflation can gradually reduce what it buys. Gold has historically served as a store of value, though storing, moving, and verifying large quantities creates costs.
Saylor’s “deep freeze” analogy is his answer to both problems. Bitcoin has no physical weight, can move globally, and follows a supply schedule set by its protocol rather than a central bank.
In his framework, that means less value “leaks” away while wealth moves through time.
To understand Bitcoin, first understand money.Money is energy. Bitcoin is digital monetary energy. https://t.co/qDFjo2hf6c
— Michael Saylor (@saylor) August 15, 2026
The Big Catch: Bitcoin Can Still Lose Value Fast
A deep freeze sounds stable. Bitcoin is anything but stable in the short term.
BTC currently trades near $63,000. So Saylor is making a long-term scarcity argument, rather than claiming Bitcoin works like a stable savings account. That doesn’t seem true in a real-time market context.
His question is essentially this: over several decades, would you rather store wealth in money whose supply can expand, a physical asset that is costly to move, or a digital asset with programmed scarcity?
Bitcoin Price Year-to-Date. Source: CoinGecko
Bitcoin has not existed long enough to pass Saylor’s 100-year test. Still, the analogy explains the investment thesis clearly: Bitcoin’s main pitch here is preserving purchasing power across time without relying on an issuer.

A fresh fight over Bitcoin’s 21 million supply cap has pulled Adam Back and Peter Todd onto opposite sides, after Todd’s case for a permanent block reward resurfaced this week.
Todd wants a small, never-ending issuance to keep paying miners once the last new Bitcoin arrives around 2140. Back reads the argument as a trap dressed up as engineering.
Why Peter Todd Says Bitcoin Needs a Permanent Block Reward
Bitcoin pays miners in two ways. Block subsidies mint new coins, and transaction fees ride along with each block. However, the subsidy is roughly halved every four years, and it hits zero around 2140. Fees alone must carry security after that.
Todd argues fee revenue swings too wildly to hold the chain together. Miners would be incentivized to reorganize the chain and re-mine fat-fee blocks rather than build forward. A fixed reward, he says, kills that pull.
His case leans on lost coins. Todd models supply against a loss rate and finds it settles at a ceiling, because coins vanish as fast as fresh ones appear. Therefore, he frames tail emission as a stabilizer, not inflation.
He has pointed to Monero, which already runs a small permanent reward. Its apparent inflation rate keeps sliding toward zero. The Bitcoin++ conference account resurfaced his talk on the topic this week, which reopened the argument.
The timing matters less than the mechanism. Miners currently earn 3.125 bitcoin per block, and close to 30 more halvings sit ahead. Each one thins the subsidy further while fees stay lumpy and unpredictable.
Adam Back Warns of False Narratives
Back rejects the framing outright. Meanwhile, he points to BIP-110, the contentious 2026 soft fork that tried to filter non-payment data out of blocks, as the model for how these campaigns get sold.
trick is finding ways to trigger and rally people to your dangerously inadvisable cause with simple though false narrarives. 110 used 1) JPEG spam and illegal comtent could be stopped but devs are captured so they won't, 2) anti layer2 anchors devs want to etheriumize bitcoin.
— Adam Back (@adam3us) August 15, 2026
That pattern has a recent scoreboard. The failed BIP-110 fork died after two blocks this month, with miner support near 2.53% against a 55% bar. Back had predicted the stall weeks earlier, and backers now chase a breakaway coin instead.
Bitcoin commentator Trey Sellers made the parallel explicit, writing that a supply-schedule fork would fail as hard as BIP-110, if not harder. Michael Saylor had raised a related worry, warning about protocol neutrality whenever consensus rules bend to one camp.
Still, the security question survives the politics. Bitcoin Knots developers spent August claiming the network faces attack, while miner incentive disputes drew in former Ripple CTO David Schwartz. In contrast to those fights, this one carries no deadline.
One difference cuts against Todd. BIP-110 asked for a soft fork, which needs only miner cooperation. Raising the cap demands a hard fork, and every holder would have to accept it.
Fees may yet fund the chain on their own. Nobody alive today will see that test settled.

The Solana Company’s Q2 loss reached $30.3 million, as write-downs on the firm’s crypto holdings swamped a quarter that produced only $2.5 million in revenue.
Investors punished the print. Shares of the Nasdaq-listed digital asset treasury firm that holds SOL on its balance sheet and trades under the ticker HSDT fell 5.56% and closed Friday at $1.70.
Solana Company Q2 Loss Came From Write-downs, Not Operations
The operating business actually worked. Staking generated nearly all of the $2.5 million in revenue. Gross margin landed close to 97%.
Validators earned 31,200 SOL for the company during the quarter. The protocol then restaked those tokens automatically.
However, accounting rules force treasury firms to mark holdings down when token prices drop. Solana (SOL) slid hard through the spring, so the paper value of the stack shrank.
By June 30, total assets stood at $176.1 million. Long-term digital asset positions made up $147.3 million of that figure. Cash, meanwhile, sat at just $3.6 million.
Liabilities stayed light at $6.4 million. Stockholders’ equity therefore held near $165.6 million across 57.4 million shares outstanding.
Chairman and CEO Joseph Chee pointed to strategy rather than the headline number.
“This quarter was defined by execution of our integrated flywheel strategy, expanding operations across advisory, validator infrastructure, staking and treasury.”
The first half tells a harsher story. Revenue reached $6.1 million, yet the company still reported a net loss of $130.1 million, or $1.66 per share.
Solana Company Stock Chart. Source: TradingView SOL Weakness Drags Down Every Treasury Stock
SOL changes hands near $75, down roughly 62% over the past year. The token still ranks seventh by market value at about $43.8 billion. Traders have watched on-chain SOL warning signs build for weeks.
Solana Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto Markets
Rivals report the same pattern. Forward Industries absorbed $69 million in Solana treasury writedowns last quarter. Bit Digital, meanwhile, posted a $107.2 million quarterly loss on its Ethereum stack.
Board director Cosmo Jiang of Pantera Capital argued that capital now favors firms with disciplined reporting. Not every treasury bled, though. Hyperion DeFi booked a record profit of $31 million on Hyperliquid, highlighting how much the model depends on the direction of a single token.
Capital keeps arriving regardless. Solana Company raised $7.9 million through a direct offering led by Mirae Asset, the South Korean fund manager, with HashKey Capital joining the round. Management also retired 1.3 million shares for $2.3 million during the quarter, and $5.9 million so far this year.
That buyback signals confidence in a stock trading at $1.70. Yet the treasury thesis still hinges entirely on SOL, and this crypto earnings season keeps proving the point.
So the next print matters less than the chart. Should SOL rebound, the same accounting rules that created a $30.3 million loss would swing the figure back the other way.

The Shiller CAPE ratio for the S&P 500 sits near 40 to 42, approaching the record of roughly 44 set during the late-1990s dot-com bubble.
That reading places equity valuations in rare territory, and Bitcoin holders have reason to pay attention.
What the CAPE Ratio Actually Measures
The cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio, or CAPE, divides an index by the ten-year average of inflation-adjusted earnings. Nobel laureate Robert Shiller developed it to smooth short-term distortions.
The method matters for interpretation. Using a decade of earnings filters out temporary booms and recessions, offering a longer view than conventional multiples.
History provides an uncomfortable pattern. When the ratio remained above 30 for sustained periods, subsequent 10-year real returns for US equities were modest or negative.
Two peaks stand out particularly. Both 1929 and 2000 preceded significant market declines, though the timing varied considerably in each case.
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S&P 500 Shiller PE Ratio – Historic Performance. Source: multpl.com
Current levels rank second only to the tech bubble. No other period in the series shows valuations stretched to this degree. An important caveat applies, however. Expensive markets can remain expensive for years, so the ratio functions poorly as a timing signal.
What it does indicate is probability. Elevated readings raise the odds of lower future returns and greater downside risk if earnings growth or liquidity disappoint.
The Two Competing Cases for Bitcoin
Bitcoin’s relationship to that backdrop is genuinely nuanced. Recent cycles show the asset behaving as a high-beta, risk-on instrument alongside technology stocks.
Correlation data support that pattern. Previous risk-off episodes saw Bitcoin fall in tandem with equities rather than serving as a shelter from them.
The near-term implication follows logically. A sharp correction driven by stretched valuations could pressure Bitcoin as investors reduce speculative exposure. A competing narrative pulls in the other direction. Bitcoin also carries a digital gold framing, positioning it as an alternative store of value.
Bitcoin is 87% correlated to global liquidity. The NASDAQ is 97% correlated.Which tells you something most people never realise. These assets are not really trading on earnings, or news, or whatever the story of the week is. They’re tracking the amount of money in the system.… pic.twitter.com/lWFjzm7dcg
— Raoul Pal (@RaoulGMI) July 27, 2026
That thesis gains traction under specific conditions. Persistently high equity valuations, combined with elevated public debt, can push capital toward scarce, uncorrelated assets.
Historical precedent offers partial support. Some periods of equity stress coincided with Bitcoin outperformance, though typically after the initial risk-off phase passed.
The Ratio Is Not a Forecast
Several variables will determine which pattern dominates. Interest rate paths, the durability of AI-driven earnings growth, and global liquidity conditions all matter.
Bitcoin’s own metrics add another layer. On-chain activity and institutional adoption trends could decouple the asset from equity movements or reinforce the link. The dual identity explains the uncertainty.
Bitcoin functions simultaneously as a speculative risk asset and a potential monetary alternative, leaving room for divergent outcomes.
Treating the ratio as a forecast would be a mistake. High CAPE levels form part of the backdrop rather than dictating any particular price path. Market regimes shift more often than models assume. Correlations that held through recent cycles may not persist through the next one.
Bitcoin (BTC) Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto
The practical takeaway favors caution over conviction. Elevated valuations point toward more modest equity returns ahead, with Bitcoin facing both correlation risk and longer-term opportunity.
Neither scenario is guaranteed. The ratio belongs in a broader framework alongside liquidity, adoption, and rate expectations rather than standing alone.
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Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino says the company is not building a Tether blockchain and has no plans to launch one, rejecting a widely shared analysis that put the stablecoin issuer inside a $1 billion race.
Ardoino posted the Tether denial on Saturday, one day after CoinMarketCap published research on so-called stablechains. Those networks exist for one job, moving digital dollars cheaply.
Why the Tether Blockchain Claim Took Off
The research grouped Tether with Stripe and Circle. It argued that all three want to own the rails their tokens ride on, and that they have together raised more than $1 billion for the effort.
Stripe leads that group with Tempo, a payments chain that already handles stablecoin payments for DoorDash couriers. Circle follows with Arc, a network aimed at institutional settlement.
Tether looked like the third member because it has backed Plasma and Stable, two separate stablecoin chains. Stable targets institutions and uses USDT to pay network fees. Plasma courts retail users and raised roughly $373 million in a token sale.
However, funding a network is not the same as running one. Ardoino drew that line himself.
Tether is NOT building any blockchain nor has plan to build one. We remain agnostic and support many transport layers for our stablecoins. https://t.co/asUL2am1Ug
— Paolo Ardoino 🤖 (@paoloardoino) August 15, 2026
USDT Stays on Rails It Does Not Own
Therefore, Tether keeps USDT moving across networks it does not control. Tron and Ethereum still carry most of the supply, and the company has leaned on that reach for years.
That choice carries a bill. USDT holders pay roughly $2.9 billion a year in fees to outside chains, according to CoinMarketCap research. A proprietary chain would capture that revenue for Tether instead.
Consequently, the denial reads as a deliberate trade. Tether gives up toll revenue and keeps distribution, which remains its strongest asset against every challenger.
Meanwhile, the agnostic route buys something a private chain cannot. It keeps the $183 billion USDT market cap liquid across dozens of venues at once.
It also lets Tether act quickly when regulators call, as it did when it froze USDT on Tron alongside the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).
Competitive pressure keeps building, though. Circle is winning key national markets with USDC, and Europe squeezed USDT out after Revolut delisted the token under MiCA, the European Union’s crypto rulebook. Tether answered on trust instead, landing its first clean KPMG audit this month.

Chainlink (LINK) has left its bear market behind, according to analyst Michaël van de Poppe, who now expects a run toward $11. The token trades at $9.35, up 6.2% for the day.
The Dutch analyst points to higher highs and higher lows across the LINK chart. Meanwhile, Bitcoin sits in a quiet range, giving traders very little direction.
Chainlink Bull Market Case Rests on the $10.87 Barrier
Van de Poppe’s three-day Binance chart shows LINK closing a candle at $9.33 for a 4.98% gain. That candle opened at $8.887 and reached a high of $9.746.
The rally has run for four straight sessions since August 11. LINK has climbed 12.3% over the past seven days and holds a $6.97 billion market cap, ranking 17th.
LINK Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto Markets
Michaël van de Poppe put the shift plainly in a post on X.
“It’s no bear market anymore for $LINK.”
$LINK is not stopping soon. It's hitting itself into an uptrend, and I think we'll continue to run towards $11. https://t.co/gDY5o576Be pic.twitter.com/31Ml2btPEH
— Michaël van de Poppe (@CryptoMichNL) August 15, 2026
A rising trendline connects the lows since the spring selloff. Price now sits above that line, which supports the uptrend read.
Two resistance bands sit overhead. The first runs near $10.87, while the second waits around $14.42. His $11 target therefore sits just above the first band. Momentum on the lower oscillator has flipped positive after months below zero.
Relative strength against Bitcoin strengthens the argument. LINK has printed higher highs and higher lows on that pair for weeks. Van de Poppe reads this pattern as a fresh macro uptrend rather than a relief bounce.
Institutional demand adds weight to the setup. Daily whale transactions hit a five-month high this week after Standard Chartered set a $200 long-term target.
The token also leads several real-world asset rankings, which strengthens the fundamental case. However, a close back under the trendline near $8.70 would break the structure entirely.
BTC Keeps a Lid on the LINK Rally
Bitcoin tells a duller story. BTC trades at $62,968, down 3.1% over the past seven days.
Van de Poppe marks repeated sweeps of the lows on his daily chart. Those sweeps already cleared long-side liquidity, and buyers keep defending the zone.
There's still nothing happening on the #Bitcoin markets.Liquidity on the long side could be hunted and that could trigger a reversal back up.Other than that, range-bound, low volatility, no reason to overtrade and just accumulate for multi-year holding. pic.twitter.com/UMGtLOAxz3
— Michaël van de Poppe (@CryptoMichNL) August 15, 2026
Supports now range between $ 58,115 and $ 62,275. Above spot, he flags $65,800 as the first hurdle and a heavier band near $73,674. Short-side liquidity sits above the market. Consequently, a squeeze into that pocket could trigger the next leg higher.
The analyst sees no reason to overtrade such a narrow range. Instead, he recommends steady accumulation for a multi-year hold. He also argues that every push higher raises the odds that the bottom has already formed. That reading fits a market where sellers no longer force lower lows.
Other analysts still debate how the current downturn will resolve. Some warn about a slide toward $50,000 driven by yen volatility.
Altcoins usually need Bitcoin to settle before they run. Recent dominance data suggests that rotation may have already started.
So LINK holds the stronger chart, yet Bitcoin still controls the timing.

Tim Draper has put an artificial intelligence (AI) version of himself online, and founders can now pitch it at any hour.
The billionaire investor announced the digital twin on X. He said the software sometimes does a better job than he does.
What the Tim Draper Digital Twin Actually Does
The tool sits on the contact page of Draper Associates, his venture firm in Silicon Valley. Founders describe a business, and the system replies with feedback shaped by Draper’s investing record. It also explains how the firm weighs mission against market size.
Draper has sat through thousands of pitches over 40 years. He backed Tesla, SpaceX, Coinbase, Robinhood, and Hotmail. His team poured that history into the model. As a result, founders no longer wait weeks for a slot on his calendar.
We made a digital twin of me and you can connect with it on our Contact page at https://t.co/qdn227Fwwe. It is fun, and it works pretty well. In some cases, it does a better job than I do. It is certainly more polite than I am. Founders can pitch their businesses and get valuable…
— Tim Draper (@TimDraper) August 14, 2026
The clone itself is not brand new. Draper first showed a voice version on Bloomberg television in November 2025. Since then, the firm has widened it into chat and voice formats that draw on interviews, speeches, and investor letters.
Every week, the software forwards roughly six promising pitches to the real Draper, whose notes then sharpen its answers.
Users can stay anonymous or open an account and keep their conversations. Some founders return repeatedly and treat the twin as a sounding board. The format suits a market where Web3 founders now pitch tokenized assets far more often than decentralized finance products.
When the Clone Outperforms the Human
Draper described the result in blunt terms.
“It is fun, and it works pretty well. In some cases, it does a better job than I do. It is certainly more polite than I am,” Tim Draper, X.
Politeness, however, is not accuracy. Draper admits as much himself. He told PitchBook that “everybody in the world knows that digital twins have hallucinations.” Founders therefore get a filter, not a verdict.
Timing explains much of the appeal. AI captured a record share of venture funding in the first quarter, and inbound deal flow swelled in tandem.
Meanwhile, Draper keeps a loud public profile, from his Bitcoin price call to his ranking of Elon Musk near Satoshi. Screening at scale therefore solves a real bottleneck.
The bigger question runs past venture capital. A trained clone answers faster, listens longer, and stays courteous under pressure. Professionals in law, recruiting, and sales may copy the model next.
Skeptics push back on that optimism. Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong recently warned that rogue AI could disrupt the internet within two years.
Draper’s founders will learn soon enough whether polite algorithms can ever match the gut instinct of a venture capital legend.

Two Abu Dhabi sovereign funds lost $118 million on their BlackRock Bitcoin ETF position last quarter. Neither sold a single share, new SEC filings show.
Mubadala Investment Company and the Abu Dhabi Investment Council together reported 22.94 million shares of the iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) on June 30. That stake was worth $764 million, down from $881 million three months earlier.
InvestorFirst reported positionLatest confirmed holdingMubadala8,235,533 IBIT shares, $436.9m14,721,917 sharesADIC / Al Warda2,411,034 shares, $147.6m8,218,712 sharesCombined—22,940,629 shares
Bitcoin Peaked in May Before June Erased the Quarter
Yet the quarter-on-quarter number hides a violent round trip. Bitcoin (BTC) opened April near $68,079 and climbed to $82,139 by May 10.
IBIT touched $46.47 the following day. At that mark, the two funds sat at roughly $1.07 billion, well above where they started the quarter. June wiped it out. Bitcoin shed 17.9% that month and ended June at $58,559. The stake closed the quarter $302 million below its May peak.
Both funds also file a Form 13F, the quarterly report large investors submit on their US-listed holdings. Mubadala filed on Aug. 14, one day after the Investment Council disclosed its own book.
The share counts match exactly between the two quarters. Mubadala kept 14.72 million shares. The Investment Council kept 8.22 million. Only the price moved.
However, the two funds feel that loss very differently. IBIT accounts for just 1.4% of Mubadala’s $34.77 billion US book, which chipmaker GlobalFoundries dominates at 94.7%. The ETF still ranks second on that list.
The Investment Council runs a far tighter portfolio. Its $274 million IBIT stake equals 38% of a $714 million book, the largest position the fund discloses.
Mubadala had also bought more IBIT in the first quarter, when Harvard cut its stake by 43%. Neither fund disclosed a second crypto product.
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Abu Dhabi Held While Other Institutions Trimmed
Elsewhere, institutional conviction cracked. Intesa Sanpaolo, Italy’s largest banking group, cut its IBIT holding by 93.7% and rotated toward staked Ethereum products.
Flow data tells a similar story. Spot Bitcoin funds shed 3,170 BTC in late July, while Ethereum funds drew inflows for a third straight week. Meanwhile, the average US spot Bitcoin ETF buyer sat 22% underwater at the end of July.
Bitcoin Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto Markets
Prices have since steadied. Bitcoin reclaimed $65,000 in July and traded near $62,957 on Saturday, valuing the network at $1.26 trillion. That leaves the asset almost 50% below its record of $126,080, set on Oct. 6, 2025.
Sovereign wealth funds answer to a different clock than banks or endowments. Their mandates run for decades, and one weak quarter rarely forces a decision.
Quarterly filings capture a snapshot, not daily conviction. Sitting through a $302 million swing without trimming a share signals a long horizon rather than a trade. November’s disclosure will show whether Abu Dhabi’s patience outlasted the summer.