Cryptopolitan

President Donald Trump said on Friday that data centers could grow into a larger industry than oil, and argued the United States cannot afford to let China lead on artificial intelligence or cryptocurrency.
He made this declaration today in his midterm election interview with Punchbowl News.
“Whoever wins the AI, just wins”
Stressing the importance of AI infrastructure, Trump bluntly stated that “Whoever wins the AI, just wins.”
He categorized data centers as massive revenue generators for local economies, arguing that state governors should slash taxes to attract them rather than putting up roadblocks. He specifically took issue with Texas for pushing back, noting that lower taxes are the key to winning these investments.
Trump also played down worries about the strain these sites put on the power grid. While he admitted that the buildings “need more electricity than the entire nation uses,” he still insisted that the companies behind them are building their own power plants and would not draw from the public supply.
Where crypto fits into the whole argument
In the same Punchbowl interview, Trump tied the rapid expansion of crypto and Bitcoin directly to geopolitical competition with Beijing, warning that the U.S. must not let China take the lead in digital assets.
“We don’t want to see China take over crypto,” he said, adding that “I don’t want to see China win with AI.”
He pointed out that China currently holds an energy advantage due to its heavy use of fossil fuels like coal, oil, and gas, thus giving them the juice needed to fuel massive AI buildouts.
The comments highlight the administration’s broader push for abundant, cheap energy combined with a business-friendly approach to blockchain technology.
The pledge Trump is selling at home
The optimistic pitch runs into a domestic problem. On July 23, at an event at EPA headquarters, Trump expanded a nonbinding plan meant to shield households from the cost of the data center boom, according to E&E News.
Almost 200 more companies and utilities, plus close to half the nation’s governors, all Republicans, signed his Ratepayer Protection Pledge, which asks signatories to limit electricity price increases on homeowners.
“It’s only fair that the cost of building the new infrastructure should be borne by the corporations themselves, not by the American consumers,” Trump said.
This wasn’t received well in some quarters that dismissed the pledge as a toothless way to shift blame for the rising energy costs ahead of the midterm elections.
Majority of US citizens are against the buildout
There has been a sharp spike in recent polls as well, with 71% of Americans opposing the construction of massive data facilities near their neighborhoods according to a Gallup poll. Support for the data centers also fell from 37% to 24%.
The resistance is causing division between the people and the government. Residents in Nevada protested projects on public land, while Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered temporary halts to water and power consumption so auditors could properly assess water and power use. According to political analysts, projects facing direct pushback from the locals run a roughly fifty-fifty chance of being canceled altogether.
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Japan’s Financial Services Agency (FSA) advanced its regulatory march this week with a new set of rules on how it expects crypto exchanges to report cyberattacks and handle withdrawals flagged for scams.
Per local reports, the latest recommendations that the regulator is pushing include a single form format for exchanges, as well as other tech sectors, to escalate breaches to the proper channels. The other involves how platforms move Japanese users’ funds, especially when they carry fraud red flags.
Japan is slowing down how stolen money moves
Japan’s National Police Agency and the FSA listed out 11 anti-fraud steps in an August 6 directive to members of the Japan Virtual and Crypto Assets Exchange Association (JVCEA), the industry’s self-regulatory body.
The instructions contained actions targeting accounts implicated in fraud proceedings and their ability to send out funds.
First, exchanges need to allow funds sit in a flagged account for a set amount of time before withdrawals can start to go through. Also, funds can only be sent to destination addresses that have been registered in advance. The account operator would need to wait through a cooldown period before transfers can be processed into newly added addresses.
The agencies also asked the exchanges to set withdrawal limits based on customers’ holdings and risk profiles.
Other requirements, such as multi-factor authentication and matching names on incoming bank transfers, were also proposed when phishing or impersonation attempts are suspected.
Monitoring would tighten too, with faster freezes when a transaction looks fraudulent and quicker information-sharing with prefectural police.
Each exchange has discretion over how it applies these recommendations based on its own operations and exposure, the FSA said.
Why Japanese regulators want to slow down withdrawals
The FSA wants to throw hurdles into the fast lane that currently exists between criminals acquiring and moving funds off platforms under its oversight.
According to the agency’s statement, it is tackling “growing losses among crypto exchange users and cases where funds obtained through fraudulent schemes are being transferred to exchange accounts.”
Once funds are off-ramped from exchanges and parked in wallets outside Japanese jurisdiction, the chances of a plummet are near zero.
One reporting form for 17 sectors
A day later, on August 7, the FSA published a separate draft revision to its supervisory guidelines that would standardize how firms report cyberattacks and system failures. Crypto asset exchange providers are among 17 sectors covered, CoinPost reported.
Until now, a shared reporting template existed only for DDoS attacks and ransomware. The revision adds a new “Common Template for Other Cyberattack Incidents” to capture everything else, following a May 2025 amendment to an inter-ministerial agreement.
Firms can keep using the old format during a transitional period that runs to the end of March 2027, and the FSA is taking public comment until 5 p.m. on September 7.
Part of a wider crypto overhaul
The two moves land as Japan reworks its whole approach to digital assets. On August 6, the FSA also stood up a dedicated Crypto Assets and Stablecoins Division under a new supervisory bureau, Cryptopolitan reported, replacing the scattered office-level units that had handled the sector.
That sits alongside a law passed in July that reclassifies crypto as a financial product under the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act, cuts the top tax on trading gains to a flat 20% from January 1, 2028, and lays the groundwork for domestic spot ETFs. Taken together, the week’s actions read as Japan folding crypto further into mainstream financial supervision.
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Bitcoin hovered around $65,000 Friday, while Ether traded near $1,903 and the broader crypto market stayed mostly flat ahead of US jobs data.
US payrolls fell by 23,000 in July versus an expected 83,000 gain, while unemployment slipped to 4.1%, strengthening expectations the Fed will hold rates at 3.50% to 3.75% in September.
Nasdaq 100 futures jumped 1.2%, S&P 500 futures rose 0.5%, and Dow futures gained 160 points after Wall Street’s previous session ended lower.

SK hynix is making another massive wager on artificial intelligence. The South Korean memory giant approved 54 trillion won (about $38 billion) in new manufacturing investments on Friday, authorizing two new chip fabs that will expand production of the memory chips powering AI systems. The move reflects the company’s belief that demand for AI infrastructure will stay strong for years—and that memory, not processors, remains the industry’s biggest constraint.
This announcement comes in the wake of record quarterly results that have demonstrated the importance of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) in the current AI boom. As per a previous report by Cryptopolitan, SK Hynix posted revenue of 79.3 trillion won in the second quarter, and 60.5 trillion won in net income due to growing demand for HBM technology. The company has begun to make large deliveries of HBM4 chips in order to maintain its leadership in the field of AI memory.
The investment is crucial for firms that manufacture AI chips and cloud services because sophisticated accelerator devices rely on multiple HBM stacks being integrated next to chips using advanced packaging technology, such as TSMC’s CoWoS. Merely increasing GPU chip production would not help if HBM memory is not available in enough numbers.
According to a report published by Omdia, memory is likely to account for over 50% of the global semiconductor market revenue by 2026 due to the increased demand for DRAM and NAND on account of AI. TrendForce claims that the supply of DRAM and HBM will remain tight at least through 2027, as the capacity for advanced packaging will be limited despite several industry-wide developments.
SK hynix provides HBM to Nvidia and other manufacturers of AI accelerators, meaning its manufacturing intentions become a key measure of the speed of expansion of AI infrastructure. This investment follows Cryptopolitan’s recent report about Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang’s announcement of $500 billion cooperation with SK Group, demonstrating the increasing significance of memory production.
Where the 54 trillion won goes
SK hynix announced that a sum of 35.2 trillion won will be allocated for the construction of its Y2 DRAM fab located in Yongin. At the same time, 19.1 trillion won will be used for building the M17 NAND flash fab located at its Cheongju campus. It is estimated that the combined investment will amount to around $38 billion.
These projects are an integral component of SK hynix’s more expansive plans for development. The company has already committed 600 trillion won to the Yongin Semiconductor Cluster and another 100 trillion won to expand Cheongju, while construction of the neighboring Y1 fab is already underway.
The firm is taking steps to fortify its position in AI memory. SK hynix received 58% of global HBM revenue in the initial quarter of 2026 based on Counterpoint Research’s Memory Tracker, with Samsung (21%) and Micron (21%) following behind.
HBM is now one of the rare materials in the AI industry. Different from regular DRAM materials, it makes use of stacking technology, through-silicon vias technology (TSV), and complex packaging technology, making it extremely hard to fabricate.
As per Omdia’s projections, there will be a 94.1% growth in the semiconductor industry in the year 2026, spurred by AI-related demand for NAND and DRAM.
The shortage of supply has already started to impact plans for product development. For instance, Nvidia is now considering 8-Hi HBM and HBM4 solutions for its next Rubin Ultra accelerator instead of the previously planned 12-Hi HBM4e due to worries that reduced availability of DRAM in 2027 may hinder production of HBM modules.
This dynamic means that suppliers of memory increasingly control how quickly AI hardware can enter the market. An increase in memory capacity leads to the growth in shipments of accelerators, while a shortage of memory forces manufacturers to revise the design of their products to the amount of memory available.
What the plants will build, and when
Analysts anticipate continued supply-tightening conditions because it will be several years before the new fabs are operational.
According to SK hynix, the Y2 fab is expected to produce both HBM products as well as next-generation DRAM products. Construction will start in July 2027, with the cleanroom expected by June 2029. The breaking ground for the M17 fab will take place in February 2027, and its cleanroom will be ready by December 2028.
According to SK hynix, this investment serves as groundwork for a transition that is expected to take time instead of just being a short-lived AI trend. The firm indicates that based on Omdia forecasts, it will see a 19 percent CAGR growth in the global demand for DRAM and NAND till 2030, thus confirming SK hynix’s belief in the relevance of mass memory manufacturing for competitively winning in the age of artificial intelligence.

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The estate of late Ondo Finance founder Nathan Allman has taken the tokenization firm’s current chief executive to court in Delaware over a legal ownership dispute.
A disputed leadership handover has left the company with two rival power centers and the estate is asking a judge to decide who legally runs the company. Until a judge rules, the legal standing of the company’s contracts, spending and share issuance is in doubt.
Who are the two rivals aiming to run Ondo Finance?
Three complaints were filed on the 6th of August in Delaware’s Court of Chancery by Kathleen Allman, the mother of the late Nathan Allman, founder of Ondo Finance.
When Nathan Allman died in late May at 32, he held three roles at once: CEO, sole director and controlling shareholder, according to the complaint.
His death froze the company. His voting shares passed into his estate, so no one had the authority to exercise them, and with the single board seat empty, there was no director left to appoint a successor or call a meeting.
That deadlock continued until a Hawaii probate court made his mother administrator of the estate on June 26, handing her the voting power.
The estate is accusing Ian De Bode, Ondo’s former president, of using the gap before probate closed to install himself. According to the filings, De Bode took advantage of the bylaws to declare himself CEO, then leaned on a shareholder agreement to name himself sole director and started acting alone.
Kathleen Allman’s suit argues Ondo’s charter allowed the CEO vacancy to be filled only by a board decision, and since no board existed, De Bode’s appointment was void along with everything that followed.
De Bode also allegedly leaned on corporate resources to pressure Kathleen into signing documents cementing his control, and he and Ondo’s outside lawyers refused her request for a shareholder list.
Did the Allman estate attempt to resolve its ownership dispute out of court?
After gaining her voting rights, Allman did not immediately fire De Bode. She joined the board, put an interim operating policy in place to keep the business running, and kept De Bode on as president while asking for basic company records, all of which De Bode and Ondo’s counsel declined to recognize.
De Bode has called Allman’s claims “meritless” and her decision to sue “regretful.” According to him, Ondo still has the backing of “key stakeholders, including its lead investors and the Ondo Foundation.”
The Ondo board said in a statement that it remains focused on serving users “without interruption” while it searches for a permanent successor. The company also recently named former Blockchain.com executive Adam Schlisman as its chief financial officer.
Ondo, founded in 2021 and backed by Coinbase, Wintermute, Tiger Global and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, is leading the real-world asset market with about $3.5 billion in total value locked.
It runs products including the OUSG tokenized Treasury fund and the yield-bearing USDY token, but following the news of the dispute, ONDO fell about 6% over 24 hours to $0.35. The company is currently trading at roughly 84% below its December 2024 record of $2.14.
More than 10 million ONDO was reportedly moved onto exchanges as the news spread, with some transfers tied to Ondo team wallets, and put the two-day drop at around 9%.
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We asked our newsletter readers whether quantum computing would be able to break Bitcoin by 2035. Last week, on July 28, an AI model that has not been publicly released found a flaw in a post-quantum signature scheme that two years of human review had missed. No quantum computer was involved here. This report goes through what Bitcoin actually relies on, the actual threat to BTC and why what happened last week adds a whole new dimension alongside the quantum timeline.
Where Our Readers Landed
Add those who responded “yes, they probably will” to the “before 2030” cohort and what you get is 47% of readers see the potential of a quantum break on Bitcoin within the next nine years. To this day, the largest elliptic-curve key broken on real quantum hardware is 15 bits, which happened in April this year by a researcher claiming Project Eleven’s Q-Day Prize. For context, Bitcoin’s keys are 256 bits and getting from one to the one within the span of nine years is going to require an extraordinary run of engineering innovation. Roughly third of this audience is currently seeing this as a real possibility.
What is Actually At Risk For BTC
Before we go on to discussing in depth what the poll reveals, it’s important to clarify that Bitcoin does not encrypt anything. There is no secret message being scrambled and every transaction on the network has always been public since inception. What Bitcoin does is sign and hash. Two different jobs, two different pieces of maths, two very different quantum timelines.
The signing part is the exposed part and where there is a vulnerability. When you spend Bitcoin, your wallet produces a signature proving you own the coins and this is done on an elliptic curve cryptography called secp256k1. Bitcoin has used two signing methods over the years, ECDSA from the start and Schnorr since 2021. The security in both methods rests on one assumption, which is that deriving a private key from a public key is impossible.
This is where Shor’s algorithm comes into the picture and targets that assumption. Given a large enough quantum computer, it can work backwards from a public key to the private key that generated it. In March this year, Google researchers published estimates putting the requirement at less than 1,200 logical qubits and under 500,000 physical qubits. A later paper from Caltech and Oratomic brought that as low as 10,000 qubits using a neutral-atom architecture. Nobody has built anything close. But those numbers used to run into the millions, and the direction of travel is the reason Bitcoin developers stopped treating this as a problem for the 2040s.
The hashing side is in far better shape. Bitcoin uses SHA-256 for mining, for address generation, and for linking blocks together. The best quantum attack against it is Grover’s algorithm, which offers only a quadratic speedup. In practice that reduces 256-bit security to something like 128-bit, which remains well beyond reach for any machine anyone has sketched on paper. Mining is not the weak point here, and neither is the chain structure.
So the accurate framing is narrower than “quantum breaks Bitcoin.” What is at risk are coins whose public keys are already sitting on the chain in plain view. That happens when an address has been spent from before, or when funds sit in older address formats that expose the key by default. The current estimate is somewhere between 6.5 and 6.9 million BTC, roughly a quarter to a third of total supply, and that figure includes around 1.7 million coins in early addresses widely believed to belong to Satoshi.
Coins held in modern addresses that have never been spent from do not expose a public key at all. For those, a quantum attacker would only get a window during the few minutes a transaction sits in the mempool waiting to confirm. Still a problem worth solving. A much smaller one than the headline number suggests.
Bitcoin’s Answer To The Quantum Problem
On February 11, 2026, BIP-360 was merged into the official Bitcoin BIP repository, the network’s first formal quantum-resistance proposal to get that far. It introduces a new output type called Pay-to-Merkle-Root, or P2MR, authored by Hunter Beast, Ethan Heilman and Isabel Foxen Duke.
P2MR is essentially Taproot with the key-path spend removed. Taproot commits to both an internal public key and a Merkle root of scripts, which means the key is always derivable from what sits on the chain. P2MR commits only to the Merkle root. No public key appears until you actually spend, and even then only the leaf you used. It closes the long-exposure hole.
A companion proposal, BIP-361, arrived on April 14 with a three-phase plan to sunset ECDSA and Schnorr spends entirely. That is the one causing arguments, because phase three effectively freezes coins that never migrate.
Here is the part worth sitting with. Heilman’s own estimate is seven years from the moment consensus forms to full quantum resilience, and he calls that optimistic. Two and a half years for review and testing. Half a year to activate. Then five more years before roughly 90% of wallets, custodians, Lightning nodes and treasury software have actually upgraded. Notably, BIP-360 does not include post-quantum signatures at all. Those were stripped out in July 2025 and deferred to a future proposal. The scheme Bitcoin eventually adopts will most likely be ML-DSA or SLH-DSA, the algorithms NIST has already finalised.
Which brings us to last week.
A Post-Quantum Scheme Failed and No Quantum Computer Was Involved
On July 28, Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team published a finding from Claude Mythos Preview, a model that is not publicly available. Working semi-autonomously in an agentic setup, it found a previously unknown attack against HAWK, one of nine finalists in NIST’s additional post-quantum signature competition and the only lattice-based scheme to advance to round three in May.
The attack exploited a symmetry in HAWK’s lattice structure that nobody had used before. For the HAWK-256 parameter set, it dropped the estimated work for key recovery from about 2^64 operations to roughly 2^38. In plain terms, that is the gap between “no attacker on earth is doing this” and “a well-funded team could plausibly try.”
Now the details that make this uncomfortable. HAWK had already survived two rounds of expert human review across two years. The model found the flaw in about 60 hours, at a cost of roughly $100,000 in API spend. The researcher supervising the project had a theoretical computer science background and was not a lattice cryptography specialist.
Sophie Schmieg, a post-quantum cryptographer at Google, summed it up in five words: “Basically with this paper, HAWK is dead.” The HAWK team withdrew the scheme from NIST consideration the following day, noting that the obvious fixes, doubling parameters or moving to higher-rank modules, would leave it uncompetitive against the alternatives.
No quantum computer was involved at any point. The thing that broke was post-quantum cryptography, and a classical AI model broke it over a long weekend.
What The Poll Actually Revealed
Every option in our poll asked the same underlying question: when does the quantum hardware arrive. Readers split reasonably on that, and 47% landing inside nine years is a defensible read given how the qubit estimates have moved this year.
But the HAWK result suggests the hardware timeline may not be the binding constraint. The 33% who voted “not that soon” or “only after 2050” were making a bet about quantum engineering, and they might well be right about it. That bet does not protect them from a classical attack on the replacement algorithm.
The 20% who said “no idea” deserve some credit here. In an audience that follows this closely, one in five declining to guess is not apathy. It reads more like an accurate assessment of how many unknowns are stacked on top of each other: hardware progress, algorithm selection, consensus timelines, and now AI-assisted cryptanalysis moving faster than the review process built to catch it.
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The US Senate is expected to enter the August recess without voting on the CLARITY Act, the crypto market-structure legislation, thereby postponing further action until September at the earliest.
The majority leader, Republican Senator John Thune, confirmed that the Senate would delay voting on the legislation until after the recess, blaming Democrats for impeding its progress. He, however, insisted that the bill would be high on the agenda after the break.
He contended, “The Dems are insistent on no Clarity vote. I worked with sponsors of the bill. Senator Lummis was great, and we’re getting that queued up first thing when we come back.”
The CLARITY Act is a comprehensive legal framework for digital assets in the United States. The legislation aims to clarify how crypto assets would fall under the oversight of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and to address years of regulatory uncertainty.
Proponents say the bill would reduce regulations for cryptocurrency firms to help them develop and innovate, while critics believe the legislation would need to strengthen investor protections and tighten ethical safeguards.
The Senate will discuss the bill in September
On X, Politico also confirmed that US senators will deliberate further on the CLARITY Act after the break. Earlier on Thursday, it had also reported that the Senate was unlikely to hold a preliminary vote on the legislation before the break.
Ideally, crypto companies and advocates had hoped senators would stick around longer to resolve differences over the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act. However, lawmakers on both sides still have major concerns about the bill, and unfortunately, time has run out.
Lawmakers are expected back on September 14, 2026, giving senators three weeks to continue negotiations and address the remaining agenda.
Speaking on the delay, nonetheless, crypto trade group Digital Chamber CEO Cody Carbone is optimistic. He said, “While this isn’t the result any of us hoped for when we began the week, the fight is far from over. The next few weeks, we will continue to work to find the last pieces of common ground needed to set up a successful vote when Congress returns in September.”
The postponement also extends uncertainty for crypto exchanges, token issuers, and investors who have been waiting for clearer federal rules governing digital assets.
Many industry participants had viewed the August vote as a key milestone after months of negotiations between lawmakers, regulators, and industry groups. As a result, companies will likely continue operating under the existing patchwork of regulations for at least several more weeks.
The CLARITY Act had stalled over various issues
Progress on the Clarity Act has stalled amid several other issues before the Senate, including a continuing resolution to keep the government funded, Russian sanctions legislation, a batch of nominations, and Todd Blanche’s nomination to lead the Justice Department.
According to Thune, the Senate would take votes on the first three measures on Friday at 10 a.m., along with an amendment to the Russia sanctions bill, after reaching an agreement on how long debate could continue.
The vast majority of disagreements over the bill have now been resolved, with both the Senate Banking Committee and Agriculture Committee approving it separately. The biggest unresolved matter was an ethics provision related to Trump, who disclosed that he earned more than $1 billion from his crypto ventures in 2025.
Although President Trump backed an ethics provision brokered by Senator Cynthia Lummis, Democrats and several Republicans, including Thom Tillis, were not satisfied with the language.
Tillis and Ruben Gallego drafted their own version and said they sent it to the White House at the end of July. No public response had come from the White House as of press time.
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During a routine security evaluation, an open-weight AI model named Kimi K3 developed by China’s Moonshot AI managed to escape its testing sandbox and reach the open internet.
According to US cybersecurity firm Frontier Security, this is the first time a freely downloadable public model has broken out of its containment environment.
A leak in the sandbox that the model chose to use
According to an interview with WIRED yesterday, Frontier Security was measuring Kimi K3’s defensive cybersecurity skills when the model wandered outside the environment meant to hold it.
Apparently, a misconfiguration had left a gap in that environment. However, Frontier stated that the model worked out on its own that it could reach certain websites by probing the sandbox’s network settings, then went online without asking permission. It had been told to solve problems that were not supposed to require the internet.
“We found a leak in the sandbox,” Frontier CEO Yaron Singer told WIRED. “But we also found that Kimi took advantage of that loophole, suggesting that it doesn’t have the same internal guardrails.”
Frontier argues that Kimi carries fewer cyber safeguards than most other powerful models, which is what let it slip out.
No systems hacked, but weaker guardrails
Fortunately, Kimi’s escape did not lead to any malicious hacks or system compromises. Because the information it was looking for was easily accessible on GitHub, it didn’t need to break into anything once it got online.
However, the main concern is accessibility. Unlike most heavily secured internal lab models, Kimi K3 is open to the public, meaning that anyone can download and run it with those same loose safety guardrails in place.
Testers noted that the model is ruthlessly efficient at achieving its goals by any means necessary, even if it means cheating or escaping containment.
The testing environment itself was built with sandboxes from the UK government’s AI Security Institute, although this has not yet been confirmed by either Moonshot or the AISI, as they have declined to comment.
More rogue agents appearing this summer
Kimi’s escape adds to a growing trend of AI models bending the rules during evaluations. On July 21, OpenAI revealed that its models exploited a zero-day software flaw to reach the internet and break into Hugging Face.
Days later, Cryptopolitan reported that Anthropic traced some of its models to unauthorized external break-ins. Meta even admitted one of its AI agents (Muse Spark 1.1) reached an outside firm due to a misconfigured testing environment.
Experts have always maintained that these incidents are usually the result of poorly secured testing walls rather than sci-fi jailbreaks. “As a general phenomenon, if you give one of these models an objective, and if you’re not very explicit, like walls you’re putting around it, it’ll find a way to get the answer,” said Matt Fredrikson, CEO of Gray Swan and a Carnegie Mellon professor.
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The price fluctuations of BTC depend even more on futures trading, with decreasing spot demand. On Binance, the ratio of futures to spot volumes reached a new all-time peak.
BTC price discovery has heavily shifted to the futures market. Based on Cryptoquant data, futures volumes are approximately 7.82 times higher than spot trading. Traders now rely on derivatives, instead of going through the hassle of direct buying and selling.
As of August 6, Binance open interest for BTC is $24.47B, down from over $44B in October 2025. Daily trading volumes reach $57.82B, while spot volume hovers at around $6B.
BTC futures trading picked up in the past month, though still below the levels before October 10,2025. | Source: Coinglass
Driven by futures trading, BTC mostly moved sideways, trading at $64,339.89. BTC still has a 56.8% dominance of the crypto market, and July was a relatively strong month with a close in the green.
BTC is now stuck in a tight range between $64,000 and $65,000, based on the liquidation heatmap.
BTC leveraged traders have built their positions in a relatively tight range, meaning even a small BTC price move could cause significant liquidations. | Source: Coinglass
On Binance, most accounts have taken long positions. However, in terms of the value of positions, the bulk of allocated liquidity attempts to short BTC. In the tight price range, this means even a relatively small price move can cause significant liqudiations. During previous market periods, the BTC price often had to move by thousands of dollars to attack some of the leveraged positions.
Is the high futures to spot ratio bullish?
In the past months, futures trading volumes expanded faster compared to spot trading. This reflects the potential to play out short-term market strategies, take higher risk with leverage, and make the best of the BTC range-bound price action.
The ratio is not linked to a bullish or bearish signal clearly, but this time, it reveals increasing speculative activity. For BTC, this mans traders can react much faster to rapid price shifts, without being caught with spot orders.
Despite the predominance of BTC futures trading, volatility remains low, sliding to 1.17%. Under those conditions, BTC traders can still afford relatively minor liquidations, while trying to extract gains from the BTC sideways trading.
BTC spot volumes keep weakening
BTC spot positions may be used as a hedge for futures trading. In 2026, both the spot and futures markets diminished their volumes, leading to a much smaller demand for holding spot positions.
The exit of retail traders also decreased spot BTC buying, leaving whales and professional traders to take more advanced risk with futures.
According to analyst @darkfrost, BTC spot demand has been falling for the past 10 months, still affected by the October 10 crash. In June, an extra 273,000 BTC entered the market, while currently the excess supply is 72,000 BTC.
As Cryptopolitan reported, the period of low demand coincided with Strategy’s new trend of selling BTC each week. Treasury companies may disappear as potential buyers, as Strategy’s models seems to unravel.
The weak spot demand and short-term derivative trading show BTC has fewer conviction positions. At the current price range, BTC is still not seeing significant accumulation, and still raises the question of reaching a bear market bottom.

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Ark Invest, with its co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Cathie Wood, purchased almost $21 million in Block shares on Thursday after the company’s stock dropped by over 6%. At first sight, this might seem like an apparent expression of confidence in the fintech firm run by Jack Dorsey. However, rules established by Ark with regard to its own portfolio indicate otherwise. This is actually, according to their rules, routine rebalancing.
Ark restricts any individual investment to 10% of any single fund according to the diversification strategy discussed in the firm’s disclosures. The weight of a company in a portfolio changes as the stock prices fluctuate. Ark typically buys more stock to maintain a position that has decreased below its target. In contrast, it reduces its position when it increases too much.
It seems that this situation has also occurred in the case of Block. Before the purchase that took place on Thursday, Block had been the tenth-largest holding in Ark’s Next Generation Internet ETF (ARKW), valued at approximately $60 million, which accounted for 3.51% of the fund.
ARK sticks to its playbook
When looked at from this perspective, the acquisition made on Thursday seems to be more focused on the management of the portfolio than any new investment principle.
Ark purchased 267,676 shares in Block through three of its exchange-traded funds, namely: Ark Innovation ETF (ARKK), ARKW, and the Ark Blockchain and Fintech Innovation ETF (ARKF). Ark made those purchases when Block stock closed at $79, and the stock showed a drop of 6.15% for the day.
That pattern repeated itself earlier in the week. On August 4, Ark Invest purchased approximately $8 million in shares of Coinbase after the cryptocurrency exchange dropped more than 14% in the wake of its earnings release, according to The Block. Coinbase had already been ARKK’s sixth-largest holding.
On the following day, Ark invested another $17.3 million into shares of Circle, at that time the ninth-largest holding in ARKK, trading at approximately $63.
Buying the names it already owns the most of
Instead of pursuing new investments, Ark has often increased its stake in companies that are already its biggest investments, especially after drops in share prices.
Cryptopolitan has previously reported that this approach of buying-the-dip and rebalancing-as-needed is one of the key strategies employed by Wood while managing her ETFs. Generally speaking, each transaction is executed to maintain the desired weights in the portfolio rather than indicate any fundamental shift in thinking.
The repeating pattern can be traced back many months. In late January, Ark purchased $21.5 million worth of Coinbase, Circle, and Bullish shares in a single trading session after Bitcoin briefly dropped below $90,000. Those were the firm’s first purchases of the three companies since mid-December.
Invezz, in a separate report published on TradingView, estimates that Ark invested around $72 million in crypto equity on a day when Bitcoin was trading around $75,000. This investment included around $32.7 million in Robinhood stock. The same report goes on to state that Wood still considers Bitcoin’s low correlation with traditional assets a plus for it in the long run.
Block’s earnings beat, and Mizuho’s cost warning
There was no connection between Block’s fundamentals and the decline in its share price.
According to The Block, the fintech’s revenue for the second quarter was $6.62 billion, reflecting a growth of 9% year-on-year and exceeding analysts’ predictions. Adjusted EPS stands at $1.02 after climbing by 65%, and gross profit surged by 25% to reach $3.17 billion.
Investor worries, however, turned towards costs.
Mizuho analysts stated that Block continues to see increases in operating costs even after laying off around 40% of employees back in February. Mizuho projects the adjusted operating costs to grow from $4.48 billion during the first half of the year to $4.56 billion during the second half, according to Block’s forecast.
Ark was selling on the same days it bought
The sales made by Ark present compelling evidence that the transactions pertained to the preservation of the portfolio rather than a general optimistic stance about crypto stocks.
The same day it bought Block, Ark sold 39,509 shares of Bullish through ARKW, reducing its position by roughly $910,000 after the stock closed down 3.36% at $23.04. Earlier in the week, the firm also sold 5,700 shares of Solana-focused treasury company Solmate for nearly $25,000, according to The Block.
Acquiring a crypto-backed stock and selling off another on the same day does not demonstrate a belief in the direction of the sector but shows how Ark operates its investments: continuously matching the weight of the portfolios with the movements of the market.
Is Ark changing its investing philosophy?
ARK Invest has not said it is rotating away from Bitcoin. However, several research firms have increasingly treated crypto-related equities as a distinct investment class tied to broader digital-asset adoption. Bitwise has argued that crypto equities can serve both as “a proxy for cryptoasset exposure and as unique stand-alone investments,” describing them as a “picks-and-shovels” approach to the sector.
Bernstein has repeatedly identified exchanges and crypto financial-services firms such as Coinbase as key beneficiaries of clearer U.S. regulation and expanding institutional adoption, while Galaxy Research increasingly analyzes exchanges, tokenization platforms, stablecoins and other crypto infrastructure businesses as separate investment themes alongside Bitcoin.
JPMorgan analysts likewise tend to value crypto-related companies on business fundamentals—including trading activity, custody, payments and tokenization revenues—rather than viewing them solely as leveraged bets on Bitcoin’s price.
ARK’s own Big Ideas report shows ARK has long invested in disruptive innovation across blockchain, AI, fintech, and digital assets.
“Our mission is to deliver long-term capital appreciation … by identifying and investing in the leaders, enablers and beneficiaries of disruptive innovation.”

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The US Department of Defense plans for quantum computing technology and its related hardware to be incorporated into its military equipment, used for purposes such as intelligence gathering, target identification, keeping machines in sync, and functioning without conventional navigation aids.
The Pentagon has started Farseer, a Defense Innovation Unit project built around advanced quantum sensors and atomic clocks. The July program is aimed at improving assured positioning, navigation, and timing, or A-PNT, across intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems.
The clocks in modern ISR systems must be extremely precise because information coming from various sensors has to be correlated properly. Synchronization is critical for communications as well as for military systems functioning in air, ground, maritime, space, and cyberspace domains.
DIU put it this way: “The invisible backbone of modern ISR is absolute precision timing and synchronization, which enables seamless sensor fusion, secure communications, and coordinated multi-domain effects.”
The Pentagon wants quantum hardware to give military sensors more precision with less bulk
Farseer is trying to get around those physical restrictions without lowering what the military expects from its ISR equipment. Quantum sensors can detect extremely small changes in physical conditions, while advanced clocks can keep far more precise time than many traditional alternatives.
The Pentagon is especially interested in getting that performance without loading aircraft, vehicles, ships, missiles, or other systems with oversized equipment.
DIU said, “Quantum sensors and clocks are not beholden to the same fundamental limitations of classical systems, providing a path to simultaneously achieving both high sensitivity and low SWaP.”
Farseer is therefore less about building one giant Pentagon quantum computer and more about putting quantum-based timing and sensing technology into the wider network of machines the military already depends on.
That plan is unfolding while Washington is also arguing over who controls the companies supplying the hardware behind the quantum industry.
A roughly $2 billion takeover involving IonQ (NYSE: IONQ) and semiconductor manufacturer SkyWater Technology (NASDAQ: SKYT) recently created a disagreement between the Pentagon and the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC eventually allowed IonQ to buy SkyWater without the restrictions a senior Defense Department official wanted.
The concern centered on access to SkyWater’s factories. The company is among a small group of American manufacturers able to produce the specialized chips needed by quantum computing businesses.
Pentagon research and engineering undersecretary Emil Michael wanted FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson to make IonQ guarantee that competing companies could continue ordering chips from SkyWater after the takeover.
The vote became unusually important because the FTC had only two commissioners. President Donald Trump fired two Democratic commissioners last year, while another Republican commissioner had already departed. Andrew and Mark ended up on opposite sides, leaving the agency stuck.
IonQ was therefore able to complete the purchase on Friday without accepting the proposed conditions. The company said the acquisition would “accelerate all quantum platforms across the industry.”
IonQ and Sandia are building quantum systems for US national security work
IonQ is also working directly with Sandia National Laboratories under a new memorandum of understanding focused on US national security. The agreement covers joint development of quantum computing and networking technology at New Mexico’s Quantum Demonstration Facility, where government researchers and private companies can work on new systems together.
IonQ Chairman and CEO Niccolo de Masi said, “Big breakthroughs often happen when government and industry work together.” Niccolo added that those partnerships “could help shape the future of quantum technology and play an important role in our economic and national security.”
The companies already have history together. Sandia manufactured the ion traps used in IonQ’s earliest machines. Their new work will include co-designing future quantum technology rather than limiting the relationship to manufacturing individual components.
In 2025, the company announced that it had achieved 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity. This number represents the precision of the two-qubit operations being performed. The higher the percentage value reaches towards 100%, the fewer errors there are in the computation.
IonQ has said users of its technology have recorded performance as high as 20 times that of earlier quantum systems. Companies working with its hardware include Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) through Amazon Web Services, AstraZeneca (NASDAQ: AZN), and NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA).
Sandia and IonQ are now taking that same technology into joint national security development as the Pentagon expands its own use of quantum sensors, clocks, chips, and computing hardware.

Circle says USDC is the only one of the world’s ten largest stablecoins that currently complies with the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation. If accurate, the claim means the EU’s roughly 450 million residents no longer have regulated access to most major dollar-backed stablecoins, including Tether’s USDT.
The declaration comes as Europe fully implements its landmark crypto legislation, which is changing the landscape of which stablecoins are available for trading in the region and prompting discussions on whether MiCA has indeed gotten the balance between innovation and financial stability right.
Only two Circle tokens made the compliant list
As stated on Circle’s European regulatory page, USDC is the sole top-10 stablecoin by market cap that has been given approval under MiCA. EURC, which is backed by the euro, has also been accepted. The company claims that both tokens can be completely redeemed in fiat currency, with reserves kept in compliance with regulation and made available to the general public. Circle published its reserve report on August 3.
Under the MiCA framework, stablecoin issuers must segregate their reserves, issue regular attestations, comply with the redemption rights of customers, and adhere to governance standards. Exchanges catering to EU customers can no longer offer stablecoins by issuers that fail to meet these requirements.
The transition period had run its course by July 1. The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) called on all unauthorized firms to close their operations. Moreover, it reminded the public that the only legal operators of crypto-asset services in the European Union and European Economic Area were firms with licenses.
The stricter regulations are a reflection of the increasing regulatory concern about the increasing position of stablecoins in finance. The European Systematic Risk Board (ESRB) has warned that the growing connection of stablecoins’ reserves with banks and the financial market will make it more necessary to supervise them closely and prevent wider financial risks.
The 60% reserve rule that kept Tether out
The most challenging hurdle for large issuers is the reserve requirement under MiCA. Those stablecoins that are categorized as being “significant” must maintain at least 60% of their reserves in bank deposits within the EU. This categorization applies to those issuers that fulfil at least three of the seven conditions, namely: number of token holders is higher than 10 million; market capitalization higher than €5 billion; average daily transactions exceed 2.5 million in number and €500 million in aggregate value; gatekeeper status; significance of the issuer’s activities on a global scale; financial interconnectedness; and multi-token activity. USDT meets all of the quantitative conditions.
Instead of complying, Tether decided to leave the EU market and terminated its euro-pegged stablecoin, EURT.
“After careful consideration, we have made the decision to discontinue support for EUR₮. As such, Tether has ceased minting EUR₮, with the last acquisition request processed in 2022, and new EUR₮ issuance requests are no longer accepted.
This decision aligns with our broader strategic direction, considering the evolving regulatory frameworks surrounding stablecoins in the European market. Until a more risk-averse framework is in place—one that fosters innovation and offers the stability and protection our users deserve—we have chosen to prioritize other initiatives. “ – Tether Updates Users on a Strategic Transition to Better Support Community-Driven Product Support
The CEO of Tether, Paolo Ardoino, indicated that requiring issuers to move their assets from short-term US Treasuries to deposits in commercial banks could adversely affect the stability of stablecoins, especially during times of financial stress. In a statement made after an interview with Italian television, Ardoino remarked that MiCA “poses a systemic risk to European banking stability” and added that Tether’s exit from the EU was because “we preferred to protect our current users who use Tether USDt as their only stable currency option.”
The criticism does not just stop at Tether. Industry organization Blockchain for Europe has pressed the European Commission to examine specific sections of MiCA’s stablecoin regulation, stating that some regulations may hinder the ability of Europe to compete successfully.
Delistings that left aggregate volumes nearly flat
The exchanges immediately responded to the event. Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, and OKX decided to take USDT trading pairs off of the exchange platforms of their European clients to avoid any potential MiCA violations.
Still, the overall cryptocurrency market didn’t experience serious changes that were anticipated by many.
As reported in a research released in July 2026 by LUISS economist Nicola Borri and University of Surrey researcher Kirill Shakhnov, the total shares of USDT and USDC in the market “barely move” following the delisting. In Europe, the share of USDC in the USDT-to-USDC trading increased by around six percent, largely due to the approximately 20% decrease in USDT trading volume after its removal rather than the increasing interest in USDC.
In addition, there are now new security risks resulting from the transition. According to the recent news from Cryptopolitan, there has been a major rise in impersonation scams that target clients attempting to move their assets onto MiCA-compliant systems.
Euro stablecoins hit a record as issuers pile in
MiCA also has a transforming influence on the euro-pegged stablecoin sector in Europe.
DefiLlama data shows MiCA-compliant euro stablecoins approached $900 million in value during mid-2026, a record for the sector. CoinGecko ranks Circle’s EURC as the largest euro-backed stablecoin following EURT’s retirement, while Token Terminal data shows euro stablecoins still account for well under 1% of the roughly $300 billion global stablecoin market.
🇪🇺 Two things are true at the same time about the status quo of stablecoins under MICA in the EU:
1️⃣ There are now ~35 regulated e-money tokens from 21 issuers, banks and EMIs alike. Real institutions are betting on this space and many large EU corporations will enter over the… pic.twitter.com/t6LlwtWvUR
— Patrick Hansen (@paddi_hansen) July 28, 2026
Regulators continue approving new issuers. ESMA has authorized 19 e-money token issuers across 11 EU member states, while policy analyst Patrick Hansen estimates there were about 35 regulated e-money tokens from 21 companies as of late July.
Conventional banks are venturing into the sector as well. A consortium of nine European banks, which includes BBVA, ING, and UniCredit, will release a euro stablecoin that complies with MiCA regulations, indicating that regulated banks see tokenized money as a vital part in the future of payment systems in Europe.
Despite this, euro stablecoins have a limited presence in the international market. MiCA promotes regulated issuance of euro-denominated stablecoins, but dollar-backed stablecoins continue to lead in crypto trading, payments, and liquidity.

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Following on from last week’s report on tokenized equity holders, the growth in the number of wallets holding tokenized stock has shown no signs of slowing down. Eight days ago, this number stood at 766,366. The latest data from RWA.xyz now shows that the number has reached 1,020,510 which is a 33% increase in just over a week. Zoom out to a year and the growth becomes staggering. A year ago, the total number of tokenized stock holders stood at 58,999, that is a 17.3x increase from where we stand today. No other category within the RWA space is moving at that speed.
Source: RWA.xyz
Stocks Now Hold Two Thirds of Every RWA Wallet Onchain
As of this writing, there are a total of 1.62 million RWA holders onchain. 62.8% of that now falls under the tokenized equities category. Rewind to last August and that share was 13.1%. Commodities is the second largest category with 256,264 holders which is around a quarter of the stock number. This comes after commodities grew 130% year over year, which once again tells you the sheer acceleration in tokenized stocks.
The entire RWA holder base rose from 449,297 to 1,622,570 over the past year, an addition of about 1.17 million wallets. Within this, stocks account for roughly 960,000 of them.
bStocks Did The Work This Time
In last week’s report, we highlighted how tokenized stocks on the newly launched Robinhood chain brought in the numbers. Since the readings from July 28 onwards, however, holders of its tokenized stock products grew low single digits while the overall count added a third. This means the newest wave of holders came from somewhere else.
That somewhere is bStocks, Binance’s tokenized securities arm, live since June 11 and operated by BTech Holdings under an Abu Dhabi Global Market license.
The largest tokenized stock onchain right now is SpaceX on bStocks with around 107K holders. The next two are NVIDIA xStock at 64K and NVIDIA Robinhood Token at 33K. Add both and what you get is that SpaceX on bStocks still comes out ahead.
Platform value moved with the holders
bStocks total value climbed 93.25% over 30 days to $559.2 million, passing xStocks at $540.8 million and taking second place with 24.18% market share. It did that with 67 assets against 642 on xStocks.
Ondo still leads on value at $854.1 million and 36.93% share, though its 30 day change was 0.40% and its slice is shrinking as the field grows around it. Robinhood’s tokenized stock value is $27.1 million, up 125.2% over 30 days, which still leaves it at 1.17% of the market across 94 assets.
What the average position says
Distributed tokenized stock value across the top ten platforms works out to roughly $2.3 billion. Split across 1.02 million holders, that is about $2,250 a wallet.
Small, and it should be. Growth here is coming from wallets opening positions of a few hundred dollars, not from desks taking size. Holder counts and total value have been climbing on very different curves since July, and whether they converge is the number to watch into the fourth quarter.
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Verified Traders, Introducing Brokers, and Affiliates stand a chance to win a share of 150 grams of 24K gold while gaining access to one of the world’s largest gatherings for the online trading industry.
As Forex Expo Dubai prepares for its 9th Edition on 22–23 September 2026 at Dubai World Trade Centre, the event has unveiled a Gold Lucky Draw, with 150 grams of 24K gold set to be won across the two-day expo.
Open exclusively to Verified Traders, Introducing Brokers (IBs), and Affiliates, the lucky draw rewards attendees while adding to an event already built around learning, networking, and business growth.
With 33 winners set to take home a share of 150 grams of 24K gold, this year’s Gold Lucky Draw will be distributed across the following prize categories:
1 winner of a 50grams 24K Gold Bar
2 winners of 10grams 24K Gold Bars
10 winners of 4grams 24K Gold Bars
20 winners of 2grams 24K Gold Coin
While lucky draw winners will take home gold, every participant will have the opportunity to build new partnerships, gain fresh market insights, and connect with companies shaping the future of online trading.
Five Halls. One Global Trading Landscape.
Across five halls, Forex Expo Dubai 2026 will bring together 250+ exhibitors and 100+ speakers, featuring leading brokerages, fintech companies, liquidity providers, payment providers, trading technology firms, and financial services companies from around the world.
Attendees can discover new products and services, compare trading platforms, meet solution providers, and engage directly with businesses driving the evolution of online trading.
For those looking to stay ahead of the curve, the conference programme will feature discussions on market trends, regulation, trading strategies, and the future of online trading.
Raising the Standard for Industry Events
The 9th edition introduces expanded experiences designed around the needs of its key attendee groups.
Verified Traders gain access to dedicated seminar sessions, the Traders Lounge, and the Traders Clinic, where they can pre-book one-to-one sessions with market experts.
Introducing Brokers can participate in the dedicated IB Programme, connect with brokers to discuss partnership models and rebate structures, and access the IB Lounge for focused networking.
Beyond these dedicated experiences, attendees can explore live product demonstrations, private meeting zones, pre-bookable meetings through the official event app, and side events taking place before and after the expo — creating more ways to learn, build relationships, and discover new opportunities.
*T&C Apply
About Forex Expo Dubai
Forex Expo Dubai is one of the region’s leading gatherings for the global online trading and fintech industry, bringing together brokerages, fintech innovators, traders, investors, payment providers, IBs, affiliates, and online trading technology companies under one roof. The expo provides a platform for business networking, technology showcases, industry insights, and conversations shaping the evolution of modern finance.

The flaw behind more than $83 million in Coldcard bitcoin thefts is about more than a single hardware wallet failure, according to Casa co-founder Jameson Lopp. It shows a broader change in cybersecurity, with artificial intelligence reducing the time needed for both attackers and defenders to uncover software vulnerabilities.
In The Block’s The Starting Block podcast, Lopp claimed that large language models (LLMs) are changing software security by minimizing the cost of discovering bugs.
“Advancements in large language models are drastically changing the security landscape,” he said, claiming that the Coldcard incident is one of the first examples of the phenomenon, which is expected to have ramifications for many wallets.
A race that cuts both ways
According to Lopp, it is less a case of malfunctioning hardware than that of changing security software. From being the sole privilege of well-funded security teams, AI-powered code analysis has gone mainstream. As a result, attackers can now access public code repositories for missed vulnerabilities prior to developers finding them.
The CEO of Coinkite, Rodolfo Novak, came to the same conclusion while acknowledging his responsibility in relation to the firmware bug. According to him, the incident is “a sober reality of the new AI paradigm,” with AI-assisted audits being able to uncover flaws much faster than traditional manual audits.
Surprisingly, in its previous report, Cryptopolitan mentioned that Coinkite had employed an artificial intelligence application to analyze its coding before being hacked.
As reported by Tradingview, that analysis was unable to detect the weakness, highlighting the fact that both attackers and defenders have access to similar AI technology, which gives an advantage to the one who detects the flaw first.
What actually went wrong inside the device
The weakness emerged due to the method of generating recovery wallet keys in some Coldcard firmware versions. As per information shared by Block’s Bitcoin engineering and security team, reported by the New York Post, the vulnerable devices employed certain predictable chip information (such as processor serial number and clock data) instead of using proper randomness in generating the numbers.
As a result, cybercriminals were able to reconstruct the recovery phrases used in the wallets and to steal the funds without physically accessing the wallet.
The defective firmware was introduced in March 2021 and was repaired only in the release of version 4.21. According to Coinkite, simply updating the firmware doesn’t solve the problem. Individuals who created wallets using the flawed versions should generate a new recovery seed and transfer their money since the vulnerability is closely connected with the previously used seed phrase.
Galaxy Research stated that on July 30, criminals managed to steal 1,082.65 BTC from 1,196 wallets in about 40 minutes. After that, more attacks took place, including the last wave seen by Alex Thorn of Galaxy, which seemed to be directed at multi-sig wallet holders as opposed to the earlier attacks targeted solely at single-sig users.
Popular Bitcoin commentator Guy Swann stated that the incident is “the worst hit in bitcoin history” for cautious owners of the virtual currency.
Where “don’t trust, verify” runs out
For Lopp, the breach also exposes the limits of one of Bitcoin’s best-known principles: “Don’t trust, verify.”
“It’s a good mantra,” he said, “but you have to understand that verification of complex software and hardware is simply not feasible for 99.9% of the population.”
According to Lopp, users will ultimately place their trust in a third party to validate the information. Rather than relinquish the ability to use their own wallets, Lopp advocates for users to diversify their trust by utilizing multiple hardware wallets and software applications.
Zach Herbert, CEO of Foundation, expressed the same opinion on the podcast, stating that it’s “really dangerous” to conclude that self-custody has failed considering just one case. On the contrary, he suggests that the industry needs to improve its security practices.
Lorenzo Valente, who is associated with ARK Invest, claimed that many users have merely traded their exchange counterparty risk for “software risk, hardware risk, supply-chain risk, phishing risk, backup risk.”
The case for independent audits
This occurrence has once again sparked the demand for firmware audits by an independent party in place of total reliance on the vendor’s self-review. Cryptopolitan recently published an article discussing whether open-source code presents adequate security, and the Coldcard incident is further proof of this argument.
According to Andrew Lazutkin, the Chief Technological Officer at Tangem, publicly accessible code should not be assumed to be secure. As he explained, “Security comes from strong architecture, thorough testing and independent verification.”
Lopp commented that major hardware wallet disclosures had occurred “a dozen times” and believed that all those incidents had contributed to the improvement in the industry. The next question that needs to be answered is whether Coinkite will implement its promised technical post-mortem and more widespread independent security assessments before AI-enabled hackers discover the next weakness.

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One of the leading liquidity providers in the crypto space just made it to the US securities markets legally. On August 6, Wintermute announced that its New York-based company, Wintermute USA LLC, had registered as a broker-dealer with the SEC and became a member of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA).
According to Wintermute, the authorization marks its “entry into U.S. regulated markets” and boosts its capacity to accommodate “institutional counterparties in the region.” This is an important milestone for a market maker that has over $10 billion in average daily trading activity across 60-plus centralized and decentralized platforms.
Rather than operating only in crypto-native markets, Wintermute will be able to operate in regulated markets widely used by Wall Street institutions.
What the registration lets Wintermute do
The license restricts the use to proprietary trading. Wintermute USA will be able to act as principal and provide liquidity in over-the-counter transactions involving US equities, options, and any other security-based instrument while trading for its own account. It may also engage in self-clearing transactions involving securities using digital assets that exist in its portfolio.
The significance of the approval can be seen in the fact that Wintermute is now an Authorized Participant (AP) for exchange-traded products, which includes digital asset ETFs. The APs are responsible for the creation and redemption of ETF shares, thus, ensuring that the prices of the ETF and the value of underlying assets coincide. Thus, this role of Wintermute brings it closer to the market infrastructure that is involved in the development of crypto ETFs.
The UK-based company stated that the license obtained is a result of several years of working with American authorities.
Why a single regulated entity changes the market math
Receiving a broker-dealer license means more than just getting a new regulatory approval. Since both crypto and traditional securities activities are in just one company, making trades, settling transactions, and managing risks become simpler. This also helps institutional investors to gain access to both markets using only one common platform.
In addition, it leads to increased competition between market makers. The likes of Jane Street and Citadel Securities control liquidity in the equity and ETF markets, while Wintermute is known for its prowess in cryptocurrencies.
As tokenized securities and digital asset ETFs are becoming popular, the competitive advantage may be with the businesses that are able to provide liquidity both in traditional and blockchain-based markets than those which are specializing solely in one of the types of markets. That convergence could change how institutional capital moves between the two markets.
Apart from the Wintermute itself, the registration is indicative of the greater institutionalization of the cryptocurrency markets. As more licensed digital asset products enter the market, the market-makers who understand both traditional finance and cryptocurrency may become important players.
Their involvement may improve the liquidity of the market, lower the spreads, and enhance price-discovery processes, thus, creating favorable conditions for institutional investors to invest in cryptocurrencies.
“Our long-term conviction has always been that digital asset markets will evolve in more than one direction,” founder and CEO Evgeny Gaevoy said. “Digital assets and traditional finance will continue to develop in parallel, intersect in new ways, and ultimately integrate more deeply.”
The tokenization wave the license is built for
Wintermute’s move comes as tokenization gains momentum across financial markets. Citigroup’s Tokenization 2030: Wall Street On-Chain estimates roughly $17 billion in tokenized assets today and projects a $5.5 trillion base-case market by 2030. Meanwhile, a16zcrypto estimates tokenized real-world assets have already exceeded $34 billion, excluding stablecoins.
The momentum in the industry is now becoming evident. As has been reported earlier, the UK’s Tokenization Taskforce comprises notable figures from traditional finance as well as crypto-native companies such as Circle, Ripple, Coinbase, Kraken’s Payward entity, Chainalysis, Fireblocks, Digital Asset Holdings, GFO-X and Wintermute.
Their involvement indicates that regulatory authorities are beginning to consider blockchain-based finance system as part of the capital market’s ecosystem rather than as an alternative system.
Wintermute said that by securing broker-dealer registration, it “strategically positions Wintermute USA for the emerging tokenized securities landscape.” The registration is also in line with Wintermute’s broader objective of expanding into tokenized real-world assets.
Just a couple of months ago, the company started its OTC trading service for tokenized gold products like PAXG and XAUT, citing the growing demand for settlements using blockchain payments around the clock and for being able to move collateral in a more efficient way than before. It has been reported that the tokenized gold trend has the potential to develop significantly, reaching a minimum market value of $15 billion in 2026.
Regulators have already started to clear the legal landscape. In January 2026, three divisions of the SEC stated that securities are not exempt from legal liability just because they rely on a blockchain. Wintersmute’s actions indicate that the company intends to gain access to regulated markets before tokenized securities become mainstream.
If other key players on the international crypto scene follow suit, then the lines between Wall Street companies and crypto-centric providers of liquidity may continue to blur, thereby facilitating the fusion between traditional finance and digital asset markets.

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AI company, OpenAI, has announced the purchase of patents from chip startup, Rain AI. This comes after negotiations to buy the company outright collapsed.
The announcement doesn’t state the purchase price, nor does it state how many patents were bought. It’s worth noting that Rain AI has received funding from Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, in the past.
The deal is happening at a time when OpenAI has its hands full with litigation matters. Today, OpenAI asked a federal judge to dismiss Apple’s lawsuit accusing it of pilfering secret hardware trade information.
Thus, the AI company finds itself defending its process of hiring engineers in court while simultaneously enhancing the intellectual property needed to build its own chips.
A takeover that did not materialize
Rain AI nearly became a part of OpenAI, but negotiations collapsed as both parties were unable to agree on a deal. OpenAI, however, left with some of Rain AI’s patents despite not buying the company.
This doesn’t spell good news for the AI startup. The company has lost almost all its staff, and operations have pretty much been brought to a halt.
No announcement has been made about a transfer of employees from Rain to OpenAI, but the transfer of patents makes it easy for OpenAI to keep designs that may come in hand as Rain AI crumbles.
Nobody knows what OpenAI plans to use the patents for. The company has not alluded to any future plans.
The Altman-backed startup
Rain AI is not a new company. It was founded in 2018 and built neuromorphic processing units, its flagship chip built to imitate features of the human brain to save energy and reduce the cost of training AI models.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, invested in the company with his personal funds. A move that would naturally raise suspicion.
The two companies have history. In 2019, OpenAI signed an LOI to purchase chips to the tune of $51 million once Rain released its chips. However, the chips were never delivered.
Later on, Rain AI ran out of funds, lost its customer base, and began to search for a buyer circa 2025. The company planned to raise money via a Series B round to the tune of $150 million, but it failed.
Locked in a fight with Apple while purchasing silicon
Apple’s suit against OpenAI isn’t news to anyone in the industry. The company claims its former engineers lifted secret hardware information to OpenAI. Apple says 400 of its former engineers are now employed at OpenAI.
OpenAI filed a motion to dismiss this week, arguing that Apple’s own conduct put the company in this position.
OpenAI claims Apple allowed its staff to work through personal iCloud accounts and did not cut off access when those engineers left the company. The company describes this as “residual access.”
Apple is yet to respond to the motion to dismiss, while the court is yet to issue a ruling
The nexus linking the two stories is hardware. The lawsuit with Apple and the purchase of patents from Rain all point towards OpenAI’s desire to create AI-powered devices and AI chips.
OpenAI’s desire for custom chips
OpenAI has been on the trajectory of making custom chips. In June, it launched Jalapeno, a purpose-built inference chip built in collaboration with Broadcom. The company claims this move would cut costs by half.
The move is consistent with other AI labs in America, as companies move to reduce dependence on Nvidia’s GPUs. Anthropic and Meta have recently announced moves to build their own chips.
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Michael Saylor told the Diary of a CEO podcast that a preferred-stock product he designed with ChatGPT let his company raise roughly $15 billion over the past year.
Saylor’s advice to entrepreneurs is to stop competing with machines and start directing them.
How did ChatGPT help Michael Saylor make $15 billion?
Michael Saylor, the 61-year-old executive chairman of Strategy, the firm formerly known as MicroStrategy, framed AI as a partner rather than a rival during his conversation with the host of the Diary of a CEO, Steven Bartlett.
“Don’t try to outwork the robots,” he said. “What you want to do is ask the AI to do something that’s never been done before.”
Saylor said during the interview that both Bitcoin and AI technologies are early in their adoption and that companies pairing the two will build financial products that do not yet exist.
Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, has also described AI in a similar way, calling it a “co-pilot” at Davos in 2023. Mark Cuban has also argued that entrepreneurs using AI could create outsized wealth.
Saylor revealed during the podcast that ChatGPT helped him raise $15 billion. His company, Strategy, had been using convertible bonds to fund Bitcoin purchases, but eventually hit the practical limit of that approach.
Saylor said he went back and forth with ChatGPT for hours, testing whether a monthly preferred stock that stayed stable near $100 was possible. The AI told him no one had ever done it before, but it was legal and reasonable. Bankers and lawyers also pushed back at first because nothing like it had been sold before.
The resulting preferred stock is one that was designed to bridge debt and equity while still financing more Bitcoin buying called STRK. The AI helped structure STRC as a Bitcoin-backed convertible preferred stock. It also suggested ways to adjust the dividend rate each month, which helps keep the market price close to its $100 par value.
The $15 billion figure represents the capital raised by the company, not personal profit earned by Saylor. Forbes estimates his personal net worth at $3.3 billion.
Why is Strategy now selling Bitcoin?
Bitcoin has fallen 26% in 2026, while Strategy shares are down about 38% from the start of the year. The stock is trading near $98, down roughly 76% from its 52-week high of $414.36.
Strategy has also sold its Bitcoin for the third time, Cryptopolitan reported, recently offloading 1,638 Bitcoins for about $104.7 million at an average price of $63,957 each. Combined, Strategy has sold approximately 5,226 BTC for roughly $321 million to cover preferred dividend payments.
Strategy also raised $290.6 million by selling common shares and added $250 million to its cash reserve, which now stands at $4 billion. The reserve is designed to cover at least 12 months of the company’s preferred dividend and interest obligations, which total about $1.76 billion per year.
Strategy still holds 842,138 Bitcoins at an average cost of about $75,419 per coin. With Bitcoin trading below that level, the company is sitting on a multibillion-dollar unrealized loss. Its second-quarter results included an $8.32 billion unrealized loss tied to falling Bitcoin prices and a diluted loss of $24.45 per share.
Saylor has resisted the idea that he abandoned his stance, writing on X, as Cryptopolitan quoted him, “We have never had a ‘never sell’ policy.”
Notably, during the dot-com era, MicroStrategy’s stock surge made Saylor a billionaire. But the company later restated its results and disclosed that its 1999 revenue had been overstated. The stock lost 62% of its value in one day, and Saylor later settled SEC charges by paying $8 million without admitting wrongdoing.
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A security researcher who spent nearly two years quietly monitoring North Korean hacking operations dropped a bombshell at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.
At the conference, he revealed that state-sponsored hackers have successfully breached 1,640 companies across 57 countries, with several hundred among them suffering severe compromises.
Root access to servers, AWS accounts and crypto keys
Vangelis Stykas, the CTO of cybersecurity firm Kumio, gained access after the hackers accidentally infected their own systems with malware. This blunder allowed Stykas to slip inside their command-and-control servers, access their Slack and Discord channels, and comb through roughly five terabytes of data.
According to Stykas, the level of access varied, but the worst breaches gave hackers total control, including root access to cloud servers, AWS accounts, and even master cryptographic keys for blockchain companies.
He also publicly named several affected organizations that handled his disclosure well, including Coinbase, Uniswap Labs, and Boston Children’s Hospital.
Coinbase stated that the contractor Stykas flagged was investigated and fired within 30 days without exposing customer data, while Boston Children’s Hospital clarified that the incident involved a former contractor’s personal device rather than core hospital systems.
Some pushed back on the findings.
North Korean hackers’ bait: Fake job offers
The scam itself was surprisingly simple: they lure software developers with lucrative fake job offers and trick them into running a coding test that installs malware.
The real danger lies in freelance culture.
Because independent developers often manage multiple corporate clients at once, a single infected laptop can act as a master key for dozens of companies.
Stykas noted finding individual contractors who inadvertently handed over access to as many as 30 businesses at once, mirroring broader federal investigations into North Korean remote-worker schemes that stole billions in crypto.
How commercial AI assists novice hackers
The reason a country with a notoriously isolated internet infrastructure can pull this off at scale is majorly thanks to commercial artificial intelligence. In April, WIRED discovered a North Korean group called HexagonalRodent that was using standard AI tools from companies like OpenAI, Anima, and Cursor to automate everything from writing malware code to building convincing fake recruiter websites.
Obvious clues, like English-language comments and emojis embedded deep within the malware code, point directly to AI generation.
Experts also note that AI is effectively leveling the playing field, allowing less-skilled operators to execute complex, multi-stage cyberattacks. Separate investigations by Google’s threat team also revealed North Korean hackers UNC2970 using tools like Gemini to research targets and map out high-paying job roles in defense and tech.
Two heists took over 76% of April’s stolen crypto
Beyond sheer volume, the level of precision these attacks are now carrying is starting to concern analysts. According to blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs, North Korean groups are responsible for about 76% of all stolen crypto in April, totaling up to roughly $577 million extracted from just two massive exploits.
Most experts now suspect that advanced AI tools play a major role in the meticulous social engineering required to pull off these high-stakes heists, pushing North Korea’s total estimated crypto theft past $6 billion since 2017.
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