BlockchainReporter

Laser Digital, the digital-asset unit of Japan’s largest investment bank Nomura, has become the first new entrant into the country’s crypto industry in four years after its local subsidiary secured registration as a crypto asset exchange service provider, the company announced Friday.
First new registration in four years
The firm will initially offer liquidity services to domestic virtual-asset service providers, with plans to expand into digital-asset trading for institutional investors at a later date. A launch date and the full scope of those services have not been announced.
Laser Digital began its regulatory journey in Japan in October 2025, when it first announced plans to apply for a crypto license in the country. The approval marks the culmination of roughly ten months of work with Japanese regulators and arrives just as the market enters a period of structural change.
Institutional demand on the rise
Japan reclassified cryptocurrencies as financial instruments in July, a structural shift that established the legal framework for potential crypto exchange-traded funds and separate taxation of crypto assets. The new rules are expected to take effect in 2027.
A 2026 survey by Nomura and Laser Digital found that 79% of institutional investors planned to invest in crypto assets within the next three years.
“Japan’s digital assets market is entering a new phase of maturity,” said Jez Mohideen, co-founder and CEO of Laser Digital. “As institutional investors increase their interest in this asset class, there remains a need for trusted counterparties and infrastructure designed specifically for their requirements.”
What it means for Japan’s market
Steve Ashley, co-founder and executive chairman, framed the timing as part of a broader global shift. “Sophisticated investors are increasingly looking for access and the necessary quality of infrastructure behind it,” he said.
The approval positions the Nomura-backed firm to serve the institutional wave it expects to follow once the financial-instruments framework takes effect, and could pressure domestic competitors to raise their own standards for custody and counterparty infrastructure. The registration also stands as a signal for other global banks weighing entry into Japan’s regulated crypto market, where the shift to a financial-instruments framework has raised the bar for compliance, custody and counterparty oversight once the new rules take effect in 2027.

The Solana price prediction for late 2026 targets $250, and SOL is sprinting toward it, up more than 22.03% this week to $91.80 as it presses the 200-day EMA at $89, the last major wall under $100, per FXStreet.
The whole market is running: Bitcoin printed just under $75,000, roughly $4 billion in short positions burned in two days, and the Fear and Greed Index ripped from 26 to 68, per CoinDesk. From $91.80, the $250 target still pays 177%.
The rally is three days deep and accelerating. This is the moment sharp money stops asking whether the market turns and starts asking which entry multiplies hardest. SOL, now carrying $52 billion, delivers a strong run. A presale priced below its own listing delivers 100x from a single day, and one is open right now with $10.6 million inside.
SOL Rides Day Three of the Rally as Burns and Token Rules Stack Up
The surge began Wednesday when the US Treasury doubled its long-dated bond buybacks, and it has not slowed. On top of that, founder Anatoly Yakovenko pitched an acquisition strategy tied directly to SOL token burns, per The Crypto Times, and Grayscale just named Solana one of three tokens set to win from the new US token rules, per BeInCrypto.
Institutional demand keeps building underneath. Solana ETF inflows ran 70 times the prior week’s total, their strongest week since May per SoSoValue. Rising demand against shrinking supply anchors every serious Solana price prediction now.
Every Price on the Board Just Moved Except One
Pepeto: The Presale Still Selling at Yesterday’s Price T175
Pepeto is the name pulling attention right now for one simple reason. When the market ripped, every listed coin repriced within minutes. The presale did not. Pepeto still sells at $0.0000001889, the same entry it offered while the Fear and Greed Index sat below 30. That index reads 68 today, greed is officially back, and this is still the one entry on the board carrying a fear-market price.
The setup turns heads. Pepeto launched on Ethereum and its presale has not closed, the same window ETH offered in 2014, when a few hundred dollars grew into millions for whoever acted. Leading it is the creator who built Pepe into an $11 billion market cap, this time shipping a working exchange instead of a mascot with nothing behind it. That is why $10.6 million arrived during the worst sentiment of the cycle, and this week the market proved those early wallets right in public.
The supply squeeze Yakovenko is only proposing for Solana already runs here. Staking pays 165% APY, thinning the float every day, and the rate falls as more wallets commit. So buyers moving now earn the highest yield at the lowest entry, on the smallest float this token will ever carry. Every trade on PepetoSwap costs nothing, a cross-chain bridge shifts tokens between networks free of charge, and a contract scanner flags wallet drains and hidden supply tricks before money leaves your wallet. SolidProof audited the full codebase. Pepeto sits at $0.0000001889, and listing day is what erases that price.
Solana Price Prediction: SOL at $91.80 as the 200-Day Wall Breaks T175
SOL trades at $91.80 per CoinMarketCap, up 22.03% on the week and pressing the 200-day EMA at $89 that capped every rally since the peak. A close above it opens $96, then the psychological $100. Standard Chartered holds its $250 target on the Alpenglow upgrade and accelerating ETF demand.
From our view, this week changed the chart. Our analysis reads the 200-day break, the burn proposal, and Grayscale’s endorsement as SOL’s strongest combined setup since its top, and we see $250 as reachable this cycle, a 177% gain.
The limit is arithmetic, not conviction: $52 billion needs billions in fresh capital to triple, which is why a token priced for 100x from one listing carries different math.
Conclusion
A $250 Solana price prediction means a 177% run, and that reads well in a running market until it stands beside the 100x analysts model from Pepeto’s presale price. That distance is the whole story.
Look at how the Pepe and DOGE millionaires were made. Their money went in while the name meant nothing, at prices the crowd never saw. That sequence is live again: $10.6 million committed, greed back at 68, and the listing drawing closer while the presale price stays frozen at fear levels.
Setups this rare barely appear once a cycle. A working exchange, a founder who already built an $11 billion coin, a bull market firing underneath, and a price that has not moved yet. The wallets buying at $0.0000001889 today are the ones that turn small money into millions over the next few months, and every one of them got there by acting while the entry was still open at Pepeto.
Click To Visit Pepeto Website To Enter The Presale
FAQs
What does the Solana price prediction target for late 2026?
Standard Chartered projects SOL reaching $250, a 177% gain from $91.80 after this week’s 22.03% surge. Pepeto at presale pricing targets 100x through its approaching Binance listing, which SOL cannot match from $52 billion.
Why are buyers choosing Pepeto over Solana after the market surge?
Every listed coin repriced in this week’s rally while Pepeto stayed at $0.0000001889. The wallets entering now hold the last fear-market price on the board before the listing resets it forever.
This article is not intended as financial advice. Educational purposes only.

Adoption of artificial intelligence in crypto crime rose 40% over the past year, driven primarily by scammers, according to a new report from blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs.
The index moves to “emerging”
TRM’s 2026 AI-in-Crime Adoption Index places overall AI use across crypto crime at an “emerging” level of 54 out of 100, up from about 28 in 2024. The firm rated scams at a “mature” level of AI adoption, while hacking and ransomware remain “emerging” and narcotics and darknet markets sit at the earliest “horizon” stage.
“AI has not invented new crimes. It removed the constraints on old ones,” said Ari Redbord, TRM’s global head of policy. “The skill floor collapsed, the scale ceiling lifted, and fake identity went industrial — what used to take a team of operators now takes one person with a subscription.”
The share of crypto scam reports involving AI, such as deepfakes or chatbots, has risen as much as 13 times since 2022, and losses from deepfake scams in 2026 have already surpassed the full-year 2025 total by 263%.
AI-assisted hacks and agentic ransomware
TRM said North Korean cyber actors are using deepfake IT-worker infiltration, AI-run social engineering and AI-assisted vulnerability discovery to target firms. In June, security engineer Taylor Hornby used AI to discover a critical vulnerability in Zcash’s Orchard transaction pool that could have enabled the creation of an unlimited amount of counterfeit tokens. Digital-asset hacks reached a record 201 in the first half of 2026, more than double the prior year, with North Korea-linked activity accounting for about $600 million, or 61% of first-half losses.
The firm also flagged JadePuffer, disclosed last month as the first fully agentic ransomware attack, in which an AI agent handled reconnaissance, credential theft, lateral movement and encryption end-to-end. “This is the shape of attacks at scale against hospital systems and critical infrastructure … with no human required in the loop,” Redbord said. “That is the scale that makes this a civilization-level threat.”
Onchain data as the proxy
TRM noted that no-code ransomware kits now sell for $400 to $1,200, and that much of the measured criminal activity ultimately moves value on public blockchains, making onchain trends a reasonable proxy for broader patterns.

Ethena is the largest gainer on the board, up 50.4% in twenty four hours to $0.1323, and it sits second on CoinGecko’s most viewed list behind only Bitcoin. A move of that size in a token with a $1.4 billion market capitalization normally invites the same question this site asks every time: is anything real underneath it? In this case the answer is unusually specific, because Ethena publishes revenue, and the number it publishes changes how the move should be read.
Live price and data per CoinGecko, which ranks ENA at number 58 by market capitalization at roughly $1.43 billion.
The One Number That Matters
1.1 times.
Ethena recorded approximately $3.58 million in fees over the past twenty four hours, all of which registers as protocol revenue. Annualize that figure and the protocol runs at roughly $1.3 billion a year. Against a market capitalization near $1.43 billion, ENA trades at approximately 1.1 times annualized revenue.
For context from this site’s own measurements this month: Hyperliquid, the token most often cited as having genuine revenue backing, trades near 24 times annualized revenue. Chainlink’s protocol-funded reserve buys roughly 1.2% of its market cap per year. Most tokens in the top hundred have no revenue at all to divide by.
A ratio near 1 is not merely low for crypto. It is low for anything. Traditional equities with stable cash flows rarely trade below several times revenue, and a business trading at roughly its annual revenue is either in structural decline or priced for something the market is deeply skeptical about. Which brings us to the part that explains the number.
Why the multiple is that low
Ethena issues USDe, a synthetic dollar backed not by bank deposits but by a delta-neutral position: it holds spot crypto assets while shorting equivalent perpetual futures, capturing the funding rate paid by leveraged long traders. That funding rate is the revenue.
The implication is direct and unavoidable. Ethena’s income is a function of how bullish the market is. When traders crowd into leveraged long positions, funding runs positive and Ethena collects. When sentiment turns and the market fills with shorts instead, funding can go negative and the mechanism runs in reverse.
So the $3.58 million daily figure is not a stable base to annualize with confidence. It is a snapshot taken during one of the most bullish sessions of the year, with Bitcoin up 13% and a record $2.7 billion of short positions liquidated across the market. Those are precisely the conditions that maximize funding rates, and this site’s explanation of how squeezes work covers why such conditions are self-limiting rather than persistent.
The low multiple, in other words, is not the market being asleep. It is the market pricing revenue it expects to be cyclical. Whether it is pricing that correctly is the actual investment question, and it is not one a ratio can settle.
What else is behind the move
Three items are on the public record and worth separating by weight.
Coinbase Ventures took a position in ENA and partnered with Ethena on onchain finance products aimed at Coinbase’s user base, which is the most substantive of the three because it involves distribution rather than sentiment.
Arthur Hayes was reported in early August to have bought 6 million ENA at around $0.09, a position worth roughly $525,000, tracked on-chain and widely circulated. Disclosed positions from prominent traders reliably move sentiment; they are not fundamentals.
And the market-wide rally did the rest. ENA is a high-beta asset whose business model is directly geared to bullish leverage, which makes it close to the most sensitive large token available to exactly the kind of move now underway. It should be outperforming today. That is the design.
Structure and levels
ENA reached an all-time high of $1.52 and an all-time low of $0.07023, which places today’s price roughly 90% below the peak and roughly 88% above the floor. The token spent months capped by a descending trendline before reclaiming it earlier this month.
Near-term, analysts have identified $0.12 as the level that has to hold for the move to remain constructive, with $0.15 and then the 2026 high near $0.17 as the references above. A close back below $0.12 would open the $0.104 to $0.11 support zone. Volume has expanded sharply into the move, and whether it stays elevated is the measurable question over the coming sessions, since a 50% advance on volume that immediately evaporates has a well-documented ending.
Bottom Line
Ethena is the rare crypto asset where a revenue multiple can be calculated at all, and at roughly 1.1 times annualized revenue it is the cheapest reading this site has measured this year. The reason it is cheap is legible rather than mysterious: the revenue is funding-rate income that scales with bullish leverage and compresses when sentiment turns, which makes annualizing a single day’s figure an exercise in optimism. Anyone treating ENA as a value play should understand they are buying a business whose earnings peak precisely when its token is most expensive, and trough precisely when it looks cheapest. That is not a disqualification. It is the thing to hold in mind while the chart is vertical.
This article is for information only and is not investment advice. Crypto assets are extremely volatile and you can lose your entire stake. Always do your own research.

Let me close a story properly. On July 21, when Ethereum was $1,933 and had just become the most viewed coin in crypto, this column wrote that a round number was waiting at $2,000 and that walls like it rarely fall on the first attempt. Two days ago, at $1,996, I wrote that ETH was four dollars away and that the interesting part started there. It did. Ethereum trades at $2,388.57 today, up 8.4% over twenty four hours, which means the wall did not just fall. It got trampled.
Live price per CoinGecko, with ETH sitting in both the trending and most viewed lists alongside Bitcoin at $77,580.
What broke it, and why it was not really about Ethereum
The honest version of this story gives Ethereum less credit than the chart suggests.
Two days ago I wrote that this approach to $2,000 looked different from July’s because the entire board was green rather than ETH leading alone, and that broad participation makes a level easier to break than narrow leadership does. That turned out to be the whole mechanism. Bitcoin ran roughly twenty percent in three days on a combination of US Treasury buyback expansion, the largest ETF inflows since May and a record $2.7 billion of short liquidations. Ethereum did not break its wall through some Ethereum-specific development. It was carried through by a market-wide liquidity event, as our breakdown of the rally sets out in detail.
That is not a criticism, it is a distinction that matters for what comes next. A level broken by a rising tide holds only as long as the tide does. A level broken by asset-specific demand tends to hold better, because the buyers had a reason beyond momentum.
There is one Ethereum-specific data point worth holding onto: spot Ether funds took in $221 million on August 20, alongside Bitcoin’s $606 million. That is verifiable, non-forced buying, and it is the part of this move most likely to survive the week. Flow tables at Farside Investors update daily for anyone who wants to check whether it continues.
The number that puts this in perspective
From the July 14 note where this column first flagged Ethereum’s leadership at $1,786, the token has now gained roughly $600 per coin, about 34%, in five weeks.
That number cuts both ways and deserves to be read honestly. It vindicates the observation that ETH was leading before the crowd noticed. It also means anyone arriving today is paying a third more than readers of that first note, into a market whose relative strength index has been running deep in overbought territory, after a move driven substantially by liquidations that cannot repeat.
The uncomfortable arithmetic of squeezes applies here, and this site has just published a full explanation of the mechanism. Forced buying from liquidated short positions is real buying with a finite fuel supply. When the shorts are gone, that bid disappears abruptly rather than fading. What remains is whatever voluntary demand exists at the new price, and $2,388 is a price nobody was voluntarily paying a week ago.
Where the structure sits now
The old wall becomes the new floor, which is how these things work. $2,000 is now the level that separates a genuine breakout from a round trip, and it sits roughly sixteen percent below the current price, which is a long way to fall before anyone can call the structure broken.
The nearer question is what holds in the meantime. Between here and there, the $2,250 to $2,300 area is where the last two days’ buying concentrated, and it is the first place a pullback would test. Above, there is no recent congestion until considerably higher, which is what happens when a market gaps through a level rather than grinding past it: it leaves no reference points behind.
Below everything, the $1,879 foundation this column has tracked since mid-July is now ancient history rather than a live concern. That is what a good five weeks does to a chart.
What I would watch, and what I would not
I would not watch the price for the next few days. It will be noisy, it will move on macro headlines rather than on anything about Ethereum, and reading meaning into a session in the middle of a liquidity event is how people talk themselves into bad entries.
I would watch three things instead. Whether ether ETF inflows continue at the scale of August 20, because that is the demand that is not forced. Whether the Treasury follows through on its September 9 buyback expansion, since the macro shift is doing more work here than any crypto-native story. And whether ETH can hold above $2,250 on a daily closing basis when the market next has a genuinely red day, which is the only test that distinguishes a repriced asset from a temporarily lifted one.
Five weeks ago the wall was sixty seven dollars away and I said it would take more than one attempt. It took exactly one, delivered by a market that was not really thinking about Ethereum at all. The level is behind us now. The verification is not.
This article is for information only and is not investment advice. Crypto assets are extremely volatile and you can lose your entire stake. Always do your own research.

Live tables deal faster than most of us realise. Evolution’s own figures, published in Tencent RTC’s technical review of live casino apps in May 2026, show that low latency tables produce 21% more rounds per hour and 9% higher bets, and the same review measured real app delay at between 250 and 450 milliseconds, with anything under 300ms treated as the working benchmark.
Read that again and the arithmetic becomes obvious. Twenty minutes at a blackjack table gives you dozens of hands, each with its own stake and result.
Nobody holds that in their head. We’re not built for it, and we don’t need to be, because every one of those rounds writes its own record while you play.
Three sources set the picture here: the testing standards that independent labs apply to live gaming systems, the technical documentation from the studio behind most of the tables Kiwi players open and New Zealand market data from Blask. Between them you get the location of the History button, the contents of a round ID, the detail worth screenshotting and the reason quoting a reference beats describing a hand from memory.
It’s worth knowing how many of us this applies to. Blask’s May 2026 analysis of New Zealand’s online gambling spend put the country at around 360,000 active online players as of September 2025, with monthly spend sitting above NZ$60M consistently since March 2024. Open a spinbet live casino table and you join that group, with a dealer streaming to your screen and a round-by-round log building behind every bet you place.
Your Round ID Is a Receipt
That reference number sitting beside a result in your history is a logged field with a specification behind it.
Gaming Laboratories International, the testing lab whose standards sit behind interactive gaming systems worldwide, published a draft revision of GLI-19 dated 7 July 2026 that requires each individual game played to record a unique game cycle ID and/or gaming session ID, the game theme or paytable ID, and the date and time played. The version already in circulation, GLI-19 v3.0, specifies that the system clock is used for all timestamping and that recorded data must be exportable for verification. For live games specifically, GLI’s requirements state that drawing devices are monitored and logged, with the logs showing the game rules were followed, including date and time. So the wheel itself and the shoe form part of the paper trail.
Look at the shape of a single round and it gets clearer still. Evolution’s live casino integration documentation exposes a unique game round identifier alongside startedAt and settledAt timestamps and a status of either Resolved or Cancelled.
Which is why the receipt comparison holds up so well. A supermarket receipt gives you a merchant, a time, a line item and a total. A live round gives you a table, two timestamps, a stake and an outcome. Four fields, same job, and you keep both for the same reason: having the record costs you nothing.
This applies across a whole live section rather than one or two games. SpinBet’s New Zealand live casino runs blackjack, roulette, baccarat and game show titles with professional dealers streamed in HD, and the round-level record sits under all of them equally.
The Ten Second Glance
Knowing the record exists is one thing; building the habit of reading it is where the value sits. Checking your history works best as something you do mid-session, in the gap between rounds, rather than as a stocktake at the end of the night.
That gap is shorter than it used to be, and far more predictable. Streaming specialist nanocosmos documented how live provider LiveG24 brought delay down from three or four seconds to roughly 0.8 seconds, streaming from a European studio to Brazil. Asia Gaming Brief’s January 2026 review of APAC streaming trends puts the threshold for workable interaction under 500 milliseconds. A tight, consistent rhythm is something you can plan around.
The loop itself is short:
Open the in-game menu and tap History while the table keeps dealing.
Match the top entry against the time you remember placing your bet.
Open that single round for the stake, outcome and reference detail.
Screenshot it, since the image captures the reference and the timestamp together.
Close the panel before the next betting window opens.
Angelo De Gobbi, Chief Operating Officer at LiveG24, framed the underlying issue in the nanocosmos study: “Latency is one of the most important factors in live casino games. Even a few seconds can significantly affect the player experience.”
He’s right, and it cuts both ways for us as players. Fast tables are more enjoyable, and they also mean the log is doing the remembering on our behalf.
The first time you run through those five steps it feels like admin. By the third time it takes less attention than glancing at a text message.
Some tables give you a second angle on the same round. SpinBet’s roulette lineup includes immersive live tables built with multiple camera angles and slow motion replays, so between the replay and the history entry you get two independent ways to confirm what landed.
One Habit On Every Table
Learn this once and it carries almost everywhere, because a small number of studios, led by Evolution, set the conventions.
Blask data reported by Yogonet in July 2026 counted 807 live titles tracked worldwide, with Evolution holding six of the global top ten and Pragmatic Play three. Evolution’s year-end report for 2025 shows live casino at €1.77 billion of €2.07 billion in net revenue, roughly 85% of the business, which explains why its client layout became the default most other studios echo. The volumes are large even further down the market: LiveG24 streams 44,950 game rounds per day across 72,124 annual streaming hours with a 99.5% uptime commitment.
Map the receipt onto the round and you have a reading guide for any live table you open.
Receipt field Live round equivalent Where you’ll find it Source Merchant Table and game title History list row Blask live title tracking Purchase time startedAt and settledAt timestamps Round detail view Evolution integration docs Line item Stake and bet type Round detail view Evolution integration docs Reference number Unique game cycle or session ID Round detail view GLI-19 v4.0 draft Payment status Resolved or Cancelled Round detail view Evolution integration docs
Now the part that makes the screenshot worth taking. Aggregation platform GamesValley describes its operator support dashboard as searchable by round ID, transaction ID or account, returning bet placed, outcome determined and payout processed, plus session start, end and duration. The number you captured is the same key the support agent types in.
One more detail that should put minds at rest on patchy connections. Evolution’s documentation notes that when a player disconnects and reconnects during a round, session identifiers are retained against that same round. A dropped signal halfway through a hand doesn’t erase it.
So if the record already exists, timestamped and referenced, why would any of us describe a round in our own words instead of quoting it?
Support timing helps too. SpinBet’s New Zealand platform pairs thousands of pokies and live dealer tables with NZD banking, local payment methods and 24/7 Kiwi support, so a screenshot taken at 10pm on a Tuesday reaches someone working to your clock.
Reading Your Own Patterns
Most people never open their history because nothing went wrong, which makes the less obvious use of it the more interesting one.
The same panel shows you how you play: stake sizes, which tables you keep returning to, how long you sat down for. Session start, end and duration are recorded fields rather than estimates. No maths required on your part.
That suits this audience. SiGMA World, reporting Blask consumer research in July 2026, described New Zealand’s online player base as dominated by working-age adults who prioritise convenience, accessibility and entertainment. Blask builds those profiles from more than 80,000 surveys across multiple countries. A ten second habit fits that description; a ten minute one doesn’t.
For a sense of where Kiwis are playing, Blask’s June 2026 New Zealand brand ranking lists JackpotCity at 17.52% Brand’s Accumulated Power, TAB (NZ) at 15.95%, Spin Casino at 10.87% and SpinBet at 7.16%. Worth being precise about what that measures: the Blask Index tracks consumer interest and search demand rather than revenue, so read it as attention, not turnover.
Breadth helps the habit stick. Because SpinBet keeps pokies, live tables and rugby betting inside one NZD wallet, the same reading routine covers everything you play rather than living in one corner of the lobby. If you’re deciding which of those formats suits the time you have free, this breakdown of how pokies, table games and live dealers differ sets out what each one asks of you before you sit down.
The surprise, when people do look, is rarely the results. It’s how much shorter or longer the session was than it felt.
Keep the Receipt And Keep the Rhythm
The industry has already built all of this for you. Testing labs require the identifier, studios expose it in the client, support systems index it, and streaming is quick enough that reading a round costs you a few seconds of a betting window.
The only missing piece was ever knowing where to tap.
That’s a safe habit to invest in, too. With GLI’s July 2026 draft spelling out game cycle ID logging more explicitly than the version before it, round-level detail is settling in as a baseline expectation across live products rather than a feature that comes and goes.
One glance, one screenshot, one reference number.
Every round already writes its own receipt, so the next one you play is worth reading.
Advisory Notice: Keep gambling in perspective; it’s entertainment, not an investment. Decide your spending limit before you start and don’t exceed it. Watch for signs like chasing losses or feeling you can’t stop, and step away if either appears. Gambling Helpline provides free, confidential assistance whenever things stop feeling enjoyable.
This article is not intended as financial advice. Educational purposes only.

New whitepaper proposes replacing DeFi’s fragmented pools with a single reserve for swaps, lending, leverage and limit orders
Everything Protocol just published a new whitepaper laying out what it claims is a first-of-its-kind solution to one of decentralized finance’s longest-running problems: fragmented liquidity.
Rather than building separate pools for trading, lending, leverage and limit orders, Everything Protocol proposes running all four functions through a single liquidity reserve for each token pair. The idea is straightforward: the same capital should be able to perform multiple financial functions instead of being locked into one application at a time.
That would represent a significant departure from the way most DeFi markets operate today. Decentralized exchanges generally maintain liquidity for swaps, lending protocols operate separate credit pools, and leveraged trading and order execution often require additional infrastructure.
Everything Protocol’s whitepaper argues that this fragmentation reduces capital efficiency and creates dependencies between protocols that must move assets, pricing information and risk across separate systems.
Its proposed architecture collapses those functions into one balance sheet. A single reserve can price trades, back loans and leveraged positions, and support limit orders. Liquidity providers can potentially earn swap fees while their capital also supports lending, while eligible funds sitting in limit orders can be lent to borrowers until those orders execute.
The whitepaper attempts to show how this model can work mathematically rather than simply presenting it as a theoretical concept. It details accounting rules, solvency requirements, liquidation mechanics and safeguards intended to keep the system functional during volatile or adversarial market conditions.
One of its more unusual features is the removal of external price oracles for credit decisions. Everything Protocol instead derives an internal price band from its own trading state. The band remains fixed within each block and adjusts according to predefined rules, an approach designed to prevent short-term price manipulation from immediately increasing borrowing capacity.
The protocol also connects credit directly to available liquidity. Because the same pool responsible for pricing assets is also responsible for absorbing liquidations, borrowing limits can be based on the liquidity actually available inside the system rather than assumptions about external markets.
Limit orders follow the same unified approach. Orders and loans operate on a shared tick structure, and resting order capital can optionally earn lending yield before execution.
The architecture includes a defined hierarchy for handling losses and claims. User escrow is separated from the pricing reserve, proceeds from filled orders receive senior treatment, and eligible liquidation losses are absorbed first by a junior liquidity provider tranche.
Everything Protocol acknowledges that combining these functions does not eliminate DeFi risk. Its whitepaper identifies potential trade-offs including temporary delays for voluntary withdrawals of lent funds, losses for junior liquidity providers, governance and upgrade risks, and latency associated with its internal pricing mechanism.
Still, the protocol is making an ambitious claim. Instead of treating exchanges, lending markets, leverage platforms and order systems as separate pieces of DeFi infrastructure, Everything Protocol argues that they can operate as different functions of the same on-chain balance sheet.
If the architecture performs as designed, Everything Protocol could offer a new answer to a problem DeFi has struggled with since its earliest growth: how to make the same dollar of liquidity work across an entire financial market instead of forcing it to choose a single job.

Bitcoin’s rapid move higher this week looks less like a fresh wave of spot conviction and more like a forced unwind in derivatives markets. That is the core warning from CryptoQuant analyst BorisD, who pointed to a sharp jump in Binance’s Short Squeeze indicator as the main fuel behind the rally in the original report.
The indicator climbed to 6.94, its highest level since November 2024. For traders, that number reflects a market where short positions are being forcefully closed, generating buy orders that push price higher regardless of underlying spot activity. BorisD said the move was dominated by liquidation-driven buying rather than genuine spot accumulation.
That distinction matters. Short squeezes can produce fast, aggressive upside, but they do not create the same kind of durable floor as spot demand. Once the forced buying exhausts itself, price becomes vulnerable to a retrace if organic buyers do not step in.
The danger is not that a short squeeze is illegitimate. It is that forced liquidation buys are price-insensitive. They execute because a position is being closed, not because a trader wants long exposure. That kind of flow can vanish quickly.
Why Binance Futures Matter for Price Discovery
Binance remains the deepest venue for Bitcoin futures liquidity, so liquidation events there tend to spill across other exchanges. A short liquidation cascade forces traders and risk engines to buy back exposure, and that mechanical flow can temporarily overwhelm order books. The Short Squeeze indicator at 6.94 suggests this was not a mild unwind.
Liquidation cascades often cluster around a few price levels. When stops are triggered, they feed a loop of buying that clears out shorts and leaves fewer sell-side participants in the immediate term. But the same dynamic can reverse when the cascade ends and the order book thins.
Comparisons to November 2024 are useful because that period also featured a sudden repricing after a crowded short trade. But the setup is not identical. Market participants now have to decide whether spot buyers will absorb the move or simply wait for lower prices.
Leverage works both ways. The same futures structure that helped drive price higher can accelerate a reversal if momentum stalls and long liquidations begin. That is what makes the next few sessions important for short-term positioning.
Spot Demand Is the Real Test
For the rally to hold, spot volume needs to take over from derivatives. On-chain flows, exchange inflows, and institutional spot buying become more relevant now than the liquidation data itself. Without that follow-through, the market is essentially running on borrowed demand.
Broader capital rotation has not been evenly distributed. Some altcoins have posted outsized weekly moves, as seen in the latest weekly gainers list, but Bitcoin-specific spot accumulation is a separate question.
Spot buyers tend to be slower to chase moves than leveraged traders. If the market cannot attract them near current levels, bids may appear lower, which is why BorisD flagged pullback risk rather than calling for immediate continuation.
At the same time, institutional interest in on-chain assets continues to evolve, including tokenized Treasury activity tracked in a recent tokenization roundup. That does not guarantee immediate Bitcoin spot demand, but it does show where deeper capital is moving across crypto market structure.
What Could Break the Pattern
Regulatory uncertainty remains another variable. While US lawmakers debate the largest crypto market structure bill in years, spot participants may stay cautious even if futures traders are forced to chase price. The policy fight covered in the Senate vote coverage adds a layer of hesitation that derivatives data alone cannot capture.
That does not mean policy is the primary driver here. The immediate engine is clearly in Binance futures. But spot participants rarely commit fresh capital when the rules of market access are still being negotiated.
BorisD’s warning does not predict an immediate top. It simply identifies the engine behind the move. If spot demand remains thin, the same liquidation mechanics that pushed Bitcoin higher can reverse quickly. If spot buyers return, the squeeze could become a base for a more durable advance.
The next signal likely comes from spot volume trends and long positioning after the squeeze. Traders are already watching whether the market can hold gains without another liquidation impulse. That, more than the indicator itself, will determine if this is accumulation or just leverage clearing out.

Flowra has launched new infrastructure that combines competitive blockspace auctions with programmable transaction policies for Solana validators.
Its Open Orderflow Auction altflows registered searchers to compete for transaction inclusion rather than relying on closed orderflow channels, while a separate Programmable Block Policy feature gives validators more control over how their blocks are constructed.
The auction is intended to introduce broader competition into Solana’s MEV market.
Searchers identify opportunities such as arbitrage and compete to have their transactions included in blocks. By creating an open bidding market, Flowra says validators can gain access to more competing participants and potentially earn more from the blockspace they control.
In an early test involving a single validator, Flowra reported a 20.6% increase in compute units per block. The validator moved from 84% to 101% of the network average, while also generating higher block fees than comparable validator software.
The test also recorded 100% block production and 99.999% block engine uptime, according to Flowra.
The Programmable Block Policy layer addresses a different issue by allowing validators to define their own transaction inclusion requirements.
That could enable institutional operators to introduce compliance or risk controls without forcing those same rules across the Solana network.
Flowra recently announced a collaboration with compliance infrastructure company Honeypot, which is bringing sanctions and risk screening to the programmable policy layer.
“By opening block building to transparent competition, we’re creating a more efficient market for blockspace while giving validators greater control over how their blocks are constructed with full verifiability and auditability,” said Harry Hwang, CEO of Flowra.
The model is partly inspired by Ethereum’s competitive block-building ecosystem, where builders bid to construct blocks for proposers.
Flowra believes a similar market-based structure can be adapted to Solana despite the network’s different performance and latency requirements.
The company is now onboarding institutional-grade validators, with broader participation expected as the Open Orderflow Auction expands across the Solana ecosystem.

Bitcoin has reignited market enthusiasm. As of now, BTC has broken through the $77,000 mark, reaching a new high in nearly three months. With market sentiment rapidly recovering, questions such as “Has a new bull market begun?” and “Can Bitcoin challenge $100,000 again?” have become the focus of investors’ attention.
Key factors contributing to this market rally include:
Inflows into the US spot Bitcoin ETF, marking the strongest single-day inflow in approximately three and a half months.
The US Treasury expanded its long-term Treasury bond repurchase program, leading to a decline in long-term yields.
The White House’s push for legislation to structure the crypto market collectively improved market risk appetite.
Large-scale short covering further amplified the BTC rally.
However, rapid price increases bring not only opportunities but also accumulating risks. The crypto market has historically rarely moved in a single, sustained direction. Even if the long-term trend continues positive, it’s entirely possible that new fluctuations or even pullbacks will occur before reaching $100,000. For investors already holding BTC, this is precisely the most difficult phase: continuing to hold risks eroding profits during a pullback; selling prematurely could mean missing out on the real bull market; and frequent trading could force them out of the market due to a single misjudgment.
When both upward and downward movements cannot be accurately predicted, what investors really need to think about is not just “where will BTC go next”, but rather: can we reduce our reliance on price increases and find another potential source of income in the face of market uncertainty?
Bull DeFi: Don’t pin all your hopes on BTC continuing to rise
It is in this market environment that Bull DeFi, which revolves around the development of computing power and artificial intelligence, has attracted much attention. Unlike relying on short-term buying and selling to earn price differences, its core idea is to provide digital asset holders with an alternative way to participate through platform-based computing power services. Users do not need to purchase and maintain complex equipment themselves, nor do they need to undertake the technical management work in traditional computing power participation. They can participate in the blockchain network through Bull DeFi and thus earn rewards.
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Currently, Bull DeFi supports mainstream cryptocurrencies such as BTC, XRP, USDT, DOGE, LTC, ETH, and SOL, providing a flexible and efficient way for users worldwide to participate.
In terms of compliance, security, and technology, Bull DeFi has established multiple mechanisms:
Audit and Transparency: PwC’s annual audits and certifications ensure transparency in finances and operations.
Asset insurance: Digital assets are insured by Lloyd’s of London, providing world-leading custody insurance.
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Asset custody: Separation of cold and hot wallets and multi-layered encryption effectively prevent potential attacks.
Real-time risk control: An AI-driven real-time risk monitoring system identifies and blocks suspicious transactions around the clock.
Conclusion
The surge in Bitcoin prices has brought the $100,000 mark back into the market spotlight, but a true bull market is never a straight line. Upswings, fluctuations, and pullbacks are all likely to be part of the next phase of the market trend.
The market decides when BTC will reach $100,000, but investors can decide whether their assets can create a different kind of miracle before that happens.
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Email address: info@bulldefi.com
About Bull DeFi
Bull DeFi is a UK-based cloud computing platform that strictly adheres to the EU’s Crypto Asset Markets Regulatory Framework (MiCA) and Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II). Through a distributed computing power sharing network, Bull DeFi further lowers the barrier to entry, making investment models previously only accessible to large enterprises truly available to individual investors. The platform centrally manages equipment deployment, operation, maintenance, and technical control, allowing users to participate in the blockchain network and earn rewards without purchasing hardware or dealing with complex infrastructure.
This article is not intended as financial advice. Educational purposes only.

In one recent session, bearish crypto bets lost a record $2.7 billion, with more than a billion dollars of short positions wiped out inside a single hour, and Bitcoin climbed 13% in a day. Headlines called it buying. Most of it was not buying in any meaningful sense. It was traders being removed from their positions by exchanges, automatically, against their will, and each removal purchasing the asset on the way out. That mechanism is a short squeeze, it explains a large share of the most dramatic candles in crypto history, and understanding it changes how you read every fast rally you will ever see.
The setup: what shorting actually is
To bet against an asset, a trader borrows it, sells it at today’s price, and hopes to buy it back cheaper later. The difference is the profit. If the price rises instead, the loss grows, and unlike a normal purchase, that loss has no natural ceiling: a token can rise 10x, but it can only fall to zero.
In crypto, almost all of this happens with leverage on derivatives exchanges. A trader posts collateral and controls a much larger position. That amplification is what turns an ordinary short into fuel.
The trigger: liquidation is not a choice
Every leveraged position has a liquidation price, the level at which the collateral no longer covers the loss. When price touches it, the exchange closes the position automatically. No confirmation, no decision, no opportunity to wait it out.
Closing a short position requires buying the asset back. So the liquidation of a bearish bet is, mechanically, a market buy order. The trader did not change their mind. The system bought for them.
The cascade: why it accelerates
Here is where a normal move becomes a violent one, and it is a genuine feedback loop rather than a metaphor.
Price rises modestly, perhaps on real news. It reaches the liquidation level of the most aggressively leveraged shorts. Those positions close, generating forced buy orders. Those buy orders push price higher. The higher price reaches the liquidation level of the next tier of shorts, slightly less aggressive. Those close too, generating more forced buying. Repeat.
Each round of liquidations funds the next, which is why these moves happen in minutes rather than days, and why a billion dollars of positions can vanish inside an hour. The market is not deciding anything during that hour. It is unwinding.
Two structural features of crypto make this worse than in traditional markets: leverage is available at multiples that regulated venues do not permit, and the market never closes, so there is no overnight pause to interrupt the loop.
Why every squeeze ends
This is the part that matters most for anyone reading a green chart and wondering whether to join.
A squeeze has a finite fuel supply. The forced buying comes entirely from existing short positions. When those positions are gone, the buying stops, and it stops abruptly rather than fading. There is no second wave, because the same trader cannot be liquidated twice.
That is why squeeze-driven rallies so often stall hard at the top: the mechanical bid vanishes, and whatever voluntary demand exists has to hold a price that was set by people who were not choosing to buy. Sometimes it does. Frequently it does not, and the retracement is nearly as fast as the advance.
Squeezes also tend to overshoot. The price at the peak of a cascade reflects the exhaustion of leverage, not any assessment of value. Reading that peak as the market’s opinion is a category error.
How to tell whether you are watching one
You cannot know for certain in real time, but three signals get you most of the way there.
Check the liquidation data. Platforms like CoinGlass publish liquidation totals and the long-versus-short split in near real time. A large move accompanied by enormous short liquidations is substantially mechanical. The same move with modest liquidations is closer to genuine buying.
Check the funding rate. On perpetual futures, funding is a periodic payment between longs and shorts that keeps the contract tethered to spot. Deeply negative funding means shorts are crowded and paying to stay short, which is the classic pre-squeeze configuration. When funding flips sharply positive during a rally, the crowd has already switched sides and the squeeze is likely spent.
Check whether spot demand exists underneath. This is the question that separates a squeeze that fades from a rally that holds. Is there verifiable buying that is not forced, such as ETF inflows or treasury purchases? Where mechanical buying and voluntary buying arrive together, the move has a foundation. Where only the mechanical part exists, it does not.
The mirror image: long squeezes
Everything above works identically in reverse, and it is more common in crypto than the short version.
When a market is crowded with leveraged longs, a modest decline triggers their liquidations, which generate forced selling, which pushes price lower and triggers the next tier. This is what produces the sudden vertical drops that appear without news and are described the next morning as a crash. Frequently there was no news, only leverage finding the door.
Both versions carry the same lesson: in a heavily leveraged market, the most violent moves are usually about positioning rather than about value.
Why this belongs in your reading of every rally
Three practical takeaways.
A big candle is not a big conviction. Before treating a 13% day as a signal about an asset’s prospects, check how much of it was liquidations. The answer is public.
Squeezes are terrible entry points and they feel like the opposite. The moment of maximum urgency to buy, when the chart is vertical and the commentary is loudest, is frequently the moment when the mechanical bid is closest to exhausted.
And the fundamentals underneath still decide the outcome. A squeeze can start a genuine trend if real demand arrives while it runs. It can also be a complete round trip. The distinguishing evidence is whether the voluntary buying shows up, which is checkable rather than a matter of opinion, in ETF flow tables, on-chain accumulation and the funding rate over the days after the fireworks.
Bottom Line
A short squeeze is a feedback loop in which forced buying from liquidated bearish positions drives price higher, triggering more liquidations. It explains many of crypto’s most spectacular rallies, it is measurable while it happens, and it always ends, because it runs on a fuel supply that cannot be refilled. Read the liquidation data alongside the price, ask whether anyone is buying voluntarily, and you will spend far less time confusing a positioning event with a change in what something is worth.
This article is for information only and is not investment advice. Crypto assets are extremely volatile and you can lose your entire stake. Always do your own research.

Liquidity fragmentation has long been treated as a structural tax on tokenized markets. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao now argues the industry is over-indexing on clean architecture and under-indexing on speed. In a market update cited by the original report, CZ said all assets should be tokenized and described tokenization as one of the best ways for countries to raise funds or attract foreign direct investment.
The push is broader than the usual real-world asset narrative. CZ specifically pointed to tokenized shares as an incentive for countries and companies to sell exposure to global investors, a framing that puts capital formation at the center of crypto adoption rather than asset appreciation. FDI tends to be stickier than hot trading flow because it is tied to infrastructure, local business, and longer-horizon relationships with regulators.
That argument lands after a period in which tokenized private credit and Treasury products have moved from pilots into live settlement. BlockchainReporter’s tokenization roundup tracked real-world assets crossing $20 billion on-chain, a threshold that makes capital formation claims harder to dismiss.
The FDI Angle Is Sharper Than It Sounds
Framing tokenization as a sovereignty issue changes the adoption path. Rather than asking regulators to approve crypto as an asset class, the argument becomes about whether a country can access global liquidity for state-linked issuers, airports, utilities, and corporate champions. Tokenized shares can be sold to investors without the same intermediary chain that usually restricts cross-border capital raising. That does not make it a regulatory free pass, but it changes the negotiation.
The source material does not say CZ named any country or issuer. The point is structural. If public and private issuers face pressure to list locally or rely on domestic investor bases, tokenization offers an alternative route to demand outside the usual banking corridors. That is one reason the FDI component may carry more political weight than broad crypto adoption claims.
For exchanges and market infrastructure, that shift would blur the line between a trading venue and a capital markets venue. Tokenized shares would need order books, pricing, and disclosure, not just a bridge. It also raises the stakes for stablecoin liquidity, since cross-border FDI inflows settle somewhere. That may be why the pitch has resonance in jurisdictions where dollar access is constrained.
Fragmentation as a Feature, Not a Bug
CZ’s support for tokenization on all blockchains is not the cleanest path. Multiple chains mean multiple liquidity pools, different bridging assumptions, and varied smart contract risk. He acknowledged that directly, saying simultaneous efforts by multiple parties would be the fastest way to expand the industry. The tradeoff is deliberate: accept fragmentation now to distribute the learning curve across ecosystems instead of waiting for one chain to win.
His caveat on fungibility is the important market mechanics detail. If tokens issued by different issuers share high fungibility, the damage from fragmented liquidity can be partially offset. That does not solve fragmented depth across chains, but it limits the worst outcome where supposedly identical assets trade as mutually untransferable instruments. Multi-chain tokenization still assumes multiple ecosystems can attract real deployment, not just narrative. Ethereum, BNB Chain, Polygon, and others continue to lead developer activity, but the tokenization push would need that base to extend beyond general-purpose smart contracts into securities-grade issuance.
What Still Has to Be Solved
There is no clear statement in the source about custody, legal settlement, securities classification, or institutional onboarding. Those are not minor omissions. Tokenized equity issued across multiple chains carries different risks than tokenized Treasury products. Issuer accountability, corporate action processing, and the ability to identify beneficial owners all become harder when the asset moves across jurisdictions and settlement layers.
The U.S. legislative fight is a useful reminder that the enabling rails are still contested. As banking interests press against the largest crypto bill, the rules for tokenized securities and stablecoin rails remain unresolved. That does not invalidate CZ’s argument, but it explains why issuer adoption may lag the technical capability.
CZ’s version of tokenization is deliberately uncoordinated. It accepts that some liquidity will be split, but treats speed and experimentation as the higher priority. For countries watching how to attract capital outside traditional banking channels, that pitch may be more actionable than promises of universal interoperability.

Three days ago Bitcoin sat at $64,400 and this column was writing about how quietly it had held its range. Today it trades at $77,580, up 13.2% in twenty four hours, and Ethereum is at $2,388 after clearing the $2,000 wall this site had been tracking since July. Ethena is up 50%, Pump.fun 19.8%, Solana 8.1%. When a market moves this fast, the explanations multiply faster than the price, so here are the three that are actually supported by evidence, in order of how much they matter.
One: the US Treasury quietly changed the liquidity picture
This is the driver most crypto coverage is underweighting, and it has nothing to do with crypto.
The US Treasury announced it will double its long-dated bond buybacks, from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation, beginning September 9. Long-term yields fell sharply on the news, with Secretary Bessent signalling further willingness to intervene at the long end.
Why this reaches Bitcoin: when the government buys back its own long-term debt, it injects cash into the financial system and pushes down the yield on the safest long-duration asset available. Every risk asset is priced against that yield. When the risk-free return falls, the relative case for holding volatile assets improves, and capital that was sitting in bonds starts looking elsewhere. Several market participants have described the intervention as functionally similar to quantitative easing without the label.
James Lavish of the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund put the ordering plainly, arguing Bitcoin is surging because the Treasury signalled it will do what it takes to keep long-end yields from rising, and explicitly disputing coverage that credited the White House meeting instead. That is one participant’s reading rather than settled fact, but the timing supports it: the move began before the political headlines landed.
Two: the institutional bid came back, on the record
US spot Bitcoin ETFs took in $517 million on August 19, their strongest single day since early May, and $606 million on August 20, with Ethereum funds adding $221 million on the same day. For context, July’s entire net intake across those products was roughly $172 million.
That matters because it is verifiable spot demand rather than a story. Daily flow tables are published openly at Farside Investors and SoSoValue, which means anyone can check whether this continues rather than taking a headline’s word for it.
The honest caveat belongs right here. One large day confirms a breakout, two suggest a pattern, and the difference between a genuine institutional return and a brief rebalancing shows up in the third and fourth days, not the first. Watch the tables, not the excitement.
Three: the shorts got run over, and that is not the same as buying
Bearish positions lost a record $2.7 billion during the surge, with more than $1 billion in short positions liquidated inside a single hour.
This is the part that requires care. Liquidations are forced buying: traders positioned against the market are automatically closed out, and closing a short means purchasing the asset. That purchasing is real and it moves price violently, but it is mechanical rather than voluntary. Nobody in that $2.7 billion decided Bitcoin was worth more. They were removed from their position by an exchange.
A significant share of any move this fast is that mechanism, and it has a natural limit: it stops when the shorts are gone. If you want one number to understand why a market can climb 13% in a day and then stall for a week, it is that one. The token unlock guide on this site makes a similar point about forced versus voluntary flows in a different context; the principle transfers.
What about the political headlines?
President Trump used an August 19 White House meeting with crypto executives and regulators to press Congress to pass a version of the CLARITY Act, the bill that would define whether digital assets are regulated as securities or commodities. It remains stalled in the Senate with a procedural vote scheduled for September, and its status is trackable directly on congress.gov rather than through commentary.
The market clearly liked it. But regulatory optimism has moved crypto prices many times before without legislation ever arriving, and a bill that is stalled is a bill that has not passed. Treat this as sentiment support rather than a structural change, at least until the September vote produces something.
The part nobody wants in the article
Bitcoin at $77,580 is still roughly 38% below its all-time high of $126,198, set on October 6, 2025. A 13% day feels like a regime change from inside it, and the chart says the market is recovering ground it already held, not breaking new ground.
Technical readings also show the move stretched: the relative strength index has been running near 78 on hourly charts, which is squarely in overbought territory, with analysts flagging the $73,000 to $77,800 zone as the likely consolidation range. Overbought does not mean a top. It means the easy part of the move has probably happened.
And the structure underneath is honest about what would break it. Bitcoin reclaimed and held $70,000 for the first time since early June. Below that, the old $64,000 level, which this site tracked as a floor through July and August, comes back into play if the ETF flows reverse quickly.
So is crypto back?
The honest answer is that three genuine things happened at once: a macro liquidity shift, a verified return of institutional buying, and a violent unwind of bearish positioning. The first two can compound. The third one cannot; it is a one-time event that has now largely spent itself.
What to watch over the next week is simple and specific. Whether ETF inflows continue at this scale, whether Bitcoin accepts above $70,000 the way it accepted above $64,000 in July, and whether the Treasury follows through on September 9. Those three answers will tell you whether this was the start of something or the best relief rally of the year, and none of them require a prediction to observe.
This article is for information only and is not investment advice. Crypto assets are extremely volatile and you can lose your entire stake. Always do your own research.

JPMorgan Chase grew its position in BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust to roughly 10.4 million shares, worth about $355.7 million as of June 30, according to the bank’s second-quarter 13F filing with the SEC, filed Aug. 12. That is up from about 8.3 million shares, valued near $162 million, the prior quarter.
The crypto positions remain a small fraction of JPMorgan’s total reportable holdings, which the same filing pegs at $1.807 trillion across more than 34,000 positions, but the direction of travel points to deeper exposure to regulated crypto products.
Ether and altcoin exposure
JPMorgan’s stake in BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust rose more than fourfold to about 1.17 million shares, valued near $14.3 million, up 338% from the first quarter. The bank also established a new position in the Bitwise Solana Staking ETF of roughly 47,500 shares.
The filing showed a return to XRP after the bank had exited the asset entirely in Q1. The new exposure is small, spread across the Bitwise XRP ETF, the Grayscale XRP Trust ETF and a stake in Armada Acquisition Corp II, a blank-check company pursuing a deal tied to the Ripple ecosystem.
The bitcoin position still exceeds the ether stake by a wide margin, and the XRP holdings are nominal in dollar terms, but the return to the asset after a zero position is the more notable signal in the filing.
Context: institutions via ETFs
13F filings offer a quarterly snapshot of institutional holdings of U.S.-listed equities and ETFs, and banks’ crypto exposure through these vehicles reflects client-driven demand for regulated access rather than a direct endorsement of the underlying tokens. The holdings can shift between quarters as client flows and market conditions change.
What to watch next
JPMorgan’s next 13F, due in mid-November, will show whether the bank continued adding to its bitcoin, ether, XRP and solana positions through the third quarter or pared back after Q2’s build-up. The filing arrives as spot bitcoin ETFs have seen volatile flows, making the bank’s positioning a useful signal of institutional sentiment. Morgan Stanley also increased its crypto ETF holdings in the same reporting period, underscoring a broader trend among large banks.

Use both. Keep the bulk of your crypto in a cold wallet for long-term storage and a small operational balance in a hot wallet for spending and trading. Chainalysis has tracked how online exposure remains a leading driver of theft, and Blockchainreporter has covered several device-level exploits that show even cold storage needs careful handling.
Quick rule of thumb: keep a small portion of your holdings hot for daily use; move the majority to cold storage.
The trade-off in one line: hot wallets trade security for speed; cold wallets trade speed for security.
Key Takeaways
The safest crypto storage strategy pairs a cold wallet for the majority of your holdings with a hot wallet for the small balance you actually spend or trade.
Point Details Split your holdings Keep a small portion in a hot wallet for spending and the rest in cold storage. Cold storage isn’t risk-free Physical theft, lost seed phrases, and firmware flaws can still cause losses. Verify before you trust hardware Buy from authorized sellers and check firmware signatures before setup. Backup redundancy matters Store seed phrase copies, ideally on metal, in two separate secure locations. Match wallet to frequency of use If you touch a balance less than monthly, move it to cold storage.
Table of Contents
What Is a Hot Wallet? Types and Everyday Uses
What Is a Cold Wallet? Hardware, Paper, and Deep Storage
Hot vs Cold Wallet: Security, Cost, and Convenience Compared
How Do You Decide Between Hot and Cold Storage?
Moving Funds Between Cold Storage and a Hot Wallet
Security Best Practices for Hot and Cold Wallets
What Cold Wallets Don’t Protect Against
What Does a Cold Wallet Cost, and How Fast Can You Access Funds?
Why the Combined Approach Actually Works
Frequently Asked Questions
Sources
What Is a Hot Wallet? Types and Everyday Uses
A hot wallet is internet-connected software that holds or accesses your private keys, according to Investopedia. That constant connection is what makes it fast and what makes it a target.
You’ll run into four main flavors:
Mobile wallets — apps on your phone, built for quick sends and QR-code payments.
Desktop wallets — software installed on a computer, often used alongside trading terminals.
Web or browser wallets — extensions or browser-based tools that plug directly into decentralized apps.
Custodial exchange wallets — balances held by a platform like Coinbase, where the exchange manages the keys on your behalf.
Hot wallets shine for trading, small transfers, and interacting with DeFi apps, and many now bundle recovery prompts and one-click integrations, the kind of feature expansion you see in products like KuCoin’s Web3 wallet. Convenient, yes. Also always reachable by anyone probing for a weak password or a phishing click.
What Is a Cold Wallet? Hardware, Paper, and Deep Storage
Cold storage keeps your private keys completely offline, and transactions get signed off-device before ever touching the internet, as Forbes notes in its breakdown of the two approaches. Your crypto doesn’t actually live on the device. The device just holds the keys that prove ownership on the blockchain, which is why losing a hardware wallet isn’t fatal if you still have the seed phrase.
Common forms of cold storage include:
Hardware devices like Ledger, Trezor, Coldcard, and KeepKey, which sign transactions on a physically isolated chip.
Paper wallets — printed private keys or seed phrases, cheap but fragile against fire, water, and fading ink.
Deep cold storage — seeds split across bank vaults or safe deposit boxes, used for holdings you don’t expect to touch for years.
Air-gapped phones — old devices wiped and kept permanently offline, running wallet software with no network access.
Setup matters more than people assume. Verify the packaging is unopened, install firmware only from the vendor’s official source, and write your seed phrase down by hand rather than photographing it.
Hot vs Cold Wallet: Security, Cost, and Convenience Compared
The gap between these two options isn’t subtle once you line up the categories side by side.
Dimension Hot Wallet Cold Wallet Security level / attack surface High exposure to malware, phishing, exchange breaches Low exposure; main risks are physical theft or loss Convenience / access speed Instant, always connected Requires physically connecting a device and confirming Cost Usually free Hardware typically $50 to $200 Recovery / backup complexity Password reset or seed import, exchange support if custodial Seed phrase required; no customer support for self-custody Best for Daily spending, active trading, DeFi Long-term holdings, savings, large balances Primary risks Hacking, credential theft, exchange insolvency Physical damage, misplaced seed, supply-chain tampering
Wireless-enabled “cold” devices and companion apps add convenience but also widen the attack surface slightly, according to Kaspersky’s comparison of hardware wallet designs. The pattern that keeps showing up across exchanges and individual holders alike: a small hot balance for liquidity and cold storage for everything else.
How Do You Decide Between Hot and Cold Storage?
Match the wallet to how often you touch the money, not how much of it there is.
Day trader: keep most funds on an exchange or hot wallet since you’re moving positions constantly, but avoid parking profits there long-term.
Active DeFi user: run a hot wallet dedicated to protocol interactions, separate from your main holdings, so a bad contract approval can’t drain everything.
Long-term HODLer: almost everything belongs in cold storage; only pull funds out when you’re actually transacting.
Small-balance consumer: if your entire stack is under a few hundred dollars, a well-secured hot wallet with two-factor authentication may be proportionate. Once balances grow, cold storage earns its cost.
Run the frequency test: if you’re not touching a balance more than once a month, it doesn’t belong in a hot wallet. Exchanges and custodial platforms already operate this way, keeping the bulk of client funds offline and hot wallets reserved for operational liquidity, the same two-tier logic you can apply to your own holdings.
Pro Tip: Treat your hot wallet like the cash in your physical wallet, not your savings account. If losing it would hurt, it’s in the wrong place.
Moving Funds Between Cold Storage and a Hot Wallet
The standard workflow: keep the majority in cold storage, transfer only what you need into a hot wallet, complete the transaction, then send any leftover balance back.
Double-check the receiving address character by character, not just the first and last few digits.
Send a small test transfer before moving a large amount.
Update firmware before initiating a transfer, never mid-process.
For shared funds, consider a multisig setup or a secondary “intermediate” device that requires two approvals before anything moves.
Security Best Practices for Hot and Cold Wallets
Hot wallet hygiene starts with the basics most people skip: a unique, strong password, two-factor authentication through an app rather than SMS, and a hard rule against clicking wallet-related links in emails or texts. Only grant a dApp the specific permissions it needs, and revoke access you no longer use.
Cold wallet security depends on the buying and setup process as much as the device itself. Buy directly from the manufacturer or an authorized reseller, never a marketplace listing. Check the tamper seal, verify firmware signatures before updating, and set a PIN that isn’t a birthday or a repeated digit.
Seed phrase handling deserves its own attention:
Write it on paper or, better, stamp it into a metal backup that survives fire and water.
Store copies in two separate physical locations, not side by side.
Never type a seed phrase into a website, email, or cloud note, no matter who’s asking.
For meaningful holdings, look at multisig arrangements that require multiple keys held by different people or devices before a transaction clears.
Pro Tip: Check firmware updates quarterly, and write down one line somewhere safe: who else knows how to access your funds if something happens to you. Compromised private keys accounted for nearly half of recorded thefts in recent reporting, according to BitGo, which is exactly what good key management and a documented emergency plan prevent.
What Cold Wallets Don’t Protect Against
Cold storage removes remote hacking as a threat, but it doesn’t remove risk entirely. Coldcard users learned that firsthand when a wallet exploit drained $114 million and forced an emergency fund migration, later followed by a second incident that flooded the bitcoin memory pool. One flaw behind a similar class of exploit reportedly cost an AI system just $2 in compute to find, a reminder that low-cost automated auditing can surface vulnerabilities vendors miss.
Where losses actually happen: device exploits, counterfeit hardware slipped into the supply chain, firmware bugs, misplaced seed phrases, and plain physical theft.
Chainalysis data shows online compromises remain a leading vector for crypto theft overall, which is exactly why pairing cold storage with disciplined hot wallet habits, not cold storage alone, is the real defense.
What Does a Cold Wallet Cost, and How Fast Can You Access Funds?
Hardware wallets typically run $50 to $200, plus optional extras like a metal seed backup or a fireproof safe. Hot wallets are usually free to set up.
Access speed is where the trade-off really shows. A hot wallet sends in seconds. A cold wallet needs you to connect the device, confirm the transaction on its screen, and wait for network confirmation, often adding a few extra minutes. Neither wallet type changes the network fee itself. It only changes how long it takes you to initiate the send.
Why the Combined Approach Actually Works
The biggest mistake I see is treating this as an either-or decision. Blockchainreporter’s coverage of incidents like the Coldcard exploits makes the case plainly: cold storage lowers risk, it doesn’t eliminate it. Splitting your holdings the way exchanges split theirs is simply the more defensible strategy.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is a Coinbase account the same as a hot wallet? A Coinbase account is custodial, meaning Coinbase holds the private keys on your behalf, which functions like a hot wallet but adds a third party into the security equation.
No. Cold wallets sharply reduce online hacking risk, but physical theft, damage, and lost seed phrases still cause losses, which is why experts recommend pairing cold storage with a small hot wallet rather than relying on either alone.
Can you lose crypto even with a hardware wallet? Yes. Losing your seed phrase, falling for a counterfeit device, or skipping firmware verification can all result in permanent loss regardless of how secure the hardware itself is.
Does wallet type affect transaction fees? No. Network fees are set by blockchain congestion, not wallet type. What changes is time-to-send, since cold wallets require an extra device-connection step before a transaction broadcasts.
Are there regulatory rules around how I store my own crypto? Self-custody wallets, hot or cold, generally aren’t regulated the way custodial exchanges are, though reporting and tax obligations on gains still apply in most jurisdictions regardless of where you store your keys.
This article is general information, not a substitute for advice from a qualified financial advisor. Consult a qualified financial professional about your own circumstances before acting on anything here.
Sources
Crypto theft and hacking trends report (Chainalysis)
Recommended
Coldcard Hack Drains $120 Million, Floods Bitcoin Memory Pool
ChangeNOW And CoinRabbit Release Joint Research On Financial Privacy In Digital Assets

Cantor Fitzgerald will serve as an introducing broker offering its roughly 3,000 institutional clients access to Kalshi’s regulated prediction markets, the firm announced in an Aug. 19 release. The move makes Cantor one of the first investment firms to give Wall Street clients institutional trading on a CFTC-regulated event-contract exchange.
“Prediction markets are growing rapidly, but institutional participation has not kept pace because investors have lacked the ability to transact at scale on a regulated exchange. The liquidity is here,” said Pascal Bandelier, Cantor’s co-chief executive and global head of equities.
How the arrangement works
Cantor will organize block trades on Kalshi’s event contracts for clients ranging from family offices to hedge funds. Block trades are large, privately negotiated transactions executed outside the public order book to limit price impact, a common feature of trading by large institutions.
Susquehanna International Group will provide pricing and liquidity as market maker for those trades. Cantor can also ask Kalshi to design new markets for clients, with early interest centered on climate, weather and economic-indicator contracts. Kalshi spokesperson Elisabeth Diana said Cantor first reached out a few months ago and can request new markets, which must be submitted to the CFTC with sufficient liquidity.
Why institutions are moving in
The arrangement addresses a long-standing gap between retail-driven prediction-market growth and institutional participation. Kalshi has increasingly courted professional investors after retail traders, largely through sports contracts, powered its rise. The firm completed its first block trade on an event-contract exchange in April.
For hedge funds, event contracts offer a regulated way to express views on weather, corporate results and economic data that do not map cleanly onto traditional securities. Susquehanna’s head of business development, Joe Grubb, described institutional risk transfer as the next step for the sector’s material growth.
What it means for the market
Bringing a bulge-bracket broker and a major market maker into prediction markets is a step toward deeper liquidity and institutional comfort with a novel asset class. It also sharpens competition with rival platforms as the sector vies for professional capital under CFTC oversight. For Kalshi, the relationship adds a distribution channel to an institutional client base that prediction markets have historically struggled to reach.

Grayscale Investments has withdrawn the registration statements for three proposed single-asset exchange-traded funds tied to Cardano’s ADA, Polkadot’s DOT and Hedera’s HBAR. The asset manager submitted three Form RW requests to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Aug. 7, telling the regulator it “does not intend to proceed with the planned distribution” of the trusts’ shares, according to the SEC filing.
The withdrawals were sponsor-initiated under Rule 477 of the Securities Act of 1933, not the result of a formal SEC rejection. Grayscale said no securities had been issued or sold under the registrations, which had not yet become effective.
Sponsor-initiated, not a rejection
Because Grayscale chose to pull the filings before the SEC reached a decision, the move signals a change in the firm’s product priorities rather than a regulatory defeat. Grayscale gave no detailed explanation in the filings, which simply stated that the sponsor no longer intends to proceed.
The S-1 registration statements had been filed in late August and early September 2025 amid a broad wave of altcoin ETF applications. All three underlying tokens have fallen sharply since then, with DOT down the most on a year-to-date basis.
The broader altcoin ETF retreat
The withdrawals are part of a wider cooling in the single-asset altcoin ETF category. Bitwise earlier withdrew a registration for a proposed Bitcoin and Ethereum ETF, and competition for inflows into smaller altcoin funds has intensified. Year to date, ADA has fallen more than 41%, DOT has lost about 54% and HBAR has shed roughly 35%, according to market data cited in coverage of the withdrawals.
Grayscale continues to operate a portfolio of roughly 17 ETF products, including its Bitcoin Mini Trust and Ethereum Staking Mini ETF.
What it means for the pipeline
Dropping three altcoin funds narrows Grayscale’s proposed single-token pipeline and reflects a more selective approach to products whose demand has not matched the filings made a year ago. For issuers, the retreat suggests the next wave of ETF filings will favor assets with clearer institutional demand rather than breadth for its own sake. The firm can re-file if market conditions change.

TRON has released GreatVoyage v4.8.2, codenamed Pyrrho, as a mandatory network upgrade, requiring node operators to update before 23:59 Singapore Time on Aug. 16 to avoid affecting block synchronization. The release was detailed in a TRON developer announcement that lists the upgrade’s core changes.
Mandatory upgrades in the GreatVoyage series are a regular part of operating the TRON network, and missing the deadline can cause a node to fall out of sync with the chain, with knock-on effects for the services that depend on it.
Ethereum compatibility at the virtual-machine level
The headline change is TVM compatibility with Ethereum’s Pectra and Osaka upgrades, which adds the CLZ instruction and a secp256r1 signature-verification precompile, among other changes. The goal is to keep TRON’s virtual machine aligned with Ethereum tooling so that developers can port and run familiar smart-contract workloads.
For developers, the alignment reduces the work of porting applications and keeps TRON’s tooling within reach of the wider EVM ecosystem. The compatibility work matters for the network’s developer base because it lowers the friction of building across networks and broadens the range of code that can run on the chain.
Infrastructure and tooling changes
Beyond the virtual machine, the release migrates the node’s JSON API from the fastjson library to Jackson, moves monitoring metrics from InfluxDB to Prometheus, and upgrades the TRON Event Plugin to version 3.0.0. Operators using the Event Plugin were instructed to upgrade the plugin before upgrading the node itself.
These changes are aimed at modernizing the tooling around the network rather than altering consensus rules, but they still require operators to plan the upgrade carefully to avoid service disruptions.
Why the timing matters
TRON hosts a large share of stablecoin activity, including a substantial portion of USDT supply, so its upgrades carry outsize operational weight for the wallets, exchanges and indexers that depend on the network. Aligning the TVM with Ethereum’s latest upgrades positions the network to keep pace with the broader EVM ecosystem while giving developers a clearer path for cross-chain compatibility. It also signals that TRON intends to keep its smart-contract environment broadly aligned with Ethereum as both networks continue to evolve.

HSBC and Standard Chartered have completed the first live cross-border interbank transaction using tokenised deposits on Swift’s blockchain-based ledger, the banks announced in a joint Aug. 19 statement. The transaction marked the first interbank transfer executed on Swift’s ledger since it became ready for live use.
“HSBC’s interoperability transaction with Standard Chartered via Swift is a landmark moment for the promise of tokenised deposits,” said Lewis Sun, HSBC’s head of digital currencies. He said the demonstration shows how bank-issued digital money can be interoperable across institutions while maintaining regulatory oversight.
How the transaction worked
The transfer was conducted through an exchange of payment messages between the two banks using Swift’s ledger. The resulting obligations were recorded as tokenised deposit obligations on both HSBC’s Tokenised Deposit Service and Standard Chartered’s tokenised-deposit infrastructure, the announcement said.
For clients, the banks said the work highlights the potential for cross-border payments to support an increasingly 24/7 global economy, in contrast with settlement that pauses outside traditional banking hours.
Building on Swift’s July readiness
The transaction follows Swift’s announcement on July 9 that its blockchain-based ledger was ready for initial live use for tokenised deposits. The ledger is being piloted with 17 banks across six continents, including MUFG, Wells Fargo and Lloyds, and supports multiple currencies including CNH, HKD, SGD, EUR, GBP, USD and AED.
The project is part of a broader industry effort to use distributed ledger technology for real-world payment use cases while preserving the role of regulated bank money, rather than replacing banks with unregulated alternatives.
What it means for cross-border payments
A successful live transaction between two global banks is a step beyond proof-of-concept and toward production interbank settlement on shared infrastructure. Unlike stablecoins issued by non-bank firms, tokenised deposits are liabilities of regulated banks, which proponents argue keeps them anchored to existing supervision even as settlement becomes near-real-time. The demonstration is notable because it ran between two regulated banks on shared ledger infrastructure rather than in a closed pilot.
If the pilots expand, the approach could reduce the friction of correspondent banking by enabling near-real-time settlement of tokenised deposits between institutions that already operate under existing oversight.

Binance will no longer process transactions involving 11 crypto-asset service providers starting Aug. 23, 2026, the largest phase of a compliance action the exchange began earlier this month. In its Aug. 14 notice, the exchange told users not to send to, receive from, or otherwise transact through Binance with the named entities after the cutoff date.
“Binance is required to adhere to the regulatory requirements in the jurisdictions in which it operates,” the notice said, framing the restrictions as measures to keep the platform and its users’ assets secure.
The full list and timeline
The Aug. 23 batch includes HTX (Huobi Global SA), EXMO Ltd, Rapira, Aifory Pro, ABCeX, WhiteBird, NoOnecrypto, Tradex, Monease, BitPapa and Exnode. They join five platforms restricted in earlier phases, bringing the total to 16: Shelbit and Aban Tether Exchange were cut off Aug. 7, and A7 Nigeria, A7 Africa and PilotFinance on Aug. 13.
Binance said any transaction attempted with a listed platform after its effective date may be held for compliance review, with temporary restrictions applied to the impacted wallet while the review is ongoing.
Not a delisting
The move does not remove any cryptocurrency from Binance. Bitcoin, USDT and other assets remain tradable; what changes is the screening of counterparties on the other side of a transaction. A transfer to or from a listed platform will not process as normal after its cutoff.
Binance has not published a timeline for how long a compliance review may take, so users should expect delays rather than an instant block in every case.
What’s driving the action
The notice cites “recent regulatory developments” without naming a specific law. The listed platforms line up with overlapping EU, UK and US sanctions actions targeting entities accused of helping route funds around Russia- and Iran-related sanctions, including the EU’s 21st sanctions package and UK designations of what regulators have called the A7 network.
HTX and EXMO were already under EU and UK sanctions before the notice, so their inclusion in the Aug. 23 batch was widely anticipated even though Binance had not previously said when it would act. The staggered rollout suggests further batches of restricted platforms are possible if regulators add new names, making counterparty screening a recurring part of operating across regulated markets.