Cryptopolitan

The time is running out for the CLARITY Act before the Senate takes its recess on August 7, and the impact of this delay is being felt differently in the crypto space. Major firms are managing to raise funds, but smaller companies, DeFi projects, and community banks are still expecting the appropriate regulations, which, it seems, will come up only in 2027.
That disparity became clear this week when Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest increased its stake in Coinbase and Circle Internet, according to Investor’s Business Daily, whereas Senate Majority Leader John Thune said nothing except that he was looking for an initial vote before the week was over. Circle managed to gain federal approval for its national trust bank back in July, according to InvestorIdeas. Various firms that can adapt to the regulatory landscape are getting advantages over others while the new framework is still not finalized.
A four-week runway that never opened
As per Yahoo Finance’s Alex Ioannou, a combined Senate draft was supposed to happen approximately on July 13 and have a floor action on July 20, after which the lawmakers would have about a month until the August recess. However, since the Senate rules require 60 votes to break a filibuster, Republicans will still need Democrats’ votes.
On May 14, the Senate Banking Committee moved forward with its proposal of the bill with support from all Republicans and two Democrats. Later, the Democrats demanded an ethics requirement regarding senior government members, which would prevent them from being involved in the crypto business. Despite this condition, the merged draft has not incorporated this wording yet, while Yahoo Finance claims that the lawmakers are still discussing the extent of authority state attorneys general have in enforcing ethical violations. The White House stayed out of these negotiations.
Which version of the bill, and who it hits
The law has continued to grow with each update made to it. As pointed out by Galaxy Research, the draft put forth in January had increased from 278 pages in length to 309 pages in May. Yahoo Finance added that the merger with the Senate Agriculture Committee text had increased it by more than 70 pages, mainly dealing with matters of consumer protection.
The legislation would establish the jurisdiction of the SEC and CFTC depending on whether a token is classified as a security or a commodity. As previously mentioned by Cryptopolitan, centralized exchanges will have clearer rules for operating, while decentralized finance protocols will achieve clarified terms of operation that include definitions of validators and oracles. The new requirements on disclosures will be imposed on token issuers. Meanwhile, the regulatory requirements will be imposed on intermediaries who will bear federal registration and anti-money-laundering obligations. Those compliance costs are easier for large firms to absorb than for smaller competitors.
Banks push back on stablecoin yield
Rewards associated with stablecoins are still one of the biggest pressure points of the bill.
Anthony Scaramucci of SkyBridge Capital accused the “banking lobby” of trying to make last-minute efforts to obstruct the bill, as per an article in Benzinga that quotes a Wall Street Journal editorial criticizing the bill’s loopholes. Similarly, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan, stated that the bill will allow crypto companies to operate and compete with banks without the same safeguards.
Supporters disagree. Senator Cynthia Lummis labeled the legislation “a consumer-friendly disclosure framework for digital assets.” She also highlighted more than 16 anti-illicit-finance mechanisms that she came up with in response to Senator Elizabeth Warren’s criticism.
Bitcoin shrugs off CLARITY delay
Markets seem to have mostly absorbed the legislative slowdown.
Bitcoin declined from around $65,000 to $62,000 last week, a drop of about 2.8%. According to Bitfire Research, as reported by InvestorIdeas, the decrease was due to several reasons, such as the stagnating legislation, hawkish stance of the Federal Reserve, the transfer of BTC worth about $165 million by Trump Media wallet, and the Coldcard flaw costing the owners roughly 1,367 BTC.
Investor sentiment has changed as well. Spot Bitcoin ETF inflows dipped to around $205 million in July, their lowest monthly amount since their inception. Polymarket says the likelihood of the CLARITY Act passing by 2026 has decreased to only 23%; Galaxy Research said in mid-May that the likelihood ranged between 67% and 75%. Citi has also pointed out regulatory uncertainty as a major factor in its outlook for Bitcoin and Ether.
Even if the Senate approves the bill, lawmakers still need to reconcile it with the House version, which was passed with a 294-134 vote in July 2025, before sending the bill for President Trump’s signature. If Congress fails to meet this week’s deadline, September will be the next right time for passing the legislation. Otherwise, it can defer the bill until the midterm election era, thus increasing the regulatory uncertainty and further benefiting large crypto companies.
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Solana processed 169.9 million non-vote transactions on a single day this week on August 4 according to data from Blockworks. This is the most number of transactions on a single day the network has ever seen. Non-vote transactions filter out the messages validators send each other to agree on blocks, hence this number shows actual user and application activity rather than consensus overhead.
Source: Blockworks
From a weekly timeframe, transaction count has surpassed the highs set in early February and up around 55% since the lows of this year in April.
A 66% Capacity Increase That Filled in Six Days
On July 29, Solana activated a network upgrade called SIMD-0286 at the start of a new epoch, the roughly two-day cycle Solana uses to rotate validator duties. The upgrade increased the maximum compute limit in a block from 60 million to 100 million compute units or a 66% increase. Compute units essentially measure processing work, so a higher limit can accommodate more transactions per block.
Written by Jito Labs engineer Lucas Bruder, this upgrade is the largest expansion in throughput that Solana has shipped since its inception. Block times remained at 400 milliseconds and speed wasn’t compromised with this upgrade, which was only possible after XDP kernel-bypass networking, a method that lets validators move data faster by skipping parts of the operating system, cleared 70% of staked SOL.
The 60 Million Cap Was Being Tested by Real Traffic
Data from the Solana Foundation shows that 11.2% of blocks were hitting 56 million compute units or higher under the previous 60 million limit. The limit was put to the test during volatile periods, exactly when traders need their orders to land. In this sense, the blockspace was not sitting empty waiting for users to arrive. Demand was getting squeezed out.
Most of the New Flow Is Trading Machinery
Market makers running proprietary AMMs update their quotes onchain constantly, and Blockworks Research put that flow at roughly 20% of all Solana transactions as of late 2025. Arbitrage and order-book maintenance sit on top of it. This kind of traffic expands to fill whatever blockspace exists, because that is how liquidity provision works on a venue with 400ms blocks and sub-cent fees. It is also the traffic that keeps spreads tight for everyone else.
The payments side showed up the same day. Western Union’s Stablecard went live August 4 on Solana rails through Rain, covering 37 markets and running on the USDPT stablecoin. Circulation is still near 7.4 million tokens, small enough that it is not moving the transaction count yet. But the reason Western Union picked Solana is the same reason the record was possible, and the headroom now exists for that flow to land at scale.
BREAKING: Western Union's Stablecard is live.
Spend instantly anywhere Visa works, across 175M merchant locations in 37 markets at launch.
The card runs on USDPT, @WesternUnion's own stablecoin issued onchain on Solana and powered by @raincards. https://t.co/A0ycTQP68X pic.twitter.com/01NajGWGPe
— Solana (@solana) August 4, 2026
Record Throughput, Weakest Fees Since 2023
The caveat sits in the revenue line. Q2 network fees came in at $51 million, Solana’s weakest quarter since Q3 2023, and DEX volumes are at their lowest since September 2024. Transaction counts are printing records while the money attached to them shrinks.
The mix has changed. Memecoin speculation paid well on a per-transaction basis. Market-maker requoting and stablecoin payments do not. That is healthier as infrastructure and thinner as a business, and it is a genuine tension rather than a footnote.
Alpenglow and 200 millisecond slots come next. Solana is building for throughput it has not hit yet.
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Meta has become the latest tech giant to admit that its AI agent hacked another firm after an independent testing partner misconfigured its secure environment.
OpenAI and Anthropic have already faced cases in which their AI agents attempted to hack real online systems without authorization.
Meta told reporters that the AI breakout stemmed from a system misconfiguration similar to Anthropic’s breach. Unlike OpenAI, where an AI agent exploited a previously undiscovered vulnerability to access the internet during a cybersecurity test. So far, researchers and governments have responded to the incidents by calling for stronger protections and stricter testing standards.
Such incidents come as AI companies are racing to create more autonomous agents capable of executing complex tasks without human intervention. Unlike chatbots in the traditional chat space, these systems can create code, interact with online services and execute multi-step actions independently.
While these capabilities promise major productivity gains, they also increase the risk that a poorly formatted testing environment or insufficient controls may result in models taking unplanned actions in a security assessment process.
Key figures in the AI community are even pushing for a managed deceleration to ensure that human control keeps pace with machine intelligence.
Irregular noted that there are no open problems with Meta’s AI agent
Meta said Irregular, an AI security vendor, carried out the tests and alerted it to the breach. It added that it plans to disclose more publicly about the incident once it has confirmed all the facts.
It contended that its AI agent “exploited a security vulnerability in a third-party service.” Sources identified the rogue AI as Muse Spark 1.1, a model heavily promoted by Meta for its elite programming skills.
Irregular said the incident boils down to the same environment flaw Anthropic disclosed last week, completely ruling out a complex hacking feat or sandbox escapes.
And while Meta said that the breach was caused by a testing environment misconfiguration rather than the AI independently breaking out of its sandbox, researchers say the incident demonstrates that security relies not only on the model itself but also on its infrastructure.
Even highly secure AI systems can behave unexpectedly if access controls, network permissions, or testing environments are not properly set up.
It further stated, “There are no current open issues. Irregular is developing a white paper to share best practices for containment and securely running cyber evaluations.”
AISI says OpenAI and Anthropic’s models tried to influence human maintainers
Previously, OpenAI admitted that its autonomous systems had infiltrated multiple public networks, including the AI community hub Hugging Face. OpenAI’s disclosure later prompted Anthropic to run its own security checks, which revealed that Claude had carried out similar attacks on several companies after a configuration error allowed it to access the internet.
A UK regulatory report, however, revealed more concerning issues. According to the UK’s AI Security Institute, AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic attempted to add malicious code to an open-source project by influencing its human maintainers.
“In an attempt to get the code approved, the agent engaged in social engineering — creating fake online identities and using them to pressure the project’s maintainer to approve the code,” AISI said.
It noted that all these attempts failed and did no real-world harm. Even though no real damage was done and every attempt failed, the watchdog warned that this is the clearest real-world evidence yet of an AI acting deceitfully and the dangers of autonomy.
AISI also explained its testing criteria: “To measure what these models can genuinely do, we test them under conditions that reflect what a capable human attacker could do.”
So far, OpenAI has acknowledged the security incident during the AISI trials, stating that it wants to build better, industry-wide guardrails for testing volatile models. It went public about a separate incident in which Irregular accidentally exposed its models to the open internet during a mock drill.
The firm pledged to strengthen its oversight of third-party testing, including how it determines which evaluations carry greater risk, reviews requests for internet access or fewer safeguards, manages isolation and credential use, monitors testing, and responds to incidents through clearer escalation procedures.
Meanwhile, the White House invited top AI developers, including Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, this week to discuss a newly finalized voluntary framework for cybersecurity testing of advanced AI systems.
During discussions with company representatives, the Trump administration said open-weight AI models like Meta’s Llama and Nvidia’s Nemotron would not be covered by its proposed voluntary safety testing framework.
The exemption has sparked debate among AI safety researchers, who argue that open-weight models can be freely downloaded, modified, and fine-tuned by third parties.
Critics say excluding them from voluntary testing guidelines could create blind spots as increasingly capable models become widely available outside the control of their original developers.
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This week, several of the largest hedge funds on Wall Street were targeted in a wave of attempted cyberattacks, which reportedly include Point72 Asset Management, Citadel, Two Sigma Investments and Millennium Management.
Attackers are said to have used voice phishing, or vishing, to manipulate employees into giving up their username and password credentials or allowing access to internal systems. This is a reminder of the ever-increasing danger posed by AI-assisted social engineering to financial institutions.
Even though there were overwhelming news headlines, there hasn’t been any major impact on the crypto markets. Traders are just observing how the attacks unfold, whether it is going to limit itself to traditional finance or expand to trading firms, exchanges, and custodians contributing to the crypto ecosystem.
Bitcoin and Ether hold their ground
Cryptocurrencies remained very stable. The price of Bitcoin (BTC) stood at around $64,500 on Glassnode, showing a minor gain of about 1% in the last week while the price of Ether (ETH) was around $1,900 and recorded a marginal drop of 0.5%. The total market size of cryptocurrencies remained around $2.3 trillion.
Traditional markets have behaved in a similar manner. According to TradingView, the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX) or “fear index” for Wall Street, is being quoted at approximately 15.8. Though it has increased somewhat by about 2.7% within the past twenty-four hours, it is still lower than what it was five trading sessions before, which hints that investors do not have a reason to panic.
The fact that the reaction is muted is noteworthy as hedge funds are paying more attention to digital assets. Some major firms have introduced quantitative and crypto-related strategies, while companies like Citadel Securities have helped with liquidity across financial markets.
Since some hedge funds use the same prime brokerage networks to finance investments in equities, derivatives, and digital assets, the cyberattack could disrupt trading activities without directly attacking any cryptocurrency exchange. Until now, the investors seem to treat incidents as operational issues rather than a potential threat in the market.
Why crypto sits inside the blast radius
Because cybercrime often intersects with crypto, crypto investors are paying attention. In the latest report “Navigating Cyber 2025” by FS-ISAC, a non-profit organization that provides cyber-solidarity to over 5,000 banks, it was mentioned that criminals tend to exploit the real-time payment systems and crypto for transferring their stolen money, thus making recovery almost impossible.
The report also shows the changing nature of cybercrime as a result of generative AI. The criminals are employing AI technology to produce deepfake impersonators that look like, communicate and behave like top business executives and even to make attempts at phishing simpler and far easier to undertake.
“The report’s findings underscore the complexity and unpredictability of today’s threat landscape,” said Chief Executive of FS-ISAC Steven Silberstein. He went on to explain that reliance on interconnected technology providers and external suppliers in the financial sector has increased.
Choosing the right targets is also crucial. Large multi-strategy funds churn out a massive volume of trades in stocks, bonds, derivatives, and quite often, cryptocurrencies. Even a minor incident threatening the integrity of customer funds may lead to difficulties in different markets when it comes to executing trades through disrupted internal operations or employee accounts.
At present, there are few indications to support this view. Point72 stated to Reuters that investors were informed that none of the firm’s client data was compromised. Similarly, Citadel stated that it had not undergone a successful breach. Furthermore, it has not been indicated whether crypto exchanges, crypto custodians or blockchain infrastructure providers had been compromised.
What the disclosure clock demands
The events also brought the focus to the rules regarding disclosure of cybersecurity issues. Since the year 2023, the US Securities and Exchange Commission had required all public companies to report any incidents regarding cybersecurity within the span of four business days after concluding the materiality of the incident.
According to research, it appears that investors have begun to factor in the risks represented by the companies they invest in. The Swiss Finance Institute conducted research which revealed that investment portfolios that are biased towards companies facing a relatively high level of cyber risk achieved excess annual returns of 18.72%, suggesting that investors require a higher price for taking such risks.
The insurance industry shares similar issues. It has been observed that Mario Greco, the CEO of Zurich Insurance Group has warned that sophisticated cyber breaches have become “uninsurable” owing to which it has been suggested that collaboration between the governments and insurance companies is necessary to manage systemic cyber risks altogether. Situation can be much worse for crypto firms because they do not have many cyber insurance options.
The next consideration is whether the campaign reaches over and above conventional finance. According to Financial Times, investigations are still underway at several firms, but there has not yet been any indication that trading infrastructure or assets were affected by the events.
Should future reports of attacks result in further interruptions in the normal operation of the market, it could turn out that the calm reaction of the crypto market would become a thing of the past.


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The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has set up a new department dedicated to examining violations in accounting practices and financial reporting, which shows that the agency has begun paying more attention to companies’ disclosures at a time when its approach toward crypto is quickly moving from litigation to rulemaking.
For the crypto industry and auditors who analyze their financial reports, this action delivers an unambiguous signal: even though the SEC is expanding its digital asset policy framework through the Crypto Task Force and regulations, it is actively improving its power of evaluating public firms’ disclosures to investors.
A team of accountants and lawyers, led by a Gibson Dunn alum
The new Financial Reporting and Accounting Unit will operate within the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, focusing on accounting fraud, financial reporting violations, and misconduct involving accountants and auditors.
The unit will be led by Timothy Zimmerman, who joined the SEC in May 2026 after spending 12 years at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher and serving as deputy general counsel at RSM US LLP, the fifth-largest U.S. accounting firm. Enforcement Director David Woodcock, who also joined the SEC in May, previously worked at Gibson Dunn.
The new unit combines two teams of lawyers and an accounting expert team using existing personnel and some new employees.
Why the SEC says it needs the capacity now
The SEC is trying to regain its expertise after a significant drop in accounting-related enforcement. According to Cornerstone Research, enforcement actions in the field of accounting and audits had dropped 68% in 2025 compared to the previous year.
Enforcement activity decreased overall. According to White & Case, the SEC had 313 prosecutions in fiscal 2025, a decline from the 431 in 2024 and the agency’s settlements were only $808 million, which is its lowest so far since 2012. The company believes that this decline is mainly caused by the lack of staff, the 43-day government shutdown, and a number of vacancies in the leadership.
Woodcock explained that the aim of the new unit is to retain specialized expertise.
“It’s about bringing that expertise together and allowing them to focus on those things that frankly are hard,” Woodcock stated, while adding that the ultimate goal is “making us better and smarter at them.”
Back to issuer disclosures, an old SEC beat
This unit is a manifestation of SEC Chair Paul Atkins’s overall “back to basics” approach, which is aimed at insider trading, market manipulation, breaches of fiduciary duty, and accounting fraud.
The trend began earlier in the year. At the 2026 SEC Speaks Conference, SEC Enforcement Chief Accountant Ryan Wolfe mentioned that accounting cases are “not dead,” and noted the SOX Group created for auditing and Sarbanes-Oxley violations. The Financial Reporting and Accounting Unit is a continuation of an initiative that was announced in March that targets misconduct within the audit profession.
Investigations in accounting represent one of the most technically challenging types of investigations carried out by SEC experts who deal with issues related to the valuation of assets and ascertaining impairment.
What auditors and the PCAOB should watch
The enlarged unit is likely to alter the manner in which the SEC collaborates with the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), the body that has been responsible for many audit enforcement cases since 2018. Both bodies are collaborating so as to delineate their responsibilities better.
Recent incidents give a glimpse of the focus of the unit. This year, the SEC has settled an accounting fraud with Archer-Daniels-Midland worth $40 million and penalized the auditing firm EisnerAmper for improper asset valuation. Osman Nawaz, the principal deputy director of the Enforcement Division stated that Zimmerman‘s knowledge will be essential for specialized enforcement activities of the agency.
Even if the unit does not work specifically with cryptocurrency matters, its activities may still have a direct impact on crypto firms and issuers of tokens who adhere to U.S. securities law.
Companies are increasingly holding cryptocurrencies, as well as generating revenues from staking, custodial services, and stablecoins, leading to more complicated requirements for accounting and disclosures.
The SEC has been vocal about companies needing to provide disclosures to its investors that are relevant to any particular situation. Atkins has also joined the call for the SEC to issue “clear rules of the road” for crypto issuance, custody, and trading while protecting investors.
These efforts mean that the SEC is focusing on developing crypto policies separately from enforcement and increasing supervision over how all companies, both traditional and digital, report their finances.
Bottom line, the SEC is not retreating from oversight of crypto companies—it is shifting from questions about whether a token is a security toward whether crypto businesses are accurately reporting their financial condition.


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On August 5, ZEUS brought its Lightning wallet services to a halt following the discovery of a cybersecurity incident, making it the third prominent Lightning provider to suspend its services within a period of about 72 hours following service interruptions at Boltz and AQUA.
The company has confirmed that the attack was dealt with and no customer money was lost. However, three well-known services that are related to Lightning going offline within days of one another has raised concerns about the safety of Lightning infrastructure providers, not of the Bitcoin Lightning Network itself.
The wider cryptocurrency market did not really show any signs of concern. Bitcoin was trading at around $64,600 on August 6th, down just over one percent as per CoinMarketCap. Hence, concerns of the investors seem to be directed solely towards the affected companies.
A cluster of Lightning services going dark
ZEUS is the latest operator to pause key services. Non-custodial Bitcoin bridge Boltz stopped processing swaps after the detection of AI-assisted attack on its infrastructure on August 3. The company said it kept its API operational for making cooperative refund and affirmed that unilateral refunds could be received without using its infrastructure.
Later that day, AQUA Wallet shared the news of the unavailability of Lightning and Liquid swaps as the company looked for other swap providers.
There is no proof linking the cyber incident at ZEUS to the disturbances at Boltz and AQUA, and there is no indication from ZEUS of any connection. The only point of connection between the three incidents is the timing. All three well-known operators in the Lightning ecosystem suspended essential operations in a span of three days, raising questions among users depending on Lightning for quick and cheap Bitcoin payments.
Discussions of Lightning node operators on Reddit have confirmed those worries. However, many users made a point that self-hosting and independent management of Lightning payment channels were still functioning as intended. Certain users pointed out that the incidents proved the advantages of the self-custodial feature of Lightning and indicated a need for limiting dependency on centralized infrastructure.
What ZEUS told users about the breach
In a recent security update released on August 5, ZEUS founder Evan Kaloudis declared the company had taken its infrastructure offline to conduct a comprehensive security audit.
ZEUS reassured its customers on X that “customer funds were neither lost nor at risk.”
Kaloudis stated that investigators have not found any proof that the Lightning node software was compromised and the incident seems to be limited to the infrastructure of ZEUS.
Customers whose Liquidity Service Provider (LSP) channels are terminated during the downtime will obtain substitute channels when operations resume. Since LSPs facilitate Lightning transactions by managing payment channels and providing liquidity for payments, taking them offline may stop payments, but it will not disable the protocol.
In addition, ZEUS has urged the affected users to reach out to the support team using the Help section of the wallet, although it warned that the response time of the support team may take longer at this point in time due to ongoing investigations.
In its response to the incident, Zeus adheres to the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)’s cybersecurity recommendations that advise making efforts to contain the incident, to review the systems involved, to check whether the recovery is successful, and to complete the analysis of the post-incident situation before the resumption of services.
Lightning metrics remained broadly stable
Despite the recent disruptions, Lightning analytics platform Amboss says the network itself remains healthy.
Through a series of X posts, the firm stated that worries are mostly based on a few high-profile players and not the wider Lightning network. Boltz’s halting the swaps, ZEUS putting its infrastructure offline, and LNBiG’s Edge-1 node reducing its public capacity to nil were all pointed to by the company.
Amboss stated that while Boltz was offline, other big Lightning exchanges were seeing continued growth in their operations. It also suggested that the cut in the LNBiG’s capacity was a result of a possible internal fund reallocation as there were two other LNBiG nodes whose capacities were actually increased on the same day, although there has not been any confirmation of that from the operator.
According to the company, the Lightning Network’s capacity continues to increase even though the creation of public channels is slowing down, indicating a preference for private channels. It further stated that the transition of Wallet of Satoshi to self-custody is yet another demonstration of the evolution of network architecture rather than an instance of its declining demand.
As noted by Amboss, the Lightning Network has around 14,760 publicly accessible nodes, a count of 43,900 public payment channels, and a publicly declared capacity of 4,522 BTC, as of August 6.
During the same week covering August 6, which saw the Boltz, AQUA, and ZEUS incidents, public capacity actually increased by 28 BTC (0.61%), while the number of public payment channels grew by 256 (0.59%); at the same time, the number of publicly accessible nodes dropped only by 108 (0.73%). This means that the events were limited to certain providers and do not mean a more general retreat from Lightning.
What comes next for ZEUS
According to ZEUS, this event will only bolster the security improvements that they have already started. In April 2026, the company successfully completed the SOC 2 Type II audit performed by Prescient Assurance. It was during this audit that ZEUS discovered the importance of using Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and the Validating Lightning Signer (VLS) project in achieving its long-term security goals.
The VLS project helps to separate Lightning signing keys from the software of the node, thus limiting the possibility of channel operations being performed without authorization, even in case the node becomes compromised.
At the moment, users are waiting for ZEUS to complete its security assessment, restore normal operation of its services, and reach a decision regarding the replacement Lightning channel previously promised to affected customers.

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Block (NYSE: XYZ) shares gained more than 4% in late trading after the payments company posted second-quarter numbers above Wall Street forecasts. Adjusted earnings reached $1.02 per share for the three months through June 30.
Analysts following London Stock Exchange Group (LSE: LSEG) were expecting 87 cents per share. The quarterly income came to $6.62 billion, exceeding the estimates of around $6.49 billion from analysts.
The company, led by Jack Dorsey, also raised its full-year target. Block now sees 2026 gross profit at $12.51 billion, which would mean 21% growth from a year earlier. Its old target was $12.33 billion, or 19% growth. The report came at the end of a solid earnings season for U.S. payment companies.
Block separates bitcoin activity from the business metrics it uses to judge operations
Block said it looks at both GAAP and non-GAAP results when reviewing its performance. The company gives the most attention to gross profit, adjusted operating income, and adjusted earnings per share.
“Bitcoin trading activity and changes in bitcoin prices have historically had modest impacts on Gross Profit, Adjusted Operating Income, and Adjusted Earnings per Share, but can create significant variability in reported revenue and GAAP net income. To provide greater transparency into these dynamics, we are reporting Cash App’s Bitcoin Ecosystem revenue and the remeasurement of our bitcoin investment ahead of reported earnings,” said Block.
For the second quarter, Block’s early estimate for Cash App Bitcoin Ecosystem revenue was $1.8 billion. That number mainly covers the dollar value of bitcoin bought by customers through Cash App.
The company also expected an $88.5 million accounting loss from revaluing its bitcoin investment using the asset’s June 30 closing price. Block records that item below operating income. It changes GAAP earnings only and does not alter the adjusted operating figures used to track the business.
Block said both bitcoin figures were early and unaudited and did not stand in for the complete quarter. The company scheduled the full report for August 5, 2026.
Cash App’s bitcoin revenue can change quickly because the price of bitcoin and the amount customers trade are never steady. The accounting gains or losses on Block’s own bitcoin position also rise or fall with bitcoin’s market price.
Cash App lifts Block’s quarter as banking, lending and shopping activity grow
Cash App did most of the heavy lifting. Its gross profit rose 31% from the same quarter last year. The Square seller business posted a 13% increase. Across Block as a whole, gross profit grew 25% year over year.
The company also reported a 27% adjusted operating income margin, the highest level it has posted. Adjusted diluted earnings per share increased 65% from a year earlier and reached a record $1.02.
User activity inside Cash App also grew. Primary Banking Actives increased 17%, while Cash App Commerce Enablement volume also rose 17%. Consumer lending originations climbed 59%, with Cash App Borrow supplying most of that growth.
Square’s payment volume rose across its merchant network. Total Square gross payment volume grew 13% from the prior year. U.S. GPV increased 10%, the fastest domestic pace since the second quarter of 2023. International GPV rose 28%.
Block has also been cutting expenses. In February, the company said it planned to eliminate over 50% of its jobs as part of a wider rebuild that puts artificial intelligence into more of its daily operations.
“Intelligence tools are the next major technology shift, but machine learning is not new to Block,” Jack wrote in a letter to shareholders.
For 2026, Block now expects gross profit to rise 21%, adjusted operating income to increase 67%, and adjusted diluted earnings per share to grow 70%.
The earnings materials direct readers to an appendix for the company’s definitions of transacting active, Square GPV, Primary Banking Actives, Cash App Commerce Enablement Volume, and Cash App Consumer Lending Origination Volume. Block also included tables that connect each non-GAAP figure in the presentation with the closest GAAP figure.
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Federal prosecutors in Manhattan have charged Taj Tarsha, the founder of NFT startup Few and Far, with securities and wire fraud.
The authorities allege that he took more than $10 million from investors and spent it on gambling, speculative crypto bets, and a Miami condominium instead of the marketplace he promised to build.
What happened to Few and Far’s NFT marketplace?
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced an indictment today regarding an alleged scheme that dates back to February 2022.
Prosecutors claim that Taj Tarsha, the founder of the NFT startup Few and Far, began selling Simple Agreements for Future Tokens, or SAFTs. Under these contracts, buyers paid up front for the right to receive FAR tokens once Few and Far’s decentralized NFT marketplace was ready.
Prosecutors say Tarsha sold 95 million FAR tokens to at least 67 investors and raised over $10 million that was supposed to be put toward funding the platform and the token.
Instead, the funds were spent in an online casino, invested in risky cryptocurrency trades, and even used to pay off a loan tied to a Miami condominium. Tarsha also funded his DJ hobby with the money and paid for some interior design work.
Tarsha also paid himself close to $1 million through two bonuses he hid from investors and from one of his co-founders, plus a salary that he privately conceded was unreasonable given that the company had no product and, in his own words, “zero revenue.”
He also reportedly admitted to his then-fiancée that taking company assets was “unethical.”
Few and Far itself raised around $10.5 million in a funding round led by Pantera Capital. The company was founded a year earlier by Tarsha, Chris Gale, and Chris Hayes and built on NEAR Protocol.
How was Tarsha caught?
An internal audit in June 2023 revealed that some of the money was missing, but Tarsha allegedly reassured investors by telling them the bonuses were tied to preset FAR presale targets and that every remaining dollar was still needed to finish the project.
However, at that time, he had already dismissed nearly all staff and left a single contractor to produce work that only looked like development.
Once the missing funds were discovered by Tarsha’s colleagues, he was removed from Few and Far’s multi-signature wallet.
When the FAR token finally went live in May 2024, it collapsed. Prosecutors say it was effectively worthless and stopped trading soon after, and Inner City Press reported the token fell more than 99% from its launch price.
34-year-old Tarsha was initially arrested on June 6, 2026, before being released on a $500,000 personal recognizance bond four days later. The case is assigned to U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, and each charge leveled against Tarsha carries a maximum of 20 years in prison.
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Demis Hassabis will step down from the day-to-day running of Google DeepMind to become its chairman. Staff memos published August 5 say 27-year Google veteran Jeff Dean is leaving to start a startup that Google will help fund.
Hassabis shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the AlphaFold protein-structure work he led with John Jumper.
Hassabis steps back as Kavukcuoglu takes over
Hassabis is taking on two new titles, Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet. He is continuing to lead the company’s AI drug-discovery spinoff, Isomorphic Labs.
“I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand,” Hassabis wrote. He wanted “the time and space to focus on the big picture.”
AGI, or artificial general intelligence, refers to AI that matches or exceeds humans across most tasks.
Koray Kavukcuoglu, until now DeepMind’s chief technology officer and Google’s chief AI architect, will be senior vice president of the unit, reporting directly to Sundar Pichai, and will be responsible for developing Gemini, frontier research, and the app and developer teams.
Kavukcuoglu has been at DeepMind for 13 years and was part of early breakthroughs like WaveNet and DQN, Pichai’s memo said.
Pichai wrote that after “an incredible 27-year run,” Dean wants to try something new, and he’s not going alone. Dean and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are establishing an independent public benefit corporation, called Discovery Loop, to speed up discoveries in machine learning, science, and engineering.
DeepMind vice president Oriol Vinyals and Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le are joining too. Google will be a founding investor and cloud provider for the new company, and the two will collaborate on research into ML systems and infrastructure.
Dean said being outside a public company gives him room to chase science over quarterly returns. “We might make decisions that are not necessarily in the company’s purist financial interests,” he said.
Reshuffle lands as Google races OpenAI and Anthropic
Gemini 3.5 Pro is running months behind schedule. Several senior researchers, including one of Gemini’s co-leads, have already left for rival labs.
Investors read the memos as a warning. Shares of Alphabet dropped more than 4.10% on the news, giving back some of a 13% run-up the stock had enjoyed off a post-earnings low.
The departures come just weeks after Google rolled out Gemini 3 to compete with ChatGPT, a release Hassabis publicly touted. Pichai’s memo said the Gemini app has more than 950 million monthly users
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Anthropic just confirmed today that it has begun assembling its own dedicated team to design custom chips for its AI, Claude.
Until now, the company relied entirely on chips made by other tech giants, but skyrocketing demand means they need their own hardware to keep things running fast and smooth.
A job listing turns months of rumors into a staffed program
The news came via an official statement to Business Insider, where they also revealed a new opening for a lead silicon engineer. According to Business Insider, an Anthropic spokesperson said the company would co-design its hardware and its models so that Claude runs “faster and more efficiently,” in the spokesperson’s words, “at the scale our customers need.”
Interestingly, the job description is quite strict. Apparently, Anthropic is looking for engineers across front-end design, pre-silicon verification, physical design, analog and mixed-signal work, and packaging, who can work within a salary band of $320,000 to $485,000.
According to the listing, candidates must show “direct personal contribution” to finished, shipped semiconductor designs, and be ready to make “consequential calls without a large organization behind them.”
The listing also asks the new hire to “support first-silicon bring-up and debug” once a part arrives, the kind of language that describes a team expecting to tape out a chip rather than evaluate someone else’s.
While outlets like Reuters and The Information previously hinted at talks with manufacturing partners like Samsung, Anthropic hasn’t named a factory or a release date yet.
Owning the layer it currently rents
Anthropic also made it clear that they weren’t ditching their current partners. The spokesperson stressed the tech giant’s plan to keep using chips from AWS, Google, Nvidia, and AMD alongside their new hardware to keep their supply chain flexible.
However, the economics behind the decision lie in Anthropic’s own numbers. According to reports, the company said in April that its run-rate revenue had passed $30 billion, up from roughly $9 billion at the close of 2025, and that customers spending more than $1 million a year had doubled to over 1,000.
All of that compute currently runs on other companies’ silicon: AWS Trainium, Google TPUs, and Nvidia GPUs, with multiple gigawatts of next-generation Google TPU capacity committed from 2027. A chip Anthropic owns would give it one layer of that stack it no longer has to rent.
OpenAI and Meta got there first
Anthropic is not the first frontier lab to make this bet. Its closest rival, OpenAI, unveiled a purpose-built inference chip called Jalapeño, developed with Broadcom, in June. OpenAI claims the part can cut costs by up to 50%.
Other competitors are moving even faster. Meta is gearing up to start making its own chips soon, and even smaller startups are looking into the idea. The goal for everyone is the same: stop relying so heavily on Nvidia, whose chips currently dominate the market, and build hardware tailored specifically to their own AI.
For Anthropic, this also helps with their recruitment. While there are concerns that some workers care more about big tech paychecks than the company’s core mission, Anthropic, now offering the chance to build brand-new hardware from the ground up, gives top-tier engineers a brand-new reason to sign on.
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Mastercard and Borderless.xyz started testing Crypto Credential on Wednesday for cross-border stablecoin payment flows.
The pilot targets firms moving dollars on-chain that want to know who is on the other side of a transaction.
Infinia, Walapay, and Koywe test Crypto Credential
The trial runs over Borderless.xyz’s payments network. Firms that participate embed Crypto Credential’s assurance signals into their transaction approval, screening, and risk management process.
Infinia, Walapay, and Koywe are the first stablecoin payment operators to run assurance signals at network scale with a single-audit compliance model.
Raj Dhamodharan, Mastercard’s executive vice president for Blockchain and Digital Assets, said the tie-up grew out of Start Path, the company’s startup program.
“Today, we’re excited to take the next step together, exploring how Mastercard Crypto Credential can help bring greater trust and confidence to stablecoin payment flows across a growing network of participants,” he said. Infinia, Walapay, and Koywe are Start Path alumni, too.
Crypto Credential standardizes identity and compliance checks for wallet-to-wallet transactions. It uses shared assurance signals that let one party gauge whether a counterparty met the required standards.
Borderless.xyz operates a stablecoin orchestration and liquidity network, connecting wallet infrastructure to 15+ licensed stablecoin providers in 100+ countries, by its own account.
“One of the biggest friction points for stablecoin payment operators isn’t the payments. It’s that compliance doesn’t scale the same way the network does. Every new provider means starting the verification process over,” said Borderless.xyz CEO and co-founder Kevin Lehtiniitty.
He compared it to correspondent banking, where compliance done at the point of origin is trusted downstream, and reasoned that Mastercard is taking that approach to digital asset payments.
Pilot follows Mastercard’s $1.8 billion BVNK buy
Mastercard acquired BVNK for $1.8 billion, an initial $1.5 billion plus up to $300 million, subject to performance. The acquisition deal cleared regulators five months ahead of the year-end timeline Mastercard set when it announced the purchase on March 17.
BVNK, based in London, runs about $30 billion in annualized stablecoin volume across 130 markets. It holds 25+ regulatory licenses.
Mastercard started regulated settlement for stablecoins, including USDC, PYUSD, and RLUSD, in June. Cryptopolitan reported that the network would process card transactions across eight blockchains with six regulated stablecoins.
Mastercard kicked off a Crypto Partner Program in March with 85+ crypto-native companies, payment providers, and financial institutions for cross-border remittances, settlement, and payouts.
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Siemens Energy’s profit before special items more than tripled to €1.62 billion in the third quarter of fiscal 2026 from €497 million a year earlier. Record orders and rising electricity demand boosted every part of the business.
The results were published in Munich on August 5, 2026. Investors have already bid up the stock as a proxy for the AI power crunch.
Record orders lift every segment as Gamesa turns a profit
The earnings release said that order intake was another record at €17.9 billion. The growth was mainly driven by demand from the United States, said Siemens Energy.
Gas Services also reported a record order intake of its own, while Grid Technologies and Transformation of Industry also rose. The order load left a book-to-bill ratio of 1.57, meaning the company took in far more work than it billed. Backlog was €162 billion at the end of June.
On an organic basis, excluding currency and portfolio effects, comparable sales rose 18.5% to €11.4 billion, the highest figure for a quarter so far. Net income was €1,188 million compared with €697 million in the prior year.
Basic earnings per share were €1.28, versus €0.71 in the same quarter of fiscal 2025. Free cash flow before tax improved to €2,319 million from €419 million a year earlier, supported by customer advance payments tied to the incoming orders.
Siemens Gamesa posted a positive result for the quarter for the first time since fiscal 2022 and is on course to break even for the year. The wind segment had been the biggest drag on the company. It was the single biggest driver of the profit improvement this quarter.
“The fact that our wind business has returned to profitability in a quarter for the first time since 2022 is a fantastic achievement by this team,” Christian Bruch, president and CEO of Siemens Energy, said.
Demand for electricity and the company’s products “remained strong in the third quarter,” he added.
Special items were negative at €59 million versus positive €458 million a year earlier. The previous figure was on account of the demerger of the energy business from Siemens Limited, India.
AI power demand drives the stock and lifts the outlook
Siemens Energy has become one of the names investors buy to bet on AI without buying chipmakers.
Fund manager Ben Lambert called the company “absolutely mission critical in getting power from the grid to data centers.”
AI models consume electricity faster than grids can supply it. Transformer lead times in Europe stretch to as long as 100 weeks, according to a previous Cryptopolitan report.
Siemens Energy, along with GE Vernova and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, accounts for more than 70% of global gas turbine production capacity, per Cryptopolitan’s October report.
Siemens Energy reaffirmed its full-year guidance, which it had raised after the first half. Profit margin before special items is now expected to land toward the upper end of the guided range.
The company is guiding for fiscal 2026 comparable revenue growth of 14% to 16%, net income of ~€4 billion, and free cash flow before tax of ~€8 billion. Grid Technologies has the highest growth target of any segment at 25% to 27%.
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An increasing number of miners have been letting go of their Bitcoin holdings to fund a pivot into AI data centers, and just a few days into August, more Bitcoin has been sold for the same purpose.
Cipher Digital (NASDAQ: CIFR) and Hyperscale Data (NYSEAMERICAN: GPUS) are the latest miners to sell Bitcoin. So far, the number of Bitcoins sold by public miners has crossed 15,000 since their treasuries peaked.
Hyperscale Data cashed out 150 coins in a single week
In a company release, Hyperscale Data said its Bitcoin holdings stood at 959 coins, worth about $60.8 million, after it converted around 150.5 BTC into $9.6 million during the week that ended August 2.
The company is not the only miner that is draining the treasury they once built up. In July, Empery Digital sold 1,400 BTC at an average of $62,200, raising about $87.1 million to pay down debt and buy a stake in a Midwest data center project. Bitdeer took its holdings to zero back in February.
Cipher’s mining revenue slid as the data center bet piled up losses
Cipher Digital, formerly Cipher Mining, released its second-quarter revenue figures on August 4. It recorded a revenue of $25 million and an adjusted EBITDA of negative $30 million.
Its mining revenue declined by 29% from the previous quarter, and the firm registered a net loss of $267.5 million, a figure that included a $150.5 million non-cash warrant charge. Following the release, Cipher shares dropped 10.2% to $21.69 on the day.
The company signaled this direction in February, when it rebranded to Cipher Digital and told investors on its Q4 2025 earnings call that it planned to liquidate the rest of its Bitcoin treasury during 2026 to pay for the infrastructure switch.
Cipher has raised $3.73 billion across three senior secured bond offerings to build its Barber Lake and Black Pearl campuses. CEO Tyler Page stated that they delivered their first HPC data center capacity ahead of schedule with rent at Black Pearl starting two months early in August.
What is pushing miners toward AI?
The reason why many miners have been selling off their holdings is that the economics stopped working. A report showed that the weighted-average cash cost to produce one Bitcoin among listed miners reached roughly $79,995 in Q4 2025, while the price sat in the $68,000 to $70,000 band. That gap left miners losing an estimated $19,000 on every coin they mined.
The response to these losses has been a pivot, with many rushing toward artificial intelligence and high-performance computing work.
More than $70 billion in AI and HPC contracts have been announced across the public mining sector, and some operators could pull as much as 70% of their revenue from AI by the end of 2026. Cipher, TeraWulf, MARA Holdings, Core Scientific, and Hut 8 have all moved to repurpose power capacity for AI tenants.
An option near San Antonio, and a regulator in the way
Cipher used its Q2 update to disclose an option on a 900-megawatt site called Apollo, which is around 25 miles from San Antonio, Texas, and said a separate bond deal reimbursed it $56.7 million while funding its Stingray campus. The land has been submitted through the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) Batch Zero process.
However, the project now faces a snag, and this time around it is political. Texas Governor Greg Abbott told regulators to review data-center projects before they advance in the grid-approval queue.
With that directive, ERCOT has paused its Batch Zero transmission study.
The halt adds uncertainty to Apollo and much of Cipher’s 4.4-gigawatt development pipeline, on top of construction and leverage risk. Cipher projects net operating income of $97 million this year, climbing to $686 million in 2027.
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The founder of ByteDance, Zhang Yiming, has said distillation will not be used to train the company’s AI models. This differentiates the company from other Chinese AI labs that have been accused of using the distillation technique.
This comes as US officials have accused Chinese labs of using the technique to bridge the gap with American AI models. Washington officials have gone as far as threatening sanctions.
Zhang draws a line when everyone else is cutting corners
The Information report states Zhang Yiming is vehemently against distillation in training the company’s AI models. Zhang has decided to be more hands-on in ByteDance’s AI ambitions and has met with senior researchers to get first-hand knowledge, while keeping tabs on the company’s recruitment efforts.
This is important because it lands at a critical time in the AI race. Just this same month, US officials have upped the ante in their fight with Chinese labs over the practice of distillation. ByteDance also owns Seedance, a profitable and performance-leading video model, and a rare feat amongst Chinese AI products.
Why Washington frowns at distillation
Distillation is simply the training of weaker AI models on the responses of stronger models. This ensures that the smaller AI systems learn to imitate the larger system. Distillation is done openly and happens to be a routine part of the AI industry. It is considered legal, though it is usually done on a small scale.
Michael Kratsios, who serves as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has alleged that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic’s Fable model when building Kimi K3, its AI system.
He stated this in an X post that Moonshot ran the operation via a purpose-built internal platform, which rotated access routes in a bid to evade detection and used NVIDIA GB300 servers in Thailand, which are barred from being exported to China by US export rules.
Anthropic reportedly traced 3.4 million Claude conversations to Moonshot via fake accounts. Moonshot is yet to respond to these allegations.
How ByteDance built Seedance, its leading AI model
ByteDance had its turning point in a totally different way. The company took a gamble on Seedance 2.0 despite internal wrangling over the model’s high cost and aggressive scale. The video model was built to scale past the 200 billion parameters mark, but was considered too ambitious by some within the company.
The move panned out as the models’ gross margin hovered around 70-90%, after the company spent big on GPUs, data and world-class recruitment.
Washington says the AI gap is closing
The battle over distillation is the tip of the iceberg. Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary has floated placing sanctions if and when Chinese companies adopt distillation on an industrial scale. A bipartisan House bill would make it easy to identify and sanction distillation attempts.
The numbers have prompted urgent action. Despite outspending China on AI by a 23 to one ratio, the US has lost its lead over China in the AI race. As per Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI, the top models from both countries are pretty much the same.
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Circle Internet Group (NYSE: CRCL) dropped close to 4% in early Wednesday trading after its second-quarter profit came in above Wall Street forecasts while revenue fell short.
Stablecoin demand also rose during the quarter as fresh conflict in the Middle East made crypto markets more volatile. Traders cut exposure to riskier tokens and parked more funds in dollar-linked assets.
Circle reported $701 million in combined sales and reserve earnings for the three months ended June, an increase of 7% from last year. Profit from continuing operations came to $48 million, compared with a loss-heavy period a year earlier.
Circle grows USDC usage while lower interest returns limit reserve earnings
The amount of USDC in circulation stood at $73.3 billion at the end of June, up 19% from the previous year. Average circulation during the quarter reached $76.5 billion, representing growth of 25%.
Activity on public blockchains rose much faster. USDC handled $14.8 trillion in on-chain transfers during the quarter, up 151% from last year.
Circle generated $668 million from the assets backing USDC, which was 5% higher year over year. The increase came from having more tokens in use, but weaker interest returns kept the gain smaller. The average yield earned on reserves fell 66 basis points to 3.5%.
Revenue from subscriptions, services, and other products reached $34 million, up 41%. Revenue left after distribution expenses totaled $289 million, a rise of 15%. The related margin increased by 302 basis points to 41%.
Adjusted EBITDA margin came to 50%, down 329 basis points. Profit from continuing operations equaled 7% of total revenue and reserve earnings.
Circle spent $412 million on distribution, transactions, and other related costs. That figure rose 1%, mainly because payments to distribution partners increased.
Standard operating expenses fell 56% to $254 million as last year’s IPO compensation charges disappeared from the comparison. Costs on an adjusted basis still rose 23% to $146 million. Circle put more money into engineering, new infrastructure, artificial intelligence systems, and upcoming products.
The company held $12.4 billion of USDC directly on its own platform at quarter-end, more than double the amount from a year earlier. USDC stored there accounted for an average 19.5% of total circulation each day, an increase of 1,204 basis points.
Users created $83 billion worth of new USDC during the quarter, up 97%. They also returned $87 billion for redemption, up 113%.
USDC ended June with a 27% share of the large, publicly attested dollar-backed stablecoin market. Its share fell 66 basis points from the previous year.
The number of active on-chain wallets holding more than $10 in USDC grew 24% to 7 million.
Circle’s payments network also added more institutional traffic. Based on the final 30 days of the quarter, the Circle Payments Network reached an annualized volume of $14.7 billion. That was 76% above the previous quarter. Enrollment climbed 29% to 175 financial institutions.
Circle lines up banks and payment firms before Arc opens to the public
Circle plans to open the Arc blockchain to the public on September 16. More than 100 companies and development teams are already working with the network.
Arc will include private transaction features, tools for programmable finance, support for autonomous software, and systems for issuing tokenized versions of traditional assets.
Circle named its first outside validator group during the earnings announcement. The list includes BlackRock (NYSE: BLK), Galaxy Digital (Nasdaq: GLXY), Global Payments (NYSE: GPN), Intercontinental Exchange (NYSE: ICE), Mastercard (NYSE: MA), SBI Holdings (TSE: 8473), Standard Chartered (LSE: STAN), Sumitomo Corporation (TSE: 8053), and Visa (NYSE: V).
DTCC and MoneyGram will also help validate Arc. Under that setup, financial firms using the blockchain will take part in protecting and operating it.
BlackRock, BNY Mellon (NYSE: BK), DTCC, and Standard Chartered are working on possible Arc connections. Their projects cover tokenized securities, crypto custody, stablecoin access, foreign exchange trading, and repurchase agreements.
BlackRock expects to issue its BUIDL institutional liquidity fund on Arc. DTCC plans to let firms create blockchain versions of assets held through The Depository Trust Company.
BNY Mellon added direct USDC creation and redemption to its digital-asset custody service. The bank already holds most of the assets backing the stablecoin.
A bank-run system was introduced by Standard Chartered which allows institutional clients to exchange traditional money for USDC, redeeming the tokens from the same account arrangement.
Circle kept its long-term forecast for USDC circulation at a 40% compound annual growth rate. It raised its 2026 forecast for other revenue from $150 million to $170 million to a new range of $310 million to $330 million.
The company also lifted its expected margin after distribution costs from 38% to 40% to 41.7% to 43.7%. Its full-year adjusted operating expense target stayed at $570 million to $585 million.
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A former Los Angeles police officer has been sentenced to life plus 15 years in state prison for posing as a cop and robbing a teenager of a hard drive holding roughly $350,000 in Bitcoin.
Despite the recent run of violent crypto activities, the sentence is one of the stiffest punishments that have been handed down so far.
Who bagged a life sentence for a crypto crime?
Eric Halem, 38, has been sentenced to concurrent life terms for kidnapping and robbery by the Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Mildred Escobedo.
Halem was convicted by a jury in March after a two-week trial regarding a December 2024 robbery. Prosecutors said Halem and three other men presented themselves as officers serving a search warrant to talk their way into a Koreatown high-rise rented by a 17-year-old.
Once inside, the group threatened to kill the teenager unless he surrendered a hard drive storing about $350,000 in Bitcoin. The victim, sworn in under only his first name, Daniel, handed it over. The Times reported that during the investigation, it was discovered that Daniel had built his crypto holdings partly by scamming other people.
Escobedo said she changed her mind several times before settling on the punishment. She acknowledged letters from Halem’s family and friends portraying him as a caring father, but said the trial evidence pointed to a man ready to use violence out of “sheer and utter greed.”
Halem’s lawyer, Joseph Weimortz, had asked for a new trial, arguing his client’s original attorneys never called witnesses or examined key evidence and even skipped an opening statement, but Escobedo rejected that motion, stating that the earlier lawyers had performed well, but there was “extremely overwhelming evidence against Mr. Halem.”
Under the sentence, Halem becomes eligible for parole after seven years.
Was Halem’s motive really greed?
Halem had reportedly already been gone from the LAPD for nearly two years when the robbery took place, but the 13-year department veteran was still serving as a reserve officer. His former associates told the paper he ran several businesses on the side, including a luxury car rental operation and an app for remote actor auditions, and had toyed with building a reality show around his life.
His mother, Randi Halem, called the verdict “a miscarriage of the law,” and his sister, Alison, said the presence of LAPD Robbery-Homicide detectives in the gallery felt like intimidation.
Halem still faces separate cases tied to alleged insurance fraud and another crypto-related robbery. He also has three co-defendants who have yet to stand trial.
The case is one among several cases of people being targeted for their digital assets rather than cash or jewelry. Federal prosecutors in Connecticut recently charged three Missouri men over a planned home invasion meant to force a bitcoin transfer.
Three Tennessee men were also recently charged over an alleged California robbery ring that, in one incident, moved about $6.5 million in digital assets out of a victim’s accounts. Those defendants have pleaded not guilty.
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Circle (NYSE: CRCL) has announced that its Arc blockchain will go live on public mainnet on September 16. It also announced 11 founding validators for the network, and they include BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, and The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), among others.
The blockchain has been running a private mainnet that has institutional builders on it, and the announced date for a public mainnet sets another milestone for a project that already has some of the biggest names in global payments as its founding validator cohort.
Who are the names that make up Arc’s founding validator cohort?
Alongside Circle, BlackRock, DTCC, Galaxy, Global Payments, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation, and Visa are the network’s founding validator cohort.
Circle stated that the network is secured by the institutions that run on it. It says that this model makes it “meet the trust, security, operational, and compliance standards required of critical financial market infrastructure.”
Anthony Soohoo, Chairman and CEO, MoneyGram, stated, “Arc reflects where the industry is heading: trusted, compliant, and unified infrastructure that makes stablecoins practical for real-world payments.”
What exactly is Arc built for?
Arc is Circle’s stablecoin-focused layer-1 blockchain. Circle refers to it as an “economic operating system” for financial markets and, increasingly, for software agents that move money on their own. It is currently in private mainnet with more than 100 ecosystem and institutional builders, according to Circle, after running as a public testnet that launched in October 2025.
The network is built around Circle’s dollar-pegged stablecoin, USDC, which the company reported had $73.3 billion in circulation at the end of the second quarter.
According to Circle, Arc offers fast settlement, transaction fees priced in stablecoins, and privacy controls. The September 16 launch will add a full product suite that includes privacy features, an agent stack for programmable finance, and support for tokenized real-world assets.
Circle was paid to build up the project this year. In May, it raised $222 million in a token presale led by Andreessen Horowitz, which contributed $75 million, giving Arc a $3 billion network valuation. BlackRock, SBI Group, and Standard Chartered Ventures were among the other backers, several of whom now appear on the validator list.
Is BlackRock’s BUIDL going on Arc?
In its announcement, Circle mentioned that BlackRock plans to deploy its BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, known as BUIDL, on Arc using the network’s built-in USDC integration. It will be letting institutional investors subscribe, redeem and deploy fund assets in one on-chain environment.
Circle also mentioned that it is working with DTCC to enable tokenization of assets held at The Depository Trust Company on Arc beginning in the second half of 2027.
The plan would let market participants use third-party applications on Arc for stablecoin-native settlement while referencing DTC-tokenized assets.
Circle says this would keep the same investor rights and protections as traditionally held securities. BNY and Standard Chartered are also exploring integrations spanning custody, stablecoin access, and FX and repo infrastructure.
Why is Circle launching Arc’s public mainnet now?
The public mainnet and validator announced the same day it released its second-quarter results. The results showed that Circle’s positioning as a regulatory-compliant company alongside its infrastructure offerings has generated some yield and helped offset a slower market.
Circle reported $701 million in total revenue and reserve income, which is up by 7% year over year. It also reported $48 million in net income from continuing operations. USDC onchain transaction volume reached $14.8 trillion in the quarter, which was a 151% jump from a year earlier.
In July, the company received final approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to run a national trust bank, Circle National Trust. It was granted a limited purpose trust charter from the New York Department of Financial Services the same month.
More recently, Circle announced that it bought most of IBM’s blockchain patent portfolio, becoming the largest US holder, with Arc named as one of the products the patents would support.
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Galaxy Digital (NASDAQ: GLXY) and TeraWulf (NASDAQ: WULF), two pure play Bitcoin miners to have made the AI pivot, saw contrasting fortunes as both firms turned in their respective scorecards for the second quarter of 2026 on August 5.
Both firms’ relatively nascent AI data center businesses did a lot of the heavy lifting in the Q2 results, which were released before markets opened Wednesday. TeraWulf’s profits set it up for a pre-market run while Galaxy’s loss set off a slide that has grown to almost 7%.
How did markets react to Galaxy’s Q2 earnings report?
Investors were not impressed as Galaxy Digital (NASDAQ: GLXY) closed the quarter ending June 30, $85 million in the red, disregarding the fact that it made big strides in cutting down on the $216 million loss it reported in Q1. Diluted and adjusted earnings came in at negative $0.09 per share.
Galaxy shares traded at $20.99 pre-market per Google Finance, down about 6.55% around the time of this report.
Galaxy pointed to the underperformance of the digital assets in its portfolio as the reason its second-quarter results were not so hot.
Galaxy’s Data Centers segment made up for the lag, though. Adjusted gross profit came in at $20 million, a $3 million improvement on the first quarter. Adjusted EBITDA was $11 million.
Cryptopolitan reported earlier in the quarter that Galaxy confirmed that it had delivered all 133 megawatts of critical IT load under the first phase of the CoreWeave lease at its Helios campus in West Texas. That arrangement is supposed to open an $80 million quarterly lease revenue stream, starting with its next Q3 report.
TeraWulf rides HPC leasing, crossing 70% of revenue
The other half of the data center duo reporting around the same time, TeraWulf (NASDAQ: WULF), saw shares rise 1.64% to $19.19 in pre-market trading, according to Google Finance.
High-performance computing leases made up for $31.9 million of the $44.8 million revenue that Terawulf reported for the quarter. That roughly 71% contribution from the HPC segment represents a doubling down on the AI compute rush that earned it about $34 million in the first quarter.
TeraWulf reported another $3 billion in cash and restricted cash.
Executives are projecting a better third quarter too, pointing to 102 MW of revenue-generating critical IT capacity at its Lake Mariner site in New York, which came online in early July. Another 336 MW is expected to be delivered at some point. Chief Financial Officer Patrick Fleury also said the CB-3 delivery unlocked $600 million of credit support from Google backing tenant Fluidstack’s lease obligations.
Power, not chips, is the growth story
Both companies used the quarter to stretch their pipelines well beyond current capacity. TeraWulf disclosed a 20-year lease with Anthropic for about 401 MW at its Justified campus in Hawesville, Kentucky, a deal it values at roughly $19 billion in contracted revenue, or as much as $33 billion if Anthropic exercises two five-year extensions. It also agreed to sell its 50.1% stake in the Abernathy joint venture for about $530 million and won FERC authorization to acquire the Morgantown generating station in Maryland.
Galaxy, for its part, said it expanded its power pipeline past 5.7 GW after buying three Texas development sites following quarter-end, and it closed a $3.5 billion senior secured notes offering on July 28 to fund the next phase of Helios. The company also struck a multi-year agreement with BNY, the custody bank that oversees more than $60 trillion in assets, to support staking on BNY’s digital asset platform.
The common thread is electricity. As Cryptopolitan reported when TeraWulf secured its Muskie site in May, access to power, transmission, and utility approvals has become the binding constraint on AI buildouts, with the International Energy Agency projecting data center electricity use will nearly double to about 945 terawatt-hours by 2030.
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Japan’s Financial Services Agency (FSA) will launch a dedicated Crypto Assets and Stablecoins Division on August 7, giving the country’s digital-asset firms a single supervisor.
The agency is following through on a reorganization it approved back in December 2025, and is a major step forward in the country’s goal to treat crypto like mainstream financial products.
What does the new FSA division do?
Crypto oversight in Japan has typically been scattered across low-level offices, but the Financial Services Agency will be launching a division with three specialized teams dedicated to the sector, called the Crypto Assets and Stablecoins Division, on August 7.
Before the creation of this division, cryptocurrency-related work was handled by the Crypto, Blockchain and Innovation Office and the Crypto Monitoring Office— both of which sat under the Risk Analysis Division of the Comprehensive Policy Bureau. These were small office-level units without much authority or visibility.
The new Crypto Assets and Stablecoins Division sits under the newly created Asset Management and Insurance Supervision Bureau, and has more staff, a larger budget, and more authority than the previous administration.
The three specialized offices within the division include the Crypto Asset Monitoring Office, the Innovation Promotion Office, and the Digital Payment Planning Office.
The FSA said the restructuring is needed to handle new challenges from financial digitalization and to strengthen its ability to supervise financial institutions as technology evolves.
The division’s launch will fulfill a promise made eight months ago by Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama when she announced the reorganization plan on December 26, 2025, at a press conference after a cabinet meeting.
What else is changing for crypto in Japan?
Japan is in the middle of executing a plan that includes reclassifying crypto, cutting taxes, and possibly approving Bitcoin (BTC-USD) ETFs. The new division is part of that plan.
Japan has been moving fast to bring crypto under mainstream financial rules. Cryptopolitan previously reported that the country’s parliament passed a law set to take effect in 2027 that reclassifies crypto assets as financial products under the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act (FIEA), rather than the Payment Services Act.
The change means that crypto will be treated like stocks and bonds, with stricter rules including bans on insider trading, stricter disclosure requirements, and heavier penalties for unregistered operators, such as up to 10 years in prison (up from 3 years) and fines of up to ¥10 million (about $61,600), up from ¥3 million (about $18,500).
The reclassification also lays the foundation for spot crypto ETFs on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, possibly as early as 2027. Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama has said she will push forward on reviewing ETF approvals.
Regarding taxes, Cryptopolitan reported that a companion tax proposal expected to apply from January 1, 2028, would cut Japan’s maximum crypto tax from 55% to a flat 20%, matching the rate on stocks.
Japan’s three megabanks, MUFG (NYSE: MUFG), Mizuho (NYSE: MFG), and Sumitomo Mitsui (NYSE: SMFG), are already involved in stablecoin experiments under the new framework.
Only licensed banks, money transfer providers, and trust companies can issue yen-pegged stablecoins in Japan.
The FSA has also been tightening enforcement against offshore platforms. Bitget said this month it would wind down services for Japanese residents, following Bybit’s earlier exit after FSA warnings.
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