New Day Dk007

#USDAI
Cryptocurrency exchange Bullish (NYSE: $BLSH ) is providing $100 million in funding to USD.AI (CRYPTO: $CHIP ) to help finance the computers and chips used to power artificial intelligence.
The money will be provided through stablecoins and will allow USD.AI to offer loans backed by graphics processing units (GPUs), the company said in a Friday announcement.
USD.AI is a crypto platform that connects investors and lenders with companies looking to finance AI infrastructure. More than $225 million worth of crypto assets were locked in the protocol as of Friday, according to the companies.
Bullish said it will also list USD.AI's sUSDai token across several trading pairs on its exchange. The company plans to support trading in the token through a market-making program.
“Bullish recognizes that compute is becoming a credit market in its own right,” David Choi, CEO of Permian Labs, the company behind USD.AI, said. “Bullish is the right partner to scale this rapidly growing asset class on chain and broaden institutional participation,” Choi added.
The deal is part of a broader push to use blockchain technology to bring traditional assets and lending markets on chain.
In May, Bullish acquired shareholder services and transfer agent firm Equiniti for $4.2 billion, including $2.35 billion in Bullish stock and $1.85 billion in assumed debt. The deal gives Bullish traditional financial infrastructure as it expands into tokenized stocks.
The exchange has also applied to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission for approval to operate a regulated derivatives exchange and clearing organization. If approved, the move would allow the company to offer listed derivatives and provide clearing services in the U.S.
Bullish stock is currently trading at $33 U.S. per share, down 52% since the company went public last summer.

#KevinWarshSpeech $BTC
Warsh's highly anticipated remarks at the Kansas City Fed's annual symposium Friday morning leaned hawkish, prompting traders to quickly raise bets on a September rate hike.
Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh says the central bank’s “predominant focus” right now should be on inflation.
“The responsibility for 65 months of sustained, elevated inflation sits squarely with the central bank,” said Warsh, delivering his keynote address at the Kansas City’s Fed Jackson Hole symposium.
“We must be confident that underlying inflation is moving to our objective, clearly and at sufficient speed. Otherwise, we have work to do. That's our job . . . our mandate . . . and our charge to keep.”
Bitcoin is headed lower on the hawkish remarks, dipping to $78,700. U.S. stocks are down modestly, and bond yields are headed slightly higher.
September rate hike odds have jumped to 42% from 35% a day earlier, according to CME FedWatch.
Warsh’s speech was highly anticipated, as the Jackson Hole event has often been an occasion for U.S. central bank chiefs to prep markets for key policy changes.
Making his remarks today even more interesting was Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s promise last week to intervene in the bond market to try to cap or lower long-term interest rates. Warsh has been a proponent of letting the market dictate where rates are headed, but Bessent suggested inefficiencies in the market mechanism were forcing long-term bond yields to be higher than they otherwise might be.

#BitGo
The deal to buy NYDIG IF Holdings comprises $7 million in cash and around $35.5 million in stock, as well as the $15 earnout.
Cryptocurrency custody specialist BitGo is buying the institutional trading business of bitcoin-focused financial firm NYDIG, for $42.5 million comprising cash and stock, plus $15 million in cash which is contingent on meeting revenue milestones, according to a filing on Friday.
The acquisition will expand BitGo’s custody, settlement and wallet business to include derivatives, structured products, financing and other capital markets services.
The deal to buy NYDIG IF Holdings is made up of $7 million in cash and around $35.5 million in stock, as well as the $15 earnout tied to revenue milestones and potential additional stock.
BitGo granted NYDIG registration rights for the BitGo shares issued. BitGo also agreed to issue restricted stock units and cash retention awards to transferred employees upon meeting a revenue milestone.
The acquisition is indicative of the wider theme of institutionalization in crypto markets, said Andrew Melville, Head of Research at institutional crypto derivatives data and analytics firm Block Scholes.
“This cycle is driven by institutional capital rather than purely retail demand, as was the case in previous crypto cycles,” Melville said. “As a result, incumbent crypto players must adapt to the demands of the new investor type, whether by servicing institutional clientele, tokenizing TradFi assets, encouraging the adoption of stablecoins for payment rails, or real-world asset derivatives trading on chain.”
BItGo BTGO$7.0150 was the first crypto firm to IPO in 2026, at a share price of $18, raising about $212.8 million and valuing the firm at just over $2 billion. In the current depressed crypto market, BitGo shares are trading at around $7.
NYDIG (New York Digital Investment Group) spans custody, trading, financing and corporate treasury plays based around bitcoin, as well as running high-density power facilities for Bitcoin mining and AI.
“Our team built NYDIG's institutional trading business into something exceptional: proven execution expertise with derivatives and financing capabilities,” said Tejas Shah, CEO of NYDIG. “That business is complementary to BitGo's digital asset infrastructure, and we look forward to a seamless transition for our clients and our colleagues, some of the most talented people in this market. The discipline and intensity that built our trading franchise also drives our HPC data center development business, where we see one of the most significant opportunities ahead.”

#CRCL $CRCL
$CRCL.US Stablecoin issuer Circle Internet Group (NYSE: $CRCL ) has struck a sponsorship deal with the popular British Premier League soccer team Chelsea.
The deal, reportedly worth $88 million U.S. per year, will see Circle’s USDC stablecoin (CRYPTO: $USDC ) added to the front of the jerseys worn by Chelsea soccer players.
Chelsea’s front-of-shirt sponsorship slot has been vacant for three years and the team was looking for a hefty payday for the highly visible real estate on its players’ jerseys.
Media reports say Chelsea will debut its new USDC-branded uniforms at its first home game of the Premier League season on Aug. 30.
The deal represents the first time that a cryptocurrency firm’s branding will appear as the principal shirt sponsor of a Premier League team.
Other crypto firms, such as OKX and Kraken, have been less visible sleeve sponsors of Premier League teams Manchester City and the Tottenham Hotspurs.
The U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) warned Premier League teams earlier this year about partnerships with unauthorized crypto firms, saying such partnerships could be illegal.
However, as a publicly traded company, Circle Internet Group meets the criteria set out by the FCA and is not in violation of any Premier League rules.
CRCL stock has declined 30% over the last 12 months to trade at $92.14 U.S. per share.

#TRUMP $TRUMP
A new report by advocacy group Public Citizen says that investors who put money into President Donald Trump's cryptocurrency ventures are $4.7 billion U.S. underwater.
At the same time, Trump himself has earned at least $1.4 billion U.S. from the crypto ventures he has gotten involved with since returning to the White House in 2025.
Public Citizen said the figure is largely made up of unrealized losses, meaning the assets have declined in value but have not necessarily been sold. The losses are largely on paper.
The report says that the calculation also includes some realized losses where trading data allowed Public Citizen to measure them.
The biggest losses for investors have been seen in President Trump's memecoin (CRYPTO: $TRUMP ) that he launched in January 2025, three days before his inauguration.
The Public Citizen report estimates that about one million of roughly 1.6 million digital wallets that bought the Trump memecoin are underwater by a combined $3.2 billion U.S.
$TRUMP memecoin reached an all-time high of $73.43 U.S. in January 2025 before falling to $2.73 U.S. currently.
Public Citizen said early buyers of the Trump coin captured most of the gains, with wallets that purchased during the token's first two days of release accounting for nearly 90% of gains.
The report says that Trump's earnings on his memecoin have turned out to be "all profit" for the U.S. president.
Investors have also lost considerable money on Trump's other crypto vehicles that include World Liberty Financial (CRYPTO: $WLFI), Trump digital trading cards, and Trump Media's Bitcoin (CRYPTO: $BTC) treasury accounts
The stock of Trump Media & Technology Group (NASDAQ: $DJT) has declined 45% over the last 12 months to trade at $9.76 U.S. per share.

#ZEC $ZEC
The SEC approved a privacy coin ETF the same month it proposed tighter rules for every other digital asset. That contradiction tells you more about what regulators actually fear than any speech or rulemaking ever could.
The last time a privacy coin dominated headlines, exchanges were delisting them. Binance dropped Monero in February 2024. OKX followed months later. The message from compliance departments was clear: assets designed to obscure transaction details were incompatible with global anti money laundering frameworks, and no amount of technical nuance would change that.
Eighteen months later, Grayscale rang the opening bell on NYSE Arca for ZCSH, the first exchange traded fund in the United States to offer direct spot exposure to Zcash. The product holds approximately $304 million in ZEC, custodied by Coinbase, and carries a 2.50% management fee with all proceeds directed toward Zcash ecosystem development. It is not a futures wrapper or a synthetic tracker. It is a fund that buys and holds privacy coins on behalf of investors who can now access them through a standard brokerage account.
That inversion from pariah to ETF did not happen by accident, and the mechanics behind it reveal something important about where regulators are actually drawing the line on financial privacy.
$ZEC ZCSH is not a new fund. Grayscale established the Zcash Trust in October 2017, making it one of the oldest single asset crypto vehicles in the United States. For years it traded on OTC markets at persistent discounts to net asset value, sometimes exceeding 40%, because shareholders had no redemption mechanism to arbitrage the gap.
The conversion to an ETF changes that structure entirely. Authorized participants can now create and redeem shares directly against the underlying ZEC, which forces the market price to track net asset value within tight bands. The discount that defined the trust for years collapsed in the weeks before listing as arbitrageurs front ran the conversion.
Coinbase Custody International holds the underlying ZEC in cold storage. The fund’s prospectus specifies that only transparent (unshielded) Zcash addresses are used for custody, meaning the coins sitting inside the ETF are fully auditable on the public blockchain. This is a critical design choice: Grayscale gets to offer exposure to a privacy coin while ensuring the fund itself operates with the transparency that securities regulators require.
The regulatory path for ZCSH was not straightforward, but it was less contested than most observers expected. Two factors mattered.
First, the SEC completed a formal review of the Grayscale Zcash Trust in January 2026 and took no enforcement action. That review, which began in late 2024, examined whether ZEC qualified as a security under the Howey test. The conclusion was not a formal safe harbor or blessing, but the absence of action created enough regulatory clearance for Grayscale to proceed with the NYSE Arca listing.
Second, Zcash’s architecture differs from Monero’s in a way that regulators find meaningful. Zcash offers opt in privacy: users choose between transparent transactions that are fully visible on the public ledger and shielded transactions that use zero knowledge proofs to encrypt sender, receiver, and amount data. Monero, by contrast, applies privacy by default to every transaction using ring signatures, stealth addresses, and RingCT. There is no transparent mode.
The regulatory path for ZCSH was not straightforward, but it was less contested than most observers expected. Two factors mattered.
First, the SEC completed a formal review of the Grayscale Zcash Trust in January 2026 and took no enforcement action. That review, which began in late 2024, examined whether ZEC qualified as a security under the Howey test. The conclusion was not a formal safe harbor or blessing, but the absence of action created enough regulatory clearance for Grayscale to proceed with the NYSE Arca listing.
Second, Zcash’s architecture differs from Monero’s in a way that regulators find meaningful. Zcash offers opt in privacy: users choose between transparent transactions that are fully visible on the public ledger and shielded transactions that use zero knowledge proofs to encrypt sender, receiver, and amount data. Monero, by contrast, applies privacy by default to every transaction using ring signatures, stealth addresses, and RingCT. There is no transparent mode.
That distinction matters because it allows compliance frameworks to function. An exchange listing ZEC can enforce know your customer rules on deposit and withdrawal addresses because those addresses can be transparent. The same exchange listing Monero cannot verify the origin of funds with the same confidence because the protocol obscures that information by design.
The SEC held a Zcash roundtable in 2025, the kind of structured engagement that Monero has never received. Whether that difference reflects a principled regulatory distinction or simply the politics of which assets have well funded advocacy organizations is an open question, but the outcome is clear: Zcash got an ETF, and Monero remains delisted from Coinbase, Robinhood, and most major Western exchanges.

#XRP $XRP
$XRP price is trying to reconcile two conflicting signals coming from the asset. One points to distribution. The other points to accumulation at scale. Both are happening at once, and that’s not a coincidence.
CryptoQuant-linked analyst Darkfost flagged a 231 million XRP withdrawal from Binance in a single day this week, worth $330-335 million at the time, the largest such move in about six months. Whale wallets have also sent close to 1.45 billion XRP to Binance over the trailing 30 days.
Those figures look like sell-side ammunition even as some of that liquidity cycles back off-exchange. Meanwhile, seven U.S. spot XRP ETFs have pulled in $1.55 billion in cumulative inflows, with August alone doubling July’s pace.
The market isn’t dragging XRP down; Solana posted 20%+ gains this week while Bitcoin keeps on going higher.
XRP price is moving in an intraday range of $1.40 to $1.45, showing a market still digesting last week’s 50% rally before this week’s pullback toward the $1.40 zone. Immediate support sits near $1.40, with a deeper floor around $1.33-1.36 based on Fibonacci retracement levels.
Resistance clusters at $1.50-$1.55, where XRP was already rejected once, then again near the $1.65 prior weekly close. RSI(14) readings near 25 suggest an oversold condition, though the aggregate technical signal still leans toward sell pressure.
$XRP can maintain its ETF inflows with whale-driven supply, it could reclaim $1.50, and momentum carries it back toward $1.65. Consolidation could also happen between $1.40 and $1.50 while the market waits for the next flow data print.
But it’s going to look bad if it breaks below $1.40, which opens the door to $1.33, especially if escrow unlock concerns resurface and compound whale selling.
We are watching for confirmation and should track daily ETF flow reports alongside exchange balance shifts before committing size.
A 4.53% bounce off recent lows is constructive, but XRP at a market cap already north of $80 billion isn’t handing out 10x setups. The math simply doesn’t work that way at scale.
This pushed a segment of traders toward earlier-stage plays where the upside curve looks different. Liquid Chain ($LIQUID), a Layer 3 infrastructure project positioning itself as the connective tissue between Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana liquidity pools, is on traders’ radar.

#SOL $SOL #MOONPAY
MoonPay added Solana lending protocol Kamino to its PayBox AI-focused payment vault, allowing eligible users to lend tokens or borrow against crypto collateral through conversations with ChatGPT or Claude.
Kamino has around $1.3 billion in total value locked and $1 billion in active loans, according to DefiLlama. The integration lets users instruct the AI tool to supply tokens to Kamino for yield or borrow dollar-pegged stablecoin USDC against collateral supplied to the platform.
It doesn’t, however, create a new loan product. Instead, it replaces Kamino’s usual interface with a natural-language instruction to use with AI. Users can require passkey approval for every transaction or let the AI act autonomously within preset limits.
Agentic crypto use has so far centered on small, high-frequency payments for data, computing power and online tools, with Coinbase-developed x402 moving about $50 million across 165 million payments. This development allows it to manage users’ money, where an instruction can create a leveraged position that requires continued monitoring.
AI is a nascent technology still prone to execution errors, which, when dealing with funds, could get costly. While the integration allows users to manage their positions through a conversation with the software, risks remain. If the value of the collateral falls far enough, the position might cross Kamino’s liquidation threshold, allowing liquidators to repay debt and take some of the collateral.
MoonPay introduced PayBox in July with payments, token swaps, bridging and access to yield through Aave. Kamino is an expansion into a major Solana lending venue, rather than PayBox’s first move into decentralized finance, as agentic payment tools broaden into capital allocation and credit.
The integration is unavailable in the U.S., U.K., European Union and Australia, and access may vary by asset and jurisdiction.

#WazirX $AI
WazirX has launched WazirX AI, an AI-based trading assistant for researching crypto markets, reviewing portfolios and preparing trades from a single interface. WazirX said the tool is India’s first AI co-pilot for crypto trading and is available on Android, iOS and Web.
WazirX AI follows an ‘Ask-Understand-Decide’ model, combining market data, technical analysis, portfolio information and order management. Users can ask about prices, news and market developments, review their portfolio and prepare trades within the same conversation.
“Crypto markets operate 24/7, but traders should not have to spend their day moving between charts, news feeds and trading screens,” said Nischal Shetty, founder, WazirX. “WazirX AI combines market research, portfolio monitoring and trade preparation into one conversation, reducing the time and effort required to evaluate an opportunity and act on it. The AI streamlines the workflow, and enables a faster and easier decision making process.”
The AI assistant can provide live market information with charts and portfolio details such as account value, profit and loss and open positions. Users can also request a daily portfolio briefing.
For trades, WazirX AI prepares an order for user approval and can calculate position size based on the user's risk settings. It supports market and limit orders, short setups and pair-specific maximum leverage.
Users can also create alerts using natural-language instructions, such as asking to be notified when Bitcoin breaks a specified support level.
WazirX said users can ask the assistant to screen INR futures for four-hour momentum, filter results by a risk-reward threshold, check them across multiple timeframes and prepare an order with entry price, leverage, margin, stop-loss, take-profit and estimated loss.
WazirX has launched a Paper Trading Sandbox that gives users a simulated US$100,000 balance to test trading strategies without using real funds.
The AI uses live WazirX price data and supports spot and futures trading. WazirX AI and the paper trading sandbox are available to users across Android, iOS and Web.

#BTC $BTC
$BTC Bitcoin surges above $75,000 as Treasury buybacks trigger short liquidations and rapidly shift crypto market sentiment.
Those who didn’t move before Wednesday have probably spent the past two days doing the math on what they missed. Bitcoin is up roughly 20% in seven days, its best week since March 2024, trading above $75,000 in Asian hours on Friday after spending most of the past two weeks below $65,000. Ethereum climbed right along with it, and total crypto market capitalization is back above $2.5 trillion.
On Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent doubled the size of the department’s long-duration bond buybacks, from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation. One detail got lost in a lot of the crypto coverage: the change doesn’t take effect until September 9 and runs through November 4. No Treasury cash has moved yet.
The announcement said it all. Long-bond yields, which had climbed to a near two-decade high after months of weak demand for 30-year debt, dropped sharply within minutes as traders saw the surprise timing as a sign that the Treasury would step in to support a shaky market. That relief faded fast: yields drifted back up again by Thursday morning, and economists were split on whether a modestly bigger buyback program changes much of anything structurally.
Crypto’s reaction didn’t fade with it. Traders who had shorted bitcoin, positioned for tighter conditions rather than a friendlier-sounding Treasury, got caught wrong-footed by the shift in tone. About $3 billion in short positions were liquidated over the following day, and each forced liquidation led to more buying, which kept pushing the price up on its own, regardless of what bonds were doing by then. Bessent added fuel on Thursday, telling CNBC that the eventual buyback total could exceed $4 billion.
Call it a signaling story rather than a plumbing one: a policy surprise most crypto traders had never heard of on Tuesday moved the market’s price and its mood before a single dollar of the actual buyback had been spent. The Fear & Greed Index jumped from 46 to 62 in a single day, one of the sharper sentiment swings of the year, then kept climbing to 72 by Friday.

#XRP $XRP
$XRP price is changing hands at $1.3, up 18% on the day, extending a violent 22% rally that carried the token to $1.26 in a single 24-hour window days earlier, shrugging off bearish prediction. But what’s driving it, and more importantly, where does the smart money rotate once the easy gains are booked?
The rally wasn’t XRP-specific. It traces back to two August 19 announcements: the U.S. Treasury doubling its longer-term bond buyback program to inject market liquidity, and President Trump reiterating his push to make the U.S. a Bitcoin superpower while pressing Congress to pass the CLARITY Act.
Following all the catalysts, the total crypto market cap responded with an 8% jump to $2.5 trillion in 24 hours. XRP simply rode the wave harder than most large-caps.
That macro tailwind explains the spike, but it doesn’t answer whether XRP holds these levels or gives them back. The technical picture underneath the headline number tells a more complicated story.
$XRP 22% pop validates anyone who bought the dip below $1. But XRP is a multi-billion-dollar asset now, and a repeat of that percentage gain from here requires enormous capital inflow, not just sentiment.
That math is exactly why traders chasing outsized returns increasingly look toward earlier-stage infrastructure plays where the market cap ceiling hasn’t been tested yet. Some of that rotation lands on Ripple’s broader valuation story; some of it lands on presales building the next layer of crypto infrastructure entirely.
Bitcoin Hyper ($HYPER) is positioning itself as the first Bitcoin Layer 2 with native SVM integration, smart contract execution at speeds it claims outpace Solana itself, while settling back to Bitcoin’s base layer for security.
The presale is priced at $0.013685 and has raised $33 million so far, with staking rewards on offer for early participants. The pitch: solve Bitcoin’s slow, expensive, non-programmable core through a decentralized canonical bridge and low-latency execution layer.

#ETH $ETH
$ETH Ethereum is back in the spotlight after U.S. spot Ethereum ETF pulled more than $220 million in fresh capital on August 20. The funds recorded more $219 million in net inflows, extending their winning streak to four consecutive trading days. BlackRock’s ETHA once again dominated the session with about $173 million in inflows.
That puts the August 20 flow above the $189.15 million recorded one day earlier. The back to back inflows suggest institutional demand has not slowed after Ethereum’s sharp recovery.
ETH is also surging above the $2,300 level. Ethereum trading around the $2,360 area in recent market data, with its market cap remaining above $270 billion.
BlackRock’s ETHA accounted for roughly $173 million of the August 20 inflows. That was followed by BlackRock’s ETHB with about $35.9 million, while Fidelity’s FETH added $5.8 million.
Bitwise’s ETHW brought in around $2.8 million. VanEck’s ETHV added another $1.7 million. The remaining products recorded either smaller flows or no meaningful change during the session.
The result is important because it came immediately after the $189 million inflow recorded on August 19. That earlier session had already been described as Ethereum’s strongest single day since October 2025.
As of now, August is shaping up as a major turnaround for Ethereum ETF. The funds had struggled through May and June, when combined net outflows exceeded $1 billion.
The money is moving in the opposite direction. Ethereum ETFs have posted several consecutive positive sessions while ETH has reclaimed levels that looked out of reach during the recent weakness.
Ethereum price action is giving the ETF numbers even more weight as it jumped sharply during the recent move, reaching above $2,300 and briefly trading near $2,400.
The token’s recovery also came with a sharp improvement in sentiment. Ethereum is now testing whether the $2,300 area can turn into support rather than another temporary stop. That matters because ETF demand is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Four straight days of inflows means institutions are adding exposure while ETH is already trading significantly above its recent lows.
There is another supply signal worth watching. Santiment data previously showed exchange held ETH falling from roughly 7.70 million coins on June 2 to 6.54 million on August 18. That represents a decline of around 15% over 11 weeks.
$ETH sitting on exchanges can reduce immediately available selling supply. Combined with stronger ETF demand, that creates an interesting setup if buying pressure continues.
The big question now is whether Ethereum can turn this ETF momentum into a sustained breakout as the $2,400 area is the next obvious test. If ETH clears it decisively while ETF inflows remain strong, the market could start looking toward the next major resistance levels.
For now, the message from Wall Street is getting louder: institutions are buying the dip, and Ethereum is listening.

#ENA $ENA
$ENA is rallying on a $1 billion FalconX deal, while HYPE tests its record, though flat dominance shows this is no broad alt season.
Altcoins are outpacing bitcoin by a widening margin on Friday afternoon as the rally that began with Wednesday's Treasury bond buyback announcement extends into a third day.
Ethena’s ENA is the standout, climbing 26.4% since midnight UTC to $0.1475, taking its 24-hour gain to 48.3% and its weekly move to 77.2%. The trigger is a $1 billion secured warehouse facility with FalconX announced Wednesday, which deploys the assets backing its USDe synthetic dollar into overcollateralized institutional credit rather than the crypto basis trade.
The move comes after $ENA had spent months grinding sideways between $0.06 and $0.10 after collapsing from above $0.80, leaving little overhead supply once buyers returned. Volume has reached $1.04 billion, close to three-quarters of the token's market cap and a 319% rise in volume from the previous 24-hour period.
Hyperliquid is the other name traders are watching. HYPE touched $77.87 on Friday and is trading near $76.85, putting it just above the June 16 record high of around $76.87. The move follows President Trump's comment at Wednesday's White House meeting that the CFTC is working to bring the exchange to the US in a fully compliant manner. Unlike ENA, HYPE is not recovering from a drawdown but breaking to new highs, having climbed from $52 in early August.
The rally was not confined to a couple of tokens; Curve CRV$0.3190 added 20.6% over 24 hours, Fetch.ai FET$0.1610 20.7%, Pudgy Penguins PENGU$0.008265 19.1%, Pump.fun PUMP$0.004002 18.7% and Pepe PEPE$0.0₅3801 18.6%. Bitcoin Cash also gained 26.7%, although it’s worth noting that BCH trading volume is actually down by 10% over the past 24 hours, suggesting a lack of conviction in the rally.
The difference between this rally and previous “alcoin seasons” is that the aggregate measures have not moved. Bitcoin dominance is at 59.8%, down 0.1%, while CoinMarketCap's altcoin season index is 33/100, down from a high of 51/100 last week.
The tokens moving the hardest have identifiable catalysts, including Ethena’s FalconX facility and Hyperliquid’s regulatory pathway, demonstrating a market that has matured from the cycles of the past, when tokens would rally indiscriminately.
Not everyone reads the muted aggregate figures as a ceiling. "Bitcoin has seen a tremendous move, which means that liquidity is very likely going to pour into those altcoins as most of them have barely made any move yet," MN Fund founder Michaël van de Poppe said in a post on X on Friday.

#ElonMuskUpdates
Social media platform X is in talks to explore how stablecoins, such as Circle Internet’s CRCL$81.56 USDC, can be used to pay royalties to influential users for uploading content, according to a person familiar with the plans.
The conversations with X are ongoing, said the person, who also works with other social media platforms testing stablecoins as a way to pay commissions to influencers.
Media representatives of X did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Stablecoins, which boast a collective market cap of over $300 billion, have become a staple for blockchain payments, facilitating faster, cheaper cross-border transactions for everyone from small businesses to multinationals moving large amounts of money between subsidiaries.
It’s not so surprising the Elon Musk-owned company is looking to stablecoins to pay royalties to content providers around the world. Musk’s SpaceX already uses stablecoins to collect cross-border payments from customers of Starlink, which provides satellite internet services in various emerging markets.
In March, Musk hired crypto veteran Benji Taylor as the head of design at X, tying his role to both xAI and SpaceX. Taylor, who led design at Coinbase Global’s COIN$169.99 Base blockchain network, has a background in wallets and decentralized finance
X is overhauling how it pays creators, as outlined in a recent post by the social media firm, phasing out its long-running Revenue Sharing program in favor of a new system called the Original Content Rewards Program.
The new program is designed to “reward creators who bring original ideas, expertise, reporting, creativity, and commentary to X,” the company said.

#ZEC $ZEC
Grayscale has filed its fourth amendment to convert the Zcash Trust into an exchange-traded fund while disclosing that a Digital Currency Group subsidiary is considering an investment representing about 200,000 ZEC, currently worth roughly $110 million
According to an Aug. 18 registration statement filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Grayscale plans to list shares of the converted trust on NYSE Arca under the existing ZCSH ticker, subject to the registration becoming effective.
The latest amendment also identifies DCG International Investments Ltd., a subsidiary of Grayscale parent Digital Currency Group, as a potential investor. The company is discussing a purchase of shares representing exposure to approximately 200,000 ZEC.
With Zcash trading near $555, the proposed amount would be valued at roughly $111 million. Grayscale stressed that no binding purchase agreement has been reached and that the eventual transaction, if one takes place, could differ substantially from the amount under discussion.
“However, because these discussions are not binding agreements or commitments to purchase, the Potential Investor could determine to purchase more, fewer or no Shares,” the filing said.
The amendment moves forward a conversion process built around Grayscale’s existing Zcash investment vehicle, which has provided investors with ZEC exposure without requiring them to hold the cryptocurrency directly.
Grayscale filed for the conversion in May, proposing to move ZCSH from its existing over-the-counter structure to NYSE Arca. The trust would continue holding ZEC while its publicly traded shares would provide investors with exposure to the value of the underlying cryptocurrency.
A subsequent crypto.news review of the filing found that the trust held 391,103.89 ZEC worth about $99.4 million as of March 31. Coinbase Custody was listed as custodian, BNY Mellon as administrator and the CoinDesk Zcash Price Index as the pricing benchmark.
The latest SEC filing shows that the trust’s principal market net asset value had increased to about $155.25 million as of June 30, with a principal market NAV per share of $32.15.
Under the proposed ETF structure, authorized participants would be able to purchase and redeem shares in blocks of 10,000 shares, which Grayscale defines as baskets. The trust intends to issue shares continuously once the registration becomes effective and the NYSE Arca listing is completed.
Grayscale’s filing states that the investment objective remains for the value of ZCSH shares, based on ZEC held per share, to track the value of the trust’s cryptocurrency holdings after expenses and liabilities.
The possible DCG International Investments purchase could add a sizeable investor to the product, although Grayscale has not provided a timetable for the discussions or stated whether the subsidiary has committed capital to the transaction.
Alongside the investment disclosure, Grayscale has expanded the registration statement to account for the security incident that affected Zcash earlier this year.
The issue centred on a vulnerability in Orchard, Zcash’s shielded transaction pool, which could have allowed an attacker to create counterfeit ZEC without leaving an obvious public record of the additional supply.
Developers deployed emergency network changes in June after the flaw was discovered. Although the Zcash team said it found no evidence that the vulnerability had been exploited, the privacy properties of Orchard meant developers could not conclusively prove that counterfeit ZEC had never been created.
The uncertainty became particularly important for an investment product designed to hold ZEC because any hidden inflation could affect the cryptocurrency’s circulating supply and, in turn, the value of assets held by the trust.
Zcash developers later prepared the Ironwood upgrade to deal with the remaining supply question. As reported ahead of activation, Ironwood was scheduled for July 28 at block 3,428,143 and introduced a separately tracked shielded pool alongside controls governing funds leaving the old Orchard pool.
The upgrade included a supply turnstile designed to prevent more ZEC from leaving Orchard than had legitimately entered it. The mechanism did not identify individual counterfeit coins but provided a way to contain any excess hidden supply if the earlier vulnerability had been exploited.
$ZEC Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox also explained before the fork that the old Orchard pool would effectively be sealed, while funds could leave through the turnstile under the network’s accounting rules.
When Ironwood activated on July 28, Zcash replaced the vulnerable pool with a new shielded pool backed by a formally verified design. Orchard stopped accepting new shielded transfers and remained available for withdrawals as users began moving funds into Ironwood.
More than 40,000 ZEC had moved into the new pool shortly after activation, while about 3.6 million ZEC remained in Orchard, according to data cited at the time.

#CryptoStocksToday
Crypto stocks jumped in premarket trading on Thursday after US President Donald Trump pushed Congress to pass the Clarity Act, giving the cryptocurrency industry a clearer set of rules. The move came after Trump met cryptocurrency industry executives at the White House.
Trump asked lawmakers to pass a “fair version” of the Clarity Act, an industry-backed bill that has been stuck in the US Senate. Trump has repeatedly said he wants the US to become the “crypto capital of the world,” according to Reuters. The Clarity Act could bring more clarity to how cryptocurrencies are regulated in the US. The bill would help decide whether different cryptocurrencies should be treated as securities or commodities.
The bill would also help define the roles of two major US regulators — the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). This could make it clearer which agency is responsible for different parts of the crypto market.
Crypto companies and analysts say clear legislation is important because current rules can change with political decisions and court cases. Without a law passed by Congress, companies face uncertainty over how cryptocurrencies will be regulated in the future, according to Reuters.