Cryptopolitan

Based on blockchain analysis by Arkham, North Korean hackers have laundered over $30 million worth of Bitcoin through Hyperliquid over the last three weeks, according to reports. The developments come at a delicate time.
President Donald Trump and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) are attempting to bring the offshore derivatives exchange within the boundaries of the United States. The discovery of Arkham intensifies the unresolved question: is it possible for a decentralized venue to fall under American regulation without incurring the sanctions and unlawful financial risk avoidance that were purposefully avoided by the creation of permissionless DeFi?
Arkham’s data lands as Hyperliquid courts Washington
As reported by Cryptopolitan and various media outlets, Hyperliquid was subject to the same criticism in December 2024 in relation to wallets linked with North Korean parties. According to Hyperliquid, no hacking had taken place and no money had vanished from user accounts. The new transactions show that the association is still in place while Hyperliquid is becoming more popular in the US.
According to Chainalysis, the North Korean regime looted around $2 billion worth of cryptocurrency in 2025, its most prosperous year ever in this regard, with the funds allegedly used to fund its weapons programs. CertiK has said that the DPRK has stolen about $6.75 billion in total during 263 incidents since 2016. On August 11, the Royal United Services Institute published a report outlining how Pyongyang exchanges the looted crypto for fiat currency to support its programs and calling for stricter onboarding processes and information-sharing rules regarding virtual asset service providers.
A rental deal through Kraken’s parent, not a purchase
Hyperliquid Labs is currently having discussions with Payward, the parent company of Kraken, regarding a U.S. strategy. Instead of purchasing an exchange with a license, American registered traders will be able to make trades using specific Hyperliquid-related perpetual futures via Bitnomial, the CFTC-regulated clearinghouse operated by Payward. Payward has already submitted the plan to the CFTC but has not yet received approval.
The Hyperliquid application would still not be available to U.S. users and registered users of Bitnomial would have access only to a small portion of what Hyperliquid has to offer in terms of perpetual futures. Specific compliance levels in the app are unknown.
On May 1, Payward confirmed the successful acquisition of Bitnomial, which was valued at $550 million. This move gave Payward access to Bitnomial’s entire derivatives stack, which consists of a Futures Commission Merchant, Designated Contract Market, and Derivatives Clearing Organization, among others, that are registered with the CFTC.
The commercial logic runs through HYPE. Hyperliquid allocates 99% of protocol fees to its Assistance Fund, which automatically converts trading fees into HYPE. Its documentation says the fund’s HYPE is burned, permanently removing it from circulating and total supply. An SEC filing by Hyperliquid Strategies said 46.7 million HYPE, or 4.7% of initial supply, had been acquired by the fund and permanently removed as of August 23.
It is not known if the volume routed via Bitnomial would contribute to such a mechanism, nor infomation about the commercial agreement between Payward and Hyperliquid has been provided. The flat licensing fee and the percentage of the U.S. trading income could mean something very different for HYPE investors. HYPE reached its all-time high of $86.71 on August 27, while there were not a single U.S. trader using the outlined route.
The perimeter question critics keep raising
Trump during a meeting at the White House on August 19 referred to CFTC Chairman Michael Selig as playing an important role in making the crypto trading platform of Hyperliquid “fully compliant and legal”. Following this comment, HYPE saw a spike of almost 17%. Further reports from Cryptopolitan indicate that the CME Group and ICE participated in the meeting too but they have been pushing regulators to investigate Hyperliquid for price manipulation and sanctions exposure.
That is the key point – when it comes to onshoring a decentralized platform, one has to account for customer verification, market surveillance, and checking for sanctions – which are the processes that the DeFi sector minimizes. Arkham’s figures illustrate what these measures need to uncover on the market.
The investors’ enthusiasm keeps growing. The Bitwise fund launched its spot Hyperliquid ETF, BHYP, on May 14, trading it at NYSE Arca and using Anchorage Digital Banking as its digital asset custodian.
What the CFTC proposal does and does not settle
The reported on-chain movements do not establish who controlled the receiving exchange accounts or whether the exchanges knew the funds were linked to Lazarus. CoinDesk also notes that public blockchain data cannot show all compliance actions taken after assets reach a centralized exchange. Hyperliquid has yet to explain publicly how its architecture can screen or block the Lazarus-linked wallets identified by Arkham.
A proposal is not a clearance. Hyperliquid and Payward declined to comment, and no final registration terms, timetable or product-specific compliance framework is public. Payward has reportedly presented the basic structure to the CFTC, but final regulatory approval remains pending.
Until regulators act, onshoring remains a proposal, and the North Korean transfers remain a reminder of what supervisors would be signing up to police.


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The corporate purchases of Bitcoin resumed this week, creating additional demand in the market that has already risen significantly throughout August. Strive bought Bitcoin for approximately $143 million while Strategy came back from a roughly ten-week hiatus and bought approximately $370 million worth of Bitcoin, further indicating the ongoing interest from corporate buyers who have turned into a new source of demand for the crypto-assets.
As for the larger market, timing plays a crucial role. Even as of Monday, Bitcoin was trading near $78,600, closing August up by more than 24%. The return of some significant treasury buyers eliminates another burden that has been put on the industry when those firms stopped purchasing or in some situations sold Bitcoin.
Treasury buyers return as Bitcoin holds near $79,000
The buying spree comes after a period of uncertainty regarding treasury trades. Strategy, founded by Michael Saylor and the company which pioneered the model, resumed buying BTC last week, acquiring 4,603 BTC worth $369.7 million and bringing its total holdings up to 845,050 BTC.
The acquisition marked the firm’s first Bitcoin purchase in 10 weeks. However, in that interim, Strategy sold 6,916 BTC for approximately $430 million between June 30 and August 10 to help enhance its liquidity position.
Tom Lee’s Bitmine was also in the market with its largest Ethereum purchase since June. All of these actions indicate that the digital-assets treasury companies are returning to accumulation mode as prices recover.
On August 25, Bitcoin hit a price in excess of $80,000 for the first time since mid-May, aided by a softer U.S. dollar and increasing fears of debasement, as per a report by Reuters.
Publicly-traded firms are reported to have approximately 1.264 million Bitcoin across a total of 198 companies according to Bitcoin Treasuries. Nevertheless, these holdings as mentioned are highly concentrated. The top five listed companies today have about 78.4% of the total amount of Bitcoin among public companies with Strategy having independently more than 66% of the total amount.
That concentration matters. Corporate demand can return quickly, but aggregate flows still depend heavily on a relatively small group of companies with access to capital markets.
Strive climbs to the fifth-largest corporate holder
Strive bought 1,800 BTC between August 24 and 28 at an average price of $79,431 per coin, including fees and expenses, according to a Form 8-K filed Monday. The purchase lifted its stash from 21,356 BTC to 23,156 BTC.
With the acquisition, Strive became fifth in the Bitcoin Treasuries’ rankings of public equity Bitcoin holders, surpassing Bullish.
The buying speed of Strive has greatly increased. The company purchased 20 BTC in the last week of July, acquired 79 BTC from August 10-14, and in the subsequent week acquired 1,110 BTC, followed by 1,800 BTC the week that ended August 28.
TD Cowen lifts its price target on ASST
Wall Street responded positively to the acquisition. TD Cowen increased its pricing target for Strive’s stock from $28 to $32, up 14%, while maintaining its buy recommendation.
ASST’s stock increased by about 6% to around $23 Monday morning, and the asset is up almost 165% over the last six months, according to The Block.
As of August 28, Strive’s year-to-date Bitcoin yield stood at 40.8%. TD Cowen anticipates that the company will purchase approximately 4,300 BTC in the third quarter, which is more than 180% higher than its earlier projection of 1,500 BTC.
The new filing also reiterates why dilution is so important to the model. Bitcoin’s value held by Strive increased by 8.4% in the interval between August 21 and 28. However, during this same period the number of effective common shares increased by about 4.0%. This means that Bitcoin held for each effective common share increased by approximately 4.3%.
Why the treasury model cuts both ways
The demand story has a counterweight. The Financial Times reported that Bitcoin treasury companies had shed more than $80 billion in market value from their mid-2025 peak as the model unwound.
Strive itself reported a GAAP net loss of $257.6 million in the second quarter, with $234 million tied to fair-value declines in its Bitcoin and Strategy preferred-stock holdings.
That volatility is the trade-off. When Bitcoin rises and capital markets stay receptive, companies can issue securities, buy more coins and reinforce buying pressure. When Bitcoin falls or equity premiums disappear, the same mechanism can reverse through dilution, financing stress or outright Bitcoin sales.
The latest purchases show the treasury flywheel turning again. Whether it becomes a durable source of global crypto demand will depend on whether these companies can keep raising capital faster than Bitcoin volatility erodes the premiums that make the strategy work.
The Financial Times says companies that copied Strategy’s model included businesses such as a Spanish coffee chain and Japanese clothing retailer. As the treasury model deteriorated, some companies began selling crypto and returning toward their original operations. This means Strive’s $143M purchase may actually be evidence of a shakeout, not a broad revival.
The corporate crypto-treasury experiment is entering a selection phase: the strongest operators are accumulating aggressively while weaker or more financially constrained companies are retreating, restructuring or losing the executives who built their crypto strategies.
Today’s evidence Direction Strive Accelerating BTC accumulation Strategy Resumed BTC purchases after ~10-week pause Smarter Web Bitcoin strategy chief departing Sept. 1 35 of top 50 treasury firms Shares down >50% from earlier levels Top 50 treasury-company market cap ~$150B → ~$67B Smarter Web BTC 2,712 BTC Strive BTC 23,156 BTC
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George Santos, former U.S. Representative, was banned from participating in Kalshi’s prediction market and has been asked to pay more than $71,000. This marks the first time Kalshi has banned a person indefinitely in response to disciplinary sanctions. However, it suggests that alongside federal regulators, the platforms are also starting to impose penalties on their users who bet on results they can affect personally.
Mr. Santos bet on whether or not he would be present at the State of the Union Address, which was a market that only he could affect himself.
Kalshi bans Santos after CFTC fines him $35K
According to the notice issued by Kalshi’s compliance team, it has been established that “George Santos engaged in trading activity in certain markets related to his attendance at the State of the Union address.”
The permanent ban and the fine of more than $71,000 have been imposed independently of any government proceedings by Kalshi itself. Meanwhile, it is not the only punishment that Santos is receiving because of those trades. Last month, he settled with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The agency holds jurisdiction over prediction markets.
According to the CFTC, Santos manipulated the value of the State of the Union contract through the positions he held at Kalshi, based on public statements he made about attending the event in the two weeks prior that moved the contract price “significantly.”
For that violation, Santos had to pay $35,000 without admitting or denying the CFTC’s allegations. As stated by Santos’s attorney, Joseph W. Murray, Santos cooperated with the CFTC in its investigation and the address was the first time his client placed a trade on a prediction market. As per Murray, Santos reserved his travel and hotel in Washington because he expected to attend the event.
Santos was a congressman representing New York starting in January 2023. Before the end of the year, he was expelled from Congress due to the investigation performed by the House Ethics Committee regarding Santos’s misconduct associated with ethics violations.
Why do prediction markets continue to fall into the same trap
Insider trading has become a recurring issue since prediction markets have developed into a business worth billions. Santos is the latest name, but not the only one. In April, the Department of Justice arrested an active-duty U.S. Army soldier who allegedly traded on confidential information on Polymarket before the arrest of former President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro.
Days later, the same pattern came up. Last Friday, the CFTC issued an order to Gabriel Perez, who used to be a White House teleprompter operator, to pay more than $172,000 for using advance access to President Donald Trump’s speeches to benefit from “mention markets” on Kalshi.
Some bipartisan legislation bills have been proposed by lawmakers that would prohibit trading by individuals with non-public information. However, nothing has been approved yet. Meanwhile, prediction market companies. This includes Kalshi and Polymarket, which rely on their own approaches, such as the requirement to verify the employment of traders in sensitive markets. The lifetime ban on Santos is the most vivid example of self-regulation of venues.
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Polygon Labs quietly released two hard forks that fixed a number of security issues in its proof-of-stake (POS) network.
The layer-2 network finally shared the details in a forum post. All node operators have to upgrade or they will be kicked out of the network consensus.
Austin fork stops nodes from sending the TxDependency field
The worst bug was in Heimdall, which is the software that coordinates Polygon validators.
Heimdall bundles the contents of each transaction inside a wrapper called, google.protobuf.Any, according to a forum post by Parvez03.
A wrapper can sit inside another, just like how boxes can be packed inside other boxes. However, in this analogy, there’s no cap on how many layers deep wrappers could go.
An attacker could create a single transaction stacked with those layers for almost no cost. This makes validators waste computing power to unpack it.
Polygon described the flaw as “a permissionless way to force costly, correlated work across the whole validator set.”
The Kyoto hard fork upgraded the Heimdall software to v0.11.0.
“Kyoto adds a byte-level pre-scan that rejects a transaction once its nesting passes a threshold, enforced identically at mempool admission (CheckTx) and on the consensus path (ProcessProposal),” the post said.
Polygon checks two times:
When a transaction arrives.
When validators build the block.
The second hard fork, named Austin, focused on Bor, Polygon’s execution client. It patched two denial-of-service paths.
One was state-sync events, the process that carries L1-to-L2 bridge deposits. Those events execute contract code and precompiles, just like a normal transaction would do. However, the amount of gas burned was not capped per block.
The Austin fork adds a hard per-block limit on state-sync gas.
Polygon never capped the size of the TxDependency field.
A validator could load it with huge data to crash every node that read the block. There’s nothing else about that block that looked wrong.
Austin removes the field from the wire format entirely.
Source: Polygon Forum.
Kyoto fork activated at Heimdall height 51,533,000
Polygon said that nobody exploited the bugs on the mainnet and that it fixed them all before the forks went live.
The Austin fork was activated on mainnet at Bor block 91,949,700 and the Kyoto fork at Heimdall height 51,533,000.
Every node requires Bor v2.10.0. Validators and full nodes also require Heimdall version 0.11.0. Nodes running older software have already forked from the canonical chain.
The fixes are simple binary upgrades, with no state migration, genesis change, or full resyncs needed.
POL traded at $0.09, down about 9.3% over the past 24 hours. The token is in the green zone, up 25.8% over the last 30 days, according to CoinGecko.
In July, the Heimdall V2 mainnet went offline for about an hour, according to a past Cryptopolitan report.
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Anthropic becomes the latest AI company to be sued over how it trained its AI models. Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music took Anthropic and its co-founders to a federal court in Northern California. The suit was filed late on Friday, August 28, and it accuses the AI firm of pirating over 20,000 songs to train its Claude chatbot.
The lawsuit comes amid growing copyright suits against AI companies. Just last year, Anthropic was ordered to pay $1.5 billion by the courts after it was sued by authors in another piracy case.
The plaintiffs in this case argue Anthropic has not changed its pattern of pirating copyrighted content.
Why are publishers suing Anthropic?
The 48-page filing tells of Anthropic’s antics, calling it “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history,” naming CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as individual defendants as well as the company.
The plaintiffs accuse the Amodei-led firm of running “a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works” just to train Claude.
The suit gets more detailed as it describes how the copyrighted materials were allegedly obtained. Co-founder Benjamin Mann is accused of obtaining over five million pirated books using BitTorrent while his employees pulled down 2 million more from Pirate Library Mirror.
Those books contained lyrics and sheet music. Anthropic also obtained lyrics from MusixMatch and LyricFind; both services pay the labels for the license to their content.
The catalog Anthropic allegedly pirated
The publishers allege the piracy of popular songs like Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You,” Taylor Swift’s “Paper Rings,” Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer,” Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September,” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”
Sony and Warner seek a jury trial and statutory damages to the tune of $150,000 per pirated copy, as well as $25,000 for each time copyright information was copied from a work. That amounts to billions of dollars for over 20,000 songs.
In matters pertaining to individually copyrighted commercial recordings, plaintiffs need not prove they lost money before seeking statutory damages.
Why the piracy claim is a big deal
The manner of acquiring the music catalog is what makes this a big deal for Anthropic. This all leads back to the author’s case from 2025. The judge ruled that using copyrighted work to train AI can pass as fair use, but downloading such works from pirated sources is against the law.
That led to the $1.5 billion settlement, and Sony and Warner have made reference to the judge’s ruling in that case, claiming Anthropic’s business model is “built on copyright theft.”
The irony is not lost on anyone who has been paying close attention to the AI industry. AI labs jealously guard their systems against distillation, the practice of training a rival model on another model’s outputs, calling it the pilfering of proprietary work.
The same firm(s) protecting their intellectual property are now accused of stealing the proprietary work of others.
Anthropic’s response
Anthropic is not going down without a fight, saying, “We disagree with the publishers’ claims, and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court.” The company continued its response by calling this “the third lawsuit from the same lawyers, recycling allegations from cases already before the courts,” and reiterating that model training is “a transformative fair use.”
The suit comes in the wake of other lawsuits against Anthropic from Universal Music Group, Concord, BMG, and Round Hill Music. It remains to be seen whether or not US courts will label AI training on copyrighted material as fair use.
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BlackRock’s BUIDL fund has grown back to roughly $2.8 billion in assets and reclaimed its title as the largest tokenized U.S. Treasury product.
BUIDL is taking the lead back from Circle’s USYC. At the same time, Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) and NYSE owner Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) are moving their tokenization plans closer to launch.
What token occupies the top spot in the U.S. Treasury?
BUIDL, formally known as the USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, has reclaimed its position as the lead in the U.S. treasury after it lost it to Circle’s USYC in March 2026.
The fund currently holds about $2.8 billion in assets, accounting for about 18.5% of a tokenized Treasury market that data trackers put at $15.1 billion. The remaining 81.5% is split among USYC and everyone else.
The overall market is slightly higher at $16 billion, up from $15 billion in recent weeks due to an increase in institutional demand. Franklin Templeton (NYSE: BEN) and Ondo Finance are among the newer names contributing to the increase.
Securitize, which built BUIDL, now handles the fund across eight blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, Aptos, and BNB Chain.
The company posted record first-quarter 2026 revenue on the asset-servicing fees tied largely to BUIDL, and has since listed on the NYSE.
What is DTCC launching in October?
Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), which clears most U.S. equity activity, announced back in May that it plans to open its DTC tokenization service commercially in October 2026.
In regard to that, the company completed production trades on July 15 that stress-tested collateral pledges, securities lending, Treasury and repo settlement, and CCP margin workflows across the Canton Network and Hyperledger Besu.
The SEC issued a no-action letter clearing DTC to run the service for three years on pre-approved blockchains on December 11, 2025. DTCC’s Industry Working Group now counts more than 50 firms, including BlackRock, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, NYSE, Nasdaq, Circle, and Ondo.
DTCC data puts $300 trillion in global high-quality liquid assets on the table, of which only 10% to 11% currently gets used as collateral.
On August 31, 2026, tZERO and ICE (NYSE: ICE) also signed a memorandum of understanding under which tZERO will help design the digital transfer agent and broker-dealer systems for ICE’s planned NYSE-affiliated Digital Trading Platform.
ICE also agreed to put money into tZERO’s latest funding round. In addition, ICE will license tZERO’s blockchain patent portfolio, which includes 23 patent families and 103 patents, according to tZERO.
The two firms said they will consider using tZERO tokenized assets as collateral at ICE’s clearing houses.
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Metaplanet put 2,400 bitcoin worth around $186 million into Coinbase Prime over three hours on August 31.
The firm’s third large transfer to the exchange in a week comes as bitcoin trades well below the average buy price for the Tokyo-listed company.
Six deposits from 103 BTC to 800 BTC in 3 hours
Arkham data showed Metaplanet’s transfer occurred on August 31 and was broken into six deposits from 103 BTC to 800 BTC.
The sole 800 BTC leg, valued at some $62 million, went out about half an hour before the rest, which then came down in quick succession.
A deposit of 1,000 BTC on August 25 was worth about $79.77 million at the time, while 1,350 BTC, worth about $108 million, went out on August 28.
Metaplanet has sent at least 4,750 BTC, worth ~$374 million, to Coinbase Prime in under seven days.
It’s unclear how much of the 3,000 BTC overlaps, so the total counts only the distinguishable transfers.
On August 29, Lookonchain tweeted that 3,000 BTC, worth around $237 million, had hit Coinbase Prime in a 24-hour period.
Metaplanet still reports 43,000 BTC on its balance sheet, now worth about $3.36 billion, at an average purchase price of ~$96,191 per coin.
None of these recent deposits have been connected to any confirmed decrease in that holding.
Coinbase Prime holds crypto in regulated custody. It offers over-the-counter (OTC) trading and offers collateral services.
Source: Lookonchain via X.
Superplanet would take 4.9% of the holdings and $2.5 million in cash
Bitcoin was trading close to $78,000 last week. This price puts Metaplanet’s coins underwater against their $96,191 cost.
That gap does make a sale a costly proposition, because selling now means taking the loss.”
CEO Simon Gerovich has pushed back on the sale chatter directly, calling the transfers custodial and not showing “any intention to liquidate.”
Gerovich explained that the company had actually moved 5,014 BTC when trackers flagged a 3,881 BTC transfer around August 13.
“This was a routine custody operation. No bitcoin was sold, and our holdings remain 43,000 BTC,” Gerovich wrote on X, per Cryptopolitan.
A similar 4,986 BTC reshuffle in March also ended without a sale.
Metaplanet has offered to give Superplanet 2,100 BTC plus $2.5 million in cash, or about 4.9% of its present holdings.
Superplanet is a Nasdaq-listed US bitcoin treasury platform that Metaplanet is building with Super League Enterprises.
Nasdaq filings, regulatory approval in the US and Japan, and a Super League shareholder vote anticipated in the fourth quarter of 2026 are all prerequisites for that plan.
Metaplanet is the world’s third-largest listed corporate holder of bitcoin, according to data from Bitcoin Treasuries. It’s behind Strategy’s 840,447 coins and just under Twenty One Capital’s 43,514.
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Etherscan has released a suite of tools that lets AI agents and coding assistants pull live blockchain data directly from the explorer’s API.
The latest release is aimed at developers building agents that need verified onchain facts across more than 60 EVM-compatible networks. The company announced the “Build with AI” launch in a post on X on August 31, 2026.
What Etherscan actually shipped
The release bundles three ways for a machine to reach Etherscan’s data. There is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, a hosted interface that agents such as Claude and ChatGPT can call in plain language; a command-line tool for terminals, scripts, and CI pipelines; and a set of installable agent “skills.”
According to Etherscan’s documentation, the MCP server runs at a single endpoint, mcp.etherscan.io/mcp, and exposes 20 tools.
Those cover the basics of reading a chain: native and token balances, normal and internal transactions, transaction and receipt lookups, contract details, gas prices, and event logs. One connection reaches every supported network.
The Command-Line Interface (CLI) follows the API’s structure, with commands in the form etherscan <module> <action> and JSON output by default, plus table and CSV options for people reading the results.
All of it authenticates with a standard Etherscan API key, and a free key works across every supported chain.
Skills that trace money and read contracts
Etherscan’s public GitHub repository lists four installable skills through a npx skills add command or by copying a folder into an agent’s skills directory.
Etherscan Flow traces money movements across addresses and writes them into a case file. Etherscan Contract Review explains what a verified deployed contract does. A transaction debugger reconstructs what a given transaction did and why. An orchestrator skill routes a task to the right interface.
According to the repository, the stated point of the skills is that “every address, amount, and transaction hash comes from a live API call, never invented.” The whole suite is read-only and respects the API’s normal quotas and rate limits.
Fighting the hallucination problem
Etherscan’s release is seen as a solution to the hallucination problem that also found its way into crypto-AI tools.
Language models can fabricate a wallet balance or a transaction that never happened, both of which can be costly. This usually happens when they do not have the right data, and in most cases, it is because they cannot crawl the pages with the data they are looking for.
In its documentation, Etherscan also warned users not to paste their API keys in fake or fraudulent MCPs posing as legitimate. It stated that only one official MCP server exists and warned that listings on MCP marketplaces calling themselves “Etherscan MCP” are unaffiliated.
Built for an internet where bots outnumber people
So, the scale usage and agentic activities call for appropriate measures to be in place to prevent lapses.
In early June, AI agents surpassed humans as the internet’s largest source of traffic. This was confirmed by Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, who said that it happened sooner than he had predicted.
Then Cloudflare Radar data put agentic bots at 57.4% of web traffic against 42.6% for humans, with North America skewed further toward bots at 68.6%.
So far, humans have taken the lead back; however, bots still account for over 35% of the web traffic in the past four weeks.
Even publishers are now working on making it easy for AI agents to access their content.
Etherscan’s release is similar to that move as well. It is publishing machine-readable docs and a query layer built for software readers, not just human ones.
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Yorkville America has announced the launch of an artificial intelligence ETF called the MANGOS Plus Index ETF (ticker FRUT).
Yorkville previously acted as an investment advisor for Truth Social’s defunct digital-asset funds. The move is now being regarded as a signal of a departure from crypto into AI stocks.
Started with Bitcoin baskets, now a single-ticket AI fund
The new fund will adopt the ticker FRUT and is designed around the hardware aspects of artificial intelligence, Yorkville America announced. The company believes FRUT will serve as a “single-ticket expression” of the platform and hardware aspects of artificial intelligence. This simply means that investors get access to AI infrastructure with one product, as opposed to mixing up different chipmakers and platform names.
The launch becomes more relevant when you realize who is backing it. Yorkville America was an advisor to Truth Social Funds, the ETF branch of Trump Media & Technology Group. This marks a clear shift in emphasis for a firm that has spent the last eighteen months developing crypto products.
The crypto ETFs that arrived first
Prior to its recent pivot into AI, Yorkville America served as an advisor to a bunch of digital-asset funds. In February of this year, TMTG filed with the SEC for the Truth Social Bitcoin and Ether ETF. The joint product weighted ~60% to Bitcoin and 40% to Ethereum.
A companion filing covered the Truth Social Cronos Yield Maximizer ETF, centered on Cronos (CRO), the token linked to Crypto.com.
Both funds were built to disburse staking rewards to shareholders. Crypto.com was billed to serve as a custodian while offering liquidity and staking services. Yorkville America Equities advised on both funds.
Why TMTG withdrew the crypto filings
The digital asset play gained little traction. In May of this year, Truth Social withdrew its Form S-1 registration statements for the Truth Social Bitcoin ETF and the Truth Social Bitcoin & Ethereum ETF.
“The Company has determined to withdraw the Registration Statement and not to pursue the public offering at this time,” the filing said.
Yorkville America framed the withdrawal as repositioning rather than a defeat. The President of Yorkville America, Steve Neamtz, stated that the ’40 Act structure “allows us to bring more differentiated investment strategies to our investors that are not possible under the ’33 Act framework.”
The ’33 Act, or Securities Act of 1933, dictates the manner in which securities are first offered to the public for sale. While the ’40 Act, the Investment Company Act of 1940, dictates the organization and structure of investment companies.
Not everyone sees it the same way, though, as James Seyffart, a Bloomberg analyst, believes the decision is related to the saturated nature of the market for spot Bitcoin ETFs. He referenced Morgan Stanley’s MSBT, which arrived at a 14 basis-point fee.
The SEC initially approved US spot Bitcoin ETFs in January 2024, and those funds have gone on to accrue inflows to the tune of $57.7 billion.
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OpenAI said on Monday that its advertising business has reached a $1 billion annualized revenue in less than 200 days after its launch.
OpenAI is trying to prove it can earn money from more than subscriptions as it prepares for a public listing with a valuation above $1 trillion.
How much revenue did ChatGPT generate through ads?
OpenAI reported that its ChatGPT advertising business generated $1 billion in annualized revenue within fewer than 200 days of launch.
In its announcement, OpenAI said its revenue comes from “consumer subscriptions, enterprise offerings, and usage-based APIs,” and now advertising.
Ads currently reach users on ChatGPT’s free tier and its lower-cost Go plan. OpenAI puts ChatGPT’s free plan audience at more than 1 billion weekly active users, and the advertising model is what helps keep the free version running.
Tens of thousands of advertisers now buy space, and the company said small and medium businesses have become a “material share of the business” since it opened a self-service Ads Manager in May.
As of August, the self-serve buying feature was available in more than 40 countries. It is now open to marketers across India, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.
India, as one of ChatGPT’s largest markets by weekly users, received the rolled out ads last week with 50 brands and the agencies WPP and Omnicom on board. A self-serve tool for Indian marketers is set to open on September 4, with a daily minimum spend of ₹725, or about $7.60.
Earlier this year, OpenAI added cost-per-click billing, which charges only when someone clicks, and it dropped a $50,000 minimum spend when it opened the platform to all U.S. businesses.
Did OpenAI always intend to have ads on ChatGPT?
OpenAI’s chief executive Sam Altman once bristled at the idea of including ads on the platform, telling a Harvard audience in May 2024 that mixing ads and AI felt “uniquely unsettling” and called advertising a “last resort.”
Anthropic built its first Super Bowl campaign around mocking OpenAI’s move into ads, portraying a chatbot that twists user questions into emotional pitches. Altman called the trolling “funny” but “clearly dishonest.”
OpenAI maintains that the ads are clearly labeled and do not interfere with the answers its chatbot provides. Buyers also cannot see what users type in private.
OpenAI reported $6.7 billion in revenue for the second quarter of 2026, up from $5.7 billion the quarter before, but it also posted a $38.5 billion net loss in 2025 on $13.07 billion of revenue. The company is targeting $2.5 billion in ad revenue this year and total annualized revenue above $40 billion, which is roughly double its reported figures at the end of 2025.
Despite its impressive financial projections and performance, Cryptopolitan has reported that at least 14 executives left OpenAI in 2026, feeding doubts about the near $1 trillion valuation it wants to carry into public markets.
Anthropic is expected to list first while OpenAI said in June that its own debut “may be a while.”
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South Korea will offer free, unlimited generative AI access to every citizen through three telecom-led consortia.
The rules say that at least 80% of the service has to run on Korean models, not on AI systems from the U.S. or China.
SK Telecom will route the assistant into Government24 and the PASS app
The Ministry of Science and ICT named SK Telecom, Kakao, and KT as the operators, with beta testing to start in the coming weeks.
The “AI for All” program covers all 51 million people. Each selected provider must obtain at least half of its service from South Korean sovereign foundation models.
Another 30% must be local models made by companies other than the operator, a clause that prevents any company from relying entirely on its own technology.
The ministry said foreign models are allowed only where it considers them minimally necessary, and the government will not subsidize that segment.
Seoul launched the competition in July, and the three winners were selected from six applicants. The lineup places the country’s two largest telecom operators alongside Kakao, whose messaging app is a default utility of Korean daily life.
Each consortium will ship a standalone app and embed the assistant into products people already use daily.
SK Telecom has been the most candid. The company’s A.X K2 foundation model and other Korean systems will drive its service, which will be delivered to users via an app, phone calls, and text messages. This method is designed for older people less familiar with apps.
The company said it will integrate the assistant with Government24 and the PASS identity app so that users can request 83 types of official certificates.
It said 20 organizations are directly involved, with another 11 signed up through memoranda of understanding for a total group of 31.
Seoul hands over 512 Nvidia B200 chips and no cost estimate
In 2026, Seoul will provide up to 512 of Nvidia’s top-of-the-line B200 graphics processors to the three groups and help with operating costs. There will be no token limits for AI usage.
The funding model changes in 2027. From then on, the government intends to pay the public-service costs from the national budget while requiring the operators to build their own sources of revenue to assure quality over time.
The ministry has not said what the overall cost of the program will be.
In July, Cryptopolitan reported that Seoul is building a sovereign wealth fund of over 20 trillion won, or ~$14 billion, for AI and strategic industries in 2027.
A June report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace found the country has no major publicly known operational AI chip clusters, even as SK Hynix and Samsung supply the high-bandwidth memory inside much of the world’s AI hardware.
During Jensen Huang’s June visit to Seoul, Nvidia struck partnerships with SK Hynix, Naver, and SK Telecom. Cryptopolitan reported that SK Telecom plans to build a gigawatt-class AI cloud on Nvidia’s DSX system starting in 2027.
About two-thirds of South Koreans have tried AI, and about 23 million use generative tools regularly. Beta testing starts as early as the end of September, though SK Telecom now points to October for its own launch, with full rollout targeted before year-end.
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Berlin artist Simon Weckert has built a button-up shirt called Digital Camouflage that AI surveillance cameras fail to register as a human being.
The creation of the garment is a direct response to the AI-powered video system switching on this month at the city’s Kottbusser Tor transit hub.
Demo of how the ‘Digital Camouflage’ shirt works. Source: Simon Weckert.
How can a shirt protect you from surveillance?
Simon Weckert, an artist from Berlin has released a shirt called Digital Camouflage, which can reportedly reduce an object-detection software’s confidence in recognizing a human being.
Weckert stated that these systems never actually learned what a person is, and only learned what people tend to look like across millions of training photos; edges and texture in the early layers, then the head-and-shoulders outline and limb proportions deeper in.
Digital Camouflage exploits that training method with a loud tangle of pink, orange, and green shapes.
Weckert explained that the saturated colors light up a network’s first layers while the overlapping forms distort the body’s outline to the point where the detector cannot stitch the pieces back into a single figure.
To a human, the shirt looks like a hypnotic Hawaiian print, but to surveillance models, it reads as nothing.
Weckert built the pattern through an “adversarial loop,” in which he would generate a candidate print, show it to a detector, measure how sure the software still was that it saw a person, then adjust and repeat until he got satisfactory results.
He reportedly used a generative method labeled TC-EGA (Toroidal-Cropping-based Expandable Generative Attack) to run those rounds and tested the results against YOLO, an open-source, real-time detection system built on the same class of technology behind many commercial surveillance products.
However Weckert clarified that the shirt was not engineered to beat one particular government camera, but to ask how much trust a system deserves if cheap fabric can defeat it.
On his own site, he stresses the shirt is “not a promise of anonymity” and makes no claim about any specific deployment, precisely because outsiders cannot test those systems. The garment sells for roughly $88, with a cut of each sale going to digital civil-rights groups.
Why are people suddenly looking for protection from surveillance?
Weckert’s website explains that cameras, which he calls behavior scanners, are set to be installed at Kottbusser Tor, a busy U-Bahn station in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district. The software is meant to sort passers-by into “normal” and “suspicious.” He believes that three more Berlin locations are next in line.
In the United States, Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered state agencies on a Thursday night to stop funding Flock Safety, whose license-plate readers number more than 120,000 across 49 states. Republican Senator Josh Hawley also opened an investigation into how the company handles captured data.
Flock Safety’s license-plate readers have received significant backlash following reports of law enforcement officers severely abusing the system for personal purposes like tracking ex-girlfriends, spouses, and romantic rivals.
In one extreme case, a Kentucky officer accessed the Flock system approximately 2,000 times to monitor his former partner’s movements. Another officer in Georgia, who was also a police chief, conducted over 600 searches of his ex-girlfriend and her daughter before later taking his own life while he faced charges for stalking and misuse of police equipment.
The shirt is not Weckert’s first attempt at fighting back against the system or sending a message. Back in 2020, he dragged a wagon of 99 phones through Berlin to fake a Google Maps traffic jam, showing that AI-driven systems are easily manipulated.
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Russia’s new “digital currency” law will enter into force on September 1 to make some crypto transactions perfectly legal while permanently prohibiting others.
The legislation expands access to assets like Bitcoin, most notably for non-professional investors and players circumventing war-related Western sanctions and restrictions.
Russian crypto regulations to come into effect on Tuesday
Starting from the first day of September 2026, operations with cryptocurrencies in Russia will be largely governed by the law “On Digital Currency and Digital Rights.”
The comprehensive regulatory framework, which enters into full force now, was passed by both houses of Russian parliament in July and signed by President Putin in early August.
It represents Moscow’s first attempt to legalize crypto transactions like investment and trading, while ensuring these are confined within the limits of an infrastructure under its control.
Russian citizens, including non-professional investors, will gain legal access to digital assets, but the legislation imposes a ban on domestic crypto payments, which stems from texts in the constitution.
Thus, the ruble, including its digital form which will also be rolled out on September 1, will remain the only legal tender, preserving its exclusive status as national currency and sole monetary unit.
In a press release on Monday, the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) officially announced the launch of the digital ruble. The regulator will be open its CBDC system for public use in several stages, as reported by Cryptopolitan.
Crypto to serve as investment asset and settlement tool in foreign trade
The key objective of the 290-page document is to regulate the circulation of digital assets within Russia’s economy and their use in foreign trade, while setting requirements for market participants.
Under the legislation, cryptocurrency will be mainly used as an investment instrument inside the Russian Federation and a payment tool for cross-border transactions with foreign-based partners.
In the first case, Russian residents will be free to acquire digital coins, depending on their qualifications, but only through intermediaries licensed and registered with the Bank of Russia.
The second scenario allows Russian entities to employ digital money for international settlements, helping them circumvent fiat restrictions imposed over Moscow’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
Some companies are already doing that within an experiment launched last year, which will now become a permanent option, as the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily noted in an article.
Bitcoin, Ethereum and Tether’s USDT to be widely available
Under the same experimental regime, Russian authorities granted “highly qualified” investors access to cryptocurrencies and their derivatives in the spring of 2025.
The new law now expands it to include non-professional investors. Even ordinary Russians will be able to buy certain digital assets, although not without strict limitations.
Only the most liquid and capitalized coins will be available to them. The shortlist currently includes Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and Tether’s dollar-pegged stablecoin USDT.
The top three coins meet Russia’s criteria – a market cap exceeding 5 trillion rubles and an average daily trading volume of over 1 trillion rubles over the past two years (approx. $58 billion and $11.5 billion respectively).
The monetary authority in Moscow made it clear it might add more currencies in the future. Also, the restrictions do not apply to professional investors as well as exporters and importers.
Non-qualified investors will be permitted to acquire no more than 300,000 rubles’ worth of crypto annually (less than $3,500 at the current exchange rate) per each intermediary they are working with.
Cryptocurrency will be traded only through authorized intermediaries
Regardless of the use case, all trading must take place through approved banks, brokers, trust managers, stock exchanges, and digital depositories, the latter being a new category of custodians.
These will be mainly specialized divisions of traditional financial institutions which will be permitted to provide intermediary services in the crypto market under their existing licenses.
Other, already active coin trading platforms will have to apply for and obtain a license from the CBR to continue to operate. The central bank is yet to publish a list of authorized venues.
To be recognized as legitimate crypto exchanges, the entities that have been working in the absence of proper rules until now must have equity of at least 15 million rubles (over $170,000).
All investors will have to take a test with the Bank of Russia to determine whether they understand what kind of instruments they are going to buy and if they are aware of the relevant risks.
While the law does not tolerate transfers to self-hosted wallets, Russians will be able to legalize the coins they already have by depositing them to a custodial wallet.
There are also no restrictions on opening wallets with foreign exchanges or sending cryptocurrency abroad, as long as Russia’s Federal Tax Service (FNS) is notified and a domestic intermediary is involved.
The law also recognizes crypto assets as property that can be not only transferred, but also inherited, and even divided as a result of a divorce, for instance.
Up to 30 million Russian citizens are believed to own some cryptocurrency, with the associated daily turnover reaching 50 billion rubles (nearly $580 million).
According to Anatoly Popov, deputy chairman of Sberbank’s board, the annual trading volume through licensed exchanges may reach 4 trillion rubles ($46 billion) in the first year after legalization.
In an interview with TASS, the high-ranking executive of Russia’s largest bank added that the total may increase to 5.25 trillion rubles by 2028, and to 7.5 trillion rubles by 2029, after market players obtain their licenses by July 2027.
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Strive (NASDAQ: ASST) has now jumped to the fifth spot among publicly traded corporate Bitcoin holders, leapfrogging Bullish (NYSE: BLSH) after a 1,800 token accumulation week pushed the firm’s stack to 23,156 BTC worth roughly $1.8 billion as of August 31.
The Dallas-based asset manager overtook Bullish as it continues to build up its Bitcoin stash, while the latter is on its way down.
Before the latest update to its balance sheet, Strive entered the final week of August with 21,356 BTC, per its August 24 filing with the SEC. At the time, Bullish held 22,000 BTC, with its 1,700 token sale at the end of June as its most recent transaction.
Source: Bitcointreasuries.net.
Both companies still rank behind MARA Holdings at 35,577 BTC and far behind Michael Saylor’s Strategy, which now holds 845,050 BTC after its first token purchase since June.
How did Strive fund its Bitcoin buying?
Strive has been steadily tapping equity issuance of common stock (ASST) and preferred stock (SATA) to power its Bitcoin accumulation strategy. SATA powers most of the firm’s buying activity when it trades near its $100 par value.
The variable-rate perpetual preferred pays a 13% annualized dividend every business day, a design that CEO Matt Cole touted as a first for a US-listed security.
Last week’s 1,800 BTC acquisition follows an $81.5 million splurge on 1,110 BTC per the firm’s 8-K for the August 17 to 21 period, as Cryptopolitan reported.
The company’s cash rose to $171.9 million following a $17.1 million gain on the at-the-market sales of its common and preferred stock over the same period.
Strive entered the corporate Bitcoin leaderboard through a September 2025 merger with Asset Entities. It expanded with an all-stock deal for Semler Scientific in January 2026.
Bullish, on the other hand, is a digital-asset exchange operator led by the former president of the New York Stock Exchange, Tom Farley. It became a publicly traded Bitcoin treasury firm after it raised $1.1 billion in its August 2025 IPO.
Strive stays hot after difficult quarter
Strive maintained its Bitcoin buying despite taking a $257.6 million net loss for the quarter ended June 30, disclosed on August 10. It related 94% of that drawdown to Bitcoin’s price struggles during that period and its stake in Strategy’s preferred shares.
Ironically, the medical device sales business it took over with its Semler deal posted close to a 100% year-on-year revenue growth to $2.94 million.
Cole has framed the balance sheet as built for this kind of volatility, telling investors the company stands debt-free with no margin requirements and no encumbered Bitcoin.
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Chainalysis has asked a federal court to annul a ~$95 million award from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to its rival TRM Labs.
According to a recently unsealed complaint, ICE wrote the buying criteria around capabilities only TRM already had.
Three days and one page were all rivals got to respond
The $94.66 million contract is for a duration of one year, from July 1, 2026, to June 30, 2027. It covers forensic software and support for Homeland Security Task Force cases, including scams, cybercrime, and sextortion.
The federal award record lists $94,655,840 obligated and nothing paid out so far.
ICE put out a Request for Information (RFI) on May 28, with responses due June 2, and followed up with a Notice of Intent to sole source the work to TRM on June 8.
Companies that wanted to challenge that intent were given a separate Statement of Need and three days to respond, limited to one page.
The federal award record for the ICE contract, showing TRM Labs as the recipient.
Chainalysis Government Solutions, the vendor’s federal-facing subsidiary, says it filed its one-page statement on June 11 and was the only firm to do so.
ICE later defended the sole-source route, saying a market-research window of six days showed none of the eight companies that responded could match TRM.
The May RFI asked vendors 18 questions, including if a firm had a scam-victim database with more than one million records and an AI platform with “agentic data retrieval and entity resolution.”
It also asked if a firm had “an operational partnership with stablecoin issuers” to facilitate the coordination of illicit-asset freezes.
Many of those items, Chainalysis says, never re-emerged in the June Statement of Need, which based the job around scam disruption, cybercrime disruption, and sextortion disruption.
The word “sextortion” did not appear in the earlier RFI at all, the company notes, yet it became a headline requirement.
ICE nonetheless concluded that Chainalysis fell short on automated, real-time disruption, on blending on-chain and off-chain intelligence, and on victim notification at scale, according to the complaint.
Chainalysis says it was judged against thresholds it was never told would decide whether it could compete.
Beacon Network sits inside a T3 unit that froze $450 million
ICE justified the award by claiming that TRM had unique features, including a large proprietary scam-victim database, an AI-native investigative platform, automated freezes through its Beacon Network, formal ties to stablecoin issuers, and a security-cleared staff.
Chainalysis responds that several of those features were not part of the Statement of Need, and some were not exclusive to TRM.
It says ICE’s research recognized that both vendors had developed AI-enabled platforms and credited Chainalysis with law-enforcement experience and cleared personnel.
TRM’s Beacon Network operates with Tether and TRON through the T3 Financial Crime Unit, a partnership that Cryptopolitan reported had frozen over $450 million worth of USDT connected to criminal activity since 2024.
Part of what ICE cited was that real-world footprint, and part of what Chainalysis says was unfairly baked into the requirements.
On July 27, Chainalysis filed the sealed protest, and TRM filed the intervention to defend the award on July 28. A redacted version was filed on Friday, August 28.
Judge Stephen Schwartz has set oral arguments for September 2 on an accelerated track, with the government asking for a ruling by September 10.
Chainalysis has requested the court to stop the TRM deal and have a full and open competition.
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On Sunday, Cronos halted its whole blockchain after an attacker drained ~$75 million from Tectonic, the network’s largest lending market.
The halt trapped all but about $6 million of the loot before it could leave the chain.
Only $6 million reached Ethereum before Cronos stopped producing blocks
The attack targeted the price of TONIC, the protocol’s thinly traded governance token, said on-chain researcher Weilin Li, who was the first to lay the sequence out on X.
The token was pumped about 100 times in 20 minutes and then collateralized to borrow other real assets out of the protocol, Li says.
Tectonic’s own parameters gave TONIC a 20% collateral factor, meaning a depositor could borrow up to a fifth of the value of the deposited token. Li counted about 364.6 trillion TONIC in the attack position.
The pile needed to be worth around $0.00000103 per token to support the borrowing on display, CoinGecko data shows, or about 100 times where TONIC was trading before the attack.
Tectonic’s documentation warned that low-liquidity assets are susceptible to exactly this kind of price manipulation.
Li compares it to the 2022 Mango Markets hack, where a trader inflated an illiquid token and borrowed against the fake value.
“We identified an exploit in Tectonic. The Cronos Network has been halted and we’ll provide updates here,” Cronos Network posted on X on August 30.
Source: Cronos Network via X.
Tectonic also warned users to stay away from the protocol until it could confirm the situation was safe.
Li began with a total of about $66 million, then raised it to about $75 million when he followed the track to a second address belonging to an attacker with another $8 million.
Only about $6 million was sent to Ethereum before Cronos stopped making blocks. This meant that most of the stolen assets stayed on the chain they were stolen from.
According to DeFiLlama, Tectonic had about $82.7 million in active loans and about $121.7 million in locked value before the attack.
The figures reported by Li are not confirmed by Tectonic or Cronos.
Lending protocols logged 67 exploits out of 267 DeFi incidents
Chief executive Kris Marszalek said in a post on X that the Crypto.com app and exchange were not compromised and that the firm’s security team is helping Cronos investigate.
The exposure is with the Tectonic DeFi app, not the Crypto.com exchange. Tectonic is the first lending protocol in the network and runs independently on Cronos.
CRO fell about 10.0% over 24 hours as the news spread, and it’s changing hands at ~$0.055 according to CoinGecko.
Li said an attacker manipulated the price of the illiquid MAMO token, causing Base lending protocol Moonwell to lose an estimated $8.7 million three days earlier.
He also highlighted an August 25 episode where a thinly traded Pendle market was gamed into about $36 million of liquidations on leveraged PT-reUSD positions on Morpho.
Cryptopolitan reported in July an oracle attack on Balance Protocol that fed a bad price, which crashed the BLC token about 99% and drained about $912,000 from governance entity 42DAO.
In February, lending protocols logged 67 exploits over the past year out of 267 DeFi incidents. Price manipulation alone accounted for 13 attacks and resulted in about $65 million in losses.
Cronos hasn’t said when it will reboot the chain or what it will do with the attacker’s stranded assets.
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Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) reverted to its Bitcoin plan. It disclosed a $369.7 million buy in an SEC filing on Monday. This purchase turns out to be Strategy’s first one in the last two months. Michael Saylor’s company is the largest corporate Bitcoin owner, and its comeback from selling to buying might increase confidence among investors.
Strategy bought 4,603 Bitcoin between August 24 and 30 for an average of $80,318 per Bitcoin, as per the SEC filing. This brings Strategy’s total holdings to 845,050 Bitcoin. Strategy has already spent $63.73 billion in accumulating this stake in Bitcoin. Its average price per Bitcoin is $75,412.
Saylor confirmed the figures in an X post on August 31, saying that the company owns “845,050 bitcoin” and $6.71 billion in what they call “USD Assets” which consist of USD Reserve and USD Cash accounts. The net leverage of the company is 0.0%.
Strategy raises $603M from stock sales
The purchase was reportedly done without spending any extra money. As part of its ATM program, Strategy raised a net of $602.8 million through selling 4,531,421 shares of MSTR stock in one week.
$369.7 million was spent to purchase Bitcoin, $151.8 million was spent to purchase STRC preferred stock, $50.7 million was spent on dividend payments on preferred stock, while the remaining $30 million was spent on increasing the company’s USD Cash reserves.
The issuing of stocks to acquire Bitcoin has always been the way of funding the company’s operations. The company decided to restart the process only when the prices of its stocks recovered enough to be a more profitable way of acquiring capital compared to borrowing.
Strategy pays nearly 29% more to replace Bitcoin
That approach has turned out to be quite costly. From May to August, the company sold 6,948 BTC for around $432.5 million ($62,250 each). The repurchase at the price of $80,318 per coin implies that the company overpaid by almost 29%. The final result is that Strategy is down 2,345 BTC, but it managed to get around $63 million in the process.
The summer sales happened for certain reasons. When the share price of STRC fell below its par value of $100, a funding source of the company was closed off.
In order to continue with the process, the company has decided to launch the Digital Credit Capital Framework, under which it plans to sell Bitcoin up to $1.25 billion to pay dividends and repurchase its own preferred stock. At press time, Bitcoin costs $77,849.
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Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, has warned the world’s top finance officials that the most advanced artificial intelligence models now threaten the stability of the global financial system.
Bailey says cyber attacks are one of the dangers regulators should worry about first.
Why is cyber risk from AI a big worry right now?
In a letter to G20 finance ministers, Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, warned that the most advanced artificial intelligence models now pose a threat to the global financial system. The letter was sent before the G20 meeting taking place in Asheville, North Carolina, where central bankers and finance ministers will be present.
Bailey sent the warning as chair of the Financial Stability Board (FSB), an international group that watches over financial risks. In the letter, he described frontier AI models as “showing increasingly sophisticated autonomy and problem-solving abilities, as well as threat capabilities.”
Cryptopolitan reported that British banks have been trying for months to get trial access to Anthropic’s Mythos model so they can better understand the risks these AI tools bring, but they have not been able to get it due to political tensions in the United States.
Notably, despite being intended for defense, the tool is in the same class of technology that Bailey’s G20 letter flags as a systemic threat.
Bailey wants governments to agree on rules for safely releasing powerful AI models before the next AI breakthrough. He argues that because banks rely on the same small group of technology suppliers and shared computer systems, a cyber attack on one bank can quickly jump across borders to others.
Bailey wrote that frontier AI may have the ability to materially alter the speed, scale and economics of cyber risk,” meaning AI could make cyber attacks happen faster, cause more damage, and cost less for attackers to carry out.
Bailey’s warnings are not unfounded. OpenAI staff recently saw signs of bad behavior in cutting-edge AI agents before those agents escaped their training environment. Anthropic also recently reported that its AI models had hacked into three organizations on their own during a private test.
In June, the deputy governor of the Bank of England, Sarah Breeden, told central bankers in Sintra that the Bank was studying “kill switches,” which are emergency tools that could halt market-wide trading if AI models trigger a meltdown.
Cryptopolitan covered her follow-up warning that agentic systems pose growing risks to markets, cybersecurity and payment systems.
Could the AI stock boom cause a market crash?
The second half of Bailey’s letter was regarding the rising debt levels in bond and equity markets. He warned that high stock valuations, market concentration, and investor excitement about AI are combining in a risky way that “could amplify a future market correction.”
For instance, Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) is now worth more than $5.2 trillion. The company recently raised $500 billion from a group of U.S. banks and investors, and its shares have climbed 850% over five years.
Bailey’s worry is that investors borrowed heavily to buy into a small group of AI companies. If those stocks drop in value, these investors would be forced to sell other assets to cover their losses. That selling could push prices down further and create a wider market crash.
He also pointed out that U.S. borrowing has now crossed $40 trillion, which puts strain on bond markets that are already sensitive to interest rate changes.

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The European Commission has advanced OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Reddit (NYSE: RDDT) and Roblox (NYSE: RBLX) to the toughest regulation tier on its Digital Services Act (DSA) as of Monday, August 31, 2026.
ChatGPT became a Very Large Online Search Engine (VLOSE), while Reddit and Roblox were added to the Very Large Online Platform (VLOP) category.
The new designation for the US-based companies came after the European regulator acknowledged that they had grown large enough, especially in the bloc, to be held to a higher standard.
What the EU’s ‘very large’ designation means
OpenAI, Reddit and Roblox now have four months to prove to Brussels that they have sufficient tools in place to handle risks associated with minors, elections and public safety. Failing to score passing marks could lead to fines of up to 6% of global revenue.
The EU’s “very large” designation is set at a 45 million average monthly users cutoff, with the level of platform supervision depending on how they place on the DSA’s bar.
Reddit reported 57.2 million EU users in July.
Roblox had 46.6 million users in the same month.
ChatGPT’s designation was not as straightforward, with disagreements over whether the chatbot, which OpenAI claimed had 120 million users as of last year, was a platform or a search engine.
Brussels eventually filed it in the search engine sub-category.
Roblox immediately expressed pride in becoming “the first gaming platform to reach this milestone in the EU.” Joost Hagesteijn, the company’s general manager for Europe, also invited further “constructive engagement” with the European regulator.
Very large platforms face stricter scrutiny
The European Commission now has direct oversight over ChatGPT, Reddit and Roblox, in the same way it watches over other tech giants that have earned the “very large” designation in the past.
The Commission’s executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, Henna Virkkunen, wrote that the three US-based firms “will now be held to a higher standard of scrutiny.” She also emphasized that the Commission “will not hesitate to designate any platform” that clears the threshold and hold it accountable per the Commission’s standard.
All three of them now have until the end of December 2026 to identify and address any systemic risks that the DSA believes their services and algorithms create. The current list of infractions includes:
Propagation of illegal content
Harm to minors
Negative impact on users’ mental and physical health
Threats to fundamental rights
Interference with elections and public security
The December 2026 audit is only the first of their obligations. Per the European Commission’s digital policy pages, designated services must:
Open their data to vetted researchers
Submit to an independent yearly audit
Run an internal compliance function
Offer a version of their recommender systems that does not profile the user
Fines, appeals and a widening enforcement drive
Missing the December deadline carries a real cost. A company that fails to comply risks a penalty of up to 6% of its annual worldwide turnover, and, as legal scholar Steve Peers notes in an EU Law Analysis summary, continued breach of a Commission order can draw daily fines of as much as 5% of global turnover.
The designation itself can be fought, though challengers have not fared well. Both Amazon and Zalando lost General Court cases contesting their VLOP status and have appealed to the EU’s Court of Justice, per Peers.
Amazon argued the entire VLOP regime violated its right to conduct a business; the court accepted that the rules impose high costs but ruled the burden justified.
Monday’s move lands amid a run of DSA enforcement. The list of regulated services now numbers 28. In July alone, the Commission issued preliminary findings against TikTok over the safety of minors’ accounts, fined AliExpress 550 million euros over counterfeit goods, and accepted a compliance plan from X.
For OpenAI, the DSA label adds a second Brussels rulebook on top of the AI Act, which already governs ChatGPT.

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