Global Crypto Press | Crypto News Today - The Latest Cryptocurrency Market & Bitcoin News

Citi Doubles Its Bitcoin Target to $113k as Warnings of an Altcoin Bloodbath Get Louder...

Publishing@GlobalCryptoPress.com (Silicon Valley Newsroom) — Sat, 3 Oct 2026 04:59:00 -0700

Citigroup raised its 12-month Bitcoin price target from $82,000 to $113,000 and its Ethereum target from $2,240 to $3,028, citing stronger crypto market activity, a supportive macro backdrop, and the return of ETF inflows. The note, dated September 30 and reported by Reuters on October 1, reverses two cuts Citi made earlier in 2026. Meanwhile, Gareth Soloway, chief market strategist at VerifiedInvesting.com, is warning that altcoins could lose 30% to 50% of their value if Bitcoin dominance keeps climbing. Both can't be right - or maybe they both are, which is the part that should make you uncomfortable.

Citi's Case: ETF Flows and Macro Tailwinds

Citi analyst Alex Saunders built the revised targets on three pillars: activity, macro, and ETF flows. The bank now expects $5 billion in inflows into crypto investment products over the next 12 months, replacing its previous assumption of flat net buying. The logic is that financial advisers and brokerages will gradually increase Bitcoin allocations through ETFs, creating a slower but steadier demand floor than the speculative waves of 2025.

The flow data backs that up. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs pulled in $2.39 billion during the week ending September 25 - the largest weekly inflow since October 2025 - extending a nine-session streak that totaled about $3.08 billion. Ether products received $689.88 million that same week. The streak broke on September 30 with $148.7 million in net outflows, led by Fidelity's Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund pulling $125.6 million. Over the preceding three months, Bitcoin gained nearly 40% and Ethereum 68%, though both remain down roughly 3% and 9% year-to-date. Citi's $113,000 target sits about 10% below Bitcoin's October 2025 record of roughly $126,200.

Saunders also pointed to SEC rulemaking as a factor. The Senate's failure to advance the Clarity Act in September had "narrowed the path to a market-structure bill," but subsequent SEC regulatory proposals - including new rules on crypto custody and a nationwide preemption framework - took the edge off the negative sentiment. Citi even acknowledged that a 2028 administration change could reverse agency rules, though it placed that risk outside its forecast horizon.

The Altcoin Warning: Dominance Is the Kill Switch

While Citi paints a rosy picture for the majors, Soloway is looking at the same market and seeing trouble for everything else. His argument hinges on Bitcoin dominance, which he says broke above a long-running downward trend line and then retested it - a pattern that has preceded major market turns before. If dominance keeps climbing, the math gets ugly fast.

A 10% Bitcoin decline could push BTC back to the mid-$70,000 range and drag altcoins down 30% to 40%. A deeper 20% correction could mean a 50% altcoin wipeout. Soloway's key level to watch is $81,000 - a daily close below that would break Bitcoin's current bull flag pattern and open the path toward $70,000. He still believes the cycle low is in, but his short-term view is that sideways or slightly down Bitcoin action could still crush altcoins.

Bitcoin dominance sat around 58-60% entering October, with the altcoin season index near 30, meaning most altcoins are already underperforming Bitcoin. The divergence is widening: institutional money is flowing into Bitcoin ETFs and Ethereum ETFs, while altcoins are left fighting for scraps.

Two Exploits, One Bad Week for Altcoins

The altcoin space didn't exactly help its own case. NEAR Protocol's cross-chain swap system, NEAR Intents, lost about $3.8 million to an exploit on October 1. The bug sat in the interaction between NEAR Intents' Omni deposit-and-withdrawal infrastructure and its smart contract. Blockchain investigator ZachXBT traced the stolen funds to KuCoin, where they were bridged into Bitcoin. PeckShield flagged that the attacker's address had interacted with a wallet linked to North Korea's Lazarus Group, though no official attribution has been made.

The irony is thick. NEAR Intents had blocked more than $50 million tied to the Bitget hack from being laundered through its solver network just two days earlier. It fended off one attack and then got hit through a different door. The NEAR token fell as much as 8.6% intraday to around $4.92, giving back gains from a September where it had roughly doubled. The exploit also came two days after Bitwise's NEAR ETF began trading in the U.S. - a brutal juxtaposition of progress and setback.

Stacks Bucks the Trend

One altcoin that refused to die was Stacks (STX), which surged 20% to 28% after founder Muneeb Ali was named CEO of Stacks Labs, replacing interim CEO Alex Miller. The rally coincided with the network's Bitcoin staking program entering its expansion phase. Stacks launched its Genesis Bond on September 10, letting institutions lock BTC on Bitcoin L1 alongside an STX position and earn BTC-denominated rewards. By September 24, participants had bonded 230 BTC alongside 310,000 STX, earning 0.28 BTC in weekly rewards. The next bonding period opens October 10 with 500 BTC of capacity - more than double the initial round.

Ali's priorities include bringing more Bitcoin capital onto Stacks, expanding institutional adoption, and pushing toward a 100x throughput increase. Anchorage Digital is building custody infrastructure for institutional participants. The roadmap also lists privacy tools and post-quantum security. Whether any of that justifies a 28% price move in a day is a separate question, but at least Stacks is building something while the rest of the altcoin market waits to see if dominance kills them.

The market right now is split between two stories that don't reconcile neatly. Wall Street sees Bitcoin heading to $113,000 on the back of ETF flows and macro support. Technical analysts see altcoins heading for a 30-50% haircut if Bitcoin dominance keeps rising. Both can be true if the money flowing into ETFs stays concentrated in Bitcoin and Ethereum while the long tail of altcoins bleeds out. The Citi target is a directional signal, not a timing tool. The altcoin warning is a risk model, not a prophecy. Trade accordingly, and maybe keep some dry powder for when one of them is proven wrong.

---------------

Author: Cedric Holloway
New York Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

MetaMask Yanks 17,000 Ethereum Validators Offline After a "Pocket Change" Sized Theft...

Publishing@GlobalCryptoPress.com (Silicon Valley Newsroom) — Fri, 2 Oct 2026 07:52:00 -0700

An attacker walked off with roughly 0.36 ETH - worth less than a thousand dollars - from MetaMask's Ethereum staking operation. The response? MetaMask yanked roughly 17,000 validators holding about 523,000 ETH, worth around $1.4 billion at current prices, off the network. The ratio of damage done to damage prevented is, to put it mildly, not 1:1.

The incident started on September 30, 2026, when MetaMask disclosed what it called "an ongoing security incident affecting part of our infrastructure." The company was quick to stress it had found no immediate threat to MetaMask wallets. The issue was confined to MetaMask Staking, the validator business formerly known as Consensys Staking, which runs Ethereum validators for Lido, Coinbase, and its own pooled staking product.

What Actually Got Stolen

Not much, is the honest answer. According to on-chain analysis by security researcher 0xKaden and a detailed investigation by Bitquery, the attacker changed the fee-recipient address on about 18 of 19 MetaMask-operated validators that had earned block rewards on September 30. For roughly four and a half hours, between 12:12 and 16:46 UTC, block tips - the extra fees users pay to get transactions included in a block - were redirected to a wallet funded through Tornado Cash.

The total haul: 0.36 ETH. About $950. The wallet, which received 0.1 ETH from Tornado Cash at 10:27 UTC that morning, hadn't moved by the next day. No validator stake was taken. No slashing occurred. The attacker couldn't reach the staked ETH itself, because withdrawal credentials are controlled by the clients, not by MetaMask's staking infrastructure.

So why the massive response? Because the attacker had access to the machines that sign blocks and set fee addresses. That means the signing keys may have been exposed. A signing key can't be rotated - the only fix is to exit the validator entirely and start fresh with a new key. MetaMask began pulling validators before the first tip was even diverted, which suggests they spotted something suspicious early and decided the nuclear option was the safe one.

The Chain Reaction

The exits hit Ethereum's staking queue hard. The withdrawal queue jumped from about 200,000 ETH to over 700,000 ETH in a single day, pushing wait times from three and a half days to nearly two weeks. Lido, whose stETH token is backed by validators MetaMask operates, told stETH holders that the last affected validator would exit by October 7. The full cycle - exit, withdraw, redeposit under fresh keys, and re-enter the activation queue - could take up to 45 days, during which that ETH earns nothing.

For Lido stakers, the real cost isn't stolen funds. It's lost time. About 0.19 ETH in tips from 11 Lido-set blocks went to the intruder instead of Lido's rewards vault. Lido's reserve of 6,750 stETH would have covered a worst-case slashing scenario for its own validators. But had every MetaMask-run validator been slashed simultaneously - which didn't happen - about 22,000 ETH would have burned, exceeding Lido's reserve. The system dodged a much bigger bullet.

A Troubling Backdrop

This isn't happening in a vacuum. Back in July, Drop Site News reported that Consensys - MetaMask's parent company, before it rebranded - had unknowingly hired a software developer linked to North Korea as a consultant for about a month. There's no evidence connecting that incident to the September 30 staking breach. But the Tornado Cash funding, the KuCoin routing, and the quiet professionalism of the attack are enough to make anyone in staking infrastructure a little nervous.

It's also not the first time a staking provider has had to pull validators over a suspected compromise. Kiln, a competing operator, exited all its active validators last September after a $41 million loss in its SOL staking operations, rotating signing keys and treating related infrastructure as potentially compromised. The pattern is becoming familiar: a small breach, a large precautionary response, and a lot of questions about how keys are stored and who can reach them.

MetaMask hasn't publicly explained how the attacker got in, whether signing keys were actually compromised, or which specific infrastructure component was targeted. The company said it's working with external security partners and has not provided further details. For the thousands of stakers whose ETH is now sitting in an exit queue, the silence is not exactly reassuring.

The takeaway for anyone staking ETH through a provider: your principal is probably safe if the provider doesn't control withdrawal keys. But your rewards, your uptime, and your patience are all on the line when something goes wrong. A $950 theft triggered a $1.4 billion validator exodus and a two-week bottleneck for withdrawals. The math is absurd, but the logic is sound. In staking, a compromised signing key isn't a small problem - it's a reason to burn everything down and start over.

---------------

Author: Dorian Fenwick
Silicon Valley Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

Bitwise Launches NEAR ETF, With 33% of Staking Rewards Going to Fees...

Publishing@GlobalCryptoPress.com (Live Newsroom) — Fri, 2 Oct 2026 02:46:41 -0700

Bitwise's new NEAR fund brings staking to brokerage accounts, but a third of the rewards is earmarked for fees.

The Bitwise NEAR ETF launched on NYSE Arca on September 29, 2026, under the ticker NRR. Bitwise describes it as the first spot NEAR exchange-traded product in the United States. Its launch announcement highlights network staking rewards of roughly 5%. Investors comparing that figure with the fund's 0.75% annual management fee need to account for a separate charge on the staking rewards themselves.

The prospectus, dated September 24, assigns 33% of the additional NEAR generated by staking to staking expenses. Those fees are shared among the staking agents, the custodian and the sponsor. The trust keeps approximately 67% of the staking rewards. That split does not replace the annual management fee. It means a headline network reward rate cannot be read as the return an NRR shareholder will receive.

How the staking arithmetic changes

A simple illustration shows the difference. If the gross staking rate stayed at exactly 5%, retaining 67% would leave 3.35% before the management fee. Subtracting 0.75 percentage points gives roughly 2.60%, assuming the entire holding stayed staked for a year and ignoring compounding, other costs and token-price changes. That is an illustration of the fee arithmetic, not a forecast or a quoted fund yield. Actual results depend on how much NEAR is staked, the rewards earned and the value of those tokens.

Bitwise's approximately 5% figure is an annualized network rate measured as of September 25. The company says rewards accrue through the fund's net asset value per share, so the figure should not be mistaken for a promised cash payout. Its stated plan is to use its institutional staking team. The announcement does not establish a full year's realized results for this newly launched product. A lower NEAR price can also outweigh the value of additional tokens earned through staking.

The AI pitch still needs to deliver

Bitwise is marketing NEAR as infrastructure for an economy in which AI agents make payments and coordinate transactions. The fund gives brokerage investors another route to express that investment view. It does not establish how much future business those agents will bring to the network. Nor does an exchange listing turn expectations about AI adoption into earnings for token holders. The investment case still depends on demand for NEAR, while the fees apply regardless of whether the AI story delivers.

For traders, the practical comparison is the convenience of holding fund shares against the cost and responsibilities of holding and staking tokens directly. NRR's shares can trade above or below the value of the assets they represent. The product also lacks the same protections as funds registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940. As trading develops, watch the bid-ask spread and the fund's reported staking participation alongside the management fee. The useful number is the reward that actually reaches the fund after costs, considered together with NEAR's price performance.

---------------

Author: Dorian Fenwick
Silicon Valley Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

Your Next Bitcoin Payment Could Come From an AI Agent - Block Adds Lightning to x402

Publishing@GlobalCryptoPress.com (Live Newsroom) — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 09:00:00 -0700

Block wants Bitcoin to handle the tiny payments AI agents make while getting things done online.

The company announced on September 24 that it had joined the x402 Foundation and contributed Lightning payments to the protocol. Its announcement puts Bitcoin into an open standard for software that can request and pay for services. Block sees fast, inexpensive transactions as essential to that market. The development gives Bitcoin holders a practical adoption story to follow beyond the next price target.

The proposed customer is often a program acting for a person or business. Think of an agent paying for a piece of data it needs to complete a task. The payment could happen within its interaction with the service, without a person stepping through a checkout each time. That is the kind of repeated, small transaction Block is targeting. It is also a very different use of Bitcoin from parking a large balance in a treasury.

A payment request built into the web

The standard uses HTTP 402, the web's Payment Required response. A service receiving an unpaid request can return instructions for payment. The client pays and retries, allowing the service to deliver the requested resource. The x402 project describes applications including paid API access and digital content. Developers can support multiple networks or payment schemes through the same framework.

That flexibility is part of the significance of Lightning joining. The standard is designed to work across currencies and networks, under Linux Foundation governance. Block's contribution adds another way to settle payments inside it. Businesses still need to build services that accept the method, and users need software capable of paying that way. A supported payment option only becomes useful when the two sides actually meet.

The demand still has to show up

At the time of review on September 25, x402's website displayed 75.41 million transactions and $24.24 million in volume for the previous 30 days. Those are figures for the overall protocol. They cannot be counted as activity generated by Block's new Lightning contribution. Block's announcement did not provide a separate Lightning transaction total or a consumer-product rollout date. It would be premature to treat its participation as evidence that millions of agents are already spending bitcoin through the integration.

Block says it will keep contributing to Lightning support and the foundation's working groups. It also plans further tools for agent-driven commerce. The useful test now is whether developers turn that work into services people repeatedly use. Watch for named deployments and payment activity that can actually be attributed to Lightning. The technology has a new route to customers; sustained use will tell us how much that route matters.

---------------

Author: Dorian Fenwick
Silicon Valley Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

Bitget Raises Hack Estimate to $387.5 Million, Withdraws Still Suspended for All Users...

Publishing@GlobalCryptoPress.com (Live Newsroom) — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 17:10:44 -0700

Bitget's hack just got more expensive, and customers are still waiting for a withdrawal update.

The exchange raised its estimate to $387.5 million in a September 25 update, replacing the earlier $351.6 million figure. It attributed the difference to previously uncounted Zcash and TRON transfers. Bitget said the revision reflects better accounting of the original incident, not another attack. That distinction matters when an already substantial loss grows overnight.

The original alarm came at 18:31 UTC on September 24, according to Bitget's security notice. The company said only part of its hot and warm wallet infrastructure was affected and its cold wallets remained secure. It paused withdrawals while keeping deposits and trading open. Bitget also said account balances remained accurate. Customers therefore face a separation between what their accounts show and their ability to move those assets elsewhere.

The investigation points beyond stolen keys

CEO Gracy Chen has described a compromise of a backend wallet service, according to Cointelegraph. Her account was that attackers forged transfer information and triggered the authorization-signing process. She said the preliminary investigation did not point to leaked private keys. That would put the weakness in the systems instructing transfers, rather than possession of the keys alone. A complete technical explanation is still important before treating that account as the final root-cause finding.

Chen also raised the possibility of North Korean involvement, citing IP and VPN patterns resembling those associated with a North Korean group. That is a preliminary attribution by the exchange's chief executive. It should not be presented as an independently established identity for the attacker. Mandiant and SlowMist are assisting the investigation, Bitget said. For affected customers, identifying the perpetrators and restoring access are separate problems, even when both are being worked on at once.

A coverage promise still needs an operational recovery

Bitget's original notice said its User Protection Fund held more than $464 million and covered the incident. That was the exchange's assurance about its own resources. It does not mean the stolen assets have already been returned. The September 25 update says some funds have been frozen and introduces conditional 5% bounties for eligible freezing or recovery work. Freezing funds and returning them to the exchange are different stages of that process.

Bitget says it has fixed the vulnerability and is validating security before restoring withdrawals. It promises an announcement about withdrawal status or timing by September 26 at 04:00 UTC. That is a deadline for information, not a guaranteed reopening time. The next useful evidence is a clear service update followed by withdrawals actually working again. Until then, the larger loss estimate and the coverage pledge should be read alongside the access restrictions customers still face.

---------------

Author: Ren Nakamura
Asia Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

SEC Opens a Five-Year Door to Onchain Stock Trading - But Companies Can Say No

Publishing@GlobalCryptoPress.com (Live Newsroom) — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 07:07:00 -0700

Wall Street shares are getting a new route onto crypto trading infrastructure, but the companies behind those shares still get a say.

The SEC issued its Innovation Exemption on September 17, giving qualifying venues a temporary path to trade tokenized U.S. stocks through automated market makers and liquidity pools. Its announcement sets a five-year expiry after publication. The relief covers specified exchange and dealer requirements, subject to conditions. For crypto traders, the immediate significance is a defined framework for bringing familiar stock exposure into an onchain trading environment.

The SEC calls the operators Tokenized Securities Venues, or TSVs. They provide the pools and decide who can access trading. Commissioner Hester Peirce said the exemptions are available to U.S. persons, including established businesses and newcomers. She described the move as an interim step that will help regulators observe how blockchain markets and traditional markets interact. Her statement also makes clear that this framework addresses one particular trading model, leaving room for other approaches.

A stock token has to come with shareholder rights

The venues must verify that qualifying tokens give holders the same rights and privileges as the equivalent traditional shares. That matters because a token tracking a share price can sound deceptively similar to owning the share itself. The SEC's order excludes third-party securities that merely provide synthetic exposure to another security. It also prohibits primary issuance and initial offerings on these venues under this exemption. Traders will need to look at what a product actually represents before treating a familiar ticker as proof of ownership.

Companies also have a way to refuse certain listings. If a token was created by an unaffiliated third party, the venue must notify the underlying stock's issuer and wait at least 30 calendar days after receipt. A written objection delivered within that window prevents the venue from making that token available for trading. Separately, a venue must publish its own operational notice at least 30 calendar days before starting. Those waiting periods mean the announcement does not translate into an instant menu of every U.S. stock in your wallet.

Public blockchains, controlled access

The design combines public infrastructure with permissioned trading. Smart contracts must be public and auditable, and operate on a public, permissionless distributed ledger. The venues still set entry standards for participants using their pools. They must also stop trading a tokenized stock when its underlying stock is halted or suspended on the primary listing exchange. Moving the trade onchain does not make those market stoppages disappear.

Commissioner Mark Uyeda highlighted limits on the number of symbols and trading volume, along with public transaction data intended to make activity easier to monitor. He said the framework would give the agency practical evidence for future policymaking. That leaves a concrete test for the businesses pursuing this market: attract usable liquidity while meeting the conditions. For readers, the next developments worth watching are actual venue notices and the stocks those venues can support. The SEC has supplied a route forward; which shares become available, and how well they trade, will determine how useful it is.

---------------

Author: Cedric Holloway
New York Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

Your Old Email Password Could Unlock Your Crypto Account, Police Warn

Publishing@GlobalCryptoPress.com (Live Newsroom) — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 06:30:53 -0700

The password you reused years ago could give someone a route into your crypto account today.

Singapore police warned on September 12 that they have seen an increase in unauthorised access to cryptocurrency accounts through compromised email since mid-August, according to CNA. Investigators found that several affected email accounts had appeared in earlier data breaches on other platforms. Police said exposed credentials and password reuse may have helped attackers gain access. The warning concerns account takeovers, and does not establish that an exchange's own systems were breached.

Once inside an inbox, attackers may be able to work out which crypto services its owner uses. Police described the possibility of password-reset requests followed by interception of reset links, verification messages or one-time passwords delivered by email. They also warned that intruders may alter inbox rules to hide exchange messages by forwarding, archiving or deleting them. That makes a quiet inbox a poor substitute for checking the account itself. A notification cannot warn you if someone has arranged for you never to see it.

The inbox deserves the same attention as the exchange

The practical issue is how much authority your email account has over your other accounts. If it receives recovery links, access to that mailbox can become part of the route to changing a login. Reusing a password creates another connection between services that might otherwise have little to do with each other. An old breach at one website can therefore remain relevant long after you stopped using that website. The police's wording leaves room for differences between individual cases, so this should not be read as a claim that every exchange can be unlocked with email alone.

The warning follows a separate August 21 police advisory about criminals allegedly impersonating Apple support to steal cryptocurrency. In that scheme, police said victims were directed to fraudulent websites and asked for login details and one-time passwords. The reported sequence included unexpected device prompts and unsolicited calls claiming that an account was compromised. Police recorded at least five cases after August 7 in that earlier warning. Those were separate incidents, but they illustrate why an urgent offer to secure an account also needs checking through the provider's official channels.

Check the settings that can hide a takeover

For the latest warning, police recommended unique passwords and multi-factor authentication, with an authenticator app preferred over SMS where available. Their advice also included reviewing email forwarding rules and suspicious login activity. Crypto users were urged to inspect transaction history and enable activity alerts where supported. That review needs to include the mailbox receiving those alerts. Security settings on the exchange are only part of the picture when account recovery depends on another service.

Anyone who suspects a compromise should contact both the email provider and the crypto exchange promptly, police said, asking them to secure or freeze affected accounts where possible. Password changes should cover the affected accounts and other services where the same password was used. A suspicious login or unexplained forwarding rule deserves attention even before you spot an unfamiliar withdrawal. The useful response to this warning is to check your recovery route while you still control it. Start with the inbox that receives your exchange emails.

---------------

Author: Ren Nakamura
Asia Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

NASDAQ Bets $100 Million on Kraken's Parent as Tokenized Stocks Target 2027...

Publishing@GlobalCryptoPress.com (Live Newsroom) — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 05:34:52 -0700

Nasdaq is putting $100 million behind Kraken's parent company, with tokenized stock trading on the agenda for 2027.

The exchange operator announced the investment agreement with Payward on September 10. Its venture arm will make the investment as the companies expand an existing partnership. Their Nasdaq Equity Tokens, or NETs, are expected to launch in the second quarter of next year. For traders accustomed to crypto markets that never close, the attraction is easy to understand: bringing more of that flexibility to stocks.

The companies still have work to do before that becomes a product traders can use. Nasdaq's announcement describes an agreement to invest and an expected launch date. It does not announce that NET trading has opened today. The distinction matters when a headline combines a familiar Wall Street name with a large dollar figure. A development timetable is useful information, but it is not a completed rollout.

A bigger role for Kraken's parent

The deal values Payward at $21 billion, according to Bloomberg reporting cited by CNBC. That figure is a reported valuation of the company, separate from Nasdaq's $100 million investment. CNBC places the agreement within Kraken's expansion into a broader platform spanning traditional financial products as well as crypto. The distinction is relevant to readers who see every institutional crypto headline as a fresh purchase of Bitcoin. This transaction concerns an ownership investment in a business building trading infrastructure.

The partnership also reaches the systems used to monitor trading. Payward plans to adopt Nasdaq's surveillance technology across its venues, covering crypto and traditional asset markets. Surveillance is less glamorous than a new token launch, but it is part of how venues look for suspicious activity. Adding technology does not, by itself, establish that misconduct cannot happen. Customers will still need to judge the venues and products they use on their actual operation.

What will the token actually give you?

One issue deserves as much attention as the launch date: the rights attached to the token. CNBC describes a wider dispute over tokenized stocks, including a clash between Robinhood and AMC over products referencing AMC shares. Economic exposure to a share price and shareholder rights are different questions. Nasdaq says its framework is designed to preserve protections for issuers and investors. Readers should check the eventual product terms rather than assume that every instrument called a tokenized stock works the same way.

For now, the concrete development is a major exchange operator committing capital to its partnership with a crypto company. The commercial opportunity depends on turning that relationship into a service people can actually access and use. The next useful details will concern launch availability and the terms offered to customers. Traders should also look for clear explanations of how ownership and settlement work in the finished product. The second quarter of 2027 is the milestone to watch, with delivery still ahead.

---------------

Author: Cedric Holloway
New York Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

As Congress Debates Crypto Regulations in the CLARITY Act, Trump Pushes for Republicans to Vote 'YES'...

Publishing@GlobalCryptoPress.com (Silicon Valley Newsroom) — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 03:30:36 -0700

Congress is debating the CLARITY Act, aimed at regulating cryptocurrency and supported by the crypto industry - and Trump wants it passed..

Video Courtesy Of Fox News

Anti-Crypto U.S. Sheriffs Organization Changes Their Stance to 'Neutral'...

Publishing@GlobalCryptoPress.com (Silicon Valley Newsroom) — Wed, 9 Sep 2026 05:00:00 -0700

One of the louder institutional critics of the CLARITY Act has stepped out of the way just before the bill reaches a major Senate test.

The National Sheriffs' Association has changed its position on the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act from opposition to neutral. The shift does not amount to an endorsement, but it removes a law-enforcement group that had spent months warning senators that parts of the bill could make crypto crime harder to investigate.

In a September 3 letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the association said the legislation remains complex and that important details are still under consideration. The group said it would step back and allow lawmakers to continue building a regulatory framework. Cointelegraph reported the change on September 4.

Why the Sheriffs Were Fighting It

The National Sheriffs' Association was not opposing crypto regulation in general. Its earlier objections focused on provisions it believed could weaken law enforcement's ability to trace transactions and recover money linked to fraud and other crimes.

The group raised particular concerns about proposed exemptions affecting crypto mixers and certain registration requirements. Its argument was straightforward: if services capable of obscuring transactions sit outside traditional compliance rules, investigators may have fewer tools when stolen assets move through them.

Those arguments mattered politically because several senators whose votes could be decisive have emphasized anti-money-laundering protections and consumer fraud. A law-enforcement organization opposing the bill gave skeptical lawmakers another reason to hold back.

Neutral Is Not the Same as Satisfied

The new position should not be read as the sheriffs suddenly deciding every problem has been fixed.

The association said important details remain under consideration. It is stepping aside rather than declaring victory. That distinction matters because lawmakers are still negotiating provisions touching stablecoin rewards, tokenized securities, decentralized finance and potential conflicts of interest involving government officials.

For the crypto industry, however, losing an opponent is still valuable even when it does not gain a supporter. Senate floor math is not known for rewarding philosophical nuance.

The September 15 Vote Is Real

The House passed H.R. 3633, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025, on July 17, 2025 by a 294 to 134 vote. The official Congressional Record confirms the tally.

The next major test is now on the Senate calendar. The Senate's official schedule says the cloture motion on H.R. 3633 will ripen on Tuesday, September 15 at 2:15 p.m. Eastern time.

Cloture is a procedural vote used to limit debate and move a measure forward. In practice, it is a major test of whether Senate leadership has enough support to advance the legislation rather than letting it remain stuck.

What CLARITY Is Trying to Do

The central purpose of the bill is to establish a clearer division of authority over digital assets, particularly between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The crypto industry has spent years operating under a system where the legal status of a token can depend heavily on how it was issued, sold, marketed and used. Exchanges have repeatedly argued that they cannot reliably determine which assets regulators consider securities until enforcement arrives after the fact.

CLARITY attempts to create a framework for digital commodities and related market intermediaries, while setting rules around registration, disclosures and the application of existing securities and commodities laws.

Supporters say that would let legitimate companies operate in the United States under defined rules rather than moving activity offshore. Critics worry that definitions or exemptions could leave consumers exposed, weaken securities protections or create loopholes for illicit finance.

There Are Still Bigger Political Problems

The sheriffs' move helps, but it does not clear the bill's path to the president's desk.

Lawmakers and interest groups are still fighting over stablecoin rewards, tokenized equities, DeFi treatment and ethics questions involving political officials with crypto business interests. Those disputes are more likely to decide the bill's final shape than the National Sheriffs' Association alone.

Even if the Senate advances the measure, differences between House and Senate language may need to be reconciled before final passage.

Why Crypto Markets Care

For traders, CLARITY matters less because of any single paragraph in the bill and more because of what it could change about the U.S. market.

A workable market-structure law could make it easier for exchanges to list assets, for traditional financial firms to enter crypto markets and for token issuers to understand which regulator they answer to. It could also reduce the regulatory premium investors place on U.S.-focused crypto companies.

Failure would not stop the industry. The SEC and CFTC have already been moving on crypto policy under existing authority. It would, however, leave major questions dependent on agency interpretation and future administrations.

The National Sheriffs' Association has not blessed the CLARITY Act. It simply stopped trying to block it. With a Senate procedural vote scheduled for September 15, that is still meaningful: one fewer organized opponent stands between the bill and its next major floor test.

----------------
Author: Dorian Fenwick
Silicon Valley Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

Wall Street Keeps Buying Bitcoin...

Publishing@GlobalCryptoPress.com (Silicon Valley Newsroom) — Mon, 7 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700

Institutional Bitcoin demand is doing something traders have not seen much of this year: getting stronger for several weeks in a row.

U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs took in roughly $986.9 million during the week ending September 4, bringing their three-week net inflow total to about $3.8 billion. That is the strongest three-week stretch of 2026, according to SoSoValue data cited by Cointelegraph.

The timing is what makes the move interesting. Bitcoin has been trading around the $80,000 area while interest-rate expectations keep shifting underneath it. On Thursday, the ETFs pulled in nearly $731 million in a single session, their biggest daily haul since January. BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust, IBIT, again accounted for a large share of the buying.

Three Weeks of Buying Have Changed the Picture

The current run is a sharp reversal from the first half of the year, when repeated ETF redemptions often amplified Bitcoin's selloffs. After three consecutive weeks of positive flows, total net assets across U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs stood at about $101.3 billion on Friday, while cumulative net inflows since launch reached roughly $55.6 billion.

Year-to-date flows are still slightly negative at roughly $1 billion in net outflows. That detail matters because it shows how much ground the ETFs had to recover. The recent $3.8 billion wave is not simply adding to an already euphoric year. It is repairing one that began badly.

Friday also showed that demand did not vanish as soon as the macro picture got rougher. Spot Bitcoin ETFs still attracted about $174.6 million in net inflows, with BlackRock's IBIT taking roughly $117.4 million and Fidelity's FBTC about $57.2 million.

Then the Jobs Report Hit

The macro setup turned less friendly on Friday.

U.S. employers added 162,000 jobs in August, far above the roughly 56,000 economists had expected. The unemployment rate held at 4.1%, while labor force participation rose. Wage growth eased slightly to 3.1% from a year earlier, but the headline employment number was strong enough to push markets toward a more hawkish Federal Reserve outlook.

Interest-rate futures moved toward roughly a 60% chance of a September rate hike after the report. Reuters reported that the August gain was the largest in five months and well above the consensus forecast.

Bitcoin responded the way rate-sensitive assets usually do. It slipped from around $81,200 to below $79,000 before recovering part of the move, while Treasury yields and the dollar moved higher.

That reaction gives traders a useful stress test. ETF demand is strong, but it is being asked to absorb a macro environment that can still turn quickly against risk assets.

Bitcoin Is Winning the ETF Flow Race

The contrast with other major crypto funds is getting harder to ignore. Bitcoin ETF inflows increased about 7% from the previous week, while weekly Ether ETF inflows fell roughly 74% to about $218.4 million. XRP ETF inflows dropped about 83% to roughly $19 million.

Ether and XRP products remain positive for 2026 overall, but right now Bitcoin is clearly winning the contest for fresh regulated capital.

That matters because spot ETF flows tend to be slower and more deliberate than derivatives positioning. Bitcoin price action can be pushed around by liquidations, funding rates and thin weekend order books. A multi-week streak of net ETF creations is harder to dismiss as short-term trading noise.

The Next Test Is Inflation

The jobs report did not settle the rate question. Inflation data is next.

A softer CPI print could revive the case for holding rates steady. Another hot reading would strengthen the argument for a hike and could put more pressure on Bitcoin, growth stocks and other assets that benefited from easier-rate expectations.

That makes the ETF flow data unusually useful. If inflows remain strong through a more hawkish rates market, it would suggest institutional buyers are willing to accumulate even without a friendly macro backdrop. If flows disappear as yields rise, the recent surge may have depended more on the dovish trade than it first appeared.

For now, the signal is constructive: nearly $1 billion entered U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs in one week, $3.8 billion arrived over three weeks, and buyers kept showing up even as Bitcoin struggled around $80,000. The next few ETF sessions should tell us whether Wall Street is buying the dip or simply buying the mood.
---------------

Author: Cedric Holloway
New York Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

Zcash Breaks $1200 as Grayscale's New ETF Pulls in Fresh Money...

Publishing@GlobalCryptoPress.com (Silicon Valley Newsroom) — Mon, 7 Sep 2026 04:09:53 -0700

Zcash just crossed one of those price levels that forces everyone to reopen a chart they had not looked at in years.

ZEC traded above $1,000 on Friday, reaching roughly $1200 at time of publishing and pushing its market capitalization toward $17 billion. The privacy-focused cryptocurrency gained about 94% over the past month and has climbed from roughly $200 in March.

The move was not driven by one clean catalyst. ETF demand, a surge in mining activity, faster privacy tooling and a very crowded derivatives trade all hit at the same time.

The ETF Is No Longer Theoretical

Grayscale converted its long-running Zcash Trust into The Zcash ETF, ticker ZCSH, which began trading on NYSE Arca on August 25. SEC filings confirm that the shares are registered for NYSE Arca and that the vehicle is now named The Zcash ETF.

The fund is designed to hold ZEC directly, giving brokerage investors regulated exposure to the underlying asset rather than a futures contract or a crypto-related stock.

Since launch, ZCSH has recorded at least $34.4 million in net inflows, according to Grayscale data tracked by The Block. September 2 was its strongest reported day so far, with about $12.6 million entering the fund. Reported totals for September 3 and 4 appeared incomplete, so the true cumulative figure may be somewhat higher.

The dollar amount is modest compared with Bitcoin ETF flows, but Zcash is a much smaller market. Tens of millions of dollars entering a regulated product can matter more when the underlying asset has a market cap measured in the teens of billions rather than trillions.

Then the Shorts Got Run Over

ZEC began Friday near $828 before climbing through $1,000. That move triggered a large wave of forced buying in derivatives markets.

About $36.6 million in leveraged ZEC positions were liquidated over 24 hours, with roughly $34.5 million coming from shorts. CoinDesk reported that open interest climbed to around 2.3 million ZEC, worth roughly $2.3 billion at the time.

A short squeeze can make a real rally look even more vertical. When a bearish leveraged position is liquidated, the exchange buys back the asset to close it. Enough liquidations at once create more market buying, which can trigger more liquidations. Crypto has never been shy about turning a feedback loop into a spectacle.

The presence of ETF inflows means this is not purely a derivatives story. Still, the size of open interest tells traders that leverage is playing a major role in short-term price discovery.

Miners Are Chasing the Move Too

Zcash remains a proof-of-work network, so rising token prices quickly change mining economics.

Network computing power, commonly measured as solrate, climbed from around 25 GSol/s in late August to above 30 GSol/s as more mining capacity came online.

Counterintuitively, the extra competition has already squeezed miner economics. The Block reported that an Antminer Z15 Pro was generating an estimated $708 in gross revenue per megawatt-hour of electricity, about 3% below its estimated revenue on August 24 when ZEC was trading below $900.

The token price went up, but so did the number of machines fighting for the same block rewards. Miners noticed ZEC's rally too. Very considerate of them.

Zcash Is Also Getting Easier to Use

Price is not the only thing changing around the network.

Developers behind Zakura recently released an open-source cryptography toolkit that they say can cut the time required for some private transaction creation on mobile devices from more than three seconds to under 200 milliseconds. The tools do not require a network upgrade and are aimed at removing one of the practical bottlenecks around shielded transactions.

That technical progress matters because privacy technology is only useful at scale if normal users can actually use it without waiting around for heavy cryptographic work to finish.

A Four-Digit Price Changes the Risk Profile

ZEC trading above $1,000 does not mean it has suddenly become a low-volatility institutional asset. Quite the opposite.

A near doubling in a month, billions of dollars in derivatives exposure and tens of millions in short liquidations are signs of a market that can move violently in both directions. The new ETF adds a source of spot demand, but it also gives traders another daily data point to obsess over.

The cleaner signals to watch are ZCSH inflows, ZEC open interest and mining solrate. If ETF assets keep growing while leverage cools, the rally would have a more durable base. If open interest keeps climbing faster than spot demand, four-digit ZEC could become just as dramatic on the way down.

Zcash has gone from roughly $200 in March to more than $1,000, gained a U.S. ETF, attracted new mining power and vaporized $34.5 million in short bets in a single day. That is enough to make the breakout real. Whether $1,000 becomes support rather than a souvenir depends on what happens after the squeeze.
---------------

Author: Ren Nakamura
Asia Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

Solana Just Got Faster: Mainnet Slot Time Drops to 350ms!

Publishing@GlobalCryptoPress.com (Silicon Valley Newsroom) — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 11:30:00 -0700

Solana has reduced its mainnet target slot time from 400 milliseconds to 350 milliseconds, the first step in a staged plan to eventually cut it to 200ms.

The change went live around the start of epoch 1020 on Friday and marks the first time Solana has shortened its target slot duration since the network launched. It is a small-looking number with a fairly large engineering job behind it.

A slot is the window in which a leader validator can produce a block. Shorter slots mean blocks can be produced more frequently, which can reduce the time users and applications wait for confirmations. The key word is latency. This upgrade is not designed to magically double Solana's transaction throughput.

The Network Is Taking the Staircase to 200ms

The plan comes from SIMD-0525, a Solana improvement proposal authored by Anza engineer Brennan Watt. Rather than jumping straight from 400ms to 200ms, the network is using four separate feature-gated stages: 350ms, 300ms, 250ms and finally 200ms.

Solana's official proposal keeps 64 ticks per slot, four slots per leader window and 432,000 slots per epoch. The number of slots stays the same. The amount of real-world time represented by them gets shorter.

400ms slots: roughly 48-hour epochs and 1.6-second leader windows
350ms slots: roughly 42-hour epochs and 1.4-second leader windows
300ms slots: roughly 36-hour epochs and 1.2-second leader windows
250ms slots: roughly 30-hour epochs and 1.0-second leader windows
200ms slots: roughly 24-hour epochs and 0.8-second leader windows

The rollout is intentionally cautious. Each stage has its own feature gate, and developers can stop before the next reduction if validator performance or block skip rates start moving in the wrong direction. Cutting latency is useful. Turning mainnet into an involuntary stress test is less useful.

350ms Is Already Showing Up on Mainnet

The first live measurements suggest the network moved in the intended direction. The Block compared two 1,000-slot periods around the transition. A period before the change took about 415 seconds, while a later sample in epoch 1020 took roughly 368 seconds.

Those figures will naturally vary because a 350ms target does not mean every slot lands at exactly 350ms. Still, they show that the mainnet change is more than a configuration file waiting to matter. The shorter timing is visible in actual block production.

The same report notes that developers have not yet set a mainnet activation date for the next 300ms stage. They plan to watch how the network behaves at 350ms first.

This Is Not a Free Throughput Upgrade

One of the easiest ways to misunderstand the change is to assume that 12.5% shorter slots automatically mean 12.5% more network capacity. SIMD-0525 deliberately scales down the amount of work allowed in each slot as the slots become shorter.

Solana recently raised its mainnet block limit to 100 million compute units. Under the shorter-slot proposal, that per-slot ceiling scales to 87.5 million compute units at 350ms, 75 million at 300ms, 62.5 million at 250ms and 50 million at 200ms.

The point is to keep the wall-clock rate of work roughly stable while reducing how long users wait between slots. Validators get less time to process each slot, but they are also given proportionally less work inside it.

That makes this primarily a responsiveness upgrade. Separate changes to compute limits, validator software and transaction processing are where raw capacity increases come from.

Shorter Leader Windows Have a Market Structure Benefit

There is another reason developers want shorter slots that has little to do with how quickly a wallet displays "confirmed."

A Solana leader currently controls four consecutive slots. At the old 400ms target, that gave one leader a nominal 1.6-second window. At 350ms it falls to 1.4 seconds, and at the proposed 200ms endpoint it would be 0.8 seconds.

That reduces the maximum amount of time a single leader can delay, reorder or selectively include transactions before another validator gets its turn. For traders, market makers and latency-sensitive applications, cutting that window can improve market structure as well as user experience.

Shorter slots also make on-chain time more precise for systems that measure freshness in slots, including oracle consumers and automated market-making applications. Solana's own upgrade documentation says market makers may be able to quote tighter spreads as latency falls.

Finality Is a Separate Project

Solana can produce slots every few hundred milliseconds without reaching irreversible finality that quickly. Current full finality still takes roughly 12.8 seconds.

That is where Alpenglow comes in. The separate consensus overhaul under development aims to reduce finality to around 150ms. If that work reaches mainnet as planned, it would represent a much larger change to the time required for the network to treat a block as final.

The two efforts are related in the broad goal of reducing latency, but they should not be confused. SIMD-0525 shortens slots under the current progression. Alpenglow changes the consensus and finality system itself.

Why Traders Should Care

For ordinary SOL holders, a 50ms slot reduction is unlikely to produce an overnight "wow, my wallet is different" moment. The investment case is more cumulative.

Solana has spent years competing on speed, low fees and high-frequency on-chain activity. Cutting slot times without destabilizing validators would strengthen the network's position in trading, payments and applications where latency matters. Reaching 200ms would cut the target slot duration in half from the network's original 400ms setting.

The engineering risk also rises as timing gets tighter, which is why the staged rollout matters. The next milestones are not guaranteed simply because 350ms went live. Developers intend to move to 300ms, then 250ms and 200ms only if network performance remains healthy.

For now, Solana has completed the first real mainnet step. It is faster, the change is measurable, and the path to 200ms is no longer just a proposal sitting on GitHub. The more interesting test starts now: whether validators can keep shortening the clock without giving reliability back in exchange.

---------------

Author: Sebastian Marrow
European Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

Wall Street Returns to Crypto: Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs See a $3 Billion Weekly Swing

Publishing@GlobalCryptoPress.com (Silicon Valley Newsroom) — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 20:30:00 -0700

After months of inconsistent institutional demand, U.S. crypto ETFs just produced the kind of week traders have been waiting for. Spot Bitcoin and Ethereum funds collected roughly $2.6 billion in net inflows during the five trading days ending August 21, their strongest combined week since October 2025.

Bitcoin funds took in about $1.92 billion, while spot Ethereum ETFs added roughly $697 million. Both categories posted their best weekly inflow totals of 2026. More importantly, the money arrived during a sharp crypto rally instead of after it was already over.

The reversal was fast. One week earlier, the same two ETF categories had lost about $392 million combined. Going from a $392 million outflow to a $2.6 billion inflow is a week-over-week swing of roughly $3 billion. That is large enough to matter in a market where ETF demand has repeatedly acted as one of the clearest gauges of institutional appetite.

Five Straight Days of Buying

This was not one giant order making the weekly total look impressive. Bitcoin ETFs posted positive flows across all five trading sessions. Monday brought about $298 million, followed by another positive day Tuesday. Wednesday accelerated to roughly $517 million, and Thursday climbed again to about $606 million.

Thursday was the standout. BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust, IBIT, absorbed roughly $503 million by itself, accounting for more than 80% of that day's Bitcoin ETF inflows. Fidelity and Bitwise also took in new money, but BlackRock was doing most of the heavy lifting.

By Friday, Bitcoin funds had added another roughly $307 million. Ethereum ETFs followed a similar pattern throughout the week, finishing with about $697 million in net inflows. The full weekly figures show demand broadening beyond a single fund or a single trading session.

Trading Volume Came Back Too

Flows were not the only number that changed dramatically. Trading volume in the spot Bitcoin ETFs jumped to about $22.1 billion for the week, up from $6.9 billion the week before. Ethereum ETF volume rose to about $6.9 billion from $1.9 billion.

Combined, the two categories traded around $29 billion, more than triple the previous week's level. That matters because a large inflow alongside rising volume gives the move more weight than an isolated creation or redemption event.

Assets under management also jumped. Bitcoin ETF assets rose from roughly $76.6 billion to $96.1 billion, while Ethereum ETF assets climbed from about $10.5 billion to $14.3 billion. Those increases should not be mistaken for pure new buying, however. Most of that asset growth came from Bitcoin and Ethereum becoming more valuable during the week. Only $2.6 billion of it was actual net new ETF money.

The Rally Had Some Powerful Fuel

The ETF buying landed during one of crypto's strongest weeks of the year. Bitcoin briefly moved above $79,000 on Friday and posted its largest weekly gain in roughly two years. Ethereum also rallied sharply, with both assets gaining roughly 24% to 28% during the week.

A major macro catalyst arrived when the U.S. Treasury announced plans to increase purchases of longer-dated government debt. The move helped calm a stressed bond market and contributed to lower yields and a weaker dollar, conditions that quickly improved demand for Bitcoin, gold and other risk-sensitive assets. Reuters reported that crypto stocks rallied alongside Bitcoin after the announcement.

There was also a substantial short squeeze as prices accelerated. That makes the ETF numbers especially useful. Liquidations can force traders to buy whether they want to or not. ETF creations are a different signal. They show fresh capital entering regulated investment products while the rally is happening.

BlackRock Is Still the 800-Pound Gorilla

The flow breakdown again showed how much influence BlackRock now has over the institutional Bitcoin market. IBIT received about $503 million on Thursday and another roughly $239 million Friday. BlackRock's Ethereum fund, ETHA, was also one of the largest destinations for Ethereum ETF money.

That concentration is worth watching. Strong ETF demand is bullish for the underlying assets, but a large share of that demand continues to come through a small number of giant issuers. When IBIT has a particularly strong or weak day, it can move the headline number for the entire ETF category.

2026 Is Still in the Red

One great week has not erased the damage from earlier in the year. Despite the latest inflows, U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs remain roughly $2.9 billion in net outflows for 2026. Ethereum ETFs are still down around $192 million for the year.

The improvement is still significant. Before last week's rebound, the combined year-to-date deficit for Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs was around $5.7 billion. It is now closer to $3.1 billion.

That gives traders a clean metric to watch next. If ETF inflows continue while prices consolidate, the rally gains a stronger foundation. If flows disappear as soon as the price momentum cools, last week may turn out to have been a very enthusiastic reunion rather than a lasting return of institutional demand.

For now, the important change is simple: regulated crypto funds are attracting serious money again, and they did it for five straight trading days while Bitcoin and Ethereum were already moving higher. After a year dominated by ETF outflows, that is a market signal worth paying attention to.

---------------

Author: Ren Nakamura
Asia Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

The Sandbox Bridge Was Exploited, Creating More SAND Than Was Ever Supposed to Exist...

Publishing@GlobalCryptoPress.com (Silicon Valley Newsroom) — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 13:44:15 -0700

The Sandbox has contained a cross-chain bridge exploit that allowed an attacker to create unbacked SAND tokens on Base and BNB Smart Chain, producing one of those crypto headlines that sounds physically impossible at first glance: security researchers counted billions of newly minted SAND, with one estimate putting their nominal value near $49 billion.

No, an attacker did not steal $49 billion from The Sandbox. There was never $49 billion of real value sitting there waiting to be withdrawn. The number came from applying SAND's normal market price to an absurd quantity of tokens that had been created without collateral behind them.

That distinction is the center of this story.

What the Attacker Actually Found

The affected infrastructure was the cross-chain version of SAND used on Base and BNB Smart Chain. In a normal bridge setup, SAND is locked on Ethereum and a corresponding amount can then exist on another supported network. The supply on the destination chain is supposed to remain backed by the original tokens.

According to blockchain security firm Blockaid, the attacker hijacked LayerZero delegate permissions tied to SAND's omnichain fungible token contract and used the approveAndCall function to mint tokens that had no corresponding SAND locked behind them. Blockaid flagged roughly $49 billion in face-value minting across more than 400 transactions while the attack was still underway.

PeckShield later counted roughly 14.9 billion SAND minted across two attacker addresses. For perspective, SAND's stated maximum supply is only 3 billion tokens. The forged amount identified by PeckShield was therefore close to five times the maximum supply the token was ever supposed to have.

Crypto has found many creative ways to make token supply charts look strange. Creating several extra lifetimes' worth of supply in one exploit is certainly one of them.

Why $49 Billion Was Never Really $49 Billion

At the time of the incident, SAND's entire market capitalization was only around $140 million. There was obviously nowhere near enough liquidity on Base, BNB Chain, centralized exchanges, or anywhere else to turn tens of billions of newly created tokens into tens of billions of dollars.

If someone creates 10 billion unbacked tokens and the legitimate token trades at five cents, a block explorer can display a theoretical value of $500 million. That does not mean there are buyers willing to hand over $500 million. In an exploit like this, the displayed value becomes increasingly fictional as the unauthorized supply grows.

The economically important questions are how much legitimate liquidity the attacker could reach, whether any backed tokens or other assets escaped before containment, and who was left holding affected liquidity positions. The Sandbox has not yet published a full technical post-mortem or a final audited loss figure.

The Sandbox Shut the Doors on Base and BNB Chain

The Sandbox said it identified and contained the vulnerability, disabled bridging to and from Base and BNB Smart Chain, and isolated SAND on those networks so the affected tokens cannot be moved or redeemed through the official bridge.

The company also said SAND on Ethereum and Polygon was unaffected, no user wallets were compromised, and the Ethereum-held SAND backing legitimate bridged tokens remains intact. It warned users not to buy, sell or trade SAND on Base or BNB Smart Chain while liquidity on those networks is compromised. CoinDesk's report also noted that Upbit and Bithumb suspended SAND deposits and withdrawals after the incident.

The team is taking a pre-incident snapshot and says it is preparing compensation for eligible users of the affected liquidity pools. A full incident report and technical post-mortem are still expected.

There Is One Number That Still Needs Clarification

The Sandbox described the impact as less than 0.01% of total SAND supply. Taken literally against a 3 billion-token maximum supply, 0.01% would be fewer than 300,000 SAND.

That clearly does not describe the total number of unauthorized tokens minted, because independent security firms observed billions. The most reasonable reading is that The Sandbox is using "impact" to describe the amount of legitimate value affected rather than the quantity of fake tokens created. The company has not yet fully reconciled those figures publicly, so investors should avoid treating the 0.01% statement as a measurement of the exploit's minting activity.

That distinction matters because headlines can easily swing from one bad interpretation to another. Calling this a $49 billion theft would be wrong. Calling it a trivial exploit because the project says the impact was under 0.01% would also skip over what actually happened.

The Weak Link Was the Cross-Chain Layer

Ethereum SAND itself was not reported compromised. The exploit targeted the machinery that lets representations of SAND exist on other networks. That is a familiar pattern in crypto security: the underlying chain or token can work exactly as designed while permissions in a bridge create a completely separate attack surface.

The technical issue is particularly important because the attack involved LayerZero-related delegate permissions. That does not automatically mean LayerZero itself was compromised. The available reports point to permissions associated with The Sandbox's SAND OFT deployment. The final post-mortem will need to explain precisely where control failed, how the delegate authority was obtained, and why the minting path accepted it.

Until that report arrives, traders should focus on the facts that can be established: unbacked SAND was minted on Base and BNB Smart Chain, the affected bridge routes have been disabled, Ethereum and Polygon SAND were reported safe, and the eye-popping $49 billion figure measures theoretical face value rather than money stolen.

The exploit may ultimately prove modest in direct financial losses, but the permission failure was anything but modest. When a bridge can create several times a token's maximum supply before someone hits the stop button, the post-mortem matters almost as much as the reimbursement plan.

---------------

Author: Cedric Holloway
New York Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

Strategy Makes $334 Million in New Investments... None of it Bitcoin.

Publishing@GlobalCryptoPress.com (Silicon Valley Newsroom) — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 05:17:00 -0700

For years, Strategy had one of the easiest corporate capital allocation stories in America to explain: sell securities, buy Bitcoin, repeat. That story is now getting more complicated.

Strategy sold 3,458,866 shares of MSTR between August 10 and August 16 and raised $333.7 million in net proceeds. It bought no Bitcoin. It also sold no Bitcoin during the week. Instead, the entire haul went toward preferred-stock dividends, repurchasing STRC preferred shares and adding cash to the company's growing U.S. dollar reserve.

The breakdown in Strategy's latest SEC filing is unusually revealing. Of the $333.7 million raised, $52.4 million went to STRC dividends, $132.2 million funded the repurchase of 1,388,720 STRC shares, and $149.1 million went into the dollar reserve. In percentage terms, roughly 16% funded dividends, 40% funded preferred-stock buybacks and 45% went to cash.

The Bitcoin Machine Has Become a Capital Structure Machine

Strategy still owns an enormous amount of Bitcoin: 840,447 BTC acquired for an aggregate $63.36 billion, or an average of $75,385 per coin. But its behavior since late June shows that management is now actively balancing Bitcoin exposure against the obligations created by its increasingly elaborate stack of common stock, preferred stock and debt.

The change did not begin this week. Strategy's last Bitcoin purchase was 520 BTC reported on June 22. Since then, its own Bitcoin ledger shows four rounds of sales totaling 6,916 BTC: 1,363 BTC around the end of June, 2,225 BTC in early July, 1,638 BTC reported in early August and another 1,690 BTC reported last week. Add the small 32 BTC sale from earlier in June and Strategy has sold 6,948 BTC during 2026.

That is tiny next to an 840,447 BTC treasury, so calling this an exit from Bitcoin would be absurd. It is not. What has changed is the old assumption that every fresh dollar raised by Strategy is destined to become another satoshi on the balance sheet.

Why Strategy Is Building So Much Cash

Strategy created its U.S. dollar reserve to cover preferred-stock dividends and interest on outstanding debt. The reserve stood at $4.80 billion as of August 16, up from $4.65 billion a week earlier and $2.55 billion in early July.

That cash pile matters because Strategy now has recurring obligations that do not disappear when Bitcoin has a bad quarter. Preferred shareholders expect dividends. Debt holders expect interest. Bitcoin, famously, does not care about either one.

In late June, Strategy's board formally approved a Bitcoin monetization program that allows the company to sell BTC to replenish the dollar reserve, cover preferred dividends and interest, or fund repurchases of its securities. The company also authorized up to $1 billion of preferred-stock repurchases and up to $1 billion of MSTR repurchases.

Last week's transactions show the other side of that framework. Strategy did not need to sell BTC because it could issue common stock instead. In effect, the company sold new MSTR shares, used part of the proceeds to buy back STRC, paid STRC dividends and banked the rest.

For common shareholders, that is a much more nuanced equation than the old "issue stock and buy Bitcoin" model. Selling MSTR creates dilution. Buying back preferred shares can reduce financing costs or improve the capital structure. Building the dollar reserve lowers the risk that a prolonged Bitcoin downturn forces unpleasant choices later. Whether the trade is attractive depends heavily on the price at which each security is issued or repurchased.

There Is Still a Lot More MSTR That Can Be Sold

Strategy reported about $21.7 billion of remaining capacity under its MSTR at-the-market programs. That does not mean the company will issue all of it, but it gives management a very large financing lever if market conditions allow.

The company also had $653 million of authorization remaining for preferred-stock repurchases after last week's STRC purchases. Its separate $1 billion MSTR repurchase authorization remained untouched.

This is the part of Strategy that is becoming easy to miss if every update is reduced to one question about how much Bitcoin Michael Saylor bought. Strategy is now managing several securities that interact with each other, with Bitcoin and with a multibillion-dollar cash reserve. The Bitcoin treasury remains the center of gravity, but it is no longer the only moving part.

The latest week is therefore notable precisely because nothing happened to the Bitcoin count. Strategy raised $333.7 million and found three other uses for it. For investors who still model MSTR as a simple machine that converts equity issuance directly into Bitcoin, the machine has clearly acquired a few more gears.

Author: Cedric Holloway
New York Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

Harmony Exploit Forged 3.01 Trillion Tokens, They Want to Fix it By Reverting Blockchain to Pre-Hack Date...

Publishing@GlobalCryptoPress.com (Silicon Valley Newsroom) — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 16:30:00 -0700

Harmony's latest security incident has gone from bad to surreal. What initially looked like an unauthorized mint of about 4 billion ONE has turned into a reconstructed total of roughly 3.01 trillion forged tokens, and the network's chosen fix is equally dramatic: roll the blockchain back to a point before the exploit and throw away everything recorded after it.

Harmony says the forged supply was created through six cross-shard transactions and sent to four attacker-controlled wallets. One wallet alone moved 2.385 trillion ONE through 477 successful transfers in just 106 seconds. At pre-attack prices, that quantity had a notional value measured in billions of dollars, although no attacker could realistically sell trillions of ONE anywhere near the pre-attack market price.

The Original 4 Billion Figure Was Only the Beginning

Harmony first acknowledged the incident on August 12 after researchers spotted unauthorized ONE appearing through empty blocks. The early analysis identified two records that created 1 billion and 3 billion ONE. That 4 billion figure was alarming on its own because it represented a large chunk of the legitimate token supply.

A deeper reconstruction changed the scale completely. Harmony's later incident update said investigators found a flaw in cross-shard receipt verification that allowed valid receipts to be processed more than once.

In plain English, a cross-shard receipt is evidence that something happened on one part of Harmony's sharded network and should be credited on another. If that receipt can be reused, the receiving side can credit value repeatedly without a matching debit happening again on the sending side. That turns a bookkeeping proof into a printing press, which is generally not a feature anyone wants in a monetary system.

Harmony patched the vulnerability on August 12 with Mainnet v2026.1.1 and suspended bridge services while it worked with validators, exchanges and infrastructure providers to contain the damage. The project has said it traced more than 99.9% of the forged ONE pathways to wallets or service clusters. Tracing a path, however, is not the same thing as recovering the money or identifying the person behind the wallet.

Why Harmony Chose a Full Rollback

The team considered less disruptive options. Those included blacklisting wallets, trying to burn forged tokens, selectively replaying legitimate transactions and even migrating ONE to a new token. Harmony concluded that each option created its own problems, especially because forged tokens had already moved through exchanges, decentralized pools, bridges and other wallets.

If an innocent user received ONE that had passed through an attacker-linked pool, a blunt blacklist or burn could punish the wrong person. Selectively restoring transactions sounds cleaner until smart contracts, balances, transaction nonces and dependent transactions no longer line up with the altered history.

Harmony's answer is a fixed rollback window. Its rollback plan keeps Shard 0 at block 92,730,034 and Shard 1 at block 94,978,278, both timestamped August 11 at 23:25:37 UTC. New blocks would then be produced from replacement databases built around those checkpoints.

The cost is real. Harmony says the discarded window contains 141,628 consecutive blocks, 109,126 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions. Those are not all attacker transactions. Legitimate activity after the checkpoint disappears too.

Harmony says about 95.8% of the affected regular transactions were automated activity, much of it associated with decentralized exchange bots. The network also said only 22 of the 109,126 regular transactions were simple native transfers with no obvious dependency in its data. Even those cannot simply be dropped back into the replacement chain with complete confidence because the state around them may have changed.

This Is What Blockchain Finality Looks Like Under Stress

Rollback debates tend to become philosophical very quickly because blockchains market themselves around immutability. In practice, public chains are software systems run by human communities, validators and developers. When the ledger itself has accepted a catastrophic amount of forged supply, every available choice damages something.

Do nothing, and trillions of unauthorized tokens remain part of the ledger. Blacklist aggressively, and innocent holders can get caught in the blast radius. Attempt a surgical reconstruction, and subtle state mismatches can create a second disaster. Roll back the chain, and valid transactions that users reasonably believed were final are erased.

Harmony chose the last option because it believes one audited cutoff applied to everyone creates the lowest risk of another exploit or consensus failure. Whether validators, exchanges, bridges and users can coordinate the restart cleanly is now the practical test.

Harmony Has Been Here Before, but This Attack Is Different

The incident also lands on a network with painful security history. In 2022, Harmony's Horizon bridge lost about $100 million in crypto. The FBI later attributed that theft to North Korea's Lazarus Group. That attack targeted bridge infrastructure. This one is more fundamental because the vulnerability involved the network's own cross-shard verification logic and the creation of native ONE.

There is no public evidence at this point linking the current exploit to Lazarus Group, and it would be irresponsible to imply otherwise. The relevant comparison is technical and reputational: Harmony is once again asking users and counterparties to trust its recovery process after a major security failure.

The patch may have closed the bug, but the harder part is restoring a coherent ledger, reconciling exchange and bridge balances, and convincing users that the replacement history can be treated as final. A blockchain can survive a rollback. Restoring confidence after trillions of tokens appeared from nowhere is the more difficult job.
---------------

Author: Dorian Fenwick
Silicon Valley Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

Bitcoin ETFs Bleed $300+ Million, While Solana Funds Quietly Pull In Fresh Cash...

Publishing@GlobalCryptoPress.com (Silicon Valley Newsroom) — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 05:16:34 -0700

Bitcoin started the week with a modest rebound, but the money moving through U.S. crypto ETFs is sending a less comfortable message. Spot Bitcoin funds saw roughly $390 million in net withdrawals during the trading week of August 10 through August 14, reversing the strong inflows from the week before. At the same time, Solana ETFs attracted fresh money and posted their strongest weekly inflow since mid-May.

That split is more interesting than another day of Bitcoin moving a percent or two. ETF flows have become one of the clearest public windows into demand from investors who want crypto exposure through traditional brokerage accounts, retirement accounts and institutional portfolios. They do not tell us what every large investor is doing, but when hundreds of millions of dollars reverse direction in a week, it is worth paying attention.

A $1.2 Billion Swing in Bitcoin ETF Demand

The reversal was sharp. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs had pulled in about $853.5 million during the previous week, their best weekly showing since April. One week later, the same category finished roughly $390 million in the red. That is a swing of more than $1.2 billion in weekly net flows.

The daily numbers show that this was not one giant redemption distorting an otherwise normal week. According to flow data from Farside Investors, the funds were negative on four of the five trading days. Monday lost about $145 million, Wednesday about $61 million, Thursday about $131 million and Friday another $56 million. Tuesday was the lone positive session.

Fidelity's FBTC took the biggest weekly hit in Farside's table, losing about $153 million. Grayscale's GBTC lost roughly $88 million, BlackRock's IBIT about $79 million and ARK 21Shares' ARKB about $70 million. Grayscale's lower-fee Bitcoin Mini Trust moved the other way, taking in about $76 million during the week, which softened the total damage.

There is an important distinction here. ETF redemptions do not automatically mean a wave of institutions has suddenly decided Bitcoin is doomed. Some flows come from short-term positioning, basis trades, portfolio rebalancing and investors moving between products. Still, the broad pattern matters because Bitcoin has spent much of the summer struggling to build sustained momentum. A market can rally without ETF inflows, of course. It is simply easier when one of its largest regulated demand channels is buying instead of redeeming.

Solana Went the Other Direction

Solana's ETF market is much smaller, which makes direct dollar comparisons with Bitcoin misleading. The direction of travel is still notable. Solana spot ETFs took in about $10.26 million for the week, their strongest weekly inflow since May.

Bitwise's BSOL accounted for most of the buying with roughly $8.83 million in weekly inflows. Morgan Stanley's MSOL added about $1.43 million. SoSoValue data put total Solana ETF assets at roughly $894 million at the end of the period, with cumulative net inflows of about $1.16 billion. The detailed fund lineup can also be seen in Farside's Solana table.

Those are not giant numbers by Bitcoin standards, but that is precisely why traders may want to watch the trend rather than the absolute amount. Bitcoin products are already huge. Solana's regulated ETF market is still relatively young, so a persistent flow advantage can become meaningful faster if it continues.

Bitcoin Is Still Trading Like a Macro Asset

Bitcoin was holding above the low $63,000 area early Monday and recovering alongside U.S. equity futures. Nasdaq 100 futures were also higher, reinforcing a pattern that has become familiar over the last year: when there is no major crypto-specific catalyst, Bitcoin frequently behaves like a high-beta macro asset with a 24-hour trading schedule.

That leaves traders with mixed signals. Equity markets are providing some support. Bitcoin ETF demand weakened sharply. Solana ETF demand improved. Derivatives positioning is not screaming conviction in either direction, and the broader U.S. crypto market structure bill remains stuck in Washington.

None of that produces a clean "Bitcoin down, Solana up" trade. Markets are rarely considerate enough to make it that easy. What it does show is that crypto ETF demand is becoming more selective. Investors are no longer moving through the entire asset class as one trade.

For Bitcoin, the next useful signal is whether the ETF outflows fade as quickly as they appeared or develop into another multiweek streak. For Solana, the question is whether its strongest week since May becomes the start of sustained demand or simply one good week in a small market. Right now, the money is giving traders a reason to watch both.

Author: Ren Nakamura
Asia Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

Senate Pushes CLARITY Act Vote to September, Extending Crypto's Regulatory Wait...

Publishing@GlobalCryptoPress.com (Silicon Valley Newsroom) — Sat, 8 Aug 2026 15:06:00 -0700

Washington has given the crypto industry a familiar product update: the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act is not dead, but the launch date has slipped. The U.S. Senate will not vote on the market-structure bill before the August recess, moving its next real chance of action to September.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said there would be no August vote, with a possible vote in September. The delay follows unresolved disagreements between the parties, including demands for stronger ethics rules, enforcement provisions and market safeguards. The result is straightforward for traders and companies: the regulatory map remains unfinished for at least another month.

What the bill is trying to settle

The bill, H.R. 3633, is designed to create a clearer U.S. framework for digital-asset markets. At its core, it aims to define responsibilities across the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission, while setting rules that would matter to token issuers, exchanges, brokers and customers. That may sound like Capitol Hill furniture-moving, but the practical stakes are substantial: classification and registration rules help determine which products can be offered, by whom, and under what compliance burden.

The House has already passed the measure, and its official Congress record lists it on the Senate Legislative Calendar. The Senate, however, is not a conveyor belt. A calendar placement means the bill is available for consideration, not that the chamber has solved its political and procedural problems.

Why the August miss matters

The Senate is scheduled to return on Sept. 14, leaving a relatively short working window before other legislative deadlines and election-season pressures crowd the agenda. Industry participants had hoped senators would remain in session long enough to resolve final disputes. That did not happen, and the bill now arrives in September with the same complicated questions still waiting for it.

For exchanges and U.S.-based crypto businesses, delay has a cost even without a new ban or enforcement action. Companies must still make product, custody, listing and compliance decisions under overlapping claims of authority. Investors also have to price the chance that a rulebook appears, changes materially, or remains stuck in the legislative queue. Regulatory uncertainty is not exciting, unless your hobby is modeling downside cases in a spreadsheet.

What has to happen next

A September vote is possible, not guaranteed. Senators will need to settle whether the bill has sufficient guardrails around consumer protection, enforcement and conflicts of interest, then navigate the usual Senate procedural gauntlet. Reporting on the delay indicated that unresolved bipartisan issues, rather than a simple lack of floor time, kept the measure from moving before recess.

Traders should avoid treating a September date as an automatic bullish or bearish catalyst. A credible path toward market-structure rules could improve confidence for institutions and U.S. platforms, but the final text and the timing of any vote matter more than the calendar headline. It is also possible the debate produces amendments that shift the bill's impact for particular categories of tokens or intermediaries.

For now, the CLARITY Act remains one of crypto's most consequential U.S. policy files, just delayed rather than decided. September will show whether the Senate can turn broad support for clearer rules into actual legislation, or whether the industry gets another reminder that “soon” is Washington's most flexible unit of time.

---------------

Author: Cedric Holloway
New York Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

Bitcoin Reclaims $65,000 After Payrolls Miss - is it a Breakout or a Fake-out?

Publishing@GlobalCryptoPress.com (Silicon Valley Newsroom) — Sat, 8 Aug 2026 06:18:17 -0700

Bitcoin got the macro catalyst traders had been waiting for on Friday: a U.S. jobs report soft enough to restart the argument over how much room the Federal Reserve has to ease. BTC pushed as high as $65,340 on Bitstamp, up roughly 1.3% on the day, after July nonfarm payrolls showed the economy lost 23,000 jobs instead of adding the roughly 80,000 economists expected.

That is a meaningful miss, not a rounding error. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also revised May and June employment lower by a combined 103,000 jobs. July unemployment came in at 4.1%, little changed from the prior month, but the larger message was clear: the labor market is no longer giving the Fed the same comfortable cushion it appeared to have a few months ago. The full payroll release gave risk markets exactly the kind of ambiguity they enjoy turning into a bid.

Why Bitcoin cared

A cooler labor market can reduce the case for keeping monetary policy tight, assuming inflation does not decide to become difficult again. Lower expected rates generally help long-duration and liquidity-sensitive assets, and crypto has spent years proving it belongs in that unruly group. Traders swiftly repriced the rate discussion after the data, helping bitcoin take another run at a zone that had repeatedly capped it near $65,000.

The setup was especially notable because the prior session had pointed the other way. Stronger-than-expected jobless-claims data had helped push BTC down to about $64,384, while $64,800 to $65,000 remained a stubborn resistance band. In other words, bitcoin did not suddenly discover a new narrative. It got a fresh macro datapoint that challenged the one from a day earlier. Markets, in their eternal quest for efficiency, can now argue with themselves using two labor reports instead of one.

The number to watch is still $65,000

Friday's intraday high matters, but it is not the same as a clean break and hold. Bitcoin had been hovering near $64,350 before the payrolls release and remains in a range where quick moves above $65,000 have not yet turned into durable acceptance. For traders, the useful question is less whether BTC printed a satisfying headline number and more whether spot demand can keep it above the former ceiling when the initial macro reaction fades.

Near-term support remains clustered around the low-$64,000 area, based on this week's price action. A sustained move above the Friday high would put the next nearby round-number zone near $67,000 on more desks, while a return below $65,000 would make this another familiar range trade rather than the start of a clean trend. Current price feeds put BTC near $65,000, reinforcing just how close the market remains to that decision point.

What changes next

The next major test is whether incoming inflation data agrees with the rate-friendly reading investors drew from payrolls. Weak employment can support risk appetite, but it does not automatically produce easier policy. If inflation stays sticky, the Fed could remain cautious and leave crypto with a very expensive false start.

For now, the report gave bitcoin a lift and returned $65,000 to center stage. That is progress, but not a coronation. A breakout needs follow-through, and BTC has seen enough dramatic intraday reversals to know that one cheerful Friday candle is not a binding contract.

Bitcoin has regained a key psychological level on softer labor data; the next few sessions will show whether that level becomes support or merely another well-photographed ceiling.

---------------

Author: Ren Nakamura
Asia Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

$70 Million in Bitcoin Vanished From Coldcard Wallets - Make Sure YOUR Crypto is Safe...

Publishing@GlobalCryptoPress.com (Digital Newsroom Three) — Tue, 4 Aug 2026 06:26:34 -0700

For years the whole pitch behind a Coldcard was that nobody could reach your Bitcoin unless they were physically holding the device in their hands.

That promise came apart this week, when an attacker quietly swept around 1,082 BTC, worth roughly $70 million, out of more than a thousand wallets in under an hour. The unsettling part is that the thief never touched a single device, never phished anyone, and never needed a PIN or a password. These coins were sitting in cold storage, offline, kept exactly the way every self-custody guide tells you to keep them. And they walked out anyway. For a corner of crypto that treats hardware wallets as the gold standard of safety, this is a genuinely rough moment.

Blockchain analysts at Galaxy Digital, who have been tracking the drain, first put the losses near $38 million before revising the number upward as more addresses turned up in the sweep. Hardware wallet maker Coinkite has confirmed the flaw and rushed out patched firmware, but by then the money was long gone. According to Coinkite's own security advisory, the theft happened roughly a day before the company managed to warn users publicly, so plenty of people watched their balances drop to zero before they had any idea anything was wrong. When your entire brand is built on paranoid, belt-and-suspenders security, a delay like that is about as bad as it gets. The company says it is still working to pin down the full scope of the damage.

A five-year-old bug in how the wallet made its keys

The root cause here is boring and alarming at the same time. When you set up a hardware wallet, it is supposed to build your seed phrase from true randomness, the kind that makes guessing it mathematically hopeless. Somewhere in a firmware build shipped back in March 2021, Coldcard's software started skipping its dedicated hardware random number generator and quietly fell back to predictable values pulled from the chip itself. Instead of the expected 128 bits of entropy, affected Mk3 devices were producing seeds with only about 40 bits, and later Mk4, Mk5 and Q models landed somewhere around 72 bits. In plain English, the recovery phrase that was meant to be unguessable became something a determined attacker with modern hardware could grind through.

What makes it worse is that this sat undetected for more than five years. Every wallet created on the affected builds carried the same weakness baked in from the very start, whether or not the owner ever did a single thing wrong. Some researchers have suggested that automated or AI-assisted tooling may have helped the attacker chew through the reduced keyspace fast enough to clear so many wallets in one sitting, though that claim has not been confirmed. Coinkite says the fixed firmware restores proper randomness, but a patch cannot rewrite history. Any seed generated on the old software still exists in its weakened form, which is exactly why the advice coming out now has been so blunt.

The people who got hit did everything "right"

This one stings because it landed on the folks who followed the standard advice to the letter. The drained wallets largely belonged to long-term holders who pulled their coins off exchanges years ago and left them sitting untouched in cold storage, which is supposed to be the responsible move. Their reward for being careful was watching those balances vanish while newer and less disciplined traders on custodial platforms were completely unaffected. There is a bitter twist buried in here too. Users who bothered to add their own dice rolls during setup, or who layered on a passphrase or a multisig arrangement, appear to have been protected, because that extra input put back the randomness the firmware had thrown away, and the people most exposed were the ones who simply trusted the device to handle its single most important job.

What to do if you own one

If you have a Coldcard, the guidance from Coinkite is direct: treat your seed as compromised and move your funds. That means updating to the patched firmware, generating a brand new seed on that updated hardware, and then sending everything over to the fresh wallet, because a firmware update on its own fixes nothing when the weak seed already exists. Annoyingly, there is no self-test that tells you whether your particular seed falls inside the guessable range, so the only safe assumption is that it might. You can check your firmware version under the Advanced menu on the device, and anything generated on the vulnerable builds between 2021 and the recent fix should be treated as suspect. Bitcoin slipped about 3% as the scale of the mess sank in, and the timing hands an easy talking point to everyone who has been pushing regulated custodians and spot ETFs over do-it-yourself storage.

The uncomfortable lesson is that "not your keys, not your coins" was always sold as the safer road, and for the most part it still is, but your keys only protect you if they were actually random to begin with. A single quiet build error hid for half a decade inside one of the most trusted names in Bitcoin self-custody, and it took a $70 million heist for anyone to catch it. None of this means hardware wallets are a scam or that cold storage is suddenly dead. It does mean the unglamorous stuff, the firmware updates and the extra entropy and the passphrases and the multisig setups, is the part that quietly saves you, right up until the day it turns out to be the only thing standing between you and an empty wallet.

---------------

Author: Cedric Holloway
New York Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

Samsung Is Putting Stablecoins on 240 Million Phones... It Just Won't Say Which Ones...

Publishing@GlobalCryptoPress.com (Digital Newsroom Three) — Sat, 1 Aug 2026 05:47:36 -0700

Samsung just told hundreds of millions of phone owners they'll soon be able to hold digital dollars right next to their boarding passes and coffee loyalty cards.

At Galaxy Unpacked in London on July 22, the company confirmed that Samsung Wallet will get native stablecoin support, putting dollar-pegged tokens into the same app people already use to tap their phone at the checkout. For an industry that has spent years arguing stablecoins are the killer app for crypto, having one of the biggest hardware makers on earth agree out loud is a big deal. Samsung says the feature would make it one of the first major smartphone brands to support stablecoins natively on its devices, and that reach is the whole story here. This is a company that ships phones by the hundreds of millions every year, so the potential distribution dwarfs anything a standalone crypto wallet could ever dream of building on its own.

And yet, for an announcement this large, Samsung was strangely quiet on the details that actually matter. It showed a mockup with Circle's USDC on stage, then declined to name USDC, Tether, or any other issuer as a confirmed partner. There is no launch date, no word on which blockchains will be supported, no list of eligible countries, and no answer to the single most important question for anyone who cares about their money: will Samsung hold your funds, or will you? That last point, custodial versus non-custodial, is the difference between a real crypto wallet and a glorified balance display, and so far Samsung has said nothing about it. For a feature meant to inspire trust, that is a lot of blanks left unfilled.

The credit card is the part that's actually shipping

Buried under the stablecoin headlines was the thing Samsung actually launched that same day: the Samsung Galaxy Card. It's a credit card issued by Barclays and running on the Visa network, and it went live in the United States on July 22 with no "coming soon" asterisk attached. The rewards structure is aimed squarely at keeping you inside Samsung's world, with 5% back on Samsung purchases, 3% on anything you buy through Samsung Wallet, and 2% on streaming services. On its own that's a fairly ordinary co-branded card, the kind every big brand eventually launches to lock in loyal customers. What makes it interesting is the context, because Samsung is clearly trying to turn Wallet from a place you store a plane ticket into a full financial hub, and stablecoins are meant to be the piece that makes it all feel modern.

Read together, the card and the stablecoin tease point at the same ambition. Samsung wants Wallet to be where you keep money, spend money, and eventually move money, all without opening a separate banking or crypto app. The card handles the spending side today, and it works right now. The stablecoin support, whenever it actually arrives, is supposed to handle the moving-money-around side, letting people send digital dollars roughly as easily as they send a photo. It's a coherent plan on paper, but plans on paper have a habit of slipping, and Samsung gave itself plenty of room to slip by refusing to commit to any date at all.

Wider implications

Even if you never personally plan to keep a single dime of USDC in your phone, if you trade crypto this is good news. Retail crypto adoption has historically gone stablecoins first and speculation second. Someone who already holds a stablecoin balance in an app they trust is a much shorter walk away from buying bitcoin or ether than someone who holds nothing at all and has to sign up for an exchange from scratch. If Samsung genuinely puts even a basic stablecoin feature in front of a big chunk of its user base, it quietly widens the top of the funnel for the entire market. That's a slow-burn effect rather than an overnight one, and it won't show up on a candlestick chart next week no matter how much anyone wants it to.

Which is exactly why you shouldn't expect this to move prices in any immediate way. The crypto industry has a long and unimpressive record of "major partnership" and "mainstream adoption" headlines that felt enormous in the moment and then did absolutely nothing to the charts over the following month. Infrastructure announcements tend to work like that. They matter over years, not days, and this one is especially soft because so much of it is still a mockup and a promise rather than shipping code. Treat it as a directional signal about where consumer fintech is heading, which is clearly toward digital dollars living inside apps you already have, and not as a reason to reposition your portfolio today.

The small print

So where does all this leave things? Samsung has made a loud and credible commitment to putting stablecoins in front of an enormous audience, and that commitment is genuinely meaningful for the long arc of adoption. But a commitment with no named partner, no date, no chain, and no custody model is still mostly a statement of intent, and intent has always been cheap in this industry. The Galaxy Card is real and available now, the stablecoin wallet is a slide and a mockup, and the gap between those two things is worth remembering the next time someone tells you crypto just went mainstream overnight. Watch for the follow-up details in the months ahead, because that's when we'll actually find out whether Samsung is building a real crypto wallet or just a nicer place to stare at a number.

---------------

Author: Ren Nakamura
Asia Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

Nine of Crypto's Biggest Players Are Racing to Quantum-Proof Bitcoin - and Satoshi's Million Coins Are the One Thing They Can't Save

Publishing@GlobalCryptoPress.com (Digital Newsroom Three) — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 04:37:53 -0700

Nine of the biggest names in crypto just agreed to spend $15 million defending Bitcoin against a machine that does not exist yet.

On July 23, BlackRock, Coinbase, Strategy, Fidelity Digital Assets, Galaxy, ARK Invest, Block, Blockstream and Anchorage Digital announced the Bitcoin Security Consortium, a three-year commitment to fund security research and open-source development for the network they have all bet heavily on. The dollar figure is modest by the standards of any one of these firms, but the message lands louder than the money. These are companies that between them custody or manage hundreds of billions of dollars in Bitcoin, and they are now saying out loud that the cryptography holding it all together needs work before a real threat shows up. That threat, the one everyone keeps circling back to, is quantum computing. The timeline is fuzzy, but the group clearly decided it would rather move early than explain later why it waited.

What the money actually buys

The structure here is worth understanding, because it is not what most people picture when they hear the word "consortium." The $15 million is not pooled into a shared war chest that some committee doles out. Each member directs its own share independently, choosing which developers, researchers or organizations to back with its dollars. The group has said it will not direct Bitcoin's development, will not take sides on proposed protocol changes, and will not touch governance in any form. In plain terms, they are writing checks and then stepping back, which for a network built on the idea that no big player should be able to steer it is a meaningful promise to make in public.

Galaxy had already gotten a head start, launching a separate $5 million quantum readiness effort two days earlier that focuses on quantum-resistant signatures, wallet migration tools and security audits. Whether that money folds into the $15 million total or sits alongside it was never made clear, which is a small reminder that this whole space is still being figured out on the fly. What matters is the direction of travel. A year ago the quantum question lived mostly in academic papers and the darker corners of crypto Twitter. Now it has a line item on the budgets of some of the largest financial firms on the planet, and that shift alone tells you something changed.

Why quantum keeps everyone up at night

Bitcoin's security rests on a type of math that ordinary computers cannot crack in any reasonable amount of time. A powerful enough quantum computer running an approach called Shor's algorithm could change that by working backward from a public key to the private key that controls the coins. The uncomfortable part is that any address that has ever exposed its public key on the blockchain is potentially in range of that kind of attack. Researchers estimate that roughly a quarter of all Bitcoin sits in addresses with exposed public keys, including around 1.9 million BTC in the oldest address format and several million more in addresses that have been reused. Nobody thinks a machine capable of this exists today, and credible estimates put it a few years out.

The scarier wrinkle is that an attacker does not need the quantum computer to exist yet in order to start preparing. Public keys sitting on a public blockchain can be copied and archived right now, then cracked later once the hardware finally catches up. Security researchers have a grim name for this waiting game, calling it "harvest now, decrypt later." It means the clock is already running even though the weapon has not been built, and it explains why firms with a lot of Bitcoin on their books would rather fund the fix years early than gamble on exactly when the threat becomes real. Prevention is a lot cheaper than trying to claw back coins that have already vanished into a quantum attacker's wallet.

The coins nobody can rescue

There is one pile of Bitcoin the consortium's money can never protect, no matter how good the new cryptography gets. Satoshi Nakamoto's estimated one million or so coins sit in the original Pay-to-Public-Key format, with the public keys written directly onto the blockchain for anyone to see. Moving that Bitcoin to a safer, quantum-resistant address would require signing a transaction with Satoshi's private keys, and Bitcoin's creator has been silent for well over a decade. So those coins stay exactly where they are, permanently visible, essentially a giant target that will be sitting there whenever quantum hardware finally arrives. It is one of the stranger tensions in all of crypto, where the founder's untouchable fortune doubles as the network's most obvious weak spot.

The good news is that the tools to fix most of this already exist, since standards bodies have approved several post-quantum signature schemes that Bitcoin could eventually adopt. What has been missing is money, coordination and a sense of urgency from the players with the most to lose, and that is exactly the gap this consortium is trying to close. Fifteen million dollars will not quantum-proof Bitcoin on its own, and the hardest technical and political work of actually changing the protocol still lies ahead. But when firms this large start funding a problem years before it turns into an emergency, it is usually worth paying attention to what has them worried.

---------------

Author: Dorian Fenwick
Silicon Valley Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

The Hack They Called "Structurally Impossible" in 2023 Just Cost Them $1.65...

Publishing@GlobalCryptoPress.com (Digital Newsroom Three) — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 01:50:43 -0700

Allbridge spent 2023 explaining why this exact attack could never work on its pools again.

On Sunday night an attacker drained roughly $1.65 million in stablecoins out of Allbridge Core's Solana liquidity pools, and the method was not some novel zero-day that nobody saw coming. It was a flash loan pool-ratio manipulation, the same class of attack that hit Allbridge's BNB Chain pools in May 2023 for about $570,000. Back then the team published a postmortem, took the loss on the chin, and committed to an architectural change that was supposed to make the whole category of attack structurally impossible going forward. Three years later, that promise met reality on a different chain, and reality won. The protocol has since paused Core while it investigates.

For anyone who provides liquidity to cross-chain bridges, this one is worth reading past the headline number. The dollar figure is small by 2026 standards, well under what Ostium lost to a compromised oracle key just five days earlier, and nowhere near the nine-figure bridge disasters that defined the last cycle. But the size of the loss is not really the story here. The story is that a documented vulnerability with a documented fix stayed open on a production chain for three years, and nobody caught it until someone with a Kamino account decided to check.

How the attacker allegedly pulled it off

The sequence started with a $1.12 million flash loan taken from Kamino, a Solana lending protocol. Flash loans let you borrow a large sum with no collateral as long as you repay it inside the same transaction, which makes them perfect for anyone who wants temporary size to push a pool out of balance. The attacker used that borrowed capital to rapidly swap USDC for USDT inside Allbridge's Solana pools, skewing the ratio between the two assets far away from where it should sit. Allbridge's pricing math then treated that distorted ratio as real, which let the attacker withdraw more value than they put in. Repeat the loop, repay the loan, keep the difference, and walk away with roughly $1.65 million in about the time it takes to read this paragraph.

None of that is exotic. Flash loan pool manipulation has been in every DeFi security checklist since 2020, and auditors flag it as a matter of routine. What makes it work is a specific structural condition: two or more swappable assets sitting in pools that can be interacted with inside a single atomic transaction. Remove that condition and the attack has nothing to grip. That is precisely what Allbridge said it was doing after the BNB Chain incident.

The 2023 fix that never reached Solana

After the May 2023 attack, Allbridge's stated remedy was to move to a single liquidity pool per blockchain. One pool means no sibling pool to swap against, no ratio to distort, and no path for a flash loan to do anything useful. On paper it is a clean fix, and it is the kind of answer that reassures depositors because it changes the shape of the system rather than patching a symptom. The team also recovered roughly $465,000 of the 2023 losses through a white-hat arrangement with the attacker, which at the time looked like a reasonably competent handling of a bad week.

The Solana deployment, though, was still running USDC and USDT pools side by side. That is exactly the configuration the single-pool policy was meant to retire. Whether it was never migrated, was migrated and later reverted, or simply predates the policy in a way nobody revisited, the practical result is the same. A security commitment that existed in a blog post did not exist in the code on at least one chain, and there was apparently no process catching the gap. On-chain analysts including researchers tracking the incident flagged the pause and the fund movements within hours.

Where the money went, and what Allbridge is asking for

The stolen stablecoins were bridged from Solana to Ethereum and then split across multiple addresses, with portions reportedly routed into privacy pools to make tracing harder. That is a familiar pattern at this point and it usually means recovery odds drop sharply once the funds land. Allbridge has paused Core operations, advised liquidity providers to withdraw, and made an additional request that says a lot about how these events actually unfold: it asked traders who profited from the temporary pool imbalance to send the money back. Ordinary arbitrage bots almost certainly picked up free value while the pools were skewed, and those operators did nothing wrong beyond taking a trade the market offered them. Getting that money back is a matter of goodwill, not enforcement, so nobody should count on it.

There is no compensation plan announced yet and no timeline for Core coming back online. Anyone with capital still parked in Allbridge pools on any chain should treat the withdrawal advisory as the operative instruction rather than waiting to see how the investigation reads.

Lessons Learned?

Bridges remain one of the most attacked surfaces in crypto for an obvious reason: they concentrate a lot of idle capital in contracts that have to trust conditions on two different chains at once. What happened here is worse than a clever exploit, because a clever exploit at least implies the defenders were beaten by something new. This was a known attack against a known configuration on a protocol that had already been burned by it once and had publicly described the cure.

If you provide liquidity anywhere, the useful takeaway is that a postmortem is a statement of intent, not proof of work completed. Ask which chains a fix actually shipped to. Multi-chain deployments drift, and the chain everyone stopped watching is the one that gets hit. Allbridge will probably survive this given the modest size of the loss, but the reputational damage of getting caught by your own 2023 homework is going to stick around a lot longer than $1.65 million.

---------------

Author: Rowan Marrow
Seattle Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

Ethical Hackers Found a Way to Break a $70 Billion Blockchain - With a $3,000 Budget...

Publishing@GlobalCryptoPress.com (Live Newsroom) — Mon, 6 Jul 2026 00:42:47 -0700

Turns out you don't need a nation-state budget to threaten a multi-billion dollar blockchain. You need about $3,000 and a very good weekend.

That is the uncomfortable lesson from a disclosure that went public on July 4, when security firm Hexens revealed a critical flaw it found in Aptos back in February. The bug lived inside the Move virtual machine, the engine that runs every smart contract on the chain, and it was serious enough that Hexens put the first-order systemic risk at roughly $70 billion. For a network that markets itself on speed and safety, that is not a number anyone wants attached to their name. The good news, which we will get to, is that no funds were ever lost. The bad news is how little it would have taken to change that.

The story matters because Aptos is not some abandoned testnet. It is a top-tier layer-1 with real stablecoins, real bridges, and real money parked in its ecosystem. When a researcher tells you a flaw could have reached that much value, they are not just talking about tokens sitting in wallets. They are talking about the plumbing that connects Aptos to the rest of crypto. And the people who found this did it on a budget that would not cover a decent gaming PC.

What they actually found

Hexens described the issue as a "stale-cache bug" that led to a type-confusion vulnerability. In plain terms, that means the software could be tricked into treating one kind of on-chain resource as if it were a completely different one. If you have ever handed someone the wrong key and watched them open a door they were never supposed to touch, you get the general idea. According to the firm, the flaw let an attacker potentially hijack on-chain structs and authority resources, which are the core data structures that decide who owns what and who is allowed to do what. Mess with those, and the normal rules about ownership stop meaning very much.

Type confusion is one of those bug classes that sounds academic until it is pointed at real money. It has haunted traditional software for decades, and the Move language was specifically designed to make this sort of thing hard to pull off. That is part of why this disclosure stings a little. The whole selling point of Move is that it treats digital assets as a special resource the compiler guards closely, so seeing a type-confusion flaw surface in Aptos is a bit like finding a leak in the one boat everyone promised was unsinkable.

The scary part: It took $3,000 to make it happen

Plenty of blockchain exploits require deep pockets, insider access, or control of a big chunk of the network. This one, allegedly, did not. Hexens says it simulated the attack under real network conditions with a success rate above 90 percent, using a server setup that cost around $3,000 and stood in for roughly a third of the validator set. No special permissions, no insider help, no cooperation from anyone already inside the system. That combination is what turns a technical curiosity into a genuine emergency, because it means the barrier to entry was almost nothing. When the cost of breaking something is measured in hundreds or low thousands of dollars and the prize is measured in billions, you are relying entirely on nobody else noticing first.

Where the $70 billion number comes from

A $70 billion figure sounds almost cartoonish for a chain whose own token market cap is a fraction of that, so it is worth explaining. Hexens was not claiming $70 billion sits directly on Aptos. The estimate covers everything the flaw could have reached through the connections crypto has quietly built over the last few years. That includes value moving across bridges, cross-chain messaging systems, stablecoin administration flows, and assets custodied by centralized exchanges that touch the network. Modern crypto is stitched together, and a hole in one important chain does not stay politely contained to that chain. That is the real warning here, and it applies to a lot more than just Aptos.

The quiet fix nobody heard about until now

Here is the part that keeps this from being a horror story. Hexens reported the flaw through Aptos Labs' bug bounty program on February 25, and the team says a fix was developed, tested, and pushed to mainnet within hours of discovery. An Aptos spokesperson told CoinDesk that no users or funds were impacted at any point, and the details were only made public months later, which is exactly how responsible disclosure is supposed to work. The researchers got paid, the hole got patched before anyone with bad intentions found it, and the wider world found out once it was safe to talk about.

Still, it is worth sitting with what almost happened. A flaw that could have rippled across $70 billion in connected value was closed off by a bug bounty and a fast engineering response, not by luck at the moment of attack. If white-hat researchers had not gotten there first, this would read very differently. The lesson for anyone holding crypto is not to panic about Aptos specifically, which is now patched, but to notice how much of this industry's safety still depends on a small group of ethical hackers choosing to send an email instead of draining a wallet. That is a thin line to be standing on, and it is worth remembering the next time a chain tells you it is unbreakable.

---------------

Author: Dorian Fenwick
Silicon Valley Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News