Track market-moving stories before they get noisy

Zcash is emerging as one of the stars of the sudden broad-based rally in crypto assets that went into high gear last week. The privacy-focused cryptocurrency has surged 66% over the past week, hitting an eight-year high of $841 on Monday.

Its surge came after investment manager Grayscale filed an amendment with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday to convert its existing Zcash Trust into an exchange-traded fund. If approved, the fund would trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker ZCSH.

Zcash’s strong performance comes amid a broader rally across the crypto market. Cryptocurrencies have risen sharply since Wednesday, posting gains not seen in nearly a year. The Treasury Department’s bond-buyback announcement helped spark the move, while renewed political support for the industry and a wave of short-position liquidations pushed prices even higher. Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market value, continued to climb and was trading just below $80,000 on Monday.

For Zcash, Grayscale’s proposed ETF came as an additional catalyst. If approved, the fund would give investors a regulated way to gain exposure to ZEC, Zcash’s native token, through their brokerage accounts, without having to buy or hold the token directly.

Its outperformance has revived discussion of whether Zcash can emerge as a more prominent alternative to Bitcoin for investors seeking financial privacy. Unlike Bitcoin, Zcash allows users to shield transaction details, such as the sender, recipient, and transaction amount, using zero-knowledge cryptography. 

Zcash supporters say that it improves on Bitcoin by offering Bitcoin’s fixed supply without the public ledger. As artificial intelligence grows, proponents argue that so will the risk of government surveillance. 

“Many are calling it ‘perfect Bitcoin,’” Arjun Khemani, a cryptographer and engineer, wrote on X. 

Influential crypto voices have also been speaking out about Zcash’s use cases. During a meeting of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Innovation Advisory Committee on Friday, Gemini co-founder Tyler Winklevoss pointed to Zcash as an example of how developers can use artificial intelligence to identify vulnerabilities in complex blockchain code and strengthen networks before malicious actors exploit them.

But Zcash’s strongest feature is also its greatest limitation. Its privacy features make it harder for exchanges and law enforcement to trace illicit funds, potentially making Zcash a more attractive vehicle for money laundering or sanctions evasion.

Seoul, South Korea, August 24th, 2026, Chainwire

New infrastructure enables open competition for Solana blockspace while introducing programmable block policies for validators

Flowra today announced the launch of its Open Orderflow Auction (OOA), a new block-building framework for Solana designed to introduce open competition into the network’s MEV market and increase validator revenue.

The Open Orderflow Auction allows registered searchers to compete for transaction inclusion through a transparent auction rather than relying on closed orderflow channels. By opening blockspace to competitive bidding, Flowra aims to improve price discovery and enable validators to capture a greater share of the value generated by MEV.

In early testing on a single validator, a Flowra-enabled setup increased compute units per block by 20.6%, moving that validator from 84% to 101% of the network average, alongside higher block fees than comparable validator software and 100% block production with 99.999% block engine uptime

In addition to the auction, Flowra is introducing Programmable Block Policy, which allows validators to define their own transaction inclusion policies at the block-building layer. The feature is designed to give validators greater operational flexibility, including the ability to meet regulatory or institutional compliance requirements without changing the underlying Solana protocol. They recently announced a collaboration with compliance infrastructure provider Honeypot to bring sanctions and risk screening to this layer.

“Solana’s performance has made it one of the industry’s leading blockchain networks, but its MEV market remains largely concentrated,” said Harry Hwang , CEO at Flowra. “By opening block building to transparent competition, we’re creating a more efficient market for blockspace while giving validators greater control over how their blocks are constructed with full verifiability and auditability.”

Flowra’s architecture is inspired by the competitive block-building model that emerged on Ethereum, where open bidding significantly increased proposer revenue. The company believes Solana’s high throughput and low-latency design make it well suited for a similar market-based approach to block building.

Flowra is currently onboarding institutional-grade validators to the Open Orderflow Auction, with a broader rollout to follow as the network expands. The Open Orderflow Auction is now available to validators and searchers participating in the Solana ecosystem.

About Flowra Flowra is a blockchain infrastructure company building validator and order flow solutions for the Solana ecosystem. The company develops technology designed to improve transaction transparency, value distribution, and incentive alignment across validators, users, and builders. Through its validator infrastructure, delegation programs, and MEV-related technologies, Flowra aims to create a more open, efficient, and scalable foundation for the next generation of blockchain networks.

Website | X | Telegram

Solana tokenomics proposals SGP-002 and SGP-003 are now open, with $SOL stakeholders casting their votes on two critical changes to network inflation and resource fees.

While initial votes lean heavily towards approving both proposals with flying colors, critics have become more vocal in arguing against SGP-002 and SGP-003.

Why are the experts divided on proposals theoretically designed to make $SOL more valuable?

Solana Governance Proposals Go Live Solana’s stakeholders are once again heading to the ballot boxes to express their views on $SOL inflation and tokenomics design. 

Authored by Helius’ _lostin_, SGP-002 suggests doubling $SOL’s disinflationary rate, bringing the network to its terminal inflation rate of 1.5% p.a. ~3 years early. Simultaneously, Temporal’s cavemanloverboy has floated SGP-003, which proposes introducing a resource fee designed to make Solana programs more efficient and implement a $SOL value accrual mechanic.

With both votes scheduled to run until the end of epoch 1024, or roughly September 28, onchain data suggests both proposals will pass in a landslide. While both SGP-002 and SGP-003 are far from reaching the 33% of stake quorum, over 96% of early voters have responded in favor of the proposals.

However, as we’ve seen previously, early voting behavior is hardly an indicator of final outcomes. SIMD-0228, an earlier governance proposal deliberately new $SOL issuance mechanics, received strong initial support, before a flurry of late voters overturned the vote, which ultimately failed.

Ellipsis Labs CEO Pushes Back on SGP-003 With SGP-003 finally being put to a vote, many of the proposal’s critics have reinforced their arguments against the suggested resource fee. Speaking out against SGP-003, Ellipsis Labs CEO Eugene Chen asserted that introducing a resource fee will make Solana a “worse home for applications”.

Chen, CEO of the firm behind Phoenix Perps and SolFi, the network’s first major prop AMM, argues that the proposal penalizes applications the author deems a “a poor use of blockspace”. By adding a fee that scales based on the complexity and resource-intensiveness, one could argue that the network discourages developers and engineers from building creative and complex applications.

Speaking with SolanaFloor, SGP-003 author cavemanloverboy asserts that the onus is then simply on developers and engineers to write more efficient code. His sentiments were further echoed by ex-Flash Trade engineer Busy Panda, who opined that Solana needs a resource fee mechanic to ensure block space is correctly optimized.

Manifest has also expressed opposition towards SGP-003. According to Solana’s leading spot CLOB DEX, the proposal favors prop AMM architecture and could result in more onchain security risks by forcing developers to write more complex code.

Stakeholders Express Concerns Over “Lost Income” As for SGP-002, pockets of Solana’s validator community are voicing their concerns over the impacts of doubling network disinflation. While much of the Solana community has expressed resounding support for any proposal that will lower $SOL inflation, validators argue this change comes at the direct expense of those providing the network security we all rely upon.

Triton’s Brian Long recently shared a series of arguments against SGP-002 and the proposed acceleration of Solana’s disinflation rate, citing lost stakeholder income as a potential risk to validators. Long asserts the proposal forces validators to give up income for the sake of a speculative attempt to increase price.

Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz pushed back on Long’s arguments, claiming they are mathematically incorrect and positioning it as a Trojan Horse to justify “extracting more value from users” in the name of “economic rationality”.

Ultimately, the raging debates around both proposals highlight one of the core features of blockchain governance. Everyone has self-serving interests, and these can either support or inhibit the chain’s development and progress. 

Validators rightly don’t want to suffer a loss of income, and developers and engineers don’t want to pay higher fees in order to run existing programs. Neither of these positions is unreasonable, but both can be seen as counterproductive to the more popular desire among $SOL holders to try and increase the asset’s markets.

Under Solana’s new governance mechanics, stakers are now able to override validators and vote on these proposals directly. Regardless of your views, every $SOL staker owes it to themselves to learn the ins and outs of each proposal and ensure that their votes reflect their views.

Read More on SolanaFloor Stocks on Solana

Solana’s Tokenized Equity Market Size Hits $465M as Sunrise Brings Healthcare Stocks Onchain

SGP-003 Explained

Solana is preparing to flip the switch on Transaction v1, a protocol upgrade heading to testnet in the coming weeks that triples the maximum transaction size. The change takes the ceiling from 1,232 bytes to 4,096 bytes, clearing the way for operations that previously had to be split across multiple transactions or stitched together with workarounds.

What’s actually changing The upgrade is defined across two Solana Improvement Documents: SIMD-0296 and SIMD-0385. Together, they redesign how transactions are structured at the protocol level.

Transaction v1 introduces a new version byte (0x81) and moves compute and priority-fee configurations into a fixed header mask. That’s a fancy way of saying resource limits get baked directly into the transaction header instead of being handled separately, which should streamline how validators process each transaction.

The bigger payload capacity unlocks several use cases that were previously painful or impossible to execute atomically. Zero-knowledge proofs, large multisig transactions, and BLS signature schemes can now fit inside a single transaction rather than relying on lookup tables or bundling tricks to piece things together.

Address Lookup Tables, the compression tool Solana introduced to squeeze more accounts into legacy-sized transactions, are being removed in the new format. Analysis from mid-August 2026 suggests the transition is smoother than it might appear. Roughly 62% of sampled v0 transactions were using ALTs, yet most of those transactions fit comfortably within the new 4,096-byte limit when converted to v1 format, with a median excess of approximately 420 bytes to spare.

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Timeline and testing status The testnet launch is targeted for late August 2026. Local testing has been available for a while through solana-test-validator version 4.2 and above, along with tools like Surfpool.

Preliminary feature-gated improvements for mainnet kicked off on August 17, 2026 as part of the Agave 4.2 client release cycle. That means the groundwork is already being laid for an eventual mainnet deployment, though the testnet phase will come first to shake out any issues.

Legacy transactions and the current v0 format will continue to work without modification. This isn’t a forced migration. Developers and applications that don’t need the extra capacity can keep doing exactly what they’re doing.

That said, indexers and infrastructure services will need to adapt. The new transaction serialization format means any tool that parses raw transactions, block explorers, analytics platforms, RPC providers, needs to understand the v1 structure.

Why this matters for Solana’s architecture The 1,232-byte transaction limit dates back to the network’s early design decisions around UDP packet sizes and later QUIC networking protocols adopted post-2022. While the limit helped keep the network fast, it also forced developers into creative contortions when building anything complex.

DeFi protocols sometimes had to break a single logical operation into multiple transactions. Multisig wallets with many signers bumped up against the ceiling regularly. And zero-knowledge applications, which produce proofs that simply don’t fit in 1,232 bytes, required workarounds.

Transaction v1 doesn’t solve every scaling challenge Solana faces, but it removes a bottleneck that was becoming more noticeable as applications grew more sophisticated. The 3.3x increase gives developers meaningfully more room without fundamentally changing the network’s performance characteristics.

What to watch next Developers building on Solana should be watching how their existing transaction patterns translate to the new format, especially if they currently rely on Address Lookup Tables. While the data suggests most workloads will port cleanly, edge cases always exist.

The gap between testnet activation and mainnet deployment will be the window to watch. If that transition happens without major incidents, it validates Solana’s approach of embedding resource limits directly into transaction headers.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.

DVN and Executor Services to Be DeprecatedCross-chain interoperability protocol LayerZero is pulling offchain support from 15 low-activity chains as part of an operational cleanup that takes effect over the next 30 days.

The affected chains named in the announcement include EDU Chain, Meter, Shimmer, Cyber, Silicon, Sophon, Bitlayer, Degen, Arbitrum Nova, and Cronos zkEVM, among others.

In other words, the core protocol itself remains intact, but operators relying on LayerZero Labs' own infrastructure on these chains will lose those routes once the transition is complete.

Stargate Users Urged to Act Before DeadlineThe deprecation also has direct consequences for Stargate users.

The move reads as routine housekeeping rather than a retreat from the protocol's core, since the affected chains carried minimal volume to begin with. Still, anyone holding assets on the named networks should treat the 30-day window as urgent.

Sources:
LayerZero Official Support Update | CryptoAdventure: LayerZero DVN and Executor Deprecation | AMBCrypto: LayerZero Chain Wind-Down Details

An attacker weaponized a single ERC-20 function to hijack LayerZero delegate permissions and mint 329 trillion unbacked SAND on Base, yet the actual reserve drain totaled just $675,000, exposing both the fragility and the hidden safeguards of cross-chain token architecture.

Summary

An attacker exploited the approveAndCall function on The Sandbox\u2019s SAND omnichain fungible token contract on Base, hijacking LayerZero delegate permissions and minting 329.24 trillion unbacked SAND across 703 events over five hours on Aug. 21 and 22, 2026. Blockchain security firm Blockaid flagged $49 billion in face-value SAND minted across more than 400 transactions, while PeckShield counted 14.9 billion SAND directed to two attacker-controlled addresses. The actual financial extraction was far smaller: roughly 14.75 million SAND drained from the Ethereum OFT Adapter in under 60 seconds, yielding approximately 80 ETH (around $675,000 at the time of the transactions). The Sandbox disabled bridging on Base and BNB Smart Chain, removed LayerZero peer settings via multisig, and confirmed that SAND on Ethereum and Polygon was unaffected; Korean exchanges Upbit and Bithumb halted deposits and withdrawals, and Coinbase delisted SAND futures. The incident marks the third major LayerZero-related bridge exploit in five months, following the $292 million Kelp DAO attack in April and the Stake DAO breach in May, accelerating a $15 billion migration wave from LayerZero to Chainlink CCIP. On the night of Aug. 21, 2026, an address that had been dormant for 313 days routed a crafted payload through The Sandbox\u2019s SAND token contract on Base. Within five hours, blockchain explorers showed trillions of freshly minted SAND tokens spreading across 173 wallets. The face value, calculated by multiplying inflated balances against the live market price, briefly crossed $49 billion. That number exceeded the market capitalization of all but a handful of crypto projects. It also had almost no relationship to the money the attacker actually took.

The gap between the headline figure and the real extraction ($675,000, roughly the price of a modest house) reveals something important about how cross-chain token systems work and how they fail. It also reveals how crypto security reporting can amplify panic through numbers that are technically accurate but practically meaningless. Understanding why the attacker could mint a number larger than the gross domestic product of several small nations, yet walk away with a fraction of a fraction of that sum, requires examining the architecture that made the exploit possible and the constraints that limited its damage.

The Sandbox is one of the most recognizable names in Web3 gaming, with its SAND token powering a virtual world where users create, own, and monetize gaming experiences. The project was expanding its cross-chain presence to Base and BNB Smart Chain through LayerZero\u2019s OFT framework when the vulnerability was exploited. That expansion, intended to improve accessibility and reduce transaction costs for users, instead became the vector for the largest nominal-value bridge exploit in crypto history.

What happened on the night of Aug. 21 The first on-chain signal appeared at 23:42:05 UTC on Aug. 21. An externally owned account, later tagged by PeckShield as attacker-controlled address 0x638C, began submitting transactions to the SAND OFT contract deployed on Base. Each transaction invoked the approveAndCall function, a standard ERC-20 extension designed as a user-experience shortcut that combines a token approval and a follow-on contract call in a single transaction.

In this case, the follow-on call was anything but routine. The crafted payload routed through the token contract into the LayerZero endpoint, granting the attacker\u2019s helper contract the effective standing of a delegate with administrative rights over endpoint configuration. Once that delegate status was secured, the attacker could mint SAND on Base without any corresponding lock of tokens on the Ethereum side.

BREAKING: Curve Finance halts LayerZero infrastructure out of precaution after rsETH LayerZero hack, affecting CRV bridging on multiple chains and crvUSD fast bridge pic.twitter.com/UwNvfxBew9

— crypto.news (@cryptodotnews) April 19, 2026 Over the next five hours, 703 distinct minting events distributed newly created SAND to 173 addresses. The minting stopped organically at 04:45:21 UTC on Aug. 22. Twenty-four minutes later, at 05:09:19 UTC, The Sandbox\u2019s multisig wallet zeroed out the trusted peer settings for Base and BNB Smart Chain, severing the cross-chain link that the attacker had exploited.

How approveAndCall became an attack vector The approveAndCall function exists in many ERC-20 token implementations. It was originally conceived to solve a genuine usability problem: standard ERC-20 transfers require two separate transactions (approve, then transferFrom), costing users extra gas and extra time. By bundling both steps, approveAndCall lets a user approve a spender and trigger an action in a single transaction.

The vulnerability in the SAND implementation was not in the approval mechanism itself but in what the function allowed as the \u201ccall\u201d portion. When the SAND OFT contract on Base processed an approveAndCall transaction, it forwarded the embedded calldata to the target contract specified by the caller. If that target was the LayerZero endpoint, the call arrived with the token contract as the msg.sender, not the original external caller.

This distinction matters because LayerZero\u2019s endpoint checks permissions based on msg.sender. The SAND OFT contract held delegate authority over its own endpoint configuration. By routing through approveAndCall, the attacker effectively borrowed that authority. The result was a privilege escalation: an unauthorized external account gained the ability to reconfigure the endpoint and authorize arbitrary minting.

Security researchers from Blockaid described the root cause as \u201cthe takeover of LayerZero delegate permissions through an approveAndCall function.\u201d It was not a flaw in the LayerZero protocol itself but an application-level configuration failure in how The Sandbox\u2019s OFT contract interacted with the endpoint.

The $49 billion that never existed The face-value figure that circulated in the hours after the exploit deserves careful scrutiny. Blockchain explorers calculate token values by multiplying balances against the last traded price. When an attacker mints 329.24 trillion SAND and the token trades at fractions of a cent, the resulting number is mathematically enormous but economically hollow.

SAND has a legitimate maximum supply of 3 billion tokens on Ethereum. The attacker\u2019s 329 trillion minted tokens exceeded that supply by a factor of roughly 110,000. No market on any exchange, centralized or decentralized, could absorb even a tiny fraction of that volume at the quoted price. The moment any significant sell pressure materialized, the price on affected venues would collapse toward zero.

The actual extraction followed a different, far more constrained path. Within the first 60 seconds of the exploit, 14.75 million SAND was withdrawn from the Ethereum OFT Adapter, the contract that holds locked SAND backing cross-chain transfers. That withdrawal happened across 15 transactions, with 14,095,483 SAND routed to a single externally owned account in six transactions over 24 seconds. The total proceeds converted to approximately 79.74 ETH, worth roughly $675,000.

The Sandbox put the impact at \u201cless than 0.01% of the total SAND token supply.\u201d While critics noted the percentage framing downplayed the absolute dollar figure, the math is straightforward: 14.75 million tokens divided by 3 billion equals 0.49% of supply, with the actual value extracted representing a small fraction of the project\u2019s market capitalization.

The bridge architecture that limited the damage Understanding why the attacker could not convert trillions of phantom tokens into billions of real dollars requires examining LayerZero\u2019s OFT adapter model and the structural constraints that turned a theoretically catastrophic exploit into a contained incident.

When a project like The Sandbox deploys across multiple chains using LayerZero\u2019s OFT framework, the original tokens remain on the home chain (in this case, Ethereum). The Ethereum-side OFT Adapter locks genuine SAND tokens when a user bridges them outbound. On the destination chain, the OFT contract mints an equivalent amount. When a user bridges back, the destination chain burns the tokens and the adapter releases the locked originals.

The critical constraint is that the Ethereum adapter only holds as many tokens as users have previously bridged. On the night of Aug. 21, the adapter held a limited amount of SAND. Once the attacker drained those reserves, no additional backed SAND existed to extract, regardless of how many unbacked tokens the attacker continued to mint on Base.

This design means the exploit\u2019s blast radius was structurally bounded by the adapter\u2019s balance, not by the attacker\u2019s minting capacity. The trillions of tokens on Base became what one analyst called \u201caccounting ghosts,\u201d visible on explorers but redeemable against nothing. An attacker\u2019s fabricated balance becomes someone else\u2019s loss only when it reaches a pool containing genuine SAND, ETH, stablecoins, or other assets with real liquidity. With most of the legitimate reserves already drained in the first minute, the remaining minted tokens had nowhere to go.

There is a secondary channel of damage worth noting. Any decentralized exchange liquidity pools on Base that held genuine SAND paired against ETH or stablecoins were also vulnerable. If the attacker swapped unbacked SAND into those pools before liquidity providers could withdraw, the LPs absorbed losses beyond the Ethereum adapter drain. The Sandbox\u2019s decision to take a pre-incident snapshot and compensate eligible LPs suggests this secondary damage was not trivial, even if the team has not disclosed exact figures.

The Sandbox\u2019s response reinforced the primary containment. By zeroing the trusted peers via multisig, the team severed the cross-chain messaging channel. SAND on Base and BNB Smart Chain became isolated, unable to bridge back to Ethereum. The team then advised users not to buy, sell, or trade SAND on either affected chain. The Ethereum-side maximum supply cap of 3 billion SAND remained intact, and the Polygon deployment was unaffected.

A pattern across three incidents in five months The Sandbox exploit did not occur in isolation. It was the third significant LayerZero-related bridge incident in five months, a pattern that has reshaped how the industry evaluates cross-chain infrastructure risk.

On April 18, 2026, attackers drained 116,500 rsETH worth approximately $292 million from a LayerZero-powered bridge operated by Kelp DAO. That attack was traced to a social engineering campaign that compromised a LayerZero Labs developer on March 6, giving the attacker access to the company\u2019s RPC cloud environment. The Kelp bridge used a 1-of-1 DVN (Decentralized Verifier Network) configuration, meaning a single compromised verifier could authorize fraudulent cross-chain messages.

In May, Stake DAO suffered a separate breach when a compromised deployer key reset a trusted peer setting, leading to 5.4 trillion vsdCRV minted for roughly $91,000 in extractable value.

The Sandbox incident followed a similar logic: application-level misconfiguration of cross-chain permissions created an opening for unauthorized minting. The mechanisms differed (approveAndCall versus social engineering versus key compromise), but the target was the same: the delegate or peer authority that controls who can trigger cross-chain token operations.

The $15 billion migration that followed The cumulative effect of three LayerZero-related incidents in five months triggered a structural shift in how protocols choose their cross-chain infrastructure. By August 2026, publicly announced migrations from LayerZero to Chainlink\u2019s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol totaled approximately $15 billion in secured value.

BitGo led the migration wave by moving $7.4 billion in WBTC. Mantle shifted its $2.5 billion Super Portal. Lombard transferred over $1 billion in bitcoin-backed assets. Solv Protocol moved $700 million in tokenized bitcoin reserves. Kraken replaced LayerZero with Chainlink CCIP for its kBTC wrapped asset. On Aug. 18, just days before the Sandbox exploit, the Wyoming Stable Token Commission migrated its Frontier Stable Token to Chainlink CCIP across eight chains following a state-level security review.

LayerZero Labs acknowledged the earlier Kelp incident, with the company publicly stating it \u201cmade a mistake\u201d in the DVN configuration that Kelp used. The Sandbox exploit adds a new vector to the conversation: even when the underlying messaging protocol functions as designed, application-level integrations can create exploitable seams.

Chainlink\u2019s CCIP uses a different verification model that relies on a decentralized oracle network and a separate risk management network that independently validates every cross-chain transaction. The risk management network operates as an independent watchdog: even if the primary oracle network is compromised, the secondary layer can halt suspicious messages before they execute. This two-layer approach directly addresses the single-point-of-failure problem that enabled the Kelp DAO exploit, where a 1-of-1 DVN configuration meant one compromised verifier was sufficient to authorize fraud.

Whether that architecture proves more resilient over time remains an open question. Chainlink\u2019s model introduces its own trust assumptions, and no cross-chain system has proven immune to sophisticated attacks over a multi-year period. But the market has voted with its capital: $15 billion in migration announcements represents a level of institutional confidence shift that is difficult to reverse. When a state government (Wyoming) and major custodians (BitGo, Kraken) independently reach the same conclusion about infrastructure risk, the signal carries weight beyond any single incident.

What the market priced in The market response to the Sandbox exploit contradicted what a casual observer might expect. Despite the $49 billion headline, SAND traded up 4.76% to $0.0476 in the 24 hours following the incident, with trading volume surging more than 400%.

Several factors may explain the counterintuitive price action. First, the rapid containment and transparent communication from The Sandbox team reassured holders that the Ethereum-side supply was intact. Second, Korean exchanges halting deposits and withdrawals under South Korea\u2019s Virtual Asset User Protection Act signaled regulatory seriousness about protecting traders. Third, some market participants may have interpreted the small actual extraction as evidence that the OFT adapter model worked as a structural safety net, even if the application-level permissions failed.

JUST IN: Coldcard wallets affected by security issue with reported losses

Roughly 594 $BTC valued at $38 million has been stolen from certain dormant single sig wallets pic.twitter.com/f3fk7kYXzM

— crypto.news (@cryptodotnews) August 1, 2026 Coinbase delisted SAND perpetual futures, a precautionary move that reduced leverage exposure. The Sandbox announced it would take a pre-incident snapshot and compensate eligible liquidity providers on Base and BNB Smart Chain, though the timeline and mechanism for compensation were not immediately disclosed.

The price resilience should not be mistaken for absolution. The exploit exposed a configuration vulnerability that existed for at least 313 days, the dormancy period of the attacker\u2019s wallet, which was pre-positioned on Oct. 13, 2025. That one of the most recognizable names in Web3 gaming carried this exposure without detection raises questions about audit coverage for cross-chain deployments. The wallet\u2019s extended dormancy also suggests the attacker either discovered the vulnerability months before acting or acquired the wallet from someone who did.

DefiLlama logged 17 separate exploits in August 2026 alone, with bridges again emerging as the recurring weak point. Q2 2026 was described as \u201cthe most hacked quarter in DeFi history,\u201d with 99 exploits draining $746 million. Cumulative DeFi losses for the year exceeded $840 million by the end of May, and the Sandbox incident pushes the running total higher still. The question facing the industry is no longer whether bridges can be secured, but whether the current generation of bridge architectures should be trusted with significant capital at all.

What to watch Post-mortem publication: The Sandbox promised a full post-mortem. Its depth, particularly around how the approveAndCall pathway was missed in prior audits, will signal how seriously the project treats the configuration gap.

Liquidity provider compensation: The snapshot-based compensation plan needs a timeline and token source. Watch whether affected LPs receive full restitution or a haircut.

LayerZero protocol-level mitigations: Whether LayerZero introduces guardrails to prevent delegate hijacking through token contract callbacks will indicate if the protocol views this as a systemic risk or a one-off configuration error.

Further migration announcements: If additional projects accelerate departures from LayerZero following this third incident, the migration wave could reshape the cross-chain infrastructure market before year-end.

Regulatory response in South Korea: Upbit and Bithumb acted under the Virtual Asset User Protection Act. Whether Korean regulators pursue further action against The Sandbox or LayerZero could set precedent for how bridge exploits are treated under consumer protection frameworks.

What is the approveAndCall function? The approveAndCall function is an ERC-20 extension that lets a user approve a token spender and execute a follow-on contract call in a single transaction. It was designed to save gas and simplify multi-step interactions. In the Sandbox exploit, the attacker used this function to route a crafted payload through the SAND token contract into the LayerZero endpoint, effectively borrowing the token contract’s delegate authority over endpoint configuration.

How much money did the attacker actually steal? The attacker extracted approximately 14.75 million SAND from the Ethereum OFT Adapter, converting the tokens to roughly 79.74 ETH, worth approximately $675,000 at the time of the transactions. While the face value of minted tokens reached $49 billion, that figure is an arithmetic artifact that could never have been realized as actual value.

Were SAND tokens on Ethereum and Polygon affected? No. The exploit targeted the SAND OFT contract on Base and BNB Smart Chain. The Ethereum-side adapter contract and the Polygon deployment were not compromised. The maximum supply cap of 3 billion SAND on Ethereum remains intact.

Why did the attacker mint trillions of tokens if they could only extract $675,000? The minting was automated across 703 events and 173 wallets over five hours. The attacker likely aimed to drain as much backed value as possible from the Ethereum adapter, but the adapter balance was limited. The excess minting beyond what the adapter held produced unbacked tokens with no redemption path.

Is this a flaw in LayerZero’s protocol? Security researchers described the vulnerability as an application-level configuration failure, not a flaw in the LayerZero protocol itself. The issue was specific to how The Sandbox’s OFT contract on Base handled approveAndCall interactions with the LayerZero endpoint. However, the fact that three LayerZero-integrated bridges have been exploited in five months has intensified scrutiny of the protocol’s overall security model.

What did Korean exchanges do in response? Upbit and Bithumb halted SAND deposits and withdrawals, citing suspected security incidents under South Korea’s Virtual Asset User Protection Act. Coinbase separately delisted SAND perpetual futures contracts.

Will affected liquidity providers be compensated? The Sandbox announced plans to compensate eligible liquidity providers based on a pre-incident snapshot of balances on Base and BNB Smart Chain. The payment schedule and token source had not been disclosed as of Aug. 23, 2026.

How does this compare to other bridge exploits? By nominal value, the $49 billion face-value figure would make this the largest bridge exploit in crypto history. By actual extraction, the $675,000 loss ranks among the smallest. The key difference is that earlier exploits like Ronin ($625 million) and Wormhole ($326 million) had sufficient bridge liquidity for attackers to drain backed assets at scale, while the Sandbox adapter held only a fraction of the total SAND supply, structurally limiting losses.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or legal advice. Cryptocurrency investments carry significant risk. Always conduct your own research before making any financial decisions. Published Aug. 23, 2026.

https://crypto.news/what-is-hyperliquid-how-does-it-work/

President Trump announced that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is exploring a legal pathway to allow Hyperliquid, a blockchain-based perpetuals exchange, to operate in the U.S. The CFTC has reportedly directed staff to consider rules for non-registered crypto exchanges. Trump’s comments come as Hyperliquid’s native token, HYPE, has seen a 40.8% increase over the past week. The move has outperformed both Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), which rose 22.5% and 30.0%, respectively, during the same period. Market participants appear to view this regulatory development as potentially supportive of further increases in HYPE’s value.

Key Takeaways Trump’s statement suggests potential U.S. regulatory accommodation for Hyperliquid, which may support increased volume and interest in HYPE. Hyperliquid’s recent performance shows a significant rise in HYPE, outpacing major cryptocurrencies like BTC and ETH. The market pricing for Hyperliquid reaching $100 by the end of 2026 has risen to 67% YES, indicating growing optimism among market participants. What to Watch Observers will be keenly focused on developments from the CFTC regarding possible regulatory frameworks for non-registered crypto exchanges. Any official announcements or changes in the regulatory landscape could influence market sentiment and pricing for HYPE. Additionally, Hyperliquid’s performance relative to major cryptocurrencies and its ability to maintain its recent momentum will be crucial indicators to watch. The market’s response to these developments will likely shape the outlook for HYPE’s price trajectory into 2026.

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Term Structure

Contract Odds Δ since publish Volume 24h December 31 66.5% — — View market → January 1 2027 4% — — View market → January 1 2027 2.9% — — View market → January 1 2027 5% — — View market → January 1 2027 3.1% — — View market → January 1 2027 82.5% — — View market →

A Hyperliquid user has lost about 550,000 USDC after a Google sponsored advertisement directed the victim to a fake version of the decentralized trading platform, with investigators linking the theft infrastructure to the Inferno drainer ecosystem.

Summary

A Hyperliquid user lost about 550,000 USDC after clicking a Google sponsored ad for a fake website. Salus linked the attack infrastructure to the Inferno drainer ecosystem. The backend automatically split the stolen funds among addresses tied to the operation. Groups linked to the infrastructure were connected to about $52.74 million in losses. Blockchain security firm Salus said in an Aug. 24 post on X that the theft took place on Aug. 13 and involved a counterfeit Hyperliquid website promoted through paid Google search results. After tracing the stolen funds and reviewing the infrastructure behind the page, the firm said it connected the operation to a professional drainer-as-a-service network associated with Inferno.

On August 13, 2026, a fake Hyperliquid website promoted through Google sponsored ads caused a victim to lose 550k USDC.

After cross-checking the subsequent fund flows, we confirmed that the case involved professional drainer-as-a-service infrastructure closely linked to the…

— Salus (@salus_sec) August 24, 2026 Hyperliquid phishing case used automated theft infrastructure Salus said its undercover investigation found that the service solicited customers through the Telegram account @AngelFernoOwner. The operator advertised tools including malicious scripts, administrative panels, approval-command generation, one-time contract deployment, automated draining, cross-chain withdrawals, token swaps, and fund consolidation.

The service also offered “automated revenue sharing,” according to the security firm, allowing proceeds from successful phishing attacks to be divided among participants without manual transfers.

In the Hyperliquid case, Salus attributed separate roles to the phishing group and the backend service. The group bought the sponsored advertisements, deployed the spoofed Hyperliquid entry point, and supplied the address designated to receive the proceeds. Once the victim approved the malicious transaction and the funds were taken, the infrastructure handled the split automatically.

According to Salus, address 0x98b276…13C55 received 80% of the proceeds, while 0x93b6B2…1d6D1 received 15% and 0x6fE314…B566 received 5%. A fourth address, 0x9bcd…9104a, executed the drain.

Earlier reporting on the Aug. 13 incident showed roughly 550,019 USDC moving in three transfers of about 440,015 USDC, 82,503 USDC and 27,501 USDC to addresses identified by security researchers as attacker-controlled. Google later suspended the advertiser linked to the reported campaign, according to reports published after the theft.

Drainer-as-a-service model provides ready-made phishing tools The setup described by Salus follows a model in which phishing operators can use ready-made wallet-draining infrastructure while concentrating on advertising, fake websites, and victim targeting.

As crypto.news explained in July 2026, wallet drainer services are built around malicious approvals that allow an attacker-controlled contract to transfer tokens after a user signs a transaction. The report also described drainer-as-a-service operations as an industry in which developers supply malicious software and share stolen proceeds with affiliates who bring in victims.

Such infrastructure can separate the visible phishing campaign from the software used to process approvals and move assets. In the latest case, Salus said the advertised package covered both the initial draining tools and later stages such as cross-chain withdrawals, swaps, consolidation, and profit distribution.

Inferno has been tied to other large approval-phishing cases. A May 2026 Coinbase lawsuit report covered an anonymous investor who alleged that about $55 million in DAI was stolen in August 2024 after the victim interacted with a fake login page. The complaint said the attacker used Inferno Drainer, while blockchain security firm Zero Shadow later traced part of the stolen assets to a Coinbase retail account.

Salus links infrastructure to $52.74 million in losses Tracing beyond the Hyperliquid victim, Salus said groups connected to the infrastructure were linked to approximately $52.74 million in total losses across multiple phishing incidents.

One of the largest cases cited by the firm involved the attacker behind the September 2025 UXLINK exploit. On Sept. 23, 2025, the attacker later became the victim of an approval-phishing attack that moved roughly 542 million UXLINK tokens.

A September 2025 UXLINK phishing report said ScamSniffer detected a malicious increaseAllowance approval that enabled phishing addresses to drain more than $43 million worth of UXLINK at the time. SlowMist founder Yu Xian said the theft was likely carried out by Inferno Drainer using an authorization-phishing method.

The phishing incident followed the original UXLINK compromise one day earlier. Attackers had exploited a delegateCall vulnerability in the project’s multi-signature wallet, obtained administrator privileges, and moved about $11.3 million in assets, while unauthorized token minting caused further disruption. The later phishing theft removed hundreds of millions of UXLINK from the exploiter’s own wallet.

Salus also linked the infrastructure to an April 15, 2026 incident involving CoW.fi. According to the security firm, the protocol’s official domain was hijacked, and one associated victim lost about 316,000 USDC.

A third incident cited by Salus occurred on July 9, when a suspected fake decentralized application or fake airdrop prompted a malicious approval that resulted in the theft of 999,999 USDT. ScamSniffer had reported the transaction, according to the firm’s account of the case.

Evidence and high-risk addresses sent for action The Hyperliquid case follows other phishing operations in which attackers copied recognizable crypto brands and used familiar online services or development platforms to place malicious pages in front of potential victims.

A March 2026 OpenClaw phishing report described attackers creating fake GitHub accounts and cloned websites before directing developers to malicious wallet-connection prompts. OX Security said the campaign used obfuscated code and targeted users with fake token offers, although no confirmed victims had been reported at the time.

For the Aug. 13 Hyperliquid theft, Salus said its investigation covered the subsequent fund flows, the service infrastructure and the accounts used to recruit phishing operators. The firm said all supporting evidence, identified high-risk addresses and related intelligence had been formally submitted to relevant organizations for risk labeling and coordinated action.

Key Highlights PUMP has gained 84% in the past week and 13% in the last 24 hours, significantly outperforming the broader crypto market which declined 1.9% The platform has executed over $1 million in daily token buybacks for three consecutive days Trading volume surged 43.68% to reach $781 million in 24 hours, demonstrating robust market engagement Critical resistance level is positioned at $0.0055, while RSI indicators show overbought conditions at 77.55 Planned Q4 2026 tokenomics overhaul may result in burning as much as 36% of the total PUMP token supply The PUMP token from Pump.fun has experienced an impressive 84% surge across the last seven days, climbing to $0.005136 while the wider cryptocurrency market declined by 1.9%. This performance positions the token among the top-performing digital assets in the current market cycle.

Pump.Fun (PUMP) Price The primary catalyst for this upward movement is Pump.fun’s active token buyback initiative. The platform allocates a percentage of its trading fees to repurchase PUMP tokens from the open market. Over the past three consecutive days, these buybacks have surpassed $1 million daily, with the latest 24-hour period recording $1.01 million in purchases.

This mechanism generates persistent buy-side pressure that’s fundamentally linked to the platform’s revenue generation, independent of broader market sentiment fluctuations.

The surge in price has been accompanied by proportional increases in trading activity. PUMP’s 24-hour trading volume jumped 43.68% to exceed $781 million, demonstrating that the price rally is supported by substantial market participation rather than low-liquidity price manipulation.

Technical Recovery From Extended Downtrend PUMP had been trapped within a persistent descending channel throughout much of the current year, bottoming out around $0.0011 in July. Following that low, the token has mounted a consistent recovery, successfully breaking through the descending trendline and recapturing the $0.00237 support level before continuing its advance.

This recovery phase has established a pattern of progressively higher peaks and troughs since late July, with the most dramatic acceleration occurring after August 19.

Cryptocurrency analyst CryptoKaleo weighed in on X, observing that the PUMP chart appears to be “speed running its way back to all time highs.” His observation captures the velocity of the rebound from the July lows.

The RSI indicator currently registers 77.55, signaling that PUMP has entered overbought territory. Meanwhile, the Ultimate Oscillator shows a reading of 60.08, maintaining positive overall momentum while simultaneously suggesting that rapid pullbacks remain possible given the magnitude of the weekly advance.

Future Price Targets and Development Roadmap The immediate resistance level to monitor is $0.0055. A decisive breach above this level, backed by sustained volume, could pave the way toward $0.0060 and subsequently $0.0065. Conversely, a rejection at this resistance would likely result in PUMP entering a consolidation phase between $0.0045 and $0.0055.

Source: TradingView Pump.fun has outlined plans for a decentralized bounty platform called GO, scheduled for Q3 2026, which is expected to increase on-chain activity and subsequently channel additional revenue into the buyback mechanism.

Looking toward Q4 2026, the project has scheduled a significant tokenomics revision that could eliminate up to 36% of the total PUMP token supply through burns. The same quarter will also see expansion efforts to Ethereum and Monad networks.

Current data confirms $1.01 million in PUMP buybacks during the previous 24-hour period, with the token maintaining support above the $0.0051 level.

The Treasury just doubled its bond buyback program while national debt crossed $40 trillion. Bitcoin responded with its best week since March 2024, gaining 27% as institutional money poured into spot ETFs at a record pace.

Summary

Bitcoin surged from $62,679 to $79,500 between Aug. 17 and Aug. 21, a 27% gain that coincided with U.S. national debt crossing $40 trillion for the first time. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent doubled the maximum per-operation buyback size from $2 billion to $4 billion for 10-to-30-year securities, effective Sept. 9, and hinted the ceiling could rise further. BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) pulled in $606 million in a single session on Aug. 20, capturing 82% of all spot Bitcoin ETF inflows that day. Short liquidations across crypto derivatives exchanges totaled $3 billion in 24 hours, affecting more than 170,000 traders in the largest squeeze since November 2021. Ray Dalio warned that a U.S. debt crisis could arrive “in three years, give or take two” and recommended investors hold gold and “a bit” of bitcoin as hedges against fiscal deterioration. On the morning of Aug. 19, 2026, the U.S. Treasury Department announced it would at least double the size of its long-end liquidity support buyback operations. Within 12 hours, bitcoin had gained 8.2%, blowing through its 200-day moving average for the first time in nine months. By Friday, it was knocking on $80,000.

The surface narrative is simple: falling yields make non-yielding assets more attractive. But the rally that followed was not just a rate-trade reaction. It was a statement about what investors now believe the United States government will do when its borrowing costs become unmanageable. And the answer, delivered by the Treasury itself, was: print more liquidity.

That interpretation turned bitcoin from a speculative risk asset into a fiscal-fear trade, a bet that the world’s reserve currency issuer has entered a debt spiral it cannot exit through austerity alone. The mechanism connecting Treasury buybacks to bitcoin’s price is more direct than most investors realize.

What the Treasury actually did On Aug. 19, the Treasury Department raised the maximum per-operation size for its liquidity support buybacks from $2 billion to at least $4 billion. The change applied to securities in the 10-to-20-year and 20-to-30-year maturity sectors. The number of long-end operations also increased from two to four per quarter, with the new schedule taking effect on Sept. 9.

Bessent told CNBC on Aug. 20 that “there is every indication that the buybacks could exceed” the $4 billion ceiling. The phrasing was deliberate. The Treasury secretary was signaling that bond market intervention would scale as needed, with no preset upper bound.

This is not quantitative easing in the formal sense. The Treasury is not creating new reserves or expanding its balance sheet the way the Federal Reserve did between 2020 and 2022. Instead, it is buying back older, less liquid bonds and replacing them with newly issued debt. The mechanical effect, however, is similar: long-term yields fall, the dollar weakens, and risk assets rally.

The 30-year Treasury yield dropped 9 basis points in the hours following the announcement. The dollar index fell to its lowest level since June. Gold climbed 2.1%. Bitcoin did all of that and more.

The $40 trillion backdrop The timing of the buyback expansion was not coincidental. U.S. national debt crossed $40,047,425,768,420.22 on Aug. 18, 2026, one day before the announcement. That milestone arrived just five months after the debt passed $39 trillion in March, making it the fastest trillion-dollar increase in the country’s history.

The numbers paint a picture of structural deterioration. The federal government is spending roughly 40% more than it collects in revenue, with annual income near $5.5 trillion and expenses near $7.5 trillion. Interest payments on the debt have surpassed Medicare to become the second-largest line item in the federal budget, trailing only Social Security.

Total debt has more than doubled from the approximately $19.95 trillion outstanding when President Trump first took office in January 2017. The Congressional Budget Office projects annual deficits exceeding $2 trillion through at least 2034, assuming no recession intervenes. Each trillion now arrives faster than the last, a compounding dynamic that bond markets have begun to price with increasing urgency.

The day the debt clock ticked past $40 trillion, the Treasury held its regularly scheduled 20-year bond auction. Demand was tepid. The bid-to-cover ratio fell to its lowest level since February, forcing a higher yield to clear the sale. One day later, the buyback announcement arrived. The sequence was not subtle: the government struggled to sell new debt on Monday, then announced it would buy back old debt on Tuesday. The market drew its own conclusions.

For bitcoin holders, this arithmetic is the thesis. A government that cannot balance its books and cannot politically tolerate the austerity required to do so will eventually monetize its obligations. Whether that monetization arrives through formal quantitative easing, yield-curve control, or the quiet expansion of buyback programs does not change the destination. It only changes the pace.

How buybacks became a bitcoin catalyst The transmission mechanism from Treasury buybacks to bitcoin runs through three channels.

First, when the Treasury buys back older bonds, it compresses long-term yields. Lower yields reduce the opportunity cost of holding non-yielding assets like gold and bitcoin. Before the buyback announcement, the 30-year Treasury was offering 5.12%. After it, 5.03%. That 9-basis-point move may sound trivial, but in a market where trillions of dollars in capital allocation are benchmarked against the risk-free rate, it shifts the entire cost-of-capital equation.

Second, the buyback program injects liquidity into the bond market. Dealers who sell older bonds to the Treasury receive cash, which they redeploy into other assets. Some of that cash flows into equities. Some flows into crypto. The pathway is indirect but measurable: on the same day as the buyback announcement, spot bitcoin ETFs absorbed $517 million in net inflows, their strongest daily result since May.

Third, and most importantly, the buyback expansion signals a policy preference. The Treasury is telling the market that it will intervene to prevent long-term yields from rising to levels that threaten fiscal sustainability. That signal, more than any single operation, is what reprices bitcoin. It tells investors that the government will choose inflation over austerity when forced to pick.

The ETF plumbing underneath the rally The week of Aug. 17 to 21 produced one of the most concentrated bursts of institutional bitcoin buying since spot ETFs launched in January 2024.

On Aug. 20 alone, U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs recorded $606 million in net inflows. BlackRock’s IBIT captured $497 million of that total, an 82% market share that underscores its dominance as the vehicle of choice for institutional allocation. IBIT’s cumulative net inflows reached $62.43 billion, and total spot bitcoin ETF assets climbed above $90 billion.

The four-day stretch from Monday through Thursday saw approximately $1.9 billion flow into spot bitcoin funds. Eight of 12 listed products attracted positive flows, suggesting the buying was broad-based rather than concentrated in a single fund.

21Shares senior strategist Matt Mena argued that expectations of a weaker dollar helped drive institutional capital toward scarce assets. The framing is significant. When an ETF strategist at a major issuer describes bitcoin as a “scarce asset” in the same sentence as dollar depreciation, the narrative has shifted from speculation to macro allocation.

Tudor Investment disclosed an additional 109,446 shares of IBIT during the same period. UBS raised its IBIT position to $90 million. These are not retail traders chasing momentum. They are multi-billion-dollar allocators repositioning around a fiscal thesis.

The composition of the buying matters as much as its volume. When ETF inflows are dominated by a single product and concentrated in a two-day window, the pattern often reflects a macro catalyst triggering allocation model changes at large institutions. A retail-driven rally tends to spread across smaller funds and arrive over weeks, not hours. The Aug. 19-20 pattern looked institutional from the first print.

Sizing the buyback against bitcoin’s market Here is arithmetic that most coverage of the rally has overlooked.

The Treasury plans to execute at least four long-end buyback operations per quarter at $4 billion each, for a minimum quarterly volume of $16 billion. Annualized, that is $64 billion in long-end bond purchases.

Bitcoin’s total market capitalization at $78,000 is approximately $1.55 trillion. The $64 billion in annual buyback volume represents 4.1% of bitcoin’s entire market cap. That does not mean 4.1% of buyback proceeds flow into bitcoin. But it does mean the liquidity injection from this single program is large enough to move bitcoin’s price if even a small fraction of the freed-up capital rotates into crypto.

Compare that to spot bitcoin ETF inflows. In the 12 months through July 2026, U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs absorbed approximately $28 billion in net inflows. The Treasury’s buyback program is injecting 2.3 times that amount into the broader financial system every year. If just 5% of buyback-related liquidity ultimately reaches bitcoin markets, through ETFs, futures, or direct spot purchases, that would equal $3.2 billion per year in incremental demand, roughly equivalent to a full month of average ETF inflows.

This is a back-of-the-envelope calculation, not a precise forecast. But it illustrates why the market’s reaction was so violent. The buyback program is not a one-time event. It is a recurring liquidity injection that compounds over time, and its scale is large relative to bitcoin’s absorptive capacity.

Consider the comparison from the other direction. Bitcoin’s daily spot volume averaged roughly $35 billion during the rally week. The Treasury’s $4 billion per operation is 11.4% of a single day’s trading volume. Spread across a quarter with four operations, that is $16 billion in fresh liquidity entering a system where marginal price is set by a much thinner order book than headline volume suggests. The effective float, the coins actually available for sale at any given price, is a fraction of total supply. Most bitcoin sits in long-term holder wallets and does not move.

The Dalio endorsement and what it signals On Friday, Aug. 21, Ray Dalio published a LinkedIn post that amounted to the most explicit bitcoin endorsement of his career. The Bridgewater Associates founder warned that the U.S. government’s financial condition had reached “an inflection point” and recommended investors reduce bond exposure while holding 10% to 15% of their portfolios in gold and “a bit” of bitcoin.

Dalio’s framing was specific. He linked the Treasury’s buyback expansion directly to the broader debt trajectory, arguing that Bessent’s move was “a sign that a debt crisis is getting closer.” If the U.S. government were a business, Dalio noted, its debt service payments would total approximately $11 trillion, roughly 200% of annual revenue.

JUST IN: Coldcard wallets affected by security issue with reported losses

Roughly 594 $BTC valued at $38 million has been stolen from certain dormant single sig wallets pic.twitter.com/f3fk7kYXzM

— crypto.news (@cryptodotnews) August 1, 2026 The significance is not that Dalio likes bitcoin. It is that the most prominent macro investor of the past four decades now treats bitcoin and gold as complements in the same hedge. When Dalio says sell bonds and buy scarce assets, the audience is not retail. It is sovereign wealth funds, pension allocators, and family offices managing multi-generational capital.

The bitcoin-gold correlation rose to approximately +0.7 during the rally week, a level described by analysts as a return to “digital-gold-era” pricing. Both assets rose together because both were responding to the same signal: the United States government will choose monetary expansion over fiscal discipline.

The White House factor The Treasury buyback was not the only policy catalyst that week. On Aug. 19, the same day as the buyback announcement, President Trump convened a White House meeting with crypto executives and regulators to discuss the CLARITY Act, the most ambitious attempt at comprehensive crypto legislation in U.S. history.

The meeting produced no binding commitments, but it sent a signal that the administration views crypto as a policy priority. Bitcoin jumped more than 5% to trade above $68,600 within hours of the meeting’s conclusion. By Thursday, BTC had cleared $72,000 for the first time since early June.

The SEC added its own accelerant. On Aug. 18, the commission published its Regulation Crypto Assets notice of proposed rulemaking, offering the first formal framework for token offerings under existing securities law. The CFTC opened its inaugural Innovation Advisory Committee session on Aug. 20. Three regulatory bodies, all moving in the same direction during the same week, created a policy convergence that the market had not seen before.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune filed cloture on the CLARITY Act before the August recess, setting up a procedural vote for Sept. 15. If the bill clears that hurdle, it would create the first statutory line between digital commodities overseen by the CFTC and investment contract assets under the SEC. Bitcoin, along with ether, XRP, SOL, and DOGE, would be permanently classified as non-securities under the bill’s ETP grandfather clause.

The opposing case: why this rally could reverse Not everyone agrees that bitcoin has become a fiscal hedge. Several structural risks could undermine the thesis.

The CLARITY Act faces long odds despite the White House push. Polymarket traders give the bill only a 16% chance of becoming law in 2026, down from an 82% peak in February. The core sticking point is an ethics provision targeting presidential crypto income. If the September 15 cloture vote fails, analysts have warned of a 15% to 30% market correction as the industry faces another year of regulation by enforcement.

The rally itself was heavily amplified by leverage. More than $3 billion in short positions were liquidated across crypto derivatives exchanges, affecting 170,237 traders. Binance alone processed over $1 billion in liquidations. When that much of a move is driven by forced buying from liquidated shorts rather than organic demand, the price can reverse just as violently.

Bitcoin also remains 37% below its all-time high of $126,198 set on Oct. 6, 2025. The rally brought BTC back to levels last seen in May, but it has not yet proven it can sustain prices above $75,000 during a period of thinner weekend liquidity.

There is also the question of bitcoin’s own supply dynamics. The 2024 halving reduced block rewards to 3.125 BTC, tightening new issuance. But Strategy, the largest corporate bitcoin holder, has been a net seller in recent months. If large holders use the rally as an exit opportunity, supply could overwhelm the ETF bid.

Finally, the fiscal-hedge narrative requires bitcoin to behave differently than it has during prior stress events. In the first half of 2026, gold outperformed bitcoin by a wide margin, gaining roughly 32% while bitcoin fell nearly 46% from its August 2025 levels. Central banks continued to accumulate gold, not bitcoin, as their reserve hedge of choice. No central bank has added bitcoin to its official reserves. The correlation may be rising, but the track record is still mixed.

The week’s real lesson The most revealing aspect of this week was not bitcoin’s price. It was the market’s interpretation of why it moved.

In 2020, bitcoin rallied on stimulus checks and retail euphoria. In 2024, it rallied on ETF approval and halving-cycle anticipation. In August 2026, it rallied because the U.S. Treasury signaled it would absorb long-duration bond risk to keep yields from spiraling, and the market read that as a confession that the fiscal trajectory is unsustainable.

That is a different kind of rally. It suggests that bitcoin is beginning to price not as a technology bet or a speculative vehicle but as an instrument of fiscal dissent, a way for capital to express the view that sovereign debt is no longer risk-free.

Whether that view proves correct depends on variables that no one can forecast with precision: the path of interest rates, the outcome of the CLARITY Act vote, the willingness of Congress to address structural deficits, and the Federal Reserve’s response at Jackson Hole and beyond. But the fact that $1.9 billion in ETF inflows arrived in four days tells you something about where institutional conviction is landing.

The bitcoin price prediction models that project a base-case target of $75,929 by year-end now look conservative. If the buyback program expands further, if the CLARITY Act clears its September vote, and if the Fed signals rate cuts at Jackson Hole, the conditions for a sustained rally above $80,000 are in place.

The conditions for a reversal are also in place. That tension is what makes this a trade, not a certainty.

What to watch Sept. 9 buyback launch: The expanded Treasury buyback schedule takes effect. Watch whether the Treasury increases operation sizes beyond $4 billion, which would confirm Bessent’s hint and likely push yields lower.

Sept. 15 CLARITY Act cloture vote: A successful vote would remove the largest regulatory overhang on crypto markets. A failure would likely trigger the 15% to 30% correction analysts have warned about.

Jackson Hole commentary: The Federal Reserve’s annual symposium in late August will signal whether rate cuts are on the table for Q4. A dovish tilt would reinforce the fiscal-fear trade.

Weekly ETF flow data: Sustained inflows above $500 million per day would indicate the institutional bid is structural, not reactive. A sharp reversal in flows would suggest the rally was leverage-driven and vulnerable.

30-year Treasury yield: If yields fall below 4.90%, the opportunity cost of holding bitcoin drops further and the fiscal-hedge narrative strengthens. If yields climb back above 5.20%, the buyback program is failing to contain the bond market and risk assets face pressure.

Why is bitcoin rallying in August 2026? Bitcoin gained 27% between Aug. 17 and Aug. 21 after the U.S. Treasury doubled its long-term bond buyback program from $2 billion to $4 billion per operation. The move compressed yields, weakened the dollar, and triggered $3 billion in short liquidations across crypto derivatives exchanges. Spot bitcoin ETFs absorbed $1.9 billion in four days.

What is the Treasury buyback program? The Treasury’s liquidity support buyback program involves purchasing older, less liquid government bonds and replacing them with newly issued debt. On Aug. 19, 2026, the Treasury doubled the maximum per-operation size to $4 billion for 10-to-30-year securities and increased the number of quarterly operations from two to four.

How much money flowed into bitcoin ETFs during the rally? U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs recorded approximately $1.9 billion in net inflows from Aug. 18 through Aug. 21. BlackRock’s IBIT captured the largest share, pulling in $606 million on Aug. 20 alone, an 82% market share. IBIT’s cumulative net inflows reached $62.43 billion.

What did Ray Dalio say about bitcoin and the debt crisis? On Aug. 21, 2026, Ray Dalio warned that a U.S. debt crisis could arrive “in three years, give or take two.” He recommended investors hold 10% to 15% of their portfolios in gold and “a bit” of bitcoin, calling the government’s financial condition “at an inflection point.”

How large is the U.S. national debt? U.S. national debt crossed $40 trillion on Aug. 18, 2026, just five months after passing $39 trillion. Interest payments have surpassed Medicare as the second-largest federal budget item. The government spends approximately 40% more than it collects in revenue.

Is bitcoin a better hedge than gold? Bitcoin and gold rose together during the August rally, with their correlation reaching approximately +0.7. However, gold has outperformed bitcoin over the trailing 12 months by a significant margin, and central banks continue to favor gold for reserve allocations. The two assets serve complementary roles in a fiscal-hedge portfolio.

What is the CLARITY Act and why does it matter for bitcoin? The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act would create the first comprehensive regulatory framework for crypto in the United States, dividing oversight between the SEC and CFTC. A cloture vote is scheduled for Sept. 15, 2026. Passage would remove a major regulatory overhang; failure could trigger a 15% to 30% market correction.

How many traders were liquidated during the bitcoin rally? More than 170,000 traders were liquidated across crypto derivatives exchanges during the Aug. 19-20 rally, with total liquidations exceeding $3 billion. Short-position holders accounted for $2.74 billion in losses. Binance led with over $1 billion in liquidations, followed by Hyperliquid at $701 million. This is educational analysis, not investment advice.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Cryptocurrency investments carry significant risk, including the potential loss of principal. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Always conduct your own research before making investment decisions. Published Aug. 23, 2026.

Litecoin (LTC) is showing renewed technical strength after rebounding from a key long-term support level, with analysts signaling growing optimism for a potential major price rally. The introduction of smart contracts through its new layer-2 solution is extending the network’s utility, positioning Litecoin as a contender in the programmable decentralized finance space.

Key technical bounce and price outlookAt press time, LTC trades at $51.19, supported by a 24-hour trading volume of $474.74 million and a total market capitalization of $3.94 billion. The coin has recorded a 7.25% gain in the past day, further fueling expectations for a bullish reversal in the near term.

Crypto analyst Crypto Patel identified that Litecoin has maintained an eight-year ascending support trendline first established in 2017. LTC recently retested the $40 support, rebounding nearly 20% from that level. This technical move has revived conversation among market observers about a possible surge to price targets ranging between $500 and $1,000 in the next market cycle.

Historically, Litecoin demonstrated sharp rallies when bouncing from higher timeframe structural levels, posting gains of 812%, 6,671%, and 1,747% in major prior cycles. Market participants are also watching Litecoin’s halving event set for April 2027 as a possible catalyst for the next significant uptrend.

LTC has rebounded from the eight-year trendline, with analysts closely watching for a move towards the $1,000 level, especially as previous cycles have delivered substantial returns after similar setups.

Analysts state that technical targets around $400, $700, and $1,000 are now under consideration. The $100 zone is seen as a critical resistance; a clear break above could strengthen signals for a bullish reversal.

Smart contract integration and network evolutionThe Litecoin Foundation highlighted notable progress on LitecoinVM, a layer-2 scaling solution created to support smart contracts and advanced applications on the Litecoin network. According to the Foundation, LitecoinVM has processed over 250 million transactions on its testnet, Liteforge, marking a major step towards expanding Litecoin’s ecosystem beyond simple payments.

The surge in transaction activity and active wallet addresses during stress testing attracted significant interest among developers. These advancements come amid plans to launch the Liteforge mainnet, which is expected to further test DeFi capabilities on the network ahead of the 2027 halving.

By integrating Ethereum-compatible rollup technology, LitecoinVM allows for the creation of decentralized apps, tokenized assets, and AI-powered solutions using LTC. This move signals a shift in Litecoin’s positioning, from a payments focus to a broader Web3 platform.

Mini dictionary: Litecoin Foundation — A non-profit organization supporting Litecoin’s development, adoption, and education initiatives worldwide, including technical innovations such as layer-2 scaling solutions.

Outlook and upcoming milestonesWith the mainnet launch of Liteforge on the horizon, developers and users await further advances in smart contract utility on the Litecoin network. A sustained move above the $100 mark is regarded as an important confirmation for bullish momentum toward higher targets.

Current network expansion and price momentum have been bolstered by broader positive sentiment in the crypto market, with Bitcoin showing signs of upward movement. Observers are watching closely to see whether these developments can spark a sustained cycle rally for Litecoin as the market approaches the next halving event.

MetricCurrent ValueCycle TargetLTC Price$51.19$500 – $1,00024H Trading Volume$474.74 million–Market Cap$3.94 billion–Liteforge Testnet Transactions250 million+Mainnet under developmentHalving DateApril 2027Potential catalystDisclaimer: The information contained in this article does not constitute investment advice. Investors should be aware that cryptocurrencies carry high volatility and therefore risk, and should conduct their own research.

XRP gained more than 50% in five trading days, its strongest weekly performance in 21 months, as a Treasury buyback expansion, a White House crypto summit, and aggressive whale accumulation converged on the same narrow window.

Summary

XRP surged from approximately $1.00 on Aug. 18 to a high of $1.6963 on Aug. 22, 2026, a gain of roughly 56% that marks its biggest weekly move since November 2024. The U.S. Treasury doubled long-term bond buyback operations from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per session, triggering a rapid drop in benchmark yields and pushing capital into risk assets across crypto markets. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse attended a White House crypto policy summit on Aug. 19 alongside SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, advancing the CLARITY Act that would classify XRP as a digital commodity under CFTC oversight. Whale addresses holding between 1 million and 10 million XRP accumulated approximately 380 million tokens in one week, pushing tracked holdings from 16.05 billion to 16.36 billion XRP while exchange outflows exceeded 240 million tokens since summer began. Spot XRP ETFs attracted $39.78 million in net inflows for the week ending Aug. 22, bringing cumulative inflows since their November 2025 launch to $1.55 billion across seven approved funds. XRP closed the week of Aug. 18 as the best-performing asset among the top ten cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, beating Bitcoin by more than 40 percentage points and Ethereum by more than 45. The move was not a single-catalyst spike. It was a compressed sequence of macro, regulatory, and on-chain events that landed in the same five-day window, each one reinforcing the next. Understanding why each catalyst mattered, and why their convergence produced a move of this magnitude, requires looking at the specific mechanics of how they interacted.

The rally also marks the first sustained price advance since the SEC settlement that correlates with improving on-chain metrics rather than pure speculation. For seven months before this week, XRP traded between $0.90 and $1.10 while Ripple’s corporate fundamentals strengthened in the background. The disconnect between token price and business development had become one of the most discussed topics in crypto markets. That gap narrowed sharply over five days.

The Treasury buyback that unlocked the rally The catalyst that set everything in motion arrived on Aug. 19, when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced an expansion of long-term government bond buyback operations. The size of each buyback would double from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation, starting Sept. 9. The announcement came after the 30-year Treasury yield spiked to its highest level since 2007, a move that had been pressuring risk assets across every market for weeks.

Buying back bonds pulls supply off the market, pushing bond prices up and yields down. The 30-year yield fell to 5.19% within hours. Traders described the dynamic as informal yield curve control, since the buybacks effectively cap how high long-end yields can climb without the Federal Reserve having to intervene directly.

The effect on crypto was immediate. Bitcoin jumped from $62,000 to $69,000 within 48 hours, its biggest weekly gain in two years. But the impact on XRP was disproportionate. More than $3 billion in crypto short positions were liquidated during the surge, and XRP’s lower market capitalization relative to Bitcoin made it more sensitive to the rotation. Leveraged short sellers who had been betting on a continued grind below $1 were forced to cover, and the resulting squeeze amplified the underlying move.

Lower yields make bonds less attractive relative to riskier assets, which frees capital to rotate into high-beta positions. XRP, with its pending regulatory catalysts and recent technical weakness, became the primary beneficiary of that rotation among large-cap altcoins.

The White House summit and the CLARITY Act On the same day the Treasury buyback was announced, a separate catalyst emerged from Washington. The White House hosted a crypto policy summit attended by Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, and members of Congress who had co-sponsored the CLARITY Act. President Trump publicly urged Congress to pass the legislation, which would classify XRP and similar tokens as digital commodities under CFTC oversight rather than securities under the SEC.

The CLARITY Act represents the most significant potential shift in U.S. crypto regulation since the Ripple settlement itself. If passed, it would give XRP the same regulatory classification as Bitcoin and Ethereum, removing the last remaining ambiguity about its legal status. The crypto.news analysis of the three conditions for XRP’s recovery identified regulatory clarity as the single most important factor, with 65% of institutional allocators surveyed saying they need this classification before increasing crypto exposure.

The bill faces a Senate procedural vote on Sept. 15. Polymarket prediction contracts currently give it approximately 16% odds of passing, reflecting the difficulty of moving any legislation through Congress in the current political environment. But the market responded to the optics of the summit itself, not the probability of passage. Brad Garlinghouse standing alongside the SEC chairman and the president, discussing a bill that would formalize XRP’s commodity status, sent a signal about the direction of policy that no probability model fully captures.

XRP price jumped roughly 30% in two days following the summit, breaking a year-long downtrend in the process. The move took the token from $1.00 to $1.31 before the additional catalysts pushed it higher.

Whale accumulation and the exchange drain The on-chain data tells a story that started before the price moved. According to crypto.news reporting on whale accumulation, addresses holding between 1 million and 10 million XRP accumulated approximately 380 million tokens over the week of Aug. 18. Total whale holdings rose from roughly 16.05 billion to 16.36 billion XRP, the highest level since the SEC settlement.

The accumulation was not limited to a single cluster of wallets. Whale transactions on the XRP Ledger surged 280% in 24 hours, with 38 large-value transfers exceeding $1 million recorded in a single trading day. The baseline for large-value XRP transactions in July and early August had averaged roughly 10 to 12 per day, making the spike to 38 a clear departure from normal activity.

More telling than the buying itself was the absence of selling. Whale transfers to Binance fell to their lowest level since 2021 during the same period, suggesting that large holders were accumulating and holding rather than flipping for short-term profit. More than 240 million XRP tokens left exchanges since summer began, reducing the available supply on order books and tightening the market.

The wallets involved in the accumulation include a mix of known institutional custodians and unidentified addresses. Analyst Ali Martinez noted that the accumulation pattern resembles the pre-rally positioning seen before XRP’s January 2026 high of $3.40, when whale addresses added similar quantities before the token rallied from $2.00 to its peak.

Ripple’s own escrow activity adds context. In August 2026, Ripple unlocked 1 billion XRP from escrow, valued at approximately $1.08 billion under its monthly program. Despite this regular supply injection, whale accumulation outpaced the new supply reaching the market, a dynamic that had not occurred since early 2025.

Spot ETF inflows and institutional re-engagement The seven U.S. spot XRP ETFs approved since November 2025 had a complicated first year. After a strong launch that saw them accumulate $1.3 billion in assets within two months, inflows collapsed through the summer. Weekly ETF inflows fell 93% to just $1.01 million for the week ending Aug. 8, down from $14.86 million the prior week. JPMorgan had predicted up to $8 billion in year-one inflows. The reality was $1.5 billion across eight months.

The week of Aug. 18 reversed that trajectory. Spot XRP ETFs attracted $39.78 million in net inflows, the strongest weekly pace since May. Bitwise Asset Management, Franklin Templeton, and Grayscale Investments led the buying. Cumulative inflows since launch reached $1.55 billion, with the funds now holding approximately 1.50% of total XRP supply.

The crypto.news coverage of ETF inflows crossing $1.55 billion noted that the timing aligned with a shift in macro sentiment following the Treasury buyback announcement. Institutional buyers who had paused allocations during the yield spike returned as soon as yields dropped, suggesting that the problem with XRP ETFs was never demand for the asset itself but the competing returns available in fixed income.

The ETF structure also matters for price mechanics. Unlike over-the-counter XRP purchases, ETF inflows require the fund to buy XRP on the open market or through authorized participants, creating direct buying pressure on the spot price. When $39 million in weekly inflows meets a market where 240 million tokens have already left exchanges, the price impact is amplified beyond what the dollar figure alone would suggest.

How this rally compares to every post-settlement XRP move XRP has produced four distinct rallies since the SEC settlement was finalized in May 2025. Each one differed in catalyst, duration, peak gain, and retracement depth. Mapping them reveals a pattern that this week’s move both follows and breaks.

Rally one: the settlement itself (May 2025). XRP jumped 42% in three days after the SEC formally withdrew its appeal and Ripple paid the reduced $50 million penalty. The catalyst was purely legal. On-chain accumulation was minimal because the news broke with no advance warning. The retracement was fast: XRP gave back 60% of the gain within two weeks as traders took profit on the news.

Rally two: the ETF approval wave (November 2025). Seven spot XRP ETFs received regulatory clearance, and XRP surged 85% over three weeks. This was the longest sustained move of the cycle, driven by genuine institutional inflows that totaled $483 million in December alone. The retracement was slower but deeper. XRP fell 65% from its January 2026 high of $3.40 to the $1.00 level it occupied before this week’s move.

Rally three: the Ripple Prime announcement (June 2026). Ripple announced conditional approval for a national trust bank charter and raised at a $50 billion valuation. XRP gained 28% in five days. The retracement was almost complete within ten trading sessions, as the market concluded that corporate milestones were not translating into token demand.

Rally four: this week (August 2026). XRP gained 56% in five days, making it the second-largest post-settlement move by magnitude. What distinguishes it from the previous three is the convergence of multiple catalyst types. The settlement rally was legal only. The ETF rally was institutional only. The Ripple Prime rally was corporate only. This week combined macro (Treasury buyback), political (White House summit), on-chain (whale accumulation), and institutional (ETF inflows) catalysts simultaneously.

The convergence matters because it creates feedback loops that single-catalyst rallies cannot sustain. Macro-driven yield drops pull capital into crypto broadly. Political catalysts direct that capital specifically toward XRP. Whale accumulation reduces available supply. ETF inflows create structured buying pressure. Each factor reinforces the others, making the rally more durable than moves driven by a single headline.

Whether this convergence produces a genuinely different outcome from the previous three rallies, all of which eventually retraced, is the central question for XRP holders heading into September.

The overbought signal and what it has meant before The Relative Strength Index on XRP’s daily chart reached 85.4 on Aug. 22, its most overbought reading since July 2025. The last time the RSI crossed 85, XRP retraced 18% within ten trading days. In three of the four previous instances where XRP’s RSI exceeded 80 since the SEC settlement, the token lost at least 15% of its value within two weeks.

The technical picture is further complicated by the death cross that formed earlier in August. The crypto.news analysis of the death cross erasure explained that while XRP’s daily candle closed above both the 50-day and 200-day exponential moving averages for the first time since the bearish crossover, the 50-day EMA remains below the 200-day line. A confirming golden cross has not yet formed.

The distinction matters because three previous breakouts above both moving averages failed to produce a golden cross, each time resulting in a return below the 200-day EMA within five trading days. The current move needs to hold for at least another week before the moving average crossover would confirm a genuine trend change.

A weekend flash crash on Aug. 22 added to the uncertainty. Approximately $500 million in XRP long positions were liquidated in minutes when the price dropped sharply from $1.69 to $1.43 before recovering to the $1.46 to $1.51 range where it traded into Saturday. The event showed how quickly leveraged positions can unwind even in the middle of a strong rally, and it reduced open interest enough to partially reset the overbought condition.

Ripple’s corporate momentum and the token disconnect The irony of XRP’s 2026 performance is that Ripple the company has never been stronger. The SEC case ended with XRP retaining full trading rights in the United States. Seven U.S. spot ETFs launched and now hold nearly a billion dollars in XRP. Ripple secured conditional approval for a national trust bank charter. The company raised at a $50 billion valuation. It spent roughly $4 billion on acquisitions. Most recently, Ripple Prime raised $275 million through a private placement of senior unsecured notes with a BBB rating from KBRA, an 8.25% coupon, and a 2031 maturity date.

Yet XRP the token spent the first seven months of 2026 trading between $0.90 and $1.10 while all of this happened. The crypto.news XRP price prediction page noted the base case of $1.80 to $3.20 by 2030, a range that assumed slow and steady appreciation from the $1.00 level. This week’s move has compressed months of expected appreciation into days.

The token’s disconnect from Ripple’s fundamentals is partly structural. XRP’s supply dynamics differ from tokens like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Ripple holds billions of XRP in escrow and releases them monthly, creating a persistent supply overhang that weighs on price even when demand increases. The monthly escrow release of 1 billion XRP in August alone exceeded the total whale accumulation for the entire week. The net effect on circulating supply depends on how much Ripple returns to escrow, a figure the company reports quarterly but not in real time. In previous months, Ripple has returned between 800 million and 900 million tokens to escrow, meaning the net new supply reaching the market each month is typically between 100 million and 200 million tokens. Even at the lower end of that range, the monthly supply addition partially offsets the accumulation pressure from whale buyers.

Ripple Prime’s integration with EDX Markets and Hyperliquid to expand institutional access to spot, perpetual futures, and decentralized liquidity creates new demand channels that did not exist during the first three post-settlement rallies. Whether these channels can absorb enough supply to offset the escrow releases is one of the structural questions that will determine whether this rally holds.

The CLARITY Act as a binary event The Senate procedural vote on the CLARITY Act scheduled for Sept. 15 creates a binary event risk for XRP that has no parallel in the token’s history. If the bill passes cloture and eventually becomes law, XRP would receive the same commodity classification as Bitcoin and Ethereum, removing the final barrier to full institutional adoption. If it fails, the market would need to reprice the probability of regulatory clarity arriving through legislation versus the current patchwork of court rulings and agency guidance.

The bill’s passage is far from certain. Polymarket gives it approximately 16% odds, and the Senate procedural calendar is crowded. But the White House summit on Aug. 19 moved the conversation from theoretical to operational. The presence of the SEC chairman at a meeting dedicated to advancing the bill suggests coordination between the executive branch and the regulatory agencies that would implement it.

For XRP specifically, the CLARITY Act would resolve the last remaining ambiguity from the Ripple settlement. While courts ruled that XRP traded on secondary markets did not constitute a securities transaction, certain institutional sales remained subject to securities law considerations. The CLARITY Act would eliminate that distinction entirely, making XRP legally identical to Bitcoin for regulatory purposes.

The market appears to be pricing in a higher probability of passage than the prediction markets suggest, or at least pricing in the optionality that the political environment has shifted enough to make some form of regulatory clarity likely within the next 12 months, whether through this specific bill or an alternative path.

https://twitter.com/cryptodotnews/article/2061436021380661610

What to watch The 200-day EMA retest. A daily close below the 200-day exponential moving average within five trading days would repeat the pattern of three previous failed breakouts and signal that the rally was a short squeeze artifact.

Weekly ETF flow data for the week ending Aug. 29. If inflows sustain or accelerate from the $39.78 million recorded this week, it would confirm that institutional demand is genuine and not a one-week reaction to macro headlines.

The Sept. 15 CLARITY Act cloture vote. The vote itself is binary, but the political dynamics in the weeks leading up to it will shape expectations. Watch for co-sponsor additions or withdrawals as a leading indicator.

Exchange reserve levels. If the drawdown of 240 million tokens from exchanges since summer continues or accelerates, it would tighten supply further and support the price. A reversal, with tokens flowing back to exchanges, would suggest whale profit-taking.

The 30-year Treasury yield. The yield fell to 5.19% after the buyback announcement. If it climbs back above 5.50%, the macro tailwind that triggered the rally would weaken, and the rotation into risk assets could reverse.

Why did XRP surge 50% in one week? XRP gained approximately 56% between Aug. 18 and Aug. 22, 2026, driven by a convergence of four factors: the U.S. Treasury doubling bond buyback operations, a White House crypto summit advancing the CLARITY Act, whale accumulation of 380 million tokens in a single week, and $39.78 million in spot ETF inflows. The combination created feedback loops that amplified the move beyond what any single catalyst could produce.

What was the Treasury buyback and why did it affect XRP? Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that long-term bond buyback operations would double from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per session starting Sept. 9. The buybacks pulled supply off the bond market, pushing yields down and freeing capital to rotate into risk assets including crypto. The 30-year yield fell to 5.19% within hours, triggering more than $3 billion in crypto short liquidations.

How much XRP did whales accumulate during the rally? Addresses holding between 1 million and 10 million XRP accumulated approximately 380 million tokens over the week of Aug. 18, according to on-chain tracking data. Total whale holdings rose from 16.05 billion to 16.36 billion XRP. Additionally, whale transactions exceeding $1 million surged 280% in 24 hours, with 38 large-value transfers recorded in a single trading day.

Is the XRP rally sustainable given the overbought RSI? The Relative Strength Index reached 85.4 on Aug. 22, the most overbought reading since July 2025. In three of four previous instances where XRP’s RSI exceeded 80 since the SEC settlement, the token retraced at least 15% within two weeks. However, the convergence of multiple catalyst types in this rally makes direct comparison to single-catalyst moves incomplete.

What is the current status of XRP spot ETFs? Seven U.S. spot XRP ETFs have been trading since November 2025, with issuers including Bitwise, Franklin Templeton, Grayscale, 21Shares, Canary Capital, and Volatility Shares. Cumulative net inflows have reached $1.55 billion, with the funds holding approximately 1.50% of total XRP supply. The week ending Aug. 22 saw $39.78 million in inflows, the strongest weekly pace since May.

What is the CLARITY Act and when is the vote? The CLARITY Act is proposed legislation that would classify XRP and similar tokens as digital commodities under CFTC oversight. A Senate procedural vote is scheduled for Sept. 15, 2026. Polymarket prediction contracts give it approximately 16% odds of passing. If enacted, it would give XRP the same regulatory classification as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

How does this rally compare to previous XRP moves since the SEC settlement? This is the second-largest post-settlement rally by magnitude (56%) and the first to combine macro, political, on-chain, and institutional catalysts simultaneously. The settlement rally (May 2025) was legal only, the ETF wave (November 2025) was institutional only, and the Ripple Prime rally (June 2026) was corporate only. Each previous rally eventually retraced between 60% and 100% of its gains.

What is XRP’s current price and market capitalization? As of Aug. 23, 2026, XRP trades near $1.46 to $1.51, with a total market capitalization of approximately $91.5 billion. It ranks among the top five cryptocurrencies by market cap. The 24-hour trading volume stands at approximately $9.3 billion, reflecting the elevated activity from the weekly surge.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Cryptocurrency markets are highly volatile, and past performance does not indicate future results. Always conduct your own research before making investment decisions. Published Aug. 23, 2026.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said on Aug. 23 that several developing economies increasingly rely on USDT for domestic commerce, international trade and dollar denominated savings.

Summary

Ardoino said USDT use is rising across Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia and Turkey amid monetary instability. Users increasingly hold USDT as digital dollars when local currencies weaken or cash dollars become scarce. Chainalysis ranked Venezuela eighteenth, Turkey fourteenth and Argentina twentieth for global crypto adoption in 2025. Chainalysis measured nearly $1.5T in Latin American crypto activity from July 2022 through June 2025. Tether said its technology served more than 570 million users worldwide as of March 2026. “The economies of several developing countries rely heavily on USDT, both for domestic and foreign trade,” Ardoino wrote in a post. He said Tether’s financial inclusion mission was becoming more important.

Ardoino cited Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia and Turkey as markets where people use the stablecoin in response to inflation, currency depreciation, limited access to dollars and restrictions within conventional financial systems.

His statement describes Tether’s view of adoption. No single public dataset measures how dependent entire national economies are on USDT. Independent blockchain research, central bank data and exchange activity nevertheless support the broader conclusion that dollar stablecoins have gained traction in those markets.

Currency instability is supporting USDT adoption USDT is designed to track the U.S. dollar, allowing users to obtain digital dollar exposure without holding a U.S. bank account. It can move between compatible wallets and exchanges at any time, although conversion options, costs and regulations vary by country.

The product can appeal to users whose local currencies are losing purchasing power. It also provides an alternative when physical dollars are scarce or cross border bank transfers are expensive and slow.

Turkey continued to face elevated inflation despite progress under its disinflation program. Consumer inflation fell from 49.4% in September 2024 to 30.9% in December 2025, according to an International Monetary Fund review. The IMF projected inflation of 23% at the end of 2026.

Argentina has also continued addressing inflation and foreign exchange pressures. The IMF reported that monthly inflation reached 3.4% in March 2026 following currency depreciation and weaker demand for pesos.

Stablecoin demand extends beyond those two markets. Chainalysis ranked Turkey 14th, Venezuela 18th and Argentina 20th in its 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index. When adjusted for population, Venezuela ranked ninth worldwide.

Venezuela and Bolivia show commercial use cases In Venezuela, local businesses reportedly use USDT for retail payments and some import and export settlements. The stablecoin operates alongside bolivars, physical dollars and other digital assets within what local observers describe as a hybrid currency economy.

Chainalysis estimated that Venezuela received $44.6 billion in cryptocurrency value between July 2022 and June 2025. The figure covers all tracked crypto assets and does not represent USDT alone.

Bolivia provides a clearer official signal. The Central Bank of Bolivia publishes a reference USDT exchange rate based on weighted peer to peer activity on Binance. Its published data show how the stablecoin trades at a premium to the country’s official dollar rate.

The bank’s January financial stability report also identified foreign currency restrictions, higher inflation and low international reserves as continuing risks.

As previously reported, Bolivia moved toward recognizing USDT within its national payment system. Local banks already provide some USDT services, while businesses have used crypto for international payments and fuel related transactions.

The government has not completed a national framework making USDT equivalent to legal tender. Any description of formal payment status therefore remains forward looking.

Regional data support the broader trend Chainalysis measured nearly $1.5 trillion in Latin American crypto activity between July 2022 and June 2025. Argentina accounted for an estimated $93.9 billion, Venezuela $44.6 billion and Bolivia $14.8 billion.

Centralized exchanges processed 64% of regional activity, showing that users generally obtain digital assets through conventional trading platforms rather than decentralized protocols.

In related coverage, dollar stablecoins accounted for 40% of purchases by Bitso users during 2025, compared with 18% for Bitcoin. The exchange operates across several Latin American markets, so those figures should not be treated as Argentina only data.

Tether says its products served more than 570 million people by March 2026. That is a company supplied estimate rather than a count of fully identified individual users because one person can control several blockchain addresses.

The company’s reported USDT supply reached a record $188 billion during 2026, reinforcing its position as the largest dollar stablecoin.

Users still face issuer, regulatory, wallet and network risks. USDT represents a claim supported by Tether’s reserves, not a bank deposit, and availability can change when governments or exchanges introduce new stablecoin rules.

TLDR: Stellar developer activity hit an all-time high of 2,968 monthly active developers in June. XLM developer growth rose 125% year over year, led by Nigeria, India, Turkey and Brazil. Stellar RWAs crossed $3 billion as Q2 stablecoin transfer volume hit a record $11.4 billion. Analyst eyes XLM wave count with long-term targets near $4.21 and $33 in bull case. Stellar (XLM) developer activity has surged to record levels, positioning the network as one of the fastest-growing ecosystems in the crypto industry.

New data shared by Scopuly shows monthly active developers on Stellar reached an all-time high of 2,968 as of June 30, placing the network second globally and ahead of both Solana and Bitcoin in developer participation.

Stellar Developer Growth Outpaces Broader Market The Stellar network added developers even as many major blockchain ecosystems reported declines during the same period.

According to the data shared by Scopuly, developer activity on Stellar climbed 125% year over year, a pace that stands in sharp contrast to contraction seen elsewhere in the industry.

Most of the world's governments don't issue debt in dollars.

And that debt is starting to move onchain. 🌍

Stellar $XLM is now the #1 blockchain for tokenized non-US government debt, with roughly $490M in sovereign instruments, according to https://t.co/OVNq5vPxVi.

Stellar… pic.twitter.com/JxHbE9pswK

— Scopuly – Stellar Wallet (@scopuly) August 23, 2026

Much of this expansion is concentrated in specific regions rather than spread evenly worldwide. Scopuly noted that growth is centered in Nigeria, India, Turkey and Brazil, four markets known for active retail crypto adoption and payment-focused use cases.

This regional pattern suggests builders are targeting practical financial applications rather than speculative experimentation.

Funding activity has followed a similar trajectory. Scopuly reported that $5.5 million was distributed to 55 companies through Stellar Community Fund rounds, supporting projects across payments, stablecoins and tokenized assets. Real-world assets built on Stellar have also crossed the $3 billion mark, according to the same source.

Payment infrastructure metrics reinforce the developer growth story. Stellar’s stablecoin transfer volume reached a record $11.4 billion in the second quarter, Scopuly said, while active accounts on the network passed 10.7 million. Together, these figures point to expanding real-world usage rather than isolated technical interest.

Price Structure Points to Longer-Term Bullish Setup Beyond network fundamentals, technical analysts are watching XLM price structure closely. Analyst Aragorn Windbreaker highlighted that XLM near $0.19 aligned with a previously identified bottom target zone on the chart.

$XLM looked great since it hit my bottom target box.

So is the bottom in?

Well, since the May 22 bottom it made a strong 5-wave move in Wave 1, then completed Wave 2 correction, and is now in potential wave 1 of Wave 3, which is usually the strongest.

I would like to see a… https://t.co/tCZ86susCf pic.twitter.com/rvmzjuJcC7

— Aragorn Windbreaker (@AragornWindbrkr) August 22, 2026

The analyst outlined a wave count beginning with the May 22 low, describing a five-wave move higher that completed an initial impulse.

This was followed by a corrective phase, with XLM now potentially entering an early stage of a larger third wave, according to the analysis.

A confirmed entry point would require XLM to complete a sub-five-wave move higher, followed by a three-wave corrective pullback, the analyst explained. This transition zone between wave two and wave three was identified as the preferred entry area for a long position.

On a broader timeframe, the analyst placed the 2024 rally as part of a larger structure, with the current bear phase representing an intermediate correction.

Under this outlook, a minimum target for the next major upward wave was placed at $4.21, based on standard Fibonacci extension levels, with an extended scenario reaching toward $33.

Together, the developer statistics and technical outlook paint a picture of a network gaining traction on multiple fronts.

Rising builder participation, expanding real-world asset activity and record payment volumes all point toward sustained infrastructure growth for Stellar heading into the second half of the year.

Pendle’s new USDC vault on the Morpho lending protocol has vacuumed up 50 million USDC from 230 depositors in roughly a week and a half. For a vault that launched on August 4, that’s the kind of traction most DeFi products spend months hoping for.

The vault, co-curated with Armitage (Wintermute’s vault curation arm), quickly became the largest vault Armitage has ever managed. It funnels stablecoin deposits into Principal Token collateral markets on Morpho, solving a problem that’s quietly plagued Pendle’s ecosystem: there simply wasn’t enough liquidity on the borrowing side of PT-backed markets.

From zero to $50M in ten days The growth trajectory tells the story. Shortly after launch, deposits sat around $15 million. Within two days, that figure hit $25 million. By August 21, it crossed $35 million.

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Now, at roughly the 1.5-week mark, the vault holds $50 million from 230 individual depositors. That’s an average deposit north of $217K, suggesting this isn’t retail tourists chasing yield. It’s larger allocators who’ve done the math.

Nearly all of the capital, approximately 99.7%, flows into a single market: PT-reUSD/USDC.

The yield equation Depositors aren’t parking stablecoins out of charity. The vault distributes 7,500 PENDLE tokens per week as rewards on top of the base lending yield.

Early APY figures painted an attractive picture: 14.08% net yield, broken down as 4.75% base yield plus 9.32% from token rewards. More recent figures have settled into a range of roughly 7.15% to 7.88%, which makes sense as the denominator (total deposits) has grown significantly while the weekly token distribution has stayed constant.

Why this matters for Pendle and Morpho Pendle has carved out a niche as DeFi’s primary marketplace for trading future yield. Users can split yield-bearing assets into Principal Tokens (representing the underlying value at maturity) and Yield Tokens (representing the stream of income). Before this vault launched, borrowers who wanted to use PT as collateral on Morpho faced thin liquidity. Lenders weren’t showing up in sufficient numbers, which meant borrowing rates were volatile and capacity was limited. The vault acts as a coordinated supply-side solution, aggregating lender capital and directing it precisely where borrowers need it.

For Morpho, the success validates its modular lending architecture. Unlike monolithic lending protocols where governance committees decide every parameter, Morpho allows curators like Armitage to build targeted vaults with specific risk profiles and allocation strategies.

The partnership with Armitage, Wintermute’s curation division, also adds a layer of institutional credibility. Wintermute is one of crypto’s largest market makers, and having its vault curation arm involved signals that serious players see commercial opportunity in PT-backed lending markets.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.

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매수 제한 : 거래 지원 이후 약 5분간 매수 주문이 제한됩니다.
최저 매도가 제한 : 거래 지원 이후 약 5분간 전일 종가 대비 – 10% 이하 가격의 매도 주문이 제한됩니다.
주문 타입 제한 : 거래 지원 이후 약 2시간 동안 지정가 주문을 제외한 모든 타입 및 조건의 주문이 제한됩니다.
전일 종가는 아래 표를 통해 확인 바랍니다.

 
   
     
     
   
 
 
   
     
     
   
 디지털 자산BTC 마켓 전일 종가LIT0.00004500 BTC (4,803 KRW)

※ 입금 유의사항
반영 불가한 입금은 반환 절차에 오랜 시간이 소요될 수 있으니 유의사항을 꼼꼼하게 확인하세요

업비트에서 거래지원하는 LIT의 컨트랙트 주소는 0x232ce3bd40fcd6f80f3d55a522d03f25df784ee2입니다. LIT 입출금 진행 시 컨트랙트 주소를 확인 바랍니다.
트래블룰 이행을 위해, 입출금 가능 가상자산사업자 리스트에 포함 되어있지 않은 거래소를 통해 업비트에 자산이 입금될 경우
'본인 소유 확인'이 완료된 개인지갑 주소로만 입출금이 가능하며, 연동된 개인지갑을 통한 입금 건이더라도 해당 자산의 네트워크에 따라 입금 반환 처리를 해야 할 수 있습니다.
출처가 불분명한 고액의 디지털 자산 입금 시, 자금 출처에 대한 소명이 요청될 수 있습니다. (이용약관 제17조 제8항)

※ 추가 디지털 자산

가상자산 LIT는 이더리움 기반으로 발행된 유틸리티 토큰으로, 탈중앙화 영구선물 거래소 라이터(Lighter) 프로토콜에서 스테이킹과 유동성 참여 구조에 활용됩니다. 라이터는 주문서 기반 퍼페추얼 거래를 제공하는 인프라로, 자산은 L1에 예치되고 거래 실행은 L2 환경에서 처리되는 구조를 갖추고 있습니다. 거래량, 오픈 인터레스트 등 주요 지표는 온체인 데이터와 외부 플랫폼을 통해 확인할 수 있으며, 주문 매칭, 포지션 관리, 청산 및 펀딩 레이트 기능을 포함한 파생상품 거래 기능을 제공합니다. LIT 토큰은 스테이킹을 통해 LLP(Lighter Liquidity Pool) 참여 한도를 부여하는 방식으로 사용됩니다. 또한 일정 수량 이상 스테이킹 시 출금 및 전송 수수료 면제와 거래 수수료 혜택이 제공됩니다.

홈페이지 : 라이터 공식 홈페이지

X(구 트위터) : 라이터 공식 X

백서 : 라이터 공식 백서

✽ PC에서 해당 디지털 자산이 조회되지 않을 경우, 새로고침 (F5) 후 확인 부탁드립니다.

✽ 업비트 App에서 해당 디지털 자산이 조회되지 않을 경우, 더보기 > 화면설정 > 코인정보 다시 받기를 클릭 후 확인 부탁드립니다.

투자 위험 안내

• 디지털 자산 투자는 투기적 수요 및 국내외 규제환경 변화 등에 따라 급격한 시세 변동에 노출될 수 있습니다. 본 디지털 자산의 투자 판단의 책임은 본인에게 있으며, 발생 가능한 손실도 투자자 본인에게 귀속됩니다. 프로젝트 홈페이지 및 공시 자료 등을 면밀히 참고하시어 디지털 자산의 특성을 충분히 인지하시고 신중하게 거래해 주시기를 당부해 드립니다.

• 디지털 자산 거래의 특성상 국내외 거래소간 시세 차이가 지속적으로 발생하고 있습니다. 반드시 디지털 자산 투자 전 글로벌 거래소와의 시세 차이에 유의하시기 바랍니다.

• 업비트는 안정된 거래 환경 조성을 위하여 최소 주문 금액 제한 등 다양한 조치를 취하고 있으나, 과열된 투자 환경에 따라 일부 회원님에게는 주문 안정화 메시지가 노출 될 수 있습니다. 이는 먼저 주문한 회원의 주문을 처리하고, 안정적인 서비스를 위한 불가피한 조치이므로 이 점 유의하시기 바랍니다.

※ 가상자산은 고위험 상품으로 투자금의 전부 또는 일부 손실을 초래할 수 있습니다.

※ 가상자산의 투자 판단 및 그에 따른 원금 손실의 책임은 투자자 본인에게 있습니다.

※ 두나무 주식회사 준법감시인 심사필 제25-0156호 (25.09.22~27.09.21)

공유

21h58 ▪ 6 min read ▪ by Fenelon L.

Summarize this article with:

Justin Sun claims to have won a first round against World Liberty Financial. On August 20, a federal judge in California reportedly refused to send all of his claims to private arbitration. This decision comes just days after the conditional green light granted by the OCC to World Liberty Trust Company, which is set to resume issuing the USD1 stablecoin.

In brief According to Justin Sun, Judge James Donato refused to submit all his claims to private arbitration, maintaining his individual claims before the federal court. On August 14, the OCC granted preliminary conditional approval to World Liberty Trust Company, which plans to take over the issuance of USD1 and management of its reserves from BitGo. The fate of claims filed by Blue Anthem and Black Anthem remains to be determined. The written order regarding the August 20 hearing was not yet publicly available at the time of writing. Justin Sun obtains the maintenance of part of the case before the court The standoff between Justin Sun and World Liberty Financial has been going on for several months. The founder of Tron, who bought $45 million worth of WLFI tokens, brought the case before a federal court in San Francisco in April.

This dispute between WLFI and Justin Sun notably concerns the freezing of his tokens and the control powers that World Liberty would have integrated into the WLFI contract.

On June 2, World Liberty Financial asked Judge James Donato to force the plaintiffs to go through arbitration and to suspend the judicial procedure. The hearing on this request took place on August 20.

At its outcome, Sun stated that his personal claims would remain publicly reviewed before the federal court. In other words, World Liberty did not get the transfer of the entire dispute to a private procedure.

This distinction matters. Indeed, arbitration generally allows settling a conflict outside of public hearings and with much more limited visibility on exchanged documents.

However, nothing has yet been decided on the merits. Blue Anthem Limited and Black Anthem Limited, two companies also parties to the complaint, have their own claims. Their treatment remains under discussion. Importantly, the written order from the judge was not yet publicly available at the time of writing this article.

World Liberty prepares in parallel its bank for USD1 The timeline adds another dimension to the case. On August 14, six days before the hearing, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency granted a preliminary conditional approval to World Liberty Trust Company.

The future national trust bank is to take charge of issuing and redeeming USD1, as well as managing its reserves. It plans to take over these activities from BitGo, which currently serves this role.

But World Liberty Trust cannot start its operations yet. Final authorization depends on meeting several conditions imposed by the OCC.

The bank must notably have at least $20 million in Tier 1 capital. It must also maintain sufficient liquid assets to cover 180 days of operational expenses and notify the regulator before any significant changes to its business model.

The OCC also retains the possibility to modify, suspend, or withdraw its preliminary approval before the official opening of the institution.

Another element in the document deserves attention: World Liberty Trust will neither be able to issue, hold, nor trade WLFI tokens. However, the OCC specifies that World Liberty Financial and the future bank indirectly share some owners.

On paper, a clear boundary is thus drawn between the WLFI token and the banking activities related to USD1.

Previous token freezes fuel questions This separation comes as the control powers exercised over certain assets linked to World Liberty are already at the heart of several conflicts.

In June, World Liberty Financial froze some on-chain addresses associated with HTX as part of a sanctions compliance review. The crypto platform challenged this decision and suspended several pairs involving WLFI and USD1. It also announced the conversion of its users’ USD1 holdings into USDT.

A few months earlier, in September 2025, Justin Sun himself saw a significant portion of his WLFI tokens blocked after movements to exchange platforms. This episode notably led to the current dispute.

The legal battle is not limited to California. World Liberty also sued Justin Sun for defamation and market manipulation in a separate proceeding.

For now, none of these proceedings have concluded on the merits of the accusations.

The next steps should bring more clarity. On one side, Judge Donato’s written order will specify which claims will remain before the court and which might still be subject to arbitration. On the other, World Liberty Trust must meet the OCC’s requirements before obtaining its final authorization.

Two separate cases, but the same underlying question: how far does the control exercised within the World Liberty ecosystem extend, as USD1 is about to enter a federally regulated banking framework reinforced by the American legislation on stablecoins?

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Fenelon L.

Passionné par le Bitcoin, j'aime explorer les méandres de la blockchain et des cryptos et je partage mes découvertes avec la communauté. Mon rêve est de vivre dans un monde où la vie privée et la liberté financière sont garanties pour tous, et je crois fermement que Bitcoin est l'outil qui peut rendre cela possible.

DISCLAIMER

The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this article belong solely to the author, and should not be taken as investment advice. Do your own research before taking any investment decisions.

Michael Saylor, executive chairman of Strategy, reiterated his perspective on Bitcoin as “digital energy,” emphasizing its role as a scarce, transferable form of economic value. Saylor described Bitcoin’s capacity to securely convert economic value into a new format that is accessible to individuals, corporations, institutions, and even governments.

Bitcoin holdings push treasury above cost basisOn August 16, Strategy reported holding 840,447 BTC, reflecting approximately 4% of Bitcoin’s total capped supply of 21 million coins. The company disclosed an average acquisition cost of $75,385 per Bitcoin, including all associated fees and expenses.

With Bitcoin trading around $77,175 on August 23, the estimated market value of Strategy’s Bitcoin holdings reached $64.86 billion. This positions the company’s Bitcoin treasury roughly $1.5 billion above its recorded purchase cost of $63.36 billion. The unrealized gain remains subject to rapid market changes, as Bitcoin’s price continues to fluctuate.

Saylor sees Bitcoin’s fundamental breakthrough in its ability to move economic value through a decentralized network, introducing digital scarcity that no central authority can alter. He pointed out that this quality allows holders to safeguard and transfer value securely across various economic actors.

Bitcoin’s most profound breakthrough is the ability to convert economic energy into digital form and bind it securely to a person, family, company, machine, or nation.

Despite recording significant paper gains, these valuations do not equate to distributable corporate profits. The company’s balance sheet must also account for debt obligations, taxes, operating costs, and preferred dividend commitments. A decline in Bitcoin’s price below the average purchase cost would result in unrealized losses, reinforcing the volatility that remains inherent in Strategy’s treasury model.

Strategy has structured its capital platform under the Digital Credit brand, offering products such as STRC, STRF, STRK, and STRD preferred shares. These financial instruments trade like traditional securities on exchanges including Nasdaq. However, investors in these preferred shares do not have direct claims on any particular Bitcoin within Strategy’s holdings.

The company’s STRC offering consists of variable-rate perpetual preferred stock, with each unit carrying a $100 stated value. The board manages dividend declarations monthly, and the market price can deviate from the stated amount based on trading activity.

Between August 10 and August 16, Strategy repurchased 1.39 million STRC shares for approximately $132.2 million using proceeds from its recent MSTR common-share sales. During the same period, the company brought in $333.7 million by selling around 3.46 million MSTR shares. Of these funds, $52.4 million went to STRC dividends, while the remaining $149.1 million was added to its dollar reserve, which stood at $4.80 billion as of August 16.

Strategy reported no Bitcoin purchases or sales during this timeframe. Chief Executive Phong Le has connected further BTC accumulation to STRC’s value aligning with its $100 stated amount, although no timeline has been given for additional Bitcoin purchases. Management decisions in coming weeks may involve new MSTR share issuances, further preferred share buybacks, or expansion of the company’s Bitcoin position.

Strategy’s next regulatory filings will clarify how these capital management moves align with both Saylor’s digital energy thesis and liquidity objectives. They will also detail any changes to the $4.80 billion reserve and whether Bitcoin acquisitions resume.

Mini dictionary: Strategy is a US-based technology company that has become widely known for its significant Bitcoin holdings, positioning itself as a corporate BTC investment pioneer.

DateBTC HoldingsAvg. Cost per BTCMarket Price per BTCAcquisition CostMarket ValueUnrealized GainAug. 16840,447$75,385$77,175$63.36 billion$64.86 billion$1.50 billion Bitcoin digital energy remains a metaphor highlighting both opportunity and risk, as actual returns depend on market volatility, operating costs, and corporate obligations.

Disclaimer: The information contained in this article does not constitute investment advice. Investors should be aware that cryptocurrencies carry high volatility and therefore risk, and should conduct their own research.

Xaman Wallet, the self-custodial app built by XRPL Labs and the dominant wallet for the XRP Ledger ecosystem, has removed its 0.09 XRP minimum fee on trades. The stated goal is straightforward: less friction at the entry point means more people can actually use the network’s liquidity, including traders moving smaller amounts who were previously priced out by the floor.

It is a notable reversal for a wallet that only introduced its service fee structure in late January 2025, when it rolled out a 0.8% trading fee on swaps and decentralized exchange activity, paired with that 0.09 XRP minimum. For context, the XRP Ledger’s own base transaction cost sits at roughly 0.00001 XRP. Xaman’s minimum was, by comparison, orders of magnitude higher than the network itself charges.

Why the minimum fee mattered more than it looked Removing the floor does not eliminate Xaman’s service fees entirely. The 0.8% trading fee on swaps and DEX activity remains in place. What changes is the lower bound: trades that previously couldn’t make economic sense below a certain size now have a clearer path to execution without being penalized simply for being small.

Context: Xaman’s evolving fee structure Xaman, formerly known as XUMM, rebranded as part of a broader effort to expand its identity beyond a simple transaction signing tool into a full-featured financial interface for XRPL. The January 2025 fee introduction was the wallet’s first significant shift toward a revenue model that didn’t rely on its Pro subscription tier.

That Pro subscription was itself discontinued for new customers on January 30, 2026, a decision that closed off one monetization path and reinforced the platform’s reliance on transaction-based fees. Free payment options within the wallet were preserved.

The June 2026 launch of Xaman Swap added one-tap swaps directly inside the wallet interface. Dropping the minimum fee is, in that light, a logical complement to the Swap feature: make it easy to trade, then make sure small trades aren’t punished for being small.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.

An artificial intelligence (AI) security firm went public with a Ledger Ethereum app bug. Ledger says it had already fixed the flaw quietly, two weeks earlier.

Chief technology officer Charles Guillemet called the disclosure fear-mongering. The patch shipped on August 12 with a one-line note and no security bulletin.

What the Ledger Ethereum App Bug Actually DidLedger sells one core promise. The screen shows you what you are signing. That promise has a name. Ledger calls it clear signing, and it turns raw transaction code into plain words on the device screen.

TestMachine says it found a way around that. The firm builds an AI agent called Azimuth that hunts exploits in smart contracts. On its own EVMBench benchmark, Azimuth catches 86.3% of known bugs with roughly 2.7% false positives.

Found by Azimuth during an autonomous scan of the Ledger Ethereum app. Validated on Flex. Shared and verified with the team. Declining any bounty. Same shared APDU/UI code across Nano X, Nano S Plus, Stax, Apex.

The power of always on securityhttps://t.co/fH5mO97Kkp

— TestMachine (@testmachine_ai) August 22, 2026
Here is the flaw in plain terms. A malicious website could send the device a second command while you were still reading the first one.

The channel between browser and device is called the Application Protocol Data Unit, or APDU. It kept listening during the review. So it accepted the swap.

You would read a small transfer on screen. Then you would tap approve. And you would actually sign an unlimited token approval to a stranger.

That last part is why this matters. Chainalysis has traced roughly $1 billion in crypto stolen through approval phishing since May 2021. Those victims signed the approvals themselves.

TestMachine says it confirmed the bug on a Ledger Flex. Ledger has sold more than 7 million devices across 180 countries.

Ledger’s Donjon Team Says It Got There FirstGuillemet flips the timeline. Donjon is Ledger’s in-house hacking team. He says it caught the bug with its own AI tools and shipped the fix first.

The public changelog backs the date. Version 1.22.2 landed on Aug. 12. Its entire security note says “Security issues.”

Donjon has published 22 numbered security bulletins. None of them covers this bug. The latest, dated June 4, deals with a Monero key-recovery issue instead.

That silence is the gap TestMachine walked into. Ledger closed the hole, then never told owners what it had closed.

Guillemet’s sharper complaint is about manners. He says TestMachine contacted the bounty program only after the patch shipped. It never spoke with the bounty team.

“…Then they published a thread implying the problem is unsolved. It is not. That’s not security research. That’s manufacturing fear for attention,” Charles Guillemet, Ledger CTO remarked.

Follow us on X to get the latest news as it happens

TestMachine praised the speed of the fix and turned down the reward. Ledger pays bounties in Bitcoin, at an amount it sets case by case.

AI Found the Bug Twice, But Humans Still FoughtBoth sides used machine learning to reach the same defect. That is the part worth watching.

Ledger has made this argument before. Its executives have said for months that AI attackers threaten wallets more than weak hardware does.

Guillemet drew his line at discipline.

“AI-speed research only makes the ecosystem safer if the people doing it still follow basic security principles. Disclose responsibly. Verify before you publish. Don’t confuse noise with a finding.”

The fight itself is familiar. Security firms have gone loud after hacking a Trezor device, and CertiK researchers fought Kraken over disclosure terms in 2024.

So is the flaw. Back in January 2021, Donjon disclosed that this same Ethereum app failed to show transaction data for unsupported assets. Same app, same lesson. What you saw was not what you signed.

AI now surfaces these bugs in hours. Vendors and researchers still coordinate at human speed. That gap is where this argument lives.

For owners, the fix is dull. Open Ledger Live, update the Ethereum app, and check that it reads 1.22.2.

Tether’s two Uruguay mining sites cost an estimated $120 million. A dispute with state utility UTE centered on how much electricity the sites could draw. UTE disconnected both facilities in July 2025 after bills went unpaid. Tether has continued pursuing Bitcoin mining elsewhere in South America. Tether’s attempt to establish Uruguay as a launchpad for a larger South American Bitcoin mining business ended with two abandoned facilities after a contractual dispute with state-owned electricity provider UTE. The sites, estimated by a person with direct knowledge to have cost about $120 million, lost power in July 2025, according to documents and interviews reviewed by Reuters, turning what began as a renewable-energy mining expansion into a costly example of how electricity contracts can determine the economics of industrial-scale Bitcoin production.

A Power Contract Became the Project’s Central Problem When Tether announced its Uruguay expansion in 2023, the country appeared well suited to the company’s mining ambitions. Uruguay offered political stability, a reliable electrical grid and a power system with substantial renewable generation.

The two facilities were built in the department of Florida, with a former contractor estimating investment of roughly $60 million in each site. Uruguay was intended to serve as a testing ground before Tether expanded further into countries including Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina.

Operations initially generated revenue, according to former contractors interviewed by Reuters. The problem emerged as electricity requirements increased.

Tether and UTE interpreted a critical part of their electricity agreement differently. Tether understood the contracted power figure as a minimum allocation that could eventually be expanded. UTE regarded it as the maximum amount of electricity available to Tether’s local entity, Microfin.

That distinction became increasingly important as the mines scaled. Bitcoin mining facilities need a large and predictable electricity supply because their economics depend heavily on keeping specialized machines operating continuously. According to Reuters, insufficient supply sometimes left the sites without enough electricity for days.

Key stages in the Uruguay project May 2023
Tether announces Bitcoin mining operations in Uruguay.

November 2024
The electricity supply dispute is documented by UTE.

May 2025
Microfin stops paying its electricity bills.

July 25, 2025
UTE disconnects electricity to the mining sites.

November 2025
Tether notifies authorities that operations will cease and most employees will be laid off.

Why Negotiations Failed Despite a Revised Electricity Deal The disagreement did not immediately end the project. UTE and Tether attempted to renegotiate the arrangement, and the utility’s board approved both a memorandum of understanding and revised contract documents.

The agreement was never completed.

According to minutes cited by Reuters, Tether representatives did not attend the planned signing. By that stage, Microfin had already stopped paying electricity bills and had informed UTE in June that it intended to terminate the contracts.

With the revised agreement unsigned and bills outstanding, UTE cut electricity to the facilities on July 25, 2025. Microfin subsequently settled its outstanding debt in December, UTE told Reuters.

The chronology matters because the shutdown was not simply the result of Uruguay lacking enough renewable electricity. The underlying problem was whether Tether could secure sufficient power under terms that made expanding its mining operation commercially workable.

Uruguay Exposed the Economics Behind Tether’s Mining Strategy Bitcoin miners effectively convert electricity and computing capacity into BTC. That makes the cost and reliability of power fundamental to profitability.

The April 2024 Bitcoin halving made that calculation harder by reducing the block subsidy from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC. Unless higher Bitcoin prices, transaction fees or improved mining efficiency compensate for the reduction, miners earn fewer coins from the same amount of computational work.

Uruguay offered extensive renewable generation, but renewable electricity is not automatically cheap electricity.

Crypto mining specialist Nicolas Ribeiro told Reuters that Uruguay’s relatively high power costs make the country less competitive for Bitcoin mining, while its stable grid and internet infrastructure may be better suited to AI data centers. Mining operators have fewer reasons to remain in a particular jurisdiction when electricity becomes uneconomical because much of their computing hardware can be relocated.

That flexibility helps explain why the collapse of the Uruguay project has not ended Tether’s broader energy strategy.

Tether Has Already Shifted Mining Investment Elsewhere The failed project also needs to be viewed against the scale of Tether’s wider expansion.

CEO Paolo Ardoino said in June 2025 that Tether had invested more than $2 billion in energy and mining infrastructure across 15 sites in Uruguay, Paraguay and El Salvador, according to The Block. The company has pursued mining infrastructure as one component of a much broader investment portfolio.
Brazil has become one of the next areas of focus.

In July 2025, Tether and agricultural and renewable-energy producer Adecoagro signed a memorandum of understanding to explore using renewable electricity for Bitcoin mining. The proposed model centers on monetizing surplus electricity from Adecoagro’s renewable-energy portfolio rather than reproducing the same arrangement used in Uruguay.

Tether had previously acquired a controlling stake in Adecoagro, giving it a more direct connection to the underlying energy assets.

The distinction could prove significant. Greater control over energy generation may reduce some of the contractual dependency that affected the Uruguay sites, although it does not eliminate mining’s exposure to

Bitcoin prices, network difficulty, equipment efficiency and local electricity economics.

What Changes Next for Tether’s Bitcoin Mining Plans The Uruguay exit leaves Tether with a more fragmented South American mining strategy than originally envisioned. Instead of using one country as a regional testing ground and then replicating the model, the company is pursuing different energy arrangements across individual markets.

For the mining industry, the episode reinforces why headline renewable-energy capacity is not enough when evaluating potential jurisdictions. Large operators need contractual certainty over both electricity prices and how much power they can consume as facilities expand.

Tether’s next South American projects will therefore provide a clearer test of whether greater involvement in energy production can improve those economics. Its partnership with Adecoagro is particularly relevant because the companies plan to examine whether surplus renewable electricity can be converted into Bitcoin mining revenue, giving Tether a different operational model from the one that failed in Uruguay.

Bittensor (TAO) is maintaining its key support levels, as buyers continue to defend the long-term price structure. The project’s recent expansion to the Base network, facilitated by Chainlink‘s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), is bringing its decentralized AI technology closer to decentralized finance (DeFi) users and supporting growth in the onchain AI sector.

Bittensor price activity and growthAs of the latest data, TAO is trading at $232.32, with a 24-hour trading volume of $217.92 million and a market capitalization of $2.61 billion. The token’s price recorded a 5.78% gain in the past day, which analysts view as a sign of a potential bullish reversal supported by network expansion and resilient market structure.

Crypto analyst Etherealist noted that TAO consistently finds buyers near the $200 zone, even during extended periods of weak sentiment. This consistent support is seen as a key factor for a possible trend reversal. The analyst suggested that if TAO breaks past its current resistance level, further rallies toward $500 could become likely.

Analysts emphasized that while TAO often struggles to attract attention at current levels, a robust move toward $500 could change market sentiment, with $1,000 and even $1,500 becoming realistic targets if upward momentum continues.

ForeverMoney reported that Bittensor’s decentralized AI network now includes Base, connecting the project’s AI offerings such as compute, code, vision, and prediction with Layer-2 DeFi infrastructure and a rapidly expanding user base.

Deeper integration through Chainlink CCIPThe use of Chainlink CCIP enables secure and reliable cross-chain communication between Bittensor and Base. This integration allows Bittensor’s decentralized AI features to be more accessible for DeFi users and traders active on Base, broadening the project’s reach within the crypto ecosystem.

By bridging Bittensor and Base, Chainlink CCIP allows for transactions and data flow between the networks, enhancing interoperability between AI and DeFi sectors. The collaboration signals a growing intersection of blockchain interoperability, artificial intelligence, and decentralized finance.

Looking at market dynamics, traders are reminded that, in a landscape where a single Federal Reserve policy move or an unexpected altcoin listing can rapidly shift valuations, switching between multiple apps for price charts, news, and portfolio management creates missed opportunities. Increasingly, investors are using all-in-one platforms like CryptoAppsy, which offer privacy-first access to real-time charts, smart price alerts, coin-specific news, and macro data on a single screen, often without the need for an account.

Support levels and future outlookTAO’s key support remains at $200. If this level holds and the token breaks above the $500 resistance, the path toward higher targets, such as $1,000 and potentially $1,500, may open. However, falling below $200 would likely challenge any bullish reversal and signal renewed downward pressure.

Further integration with Base and continued network growth could strengthen adoption within the DeFi and AI ecosystems.

The collaboration between Bittensor, Base, and Chainlink CCIP could accelerate onchain AI use case development and enhance cross-chain connectivity, potentially supporting long-term value for the TAO token.

While current indicators point to a possible bullish trajectory, analysts caution that future rallies depend on sustained demand and broader market conditions. Investors are urged to remain vigilant in a volatile environment.

Disclaimer: The information contained in this article does not constitute investment advice. Investors should be aware that cryptocurrencies carry high volatility and therefore risk, and should conduct their own research.

Cover image via U.Today Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by our writers are their own and do not represent the views of U.Today. The financial and market information provided on U.Today is intended for informational purposes only. U.Today is not liable for any financial losses incurred while trading cryptocurrencies. Conduct your own research by contacting financial experts before making any investment decisions. We believe that all content is accurate as of the date of publication, but certain offers mentioned may no longer be available.

Solana's RWA value has surpassed $4 billion, a new ATH for the network. The increase comes as the total supply of tokenized equities on Solana continues to grow.

This growth remains significant as what began as a negligible market in early 2024 has become a multibillion-dollar ecosystem spanning tokenized Treasuries, public equities, private credit, reinsurance, sovereign debt, commodities, liquidity funds, and stablecoin settlement infrastructure.

Tokenized equities are where Solana's RWA growth is accelerating fastest. As of late July 2026, 97% of all onchain tokenized equities spot volume to date had settled on Solana. This reflects Solana's increasing role as a leading venue for tokenized equity distribution and secondary activity.

RWA value doublesOne of the defining industry trends over the past year has been the growth of RWAs, with Solana sustaining its momentum. The recent increase of RWA value to $4 billion marks a nearly 100% increase from that seen at Q1 close. Solana non-stablecoin RWA value doubled, rising from $2.01 billion at the end of Q1 2026 to a current $4 billion.

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Solana currently has 347,944 RWA holders according to rwa.xyz data. The network has become a significant venue for tokenized Treasury products, with several large global issuers already on it.

These include Circle's USYC tokenized money market fund, one of the largest tokenized Treasury products worldwide, which launched on Solana in October 2025.

Others include BlackRock's BUIDL, the USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, which expanded to Solana in March 2025 through Securitize.

Ondo Finance runs two Treasury-linked products on Solana. USDY is a tokenized note backed by short-term U.S. Treasuries and bank demand deposits, and OUSG provides exposure to short-term U.S. government bonds and is backed significantly by BlackRock's BUIDL fund.

VanEck's VBILL, a short-term U.S. Treasury product, launched on Solana in May 2025 via Securitize. Franklin Templeton's BENJI, the token of the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund (FOBXX), the first U.S.-registered mutual fund to use a public blockchain as its system of record, launched on Solana in February 2025.

TLDR: The proposal could cut projected six-year SOL supply by 18.9M tokens, equal to about $1.81B at $95.70. Modeled staking yields could fall from 5.84% now to 4.34% after one year and 2.25% after three years. SGP-0002 needs one-third stake participation and two-thirds support, making it an early governance test. A 30% disinflation rate could bring Solana to its 1.5% inflation floor in 2029 instead of around 2032. Solana has opened an on-chain vote on SGP-0002, putting a token issuance change before validators and stakers. The proposal would double annual disinflation from 15% to 30%, accelerating how quickly new SOL issuance declines without changing the network’s 1.5% inflation floor.

⚡️LATEST: Solana’s proposal to double its disinflation rate from 15% to 30% is now live for governance voting.

If approved, $SOL inflation would fall twice as fast, meaning fewer new tokens entering circulation and less dilution for holders. pic.twitter.com/pPTt5iXQ5p

— CryptosRus (@CryptosR_Us) August 23, 2026

The vote is active under the network’s new stake-weighted governance framework, where validators and native stakers signal support or opposition. Delegators can override their validator’s choice, giving stakers a direct role in the outcome. The decision therefore combines monetary policy with an early governance test.

Solana Vote Puts 18.9M SOL Issuance Cut Before Stakers SGP-0002 is linked to SIMD-0550, authored by Lostin and 0xIchigo of Helius. Their June model placed the inflation rate at 3.82% under the existing schedule. At the current 15% annual disinflation rate, inflation would fall to about 3.24% after one year, reaching the 1.5% floor around the first half of 2032.

Source: X

However, the proposed 30% schedule would move faster. Inflation would decline to roughly 2.86% after one year and reach the same floor around early 2029. That acceleration would reduce cumulative issuance. The model projects total supply of 708.54 million SOL after six years, versus 727.43 million under the current schedule.

The 18.9 million-token difference equals about 2.6% of projected supply. At $95.70 per SOL on Aug. 23, that amount is worth about $1.81 billion. Nonetheless, the proposal does not immediately halve inflation. It only doubles the pace at which the inflation rate declines toward the unchanged long-term floor.

Lower issuance would also reduce staking rewards. At 68% modeled staking participation, nominal yield would fall from about 5.84% currently to 4.34% after one year. The model then places staking yield near 3.00% after two years and 2.25% after three years. Those figures exclude commissions, MEV, and block-related revenue.

Validator economics also weaken gradually. Among 738 validators, two additional operators become unprofitable or move from breakeven after one year. That number rises to 13 after two years and 30 after three years. Still, the authors modeled the overall validator impact as relatively limited.

Lower Staking Yields Put Validator Economics in Focus The economics have already drawn institutional opposition. Nasdaq-listed Solana Company said Aug. 21 that it would vote against SGP-0002. The company supports lower issuance as a long-term goal. However, it argued that changing established economics during the first governance cycle could reduce institutional predictability.

The vote also follows the failed SIMD-228 debate in 2025. That proposal sought dynamic issuance tied to staking participation rather than the existing fixed schedule. About 74% of staked SOL participated. However, only 61.4% of non-abstaining votes supported the proposal, below the required two-thirds threshold.

Under the new SGP process, at least one-third of network stake must participate. Two-thirds of participating stake must then vote in favor for passage. SGP-0002 therefore places two questions before the network. One concerns how quickly SOL dilution should decline, while the other tests whether governance can produce decisive consensus.

Fintech

23 August 2026 | 15:11 Pump’s full platform collected more fees than Hyperliquid in the latest snapshot, yet Hyperliquid sent more revenue into a HYPE buy-and-burn loop that directly shapes its token economics.

Key Takeaways Pump’s full stack generated $4.82M daily fees. Hyperliquid produced $2.37M in daily revenue. Eligible fees automatically purchase and burn HYPE. Both platforms monetise trading through distinct mechanics. Pump’s reported PUMP buybacks reached $941,387. Gross Fees Make a Misleading Headline The headline numbers suggest Pump is pulling far ahead of Hyperliquid, but raw fee totals mask a clear shift in actual protocol revenue.

DefiLlama’s Pump dashboard showed $4.82 million in 24-hour fees across its full platform, combining Pump.fun, PumpSwap, and Terminal. Over the same rolling window, Hyperliquid generated $2.94 million. On gross fees alone, Pump wins by roughly 64%.

Revenue flips the script. Hyperliquid’s dashboard listed $2.37 million in daily revenue, beating Pump’s $1.84 million by $530,000 (roughly 29%).

Revenue is the cleaner metric here. Pump’s gross fee total counts funds passed directly to liquidity providers and token creators. Meanwhile, Hyperliquid’s gross fees include builder fees that bypass its Assistance Fund. Neither headline fee figure reflects what the protocol retains or routes back to token holders.

Scope also distorts the conversation. Isolating the Pump.fun launchpad alone yields just $1.50 million in fees and $1.15 million in revenue, making Hyperliquid look much larger by comparison. Looking at the full platform vs. individual product streams keeps the playing field fair.

Protocol Fee & Revenue Comparison Matrix

Hyperliquid vs. Pump ecosystem metrics

Metric / Focus Hyperliquid Pump (Full Stack / Ecosystem) Gross Daily Fees $2.94 million $4.82 million (Full platform) / $1.50M (Launchpad alone) Daily Net Revenue $2.37 million $1.84 million (Full) / $1.15M (Launchpad alone) Token Buyback / Burn Mechanism Automatic daily purchase and permanent burn of HYPE via Assistance Fund (~$2.37M daily flow). PUMP buybacks executed from on-chain burns totaling $941,387. Core Engine & Model Perpetual derivatives, spot trading, and expanded builder markets (HIP-3). Token launches, bonding curves, and post-migration PumpSwap trading. ■ Protocol Revenue vs Fee Breakdown

 How Hyperliquid Converts Fees to HYPE Demand HYPE hit an all-time high of $82.43 on August 22 before settling near $79.22. Its tokenomics design is central to that price action.

Hyperliquid’s documentation details how its Assistance Fund automatically converts trading fees into HYPE as part of L1 execution. That acquired HYPE is then permanently burned, taking it out of total circulation.

DefiLlama routes 99% of qualifying perpetual fees (minus builder fees) and 99% of eligible spot fees into this fund. Its 24-hour revenue and holders-revenue readings sit aligned at $2.37 million, providing a direct live metric for the value entering the HYPE buy-and-burn mechanism.

At $79.22 per HYPE, that daily flow equals roughly 30,000 HYPE. While actual purchases fluctuate with live execution prices, the core mechanic remains fixed: qualifying trading revenue creates steady buying pressure, permanently locking those tokens out of circulation.

Separately, HYPE paid in successful HIP-1 token auctions is also burned. Because this is an episodic deployment cost rather than recurring trading revenue, it isn’t included in the daily $2.37 million run rate.

Spot Tokens vs. Perpetual Risk Pump is far more than a launchpad. Traders buy and sell tokens on its bonding curves from second one, continuing on PumpSwap post-migration. Its bonding-curve specs outline a 1.25% trading fee split between the protocol and token creators before liquidity transfers out.

Hyperliquid handles spot trading too, but perpetual derivatives are its real engine. Traders take leveraged long or short positions, settle funding, and manage liquidations without touching the underlying asset. Through HIP-3, third-party builders can deploy perp markets for equities, indices, ETFs, and commodities, running as USDC-margined contracts on Hyperliquid infrastructure via TradeXYZ.

Holding an Nvidia or gold perp on Hyperliquid isn’t equity ownership, it’s cash-settled price exposure backed by builder oracle rules. Pump users swap actual spot crypto tokens. This creates two entirely different business models: Pump monetizes token launches and spot volatility, while Hyperliquid extracts value from traders continuously repositioning leverage across broad markets.

Pump’s Own Buyback Machine Hyperliquid isn’t alone in supporting its token. DefiLlama tracks $941,387 in 24-hour holders revenue for Pump, reflecting PUMP buybacks executed from on-chain burns across its products.

The mechanics differ significantly. Pump’s reported buybacks combine multiple product activities and don’t sum directly with its $1.84 million revenue figure. Hyperliquid’s holders-revenue figure mirrors daily revenue directly because tracking models assign the full qualifying Assistance Fund flow straight to HYPE holders.

The reality? Both protocols actively buy back their tokens. Hyperliquid simply routes about 2.5 times as much value into its holder mechanism ($2.37 million vs $941,387) and burns the acquired HYPE automatically.

A Sustainable Trend, Not a Liquidation Spike Hyperliquid logged $6.84 billion in perpetual volume over the last snapshot, just 3% above its 30-day daily average of $6.65 billion ($199.5 billion total).

Liquidation data tells a similar story. Daily liquidations hit $55.06 million, comfortably below the protocol’s 30-day average of $78.5 million daily ($2.36 billion monthly total).

This proves the latest buy-and-burn volume wasn’t driven by a single liquidation cascade. Generating $39.74 million in revenue over the past month shows Hyperliquid’s buyback engine is backed by steady daily trading activity rather than short-lived volatility.

Pump took home more gross fees across its Solana ecosystem, but Hyperliquid generated more net revenue and directed a bigger slice straight into automated HYPE burns. While token burns aren’t the sole driver behind HYPE’s run to $82, the continuous, data-backed demand provides strong fundamental support.

Methodology: Figures were captured from DefiLlama’s live Hyperliquid, Pump and Pump.fun dashboards on August 23, 2026, at 12:00 UTC. Fee, revenue, volume and holders-revenue metrics are rolling measures and change continuously. The article is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.

Author

Kosta has reported on cryptocurrency markets and blockchain infrastructure since 2020, bringing over six years of hands-on experience in the crypto industry built through daily tracking of markets, trends, and emerging blockchain developments. Specializing in Bitcoin on-chain analysis, institutional ETF flows, and digital asset price action, his work at Coindoo has been cited by other news agencies and consistently covers market developments with a focus on data-driven reporting across Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and XRP. Over the years, Kosta has contributed to multiple crypto media outlets in different regions, authoring over 6,000 articles across the sector. His reporting spans cryptocurrency markets and the broader fintech industry, tracking not only price action but also the technological and regulatory forces shaping the ecosystem. To support his analysis, Kosta actively leverages on-chain data and metrics from leading platforms such as Santiment, Glassnode, and CryptoQuant, enabling deeper, evidence-based market insights. He believes in the power of transparency and the data that underpins the blockchain ecosystem. His academic background in Marketing Management from Denmark further complements his analytical approach, adding a strong understanding of communication strategy and content positioning to his work.