Track market-moving stories before they get noisy

Shiba Eternity advisor and long-time Shiba Inu community member Mazrael addressed recent speculation regarding a potential restart of the Shiba Inu project, firmly dismissing such rumors as untrue.

The speculation gained traction after X user RuggRat claimed that Shiba Inu could be undergoing not only a change in direction but a complete restart. RuggRat referenced a proposal discussed in a community forum, alleging it could signal a total break from the current project roadmap.

According to RuggRat’s post, the proposal suggested detaching the Shiba Inu ecosystem from elements still managed by previous leadership. Specific measures cited included moving away from the existing infrastructure, migrating to a different blockchain, building a new ShibaSwap platform, and steering clear of the Shib.io website due to lingering control by the former team. The post also mentioned considering the removal of Zama, an advanced cryptography protocol, from the project’s future plans, as well as a potential reevaluation of tokens such as BONE, LEASH, and TREAT, and a comprehensive overhaul of governance and community systems.

Mini dictionary: Zama is a company specializing in cryptographic protocols, developing solutions for privacy and confidentiality in blockchain applications using fully homomorphic encryption.

The post implied that this would mark a clear shift away from a near-term vision based on Shibarium, Shiba Inu’s Layer 2 blockchain, as well as confidentiality features provided by Zama and the established structure supported by many holders.

Advisor Denounces False Claims and Highlights Scam RisksRuggRat also included a link to a page titled ‘Shiba DAO,’ which carried a warning stating the content may be linked to scams or malicious activity. Additional users flagged the proposed ‘reconstruction’ as a potential scam.

Mazrael quickly responded to these claims, calling attention to the deliberate spread of misinformation. In a direct reply to RuggRat’s post, Mazrael wrote,

“Funny how you keep this up knowing it’s fake.”

He further underscored that attempts to promote a so-called project restart are false and intended to deceive the community. Another user echoed this sentiment, referring to the ‘reconstruction’ claims as a clear scam effort. Mazrael emphasized that the posts were an orchestrated effort to mislead the Shiba Inu supporter base.

This situation comes amid a period of heightened caution within the Shiba Inu ecosystem. There has been a rise in scam activity, particularly around false migration information distributed via Telegram channels. Scammers have reportedly posted misleading migration messages after muting and banning project developers from these channels.

Mazrael identified specific malicious actors as the originators of the fake migration claims and the false restart proposal, clarifying that these individuals have no connection to ShibaSwap, Shibarium, or related project developments, including Zama’s technology.

He reiterated that these individuals “have nothing to do with ShibaSwap or Shibarium and much less with Zama.”

Shiba Inu community members are urged to remain vigilant, refrain from visiting unofficial websites or opening suspicious links, and take necessary precautions to protect their funds from potential theft attempts.

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.

Coinbase has brought a new range of tokenized equities to Base, using the B20 token standard. From day one, eligible users can trade supported assets through 1inch.

Traditional markets are moving onchain, and 1inch has always been at the forefront of these changes, supporting RWAs from Ondo, xStocks and Maple.

Now, 1inch also supports Coinbase tokenized stocks on Base. The initial selection includes assets linked to Apple, Alphabet, Meta and Nvidia.

The launch strengthens 1inch’s position as a gateway to tokenized real-world assets, giving eligible users direct access to Coinbase’s new B20-based equities on Base. Because B20 is compatible with existing ERC-20 infrastructure, these assets can plug into 1inch’s swap routing from day one, expanding choice while keeping access within the same DeFi trading flow.

Tokenized equities on BaseTokenized equities are blockchain-based assets designed to track or provide exposure to companies and other equity-related instruments.

By bringing them on-chain, issuers can connect traditional financial assets with programmable DeFi infrastructure. These assets can be held in compatible wallets and integrated into trading applications and other on-chain products, subject to the issuer’s terms and regional restrictions.

Base has identified tokenized markets as a major part of its 2026 strategy. The network aims to support equities, commodities and other asset classes across spot, tokenized, prediction and derivatives markets.

Coinbase’s new assets take this strategy a step further by launching on Base through B20, a token standard designed with tokenized finance in mind.

What is the B20 token standard?B20 is a Base-native standard for issuing fungible assets such as stablecoins, tokenized equities and other RWAs.

Unlike a conventional ERC-20 token deployed through an individual smart contract on the Ethereum network, B20 is implemented at the protocol level. It gives issuers a standardized framework without requiring them to build and audit a new token contract from scratch.

B20 supports built-in controls for functions such as minting, burning, pausing, supply limits and transfer policies. At the same time, it remains compatible with ERC-20 infrastructure, helping existing wallets, exchanges and DeFi applications interact with B20 assets.

The standard has two configurations:

Asset tokens, designed for RWAs, tokenized equities and other fungible assetsStablecoin tokens, which use a fixed six-decimal format and specify a fiat currency denominationThis combination of standardized issuance, issuer controls and ERC-20 compatibility is designed to make it easier to bring regulated and real-world assets on-chain.

Which Coinbase tokenized assets are supported?The initial selection available through 1inch includes:

AAPLc - AppleGOOGLc - AlphabetMETAc - Meta PlatformsNVDAc - NvidiaAvailability, liquidity and trading conditions may differ between assets. The tokens are not available in the US, UK and other restricted jurisdictions.

Trading Coinbase RWAs through 1inchEligible users can now access supported Coinbase tokenized assets on Base through the 1inch dApp, 1inch Wallet and 1inch APIs.

When you initiate a swap, 1inch scans available on-chain liquidity and routes your transaction along an efficient path. This removes the need to check individual liquidity venues manually.

To explore the assets:

Open the 1inch dApp.Connect a compatible wallet.Select Base as the network.Choose one of the supported tokenized assets.Review the route, rate and transaction details before confirming the swap.As with any new on-chain asset, liquidity may vary. Always verify the token, issuer information and transaction details before proceeding.

Towards an onchain futureTokenized equities connect familiar financial assets with open, programmable infrastructure. B20 provides Base with tokenization tools built directly into the network. Coinbase is using those rails to bring a new selection of equity-linked assets on-chain. And 1inch makes supported tokens accessible through its swap infrastructure from day one.

Explore Coinbase tokenized assets on 1inch.

Disclaimer: This campaign is operated by Merkl (Angle Labs), which calculates and distributes all rewards, and is subject to Merkl's applicable terms and policies. The campaign forms part of the tokenized-equities launch programme on Base; 1inch Network has contributed funding. It is not sponsored or endorsed by Base or Coinbase. Rewards are paid in USDC on qualifying purchases made through the 1inch dApp or 1inch Wallet and held through the applicable epoch; purchases made through other interfaces, integrations or APIs do not qualify. Rewards are not an investment opportunity, and no reward, rate or return is guaranteed. Reward calculations are final once processed. Campaign parameters may change, and the campaign may be modified, suspended or discontinued at any time. Participation is subject to eligibility, geographic, integrity and compliance screening, and any wallet or participant may be excluded from the campaign or from rewards on that basis at any time; attempts to circumvent geographic or eligibility restrictions, including through VPNs or other means, result in exclusion and forfeiture of rewards. Rewards must be claimed on the Merkl app and may cease to be claimable after the end of the campaign. Tokenized stocks are issued by third parties and are subject to the issuer's terms and to transfer and regional restrictions; their availability, liquidity, transferability and market value may fluctuate, are not guaranteed and are outside the campaign's control. 1inch is not the issuer of, and is not responsible for, any tokenized asset. You are solely responsible for any taxes arising in connection with rewards or trading. Any figures shown on campaign interfaces are informational only and not a promise of returns. By participating in the campaign or claiming rewards, you agree to the campaign rules described in this post and to the 1inch.com Terms of Use, which also apply to campaign participation to the extent relevant. Not available to persons located in, residents of, or accessing from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Singapore, Switzerland, or any sanctioned or otherwise restricted jurisdiction. Nothing in this post constitutes financial, investment, legal or tax advice, or a recommendation, solicitation or inducement to buy or sell any security or other asset.

Injective Institutional Services has been officially registered as a transfer agent with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, advancing the Injective blockchain ecosystem’s regulated role in digital asset markets. This step positions Injective, known for its proof-of-stake blockchain focused on decentralized finance, to maintain securities ownership records directly onchain through its regulated subsidiary.

SEC registration supports compliant onchain recordsTransfer agents are responsible for recording securities holders and processing changes in ownership, making them vital for the transparency and integrity of financial markets. By gaining registration status with the SEC, Injective Institutional Services is now authorized to perform these functions for tokenized assets that move across its blockchain infrastructure.

The SEC has clarified that transfer agents may use distributed ledger technology, including blockchain, as their official master securityholder file if they meet regulatory conditions. This means that ownership records for securities can now be managed onchain, providing a direct link between digital asset transfers and legally recognized ownership.

INJ announced, “With transfer agent registration, we can now offer regulated market participants a compliant backbone for tokenized securities, bridging traditional recordkeeping and blockchain-based asset movement.”

While the registration allows new technical capabilities, the SEC emphasizes that existing compliance, recordkeeping, and safeguarding rules still apply. The SEC’s requirements remain unchanged by the blockchain integration, ensuring market protections continue for all parties involved.

Mini dictionary: Transfer agent, a regulated entity that maintains securities ownership records, processes transactions, and distributes corporate actions such as dividends or interest payments.

Real-world asset pilot and institutional focusInjective’s expansion into regulated tokenization aligns with its broader strategy to bridge blockchain technology with real-world financial assets. In July, two major South Korean firms, POSCO International and LG CNS, selected Injective for a pilot project involving tokenized trade receivables from international commerce. Under this initiative, receivables will be issued, transferred, administered, and settled entirely onchain using Injective’s ecosystem.

This approach addresses the practical needs of institutions that require robust permission controls, regulatory compliance, and transparent administration. By integrating transfer-agent capabilities, Injective enables institutions to manage securities in compliance with regulatory frameworks while benefiting from blockchain efficiency.

Industry participants observe that steps such as SEC registration may encourage broader adoption by addressing legal and regulatory concerns that have previously slowed institutional engagement with tokenized real-world assets.

EntityRole in PilotBlockchain UsedAsset TypePOSCO InternationalPilot participantInjectiveTrade receivablesLG CNSPilot participantInjectiveTrade receivablesNext steps and outlook for regulated tokenizationInjective previously filed for transfer-agent registration in July and has highlighted its INJ Mint solution, which is designed for compliant token issuance linked to real-world assets. The new SEC approval is seen as supporting this ongoing approach, offering a foundation for institutions seeking safeguards in the rapidly developing tokenized securities space.

The effectiveness of these measures will depend on adoption rates among financial institutions and whether regulatory clarity fosters more pilot projects and use cases. As markets move towards further integration of traditional finance and blockchain technologies, Injective’s compliant offerings may serve as a model for future developments in the space.

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.

Hyperliquid Policy Center has asked the SEC and CFTC to let qualifying equity perpetual contracts enter the U.S. as security futures after HIP-3 markets processed more than $480 billion in notional trading volume over their first 10 months.

Summary

Hyperliquid Policy Center has asked the SEC and CFTC to recognize qualifying equity perpetual contracts as security futures. The proposal would place eligible equity perpetuals under an existing framework jointly overseen by the SEC and CFTC. HIP 3 markets have processed more than $480 billion in cumulative notional volume during their first 10 months. HPC wants regulators to keep perpetual contract classification consistent across asset types while preserving exchange listing flexibility. Hyperliquid Policy Center said in an Aug. 24 comment letter that cash-settled equity perpetuals carrying the established characteristics of futures contracts should be eligible for classification as security futures, a category jointly overseen by the two U.S. regulators.

For a product trading hundreds of billions in volume, perpetual contracts still don't have a settled answer to the most basic question under U.S. law: are they futures, or are they swaps?

One federal judge described the exercise as deciding "whether tetrahedrons belong in… https://t.co/YjpwaV4fwh pic.twitter.com/dOcZtu1Ujq

— Hyperliquid Research Collective (HRC) (@HyperliquidR) August 24, 2026 The filing responds to a joint request for comment from the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission on how U.S. law should define swaps, security-based swaps and products that may fall outside those categories. HPC described the issue as a basic classification question that has remained unsettled even as perpetual contracts have expanded outside the United States.

Under HPC’s proposal, regulators would first look at the structure of a derivative and how it trades to decide whether it is a future or a swap. The asset referenced by the contract would then determine how regulatory authority is divided between the SEC and CFTC.

A perpetual contract on Bitcoin, crude oil or an individual stock should therefore receive the same initial product classification when each instrument has the same futures-like characteristics, the group argued. A contract tied to a single stock that qualifies as a future would fall into the security futures category and come under both agencies.

Hyperliquid group says equity perpetuals can qualify as security futures At the center of HPC’s position is the structure of a perpetual contract, which has no predetermined expiration date but uses recurring funding payments to keep its price close to the asset it tracks.

When a contract trades above its reference price, long-position holders pay shorts. If the contract falls below the reference price, shorts pay longs. HPC said the mechanism creates a continuous incentive for the perpetual price to converge toward the underlying market, performing a function that expiration and final settlement serve in traditional dated futures.

HPC also cited features that courts and regulators have historically used when examining futures contracts, including standardized terms, fungibility, fixed unit quantities and the ability to close a position through an offsetting trade.

On Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 markets, positions open and close through a central limit order book, margin is maintained continuously, and contract prices are publicly available. Equity perpetual holders receive price exposure but do not obtain ownership, voting rights, or other claims attached to the referenced shares.

The lack of an expiry date does not automatically prevent futures classification, according to the filing. HPC cited federal court decisions finding that a specified future delivery or settlement date is not always required and that contracts of indefinite duration can still carry the futurity associated with a futures contract.

U.S. regulators have already applied that reasoning to crypto perpetuals. In May, crypto.news previously reported that the CFTC approved Kalshi’s Bitcoin perp as the first federally regulated Bitcoin perpetual futures contract in the United States. The May 29 approval classified BTCPERP as a futures contract even though it has no fixed expiration date.

Kalshi began offering the contract in June and subsequently expanded its regulated perpetual lineup to other cryptocurrencies. The CFTC said additional products would remain subject to review, leaving the treatment of contracts referencing other asset classes open to further regulatory analysis.

SEC and CFTC have yet to settle the classification question Past enforcement cases have not produced a uniform answer for perpetual contracts.

HPC said earlier CFTC actions treated some perpetual products as swaps after examining parts of the Commodity Exchange Act’s swap definition without determining whether the instruments qualified for the statutory exclusion covering futures contracts. Other cases treated perpetual-style products as leveraged or margined retail commodity transactions subject to trading requirements similar to those applied to futures.

The SEC also used the term “perpetual futures” in its case related to the Mango Markets exploit while disputing that the products were futures contracts offered under regulated futures rules. According to HPC, neither an enforcement action nor a court had resolved the threshold question of whether the instruments themselves qualify as futures or security futures excluded from the swap definition.

The CFTC took a different approach with Kalshi in May, approving BTCPERP as a “contract for sale of a commodity for future delivery.” Its accompanying policy statement said perpetual contracts on other asset classes should undergo review and specifically identified equity-based products as an area where the CFTC and SEC should both be involved.

Disagreement over that interpretation has already reached federal court. CME Group later filed a legal challenge over perps, arguing that products such as Kalshi’s contract should fall under the swaps framework instead of being treated as ordinary futures. CME’s position contests the legal basis the CFTC used when approving the contracts.

Around the same period, the SEC and CFTC opened the definitions review that prompted HPC’s latest submission. The agencies sought public input on swaps, security-based swaps, exclusions from those definitions and emerging derivatives, including products that raise questions about the boundary between their jurisdictions.

HIP-3 volume puts $480 billion behind the regulatory debate HPC tied its request to trading activity already taking place through Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 framework, where independent market operators known as deployers can create their own perpetual markets.

The protocol handles execution, price-time order matching, enforcement of margin requirements, funding transfers, clearing and settlement. Deployers control elements including the assets listed, contract specifications, oracle sources, leverage limits and open-interest caps.

HIP-3 markets now cover several traditional asset classes for users outside the United States, including crude oil, gold and other precious metals, foreign exchange, equity indexes, individual equities and exchange-traded funds.

Over the 10 months following HIP-3’s launch, those markets accumulated more than $480 billion in notional trading volume and maintained roughly $4 billion in open interest, according to the filing. Across Hyperliquid as a whole, markets processed nearly $3 trillion in notional volume during 2025 and more than $1.5 trillion during 2026 through Aug. 23.

Stock-linked products have become part of that expansion. A July examination of Hyperliquid equity perps detailed how the platform has hosted perpetual contracts tracking equities while giving traders synthetic price exposure without ownership of the underlying shares.

HPC said U.S. users currently cannot access Hyperliquid, meaning the liquidity and infrastructure described in its filing developed outside the country while regulated domestic access to perpetual contracts remained limited.

Security futures would put equity perps under both regulators HPC proposed using the existing security futures framework for equity perpetuals that meet futures characteristics because the category already assigns oversight to both agencies.

Under the framework, a designated contract market regulated by the CFTC can list security futures after notice-registering with the SEC. A national securities exchange can cross in the other direction by notice-registering with the CFTC, while intermediaries have parallel registration routes.

Security futures have seen limited commercial activity since OneChicago closed in 2020, but the filing noted renewed interest this year. CME Group announced in June that it would launch single-stock futures beginning July 27, returning U.S. exchange activity to a product category that had been largely dormant.

HPC asked the agencies to confirm that cash-settled equity perpetuals carrying established futures characteristics may be listed as security futures, while allowing exchanges to retain flexibility when deciding how individual products should be classified.

The group also requested a consistent taxonomy between the two regulators and asked them to update the security futures framework so existing listing standards can accommodate new contract structures. HPC said classification should remain flexible enough for a bilateral, individually negotiated perpetual-style product to be treated as a swap or security-based swap when it lacks the fungibility, offset rights and multilateral execution associated with futures.

According to the filing, the SEC and CFTC could issue interpretive guidance, policy statements or staff-level guidance without waiting for a formal rulemaking. The agencies also have joint authority to modify security futures listing standards, which they previously used for American Depositary Receipts, ETFs, closed-end fund shares and debt securities.

TL;DR Entropy is live on Hyperliquid via HIP-3, with the first liquid market for Anthropic’s pre-IPO alongside equity perpetuals. RedStone is the data layer these markets run on: integrating custom sources, pushing the data onchain through a 4-of-6 multisig config, and delivering the reference prices they price against. RWA and Pre-IPO perps trade 24/7 while their home markets keep hours, so RedStone Live continues to price them through the close, sourcing live venues with low latency. Entropy liquidity-weighted methodology blends the order book with RedStone’s external reference, weighting each by executable depth so the mark rests on the sounder source. RedStone secures the large majority of oracle-protected value on HyperEVM and built HyperStone, the first oracle dedicated to HIP-3. Entropy Launches HIP-3 Equity Perps Market Entropy, a perpetuals exchange offering 24/7 trading for real-world assets and pre-IPO equity, is now live on Hyperliquid. Built via the HIP-3 standard, Entropy’s opening markets feature Anthropic’s pre-IPO stock, the first way to trade the stock at scale on Hyperliquid, along with SNDK.

RedStone is the official data layer powering Entropy’s markets, integrating custom sources for assets that have no clean feed of their own and implementing the liquidity-weighted methodology behind their pricing. The data reaches the exchange through RedStone Live, a low-latency service built for RWAs trading onchain.

A weak key setup is a direct attack surface, the kind that cost DeFi over $600M in 2026. RedStone pushes prices to Entropy’s markets through a 4-of-6 multisig, meaning four of six independent signers have to agree before any update goes onchain. No single compromised key can move the price, making any oracle-related attack vector highly unlikely.

RedStone Live: 24/7 Pricing Data For RWAs Entropy’s perps are live 24/7. The market where its underlying asset trades is not. SanDisk trades on Nasdaq during US hours, and goes quiet overnight and over the weekend.

RedStone Live closes the gap between traditional markets and onchain venues. During market hours it sources pricing from licensed institutional providers. When those markets close, it switches to the CEX derivatives and other venues where the asset keeps trading on its own order flow. This method ensures that feeds keep tracking live prices through the night instead of freezing on the last print.

Price feeds are built per asset and aggregated from multiple sources rather than a single venue, which keeps the price stable when any one source thins out or drops. RedStone Live delivers data at low latency, and every input is cryptographically signed at each step.

Liquidity-weighted Methodology Standard perp markets can usually lean on an external price since the asset trades openly. Entropy’s markets are different. Stocks have strict trading hours and a pre-IPO stock like Anthropic has no public price at all. That means that a lot of time, pricing is pulled from Entropy’s own order book. Oftentimes, the mark that drives funding and liquidations has to be built from an order book whose liquidity shifts from one moment to the next. 

RedStone implements a liquidity-weighted methodology, designed by Entropy, that reads the executable depth behind a price. The book and RedStone’s external reference for the same asset are blended into one mark, and the depth decides the mix. When there is real, fillable size resting in the book, the mark leans on the book. As that depth thins, it shifts weight onto RedStone’s reference, so the price always rests on whichever source is sounder at that moment.

The two launch markets show it working at both extremes. Anthropic has no official market price, only informal reference points, so its mark leans hardest on the book itself. The equity perps carry uneven depth through the day, and the methodology prices them on what is fillable at each point.

RedStone on HyperLiquid HIP-3 has democratized perp markets, lowering the entry barrier for teams building onchain trading venues. But once a market is launched, choosing a reliable data provider becomes one of the decisions the whole market rests on. 

RedStone is the oldest oracle on HyperEVM, securing the large majority of oracle-protected value on the network. We have also built the first oracle dedicated to HIP-3, which has powered more than $3.4B in volume across 15 HIP-3 markets since going live with Felix.

About RedStone RedStone is the data layer for institutional DeFi, delivering secure, low-latency price feeds for digital assets, RWAs, stablecoins, LSTs, LRTs, and Bitcoin LSTs across 110+ chains. Trusted by 200+ clients, including Securitize, Morpho, Pendle, Spark, Ether.fi, Ethena, Lombard, Venus, and Compound, RedStone powers lending, stablecoins, perpetuals, and tokenized asset markets with custom pricing infrastructure built for complex onchain systems. RedStone provides data for tokenized products including BlackRock’s BUIDL, Apollo ACRED, and Hamilton Lane SCOPE. Zero mispricing events. 100% uptime. Learn more at redstone.finance.

About Entropy Entropy is a new perpetuals DEX on Hyperliquid via HIP-3, backed by a $14M seed round and a $40M HYPE stake required for deployment.

The goal of Entropy is to have the highest quality perps on real-world assets and indices, and Entropy achieves that by treating market design as a research problem. Their team brings deep market microstructure expertise, with backgrounds spanning Citadel Securities and Polymarket. This experience is focused on rigorous oracle design and robust mark price construction, which will allow us to list novel pre-IPO equity perps, rates, and index products, along with more liquid and efficient global equity perps.

@WorldLibertyFi's $USD1 stablecoin has gained a significant new use case through a real-world asset (RWA) Vault built by @ConcreteXYZ, positioning the token as a yield-generating instrument backed by real economic activity rather than a simple payment tool.

What the Vault Does The vault, which operates on Ethereum, is open to whitelisted liquidity providers and targets an 8% APY, according to Concrete's platform. It channels $USD1 deposits into a diversified set of asset classes, all routed through the same execution layer.

The four core strategies inside the vault are:

1. Cross-border remittance settlement through @ZIGChain Markets.
2. Tokenized private credit through @Qiro_Finance.
3. Asset-backed European loans via @ColbFinance.
4. Data center financing using Origin Assets.

The structure means $USD1 holders can earn yield from diversified real-world exposure without having to source or manage individual RWA positions themselves.

USD1's Expanding Role in DeFi and RWA The Concrete integration is part of a broader push to deepen $USD1's on-chain utility.

The Concrete RWA Vault extends that momentum into the tokenized asset space, where real-world yields are increasingly being routed on-chain.

The move signals a clear strategic shift: $USD1 is being developed not only as a settlement or payment layer, but as a foundational asset for structured, yield-bearing DeFi products.

Sources
Concrete XYZ Earn Platform (RWA USD1 Vault details)
CoinDesk: World Liberty Financial Launches DeFi Lending Platform for USD1
RWA.xyz: USD1 Asset Overview

A Two-Pool Reward Structure Running Through Year-EndAster DEX has launched the first phase of its USD1 real-world asset (RWA) rewards campaign, running through December 31, 2026. The initiative is part of a broader partnership between Aster and World Liberty Financial (@worldlibertyfi), which has been positioning ethereum:0xda5e1988097297dcdc1f90d4dfe7909e847cbef6 as the base settlement layer for RWA perpetual markets on the platform.

The campaign distributes rewards across two independent pools. The combined growth fund holds 250 million WLFI tokens from World Liberty Financial and 12.5 million USD1 contributed by Aster. Of the WLFI allocation, 125 million tokens will be distributed based on eligible open interest, while a further 6.25 million USD1 will be allocated according to eligible trading volume. Because open interest and volume are tracked independently, traders can qualify for both pools simultaneously.

Aster is also offering a 2x open interest boost for eligible USD1-denominated RWA positions. The boost applies in full when traders use USD1 exclusively as collateral through Single Asset Mode. In Multi Asset Mode, USD1 must represent more than 50% of average collateral for the boost to apply.

USD1 as the Settlement Layer for RWA PerpsAster has listed SPCXUSD1, CLUSD1, XAUUSD1, SNDKUSD1 and SKHYNIXUSD1 under its AOS-2 standard, which sets the framework for new perpetual listings on the platform. The listed markets include assets linked to SpaceX, crude oil, gold, Sandisk and SK Hynix. USD1 is now the exclusive settlement asset for all of Aster's RWA and commodity contracts.

USD1 is a US-dollar stablecoin issued by World Liberty Financial and custodied by BitGo Trust Company, backed by cash, short-duration US Treasury bills, and government money market funds. Launched on Ethereum and BNB Chain in March 2025, it had grown to a circulating supply of roughly $4 billion by mid-2026. For World Liberty Financial, the Aster arrangement drives utility for USD1 beyond transfers and lending, as every open position locks USD1 as collateral and every trade generates settlement volume.

For Aster, the commodity expansion tracks with its transformation from a crypto-only perp DEX into a multi-asset trading platform. The exchange already offers perpetuals on US equities alongside its core crypto derivatives and recently launched the genesis phase of Aster Chain, a privacy-focused Layer 1 using zero-knowledge proofs.

Sources:
CryptoNinjas: Aster Launches Five USD1 RWA Perpetual Markets
Dealroom: Aster Launches USD1-Settled RWA Perpetuals with $28M Liquidity Fund
The Defiant: Aster to Settle RWA Perps Exclusively in USD1

Strive, a US-based investment management company, increased its Bitcoin holdings by 1,110 BTC last week, bringing its total Bitcoin treasury to 21,356 BTC. The purchase, made for $81.5 million at an average price of $73,409 per coin, was disclosed in the company’s latest filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Strive’s expanding Bitcoin strategyThe acquisition took place between August 17 and August 21, during which time Strive’s cash reserves grew from $154.8 million to $171.9 million. This increase indicates that the firm continued to raise capital even as it allocated significant resources to expand its Bitcoin position. The higher cash balance also provides Strive with liquidity to support ongoing operations and potential future purchases.

To fund these acquisitions, Strive relies on a mixture of equity and preferred share offerings. Over the reporting week, Strive’s Class A shares outstanding rose by 3,646,300 to 79,890,888, while its SATA preferred shares increased by 441,313 to 8,270,815. Assuming full dilution, the total share count reached 92,949,226 by the end of the week.

This growth in outstanding shares creates a balancing act for the company. While adding more Bitcoin to the treasury may suggest higher exposure, the real impact for individual investors depends on how much Bitcoin is held per diluted share. If new Bitcoin holdings are acquired at a slower pace than shares are issued, per-share exposure can be diluted despite headline growth metrics.

MetricAugust 14August 21BTC holdings20,24621,356Cash & equivalents$154.8 million$171.9 millionClass A shares76,244,58879,890,888SATA preferred shares7,829,5028,270,815Apart from Bitcoin, Strive also holds 505,000 shares of Strategy’s STRC preferred stock, which increased in fair value by $707,000 to reach $48.57 million. This position, alongside the larger cash balance, gives the company more flexibility, but the Bitcoin treasury remains its primary draw for investors.

According to Strive, its broader operations manage nearly $3 billion in assets across exchange-traded funds and direct indexing. The company’s strategy is to use fee income to help offset costs arising from preferred stock issuance, aiming to capture the spread between financing costs and long-term potential returns from Bitcoin. If financing costs were to rise or Bitcoin’s value were to fall, this spread could shrink.

Mini dictionary: Strive, an investment management company based in the United States, manages a range of financial products including publicly traded exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and direct indexing solutions, with a particular recent focus on large-scale Bitcoin accumulation as part of its corporate treasury strategy.

Bitcoin rally supports recent acquisitionOn the day Strive disclosed its purchase, Bitcoin was trading near $79,400, giving the new 1,110 BTC holdings a market value of $88.1 million. This value exceeds the acquisition cost by roughly $6.6 million, further strengthening the company’s position. Overall, the total Bitcoin in Strive’s treasury would now be valued near $1.70 billion at those prices.

Technical analysts observed positive signals for the broader market. Ali Martinez, an independent crypto analyst, noted that Bitcoin’s price reclaimed its 1,130-day simple moving average after moving above $74,000 on August 20. Bitcoin had traded below this long-term average for nearly three months, a period associated with broader market uncertainty.

Martinez highlighted that, across past cycles, Bitcoin began new bull markets after recovering this long-term average. However, he cautioned that a sustained rally depends on further closes above this level and stable spot demand.

During the recent session, Bitcoin reached a high close to $79,934, which provided further upside to Strive’s latest purchase. This price momentum also supported the market value of the company’s Bitcoin holdings acquired in previous quarters. In January, Strive’s acquisition of Semler Scientific added approximately 5,048 BTC to its books, helping scale the treasury quickly ahead of the latest round of buying.

Investors monitoring Strive’s performance now face two key variables: whether Bitcoin’s price can maintain support above the reclaimed moving average and whether Bitcoin per diluted share can continue to grow despite higher equity issuance.

Rising BTC holdings may grab attention, but according to Strive’s latest filing, shareholder returns depend on whether treasury growth can outpace dilution caused by increasing the number of shares outstanding.

Future company disclosures will reveal if Strive’s Bitcoin accumulation strategy continues to increase actual exposure per share or if further equity raises dilute these gains.

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.

XRP Ledger node operators are facing an important upgrade following the latest xrpld version 3.3.0 release. 

This has prompted a new alert for network participants, with node operators urged to update their nodes to stay aligned with the latest improvements and fixes. The upgrade push comes as XRPL 3.3.0 gains adoption across the network.

More than 60% of XRP Ledger nodes had already upgraded to the new xrpld version, according to a recent post by XRP Ledger Operations, an X account dedicated to sharing XRP Ledger infrastructure and software updates.

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Please update your XRPL nodes to 3.3.0!

Over 60% of $XRP Ledger nodes have already been updated to version 3.3.0.

This version includes, among other improvements, the feature amendments Batch, Dynamic MPT, Permission Delegation, Sponsor, and Confidential Transfer, as well as a… pic.twitter.com/uq5COJaVyl

— XRP Ledger Operations (@XRPLOperations) August 23, 2026 The alert for node operators remains essential to avoid amendment blocking, a security feature to protect the accuracy of XRP Ledger data.

When an amendment is enabled, servers running earlier versions of xrpld without the amendment's source code no longer understand the rules of the network. Rather than guess and misinterpret ledger data, these servers become amendment-blocked and can't determine the validity of a ledger, submit or process transactions, participate in the consensus process, or vote on future amendments.

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The XRPL 3.3.0 release introduces several new amendments alongside bug fixes and build improvements. The new amendments are BatchV1_1: Atomic batch transactions (XLS-56); ConfidentialTransfer: Privacy-preserving Multi-Purpose Token transfers (XLS-0096);  DynamicMPT: Multi-Purpose Token properties that issuers can make permanently immutable (XLS-94); PermissionDelegationV1_1: Granular account permission delegation; Sponsor: Reserve and transaction sponsoring (XLS-68); fixCleanup3_3_0, a bundle of amendment-gated bug fixes; all of these are up for voting.

fixCleanup3_3_0 hits 68% consensusThe fixCleanup3_3_0 amendment, a collection of fixes for Single Asset Vaults, the Lending Protocol, Automated Market Makers, the permissioned DEX, Checks, and pseudo-accounts, has reached 68.57% consensus, with less than 12% needed for it to reach the required 80% threshold.

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Changes in the fixCleanup3_3_0 include fixes for hybrid offers being removed from the open order book when the account that placed them loses access to the permissioned domain; fixes for Automated Market Maker liquidity being included in quality estimates for permissioned DEX order books; and additional precision and rounding fixes for Single Asset Vaults and the Lending Protocol, among others.

In brief Tom Lee's Bitmine bought another 32,447 ETH, worth roughly $81 million, last week. Bitmine says its 5.85 million ETH represents about 4.8% of the supply. The price of Ethereum is up more than 30% in the last week. Bitmine Immersion Technologies is another step closer to its goal of owning 5% of Ethereum’s supply after buying another 32,447 ETH, worth roughly $81 million, last week.

The company said Monday that it held 5,847,611 ETH, worth around $15 billion as of August 23.

Myriad: Ethereum next price move? Click to make your prediction.With Ethereum’s supply at approximately 120.7 million tokens, the 5% mark is about 6.04 million ETH. That puts Bitmine roughly 187,000 ETH short of its goal.

Bitmine's latest buy comes amid renewed interest and excitement in the crypto market, with the price of Ethereum exploding over the last week. ETH is up a whopping 31.5% in the last seven days, outperforming even Bitcoin's impressive gains of nearly 24% in the last week. ETH is currently trading for just under $2,500, up almost 3% in the last day alone.

Sentiment around the asset has shifted on prediction markets as well. On Myriad, a prediction market developed by Decrypt's parent company Dastan, traders are now pricing in 64% odds that Ethereum hits $3K before dropping down to $1.5K. Those odds were reversed less than a week ago, with odds as high as 74% on the bearish outcome before the market turned.

Bitmine’s ETH accumulation began last summer, with the company reaching roughly 1% of Ethereum’s supply that August and 2% in September. Bitmine’s ETH holdings passed 4.66 million ETH in March 2026 and 5.2 million in May.

Five percent is Bitmine’s own target, and crossing that threshold would not trigger a change to Ethereum or grant Bitmine control over transactions, upgrades, or governance.

The purchase came as ETH recorded its largest weekly gain in more than a year, rising roughly 31% since August 19, 2026.

“This is the largest weekly gain since May 2025, prior to that it was July 2021,” Chairman of Bitmine, Tom Lee, said in a statement. “In those two precedent instances, this weekly gain of >30% signaled a launch point for a larger move in ETH.” (Disclosure: Tom Lee is an investor in Dastan, Decrypt’s parent company.)

Myriad: Bitcoin next price move? Click to make your prediction.Lee pointed to easing financial conditions, White House support for crypto, and Treasury purchases of long-term bonds that had improved investors’ appetite for risk.

With 87% of its ETH already staked, Bitmine has placed much of its supply outside active markets. It has not said whether it will stop buying at 5%.

Bitmine said it has staked 5,067,309 ETH, equal to 87% of its holdings, and the company projects $330 million in annual staking revenue.

Chairman Tom Lee said in May that Bitmine would slow its buying to avoid reaching 5% too quickly. Purchases continued, but at an uneven pace. By late July, its holdings had reached 5.79 million ETH.

For BMNR investors, 5% would bring more staking revenue if Ethereum performs well—and greater exposure to falling ETH prices, custody failures, financing costs, and regulatory changes if it does not.

Daily Debrief NewsletterStart every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.

Cardano has opened community review for two new proposals targeting network security and developer tooling as its 2026 upgrade roadmap continues to take shape.

Quantum-Resistant Wallet SecurityCIP-0197 proposes post-quantum zero-knowledge (ZK) signatures for hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallets. The proposal adds ZK proofs of wallet seed phrases on top of existing signatures, described as an intermediate step toward quantum security ahead of a full cryptographic migration. The design allows users to prove ownership of a wallet's recovery phrase through a zero-knowledge proof without needing to reveal the phrase itself. A separate proposal already in active community review, CPS-0030, addresses the development of a broader quantum-secure settlement layer for the network.

Shared Plutus Testing StandardsCPS-0034 outlines a shared framework for testing Plutus behavior consistently across different node types, with the goal of reducing bugs for developers building smart contracts on Cardano. The proposal follows recent work by the Plutus team, which has added new built-in functions, improved Value support in the ledger API, and broadened the conformance test suite in recent development cycles.

Three other proposals remain in active feedback rounds. CIP-0196 aims to standardize human-readable wallet handles through a Handle Provider Registry and Resolver. CIP-0178 would allow light clients and bridges to verify a transaction without downloading a full block. A fifth proposal, CPS-0033, examines concentration risk among delegated representatives in Cardano's on-chain governance system.

Together, the five proposals reflect the range of Cardano Upgrade 2026, which spans cryptographic security, smart contract tooling, and decentralized governance.

Sources
CoinGabbar: Cardano Upgrade 2026, New CIPs Target Quantum Security
Cardano Development Updates: Plutus Core Team Update, August 2026
The Crypto Basic: Charles Hoskinson Proposes Zero-Knowledge Wallet Recovery System for Cardano

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.

Cardano has scored a major Japan win as its native cryptocurrency ADA and privacy-focused token NIGHT get listed on S.BLOX, a cryptocurrency exchange affiliated with Sony Group.

S.BLOX is a Japanese cryptocurrency exchange owned by Sony Group Corporation; it was acquired in August 2023 by Sony On-Chain Technologies Inc. (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sony Group Corporation).

In a recent X post, S.BLOX announced it will begin handling Cardano (ADA) starting August 24. The crypto exchange confirms that Cardano trading is now available and has launched a campaign where users can receive up to 10,000 yen worth of ADA to celebrate the listing milestone.

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The Sony-backed crypto exchange simultaneously announced the listing of Midnight's token. In an X post, S.BLOX confirmed that NIGHT handling is now available.

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The listing marks NIGHT's first entry into Japan; S.BLOX highlighted this in its post, pointing out that NIGHT is not handled by any domestic crypto-asset exchange operators, making it the first to do so.

To celebrate the launch, S.BLOX announced a campaign where users can receive up to 14,000 yen worth of NIGHT.

Cardano founder reacts to listingIn a recent livestream, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson hailed the recent listing, especially for Midnight.

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According to Hoskinson, S.BLOX is the first Japanese exchange to list NIGHT in Japan, which marks a monumental milestone.

The significance, according to Hoskinson, is that the listing process normally takes a very long time, citing the instance of ADA. Token listings have to go through an incredibly rigorous process with the JFSA, with relatively few tokens listed.

The listing also remains significant, as no privacy coins or privacy-preserving infrastructure trading as coins were listed on the exchange until Midnight.

In March 2026, Cardano's privacy-focused sidechain Midnight officially went live, and the NIGHT token was launched in December 2025.

DGrid AI’s utility token DGAI can now move natively between BNB Smart Chain and Arbitrum, powered by Wormhole’s Native Token Transfers framework. The cross-chain integration went live on August 24, 2026, the same day trading kicked off across a slate of major exchanges.

The timing is deliberate. DGrid AI completed its token generation event between August 17 and August 19, and within five days had its token bridgeable across two of the busiest EVM-compatible networks.

How the bridging works Wormhole’s NTT framework is the plumbing behind this integration, and it matters because of what it avoids. Traditional bridging protocols create “wrapped” versions of tokens on destination chains, essentially IOUs that represent the original asset. NTT takes a different approach: burn-and-mint mechanics.

When a user sends DGAI from BNB Smart Chain to Arbitrum, tokens are burned on the source chain and an equivalent amount is minted on the destination chain. The total circulating supply stays constant. No wrapped tokens floating around, no liquidity fragmentation between “real” and “synthetic” versions of the same asset.

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This is particularly relevant for DGAI because the token has a fixed total supply of 1 billion with no inflationary minting built into the protocol. Every token that exists is accounted for, and the burn-and-mint bridge preserves that constraint mathematically rather than relying on custodial reserves.

The contract addresses are already public: 0x10D4183389e99233db3cc981c43443Ebd28Ebd5e on BNB Smart Chain and 0x12C2dE43878FB1A06C1Ead481f11E0C693a719c7 on Arbitrum.

The broader DGrid AI picture DGrid AI is building what it describes as a community-driven decentralized AI inference network. Think of it as a marketplace where AI model providers and users connect through a unified API, cutting out the middlemen that currently dominate cloud-based AI services.

A $5 million seed funding round closed in July, providing runway ahead of the TGE.

DGAI itself is designed to be more than a speculative asset. Within the ecosystem, it serves as the payment mechanism for AI inference services, meaning users pay in DGAI to run queries against models hosted on the network. It also functions as a staking token, a governance token for protocol decisions, and a rewards token for network participants who contribute resources.

Exchange listings and early market dynamics DGAI trading began at 08:00 UTC on August 24 across Kraken, KuCoin, Bitget, Gate.io, and MEXC.

The cross-chain bridging adds another dimension to liquidity. BNB Smart Chain remains one of the highest-throughput, lowest-fee environments for retail transactions, while Arbitrum has established itself as Ethereum’s leading Layer 2 for DeFi activity. Being natively present on both chains means DGAI can plug into the DeFi ecosystems on each, whether that’s lending protocols, automated market makers, or yield strategies that emerge around the token.

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

NUVA Taps Chainlink to Power Institutional RWA Platform@NUVALabs, a venture co-created by @Animocabrands and Nuva Labs, has named @Chainlink as its exclusive data infrastructure provider as it looks to shift institutional private credit onto decentralized rails. The move signals a broader push by the platform to make high-grade financial assets accessible within the DeFi ecosystem.

Crypto Briefing reports that NUVA launched on Ethereum on May 13, 2026, leaning on Chainlink's oracle infrastructure to underpin the platform's core functions. The platform connects tokenized real-world assets from Figure Technologies' Provenance Blockchain directly into DeFi markets, with two flagship products sitting on top of an asset base valued at roughly $19 billion.

The integration opens with the debut of nvPRIME, a tokenized vault that gives on-chain investors exposure to short-term funding backed by U.S. residential mortgages and home equity lines of credit (HELOCs). According to CoinDesk, nvPRIME is tied to Figure's $18.4 billion HELOC portfolio and currently targets yields above 7%, though access is largely restricted to institutions and accredited investors. A companion product, nvYLDS, is a yield vault linked to YLDS, an SEC-registered stablecoin backed by short-dated Treasuries and bank deposits.

Why Chainlink Oracles Matter for Tokenized CreditFor tokenized credit products to function inside DeFi protocols, reliable on-chain pricing is essential. Chainlink's oracle network handles the valuation of NUVA's tokenized assets, feeding price data to the smart contracts that power collateralization and yield distribution. Without accurate oracle data, lending protocols cannot safely liquidate undercollateralized positions or calculate net asset values, making the choice of oracle provider a critical infrastructure decision.

Chainlink's growing role in institutional RWA markets is well documented. CoinPaprika notes that Chainlink's push model handles daily NAV feeds and cross-chain distribution for tokenized funds, and that the network secures roughly $110 billion in on-chain value. For NUVA, selecting a single exclusive provider rather than layering multiple oracle solutions reflects a deliberate architectural choice aimed at consistency and reliability across its vault products.

NUVA describes itself as a chain-agnostic vault marketplace designed to unlock permissionless access to institutional-grade real-world assets. The platform is backed operationally by Nuva Digital, a collaboration between Animoca Brands and Nuva Labs, and overseen by the NUVA Foundation.

Sources
Crypto Briefing: NUVA uses Chainlink for data infrastructure in DeFi
CoinDesk: Animoca-backed NUVA brings Figure's $19 billion of tokenized assets to Ethereum
Animoca Brands: NUVA launches on Ethereum

PANews reported on August 24 that stablecoin USDC issuer Circle said that four months after USDC was connected to the stablecoin trading hub OSL StableHub, its custodial funds under management have surpassed $200 million, demonstrating strong demand for USDC in Asian institutional markets.

OSL StableHub is a multi-stablecoin and U.S. dollar one-stop conversion hub and rewards center launched in February 2026 by OSL Group, a global stablecoin payment and trading platform, providing users with 1:1 no-slippage, zero-fee conversion between multiple mainstream U.S. dollar stablecoins and the U.S. dollar. In addition, Circle is cooperating with OSL in areas such as foreign exchange, custody, and cross-border payments, aiming to further consolidate OSL StableHub's position as a compliant stablecoin distribution and settlement hub. Currently, stablecoins supported by OSL StableHub include USDGO, USDC, USDT, RLUSD, AUSD, USDG and U (United Stables), among others.

Circle said that combining USDC with OSL's compliant network provides institutional and corporate clients with a one-stop compliant digital dollar liquidity channel. OSL StableHub also demonstrates how a compliant platform can integrate distribution, liquidity, and settlement capabilities, setting an industry benchmark for the booming digital dollar market in the Asia-Pacific region.

When AI agents need to pay each other for data, API calls, and compute, they are apparently very opinionated about currency. USDC accounted for over 99.99% of all agentic transfer volume on Coinbase’s x402 protocol over the past 90 days, according to recent data. That is not a rounding quirk. It is a near-complete monopoly in one of the fastest-growing corners of digital payments.

The x402 protocol is Coinbase’s infrastructure layer designed specifically for autonomous software systems. Think of it as the plumbing that lets AI agents buy and sell services from each other without a human hitting “confirm” every time.

From zero to 160 million transactions in under a year In mid-2025, x402 had virtually no usage. By June 2026, cumulative transactions on the protocol had crossed 160 million, with more than 90% of those occurring on Base, Coinbase’s Layer 2 network.

In a single 30-day window around August 2026, the protocol processed between 14 million and 17.8 million transactions.

The individual transactions are tiny by design. Average transaction value on Base clocked in at roughly $0.13, according to Token Terminal data. These are not block trades or DeFi swaps. They are machine-to-machine micropayments: one agent paying another for a weather API lookup, a dataset query, or a model inference call.

An interesting shift is happening inside those small numbers, though. Transactions valued at $1 or more made up 95% of recent transfer values by count, up sharply from 49% in early 2025.

Why USDC and why now USDC was already deeply integrated into Base infrastructure before the agentic payment narrative took off. Speed and low transaction costs on supported chains made it the obvious default.

Circle leaned into this position aggressively. In May 2026, the company launched what it calls the Agent Stack, a suite of developer tools purpose-built for AI agent payments. The headline feature is gas-free nanopayments, enabling transactions as small as $0.000001.

The macro numbers back up the momentum. Circle reported that USDC’s on-chain transaction volume hit $14.8 trillion in Q2 2026, a 151% increase year-over-year.

Approximately 400,000 agents have been identified in prior assessments as active participants in x402 transactions.

What this means for stablecoin competition and crypto markets Tether’s USDT is the dominant stablecoin by market cap and overall volume. But USDT is essentially absent from this particular arena. The reasons likely involve integration timing, chain support, and the fact that Circle moved faster to build developer tooling specifically for agentic use cases.

Circle’s AWS partnership, which routes payments through USDC infrastructure, adds another layer of institutional weight to this picture.

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

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.

Through the NU7 Coinholder Vote, Zcash (ZEC) holders will have a direct chance to impact the extent of the network's impending NU7 upgrade. This process grants eligible ZEC holders voting power linked to their shielded holdings, in contrast to governance mechanisms based on validator participation or delegated voting. A snapshot at Zcash mainnet block 3,459,350, which is currently projected for August, determines eligibility.

When does the vote take place?Around 22:20 GMT+3 on August 24, 2026. The authoritative factor is the block height, not the estimated time. One important prerequisite is that ZEC must be shielded, spendable, and stored in Ironwood at the time of the snapshot. Coins kept in Orchard, Sapling, or Sprout and transparent ZEC are ineligible unless they have already been migrated. Likewise, ZEC kept on exchanges or other networks needs to be transferred into Ironwood's self-custody.

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Crucially, holders are not required to maintain their ZEC throughout the voting period. The coins can be transferred once block 3,459,350 determines eligibility. Voting starts on August 25 and ends on September 14 at 22:00 GMT+3. Vizor, Zashi, and Zkool are among the supported wallets, and users of Keystone hardware wallets can take part without removing their keys from the device. 

A number of potentially important Zcash changes are on the ballot. The rate at which new ZEC enters circulation, when previously removed ZEC should return through future block rewards, and when the network should disable legacy Sprout transactions are all options for holders to express their preferences. 

Other concerns include whether Zcash's block interval should be shortened and how developers should handle NU7 features that are not ready on time, such as delaying NU7 until all authorized functionality is finished or shipping the upgrade without them. The process continues to be centered on privacy. 

What Are ZEC Voters Choosing? The voting system employs homomorphic encryption, which encrypts each choice and the associated ZEC amounts while the votes are being processed. After voting is over, only the aggregate ZEC totals for each response are available. To lessen balance-linkability, each vote is further split into 16 unlinkable ballots. 

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As a result, the NU7 vote serves as more than just a local survey. It provides ZEC holders with a privacy-preserving, stake-weighted way to indicate how Zcash should handle legacy infrastructure, monetary policy, and the technical details of its upcoming significant network upgrade.

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.