Bitcoin

Bitcoin Magazine Pakistan’s Crypto Pitch: “Come Build Here” as Virtual Assets Act Moves Forward Pakistan has announced a new regulatory framework for crypto after banning the asset class for close to a decade, Announcing the news in an X post Friday, Bilal Bin Saqib, the special assistant to the prime minister on blockchain and cryptocurrency, invited foreign businesses to come to the country and set up shop. Pakistan’s Virtual Assets Act introduces the country’s first comprehensive legal framework for overseeing virtual assets and the businesses that operate in this space. 8 years of prohibition end today. Chairman PVARA @BilalBinSaqib announces the notification of the Licensing Regulations and the opening of the licensing portal, and sets out what licensing requires of providers and what it guarantees consumers. Get licensed. Get compliant. Come… pic.twitter.com/STVPsoX1so — Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (@PakistanVARA) August 21, 2026 “For approximately a decade, Pakistan’s answer to virtual assets was complete permission and complete ban — but history tells us that technology never waits for permission,” Bin Saqib said. He added: “To the companies watching Pakistan from outside, the front door is open for you. Come, get licensed. Come, get banked. Come, build here under rules that are clear, public and enforceable.” In a separate post, Bin Saqib said that the country now has “the rules, the regulator and the licensing framework to bring virtual assets into the formal economy, protect consumers and build the foundation for the next generation of financial infrastructure.” Pakistan’s virtual Assets Act was approved by the senate earlier this year and then signed into law by President Asif Ali Zardari. Friday’s announcement indicates that licensing regulations are now in place. Pakistan has made a crypto-friendly pivot in recent years. In 2025, plans to launch a national strategic Bitcoin reserve were announced at the Bitcoin 2025. Before that, the country announced that it was allocating 2,000 MW of surplus electricity to Bitcoin mining and AI data centers in an initiative aimed at generating revenue, creating jobs, and attracting foreign investment, according to the Pakistani government. The country has played an important part as a mediator between the U.S. and Iran. A relationship started forming between the two after it became an affiliate of Trump-backed crypto project, World Liberty Financial. Weeks after President Donald Trump’s return to power last year, WLF leaders went to Islamabad to meet with Pakistan’s prime minister. This post Pakistan’s Crypto Pitch: “Come Build Here” as Virtual Assets Act Moves Forward first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine Bitcoin Price Roars Towards $80,000 Following Positive Regulatory News, US Buyback Pledge Bitcoin roared past $79,000 Friday, sustaining the biggest run in years following positive regulatory news and an announcement from the U.S. Treasury. The leading cryptocurrency hit as high as $79,319 before dipping slightly. It was recently priced at $77,584, a more than 7% rise over the past day. Over a seven-day period, the coin has shot up by close to 23%. Bitcoin had spent most of July and June trading below $65,000. Some analysts had said that the bottom was likely in. JUST IN: Standard Chartered bank says Bitcoin could surge back to $100,000 this year, ending the "shallowest" bear market so far pic.twitter.com/IpyESe931E — Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) August 21, 2026 And it may just be in: Writing in a note Friday, Standard Chartered’s Global Head of Digital Assets Research, Geoffrey Kendrick, said that a $100,000 price forecast by year-end was too low. “Once investors remember how quickly prices can accelerate to the topside, and we get past the 6 October date (12 months after the all-time high) an overshoot towards the all-time high (USD126k) before year-end may be possible,” he said. He added that bitcoin’s bear market so far has been the shallowest on record. Analysts have pointed out that the coin’s volatility has been dampened this year. Bitcoin notched a record last year of $126,080 but plunged soon after following the biggest liquidation event in the history of crypto. Over $19 billion in leveraged bets were closed, sending shockwaves through the market. Since then, a number of factors have hurt bitcoin’s price, including the Federal Reserve being reluctant to lower interest rates and geopolitical headwinds such as war in the Middle East. But recent positive regulatory news has helped the coin. While a vote on the long-awaited crypto Clarity Act has been delayed until September, President Donald Trump on Wednesday said that the bill was a “very, very powerful” piece of legislation, and urged lawmakers to get it over the line. The proposed law will establish a framework for distinguishing between digital assets that are securities, commodities or payment stablecoins — legislation that the crypto industry has long called for. And earlier this week, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the department would at least double the size of its long-dated bond buybacks. The news sent yields down lower; lower long-term yields reduces the opportunity cost of holding non-yielding assets like bitcoin and gold, and generally supports risk-on sentiment. This post Bitcoin Price Roars Towards $80,000 Following Positive Regulatory News, US Buyback Pledge first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine Bitcoin Could Attract More Buyers As Fast Money Is Washed Out, Says Lyn Alden Macroeconomist and author Lyn Alden has said that while sentiment for Bitcoin has been low in recent months, there are “not a lot of downside catalysts” for the asset left. Speaking in a Thursday interview with CNBC, Alden said that the “fast money” has been washed out and market observers are not expecting Bitcoin treasury Strategy to sell anymore. Alden’s comments come after Bitcoin shot up this week. The leading cryptocurrency was recently trading for $72,660 — a more than 6% 24-hour rise — after reaching $72,890 earlier on Thursday. “By almost every metric, Bitcoin is near the low end of its valuation and sentiment range,” Alden said. “Even relatively small upside gains at this point can attract new types of buyers — once people see that the chart doesn’t look bad anymore, you can get technical traders coming back in; if you get further momentum, say months from now, you could get more momentum traders back in.” Bitcoin shot up following President Trump held a meeting at the White House with crypto executives and urged lawmakers to pass the long-anticipated crypto market structure bill, the Clarity Act. The president said Wednesday that the Clarity Act was a “very, very powerful” piece of legislation and urged lawmakers to pass it. Crypto industry companies have long been waiting for the crypto legislation. The Clarity Act was passed by the House of Representatives last year but has largely remained in deadlock this year. Some lawmakers were hoping for a vote in August but that will now go ahead in September. Alden added that while Bitcoin isn’t necessarily “out of the woods yet,” hard assets like Bitcoin that are “under-owned” will come out winning over the long-run. Bitcoin notched a record in October of $126,080 but has been in a bear market in 2026 as traders have increasingly pivoted to artificial intelligence-related tech stocks, and the Federal Reserve has hinted that interest rates will not come down anytime soon. This post Bitcoin Could Attract More Buyers As Fast Money Is Washed Out, Says Lyn Alden first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine Open Source vs. Source-Available: What the Coldcard Failure Teaches About Bitcoin Software Incentives Closed versus Open Source code has divided the Bitcoin and broader crypto industry for well over a decade. Bitcoin advocates have long argued that the financial infrastructure of the world should be built in public. Transparency and auditability, they say, are non-negotiable when real money is at stake. Yet the app and legacy layers of finance often disagree. Yet the recent Coldcard hack, a popular self-custody hardware wallet where users lost over $100 million worth of bitcoin (more than 1,500 BTC), cast doubt over what “Open Source” actually means. It revealed that perhaps most people, even many hardcore bitcoiners, are poorly educated on the Open Source software development philosophy and when it fails. The Principles and Terminology The language around Open Source can be complicated. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) refer to software that meets formal definitions of user freedom. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) defines free software through four essential freedoms: Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose. Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (access to the source code is a precondition for this). Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others. Freedom 3: The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (access to the source code is a precondition for this). The FSF emphasizes that “free” refers to liberty, not price, in a common quote heard from FOSS advocates: “‘free’ as in ‘free speech,’ not as in ‘free beer.’” The Open Source Initiative’s Open Source Definition adds ten practical criteria. These include free redistribution without royalties, availability of source code in the preferred form for modification, the right to create and distribute derived works, and no discrimination against persons, groups, or fields of endeavor — including commercial use. A license must meet all ten criteria to qualify as Open Source under the OSI standard. “Source available” or “source viewable” is different. Code may be publicly readable while the license restricts the right to sell it. Coldcard’s firmware, for example, is released under MIT terms plus the Commons Clause. The Clause specifically removes the right to “Sell” the software — defined as providing it to third parties for a fee or other consideration in a product or service whose value derives entirely or substantially from the software itself. In other words, Coldcard’s firmware could not be used commercially. The Commons Clause’s own FAQ states the difference explicitly: “Is this ‘Open Source’? No.” It notes that applying the clause means the software meets many elements of the Open Source Definition but not all of them, and therefore should not be called Open Source. These distinctions matter. Publishing source code creates the possibility of inspection. Granting the full set of rights defined by the Free Software Definition or the Open Source Definition is what makes software FOSS or FLOSS. But having the badge of approval, being able to wave a FOSS or FLOSS flag, is not the point. Commercial liberty in FOSS unlocks third-party incentives to test and review code that might otherwise not be there, critics argue. The four freedoms form the philosophical core of Open Source. In practice they rest on an economic assumption: that enough motivated people will actually examine the code. When that assumption fails, the system produces a classic tragedy of the commons, a situation where a shared resource is overused or neglected because individual users act in their own short-term self-interest rather than in the long-term interest of the group. Each person has an incentive to take more (or contribute less) than is sustainable, and the resource degrades as a result. This happens when there is misalignment between the short-term self-interest of the individual and the long-term interest of the group. Sometimes alignment exists; sometimes it does not. One Bitcoin developer put the problem bluntly: “Using mocks and stubs of Open Source code in tests is irresponsible and shortsighted. Open Source code is considered safe because anyone can verify it. If you aren’t willing to do the bare minimum of testing the features you actually depend on, then you are behaving like a leech.” As a result, Open Source does not create safety by itself. It creates the possibility of verification. Whether that verification occurs depends on incentives, skill, and attention. Historical FOSS is believed to harden over time as vulnerabilities are discovered, disclosed and patched, creating solid foundations others build on top of. The Linux kernel is a great example of such hardened FOSS; it powers the vast majority of the world’s servers, cloud infrastructure, Android devices, and embedded systems, making it one of the most widely deployed pieces of software in history. Open Source as Demonstrated by Bitcoin Core Bitcoin Core, the reference implementation of Bitcoin, is another prescient large-scale example of pure open-source functioning in the wild. The software, which runs behind most Bitcoin-related infrastructure, is released under the MIT license. Its development process is broadly public by design. Anyone can open a pull request. Code review is the primary filter and the recommended entry point for new contributors. Reviewers use a formal vocabulary—Concept ACK (acknowledgment and agreement with the goal), Approach ACK (agreement with the goal and method), ACK with a specific commit hash (tested and approved for merge), or NACK (disagreement, which should be accompanied by technical reasoning). Maintainers weigh consensus among contributors and the technical merits of a change before merging. Consensus-critical changes face a still higher bar and usually require a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal and extensive multi-year discussions on the bitcoin-dev mailing list and IRC. There is no privileged caste of “Bitcoin Core developers.” Trust is earned through demonstrated competence over time. Maintainers exist for practical reasons—auditing and merging code, managing releases, and basic moderation—but the work produced is pure open-source code that anyone can inspect, build, fork, or run. Developers who get code ‘commits’ merged into Bitcoin Core are broadly called Bitcoin Core Contributors. Calle, a long-time open-source Bitcoin developer, summarized the reality recently: “People who think that core is some sort of intransparent institution operating in the shadows are either too lazy or too dumb to go have a look for themselves. Literally everything they do is public, anyone can chime in, and the result of their work is pure Open Source code.” Funding for this work comes largely through nonprofit and grant structures such as Brink, OpenSats, Spiral, and others rather than a traditional company product roadmap. Technical discussion and debate take place publicly on the bitcoin-dev mailing list and in the #bitcoin-core-dev IRC channel on Libera Chat, where proposals are scrutinized before and during the pull-request process. GitHub issues and pull requests often carry comment histories stretching back a decade. The result is a development culture optimized for correctness and auditability rather than speed or commercial feature velocity. The Economics of Open Source Most users of open-source or source-available software never read the code themselves. They rely on the assumption that others are examining it. In the Coldcard case, a critical entropy flaw remained in publicly available firmware for roughly five years before it was exploited and thus discovered. The bug entered the codebase during a major 2021 rewrite that also removed remaining GPL-derived code from Trezor, the first hardware wallet and now the second largest in the self-custody industry. The library at the center of the entropy failure, which replaced trezor-crypto, is called libngu and had minimal external scrutiny, with only 7 stars and fewer than 20 forks in over 5 years of being used in production. Compare that to the 512 stars worn by the trezor-crypto library alongside 212 forks, or the 793 forks and 1.8k stars of the more modern trezor-firmware. Source availability alone did not produce the review that mattered, because other for-profit, well-funded companies were restricted from using it, or so critics would argue. The stakes are higher in Bitcoin than in most software domains. A critical flaw can be converted directly into liquid funds on the open market. While the first half of the Coldcard funds stolen are still held in a handful of addresses and the hacker may one day be caught, copycat hackers that followed were more careful, and some have stolen more bitcoin and laundered it successfully, per Galaxy Research. Bitcoin’s censorship resistance and immutable transactability create both a powerful incentive for attackers and a Darwinian filter; only projects that continuously attract competent review, and users and companies that take serious precautions, tend to survive long-term. Licensing choices shape those incentives according to FOSS advocates who criticized Coinkite’s licensing decisions for years. Pure open-source licenses maximize the pool of potential reviewers and forks. Restricted “source available” licenses can reduce commercial free-riding but also shrink the circle of people with both the legal right and the economic motive to invest deep attention. Alas, the burden of code review falls back on the company under a restrictive license, placing it in some sense closer to closed source than open. How AI Changes Open and Closed Source Development Artificial intelligence is now also altering the balance between FOSS and Closed source. After the Coldcard incident, a volunteer effort known as the Bitcoin Red Team—led by developers including Calle and Rob Hamilton of AnchorWatch, and supported by OpenSats—used frontier AI models to scan hundreds of open-source Bitcoin repositories. In one intensive period, the team filed thousands of findings, including dozens classified as critical or high severity, across hundreds of projects. Responsible disclosures were made to maintainers before broader publication. The exercise demonstrated that systematic AI-assisted review can surface issues at a scale and speed previously impractical for purely human teams. On this front, it is worth noting that the Red Team found Chinese open-weight models far more reliable than closed-source American models, which, even with cyber permissions and top-line access, refused to answer Red Team queries, a trend that the American developers lament. At the same time, the flood of AI-generated code has created a new denial-of-service pressure on FOSS maintainers. Reviewing AI output often takes longer than generating it. Some open-source projects outside Bitcoin have restricted issue trackers or imposed strict anti-AI contribution rules simply to stay functional. On the closed-source side, the traditional advantage of security through obscurity is eroding. Modern AI models can read, de-obfuscate, probe endpoints and reason about code at high speed. The practical difference between open and closed source is now mostly relegated to back-end code that never gets shared online. Closed-source code, as a result, stands only on the quality of professional audits, the speed of patch deployment, and the incentive structure that keeps competent people with access looking. Bitcoin and the broader crypto industry are applying unusual pressures to free and open-source software. The combination of real monetary value at risk, adversarial economics, and now AI-scale analysis is forcing the software models to evolve. Returning to analog pre-digital systems is hardly an option for infrastructure that holds up modern society. Only the most audited projects are likely to survive the pressures of AI-aided hackers and the weight of digital-first finance. This post Open Source vs. Source-Available: What the Coldcard Failure Teaches About Bitcoin Software Incentives first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine Iranian Hacking Crew Charged in Sprawling Theft Case — Including $6M Bitcoin Ransom Feds have hit 17 Iranians with criminal charges for allegedly conducting a years-long campaign of cyber attacks — including trying to extort HBO for $6 million in bitcoin. The U.S. Department of Justice said Tuesday that the 17 individuals were working with the Mabna Institute, which carried out hacking campaigns on ​behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other Iranian ​government and university clients. Hundreds of U.S. and ⁠international universities, dozens of companies, and at least five ​state and federal government agencies were targeted in the campaign. Part of the indictment mentioned Behzad Mesri, who was previously charged with hacking entertainment giant Home Box Office — HBO — and stealing proprietary data. The crime then saw Mesri try and extort approximately $6 million worth of Bitcoin. Prosecutors added that five other defendants — Saeid Houshyar, Manouchehr Hashemloo, Keyvan Fayaz, Saber Shahbazi Ballojeh, and Arman Kahzadian — were directly involved in the hack. The State Department’s Rewards for Justice program is now offering up to $10 million for information on the location of the defendants. “Today’s charges, which include eight additional defendants, reveal the broader network allegedly behind a sweeping, state-sponsored campaign to steal research and intellectual property from American universities, businesses, and government institutions,” U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald for the Southern District of New York said in a statement. Founded around 2013 by Gholamreza Rafatnejad and Ehsan Mohammadi, the Mabna Institute allegedly worked at the behest of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other Iranian clients. The stolen research didn’t just go to Tehran’s intelligence services. Prosecutors say it was resold through two websites, Megapaper.ir and Gigapaper.ir, the latter renting out hijacked professor logins so Iranian customers could walk straight into foreign university libraries. U.S. institutions had spent some $3.4 billion acquiring the material in the first place. Separate victims racked up more than $20 million cleaning up the breaches. This post Iranian Hacking Crew Charged in Sprawling Theft Case — Including $6M Bitcoin Ransom first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine Bitcoin ETFs Add Over $1B as Investor Sentiment Turns Bullish Bitcoin exchange-traded funds have taken in over $1 billion in fresh cash over the past three days, helping propel the leading cryptocurrency to nearly $73,000. Just on Wednesday, investors bought over $500 million worth of shares in the funds managed by BlackRock, Fidelity, and Grayscale, according to data from Farside Investors. Bitcoin’s price has surged this week, and on Thursday reached $72,659 before dropping slightly. It was recently priced at $72,606, a 10% 24-hour rise. Bitcoin is currently a little over 40% below its October record of $126,080. JUST IN: Bitcoin is now officially out of the "Fear" in the Fear & Greed Index pic.twitter.com/x3yWLQ8hpy — Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) August 20, 2026 President Trump on Wednesday held a meeting at the White House with crypto executives like Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, as well as regulators like Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Paul Atkins. At a press conference after, the president said that the Clarity Act was a “very, very powerful” piece of legislation and urged lawmakers to pass it. The crypto market structure bill was passed by the House of Representatives last year but has largely remained in deadlock this year. Some lawmakers were hoping for a vote in August but that will now go ahead in September. Crypto businesses have long called for clear rules in the industry; the Clarity Act aims to establish a framework for distinguishing between digital assets that are securities, commodities or payment stablecoins. The lion’s share of this week’s investment has been taken in by BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, which has received $588.5 million since Monday. Other funds, like Morgan Stanley’s Bitcoin Trust, also experienced significant trading action. The flurry of buying comes after investors last week cashed out over $385 million from the U.S. funds after tensions in the Middle East started to escalate again. The price then mostly remained flat, despite the ETF redemptions. Investors may be feeling bullish after the Treasury Department announcing on Wednesday that it would more than double the size of its government debt repurchases. Lower long-term yields reduces the opportunity cost of holding non-yielding assets like bitcoin and gold, and generally supports risk-on sentiment. Both soared as the dollar weakened following the announcement. This post Bitcoin ETFs Add Over $1B as Investor Sentiment Turns Bullish first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong Says Bitcoin Will Likely Hit $400,000 By 2030 Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has said that it’s “very likely” Bitcoin will hit between $300,000 to $400,000 by 2030. Speaking on Fox Business Thursday, the crypto entrepreneur also said that the U.S. was moving in the right direction with crypto legislation following a meeting at the White House. President Donald Trump on Wednesday hosted crypto executives and traditional finance bigwigs at the White House and urged for lawmakers to move forward with the Clarity Act. Bitcoin surged following the news and was recently up 10% over the past day after blowing past $72,000 per coin. JUST IN: Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong tells CNBC: "I think there's a good chance we're on the cusp of the next bull market" "Looking at this September 15 vote for the Clarity Act and then traditionally, following the Bitcoin halving cycles like October. November, December,… pic.twitter.com/WBMlAW9ERt — Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) August 20, 2026 “I think over the next couple of years — if I say 2030 — I think it’s very likely we’ll see $300,000 and $400,000 Bitcoin and we’ll see how it goes,” Armstrong said. He added: “Just yesterday, we had this meeting with the president and the top regulators at the SEC and CFTC and that was the big topic of conversation — there was a big sense of urgency from this administration: let’s get Clarity done, let’s get it over the line.” A number of lawmakers were hoping to vote on the Clarity Act in August but after a delay, a vote will now go ahead in September. The long-awaited bill will establish a framework for distinguishing between digital assets that are securities, commodities or payment stablecoins — legislation that the crypto industry has long called for. Trump on Wednesday called for lawmakers to get the bill over the line, calling it a “very, very powerful” piece of legislation. The Clarity Act has been in deadlock for much of 2026 as the banking lobby clashed with crypto executives over the topic of stablecoin yield. Some banks warned that they could lose their deposit base if crypto companies pay their clients too generous rewards on the stablecoins they hold. But Armstrong shrugged off concerns banks may have, and said that a number of banks had praised the legislation. “There’s actually a number of banks who’ve come out and endorsed the Clarity Act,” he said. “Most banks recognize that it gives them new powers that allow them to grow their business with this new technology, which is great. There’s still a few holdout banks, I would say, that are against it.” This post Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong Says Bitcoin Will Likely Hit $400,000 By 2030 first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine Bitcoin Rockets Past $72,000 After Trump Pushes For Clarity Act Bitcoin’s price surged further on Thursday, blowing past $72,000 the day after President Trump held a meeting with crypto executives and urged lawmakers to get the long-awaited Clarity Act over the line. The leading cryptocurrency was trading for $71,758 at 8am in New York, after jumping nearly 12% over a 24-hour period. It touched as high as $72,344 earlier in the day. Bitcoin was last trading this high at the beginning of June. The coin has spent most of July and August priced under $65,000. JUST IN: $72,066 Bitcoin! pic.twitter.com/g06u7ntlJR — Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) August 20, 2026 The surge comes after President Trump held a meeting at the White House with crypto bigwigs, including Kraken and Coinbase CEOs, where he said that getting the Clarity Act over the line would keep the U.S. ahead of China. “Now we need Congress to take the next step by passing the Clarity Act — a fair version of the Clarity Act — and this landmark structure legislation,” he said at a Wednesday press conference, and even hinted that the U.S. may be open to accumulating bitcoin. “It’s taken a lot of pressure off the dollar, it’s been very, very good for the dollar, and I think if [regulators] came in with recommendations, I would certainly listen,” Trump added when asked about adding to the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. A number of lawmakers were hoping to vote on the Clarity Act in August but after a delay, a vote will now go ahead in September. The bill will establish a framework for distinguishing between digital assets that are securities, commodities or payment stablecoins — legislation that the crypto industry has long called for. Bitcoin’s price has also benefited from the Treasury Department announcing on Wednesday that it would more than double the size of its government debt repurchases. Lower long-term yields reduces the opportunity cost of holding non-yielding assets like bitcoin and gold, and generally supports risk-on sentiment. Both soared as the dollar weakened following the announcement. Bitcoin’s price has suffered in 2026 despite notching a new all-time high of $126,080 in October. Geopolitical headwinds, including the U.S.-Iran war, rising oil prices and a Federal Reserve reluctant to lower interest rates have all weighed on the coin’s price. This post Bitcoin Rockets Past $72,000 After Trump Pushes For Clarity Act first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine Trump Urges Senate to Pass Crypto’s CLARITY Act, Teases More Bitcoin Buys U.S. President Donald Trump urged lawmakers to pass the Clarity Act on Wednesday — and also hinted that the government may accumulate more bitcoin. After gathering with crypto executives at the White House, President Trump said that getting the Clarity Act over the line would keep the U.S. ahead of China. Lawmakers were hoping to get a vote on the crypto market structure bill, or Clarity Act, in August. A vote will now go ahead in September. The bill will establish a framework for distinguishing between digital assets that are securities, commodities or payment stablecoins. BREAKING: President Trump when asked if the U.S. plans to accumulate sizable amounts of Bitcoin: "Certainly it's been talked about. It's take a lot of pressure off the dollar. It's been very, very good for the dollar. and I think if you came in with recommendations I would… pic.twitter.com/NnWFHi51nT — Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) August 19, 2026 “We’re ensuring that America remains the undisputed leader in not only Bitcoin and crypto, but also technologies like prediction markets, artificial intelligence and much more,” President Trump said. He added: “Now we need Congress to take the next step by passing the Clarity Act — a fair version of the Clarity Act — and this landmark structure legislation. It’s a very, very powerful structured legislation which will keep us ahead of China, and keep us ahead of everyone else.” When asked if the U.S. government would be accumulating bitcoin, President Trump said: “It’s been talked about — it’s taken a lot of pressure off the dollar, it’s been very, very good for the dollar, and I think if [regulators] came in with recommendations, I would certainly listen.” President Trump signed an executive order to establish a strategic bitcoin reserve last year. The order states that the U.S. cannot sell any of the bitcoin it has, most of which has been seized in law enforcement operations. But the EO does not commit to buying the asset. Nevertheless, the president has recently spoken highly of bitcoin: Just last week, Trump said in an interview with Punchbowl News that “you see people paying with bitcoin and they don’t even know about cash anymore.” Despite being passed by the House of Representatives last year, the Clarity Act has been in a deadlock for most of this year after the banking lobby clashed with lawmakers and crypto businesses over whether platforms like Coinbase should be able to pay customers yield. Some lawmakers have sought to change wording in the bill regarding ethics. A new bill started circulating in July, banning government officials from promoting and making money from crypto. Other lawmakers said it still fell short, and a number of pro-crypto Republicans accused Democrats of deliberately playing politics and delaying the bill. This post Trump Urges Senate to Pass Crypto’s CLARITY Act, Teases More Bitcoin Buys first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine Bitcoin Shortsellers Get Destroyed With $1.7B in Positions Liquidated Following BTC Price Jump Daily liquidations of Bitcoin positions surged on Wednesday after the price of the leading digital asset flirted with $70,000. Over $1.7 billion in positions held by traders shorting the biggest cryptocurrency have been closed in the past 24 hours, according to Coinglass data. And the vast majority — $1.5 billion — of those positions were liquidated in the past four hours. Bitcoin on Wednesday morning traded briefly as high as $69,000 before dipping again. It was recently priced at $68,253 after jumping more than 5% over a 24-hour period. The price surge comes after bitcoin had largely been flat over the past 30 days. Analysts have pointed out that the coin’s volatility has been at record lows. Bitcoin has benefited — along with other “risk-on” assets — from news that the U.S. Treasury planned to more than double the size of its government debt repurchases. The announcement from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was aimed at taming yields, which had surged to levels not seen in nearly 20 years. Lower long-term yields reduces the opportunity cost of holding non-yielding assets like bitcoin and gold, and generally supports risk-on sentiment. Bitcoin may have also benefited from investors expecting pro-crypto regulatory news: President Trump on Wednesday will hold a meeting with crypto and prediction market executives. Despite a vote on the long-awaited crypto Clarity Act getting delayed, regulators are keen to press forward with rules that the industry has long called for. On Tuesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced Tuesday a proposed framework for crypto asset offerings, pressing ahead despite the landmark legislation stalling. This post Bitcoin Shortsellers Get Destroyed With $1.7B in Positions Liquidated Following BTC Price Jump first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine President Trump To Host Crypto Execs at White House U.S. President Donald Trump is set to host crypto bigwigs at the White House Wednesday. The meeting — first reported last week by POLITICO — will see executives from the prediction market and digital asset space meet to discuss regulation. According to reports, some of the big names due to meet include executives from Coinbase, Kraken parent company Payward, and Blockchain.com. It hasn’t been reported which prediction markets executives will be at the meeting. Despite the long-awaited crypto market structure bill — the Clarity Act — being delayed, regulators are moving ahead with digital asset initiatives. The Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday proposed its own framework for crypto asset offerings, pressing ahead while the landmark legislation stalls. Pro-crypto lawmakers had hoped that the Clarity Act passed before Congress departed for August recess. A vote will now go ahead in September. Lawmakers started mulling over a new draft of the bill, which was passed by the House of Representatives last year, in July. The text tackled the issue of ethics, banning government officials from promoting or making money from crypto. Some Democrats have criticized the president for alleged conflicts of interest as the Trump family has made money from crypto ventures. President Trump and the White House have always denied any wrongdoing. President Trump campaigned on a ticket to help America become the crypto capital of the world, and received backing from major players in the space. Since taking office, the president has passed a number of pro-crypto pieces of legislation. High-profile lawsuits against crypto companies have also been scrapped, and the SEC has taken a more friendly approach to watchdogging the space. President Trump has reported over $1.4 billion in income from his family’s cryptocurrency ventures. This post President Trump To Host Crypto Execs at White House first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine Bitcoin Blasts Past $68,000 After US Treasury Doubles Debt Buybacks Bitcoin blew past $68,000 on Wednesday, jumping nearly 3% over a 24-hour period after news dropped that the U.S. Treasury planned to more than double the size of its government debt repurchases. The price of Bitcoin was recently at $68,473 at 10.30am in New York after briefly touching $68,982. The sharp jump came as yields dropped. Over the past week, the biggest and oldest cryptocurrency is up over 3%. Bitcoin had recently been flat over a 30-day period but is now also up by close to 3%. The Treasury Department said Wednesday that it will more than double the size of its government debt repurchases due to fixed income markets under pressure and yields surging to levels not seen in nearly 20 years. “This increase in buyback operation sizes reflects Treasury’s desire to provide greater liquidity support in longer-dated nominal sectors where there is consistent strong sponsorship from market participants, as evidenced by the significant volume of high-quality offers Treasury routinely receives in longer-dated buyback operations,” the department said in a statement. Lower long-term yields reduces the opportunity cost of holding non-yielding assets like bitcoin and gold, and generally supports risk-on sentiment. Bitcoin behaved like a “risk-on” asset on the news, surging with stocks on the news, as the U.S. dollar fell sharply. The leading cryptocurrency has been battered since notching a new all-time high of $126,080 in October but has still experienced the shallowest bear market — so far — in its history. The coin’s volatility also stands at record lows: 2025 was the least volatile year for the asset and asset manager Fidelity on Wednesday said that its volatility is now lower than 98.5% of all days in its 17-year history. This post Bitcoin Blasts Past $68,000 After US Treasury Doubles Debt Buybacks first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine Bitcoin’s Volatility May Be Down But Expect a ‘Meaningful Move’ Soon, Says Fidelity Bitcoin has been sitting still recently, and the coin’s volatility is now lower than 98.5% of all days in its 17-year history, according to asset manager Fidelity. Writing on X, the firm’s digital asset arm said that spot trading volume was also at its lowest level since 2019. Bitcoin’s price is virtually unmoved over a 30-day period, with some analysts saying the bottom is likely in. The coin was recently trading for $65,329, nearly 50% lower than the all-time high it notched in October 2025. Update: BTC volatility is now lower than ~98.5% of all days in its history. Meanwhile, spot trading volume has fallen to its lowest level since 2019. Think of it like a coiled spring: The longer volatility remains compressed, the greater the potential for a meaningful move… https://t.co/8ZXosxXFd5 — Fidelity Digital Assets (@DigitalAssets) August 19, 2026 “Think of it like a coiled spring: The longer volatility remains compressed, the greater the potential for a meaningful move once it breaks,” Fidelity Digital Assets wrote. The asset manager pointed to a post from earlier this month, where it noted that while volatility was down, such “periods of compression don’t tend to last forever.” Investment manager VanEck on Tuesday said that bitcoin’s thirty-day realized volatility had fallen to 27.2% annualized, down from 30.4% the prior month and less than half bitcoin’s long-run average of roughly 80%. It added that based on the length of prior cycles, the firm sees a bottom potentially forming anywhere between September and November of this year. Bitcoin’s wild price swings have dampened — and 2025 was the least volatile year for Bitcoin, according to a K33 Research report from December. The firm predicted that 2026 would see the biggest and oldest digital asset beat both gold and equities in terms of gains. Following the approval of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds in 2024, bitcoin has become available to a whole new class of investors. Now, more cautious retail investors — previously put off by cold storage — can buy the asset via brokerage accounts. Institutional investors like sovereign wealth funds and banks are also able to buy bitcoin exposure via the ETFs. As bitcoin’s market cap has grown, the asset’s volatility has come down significantly, and now experienced less wild price swings than in the past. So far, bitcoin’s bear market is the shallowest it’s had in its 16-year history. This post Bitcoin’s Volatility May Be Down But Expect a ‘Meaningful Move’ Soon, Says Fidelity first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine BitBox Warns Bitcoiners After Discovering ‘Severe’ Vulnerability In Firmware Bitcoin wallet manufacturer BitBox has told users it was able to fix “severe vulnerabilities” with its hardware wallet’s firmware, and reassured users that no funds were taken. Yet it still urged users to upgrade carefully. Writing in a blog post Tuesday, the Swiss company said that one of the vulnerabilities would have allowed an attacker to manipulate users into installing firmware that could lead a criminal to steal funds. Users should update firmware through the official BitBoxApp, ideally by clicking the in-app update prompt rather than searching for it, BitBox said. We just released the Dixence security update. During our internal audits, we were able to discover and fix multiple security issues in the BitBox firmware. We recommend our users to update their BitBoxApp and device firmware through the BitBoxApp settings.… — BitBox (@BitBoxSwiss) August 17, 2026 “There are no reports of stolen user funds and there is no reason for users to panic,” the company said. “We recommend all users to update their BitBox devices to the latest firmware version, which fixes all security issues described in this article.” It added that another “severe vulnerability” discovered was related to memory corruption. In its post, BitBox said the finding was related to the Multi edition of the BitBox, and could enable arbitrary code execution and the subsequent installation of malicious firmware and potential loss of funds. BitBox also mentioned that the Bitcoin-only edition of the BitBox was not affected, as its firmware does not contain the affected code. Bitcoiners are still reeling after users of the popular Coldcard product, designed by Canadian company Coinkite, had their funds drained due to a firmware bug in the devices that lead to a weak seed generation (RNG). Unlike the Coldcard hack, users or BitBox do not need to migrate funds, only update the firmware. Hackers have since stolen a confirmed $115 million in bitcoin, according to Galaxy Research’s latest figures — but the figure could be much higher. Canadian company Coinkite first warned users on July 31 that a firmware bug in Coldcard Mk3 devices — starting with version 4.0.1 in March 2021 — caused seed generation to fall back to a weak software Pseudorandom Number Generator instead of the hardware true random number generator, allowing hackers to essentially guess investor seedphrases. The number has slowly risen as the criminals have targeted more recent devices while Coinkite and other Bitcoiners have urged Coldcard users to immediately move their funds. This post BitBox Warns Bitcoiners After Discovering ‘Severe’ Vulnerability In Firmware first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine SEC Proposes Crypto Rulebook as Clarity Act Stalls The Securities and Exchange Commission has proposed its own framework for crypto asset offerings, pressing ahead while landmark legislation stalls. The regulator unveiled “Regulation Crypto Assets” on Tuesday, a tailored offering regime it says will let token issuers raise money in the U.S. without falling foul of securities laws. Tuesday’s proposal carves out two exemptions from registration under the Securities Act of 1933. The first is a one-time exemption allowing issuers to raise up to $5 million in crypto over four years. The second permits up to $75 million in any 12-month period, but comes with financial statements and ongoing reporting obligations. Both require issuers to make narrative disclosures — written explainers for investors outlying a business and its risks — available. The rules also dangle a conditional safe harbor. Once an issuer has completed — or permanently abandoned — the managerial work it promised, its token would no longer be deemed subject to an investment contract, and so would sit outside the definition of a “security.” JUST IN: SEC proposes new "Regulation Crypto Assets" rules to create a framework for investment contracts involving crypto assets pic.twitter.com/AoMGh4Sx0I — Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) August 18, 2026 SEC Chairman Paul Atkins said the proposal was another step to “onshore innovation in crypto asset markets,” and would give entrepreneurs clear pathways to raise capital “as Congress works to establish a lasting regulatory framework.” That framework is going nowhere fast. Pro-crypto lawmakers had hoped to pass the Clarity Act before Congress broke for August recess, but the vote slipped to September after Democrats balked at the latest draft. Some Republican senators — like Senator Cynthia Lummis — accused some of deliberately holding it back. Regulators aren’t waiting. CFTC Chairman Michael Selig has said he will proceed with rulemaking whether or not the Clarity Act is enacted, aiming to finalise rules before the administration’s term is out. The proposal builds on the SEC’s March interpretation of how securities laws apply to crypto. Comments are open for 60 days after publication in the Federal Register. This post SEC Proposes Crypto Rulebook as Clarity Act Stalls first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine Bitcoin’s Wild Swings Go Quiet, Even as the Bears Won’t Let Go Bitcoin is deep into its bear market, though it’s doing something it doesn’t typically do: sit still. That’s according to a new report by VanEck, which noted that thirty-day realized volatility has fallen to 27.2% annualized, down from 30.4% the prior month and less than half bitcoin’s long-run average of roughly 80%. For an asset known for double-digit daily swings, that’s an unusually still market. The calm comes as bitcoin claws back from a June low near $58,500, holding inside a tight $62,265-to-$66,509 band through most of July. Bitcoin capitulation check https://t.co/r7xrKXjiNR pic.twitter.com/nuSaTDQUTz — matthew sigel, recovering CFA (@matthew_sigel) August 18, 2026 Bitcoin remains about 9% below its 200-day moving average — a narrower gap than the 14% discount seen a month ago — and still sits roughly 49% below its all-time high. Trading activity tells a similar story of a market on pause. Spot volume over the trailing 30 days is down 27% from the prior month, landing in just the 10th percentile of its own history, VanEck noted. Analysts at investment firm note the summer slowdown is deeper than in either 2024 or 2025, pushing spot volumes down toward levels last seen in the 2023 bear market. At the same time, longtime holders have started letting go of coins, VanEck said. Bitcoin held for more than a year fell by about 356,000 BTC (-2.9%) over the month, pushing the long-term holder share of total supply below 60% for the first time in months. The selling was concentrated in coins held one to three years, while the oldest holders — those sitting on coins for more than a decade — barely moved, down just 0.1%. Coming into a period historically associated with bitcoin’s four-year boom-and-bust cycle, VanEck’s research points to 8 of 12 tracked capitulation signals currently flashing, consistent with the later stages of a drawdown. Based on the length of prior cycles, the firm sees a bottom potentially forming anywhere between September and November of this year — though it cautions that the historical record of returns following similar signal clusters is mixed, and only shows a clear edge over a full one-year horizon. For now, bitcoin’s story is less about direction and more about the unusual stillness of a market that, by its own history, rarely stays this quiet for long. This post Bitcoin’s Wild Swings Go Quiet, Even as the Bears Won’t Let Go first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine Bitcoin as Digital Real Estate: An Excerpt from Leon Wankum’s Digital Real Estate Bitcoin can be understood through an analogy with real estate.16 Michael Saylor, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), has compared investing in bitcoin to buying real estate in downtown Manhattan during the early stages of its development. As population, commerce, and cultural activity concentrated in the city, demand for limited land surged, dramatically increasing property values. Many of the world’s wealthiest families built their fortunes by owning scarce real estate. When something limited is in high demand, its value rises. As the saying commonly attributed to Mark Twain goes, “Buy land—they’re not making it anymore.” Scarcity plays a central role in determining value, which is why real estate in densely populated areas is more expensive than in sparsely populated ones. Real estate has utility value—it can be used for living or production—but its price is largely driven by the limited supply of land in prime locations. There are only so many properties that can be built in Manhattan, London, Shanghai, Mumbai, Paris, Beijing, Tokyo, or Venice. What ultimately makes these locations valuable is what occurs on top of them: the people, the capital, the creativity, the energy. As a city flourishes, whether through rising population, growing business activity, or cultural relevance, demand for that scarce land surges. The value of land does not rise in a vacuum; it rises because it captures an expanding layer of economic activity that cannot be easily replicated or relocated. This dynamic is further amplified by fiat monetary expansion, which channels ever more liquidity into real estate, raising nominal prices well above what utility and income-generating capacity alone would support. Market mechanisms such as speculation and the widespread expectation of rising prices reinforce this scarcity and deepen that perception. Bitcoin operates under a similar logic. Just like prime real estate, it gains value as more people, capital, economic activity, and trust accumulate around it. At the same time, the economic network built on top of it—financial infrastructure, global adoption, liquidity, and digital connectivity—can continue expanding globally through digital networks without corresponding expansion of the underlying monetary base. Adoption on the internet occurs globally and continuously—much faster than in the physical world, where economic expansion is constrained by geography. But there is a crucial difference. In real estate, prices are shaped by development potential, location-specific utility, and relative scarcity, which is frequently intensified by regulations and policy decisions. Government interventions such as tax incentives for investors, zoning laws, and restricted building permits can artificially limit supply, pushing prices higher. These dynamics are further amplified by speculative behavior and the widespread expectation of continued price increases, making scarcity appear more absolute than it is. Bitcoin’s scarcity, by contrast, is absolute: its supply is fixed at twenty-one million, beyond the reach of policy decisions or political interference. Real estate’s manufactured constraints highlight the importance of distinguishing between natural and engineered scarcity in asset evaluation. Owning bitcoin is comparable to owning a plot in a growing, borderless economy not tied to any government or geography. As more people and businesses adopt bitcoin, the value of that digital “plot” increases. The difference is mobility—this digital plot is not tied to any location and can be transferred globally within minutes. Unlike land, bitcoin enables the rapid, low-friction transfer of value anywhere in the world, subject only to network conditions and liquidity constraints. Holding bitcoin provides a new way to participate in the global economy. While bitcoin operates on a global network, its effects are local. By enabling individuals to hold and transfer value without centralized permission, it allows participation in economic systems that are less dependent on institutions able to impose restrictions, exclude participants, or change rules unilaterally. Bitcoin’s accounting model reinforces the real estate comparison. In a traditional bank account, value is recorded as a balance held by an institution. In Bitcoin, ownership is defined by direct control over individually defined units—unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs)—recorded on the network. You can think of each bitcoin as a square of land that remains under your control until it is spent. Once spent, that square disappears, and new squares are created for the recipient. Each UTXO can be independently transferred or combined in future transactions. The result is a continuously evolving map of property claims secured by cryptography rather than institutional authority. The analogy has limits. Bitcoin differs from real estate used to generate income. It generates no operating cash flow and is best understood as a scarce digital asset whose value lies in absolute scarcity and optionality rather than income. But like real estate, bitcoin functions as a long-term savings vehicle and increasingly as collateral, capable of supporting credit formation and broader economic activity while absorbing monetary demand. This makes real estate a useful framework for understanding bitcoin’s evolving role within capital markets and monetary systems. This post Bitcoin as Digital Real Estate: An Excerpt from Leon Wankum’s Digital Real Estate first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Leon Wankum. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine Bitcoin Is Down but Asset’s Role as Global Monetary Alternative Remains, Says Blackrock Bitcoin’s price is down nearly 50% since its October record. But investors shouldn’t worry, the world’s largest asset manager has said, and the cryptocurrency still plays a role as “a global monetary alternative.” In a report Monday, Robert Mitchnick, global head of digital assets at the firm, said that the ongoing rise in U.S. and global government debt and deficits hasn’t slowed. BlackRock has argued alongside other Bitcoin proponents that the oldest and biggest cryptocurrency can be a hedge against governments printing money. JUST IN: $15 trillion BlackRock reports they're still bullish on Bitcoin despite the -50% decline from its all time high "bitcoin’s core investment case as an important emerging global monetary alternative and unique portfolio diversifier remains unchanged." pic.twitter.com/lL2tWQ6iZr — Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) August 18, 2026 Noting that there was seemingly no way governments could not debase their currencies, the report added: “With no credible path for consolidation on the horizon, these fiscal dynamics reinforce the strategic case for assets with supply constraints beyond the discretion of central banks, governed by geology in the case of gold and mathematics and code in the case of bitcoin.” The Wall Street titan added that bitcoin’s price has consistently been volatile during its 17-year history, but investors shouldn’t be put off. “And while bitcoin remains inherently volatile, its volatility has trended lower over the past decade as market structure has matured, supported by the growth of derivatives markets and the expansion of and exchange-traded products,” the report noted. The report continued by saying that the asset still deserves a spot in investors’ portfolios for uncorrelated returns. Wall Street’s top regulator, the SEC, approved BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust in January 2024. Of all the Bitcoin ETFs, BlackRock’s product has been the most successful, attracting the most investment and trading volume. BlackRock has previously said that Bitcoin is in an asset class of its own, and that investors are buying it to hedge against any potential debt crises. Bitcoin’s price recently stood at $64,713, up by nearly 2% over the past day but flat over a 30-day period. Year-to-date, the asset is down 27% and has shed nearly half of its value since its all-time high last year of $126,080. This post Bitcoin Is Down but Asset’s Role as Global Monetary Alternative Remains, Says Blackrock first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine Hunting Down the Coldcard Hacker. Wave 1 Thief May Be Known to FBI Law enforcement may already know who emptied more than a thousand Bitcoin from Coldcard wallets in the first and largest wave of the July 2026 drains. Block’s investigation believes they traced the attacker’s on-chain sweeps to a paid account at a major blockchain data provider whose internal logs matched the theft pattern with “extraordinary specificity.” PSA: The attack is ongoing, targeting weak private keys generated on devices as old as the MK2 with firmware 4.0.1 onwards. If you may have one, double-check and move funds asap. See Coinkite advisory and status page. The coins from that wave—1,082.65 BTC—still sit untouched in the attacker’s address, leaving hope that a clawback may be possible to the victims and rightful owners of that first wave of stolen bitcoin. The question now is, who is the hacker and whether the same lead points to a sophisticated outsider, or whether the five-year-old entropy bug that made the theft possible was something closer to the insider “retirement attack” Coinkite itself once warned about. What We Know On July 30, 2026, an attacker began systematically draining Bitcoin from Coldcard hardware wallets that had generated seeds under vulnerable firmware, a bug that was undiscovered for years. The first and largest wave alone moved 1,082.65 BTC. Subsequent waves followed, with estimates over 2k BTC. Alex Thorn at Galaxy Research has tracked the activity through a combination of on-chain pattern analysis and voluntary victim reports. As of early August, confirmed and estimated losses across multiple waves exceeded 1,800 BTC from more than 5,000 addresses, though exact final totals continue to be refined as new reports arrive. In dollar terms, roughly $118 million has been confirmed stolen. Thorn has publicly discussed the possibility that law enforcement already holds a concrete lead on the operator behind the largest tranche. In a Bitcoin Policy Institute segment hosted on the Bitcoin Magazine YouTube channel, Thorn stated: “Wave one’s identity, attacker identity, may be known to law enforcement.” He added that Wave 1 remains the biggest single chunk identified so far, with the coins still sitting in the attacker’s address, and noted that Wave 2’s pattern looks similar enough that it could involve the same actor. Wave 2 adds another 76 or so bitcoin to the total. The primary source for the claim that the hacker’s identity might be known is Clay Garrett, engineering lead at Block working on Bitkey. On July 31, 2026, Garrett posted the findings from Block’s investigation: “During our investigation of the Coldcard drain yesterday, we identified an unusual pattern in the sweeps. That pattern led us to a hypothesis that has since been confirmed: the operator used a paid account at a well-known blockchain-services provider to query the source addresses and perform other related activity during the sweeps.” “We contacted the provider directly. Their internal logs matched the suspected workflow with extraordinary specificity, including the number, timing and sequence of requests. The provider was supplying its standard services in response to requests that did not reveal their broader purpose. We have seen no evidence that the provider knowingly participated in or facilitated the suspected theft.” Garrett said, and added that; “We are sharing the relevant information with the appropriate authorities. We will provide further updates when doing so will not interfere with the investigation.” Thorn and others have noted that later, smaller waves show different operational patterns—some rapid, opportunistic drains followed by quick laundering—suggesting additional actors may have reverse-engineered the same weak seed space after the initial public disclosure. Self-reported confirmed drains appear to have slowed sharply after August 6, though many potentially vulnerable seeds generated on the affected firmware between 2021 and the July 2026 patch remain at risk until users migrate. A Retirement Attack? The nature of the failure has led to conspiracy theories about insider attacks that Coinkite itself once discussed publicly. In October 2021, the official COLDCARD account defined a “retirement attack” as the scenario “when the project makers could have a ‘bug’ in the entropy generation for later retrieval.” The post is still available here. The 2026 vulnerability produced exactly that outcome: seeds generated with far less entropy than intended, leaving them searchable years later. Some in the Bitcoin space now believe that the hack may have been an inside job at Coinkite, though others disagree and the evidence in the public record remains too scarce to know anything definitive. Further evidence will likely not come out for years, until litigation exposes it. It’s when the project makers could have a “bug” in the entropy generation for later retrieval. — COLDCARD (@COLDCARDwallet) October 10, 2021 The critical change entered the codebase on March 1, 2021, in a commit titled “First pass w/ libNgU” (b18723dd). That commit replaced remaining Trezor-derived cryptography and BIP-39 code with a new library, libngu, and rewired seed generation. The intended result was that the call for randomness resolved to the STM32 hardware’s true random number generator. However, the bug redirected the call to MicroPython’s software Yasmarang PRNG instead, resulting in an effective entropy collapse to roughly 40 bits on older models and around 72 bits on newer ones. That meant the Bitocin private keys generated were effectively guessable by modern computing hardware. This swap of cryptographic libraries was pushed to the codebase by Doc-Hex, also known as Peter Gray, the Chief Technical Officer of Coinkite. The move was arguably driven by licensing pressure, according to Foundation Devices CEO and founder Zach Herbert, though Coinkite has denied this as a primary motivation for the code change, saying, “COLDCARD had to make this change to move to libsecp256k1; the license change is irrelevant to this. libsecp256k1 is the standard library used by Bitcoin Core.” Coldcard had been using Trezor-derived code under the GPLv3 open source license. After Foundation Devices forked related material, Coinkite sought to move remaining components to a more restrictive MIT + Commons Clause arrangement that limited commercial reuse. The rewrite was large and carried complex engineering goals; it was this integration that arguably left the silent failure in the entropy path. Skepticism about the migration away from the Trezor crypto library emerged as early as April 7, 2021, by a member of the Coinkite Telegram group, who wrote: “do we really want to replace the many-years-old TrezorCrypto code that has been heavily scrutinized by white hatters like Johoe and penetration tested by wallet.fail”, adding “switch may be a talented pseudonymous coder, but their commit history sucks.” The criticism, however, was insufficient and quickly waved away by NVK, who criticized the Trezor library as a “shitcoin shitshow.” Ironically, sharing that codebase with the broader crypto market, under an open license meant that Trezor’s crypto library had much deeper code review than Libngu would ever get, even years later. Switch and Peter Gray aka Doc-Hex The swap of cryptographic libraries that introduced the bug was pushed to the codebase by Doc-Hex, the Chief Technical Officer of Coinkite, also known as Peter D. Gray. He replaced the GPLv3 Trezor cryptography library with Libngu, a little-known codebase created by so-called “Switch”, a nym that, up until the creation of Libngu, had no obvious previous history. The Switch account appeared on X on August 3, 2019 with a mention of DEFCON, the international hacker’s conference, an event normally attended by cybersecurity engineers of all kinds. On October 16, 2020, Switch thanked Doc-Hex on X for merging his code; “Thanks for merge @DocHex … I’m making yet another bitcoin library. Could be useful on @COLDCARDwallet someday.” A few days later, Switch tweeted out a link to Libngu, proud to have built a “useful thing.” However, here is where it gets weird. According to research by Bitcoin core contributor James O’Beirne, Switch and Peter D. Gray have signed code commits with the same GPG keys. O’Beirne demonstrated through GPG commit signatures that dozens of commits authored as switck were signed with the personal key of Peter D. Gray, Coinkite co-founder and CTO, who also operates as DocHex. Zach Herbert also claimed that phone numbers ending in the same two digits were tied to both the DocHex and switck X accounts (post). Additional researchers pointed to matching DNS registration patterns. Neither Gray nor Coinkite has publicly addressed the GPG-signature findings as of this writing, and they did not respond when asked to comment on the topic. The Switch account is still active to this day, having merged code changes to Libngu as recently as August 17th, 2026. Many in the Bitcoin industry are taking this as some sort of tangential evidence of wrongdoing. Why go out of your way to create a nym just for a particular cryptography library? This has been taken as some kind of evidence of malintent; however, a deeper analysis begs to differ. Had Gray really intended to rug Coldcard users with this RNG bug, would he really have been signing commits with his personal GPG key? Could someone be so cunning that they would hide a bug for years, waiting for its adoption to spread; yet at the same time forget to create a dedicated GPG signature for the throwaway nym? I don’t think that tracks. It is more likely that this was a random identity created at DEFCON by Gray, probably in a random bout of paranoia. An identity which he continued to use for certain projects over the years. Pseudonymous identities are not unusual in Bitcoin developer circles after all. Satoshi himself remains the most famous example. And so on its own, this connection between Gray and Switch arguably does not amount to much in the hunt for the Coldcard hacker. MicroPython Contributors A handful of other open source developers have also been recently identified as having touched or influenced code that played a role in the Coldcard RNG bug. Data Analyst LaurentMT has examined the MicroPython side of the RNG path. MicroPython is a lean and open-source implementation of Python 3, designed to run on microcontrollers and resource-constrained computers. The Coldcard firmware ultimately called MicroPython’s Yasmarang pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) fallback as a result of the bug, leading to low-entropy generation. The code changes to the PRNG logic in MicroPython began on August 20, 2020, with issue (#6347) opened on GitHub by a user named ‘mirko’. He complained that his ESP32 hardware was always returning the same result when calling the ‘random.choice()’ function in the code in a certain way. Mirko expected random results instead. The GitHub issue logs a discussion over the following months about the proper way to handle the related logic and expected behavior, which Mirko revealed to have a counterintuitive design. Laurent points out that “robert-hh initialized a [Pull Request] implementing the PRNG seeding change” on August 22, 2020. Dpgeorge, a maintainer of MicroPython, later on October 29, 2020, merged a slightly modified version of that pull request to the master repository, implementing “the (UID+SysTick+RTC) to address some limitations in robert-hh’s solution.” The changes to this critical RNG-related code were thus on the master repository of MicroPython when Coldcard forked it to be used by Libngu, yet before MicroPython had made an official new version release of the library. Apparently, it is considered risky to build on top of the master version of a software repository, which is likely to be evolving with code changes, rather than build on top of an official, stable release version. The new release of MicroPython did not come until February 3, 2021, with version v1.14. To top it off, the RNG logic change was only briefly mentioned in the release announcement, saying “the urandom module will randomize its seed on import on stm32, esp8266, esp32 and rp2 ports.” In an interview with Bitcoin Magazine, Laurent concluded in no ambiguous terms that “without this modification the bug in Coldcard code would have been immediately detected.” Commenting on the series of events that led to the bug, he also said that “there are a lot of ‘coincidences’ in this timeline,” adding that “while they don’t prove anything, I don’t see how an official investigation may completely ignore them.” It is important to note that there is no evidence any of the developers mentioned above were intentionally trying to introduce the Coldcard RNG bug with these changes, and ultimately, it is Coinkite, the hardware wallet company, that is responsible for their implementation of the critical code. MicroPython is a large, widely used open-source project. Nevertheless, there are likely many lessons to be learned from what we might as well call — for the time being anyway — a tragic comedy of errors. Why an Inside Job Appears Unlikely Several factors cut against a deliberate, long-planned insider retirement attack. The ‘switck’ identity was poorly compartmentalized; the shared GPG key and other overlaps made attribution to Doc-Hex aka Peter Gray, relatively straightforward once researchers looked. The account had been largely abandoned for years. The MicroPython contributors operate in the open on a high-visibility project. Hodlonaut’s Citadel21 investigation and other technical reviews find no clear evidence that the entropy failure was intentional. Engineer Alekos Filini’s technical report on the bug explicitly tracks the technical facts, stating that “My goal is to purely present facts and NOT make any conclusions.” Wizardsardine detailed on their Technical autopsy multiple failed safeguards and describes the failure as sitting “across a submodule boundary, which is precisely where reviewers stop looking.” Steven Geller’s technical deep dive on the topic did not make any strong claims either way on the matter. DK27ss proof-of-concept reconstruction of the bug describes the issue as “a chain of four flaws, each harmless in appearance.” If the drains had been a classic insider retirement attack, or a long con as some might call it, the conversation today would be quite different. The last time we saw a major long con hack in the Bitcoin industry was probably QuadrigaCX, a centralized Canadian exchange whose founder, Gerald Cotten, was reported “dead in India” in 2018 amid mysterious circumstances, not long after the missing funds were discovered. The founders are accused by the Ontario Securities Commission of having misappropriated the exchange users’ deposits totaling almost 170 million CAD, over many years, before disappearing. Instead, Coinkite’s leadership remains publicly active, responding to the incident, shipping patched firmware, assisting user migrations, and engaging on the technical details. Coinkite’s founders and operators are fairly well known and are still operating the company as of the time of writing; they have not disappeared at the same time as the funds went missing. Meanwhile, the wave 1 funds, totaling over 1000 BTC, are still collected in three addresses, watched by hundreds of engineers and likely law enforcement such as the FBI. Were Coinkite trying to do a 5D chess-style retirement attack, they would have been far more careful in their theft of the coins. They would not have pooled them all to a handful of addresses that are easy to track, and its founders would probably be ‘mysteriously dead in India.’ While there are no conclusions and investigations will likely be ongoing for years, so far, evidence points to a cultural failure in the Bitcoin maximalist and self-custody community, a failure to broadly educate the users and influencers about good or bad etiquette in open-source culture, and frankly, arrogance on the part of Coinkite OG’s who, in hindsight, were overconfident about their own capabilities. This post Hunting Down the Coldcard Hacker. Wave 1 Thief May Be Known to FBI first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine DMND Integrates Mempool Accelerator With Miner Revenue Sharing Using StratumV2 Last week on August 14th DMND, the Stratum V2 mining pool, announced an integration with Mempool Accelerator to introduce new transaction acceleration functionality to Stratum V2 miners. This will put individual miners in control of transaction acceleration and prioritization. This is a fundamental shakeup to the legacy model of a transaction accelerator. These products have been historically offered by mining pools, rather than actual miners, and as such the pools have traditionally been the ones to both decide which transactions to prioritize in their templates and pocket the additional revenue for accelerating them. Now, individual miners at DMND can handle the prioritization selection using Stratum V2, and when a block template containing such accelerated transactions is mined, the individual miner who found that block collects additional revenue for the acceleration. “Our premise is simple: when miners build their own blocks through DMND’s Stratum V2 implementation, they unlock revenue streams that were never available to them before,” said Alejandro De La Torre, CEO of DMND. “Accelerated transactions are one of those streams. The pool used to prioritise them and the pool used to collect for them. On DMND the miner does both. It is a paradigm shift in how miners earn.” This is a first of its kind integration of a transaction accelerator system, and opens the door for new revenue streams for individual miners. Now that this type of direct revenue sharing with additional streams of income has been demonstrated, it begs the question of why are other mining pools that own or integrate with accelerator services not doing similar revenue sharing? This type of design and revenue sharing was made directly possible by Stratum V2. “Mempool Accelerator lets anyone get their stuck transaction confirmed by paying an out of band fee, which prioritizes their transaction with over 80% of the network hashrate. DMND’s integration is the first of its kind, Stratum V2 miners using Job Declaration can now earn their share of that revenue.” – Orange Surf, Head of Strategy & Research at mempool.space This post DMND Integrates Mempool Accelerator With Miner Revenue Sharing Using StratumV2 first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Shinobi. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine Citi to Debut Bitcoin Custody for Institutional Investors Citi will debut a bitcoin custody service later this year. The top bank said Tuesday that its Custody+ product will allow institutional investors to custody both traditional assets and bitcoin within one framework, rather than needing separate systems. The bank first announced plans to debut a digital asset custody service last year. It said at the time that it had been developing the service for several years. Citi is the latest American bank to move deeper into the digital asset space following friendlier legislation and pro-crypto approach from U.S. regulators. JUST IN: $2.8 trillion bank Citi announces they will go live with Bitcoin custody services later this year pic.twitter.com/hfIZIJIh7o — Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) August 18, 2026 “Custody+ is a clear example of this investment as we build infrastructure to eliminate latency and drag for institutional investor clients,” Head of Investor Services at Citi, Chris Cox, said in a statement. The service, according to Citi, will let clients process every asset servicing transaction through a “single seamless flow.” Clients will get continuous, near-instant visibility and execution across servicing, settlement, FX, cash, and data — plus the flexibility to plug in digital assets or build their own offerings on top of Citi’s rails — instead of being locked into a single standardized custody workflow. Citi’s new custody service runs parallel to its broader blockchain offerings, including Citi Token Services, which enables real-time cross-border payments using tokenized deposits. The firm since last year has also been working with other top banks — including Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America — to explore issuing a stablecoin product. Speaking about the long-awaited crypto Clarity Act last week, Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser said that the bank was a “leader in digital assets.” She added that while the legislation needed some improvements, the bank wanted a “good bill to go through.” The Clarity Act, which aims to define which tokens qualify as securities versus commodities, is the latest pro-crypto legislation. Lawmakers will vote on the bill in September. This post Citi to Debut Bitcoin Custody for Institutional Investors first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine The Pack Is the Painting: Evil Biscuit and the Schizocollage Movement Come to Hong Kong In 1956, at an exhibition hall in Tokyo, a Japanese artist named Saburō Murakami ran through a row of paper screens, leaving a torn, human-shaped hole in each one. The audience heard the rip in the moment but likely didn’t understand it. Murakami belonged to Gutai, the radical postwar avant-garde collective whose members painted with their feet and fought with mud, and his gesture made an argument the art world is still digesting, but ultimately the tearing and the wreckage after were the actual artwork. Seventy years later, the ripping hasn’t stopped. Trading card livestreams, Discord server groups, collector markets of all sorts, gambling/flipping, and nostalgia freebasing. Layered detritus. The artist named Evil Biscuit seems aware of this. If you haven’t heard of Evil Biscuit, you may not have been watching one of the strangest and most vital corners of internet art. Over the past few years, a scene of mostly pseudonymous artists, formed across crypto subcultures, Twitter timelines, and private group chats, has been quietly staging one of the more genuine artistic rebellions of the decade. Where the establishment crypto-art world courted galleries with polished generative work, these artists went the other direction. Images so dense with meme references, anime, veiled art history, and internet debris that critics had to invent new words for them. They called the style schizocollage or traitmaxxing, a practice of taking the trait system that generates ordinary avatar collections and pushing it past its breaking point, hundreds of layers deep, until the image verges on chaos. Critics started paying attention. In Spike Art Magazine, Dean Kissick placed the work in the lineage of deliberately “bad painting”, a tradition with serious credentials: Marcia Tucker staged ‘Bad’ Painting at the New Museum in 1978, arguing that wrongness, handled deliberately, is a form of freedom. Right Click Save filed dispatches from what it called the Avant NFT underground. And the movement’s participants, with characteristic self-mockery, settled on their own name for it: Avant/Gay. Near the center of the scene sits Biscuit. His Drifella collections are widely cited as its defining works, and artist Parker Ito, the post-internet veteran who crossed over into the movement, credits Drifella 2 with establishing the aesthetic the whole scene became known for, and went on to collaborate with Biscuit on last Halloween’s Heavy Liquid Graphic. The endorsement cuts both ways: the art world is starting to take this seriously, and the scene got there without asking anyone’s permission. Lately, Biscuit’s work has been escaping the screen, and the destruction has gotten literal. His current project, Card NFT 2, debuted with preliminary ‘Framed Cards’ through SOLOS Gallery at Felix Art Fair this February. And earlier this summer he made roughly eleven thousand cards, sold in packs, each digital card redeemable for a physical one if the collector is willing to burn the NFT to get it. For the rarest tier, as he told Peter Bauman at Le Random, he takes vintage holographic Pokémon cards, dissolves the ink off them with acetone until only the bare silver foil remains, then UV-prints entirely new artwork onto the wreckage. Saburō Murakami would understand. One theme runs through everything Biscuit makes: “destruction, death and rebirth.” Now Biscuit’s art is headed to Hong Kong. He is contributing to the Bitcoin Asia 2026 conference card pack produced by the artist Rax, where his cards will sit alongside work by Ariamis (formerly Terrorism) — his New Bad Image co-exhibitor, a younger artist pouring Renaissance devotional imagery into the card format, and several other key artists in this movement. The pack is something like a satellite of the show, sealed in foil. And it sits exactly on the fault line this scene has been working: the old hierarchy between artwork and collectible has collapsed, and the most interesting artists now make objects that are both at once. Internet art has always come from rooms the trad art world ignored: forums, blogs, group chats, and now crypto. BMAG has been working in one of those rooms for years: it’s the Bitcoin conference art gallery. When the painter Nardo showed at Bitcoin MENA in 2024, our conversation circled around memes as units of cultural transmission. A year later his Citadel, a seven-foot oil painting built from a 4chan meme, debuted at the Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas, a monument raised to an internet shitpost. Ahead of the BMAG Card Expo at Bitcoin Asia and the pack’s release, I sat down with Biscuit to talk about coming up in the internet’s wildest art scene, why the trading card keeps pulling digital artists toward cardboard, and what collectors keep getting wrong, and right, about both. BMAG: Your father runs a comic shop, and you’ve talked about digging through his boxes to find the source material. What is a core memory from your time in your dad’s comic shop? What did those boxes teach you about why people collect? EB: Yeah, some of the deep ties I have with trading cards come from my experience playing in Yugioh tournaments and collecting when I was a young kid at my father’s shop. I was quite a shy young kid so it was definitely an experience going to play for the first time with a nonsense 100+ card deck against older teenagers. I remember this one autistic kid used to sit outside on a pillar and he would meditate before his matches channeling anime characters and talking to himself. Pokémon was around ever since I was born so playing my older brother’s games and going to church where they would trade cards and show off their binders were core memories before I was even 6 years old. The shop closed down when I was really young and before I became serious about making art some years ago my dad and I opened it back up selling comics, vintage video games and trading cards. card nft – 2024 BMAG: Jefferson Burdick, the father of American card collecting, spent his final years putting thousands of cards into albums at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Art Spiegelman was at Topps inventing series like Garbage Pail Kids before mainstream success. Brian Droitcour recently made the observation about the trading card medium: a Magic card is an image that does something, rarity and function entwined, while NFTs inherited that logic and captured only the rarity. What can cards do that a painting can’t? EB: A lot of my work I see as paintings. Trading cards became the substrate and source material that I drew from with card nft 1 & 2. The sheer scale that you can work with creating paintings/trading cards/NFTs and proliferating them throughout collectors is something that you just can’t compete with on any level. To me, being a serious young artist means being curious enough to experiment with the tools and formats shaping our generation—whether that’s AI, NFTs, or trading cards. Putting these all in the same context as painting is really interesting to me. card nft – 2024 BMAG: Photography has a beautiful old term, the latent image: the picture that already exists on exposed film but stays invisible until developed. A sealed pack is a stack of latent images, and opening it is the development, the moment the possible becomes the particular. You’ve said a third of your redemption collectors never open the pack at all. They’ve chosen to keep the artwork latent forever. When you’re generating a collection, do you think of yourself as making eleven thousand images, or eleven thousand moments of development? EB: When I first started wrapping my mind around the idea of NFTs, I always imagined the minting experience like a pack opening. The earliest projects and NFTs that got me into collecting were PFPs with rarity systems and similar to the chance of hitting a big holo there were rare traits that could instantly make your mint be worth 10x what you minted it for. A regular mint from the 2021 era or even from our scene is a prepared image that is randomized to you. A layer we’ve added on mons dot shop with these packs is that the mints are wrapped in a sealed package that can be kept unopened forever. I can’t put my finger on why this is but in collecting there always seems to be these systems and hierarchies that form with keeping collectibles in pristine condition and even making sure the objects inside never see the light of day again. I remember one time getting a pack of Yugioh cards when I was younger at a Wal-Mart and imagining the cards randomizing and shuffling like a slot machine inside the pack. I knew I would open it but I just was daydreaming on whether the one pack I picked would have something good in it. I ended up pulling an Ultimate Rare Blackwing Vayu. I had a Blackwing deck so it was a sick addition to my collection. My dad then helped me sell it on eBay for $80. I wish I didn’t sell it, lol. BMAG: For Card NFT 2, you strip the ink off real vintage holographic Pokémon cards, objects whose whole market value rests on condition, and print new art on the bare foil. You’ve even mentioned a desire to print recreations of ultra-expensive Gold Star cards convincing enough to fool people at card conventions. In the Philip K. Dick book The Man in the High Castle, a manufacturer of fakes holds up two identical Zippo lighters, except one was in Franklin Roosevelt’s pocket when he was assassinated (in Dick’s alternate history). One has what he calls ‘historicity’ or aura. The entire collecting world, graders, slabs, provenance, is an industry built to solve that problem. Convincing fakes prove the eye can be fooled. So what does destroying a potentially valuable card create? And what is a forgery in the hands of an artist? EB: In Hunter x Hunter there is a scene before they are going to the auction in Yorknew City where they are at a flea market of sorts looking at vases and antiques. They discover that objects have an energy aura that can be seen around them. This signifies to them that something has lived some history and possibly has value for them to buy it at a low price and resell it. I think it’s true that objects have this energy and aura to them. And even in art pieces/paintings the artist is focusing their attention directly on a single point so an item can become powerful in that way. I think it’s interesting to break these false barriers of intellectual property and almost sort of organically represent or recreate an object as powerful as a Gold Star Charizard. You could even relate it to apprentices making master copies of their favorite artist’s work. These aren’t solely done with skill. It has a lot to do with your love of the artist and your intention to make yours just as beautiful as the original. To me certain cards I own are sacred because of the memories made with them or the meaning they have to me. It’s like with an NFT I would never burn one just to destroy it. Lately I’ve been buying a lot of damaged mid-era and WOTC cards and printing collage over to breathe new life back into them. I collect old paper to print and draw on in the same way and I appreciate that they have lived a life longer than my own without being marked or drawn on at all. I was born in 1996 the same year as Pokémon and I’ve been enamored by the artwork, games and cards my whole life. It’s not a coincidence that it’s inspired my whole career and identities in multiple ways. A very well coordinated psychic operation has taken hold of my generation’s minds! Lol card nft 2 – 2026 BMAG: Hito Steyerl defended the poor image, the compressed copy that circulates everywhere, detached from its origin. Trading cards run the inversion. Thousands of images circulate, only one gets attention, and the bulk commons exist mostly to manufacture the aura around the single chase card. You’ve said you always try to break rarity standards. Why does it matter to you that the cheap card can be the best one? EB: It really is just about making the best images. While I can agree with you on modern stuff being generally filler and uninteresting, going through mid-era or vintage bulk is very enjoyable to me. There are tons of unique artworks and cards that hit just as hard to me or even better than modern chase cards. I would say most of the collectors in the Solana & adjacent scene agree with the sentiment that rarity doesn’t matter to them. These Dratinis from Team Rocket Returns are two of my favorite cards even non holo. BMAG: The philosopher Jean Baudrillard never saw a card show, but he described one perfectly. In a mature enough market, he argued, the sign detaches from the thing. The chase card isn’t valuable because of its imagery, it’s valuable because of the system that produces its value, and the market ends up referring only to itself. Grade, price, then maybe the picture. Can the artwork still pull the eye back through all of that? EB: Card 2 really put this to the test with multiple layers of rarity and subversion. There are 7,000 unique 1/1s printed on original cards, almost 4,000 ones that are printed with holographic texture, and a rare subset of 111 cards that are just pixelated mosaic blocks of color and these became sought after. There are also these gold gradient cards that I am printing front and back on metal. All of this and at the same time collectors really want Dratini/Drifella-themed cards, specifically the honor thy father CruciDrifella statue is one that a lot of people are/were looking for. I even included some precious cards that I hand painted and added embellishments onto with a trait called ‘altered’. I feel like a lot of my collections work on this level where people gravitate towards certain imagery and genuinely just buy what they love without fussing over rarity ranks or condition of cards. In fact for myself the more damaged a card the cooler it ends up looking when printed on. BMAG: The crucifixion sits at the center of your work: CruciDrifella, the death and resurrection cycles, imagery you’ve said you genuinely wrestle with. And the vessel you put it in is somewhat of a gambling object: packs, pulls, odds, speculation. The Bible has an opinion about mixing money with the sacred, and it resulted in a table-flipping meme. Do you feel that tension when you make these? Or is the pack where salvation and luck have always been confused for each other? EB: I’m not really interested in debating the sins of modern society. This is some of the culture I grew up with and the ideas I want to play with at the moment. It’s funny because Pokémon themselves have this history of being demonized by Christians in the 90s for summoning monsters and having ritualistic occult battles. I usually follow my intuition and subconscious interests when creating and it’s generally not something I think about while I work. It comes from a deep interest in theology and these symbols and archetypes are important to humanity and I don’t make light of them, but I am really not a dogmatic person. I am interested in play, working with new technology and conducting these elements together while making good images and stories. I think it’s fun and real to have anime characters interact with serious subject matter and it’s cool for me to reproduce these Naruto or Pokémon trading cards that I enjoyed collecting when I was younger linking them with disparate assets like a Francis Bacon character or even blending & morphing them into my world with Drifellas. It’s similar to how the internet is thrown at us and how my mind and interests have intersected/mutated as I grew up looking at different art with new perspectives. Right now reflecting on my work has been interesting and knowing that with all of these new tools you can generate an absurd amount of artwork to derive meaning from and peer into. I am looking at things as they come to me and asking myself why am I compelled to make certain images and if it’s genuinely important to me. It leads me to contradictions like why I am drawn to adapt this imagery & tell this story of a demon dragon character. What does it speak of Dratini & the serpent in the Garden of Eden and how it ties to certain Gnostic Christian ideas? Drifella is this beast who’s been bastardized, bred and trapped in the lower dimensions as a jester entity but he is still an innocent teenager attempting to invert what he was turned into, transforming himself into an emissary of light and dark for Jesus. I don’t identify with any particular religious tradition but I revere Christ and consider his teachings the highest standard for humanity — a lot of which is needed now; rejecting materialism, teaching self love and knowledge, and being a light shining in darkness. I look forward to exploring these ideas in the future as I make more art. Evil Biscuit’s cards appear in PoorTraits: serfs_up, the first official Bitcoin Conference card pack, in an edition of 5,000. Every pack contains one holo chase card, with 100 free GA passes and a Whale Pass hidden across the run. Packs are available for purchase online, or in-person in Hong Kong. The BMAG Card Expo runs August 27 and 28 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre as part of Bitcoin Asia 2026: 40+ trading card vendor marketplace, live Pokémon TCG tournament presented by Moonroad HK with HK$19,000 prize pool, graded artist cards on view, auctions, and main stage panels with collecting luminaries David Chau and AJ Scaramucci. Use code MEGAGA for a discount on Bitcoin Asia tickets. Follow Evil Biscuit on X/Twitter here. This post The Pack Is the Painting: Evil Biscuit and the Schizocollage Movement Come to Hong Kong first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Dennis Koch. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine Losses Top $115M In Coldcard Bitcoin Hack: Galaxy Research New data from Galaxy Research shows that $115 million in bitcoin has been lost in the Coldcard theft. Writing on X Sunday, Galaxy Research said that it had spoken with over 200 victims to support them and gather intelligence on the attackers. The figures are based on the price of bitcoin at the time of the attack. Coldcard losses have exceeded $115M (based on the price when coins were stolen) Galaxy Research has spoken with 200+ victims to support them and gather intelligence on the attackers This thread contains additional charts and info pic.twitter.com/H2K141mugF — Galaxy Research (@glxyresearch) August 16, 2026 Hackers started taking bitcoin stored using Coinkite’s popular Coldcard hardware wallet on July 31. Canadian company Coinkite said that a firmware bug in Coldcard Mk3 devices — starting with version 4.0.1 in March 2021 — caused seed generation to fall back to a weak software Pseudorandom Number Generator instead of the hardware true random number generator, allowing hackers to essentially guess investor seedphrases. The number has slowly risen as the criminals have targeted more recent devices while Coinkite and other Bitcoiners have urged Coldcard users to immediately move their funds. Galaxy Research last week said that it estimates at least 15 separate attackers were exploiting the bug independently. Previous research from Galaxy found that the typical stolen coin had sat untouched for 3.5 years, and a striking 88% of pilfered funds were at least a year old. The firm is still confirming how much is stolen, and has said that total losses could exceed $130 million. Since the attack, cautious investors have been moving their coins to other storage solutions — including exchanges. Coinkite said in a statement this week that the bug in its software “silently went unnoticed” and “its potential impact grew with every release” of its products. Days after the first hack, the company urged investors to update their software or move their funds off the popular hardware wallet. This post Losses Top $115M In Coldcard Bitcoin Hack: Galaxy Research first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine Jane Street Reveals Nearly $1B Bitcoin Position Quantitative trading firm and liquidity provider Jane Street has a nearly $1 billion bitcoin position — or 15,394 BTC at today’s prices. But the position is not held in the form of digital coins: According to a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Wall Street giant holds $990 million in Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, spread across major ETFs like BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, Fidelity’s Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund, and Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust. The lion’s share of the firm’s holdings are in BlackRock’s fund, with $828 million solely invested in the fund, according to the filing. JUST IN: Wall Street giant Jane Street dropped a bombshell SEC filing: They disclosed owning over $990 million in Bitcoin ETFs pic.twitter.com/CFEMd8MlRg — Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) August 17, 2026 BlackRock’s fund is the biggest and most popular of the spot Bitcoin ETFs, which were approved and started trading at the beginning of 2024. The fund has received more cash than any other crypto ETF and currently has $47.3 billion in assets under management. Major firms have been able to buy exposure to the asset via shares of the regulated vehicles that trade on stock exchanges. Pension funds and U.S. states have all bought exposure to Bitcoin via the ETFs, along with more traditional investments like tech stocks and other U.S. equities. Jane Street on Monday posted its first losing month in about a decade, revealing roughly $15 billion in July losses. The loss was driven mainly by its stake in AI-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness, which stumbled badly amid AI bet losses and margin calls, and by bad bets in Asian equity markets. Despite the loss, Jane Street has made over $40 billion in net trading revenue year-to-date, according to Bloomberg. That’s already more than all of 2025, when it set a Wall Street record with $39.6 billion, beating Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan. Wall Street titans Edelman Financial and Tudor Investment Corporation last week also revealed significant Bitcoin positions, along with Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth funds. This post Jane Street Reveals Nearly $1B Bitcoin Position first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine Investors Cash Out Fast of Bitcoin ETFs but Price Remains Stable American investors have reversed course, cashing out of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds after a hot run at the beginning of August. Data from Farside Investors shows that investors pulled over $385 million from the U.S. funds last week. The week before, the funds had received fresh cash every day, bringing in more than $865 million in investment — their biggest inflows since April. The turn in sentiment comes as the price of the biggest cryptocurrency remains flat: Bitcoin was recently trading for $64,066, unmoved over the past week and last 30 days. Investors initially seemed unfazed by the huge Coldcard hack on July 31, when cybercriminals stole over $115 in Bitcoin after discovering a vulnerability in the popular product’s software. Bitcoin investors also shrugged off a delay in a vote on the long-awaited crypto Clarity Act, continuing to buy into the funds despite negative regulatory news. But things last week changed, with investors pulling cash out of the major investment vehicles as tensions in the Middle East started to escalate again. BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust and Fidelity’s Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund experienced the biggest outflows last week, while Morgan Stanley’s fund, which debuted in April, received net inflows. Current macroeconomic headwinds, such as the U.S. war with Iran and rising oil prices, could see inflation go up again. The price of Bitcoin has typically done well on news that inflation is cooling because investors expect interest rates to come down. Bitcoin — along with stocks — has experienced price bumps when President Trump has hinted that a deal with Iran was imminent, but the current war appears to have no end in sight. While the price of Bitcoin has been relatively stable — it hasn’t budged over the past month — a July report from NYDIG said that the asset’s year-to-date performance makes it the worst-performing asset, losing out against U.S. treasuries, silver, and currencies like the Swiss Franc. It added that if Bitcoin’s price action were to match other drawdowns — like the bear market of 2022 — a “potential cycle low near $38k-$39k” was possible. This post Investors Cash Out Fast of Bitcoin ETFs but Price Remains Stable first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo. Переглянути повний текст