Bitcoin

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

Bitcoin Magazine US Treasury Asks For Public Input on Landmark Genius Act Crypto Legislation The U.S. Department of the Treasury is moving fast with crypto regulation, with the government body asking for public comment on the landmark GENIUS Act. In a Monday announcement, the Treasury said that it was welcoming input from stakeholders on a proposed rule that would provide clarity to industry regarding who needs a license to issue a stablecoin. President Donald Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law in 2025. The legislation allows banks and other entities to issue stablecoins if they back the tokens with assets like U.S. Treasuries and provide monthly disclosures of their reserves. While the law was passed by Congress last year, U.S. regulations typically require agencies to draft and finalize more specific implementing rules — with a period for public comment — before those rules take legal effect. The overall effective date of the GENIUS Act is expected to be January 18, 2027, with stricter offer and sale prohibition of stablecoins prohibited from July 18, 2028. JUST IN: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the "Treasury is moving quickly to implement" the GENIUS Act "Beginning on January 18, 2027, the expected effective date of the GENIUS Act," pic.twitter.com/VCxbnwNM5G — Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) August 17, 2026 “President Trump and Congress delivered the GENIUS Act, establishing a landmark framework and clear rules of the road for payment stablecoins, and Treasury is moving quickly to implement that framework,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement. “Treasury welcomes input from stakeholders as we work to provide the regulatory certainty businesses need to innovate and grow in America, cement the role of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and keep America the crypto capital of the world,” he added. The statement added that from January 2027, a person generally may not “issue a payment stablecoin in the United States” unless the person has obtained an appropriate federal or state license. Questions for stakeholders in consultation include whether key terms are defined clearly enough, when exactly a stablecoin should be considered “issued,” and what due diligence obligations digital asset service providers should have when relying on a foreign issuer’s compliance representations. The consultation comes as the U.S. races to craft laws to regulate the crypto industry. Lawmakers were this month aiming to get a vote on the crypto market structure bill, the Clarity Act, but it was delayed until September. Bessent this year urged lawmakers to get the Clarity Act over the line. President Trump said this month passing legislation like the Clarity Act is necessary for the U.S. to take the lead over China. He also claimed that more people were using Bitcoin to make payments. This post US Treasury Asks For Public Input on Landmark Genius Act Crypto Legislation first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine Strategy Goes Another Week Without Buying — Or Selling — Bitcoin, Builds Up Cash Reserve Bitcoin treasury Strategy has gone another week without buying the leading cryptocurrency — but didn’t sell any this time. The Nasdaq-listed company said Monday in a regulatory filing that it had upped its cash buffer by selling 3,458,866 shares of MSTR common stock to generate $333.7 million. Strategy added $150M to its USD Reserve and repurchased $132M of $STRC, extending USD Duration to 2.8 yrs (+41 days) and tightening STRC BTC Credit to 114 bps (-4 bps). As of 8/16/26: ₿840,447 BTC Reserve; $4.8B USD Reserve. $MSTR https://t.co/kNWPowilmT — Michael Saylor (@saylor) August 17, 2026 Strategy used $52.4 million to pay dividends on its STRC preferred stock, then spent $132.2 million to buy the stock back. It also added $149.1 million to its dollar reserve. Strategy — formerly MicroStrategy — has recently pivoted to common stock sales to build up its cash reserves, rather than buying Bitcoin. It has halted its Bitcoin sales and even sold a chunk of its holdings over the past two months after aggressively buying in 2025. Strategy stock (Nasdaq: MSTR) has taken a hit in 2026, dropping over 60% year-to-date. At a little over $95 a pop, it is currently trading nearly 80% below its 2024 record. The company started buying Bitcoin in 2020 as a way to protect shareholder returns. It has since become the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, with 840,447 coins worth $53.4 billion, acquired at an average price of $63,357, according to its website. Despite focusing on its cash buffer, Strategy has reassured investors that its long-term posture toward Bitcoin is still the same. CEO Phong Le said earlier this month that he isn’t worried about the current bear market, and that the company plans to remain a long-term buyer of Bitcoin despite its recent sales. “We’re the J.P. Morgan of the crypto economy, so whether we sell 1,000 Bitcoin out of 840,000 to me is irrelevant to the conversation,” Le said. Strategy’s approach has spawned a wave of copycat companies that have since adopted similar crypto-treasury strategies of their own. This post Strategy Goes Another Week Without Buying — Or Selling — Bitcoin, Builds Up Cash Reserve first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine Edelman Financial, Tudor Investment Reveal Significant Bitcoin Holdings Edelman Financial Engines has disclosed a $34 million position in spot Bitcoin ETFs — a stake that now exceeds some of the firm’s other holdings in major tech companies. While the position is still tiny in the investment advisor’s portfolio, it is still larger than its $25 million position in Amazon. The position — held in BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust and Grayscale’s flagship product — tracks closely with the public views of its founder, Ric Edelman. JUST IN: $326 billion Edleman Financial discloses owning $34 million in Bitcoin ETFs pic.twitter.com/oXpYCafz69 — Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) August 14, 2026 Edelman has been advocating for Bitcoin ETFs since 2019, years before the SEC approved spot products in January 2024. He also founded the Digital Assets Council of Financial Professionals, an organization built to educate financial advisors on crypto and blockchain technology. And Edelman Financial isn’t the only one: In a filing submitted this afternoon, Tudor Investment Corporation, the firm run by legendary macro trader Paul Tudor Jones, reported owning 688,529 shares of IBIT as of June 30, valued at $22.9 million. JUST IN: Billionaire Paul Tudor Jones' $106 billion Investment Corporation reports owning $22.9 million of BlackRock's spot Bitcoin ETF pic.twitter.com/mrgPf2H53s — Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) August 14, 2026 That’s up from the 579,083 shares Tudor reported the previous quarter. It’s worth remembering that few investors have built a career reading inflation cycles and their historical patterns as successfully as Jones, making the size of the add notable in its own right. This post Edelman Financial, Tudor Investment Reveal Significant Bitcoin Holdings first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine Abu Dhabi Sovereign Wealth Funds Keep Big Bitcoin Positions Bitcoin is the most important asset in two of Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth funds, according to regulatory filings. Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment Company disclosed Friday that it held a $490 million stake in BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust — the second-largest single holding across its entire 13F portfolio. And a Thursday filing from the Abu Dhabi Investment Council, another state-run fund, revealed a $273.6 million position in the popular Bitcoin exchange-traded fund. The stake is the biggest position in its portfolio. JUST IN: UAE sovereign wealth funds Mubadala and Abu Dhabi Investment Council report owning a combined $763.7 million of BlackRocks Bitcoin ETF pic.twitter.com/OOnptHhlTA — Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) August 14, 2026 Both wealth funds’ position in Bitcoin is unchanged since last quarter. Earlier this year, blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence attributed approximately 6,782 Bitcoins — worth roughly $453.6 million at the time of its analysis — to wallets connected to Bitcoin mining activity linked to the UAE’s Royal Group. The findings highlight a distinction between how the UAE has built its bitcoin position compared with other governments known to hold large amounts of the asset. Countries such as the United States hold substantial Bitcoin reserves that largely originated from law enforcement seizures. The UAE’s holdings, by contrast, stem primarily from domestic mining activity rather than confiscated assets. Since the SEC approved a slew of Bitcoin funds in January 2024, major firms have been able to buy exposure to the asset via shares of the regulated vehicles that trade on stock exchanges. BlackRock’s IBIT is the most successful crypto ETF: The fund has received more cash than any other crypto ETF and currently has $47.3 billion in assets under management. 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. This post Abu Dhabi Sovereign Wealth Funds Keep Big Bitcoin Positions first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine Bitcoiners Warned After French Tax Authority Confirms Data Breach Affecting Hundreds of Thousands Bitcoiners have been warned after France’s tax administration confirmed that hackers breached its information system, exposing sensitive financial and personal data belonging to hundreds of thousands of taxpayers and businesses. Writing on X on Friday, Bitcoin developer Jameson Lopp said the leak was “more bad news for Bitcoiners living in the leading country for wrench attacks.” Lopp has created a tracker counting wrench attacks — when physical violence is used to steal crypto — across the world. A large amount happens in France, where data has been leaked before. More bad news for Bitcoiners living in the leading country for wrench attacks. The French tax authority has been hacked and 678K records leaked. 26,805 people with income over 100K€ 386 people with income over 1M€ 8 people with income over 10M€https://t.co/KlT0XqPLFR — Jameson Lopp (@lopp) August 14, 2026 The news comes one day after hardware wallet manufacturer Trezor announced a data breach exposing customer data. Cybersecurity researchers at FrenchBreaches, who reviewed samples of the leaked data, reported that the affected records break down to roughly 392,867 individuals and 285,570 businesses. Among the individuals, an estimated 26,805 have a reported annual taxable income of €100,000 or more, 386 exceed €1 million, and eight exceed €10 million. The hacker is said to be offering the full dataset for sale for several thousand euros. The breach first surfaced publicly on August 12, when a hacker using the alias “ZeroBytes” posted on a cybercrime forum claiming to have infiltrated internal DGFiP servers and obtained VPN credentials that unlocked an internal lookup tool covering millions of taxpayers. According to the hacker’s own account, the extraction was interrupted before it could be completed, leaving what they described as only a partial dataset of 678,438 records. The exposed sample reportedly includes highly sensitive information: full legal names, dates and places of birth, home and mailing addresses, marital status, number of dependents, internal tax identification numbers, reference taxable income, individual withholding tax rates, phone numbers, email addresses, and records of past correspondence with tax officials. Security analysts warn that this combination of identity, contact and financial data could fuel highly convincing phishing campaigns impersonating tax authorities, as well as identity theft and fraud schemes tailored to victims’ income levels or family circumstances. 2025 was the worst on record for wrench attacks (crypto targeted kidnappings), with around 55 reported globally last year, according to TRM Labs. Lopp’s tool counted over 70 throughout last year. And this year is already looking bad, according to the tracker: 54 attacks have been documented so far. Wrench attacks made headlines last year when crooks kidnapped David Balland, co-founder of crypto hardware wallet brand Ledger, and his wife in France. Criminals held the pair for around 24 hours before they were rescued by the French authorities. This post Bitcoiners Warned After French Tax Authority Confirms Data Breach Affecting Hundreds of Thousands first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine Citi CEO Wants ‘Good’ Crypto Clarity Act To Get Passed Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser has said that while some improvements need to be made to the crypto Clarity Act, the bank wants a “good bill to go through.” The banking executive said that the bank was a “leader in digital assets” so wanted “safe adoption” of the technology. Lawmakers were trying to get a vote on the Clarity Act through before splitting for recess last week but ran out of time. A vote will now take place in September. JUST IN: Citi CEO Jane Fraser says she wants the CLARITY Act to become law. “We would like to see a good bill go through.” Watch pic.twitter.com/caX4lEJivk — Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) August 14, 2026 “We want to have good regulation that supports innovation and also encourages the safe adoption of the capabilities of digital assets,” Fraser said. “I think it would be excellent for the system.” A sticking point for the bill has been from the banking lobby, who raised concerns over crypto companies paying customers yield for holding stablecoins. U.S. banks have said they could lose customers if crypto exchanges offer more attractive products for their deposit base. Fraser reiterated the point on Friday, saying that small banks play an important role in the U.S. and a reward system on deposits could have a “detrimental effect.” But she added: “We have not given up on pushing to get some improvements made to the bill, but we would like to see a good bill go through.” America’s biggest crypto exchange, Coinbase, pulled support for the bill in January after clashing with banking chiefs who said that earning yield on stablecoins should be banned. The Clarity Act was passed last year by the House of Representatives but has been deadlocked since 2026. Still, the bill has been worked on by both Republicans and Democrats — despite crypto legislation being something pushed by pro-crypto President Donald Trump. Major institutions, including Fidelity and Goldman Sachs, as well as crypto lobby groups and politicians, have said the revised bill works in its current form. This post Citi CEO Wants ‘Good’ Crypto Clarity Act To Get Passed first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine Bitcoin Treasury Strategy Bites Back After MSCI Announces Possible Index Removal Bitcoin treasury Strategy has said it “doesn’t need” Morgan Stanley Capital International after the index provider said it could remove the Bitcoin company from its Global Investable Market Indexes. MSCI said in a consultation that it was consulting on a plan to define “Non-Operating Companies” and make them ineligible for its Global Investable Market Indexes (GIMI). The removal of such companies would exclude companies like Strategy from indexes visible to a large pool of institutional investors. MSCI said it was weighing up the decision as Strategy is primarily known for holding a large amount of Bitcoin rather than running a traditional operating business. Digital assets are assets. Index providers should measure markets, not decide which assets companies are allowed to own. MSCI’s proposal puts it out of step with regulators, markets, and its own customers. Bitcoin doesn’t need MSCI. Neither does Strategy. $BTC $MSTR — Strategy (@Strategy) August 14, 2026 Writing on X Friday, Strategy wrote: “Digital assets are assets. Index providers should measure markets, not decide which assets companies are allowed to own. MSCI’s proposal puts it out of step with regulators, markets, and its own customers.” It added: “Bitcoin doesn’t need MSCI. Neither does Strategy.” The consultation also included Japanese Bitcoin treasury Metaplanet, which trades on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and uranium investment company Yellow Cake. Based on financial filings as of May 2026, Strategy and Metaplanet already meet the criteria for removal under MSCI’s proposed rule. If MSCI adopts the proposal as currently written and their financial profiles remain unchanged, both companies would be deleted from the MSCI ACWI IMI Index as part of the November 2026 Index Review, triggering forced selling by index-tracking funds and loss of future passive inflows. MSCI is still gathering feedback on the proposal through September 30, and has explicitly said the consultation “may or may not result in changes to MSCI indexes” — meaning the rule could be modified, delayed, or dropped entirely based on responses from affected companies and market participants. Even if adopted, any changes to a company’s underlying financials before the review could also shift the result. Nasdaq-listed Strategy — formerly MicroStrategy — started buying Bitcoin in August 2020 as a way to generate better returns for its shareholders during the COVID-19 pandemic. It has since spent around $63.3 billion on Bitcoin and is the largest corporate holder of the asset. Investors can buy its shares to gain exposure to the leading cryptocurrency without having to buy and hold digital coins themselves. Strategy spawned a long-list of copycat firms which have bought not only Bitcoin, but other cryptocurrencies to boost their stock prices. Strategy’s stock (MSTR) was trading nearly 3% lower Friday at nearly $95 per share. MSTR year-to-date has dropped by nearly 40%. This post Bitcoin Treasury Strategy Bites Back After MSCI Announces Possible Index Removal first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine Israeli Bank Leumi to Debut Bitcoin Trading With Galaxy Digital Israel’s biggest bank, Bank Leumi, will become the first lender in the country to offer customers Bitcoin trading, according to a Friday announcement. The lender will work with Galaxy Digital to provide the service, which will become available to customers early next year, the announcement said. Bank Leumi first announced plans to debut crypto trading in 2022 but shelved the initiative. The latest project will use GalaxyOne Institutional, Galaxy’s institutional platform for banks, asset managers and other institutions for trading and other services, to debut the service. JUST IN: Israel's largest bank is entering Bitcoin. Bank Leumi will allow customers to buy, hold and sell Bitcoin directly through its banking app. The service is expected to launch in early 2027. pic.twitter.com/I7QXezzDDR — Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) August 14, 2026 “We believe that digital assets are gradually becoming an integral part of the global financial system, and it is our role to enable customers to benefit from this development within a reliable, secure, and regulated banking framework,” Bank Leumi’s Head of Strategy, Maya Ravia, said in a statement. The statement added that customers will also be able to trade other cryptocurrencies on top of Bitcoin. Leumi’s mobile banking app, PEPPER, will also provide the service. “The future of finance will run on open, programmable rails, and we believe the banks that move first will define the era that follows,” Galaxy Israel CEO Lior Lamesh said. “We are building one platform for trading and custody, with institutional-grade security at its core, and the onchain rails beneath it, through Galaxy Infrastructure and GalaxyOne Institutional, for banks around the world.” According to Chainalysis, crypto adoption in Israel has been steadily growing over the years, with geopolitical headwinds including the war in Gaza and Iran, leading Israelis to digital assets as a “safe-haven.” This post Israeli Bank Leumi to Debut Bitcoin Trading With Galaxy Digital first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo. Переглянути повний текст

Bitcoin Magazine What the CLARITY Act Actually Does for Bitcoin In July 2025, House Republicans staged a coordinated three-bill blitz they called ‘Crypto Week;, advancing the GENIUS, CLARITY, and the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act in the same five day stretch. The GENIUS Act was signed into law within 24 hours, creating a regulatory framework for dollar-backed stablecoins. However, the other two bills weren’t so lucky. The Anti-CBDC Surveillance State passed the House by an extremely narrow margin, and got stuck in Senate purgatory without a floor vote in place for over a year. Following the House’s bipartisan passage of the CLARITY Act, the bill landed in the Senate Banking Committee where it sat for nearly a year. When the bill finally emerged out of committee, its cover page included the phrase “Strike out all after the enacting clause and insert the part printed in italic.” Translation: 100% of the bill had been rewritten. If you pull up the bill on Congress’ website today, you can see that the first 256 pages (the entire House-passed bill) are struck through, line by line, top to bottom. Then, starting on page 257, the Senate’s new version of the bill begins. (This is still the official text on file; a further-updated draft has circulated since, but hasn’t been formally filed as an amendment.) Given how much the bill has changed shape, it’s worth taking a step back and assessing how the CLARITY Act, in its post-June 1st form, actually affects Bitcoin, and if it can truly “act as the catalyst for the next bull run” as I see so often on X today. What the bill does do for Bitcoin Self-custody becomes a legally protected right Section 605, the ‘Keep Your Coins Act’, prohibits federal regulators from restricting or impairing a person’s ability to self-custody for any lawful purpose. Self-custody currently has no statutory backing, and providing direct legislation creates a defense against future tyrannical powers requiring custodial intermediaries. While people often dismiss this threat as ‘fear mongering’ and ‘doomerism’, this type of overreach does have recent historical precedent. In 2020, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin directed FinCEN to propose a rule targeting “unhosted wallets”. It would have required exchanges to collect names and home addresses for anyone moving more than $3,000/day into their private wallet, and file reports to FinCEN for anything over $10,000/day. Although the rule ultimately lost momentum, it remained on the books and un-withdrawn for almost four years. During that period, any Treasury Secretary could have revived and finalized it without any new legislation. This is the exact scenario Section 605 is written to prevent from happening again. Bitcoin developers, node operators, and non-custodial wallet makers get explicit immunity from money-transmitter liability Section 604, Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, says a “non-controlling” developer or provider can’t be classified as a money transmitting business for doing that. Prime examples are Samourai Wallet and Tornado Cash. Both were open-source, non-custodial projects whose developers were criminally prosecuted under the theory that publishing the code made them unlicensed money transmitters. Samourai’s founders pleaded guilty in April 2026, and Tornado Cash’s Roman Storm was convicted on the same charge in August 2025. Section 604 does not undo either case, but it does draw a line so the next open-source developer doesn’t have to find out where it is in federal court. Bitcoin gets a statutory green light at the banking level Section 401, the “Permissibility of Digital Asset Activities”, is the only section of the CLARITY Act that is “bullish” for Bitcoin’s price, by my estimations. This section would finally let banks, brokerages, and institutions treat Bitcoin like a real asset class, pulling in a wave of new capital. The section lets financial holding companies, national banks, state banks, and credit unions custody digital assets, lend against them as collateral, operate nodes, provide brokerage and clearing services, and act as a market maker or dealer, all without needing extra prior approval beyond what banking law already requires. This section uses the term “digital asset,” which is broadly defined through the already-enacted GENIUS Act. Unlike “digital commodity” or “ancillary asset” elsewhere in the bill, Bitcoin clearly and unambiguously qualifies here. The addressable market this opens up is enormous. US commercial banks alone hold $25.7 trillion in total assets, nearly 20 times Bitcoin’s entire $1.3 trillion market cap. Custody giants like State Street and Northern Trust each sit on custody books that individually dwarf the whole Bitcoin market several times over. None of that capital needs to move far, or take much risk, to move the price of an asset this size. It just needs a legal, statutory door like Section 401 to walk through. What the bill doesn’t do for Bitcoin Bitcoin’s commodity status doesn’t get locked into federal law (at least not yet) As it currently stands, Bitcoin is treated as a commodity because the CFTC says so and courts have agreed in the course of enforcement cases. However, that is precedent, not statute. There is no framework in place preventing future regulators from not viewing it that way. The House-passed version of the CLARITY Act would have closed that gap. That language was struck out entirely when the Senate rewrote the bill on June 1, and for weeks, nothing replaced it. The July 22 draft of the CLARITY Act merges in the Senate Agriculture Committee’s CFTC framework, which does add the missing definition. But that draft isn’t law or a filed amendment yet. It doesn’t ban a Fed CBDC The House-passed version of the bill had a section called the “Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act”, which prohibited the federal reserve from issuing a retail CBDC. This section was part of the 256 pages struck by the Senate Banking Committee, and the current form of the bill offers no operative section on the matter. Even if it passes, rules won’t actually exist for a while. This is where the “CLARITY Act supercycle incoming” narrative falls flat. A signed bill doesn’t come with a functioning regulator attached. The CFTC would need to build one almost completely from scratch. The GENIUS Act, signed last year, missed its entire one-year rulemaking deadline. Zero final rules, across six federal agencies, as of mid-2026. CLARITY would hand the CFTC the biggest new mandate in the bill, and the CFTC currently has a single sitting commissioner and staff headcount has dropped 21% in one year. So, is CLARITY a Bitcoin bill? Honestly? No. CLARITY is bullish for crypto broadly, and only narrowly bullish for Bitcoin specifically. The vast majority of the bill exists to give altcoins a way out of securities law limbo, which is a problem that Bitcoin does not acutely possess. Though, “not the main point” is not the same as “it doesn’t matter”. The bill provides specific pro-Bitcoin language that’s worth supporting on its own terms. Ultimately, whether the bill passes or falls into legislative oblivion, Bitcoin’s core principles remain the same: a decentralized protocol governed by mathematical certainty, and the world’s first digital commodity, with a market cap north of $1.3 trillion. Bitcoin will never live or die on Capitol Hill. This is a guest post by Isaiah Austin. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine. This post What the CLARITY Act Actually Does for Bitcoin first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Isaiah Austin. Переглянути повний текст