Coinbase said this week it filed notice registrations with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to offer single-stock perpetual futures domestically, according to a post from the company’s official account.

The move adds another regulated derivatives product to Coinbase’s US lineup and comes as regulators continue sorting out how perpetual contracts should be classified under American law.

Coinbase Files for US Single-Stock Perps

“We’re working to bring single stock perps to the US,” Coinbase wrote, adding that it plans to work with both the SEC and the CFTC to bring more major financial products onshore.

The company shared images of two filings, both submitted on September 1. The first is a Form 1-N from Coinbase Derivatives, LLC, the entity through which the exchange already offers other futures products. The second is a Form BD-N from Coinbase Financial Markets, Inc., registering as a security futures product broker-dealer under Section 15(b)(11) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

Neither filing guarantees the product launches on any set timeline. Notice registrations open the door for a broker or exchange to offer a given product, while approval and any conditions attached to it still rest with regulators.

The filing also comes alongside a broader push into tokenized products, with Coinbase launching tokenized stock trading for customers outside the US in August, alongside options trading and real-world-asset perpetual futures tied to equity indices.

It also rolled out pre-IPO perpetual futures starting with SpaceX, with Anthropic and OpenAI contracts expected to follow, a corner of the market that grew more than tenfold in volume since May, to around $12 billion, according to CryptoQuant.

A Product Category Still Being Fought Over

Perpetual futures carry no expiration date, letting traders bet on an asset’s price without owning it, and the US market for them is new.

In May, the CFTC approved Kalshi to offer Bitcoin perpetual futures, the first time the product cleared for the US market, and a decision CME Group said it would challenge in court on the grounds that perpetuals should be regulated as swaps rather than futures.

At the time, CME CEO Terrence Duffy noted that the company spent eight months preparing the case and argued that its exclusive licensing deals with benchmark providers mean any perpetual contract tied to those benchmarks still has to run through CME.

CFTC Chair Michael Selig has defended the original approval as a way to bring regulated, expiration-free products onshore under US oversight.

The post Coinbase Files With SEC to Bring Single-Stock Perpetual Futures to US Investors appeared first on CryptoPotato.

South Korea’s Financial Services Commission unveiled a phased roadmap on September 4 for converting stocks, bonds and investment funds into blockchain-based tokens, with the earliest phase due to start in February 2027 once an amendment to the Electronic Registration Act takes effect.

The plan links the country’s securities market to a stablecoin payment system that regulators want built by the time the rollout reaches its final stage.

Seoul Lays Out a Three-Step Timeline

The FSC’s roadmap, presented during the third private-public consultative meeting on securities tokenization, breaks the transition into three stages.

Phase one starts in February 2027 and covers privately pooled money market funds and bonds reserved for institutional investors, unlisted stocks held through trust structures, and publicly offered fractional investment securities.

Phase two widens the pool to every type of publicly offered security. But the third phase is the more ambitious one: an on-chain payments system tied to stablecoins, though the FSC says the pace of phases two and three depends on how the first rollout goes, how fast the market adapts, and where pending stablecoin legislation ends up.

The commission also published model standards for fractional investment, capping individual subscriptions at whichever is smaller between 30 million won ($22,200) and 5% of an issuance, and requiring issuers to reserve a minimum retail allocation.

Trading tokenized securities over the counter won’t need a separate license, though firms must consult the Financial Supervisory Service first, and retail investors face an annual cap of 100 million won ($74,000) in net purchases per exchange.

Entities that manage tokenized securities accounts will need at least 4 billion won, which is about $2.9 million, in equity and dedicated staff for account management, internal control, and IT security, while the Korea Securities Depository is finalizing the technical checks that securities firms must pass before connecting to the shared ledger.

Revised rules under the FSCMA and the Electronic Registration Act are due by the end of September.

The Risk Other Regulators Have Already Flagged

As CryptoPotato reported previously, the IMF warned in an April note that tokenization strips out the settlement delays banks rely on to manage liquidity, delays that also give regulators time to step in before a crisis hardens.

The fund pointed to liquidity pressure, thin oversight of smart contracts, and the difficulty of policing assets that cross borders as the main risks, arguing that public infrastructure such as central bank digital currency (CBDC) is what keeps tokenized markets from making instability worse.

South Korea has also moved quickly against platforms it views as skirting its rules, with authorities blocking domestic access to Polymarket in August over concerns that the platform amounts to unlicensed gambling, joining a growing list of countries that have restricted it since last year.

The post South Korea Plans Stablecoin-Based Tokenization by 2027 appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Uniswap Labs has purchased a stake in PONS as part of a longer-term partnership, sending the token to a new all-time high of $0.75.

The move comes as the Pons team reported rising activity on the platform, with more than 63% of Robinhood Chain launchpad volume passing through the protocol over the past 24 hours.

Uniswap Labs Confirms the Purchase

Pons announced the purchase on September 4, saying the deal would deepen its partnership with Uniswap and give the two projects “long-term alignment.” However, the post did not disclose how much PONS Uniswap Labs purchased or the value of the transaction.

Still, the market reaction was immediate. At the time of writing, PONS was trading at $0.71, up 40.2% in the last 24 hours and more than 507% in the last week, per CoinGecko. It touched as high as $0.75 earlier in the day, a new price record, before easing back, so the current price sits close to 4% below that peak.

Volume climbed too, with $151.8 million changing hands in the past day, a 9% jump from the session before. And if you look at longer timeframes, the numbers get harder to ignore. PONS is up more than 1,769% in the last 14 days and over 2,713% for the month, a run that traces back to a low of $0.0033 in mid-July, and it’s also up close to 25% on its pairing with Bitcoin.

A Token Built Around Burning Its Own Supply

Pons has leaned on deflationary mechanics since it launched. The project says 29.34% of the total PONS supply has been burned to date, with 80% of protocol fees going toward buying back and burning more tokens on an ongoing basis.

The team has also been adding tokenized stock pairs to its platform, including UPS, Snap, Lululemon, Figma, Moderna, Pfizer, Rivian, Marvell, and Johnson & Johnson in the past day alone. Trading followed. More than 63% of all volume on Robinhood Chain’s launchpad flowed through its platform in a single 24-hour stretch, a day that saw $400 million in volume overall.

Uniswap’s PONS purchase came the same week its own token, UNI, was climbing. As CryptoPotato reported earlier, UNI gained as much as 32% over seven days, and it has since gone even higher, changing hands at just under $6.40 as of this writing, a jump of over 60% in the last 30 days.

The post Uniswap Buys PONS Stake, Token Jumps 40% to New All-Time High appeared first on CryptoPotato.

XRP’s spot trading volume climbed to its highest level since February during August, and the token’s price is now up roughly 8% in the last day to trade near $1.45.

The pickup in trading activity landed as the broader crypto market came back to life, with Bitcoin clearing $80,000 for the first time in a week and altcoins moving right along with it.

Volume Returns Across Major Exchanges

Data shared by CryptoQuant contributor Arab Chain showed XRP’s spot trading volume rising across several major exchanges last month, reaching its highest point since February.

Binance accounted for the largest share, logging about $7.28 billion in XRP trades during August, followed by Upbit at around $4.68 billion and Bithumb Korea at close to $2.59 billion.

Bybit processed about $1.40 billion, Gate.io around $1.33 billion, and KuCoin near $1.23 billion, while Bitget and Coinbase each came in just under the billion-dollar mark, at $918.5 million and $915.4 million, respectively.

On its own, a jump in trading volume does not point to higher or lower prices ahead. It simply means more buyers and sellers are active. Still, hitting a six-month high on volume points to a real improvement in liquidity around XRP, and if that pace holds, it could help the token absorb bigger price swings going forward.

Price Follows the Rest of the Market Higher

XRP is changing hands around $1.45 as of this writing, up more than 6% in the last 24 hours, per CoinGecko. The token has traded between $1.35 and $1.48 in the last day and between $1.31 and $1.48 in the last week, and the weekly change of just 1.4% suggests most of the recent gain came in one quick move rather than a steady climb.

Looking further out, XRP is up around 36% on the month, though it still sits about 49% below where it was a year ago and roughly 60% under its all-time high of $3.65, reached in July 2025.

The move ties into a wider rebound that took hold on Thursday, when Bitcoin pushed past $80,000 for the first time in a week, as CryptoPotato reported earlier, after briefly dipping to a 10-day low near $76,200 amid tension in the Middle East.

XRP was among the bigger movers in that stretch, gaining 9% on the day and clearing $1.40, ahead of ETH’s climb toward $2,500 and BNB’s push above $720.

The post XRP Trading Activity Hits Highest Level Since February as Price Jumps 8% appeared first on CryptoPotato.

XRPL developer Denis Angell launched a live dashboard this week that scores every amendment on the XRP Ledger for how much of its functionality has actually been exercised on devnet before it reaches mainnet.

The tool turns amendment readiness, previously a matter of trust in the process, into a public scorecard that shows exactly which transaction types, fields, and result codes have never been touched by a real transaction.

What the Dashboard Actually Tracks

Angell built the tool, hosted at amendments-staging.xrpl.foundation, to read each amendment’s full spec surface directly from the node rather than maintaining it by hand. That includes every transaction type, optional field, flag, result code, and ledger entry the amendment introduces.

The dashboard then watches devnet activity and checks whether a validated transaction has ever exercised each one, with green cells linking to the transaction that first did it and red cells marking what hasn’t happened yet.

The developer explained the reasoning behind the project directly, saying:

“Every new XRPL feature ships as an amendment. Validators vote it in, and once it’s active it’s part of the protocol for good. That deserves real evidence that the feature has been exercised end to end on devnet, not just tested in isolation.”

As of this week, the dashboard is watching 16 amendments live on devnet, and 13 of them still have untested surface.

The widest gaps sit in newer amendments: Sponsor has 65 of its 107 possible checks never exercised, XChainBridge is missing 30 of 40, and MPTokensV1 is short 27 of 102.

This week’s scan also turned up 59 findings across the set: two spec bugs, 23 documentation gaps, and 34 test gaps.

One amendment, XLS-75 permission delegation, which lets an account hand off narrow powers to another key, such as freezing trust lines and nothing else, closed out its remaining test gaps this week.

According to Angell, the team added logic mapping each delegated transaction back to the specific permission behind it, then exercised every remaining cell on devnet, bringing all 122 checks across its 12 granular permissions to full coverage.

He’s framed the effort as crowdsourced, encouraging XRPL builders to “go find the red cells” and run the missing transactions themselves, since the dashboard picks up new activity within seconds.

Amendment Testing Comes as Adoption Lags

The push for more rigorous pre-activation testing follows a rocky upgrade cycle. As CryptoPotato reported in July, Ripple’s v3.2.0 update, which renamed the core server software from rippled to xrpld and cut node memory usage by 30% to 40%, had sat unadopted by more than half of XRPL nodes weeks after release, even as 89% of the network’s trusted validator set had moved it.

The post New XRP Ledger Tool Turns Amendment Testing Into Public Scorecard appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Arthur Hayes, the chief investment officer of crypto family office Maelstrom, said in an essay published Thursday that traders should stop paying attention to Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s hawkish comments and instead watch the euro-yen exchange rate for early signs of fresh dollar liquidity.

He argued that mounting funding stress at French banks will eventually force the Federal Reserve to print money to keep the US repo market working, a dynamic he sees as bullish for Bitcoin and the wider crypto market.

Hayes Points to EUR/JPY as His Liquidity Gauge

Hayes said EUR/JPY, trading near 185 at the time of writing, will fall to 140 or lower by next June. He tied that forecast to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s effort to weaken the euro and strengthen the currencies of US allies in Asia, meant to make American exports more competitive.

Rather than let Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan sell their dollar holdings outright, Hayes said the plan is to route that capital through the Fed’s FIMA repo facility, and he noted Bessent has already sold euros for yen through the Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund.

The bigger risk, in his view, sits with French banks. He named BNP Paribas, Credit Agricole, and Societe Generale, which together handle roughly a fifth of US repo lending, and pointed to widening French government bond spreads and capital leaving French banks as signs that foreign lenders are pulling back.

If those banks retreat from repo lending, Hayes expects the New York Fed to lean harder on its RPM program, which already buys 39% of T-bill issuance, to keep the market funded.

That program has grown the balance sheet by about $22 billion a month since December, and Hayes said the pace could climb toward $100 billion if the Treasury steps up long-end bond purchases too.

He dismissed Warsh directly, writing, “I don’t pay attention to anything Warsh says.” Maelstrom’s portfolio, he added, keeps Bitcoin at its core long-term holding with year-end 2026 price targets of $10,000 for ETH and $0.50 for ENA.

A Hawkish Fed and a Choppy Bitcoin

Hayes’ essay comes about a week after Warsh’s hawkish Jackson Hole speech, which hit Bitcoin hard.

As CryptoPotato reported then, the OG cryptocurrency dropped by $3,000 within hours of that address, slipping under $77,000 after Warsh said the Fed’s 2% inflation target was “firm and fixed” and downplayed recent encouraging inflation data. Rate-hike odds for September then jumped from about a third to roughly 60% in the aftermath.

Bitcoin has stayed choppy since, with the asset turned away from $79,000 more than once before another leg down pushed it under $76,500, the lowest level in ten days, after renewed US-Iran strikes rattled markets.

However, at the time of writing, it had clawed its way back up and was trading closer to $78,000 than $77,000, pushing its gains over the last 30 days to almost 22%.

The post Arthur Hayes Says Ignore Warsh and Watch EUR/JPY for Bitcoin’s Next Move appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin (BTC) sat near $77,000 today, clawing back part of a slide that took it under $76,500 earlier in the week after fresh US-Iran strikes spooked the markets.

Analysts are now split on whether the dip was a shakeout before another push higher or the first sign of a deeper pullback.

Traders Watch the $83,000 Gap

Analyst NoName is watching the CME futures gap above the current price and considers $83,000 the line that decides what happens next. They wrote that Bitcoin needs “the level that separates a real reversal from another relief rally” with a daily close above it backed by real spot volume.

Without that close, they are treating the recent bounce as a retest of old supply rather than confirmation of a new uptrend, and their downside case is blunt: if $83,000 rejects and $74,000 gives way, they see room for a drop toward $50,000 to $55,000 before Bitcoin finds a real bottom.

But not everyone is reading the chart that way, including Doctor Profit, who dismissed calls for a new low outright, saying, “I consider the bear market as over.”

Another market watcher, Sykodelic, pointed to the monthly candle instead of shorter timeframes, citing the reversal structure, a bullish tick on the DSS Bressert indicator, and a flattening MACD.

He called the setup “not bearish, and never been bearish,” and said the monthly close held above the $76,400 level he had flagged as the line between confirming the reversal and voiding it.

Behind the argument sits a rough week. As CryptoPotato reported previously, Bitcoin got turned away at $79,000 more than once before the latest leg down pushed it under $76,500 for the first time since August 23, with renewed US-Iran fighting being the main trigger. You can hear more about that in the video below:

The primary cryptocurrency is now changing hands above $77,000, having traded between $76,300 and $77,800 in the last 24 hours. It’s down almost 2% for the week but still up nearly 22% for the month.

August’s Rare Green Candle Complicates the Picture

The pullback follows a month that broke a pattern, with BTC closing August up almost 25%, the first green August during a bear market stretch comparable to 2014, 2018, or 2022, when it fell between 9% and 18% at the same point in each cycle.

It was also the asset’s best August since 2017, when the month closed up more than 65%. Furthermore, the third quarter is already up close to 33%, with one month left to go.

That doesn’t change where Bitcoin sits against its cycle high, though. It remains down close to 30% for the year and more than 38% below its October 2025 peak of over $126,000, with dominance currently above 57%.

The post Bitcoin Could Crash to $50K if Bulls Fail This Crucial Test: Analyst appeared first on CryptoPotato.

XRP is changing hands around $1.35, down roughly 6% over the last week after slipping beneath a support level chart analysts had been watching closely since late August.

Trader ChartNerd says the token’s second failed weekly close above its 50-week EMA leaves room for a deeper slide to $1.27, or lower, before the rally that took XRP to $1.70 can resume.

Bulls Lose Their Grip on the $1.36 Floor

ChartNerd has been tracking XRP’s four-hour structure for weeks, watching a range that formed beneath $1.47 resistance and above $1.36 support. That floor has now been swept twice. According to the analyst, the price rejected from $1.43 and printed another lower high beneath a bearish trend signal sitting at $1.39.

Zooming out, the picture traces back to August 22, the day XRP touched a multi-month high of $1.70, as CryptoPotato reported. The rally followed a broader market move triggered by Bitcoin’s jump from under $65,000 to $80,000, and pushed XRP up 70% in three days after a tough start to the month that had briefly dragged it under $1.00. It ended August at just under $1.40, still a 30% monthly gain despite the pullback.

ChartNerd flagged the retracement risk the day after that peak, warning that a weekly close below the 50 EMA “would be an early warning sign in advance for a larger retracement.”

That’s exactly what has followed: two consecutive weekly closes beneath the average and a retreat the analyst pegged at around 22% from the top. The next support in that scenario is the weekly 20 EMA, which now sits at $1.27.

No Recovery Case Until $1.50 Gets Reclaimed

ChartNerd’s resistance ladder above the current price runs from $1.40 to $1.43, then $1.47, then $1.65, $1.82, and $2.40. On the downside, the levels being watched are $1.30, $1.27, $1.21, and $0.85, the last tied to a zone the analyst has been flagging for accumulation since June.

The broader case for a bottom rests on a golden cross that hasn’t formed yet. XRP’s EMAs are coiling, with price stuck under the 50-week average and above the 20-week one. Until both are reclaimed and held, ChartNerd isn’t willing to call a floor, comparing the current stretch to the compression that preceded August’s breakout.

Spot XRP ETFs still pulled in more than $110 million last week, their strongest inflow since December, which has kept some traders open to a faster turnaround than the charts alone suggest.

September carries its own catalysts, including a CLARITY Act vote in the Senate around September 15 and a shareholder vote on Evernorth’s planned Nasdaq listing. But none of that changes the technical picture ChartNerd is describing: XRP is boxed in below resistance, and until that changes, another leg down to $1.27 or beyond stays on the table.

The post XRP’s Next Move Comes Down to These Key Price Levels: Analyst appeared first on CryptoPotato.

TapTools has abandoned a community NFT sale intended to help bring its Cardano analytics platform back online after users reacted angrily to its return, with every participant refunded in full.

The backlash quickly reached Charles Hoskinson, who responded by sharing a South Park parody of BP’s repeated “we’re sorry” apology.

TapTools Pulls Sale After Community Backlash

TapTools shut down in June after four years of operating in the Cardano ecosystem. In its announcement then, the team said two co-founders, including its CTO and COO, had left earlier in the year, while its replacement CTO later decided to leave as well.

The company also cited infrastructure, development, and support costs as reasons it could not responsibly continue without a sustainable path forward. But that changed on September 2, when TapTools posted “We’re back” and said thousands of users had reached out after the shutdown asking how they could help. The team described the return as “Phase One” and said it wanted to try to bring the platform back.

The reaction was immediate and largely hostile. One X user, Sssebi, wrote that they were initially happy to see TapTools return but became disappointed after visiting the website and finding a limited NFT sale of 777 pieces at 777 ADA each, “the price of 2 copies of GTA6,” as a community member put it. Another, Matt Scheff, described the new NFT mint as “dumb and extractive” and urged users not to buy it, while Gero Wallet called the move “either a scam or a scam.”

TapTools later acknowledged the problem. “We got this one wrong,” the team wrote, saying it had believed the sale could give the community a way to support an attempt at bringing the platform back. Instead, it said it had “misread the moment, the sentiment, and how it would be received.”

Some time after the apology, Hoskinson responded by quote-tweeting it with nothing but a link to a South Park clip parodying former BP CEO Tony Hayward repeatedly saying “we’re sorry” after the Gulf oil spill, a well-worn reference for hollow corporate apologies. He did not add a written comment, leaving the clip itself to carry the message.

Cardano’s Wider Frustration Adds Pressure

TapTools’ original shutdown landed when Cardano was going through a rough stretch, with EMURGO stepping down from the network’s governance group to focus on helping users affected by the SecondFi exploit, a planned Singapore summit getting called off, and Hoskinson himself warning of a possible “wave of failures” among the ecosystem’s DeFi projects.

Even so, large ADA holders were adding to their positions while smaller wallets kept selling, a split some read at the time as one of the healthier setups the token had shown all year.

For TapTools, the immediate issue is no longer the sale, with the team withdrawing it and refunding participants. The harder part is rebuilding trust with users.

The post Cardano Firm TapTools Scraps Revival NFT Sale After Community Backlash appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Analyst Ali Martinez says the $15 Dogecoin target he has been tracking since the token’s early days is dead, now that DOGE has broken below the long-term rising channel the whole thesis was built on.

The call undoes months of bullish setups other analysts pointed to through August, from whale accumulation to a technical buy signal that had suggested a rally back toward that same structure.

The Channel That Defined the $15 Case Just Broke

The channel in question is a rising parallel one that Martinez says has defined Dogecoin’s price action since inception. Every time the price touched its lower boundary, it marked what he calls a generational buying opportunity, pointing to gains of 9,221% in 2017 and 30,694% in 2020.

When DOGE returned to that support in February 2026, the setup pointed to the possibility of another historic run, with $15 as the projected target. Now that DOGE has broken below the boundary, Martinez says the move has removed “the technical foundation behind the $15 thesis.”

The OG meme coin was trading around $0.0806 at the time of writing, down about 6.6% for the week and 3% on the day, sitting just below the $0.0813 level several analysts had flagged earlier this month as the line to hold.

Against Bitcoin, the token is almost flat, down about half a percent, so this isn’t a case of DOGE lagging some broader market pullback so much as losing a level tied to its own chart. It also remains 89% below its all-time high of $0.7316, set in May 2021.

How the Bullish Case Built Up Through August

The bullish case has been building for weeks. On August 15, Martinez pointed to a monthly TD Sequential buy signal alongside an inverted hammer and a developing doji candle, a combination he compared to a setup from August 2022 that preceded a 145% monthly rally.

He also flagged whale wallets adding more than 430 million DOGE that week. As CryptoPotato reported, the meme coin had slumped below $0.07 days earlier, its lowest level in almost three years, with active addresses climbing from 38,000 in July to 44,000, and other analysts, including Crypto Patel, marking the $0.07 to $0.10 range as a long-term accumulation zone.

By late August, DOGE had rallied 30% in a week to near $0.09, clearing that $0.0813 level the market was watching. More aggressive traders went further still, with MikybullCrypto calling for $3 and Vuori Trading predicting $10, a target that would require Dogecoin’s market cap to top $1.5 trillion.

That rally has since faded, with DOGE back under the same resistance it broke through weeks earlier.

The post Analyst Says $15 Dogecoin Target Is Dead After Long-Term Channel Break appeared first on CryptoPotato.

UNI is trading around $6.31, up 16.5% in the last 24 hours, after Robinhood Chain’s decentralized exchange volume hit a new daily high above $1.3 billion, according to CoinGecko.

The move ties Uniswap’s token price directly to trading activity on Robinhood Chain, where Uniswap is the network’s primary automated market maker and collects fees on that volume.

Robinhood Chain’s Volume Keeps Climbing

UNI’s 24-hour range ran from $5.58 to $6.37. The token is up nearly 46% for the week and more than 51% for the month, though still down about 35% for the year and roughly 86% below its all-time high of $44.92, set in May 2021.

UNI also gained about 12% against Bitcoin and nearly 13% against Ethereum over the same window, according to CoinGecko’s pairing data.

Trading activity also picked up alongside the price, with the token’s 24-hour volume hitting $1.17 billion, up 95% from the previous day.

Robinhood Chain’s volume has been climbing for weeks, with a record $875 million in daily DEX volume on August 30. By today, CoinGecko’s tracking puts that figure above $1.3 billion, nearly 50% higher within three days.

Separately, Arkham reported that Robinhood Chain is now generating more in chain fees than Solana, Base or Ethereum, pointing to $1.49 billion in DEX volume and 5.52 million daily transactions as the drivers, along with a new trading pattern that pairs meme coins directly against tokenized stocks.

One example it cited is Artificial Inu, a meme coin with a $184 million market cap that trades against a tokenized version of Nvidia stock rather than a stablecoin or the network’s native asset.

Uniswap’s Growing Role on Robinhood Chain

Uniswap’s position on Robinhood Chain goes beyond just facilitating trades. As CryptoPotato reported in August, the platform launched Pools.trade, a token launchpad, on the network early that month, letting users create tokens through either a four-hour Crowd Launch or an Instant Launch before liquidity gets locked into Uniswap v4 pools.

The rollout pulled traders away from rival launchpad token PONS, which fell nearly 14% in 24 hours and almost 48% over the week that followed.

Uniswap still trails other Robinhood Chain applications on direct fee capture. GMGN generated $1.11 million in application fees, and Pons brought in $930,000, compared with $307,000 for Uniswap, according to Arkham’s data.

Meanwhile, Robinhood’s total value locked (TVL) has climbed to $740 million, up 23% on the week, on a network that only launched on July 1.

The post UNI Jumps 16% as Robinhood Chain DEX Volume Hits $1.3B appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Goldman Sachs, Jane Street Group, and Millennium Management were the three largest reported holders of spot XRP ETFs in second-quarter 13F filings, according to Bloomberg Intelligence data shared by James Seyffart on August 31.

The filings show that institutional exposure has grown alongside a sharp increase in XRP ETF inflows, even as the Ripple token itself has pulled back from its August highs.

Advisors Dominate XRP ETF Holdings

Bloomberg’s compilation puts Goldman Sachs well ahead of other reported holders, with $87.4 million in ETF exposure representing 84 million XRP. Jane Street followed with just under 16 million XRP, worth $16.6 million, while Millennium Management held 15.5 million tokens valued at about $16.2 million.

Intesa Sanpaolo ranked fourth with $14.4 million in exposure, followed by Marex UK Holdings at $8.1 million. Citadel Advisors also appeared in the filing data, although its XRP exposure fell by $645,000. But SIG Holdings recorded a much larger reduction, with its reported XRP exposure down by roughly $4.6 million.

Across the identified holders, total exposure reached $183.5 million, representing about 176.4 million XRP. Bloomberg also grouped the holders by category and found investment advisors far ahead of the other groups, with $120.9 million in exposure. Hedge fund managers accounted for $25.1 million, brokerages for $17.9 million, and banks for $14.8 million.

ETF Demand Rises While XRP Price Cools

The numbers come as demand for spot XRP ETFs has picked up, with the funds attracting $110.5 million during the week ending August 28, their strongest five-day inflow since the first week of December 2025, when they drew in more than $230 million. SoSoValue data shows another $5.6 million entered the products on August 31, taking cumulative net inflows to about $1.67 billion, with total net assets reaching roughly $1.45 billion.

Meanwhile, the token itself was trading near $1.40 at the time of writing, having hit a multi-month high of $1.70 last week. Although that price represents a nearly 9% dip over seven days, it is still 28% higher than where it was a month ago and almost 40% up from its level two weeks ago. That said, XRP’s value is still nearly half of what it was this time last year, and it is stuck approximately 62% below its all-time high of $3.65 recorded in July 2025.

Traders are now watching the $1.35 to $1.38 zone closely, since a break below could open the door to more downside, while analyst Ali Martinez fingered $1.60 as the next major resistance level were XRP to attempt another recovery.

The post These Wall Street Giants Are the Biggest Holders of Spot XRP ETFs appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Ethereum’s latest monthly candle closed above a key resistance level around $2,470 on August 31, prompting analyst Matthew Hyland to declare on X that the downtrend that started in August 2025 is over.

He framed the close as the first confirmation that a new bull market has started, comparing the current chart structure to the setups that preceded ETH’s 2016 and 2020 rallies.

ETH’s Monthly Chart Flips Bullish

Hyland’s chart runs from ETH’s 2025 peak, hit in August of that year, through a steady run of lower highs and lower lows that bottomed out near $1,500 to $1,600 in June and July of this year.

“ETH confirms a Monthly Higher_High and ends its downtrend that started in August of 2025,” Hyland posted. “The Bears have been slayed. WELCOME TO THE #CRYPTO BULL MARKET!!”

Other traders have been circling the same zone, including DonAlt, who wrote that ETH has “No real resistance till $4k,” pointing to support around $2,100 and warning that a break below $2,000 could send price toward $1,000.

Fellow market watcher Daan Crypto Trades pointed out that ETH has spent the last 11 days pinned between its weekly 200-period moving average and a horizontal support level.

Another analyst, Quantum Ascend, noted that ETH’s monthly candle closed near its 50-month simple moving average with the RSI still deeply oversold, a setup that last showed up in spring 2025, right before the token rallied 3.5x in five months, and he says he’s “expecting a new all-time high” based on the move.

At the time of writing, the second-largest crypto asset was trading above $2,400, up roughly 31% over the past month and 30% in two weeks, while remaining about 50% below its record price of over $4,900 from August last year.

Network Activity Adds Another Piece

ETH’s price recovery is happening alongside increased network activity. As CryptoPotato reported, Ethereum is approaching 1 million active addresses, despite substantial activity taking place across Layer 2 networks.

That gives the price move some additional context, although active addresses alone cannot establish whether ETH has entered a new long-term cycle. Tron, for example, has more than 4 million active addresses, largely linked to payments and stablecoin transfers.

For now, the cleanest test of Hyland’s thesis is whether ETH can hold the $2,470 breakout area. A sustained move above it would leave the $4,000 region as the next major target cited by traders, while a failure below $2,000 would considerably weaken the bullish structure.

More on Ethereum can be found in our market video below:

The post Analyst Declares Bull Market After ETH Breaks Key Monthly Resistance appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin closed August 2026 up nearly 25%, giving the month a result that has not appeared in comparable post-peak years of 2014, 2018, and 2022.

Ash Crypto pointed to the unusual monthly candle on September 1, noting that the latest close breaks a pattern that has accompanied Bitcoin’s previous bear-market phases.

Bitcoin Breaks an August Pattern

Ash Crypto’s chart, based on Bitstamp data and using a logarithmic scale, compares August performances after Bitcoin’s major cycle highs. August 2014 fell about 18% after the 2013 peak, August 2018 lost roughly 9% after the 2017 peak, and August 2022 dropped some 14% following the 2021 high. However, this year, things went the other way.

Bitcoin started the month in the low $60,000s and climbed above $81,000 before finishing at about $78,600, producing a monthly gain of 24.95%, according to CoinGlass data. Ash Crypto described it as “BITCOIN JUST CLOSED AUGUST GREEN FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER IN A BEAR MARKET.”

The distinction is important, since the chart does not establish that BTC has entered a new bull market. Instead, it shows that August behaved differently from the same point in the previous three post-peak cycles. Bitcoin’s last all-time high was just past $126,000 in October 2025, leaving the asset well below that level despite the August recovery.

Furthermore, the flagship cryptocurrency also had its best August since 2017, when the month closed up more than 65%.

CoinGlass data back to 2017 shows how unusual that stretch has been. Outside of the aforementioned 65% gain in 2017 and 2021’s 13.8% jump, every August in between finished red, including two straight double-digit losses in 2022 and 2023, with this year snapping that run.

Besides August ending up positively, the third quarter is also shaping up nicely, with the same CoinGlass data showing it’s in the green by nearly 33%, although there’s still one month to go.

That uptick is only bettered by the same period in 2017 that saw BTC’s value go up more than 80%, and it would take an incredible run in September to bring Q3 2026 anywhere near that.

Price Action as September Starts

Bitcoin dipped below $77,000 as fresh attacks in the Middle East revived geopolitical tension, then clawed back most of that loss soon after.

That follows a productive patch last week, when the OG cryptocurrency pushed past $81,000 to hit its highest level in over three months, only to get rejected after Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s hawkish remarks at Jackson Hole.

At the time of writing, it was trading near $78,000, after barely moving either way in 24 hours. Although that price reflected a loss of about 2.5% for the week, it was still up more than 23% over the past month.

Dominance over the rest of the crypto market has climbed above 58%, with a market cap near $1.57 trillion. Zoomed out further, BTC remains down close to 29% for the year and more than 38% below its October 2025 ATH.

The post Bitcoin Makes History With First-Ever Green August During a Bear Market appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm, 1789 Capital, is leading a $1 billion funding round that values Polymarket at $21 billion, contributing roughly $300 million in fresh capital on top of the $200 million it had already put into the prediction market platform.

The new round lifts Polymarket’s valuation 40% above the roughly $15 billion mark it carried earlier this year, and it comes as the Trump family’s footprint in prediction markets keeps growing even as regulators in multiple countries and at least one US city move to shut the platforms out.

1789 Capital’s Stake Keeps Growing

1789 Capital spokesperson Alexa Henning said the firm’s total investment in Polymarket now sits at around $500 million combined between the new money and what it put in previously. The $21 billion figure is a jump from the roughly $15 billion valuation Polymarket was working with back in April, when the platform first opened talks on a new funding round.

Polymarket, alongside similar platforms like Kalshi, lets users bet on outcomes ranging from what a president says in a speech to who gets married on a reality show, and both have grown quickly over the past year.

Trump Jr.’s ties to the prediction market industry go beyond Polymarket. He became an adviser to Kalshi in 2025 and received shares in the company worth more than $300,000, and he separately advises Polymarket too.

His father’s administration has also moved in the industry’s favor, with Michael Selig, who heads the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), responsible for regulating prediction markets, speaking favorably of both companies.

However, Polymarket has run into trouble, with Baltimore Mayor Brandon M. Scott and the City Council suing both it and Kalshi last month, accusing them of offering unlicensed sports betting dressed up as event contracts and marketing their products in ways that could make people think they’re legal, regulated sportsbooks.

The city is seeking penalties and restitution for residents it says were exposed to unregulated gambling.

Trouble Overseas Too

Things are also heating up abroad. As CryptoPotato reported, South Korea ordered domestic access to Polymarket blocked, with regulators there saying the platform’s structure “encourages gambling behavior.”

France, Germany, and Australia have also imposed similar restrictions, and more than 30 countries in total have blocked or limited the platform.

Despite the legal troubles, money has kept flowing into Polymarket, as months before Trump Jr. upped his stake, the firm took on a $600 million investment from Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Exchange, as part of a plan to put up to $2 billion toward expanding into event-based trading.

The post Donald Trump Jr.’s 1789 Capital to Put $300M Into Polymarket appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin’s derivatives market is showing a curious split, with open interest falling nearly 4% since August 21, while funding costs for long positions have risen quickly.

Analyst Axel Adler Jr. says that combination could leave BTC exposed to a long squeeze if traders start rebuilding leverage while maintaining an increasingly bullish bias.

Falling OI Meets Rising Funding

In Adler’s latest brief, he put the focus on what is happening beneath Bitcoin’s price, with BTC-denominated open interest falling from 331,100 BTC on August 21 to 318,600 BTC on August 31, a decline of 3.8%. Over the past 24 hours, another 2,850 BTC has left open positions.

That means the derivatives market is still in a deleveraging phase following the short squeeze. But traders have not rushed to rebuild the amount of leverage that was cleared out during the earlier move.

Meanwhile, funding tells a different story, with the current funding rate at 0.00906%, while the eight-hour average sits at 0.00821% and the 24-hour average at 0.00725%. The shorter-term average is already 13% above the 24-hour figure, pointing to a stronger preference for long positions among active traders.

“The shorts have already been burned. Now the longs are in the crosshairs,” noted the market watcher.

For now, he does not consider the market overheated, with the concern coming if funding continues rising at the same time that open interest begins recovering. That would mean traders are adding new long leverage rather than simply maintaining a bullish bias within a smaller derivatives market. A decline in Bitcoin under those conditions could trigger forced liquidations as leveraged longs close.

The price action gives that risk some context, with Bitcoin dipping below $77,000 due to ongoing tensions between the US and Iran, as reported by CryptoPotato earlier today, before rising back up again to $79,000.

Why $79,700 Matters

The immediate technical question is whether Bitcoin can reclaim and hold $79,700, and CryptoRUs has identified that price as the level needed for a four-hour confirmation, with $77,000 to $78,000 acting as nearby support.

However, the setup is complicated by the amount of leverage already removed. More than $9.7 billion in crypto positions has been liquidated over the past two weeks, including $6.55 billion in shorts and $3.16 billion in longs. Bitcoin’s move back to $79,000 also caused roughly $30 million in short liquidations within an hour.

That leaves a distinction between forced buying and genuine spot demand, and according to the crypto intel provider, if BTC holds above $79,700 with stronger volume, the market may absorb higher funding without immediately becoming vulnerable to a squeeze. But if the level fails and Bitcoin falls through $77,000 to $78,000, rising funding could become much more uncomfortable for longs.

Adler’s warning is therefore conditional, rather than a prediction of an imminent liquidation event. Open interest is falling now, but the more dangerous setup would come if it starts rising again while funding keeps climbing.

More on the market’s state and the latest developments can be found in our video below:

The post These 2 Bitcoin Derivatives Signals Could Trigger a Long Squeeze: Analyst appeared first on CryptoPotato.

David Schwartz, the Ripple CTO emeritus, argued on August 31 that supporters of Bitcoin’s BIP-110 fork crossed from governance into an attack after rejecting the soft-fork result and continuing on a separate proof-of-work chain.

His exchange with fork supporter loogart captures the dispute: whether losing a consensus fight justifies creating a new Bitcoin chain, or whether that move itself amounts to attacking the network.

New Chain Goes Live

The account loogart opened the exchange by describing the sequence from the group’s perspective: it objected to the direction Bitcoin Core was taking, was told to fork, forked with a different proof-of-work algorithm, and is now building a separate chain, all while still being called an attacker.

“You’re not ‘still’ attacking,” Schwartz wrote in response to loogart’s take. “You switched from participating in governance to attacking when you refused to accept that you lost.”

Loogart replied that their group had accepted defeat and continued their version of Bitcoin elsewhere. They argued that open dialogue, a soft fork, and eventually a hard fork cannot amount to an attack because no one was compelled to follow, writing, “Nobody was forced to follow us.”

However, Schwartz rejected that framing, stating that inventing language that makes disagreement impossible to reason through moves the dispute beyond a good-faith disagreement and into what he called attacks and lunacy.

“I’m not arguing that you are incapable of pretending you have good faith disagreement over governance,” the XRP Ledger architect added. “I’m arguing that there’s lots of evidence that when you do so, you are pretending.”

The chain he referenced went live through a flag-day hard fork at block 961,640, replacing SHA256d with BLAKE2b as the mining algorithm. The update also introduced a new 164-byte block header and temporary rules capping block size at roughly 300 kilobytes until September 2027.

Bitcoin Knots developer Luke Dashjr defended the switch on August 30, arguing that BLAKE2b carries none of SHA256d’s known weaknesses, such as ASICBoost, and that the redesigned header closes a block-withholding loophole that previously relied on miner monitoring to catch.

A Fork That Struggled Before It Split Again

As CryptoPotato reported previously, the BIP-110 chain split from Bitcoin’s main chain at block 961,632 after failing to draw enough miner support.

The backing pool, Roughnecks, produced only two blocks before the branch stalled while the main chain kept its normal pace, and the gap between them grew to several hundred blocks within weeks. Dashjr was separately removed as an editor of Bitcoin’s improvement proposal repository over what was described as a conflict of interest in his handling of BIP-110.

The dispute traces back to Bitcoin Core dropping its old limit on OP_RETURN data, which let more non-monetary content, including Ordinals and Runes, fill blocks that BIP-110 supporters wanted reserved for payments.

That disagreement has since split Bitcoin’s online community into camps, exemplified by how one X user, Robin Seyr, called BLAKE2b hostile in the same way Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Bitcoin SV (BSV) were viewed, while another poster, Luke Mikic, described BIP-110 as an attempt to fix bugs introduced by Taproot rather than an attack on Bitcoin at all.

The post Ripple CTO Emeritus: BIP-110 Vote Loss Doesn’t Justify New Chain appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has accused “entrenched incumbents” of lobbying against the CLARITY Act, arguing that established financial players are trying to stop crypto companies from competing in US financial services.

His comments frame the fight over the bill as a contest between traditional firms protecting their position and crypto businesses seeking clearer rules.

Armstrong Puts Competition at Center of CLARITY Fight

Armstrong said the Trump administration came to power after millions of Americans felt “disenfranchised” by the previous administration’s approach to crypto.

He pointed to Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign promise to remove former SEC Chair Gary Gensler, recalling the reaction when Trump said at a Bitcoin conference that he would fire Gensler “on day one.”

He then ran through what he sees as progress since Trump took office: an executive order calling for clearer crypto rules, the appointment of SEC Chair Paul Atkins and CFTC Chair Mike Selig, and passage of the GENIUS Act for stablecoins. The CLARITY Act, Armstrong said, is the next piece.

“Make no mistake, there are people out there actively fighting against this,” Armstrong said. “There are entrenched incumbents who don’t want competition from crypto companies that would provide better financial services.”

He went further, alleging that some of those firms are “actively lobbying against it, trying to kill it.” The Coinbase chief also singled out Senator Elizabeth Warren, saying she is among those seeking to stop the legislation. His argument comes as the bill approaches a September 15 Senate vote on a motion to proceed.

As CryptoPotato reported previously, Armstrong had earlier said on August 21 that regulatory clarity was coming either through Congress or through action by the SEC and CFTC. He pointed to September 15 and 16 as possible dates for that development.

The Senate needs 60 votes for cloture, while Republicans hold 53 seats. That means if all of them support the measure, it would still leave them needing at least seven additional votes from Democrats or independents.

Furthermore, the bill still faces disputes over ethics rules, anti-money laundering provisions, and whether crypto companies can offer rewards on customer stablecoin holdings.

Banks Remain a Point of Tension

The banking industry’s concerns over stablecoin rewards sit close to Armstrong’s competition argument. The provision has drawn resistance from traditional lenders, who say such products could pull deposits away from banks.

That dispute helps explain why the CLARITY debate is about more than deciding which regulator handles crypto. The legislation would establish federal rules for digital assets, including how tokens are classified and where SEC and CFTC responsibilities begin and end.

With all that going on, Armstrong’s message is direct: the bill should pass because consumers and crypto firms need clearer rules, while established financial companies should not be able to block competitors through lobbying.

“It’s time to get the Clarity Act, which will protect consumers, over the finish line,” he wrote on X. “There’s something in it for everyone: banks, law enforcement, crypto companies, and most importantly the American people.”

The post Brian Armstrong: ‘Incumbents’ Are Trying to Kill Crypto Competition appeared first on CryptoPotato.

DeFi tokens have climbed nearly 38% since August 17 as investors reassess how US crypto policy could affect protocol revenue and token value.

SoSoValue says the rally is moving DeFi closer to a market where fees, buybacks and on-chain activity can play a larger role in how tokens are valued.

Policy Shift and Protocol Revenue Behind the Rally

In a post on X, SoSoValue said its DeFi sector index, $DEFI.ssi, rose from 0.3616 on August 17 to around 0.498 after reaching 0.511, for a cumulative gain of about 37.7%.

The move came alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum’s recovery and broader short covering, but the research firm argues that investors are also reassessing whether mature DeFi protocols can return more of their revenue to tokenholders.

That issue has limited DeFi valuations for years. Protocols could generate substantial trading fees, lending income, and other revenue while tokenholders had little direct claim on those economics.

Fee distributions and buybacks could also create securities-law concerns in the US, leaving many protocols reluctant to activate mechanisms that tie revenue to their tokens. But that may be changing, considering that last week, the SEC proposed its “Regulation Crypto Assets” framework, which includes exemptions and a conditional safe harbor for certain crypto-asset offerings.

Under the proposal, once a project has completed or permanently stopped the essential managerial work it had promised, its token may no longer remain part of an investment contract.

The Senate’s CLARITY Act draft goes further for DeFi, with protections for noncontrolling developers, validators, node operators, oracle providers and self-custody wallet software.

That draft also leaves room for rewards linked to trading, staking, governance, and liquidity provision. However, it still needs 60 votes in the Senate, while the SEC proposal is subject to public comment, but according to SoSoValue, markets are already assigning more confidence to the direction of US policy, even though legal certainty is still not there.

Revenue and Buybacks Give DeFi Tokens a Different Valuation Case

When you consider protocol revenue, the case becomes even more interesting, with Uniswap generating about $7.18 million during the past 30 days, followed by PancakeSwap at $5.16 million, Jupiter at $4.69 million, Aave at $4.12 million, and Aerodrome at $4.11 million.

Several of these protocols now have mechanisms that connect those economics to their tokens. For example, Hyperliquid uses part of trading fees to buy HYPE, Uniswap has linked revenue to UNI burns, and Jupiter allocates 50% of protocol fees to JUP purchases. PancakeSwap also uses part of its fees for CAKE buybacks and burns.

Meanwhile, Ethena has proposed an even larger allocation. Once USDe reaches its stated supply threshold, 95% of net revenue paid to the foundation across its three core business lines would go towards ENA buybacks.

According to SoSoValue, the next phase depends on whether those protocol revenues keep rising and whether tokenholders can get a larger share of it.

The post DeFi Sector Jumps 38% as US Policy Shift Unlocks Token Value Capture appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Crypto analyst Sykodelic says Bitcoin has now cleared roughly 80% of the technical conditions needed to confirm that its recent low is in, with the final answer likely to arrive in the next few days as the weekly and monthly candles close.

Whether BTC can close above $82,700 in that window will decide if the bottom has locked in for good or if there is still room for one more drop toward $75,000 first.

Where the Confirmation Case Stands

In a post on August 28, Sykodelic laid out which boxes have already been checked. For one, Bitcoin has reclaimed the $67,000 local structure level and the $74,400 higher-timeframe structure level.

It has also moved back above its daily 200 SMA and EMA, reclaimed its weekly 50 EMA, and pushed its daily RSI above 85, something the analyst says never happens during a bear-market bounce.

What is still missing is a weekly close above the 50 SMA at $82,000, a weekly close above the Supertrend line at $79,000, a higher low set above $82,700, and a monthly close above $76,463.

“Bitcoin has put in 80% of the data needed to confirm the low,” Sykodelic wrote. “However, for this low to be undeniable, we need to close above $82,700.”

The analyst mapped out two paths from here: a push back above $82,000 this week could send price toward $90,000 quickly, while chopping below the aforementioned $82,700 could mean there’s still one more leg down to around $75,000 to go before that level eventually gets taken out.

In another post, the analyst added that he’d seen another bottom signal. Short-term holder MVRV Bollinger Bands have entered an overheated zone for the first time since November 2024. He pointed out that similar readings appeared near the ends of the 2018 and 2022 bear markets and described the latest reading as the third-largest in nine years.

He also described the broader setup as healthy on multiple fronts, with funding rates having eased even as prices pushed higher, open interest cooling off and stabilizing instead of piling on leverage, and the Coinbase premium turning positive for the first time in three and a half months. Additionally, spot volume has stayed strong throughout.

How We Got Here

Bitcoin broke above $65,000 roughly two weeks ago, as CryptoPotato reported, then ran to $70,000 within hours and touched almost $80,000 by that Friday before slipping to $75,500 over the weekend.

It found buyers there, climbed past $81,000 for the first time since mid-May, dipped back under $78,000, and has since recovered to trade just under $79,000. At the time of writing, the primary crypto was up by slightly over 1% in 24 hours and more than 5% across seven days, per CoinGecko data. It was also up nearly 24% over 30 days, although it is still about 36% below its October 2025 all-time high.

If you are interested in learning more about the current market rally and a major Bitcoin protection development, check out the video below.

The post These Four Signals Could Confirm if Bitcoin’s Low Is Locked In: Analyst appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin (BTC) is hovering near $80,000 with a $6.36 billion Deribit options expiry due today.

With roughly 81,000 contracts set to expire and max pain at $69,000, the setup could leave the OG cryptocurrency vulnerable to large moves as traders close, roll or hedge positions.

Bitcoin Options Expiration Puts $6.36B at the Center of Friday’s Trading

That expiry carries a 0.85 put/call ratio, meaning there are slightly more call contracts than puts. Calls become more prominent from about $66,000, with sizeable positions around $70,000, $72,000, $74,000 to $75,500, and $78,500 to $80,500.

Max-pain at the $69,000 level is the price at which the combined payout to option holders would theoretically be lowest. It does not mean Bitcoin will fall there, and dealer hedging can sometimes create a temporary pull toward that level as expiry approaches, although it is more a reference point than a firm magnet.

This settlement arrives after Bitcoin added more than $16,000 in less than a week, moving from a break above $65,000 to more than $81,000 before pulling back. CoinGecko data at the time of writing put Bitcoin about $300 below the $80,000 level, with the asset having gained slightly more than 1% in 24 hours, 6% over seven days, and 25% across the last month.

The options event is seen as capable of producing “sharp price swings” in either direction. If BTC holds near $80,000 or climbs, call holders stand to benefit, and dealer hedging could add buy pressure. If the selling takes hold, hedges could move the other way and deepen a decline toward $70,000 or below. But a quieter outcome is also possible if Bitcoin stays between roughly $75,000 and $80,000 while positions are closed or rolled.

Short Covering Leaves Bitcoin Rally Facing Test

Bitcoin’s latest move is also being questioned on the demand side. As CryptoPotato reported earlier, QCP Research said part of BTC’s recent rise came from short covering, with open interest falling as prices climbed. ETF inflows were nearing the 95th percentile of the past year, providing spot demand, but QCP warned that the rally could become fragile if short covering fades without enough new buying.

That leaves Friday’s expiry as a near-term test of an already extended move, although the options data does not predict where Bitcoin will settle.

Meanwhile, if you want to know more about BTC’s latest move alongside what the current RSI reading suggests, take a look at this video.

The post Bitcoin Rally Faces a Massive $6.36B Options Expiry Test Today appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Evernorth said on August 27 that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had declared its registration statement effective, moving its proposed merger with Armada Acquisition Corp. II closer to completion.

The development puts the XRP treasury company one step closer to a Nasdaq listing, although shareholders still need to approve the deal before it can close.

Evernorth Moves Closer to Nasdaq

The company announced that Armada Acquisition Corp. II shareholders will vote on the proposed business combination on September 30, 2026. Closing remains subject to that vote and other customary conditions.

Evernorth CEO Asheesh Birla said the company plans to enter public markets as blockchain utility grows, adding that it expects institutional finance to increasingly be built on-chain. “Evernorth is designed to accelerate XRP’s role in that work,” he noted in the announcement.

The effective registration statement follows a process that started publicly in March when Evernorth filed its Form S-4 in connection with its planned combination with Armada II, a special purpose acquisition company sponsored by Arrington Capital.

As CryptoPotato reported at the time, the filing provided the first detailed look at Evernorth’s plan to give public-market investors exposure to XRP through an actively managed treasury. The company said then that it had raised more than $1 billion in gross proceeds from institutional and strategic investors, including Ripple, SBI Holdings, Pantera Capital, Kraken, and Arrington Capital.

The latest filing moves the transaction beyond the SEC review stage, but it does not mean the merger has already closed. If shareholders approve the deal and the remaining conditions are satisfied, the combined firm is expected to become publicly traded on Nasdaq under the ticker XRPN, subject to exchange approval.

What the SEC Decision Changes

The registration statement becoming effective removes one major procedural hurdle, but as pointed out before, the shareholder vote remains ahead.

Evernorth’s March filing described the proposed transaction as a combination involving it, Armada II, and Ripple. Under the agreement, holders of company units and Armada stock would receive shares in the resulting public company, subject to the terms and limitations set out in the transaction document.

The proposed structure is also different from simply launching an XRP-focused fund. Evernorth is being organized as a public company whose strategy centers on holding and managing XRP. That gives investors exposure through corporate equity rather than direct ownership of the underlying token.

For XRP holders, the more interesting question may come after the merger. Evernorth, as said earlier, has raised more than $1 billion for its treasury strategy and has said it wants to build what it expects to be Nasdaq’s largest publicly traded XRP treasury company, and the community will be waiting to see whether that translates into sustained XRP demand or meaningful activity on the XRP Ledger.

At the time of writing, the fifth-largest cryptocurrency was trading just above $1.40, up almost 10% over one week and nearly 32% in the last 30 days.

The post XRP Treasury Giant Evernorth Moves Closer to Nasdaq Debut After SEC Milestone appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Machi Big Brother proposed a $1 million buyout of Friends.Tech on August 27, offering to acquire the stalled project from Racer and Paradigm and relaunch its FRIEND token.

The proposal sent FRIEND sharply higher, but the move also revived questions about Machi’s own heavy losses on the token and whether his plan can bring the project back to life.

Machi Offers $1M as FRIEND Trading Activity Explodes

In a post on Wednesday, Machi Big Brother wrote that Friend.Tech was trading at less than $300,000 in market capitalization before making his offer.

“I’m offering a 1 mil usd buyout offer to Racer and @paradigm. We can CTO relaunch $FRIEND,” he wrote.

The proposal quickly changed the token’s trading activity, with CoinGecko data showing FRIEND up more than 1,600% over 24 hours at the time of writing, with the token trading near $0.06. It had traded as low as $0.0025 during the previous 24 hours and reached roughly $0.10 at its high. In addition, trading volume had climbed to about $5.3 million over 24 hours, a 94,831% increase from the previous day.

Moves across other timeframes were even bigger, with the asset jumping by more than 2,600% from where it had been a week ago and almost 3,400% in 14 days. Across one month, it had gained nearly 3,300%, although the numbers are bound to change given ongoing volatility.

Machi’s offer comes with a sizable personal history involving FRIEND. According to Lookonchain, he previously spent about 5,200 ETH, worth $16.7 million at the time, to acquire aroud 11 million FRIEND. Those tokens had been worth only $500,000 when Lookonchain posted, leaving Machi with a loss exceeding $16 million.

There was another detail. Lookonchain noted that Machi had transferred the 11 million coins to wallet 0x3205 five days before announcing his $1 million offer. However, the crypto trader rejected any suggestion that he had sold the tokens, and described the receiving address as his “new fomo wallet.”

Friend.Tech’s Collapse Left FRIEND Vulnerable

Friend.Tech launched on Base on August 2023 and initially drew users with a system that allowed people to trade access to influencers’ feeds. But activity weakened considerably after its early success.

As CryptoPotato reported in September 2024, the development team then transferred control of Friend.Tech’s smart contract to Ethereum’s null address, preventing future changes to fee or functionality. The decision came as platform revenues had fallen dramatically, with reported fees reaching as little as $71.

FRIEND also suffered heavily during that decline, and even reached a new all-time low. Wednesday’s rally therefore needs to be viewed against a much larger collapse, as even that move still leaves the token over 98% below its all-time high.

Machi’s proposal now puts the project in an unusual position: a token that had almost disappeared from traders’ attention suddenly has millions of dollars in daily turnover, while the person proposing its revival has already lost millions on a past investment. Whether the bid becomes an actual acqusition remains to be seen.

The post FRIEND Explodes Over 1,600% After Machi Big Brother Proposes $1M Takeover appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Arthur Hayes has expanded his thesis for Flop Labs, an AI payment project he announced recently, arguing that AI agents need a form of money that can be exchanged directly for computing power rather than relying on dollars, Bitcoin, or conventional payment rails.

The idea is simple on paper but ambitious in practice: if AI agents become major consumers of computing power, he believes their money should be directly redeemable for the resources they actually use.

A Case for a Compute-Based Currency

Flop Labs laid out Hayes’ latest argument in a six-part thread on August 27, starting with a basic problem: there is no efficient spot market for turning money into a known quantity of compute over a known period.

That is important because AI agents have different spending needs than people. “Agents don’t eat. They consume floating-point operations,” Flop Labs wrote, referring to the calculations required to run AI models.

The argument follows that an agent’s money should be useful for the thing the agent actually consumes. Hayes’ view, as presented by Flop Labs, is that the currency capable of converting into compute on demand at a fair price could become the money used by an agent economy.

He also questioned whether stablecoins and tokenized cards are suited to that role, given that those systems are designed around institutions and users that have people, legal entities, and physical-world needs behind them. An autonomous agent has none of those things.

The proposed Flop Network is designed around that distinction. GPU operators would provide inference and receive FLOP, while validators would check the work cryptographically. Miners would also post a stake that could be lost if they submit false results. Agents would then pay for compute using the same token they hold, with the network providing proof that the requested work was delivered.

Per the project’s tokenomics, which are still preliminary, the FLOP supply should hit about 17.2 billion by year 10 of its existence, with no venture capital allocation or presale. The Genesis airdrop is listed at 3.5 billion tokens, including 1.5 billion for miners, 1.2 billion for agents, 310 million for validators, and 790 million for reserves and incentives. There’s also a planned testnet in the works, which is expected to run for about 90 days, with the source code public.

Connecting AI Debt to a Crypto Liquidity Bet

The other part of the thread is more familiar to anyone who has followed Hayes’ AI criticism. He has spent months calling AI investment a bubble, but he said the excess sits in data center debt and unprofitable hyperscaler shares, not in agentic technology itself.

For that reason, the BitMEX co-founder expects AI spending to slow down next year, then contract, forcing bailouts bigger than those seen in 2008, which he believes will push new money toward crypto, potentially sending Bitcoin toward $1 million.

Still, real-world usage is lagging the pitch, with analyst Jamie Coutts recently finding that settlement volume on Coinbase’s x402 agent payment protocol had gone down 93% this year. While he called it a “reality check” for those building in the space, he expects volume to once again pick up in the fourth quarter.

The post This Is Why Arthur Hayes Thinks AI Agents Need Their Own Money appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin (BTC) has pushed its daily relative strength index (RSI) above 85, a level crypto analyst Sykodelic says has never appeared during a bear market, after the asset reached above $81,000 this week.

The reading is being used to argue that the latest rally looks more like the opening of a new uptrend than a temporary bear-market bounce.

Bitcoin’s RSI Breaks a Historical Pattern

In a post on August 27, Sykodelic pointed to Bitcoin’s 10-year price history and argued that every time the daily RSI moved above 85, it either came near the top of a major uptrend or appeared at the beginning of one.

“Never in Bitcoin’s history has it ever tagged 85+ in a bear market,” the analyst wrote. “Even when Bitcoin was worth $10 in 2011 there was not a 1D RSI reading of 85+ in a bear market.”

However, he did acknowledge that the current move could become the first exception, but added, “But I doubt it.”

The analyst later described the price action as “vertical accumulation,” saying the current structure resembles November 2024, the last time Bitcoin’s daily RSI reached 85. The pattern starts with a move into overbought territory, followed by a rally that gives traders few entries. Price then works through resistance without large pullbacks, with a higher continuation while “everyone expects it to drop again.”

Derivatives activity has also picked up. Arab Chain reported earlier today that Bitcoin open interest on Binance reached about $9.54 billion, its highest level in three months, showing a clear return of activity and liquidity to the futures market.

According to the market watchers, an uptick in open interest coming at the same time that price is increasing could be a reflection of “growing confidence in the bullish trend.” However, it also raises liquidation risk if BTC reverses.

The Bull-Cycle Case Still Needs Confirmation

CryptoQuant recently offered a more cautious reading in an update published August 25, which showed its Bull Score had risen from 30 to 80, with eight out of 10 indicators in bullish territory, while apparent spot demand posted its fastest monthly increase since late December 2025. Spot and futures demand also rose together for the first time since early October of the same year.

CryptoQuant nevertheless set a condition for confirmation: Bitcoin needs a daily close above its 365-day moving average, currently near $83,000.

BTC’s rejection after crossing $81,000 also added another wrinkle, with the price falling by roughly $3,000 from that local high but remaining more than 22% higher on the week at the time.

The OG crypto was trading near $79,000 at the time of writing, having barely changed in 24 hours but still up nearly 14% in seven days, with a range stretching from about $69,000 to $81,000 in that time. Its 30-day gain stood at roughly 24%, but Bitcoin is still almost 38% below its October 2025 record of just over $126,000.

The post Bitcoin’s RSI Has Done This Only Near Major Bull Runs: Analyst appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin got its first known quantum-resistant transaction on mainnet today, mined through MARA’s private Slipstream mempool using a method called Quantum Safe Bitcoin, built by StarkWare’s Avihu Levy.

It closes a real gap in how Bitcoin protects funds in transit, without asking the network to change a single consensus rule, though even the people behind it call it a stopgap rather than a fix.

How Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Closes the Mempool Gap

Bitcoin held behind a hashed address, the P2PKH format most wallets use, is already considered safe from quantum attacks. The problem shows up the moment someone spends it.

Sending Bitcoin means revealing the wallet’s public key, and that key sits exposed in the mempool for roughly the ten minutes it takes to confirm, exactly the window a quantum computer could exploit.

Levy built Quantum Safe Bitcoin to close that window without touching consensus rules. The scheme modifies Binohash, a technique from BitVM creator Robin Linus, wrapping each transaction in a proof-of-work puzzle whose security rests on hash functions believed to resist quantum attacks rather than on the signature itself.

Levy first published the approach in an April paper, putting its security at around 118 bits under Shor’s algorithm, roughly half that under Grover’s, with an estimated extra cost of a few hundred dollars in GPU time.

It fits inside Bitcoin’s existing script limit, so no soft fork is needed, though it does require a non-standard transaction format that only private mempools like Slipstream will accept. MARA Foundation head Isabel Foxen Duke framed the mining of the transaction as a stopgap rather than an endorsement of private mempools long-term.

“We don’t believe private mempools are an appropriate long-term solution for Bitcoin quantum resistance,” she said, adding that MARA is willing to keep supporting Slipstream for break-glass cases while the network works toward a consensus-level change.

Levy credited StarkWare’s Tom Giladi with finishing the execution, building on earlier work from Linus and Ethan Heilman, but was careful to call the result “a research quirk and not the straightforward way for Bitcoin to become” quantum-ready.

Why the Rest of the Industry Is Racing on This

The urgency traces back to a Google paper from earlier this year, which found that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could break the private keys behind Ethereum’s 1,000 richest wallets in under nine days, as CryptoPotato reported in March.

Researchers at Project Eleven flagged the same mempool-stage vulnerability Quantum Safe Bitcoin is targeting, warning that funds could be intercepted from a transaction before it even clears. But Bitcoin developers have their own fix in the works too, including a proposal called BIP-361 that would freeze old, quantum-vulnerable addresses in stages, starting with new deposits and eventually blocking withdrawals.

Blockstream has taken a different route, running post-quantum signatures on its Liquid sidechain since April so users can opt into protection without waiting on Bitcoin’s own upgrade path.

The post First Quantum-Resistant Bitcoin Transaction Confirmed on Mainnet Without Protocol Change appeared first on CryptoPotato.

BlackRock has facilitated more than $5 billion in Bitcoin-for-ETF-share swaps from private wallets into its IBIT fund, after cutting the minimum size for such in-kind transactions to $1 million in July.

The shift gives investors a way to keep Bitcoin exposure while moving custody into a regulated ETF structure, with security concerns around self-custody adding to the appeal.

BlackRock Lowers Barrier for Bitcoin ETF Swaps

As noted in a report by Bloomberg, BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust first opened its in-kind creation process to private wallets with a $25 million minimum, a threshold that fell to $1 million in July.

IBIT’s total volume for these conversions has climbed past $5 billion, up from more than $3 billion when Bloomberg first reported on the trend last October. The process can take more than a week to complete, per Robbie Mitchnick, BlackRock’s head of digital assets, and inquiries are now coming in from clients both inside and outside the US.

Mitchnick tied the growth to security scares like kidnappings, ransom situations, and custody failures, saying those incidents “motivate them to make this switch for all or some of their holdings.”

Swapping Bitcoin for ETF shares also lets holders avoid triggering an immediate capital gains bill in many cases, since the BTC is exchanged rather than sold outright.

Bitwise has cut its own in-kind minimum from $100 million at launch to $50 million and now $3 million; chief investment officer Matt Hougan said the process now moves “more like a conveyor belt.”

At Morgan Stanley, in-kind conversions make up an estimated 5% to 7% of the roughly $560 million MSBT fund per the report, though global ETF head Ally Wallace noted: “there is a lengthy education process related to this type of transaction.” Meanwhile, 21Shares has averaged around $5 million per in-kind transaction over the past three months, according to capital markets head Alistair Perry.

The mechanism has also spread past Bitcoin, with Grayscale and VanEck now processing in-kind trades for Ethereum (ETH), and Bitwise handling them for both ETH and Solana (SOL).

At Grayscale, in-kind now accounts for 62% of gross Bitcoin creations and 63% of Ethereum creations, up from 28% and 57% respectively in March, the firm’s head of trading and capital markets, Krista Lynch, told the publication.

Just This One Bottleneck

There’s one major issue in the backend that’s still holding up such swaps. Every in-kind trade still has to pass through an authorized participant or market maker willing to take custody of the crypto, which adds cost and helps explain why the service began with the very largest holders.

But the encouraging news is that issuers expect minimums to keep falling as more intermediaries build that capacity.

All that is happening with BTC climbing back above $81,000 for the first time since May, with its spot ETFs pulling in more than $2.5 billion since August 17, to bring the entire month’s total so far to just over $3 billion. This marks the funds’ biggest inflows since October 2025, with a few trading days still to go before the month is done.

The post Bitcoin Whales Have Moved $5B Into BlackRock’s IBIT: Here’s Why appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin (BTC) slipped back below $80,000 after testing the level again, with XWIN Japan pointing to profit-taking by existing holders as a major barrier on August 26.

The next move may depend less on another brief test of $80,000 and more on whether fresh demand can absorb units being sold by investors sitting on gains.

Profit-Taking Puts BTC’s $80K Test Under Pressure

XWIN Japan noted that nearly every Bitcoin investor group has returned to profit as the cryptocurrency approached $80,000. Its unrealized PnL reading stood at 21.1 for long-term holders, 13.4 for short-term holders, 13.9 for investors holding for one day to one month, and 5.3 for the newest buyers. That creates a familiar problem during a fast recovery: more profitable holders have a reason to sell.

The post also pointed to the SOPR Ratio, which compares profit-taking by long-term holders with that of short-term holders. The ratio briefly reached 1.4 as BTC neared $80,000, suggesting long-term holders were realizing profits at a higher relative rate. However, it has since fallen to 0.93, meaning short-term holders are now showing stronger realized performance relative to long-term holders.

As per XWIN, any sustained breakout above the $80,000 mark, coupled with rising ETF and spot demand, might be one way through which Bitcoin can reach the $88,000-$90,000 price point. However, it pointed out that the $75,000-$76,000 mark is the level to pay attention to if prices decline further. Failure at this level may make it difficult for the short-term holders to earn a profit, which, in XWIN’s opinion, could speed up the correction.

“The key question is not whether Bitcoin can briefly touch $80,000, but whether new demand can absorb selling from profitable holders,” the research firm concluded.

Momentum Has Cooled After a Huge Weekly Move

Another analyst, BorisD, also pointed to fading buying pressure at higher prices, noting that Binance’s volume delta, which tracks the difference between aggressive buying and selling, fell from $1.17 during Bitcoin’s move from $63,000 to $70,000 to about $350 million near $80,000.

The other major exchanges showed much flatter readings. BorisD argued that the market may need a period of consolidation before attempting another breakout. But the backdrop remains more supportive than it was a week ago.

As CryptoPotato reported, BTC climbed from below $65,000 on August 19 to above $81,000, helped by Treasury buyback plans, renewed ETF demand and more than $4 billion in short liquidations.

Nearly $2 billion entered US spot Bitcoin ETFs over five days, while Treasury buybacks of longer-dated debt were increased from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation.

Bitcoin was trading around $79,000 at the time of writing, down 2% over 24 hours but still up 23% in the last seven days and 21% over the month, even after a year that has left it down close to 28% and about 37% below its all-time high of over $126,000, set last October.

The post Bitcoin Could Hit $90K – But This Major Test Comes First, Analysts Say appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin (BTC) has entered a new bull market, according to Arthur Hayes, who argues that US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is preparing to create more dollar liquidity through Treasury market operations.

The thesis rests on a familiar argument of his: when policymakers inject liquidity to keep Treasury yields under control, Bitcoin and other risk assets tend to benefit.

Hayes Points to Bessent’s Treasury Strategy

In an August 25 essay, Hayes compared Bessent with his predecessor, Janet Yellen, arguing that both have faced pressure to keep borrowing costs under control while the US government continues spending. He focused on the 10-year Treasury yield, which, as he put it, is the most important price in US financial markets.

According to the BitMEX co-founder, regulators tend to get nervous whenever the yield on the 10-year Treasury is near 5% because higher yields tend to increase the cost of mortgages and borrowing for corporations and consumers, which could have an impact on the economy.

He went back to December 2023, when Yellen boosted the issuance of Treasury bills compared to long-duration Treasury bonds, allowing money market fund balances to move from the Fed’s Reserve Repo program to T-bills.

Hayes estimates that the RRP balance fell from roughly $2.5 trillion to $100 billion by the time Bessent took office in January 2025. He also described the resulting $2.4 trillion movement as a liquidity injection that flowed into financial markets that saw Bitcoin and the Nasdaq 100 both rallying while the 10-year yield moved away from 5%, even though the Federal Reserve kept rates near 5.3% and continued shrinking its balance sheet.

Bessent is now attempting something similar through the Treasury’s debt-management tools. Recall that on August 19, he announced that buybacks would increase from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation. Ten-year yields initially fell, while Bitcoin rallied over the following days. However, the effect did not last, and by the following trading session, the 10-year yield had climbed back above its pre-announcement level.

And that’s why Hayes is contending that the Treasury’s planned purchases are too small relative to the roughly $40 trillion US debt stock.

“Bitcoin ripped off its lows after Yellen announced her money printing scheme, and I argue it will do the same after Bessent reestablished his conviction to follow in his predecessors’ footsteps and materially increase the pace of dollar liquidity creation,” he wrote.

Why Hayes Expects More Liquidity

The crypto investor laid out three paths for Bessent: cutting spending, which is unlikely given upcoming elections; an aggressive, Bank of Japan-style pledge to buy unlimited bonds if yields top 5%; or, most likely in his view, smaller and more frequent buyback increases unless volatility rises fast.

He also sees another possible source of liquidity in the Treasury General Account (TGA), which is at approximately $1 trillion, with a CNBC report suggesting that the Treasury Secretary could drain the TGA to fund additional buybacks.

All this is happening with Bitcoin having already moved considerably higher, after recently crossing $80,000 for the first time since May. While writing this piece, the OG crypto had gone back closer to $79,000 than $80,000, although the price still reflected a jump of more than 23% in seven days and slightly less than that across one month, but it remains about 37% below its October 2025 all-time high record of over $126,000.

The post Arthur Hayes Predicts More Dollar Liquidity that Could Push Bitcoin’s Rally Further appeared first on CryptoPotato.

An analyst has claimed that large Coinbase-linked holders are pinning XRP’s price with the buy and sell walls on both sides of the market.

Their thesis landed as the Ripple token hovered near $1.51, holding a tight range after a rally that more than doubled the asset’s price from its early-August low.

Whale Walls and a Split Order Book

CW posted a chart showing XRP consolidating between roughly $1.52 and $1.53, with heavy sell orders stacked above $1.70 and $2.00 and buy orders clustered just under $1.52.

“It is Coinbase whales that are controlling the price of XRP,” the account wrote, arguing that the walls are not there to push price up or down but to hold it in place, and tying the standoff specifically to US trading desks not yet ready for a rally.

They followed up later with data on futures positioning, suggesting the setup for a rally is building even though price has not moved.

The data showed whale long/short ratios on Binance and OKX both leaning bullish, with OKX’s whale position ratio at 8.16, but smart money sentiment stayed split: extremely bullish on OKX, extremely bearish on Bybit, and merely bearish on Binance, which was an improvement from a more bearish reading a day earlier. Taker volume was close to even, 48.74% long against 51.26% short.

In another post, CW said XRP had broken through its point of control and main resistance zone, with the sell wall now above price looking small by comparison.

ETF flow added another data point, with a net inflow of $13.82 million across XRP ETFs, split between $8.25 million on Bitwise’s fund, now at $551 million cumulative, $4.01 million into Franklin’s XRPZ, at $438 million cumulative, and $1.57 million on Canary’s XRPC fund.

Combined AUM sits at $1.441 billion, and total XRP ETF volume, spot and otherwise, topped $207 million for the day.

How XRP Got Here

CryptoPotato reported that XRP surged more than 65%, raising its market cap above $94 billion and briefly taking the position of the fourth-largest cryptocurrency ahead of BNB, although it later fell back to fifth.

The token saw a rally from below $1.00 to nearly $1.70 in under 72 hours, its highest level since January, before retracing, with market watchers like EGRAG CRYPTO considering $1.65 to $1.70 the level where its fate will be decided.

Diana, another trader active on X, laid out a wave count putting $1.79 as the first target if XRP clears resistance between $1.53 and $1.64, followed by $2.58 and $2.89 after a pullback toward $1.27 to $1.30.

At the time of writing, XRP was trading around $1.51, which is still a more than 50% jump in seven days. The token’s trading volume also went up by more than 11% from Monday’s numbers to hit $5.9 billion. However, it is still about 59% below its all-time high of 3.65, set in July 2025.

The post The Real Reason XRP Is Stuck: Analyst Blames Massive Trading Walls on Coinbase appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Michael Saylor’s Strategy swung an unrealized loss of more than $9.5 billion to a paper profit above $4.7 billion in just seven days.

The reversal follows Bitcoin’s climb from the low $60,000s to above $80,000 over the same week, turning the largest corporate BTC holder’s balance sheet from red to green.

The Numbers Behind the Swing

Strategy’s own dashboard puts its holdings at 840,477 BTC, bought at an average price of $75,385, a position that was down more than $9.5 billion a week earlier and is now up more than $4.7 billion.

The firm has kept building its cash position and has not bought or sold any Bitcoin over the stretch. However, it did sell 18.26 million shares of MSTR for $2.01 billion, with $1.59 billion moved into a second reserve, USD Cash, that Strategy says can be used for future Bitcoin purchases. Its regular USD reserve also grew to $5.1 billion.

It also repurchased $136 million of its STRC preferred shares, whose price keeps climbing toward its $100 par value ($97.21 at last check), with its last Bitcoin move being a sale on August 10, when it shed 1,690 BTC.

Saylor addressed the shift on X, writing, “Bitcoin is not abandoning its principles. It is transcending its prejudices.” The line followed a lengthy essay he published arguing that the OG cryptocurrency’s move into exchange-traded funds, corporate treasuries and regulated custody should not be treated as a betrayal of the network’s original purpose, but as a natural stage of its growth.

Bitcoin’s Broader Move

At the time of writing, BTC was trading above $80,000 for the first time since mid-May, tapping a multi-month high above $81,000, according to CoinGecko data. The asset was up roughly 25% in a week and about 4% in 24 hours.

The rally wiped out more than $260 million in short positions within four hours, pushing daily liquidations to about $650 million, with Bitcoin accounting for at least half of that amount.

Elsewhere, analyst Matthew Hyland has pointed to $83,000 and then $118,000 as the next levels to watch. Another market watcher, Will Clemente, noted that Bitcoin has now closed above its 20-, 50-, and 200-day exponential moving averages against the dollar, gold, the S&P 500, and the Nasdaq 100, something it had not done in months.

Other coins moved with it, including Ethereum, which has gone above $2,500 after gaining 32% in the week, and XRP, which also pushed past $1.50. Meanwhile, Solana broke back above $100 for the first time in months and was up more than 7.5% on the day.

Additionally, a chart shared by trader Mark Harvey put Bitcoin’s ten-year returns at 13,491%, just ahead of Nvidia’s 13,428%, and way better than every other entry on the list, including Tesla, Apple and Amazon.

The post Bitcoin Rally Takes Strategy From $9.5B Underwater to $4.7B Paper Profit in 7 Days appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin (BTC) spent this past week ripping from the low $60,000s to just under $80,000, and to trader Nonzee, none of it looks like conviction.

They are calling the move a trap built on forced buying rather than real demand, and say the next leg is down, not up.

The Case for a Distribution Phase, Not a New Bull Run

Nonzee’s argument starts with the size of the squeeze, where more than $3.1 billion in short positions were wiped out during the run, and Bitcoin alone was responsible for roughly $1.65 billion of that figure. In their view, that is what actually pushed the price higher, not a change in sentiment.

“That was not a reversal. It was a liquidity squeeze,” they wrote.

The trader tied the timing to two catalysts: Trump putting the CLARITY Act back in the headlines and the Treasury Department increasing its long-term bond buybacks. Both, they argue, forced shorts out and pulled fresh longs into a market that was already stretched thin.

Their read on where things stand now is that the $70,000 fair value gap, a pricing gap left behind during an earlier fast move that traders watch for a return visit, has been filled, the short squeeze has run its course, and FOMO buying is happening in real time.

Next will come distribution, then the selloff, in their framing, with a downside path running from $77,000 to $67,000, then $55,000, before a final leg down to between $48,000 and $45,000.

Bitcoin was trading around $78,000 at the time of writing, up roughly 2% on the day and about 22% over the past week, according to CoinGecko. It has swung between $76,000 and $79,000 in the last 24 hours alone. Still, the OG crypto remains 39% below its all-time high of around $126,000, set back in October 2025, and it is still down 33% on a one-year basis despite the bounce.

A Choppy Few Days Either Way

Whether or not Nonzee’s call plays out, the past several days have already been rough on traders in both directions. BTC briefly touched almost $80,000 on Friday before slipping to around $75,500 over the weekend, as CryptoPotato reported, with the drop coinciding with reports that market maker Wintermute had built a sizable short position on Hyperliquid. During that stretch, altcoins fared worse, with ETH down 5% and XRP off by more than 6%.

The bounce also pushed the Fear and Greed Index to its highest reading since last October’s crash, a jump that has some drawing comparisons to the conditions right before that selloff wiped out billions in leveraged positions.

Elsewhere, HYPE printed a new all-time high above $82 even as BTC cooled off, and separately, data from analyst nocoffeenobrain shows open interest climbing from around $22 billion to nearly $25 billion during the rally, a slower pace than the move in price itself, which points to traders adding positions cautiously rather than piling on leverage all at once.

The post Bitcoin’s $80K Rally Is a Trap, Analyst Warns of $45K Drop appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Ethereum (ETH) could reach $20,000 in the next few years, according to Credible Crypto.

The premise for his thesis lies in ETH’s trading range of five years, weak relative performance vis-à-vis Bitcoin (BTC), as well as a potential rotation into higher-risk assets.

Analyst Sees ETH Breaking 5-Year Range

As explained by the analyst in Sunday’s episode of the No Bs Crypto podcast, ETH has been trading in a range of around $1,500 to $5,000 for about five years now, the token having touched both ends several times in the process, forming what he considers a large higher timeframe range.

Additionally, while Bitcoin is trading above the 2021 high, Ethereum is lagging behind, and according to Credible Crypto, the ETH/BTC ratio has reached such levels that it can allow ETH to catch up with BTC.

His basic target is $10,000. He argued that doubling Ethereum’s previous range high near $5,000 would produce that level, while a larger range expansion could push ETH toward $8,000 and $9,000 even before we consider other factors.

The $20,000 target will rely heavily on Bitcoin’s price. If the BTC price stands at about $80,000, where it is currently close to, with ETH/BTC recovering back to its earlier high of 0.156, then Credible says Ethereum will hit above $12,000.

“Now, if we take a more optimistic scenario with Bitcoin at $100K, that gives us over $15,000 Ethereum,” Credible told his host Kyren. “And if we take the most realistic scenario, in my opinion, the Bitcoin highs at $126K will be broken and we’ll actually trade above those levels. Now we’re pushing $20K Ethereum and above.”

The crypto trader also pointed to ETH’s higher risk compared to Bitcoin, with that, in his view, creating room for the former to deliver a larger return during a bull cycle. But his technical case rests on Ethereum defending a higher-timeframe low near $1,388.

He believes a break below that level would invalidate the bullish structure. However, he considers a move below $1,500 increasingly unlikely and estimates there’s maybe a 90% chance that ETH does not return below $1,900.

Altcoins Could Follow Ethereum Higher

The latest market data gives the bullish case some context, as CoinGecko data shows ETH above $2,400 at the time of writing, up 3.5% in 24 hours and about 30% in seven days. In addition, it has gained more than 32% over 30 days but is still about 50% below its all-time high.

ETH’s recent double-digit one-day pump has also attracted historical comparison, with market watcher Jamie Coutts noting that several similar upticks in the past helped push up ETH prices as much as 60% higher within 180 days.

Other altcoins have also started moving faster, and that segment added $215 billion between August 19 and 22, pushing its total market cap above $1 trillion, with the share of Binance-listed altcoins trading above their 200-day moving average also rising from 15% to 56%.

According to Credible Crypto, some assets with stronger fundamentals could outperform ETH if the cycle continues, potentially delivering even bigger returns if Ethereum goes up tenfold from $2,000 to $20,000, as he predicts.

“I’ve talked about end-of-cycle targets for those altcoins, and those targets are 30, 40, 50x higher than where they trade today,” he said. “There’s no doubt in my mind that those levels will be met.”

The post Bitcoin’s Next Rally Could Send Ethereum Toward $20K: Analyst appeared first on CryptoPotato.

This week, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) finally revealed why he chose to face US prosecutors during his AML violation case despite holding UAE citizenship that could have kept him from the grasp of US law enforcement.

His account offered a rare explanation of his thinking before a four-month prison sentence and the end of his leadership at Binance.

CZ Says Running From the Case Was Never an Option

Zhao talked about the matter in a fireside chat with Anthony Scaramucci on August 19 at the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium in Jackson Hole, stating that he had become a citizen of the United Arab Emirates approximately six months before the Binance case became public and that the country has no extradition treaty with the USA.

He could have stayed in the Middle East and avoided US courts altogether, but he said that option didn’t feel honorable to him.

“Actually, I was granted citizenship of the UAE, but I didn’t want to leverage that,” Zhao explained. “That’s just the wrong thing to do.”

According to him, resolving the case one way or the other was better for himself, Binance, BNB holders, and the wider crypto industry.

“When the US government is going after you, you don’t dodge it,” declared the former Binance CEO. “You shouldn’t be hiding or running away from it.”

But on the other hand, Zhao had quite different expectations about the punishment he would face. He told Scaramucci that he never expected to get imprisoned since his case had no fraud, just one Bank Secrecy Act violation.

CZ also compared his sentence with that of former BitMEX executive Arthur Hayes, who received six months of home confinement after pleading guilty to one count of violating the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to establish adequate AML and KYC at his exchange.

Zhao, meanwhile, got four months in federal prison for fundamentally the same personal offense. And while that was still a much shorter jail term than the three years the Justice Department had recommended, it was certainly more than the no-prison-time his legal team had asked for.

“I think I’m still the single only person that went to jail for a single violation of a Banking Secrecy Act,” he remarked.

A Case That Ended With Prison, Then a Pardon

In the interview, CZ also reflected on Binance’s position at the time of the case. He pointed to its status as the world’s largest crypto platform while stressing that it was neither US-based nor China-based.

“We’re not US-based, we’re not China-based, but look Chinese, so kind of an easy target,” he said. “I don’t blame them. It is what it is.”

The 48-year-old stepped down from his position at the helm of Binance after the exchange agreed to a $4.3 billion settlement with US authorities.

He himself also paid a $50 million personal penalty before heading to the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Lompoc II in Santa Barbara, California, to serve out his sentence, leaving the facility near the end of September, 2024.

A year after that, President Donald Trump gave him a full and unconditional pardon.

The post CZ Reveals Why He Didn’t Use UAE Citizenship to Avoid US Charges appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Altcoins could deliver returns ranging from 10x to 1000x after the latest market pullback, according to analyst Matthew Hyland.

He compared the June sell-off with March 2020 and argued that many alts could recover within months rather than years.

Hyland Compares June Altcoin Pullback to 2020

Hyland made the comparison on August 21, arguing that June was essentially an altcoin equivalent of the March 2020 market collapse. He pointed to Ethereum, Cardano, and other tokens as examples of assets that could deliver outsized gains if his comparison plays out.

“IMO you will see 10x-1000x returns from the maximum opportunity over the past few months the same way you did from the March 2020 prices,” the analyst wrote.

He later argued that many altcoins could fully recover within only a few months, with his reasoning resting partly on the speed of previous market recoveries rather than a specific price target.

The market watcher used the S&P 500 as an example. He pointed out that the index took 13 weeks to recover from its March 2025 low by June 2025.

“I don’t know when but when it does start it won’t take years, it will be just a few months,” he wrote.

Other traders were also incredibly bullish, including CrediBULL Crypto, who claimed that the latest move had confirmed a macro bottom, with Bitcoin potentially heading above $100,000 and ETH above $3,500.

Sykodelic made a similar case, stating that BTC had “sliced through the 200D SMA like butter” on its way toward $75,000. The trader also pointed to previous Bitcoin moves after similar breaks, citing gains of 124% in 2019, 724% in 2020, and 511% in 2023.

However, that view comes with an important condition. According to Sykodelic, a fall below $65,000 would weaken the argument that the bottom is in.

Bitcoin Rally Gives Altcoins Room to Catch Up

The latest price data shows why traders are revisiting altcoin recovery scenarios. At the time of writing, Bitcoin was above $76,000, up nearly 9% over 24 hours and more than 19% in seven days. Ethereum was near $2,400, having gained 5% in 24 hours and 26% over the week.

Several major altcoins have moved even faster, for example, XRP, which was around $1.32, up almost 18% in one day and about 29% on the weekly chart. Bitcoin Cash also gained 18% over 24 hours, while Dogecoin rose 12%.

The current run traces back to a Wednesday rally that took BTC from the low $60,000s past $70,000 and eventually to where it sits now, its highest level since May.

That move was helped along by the US Treasury doubling the size of its liquidity-support buybacks for longer-dated government debt and a White House meeting where President Donald Trump pushed for the CLARITY Act and floated further government Bitcoin purchases.

Hyland expects the next phase to bring more attention to altcoins. According to him, the rally could become “the most hated rally in Crypto history” because many traders had concluded that crypto was finished.

The post Altcoins Could See Up to 1,000x Returns Post-Pullback, Analyst Predicts appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Justin Sun said Thursday that a California federal judge ruled his individual claims against World Liberty Financial will stay in open court, rejecting the Trump-linked project’s push to force the dispute into private arbitration and seal the case from public view.

The ruling keeps alive one of crypto’s messiest ongoing legal fights, one that has grown from a token-freezing dispute into a broader case questioning whether World Liberty and its USD1 stablecoin can actually cover what they owe.

Sun Says Individual Claims Will Stay Public

Sun made the comments in a post on X after his counsel appeared in federal court in San Francisco to oppose World Liberty Financial’s request for arbitration and sealed proceedings.

“Today, my counsel appeared in California federal court to oppose World Liberty Financial’s efforts to force our dispute into secret arbitration proceedings and seal documents from public view,” Sun wrote. “The Court agreed with us.”

According to the crypto entrepreneur, the judge ruled that all of his individual claims will remain in open court. The judge also rejected World Liberty’s position that all company-related claims should be arbitrated, with the parties instead ordered to meet and confer over which of those claims should stay in court and which could proceed through arbitration.

Sun’s lawsuit dates back to April. He alleges that World Liberty froze his WLFI tokens, removed his governance rights, and threatened to burn the tokens. He is seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.

The dispute escalated after the former Grenada diplomat questioned the project’s control over its token contracts. As CryptoPotato reported back in April, blockchain researcher banteg had identified a blacklist function added to a later version of the WLFI contract, along with a “batch reallocation” feature.

In his X post, he wrote that he has since learned World Liberty built the same freeze-and-burn capability into its USD1 stablecoin and warned USD1 holders that the company has already shown a willingness to use those functions.

He also pointed to World Liberty depositing roughly 5 billion WLFI tokens, about half its treasury, as collateral on Dolomite, a lending platform co-founded by its own chief technology officer, to borrow at least $75 million in stablecoins, including its own USD1, a structure he said analysts have compared to the circular leverage that collapsed FTX.

Sun added that USD1’s reported $4 billion market cap is user collateral, not money that could be used to pay a court judgment, and stated that he has seen no sign that World Liberty holds enough capital to cover a claim worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Dispute Has Widened Since April

The legal fight followed a governance dispute over more than 62 billion WLFI tokens, with Sun objecting back in April to a proposal that would place different groups of locked tokens under new vesting terms, as well as the alleged existence of a separate control structure involving an anonymous guardian address and a 3-of-5 multisignature group.

He argued that holders who rejected the proposal could face indefinite restrictions and called the arrangement “a dictatorship wearing the mask of a DAO.” World Liberty rejected his accusations, telling him on X:

“We have the contracts. We have the evidence. We have the truth. See you in court pal.”

The firm indeed filed its own defamation lawsuit in Florida, accusing Sun of spreading false claims, an accusation he dismissed as “nothing more than a meritless PR stunt.”

The post Justin Sun Scores Court Win Against World Liberty Financial appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong expects US crypto regulation to move forward by mid-September, either through a Senate vote or new SEC and CFTC rules.

His comments came after a White House meeting with President Donald Trump and crypto executives, as lawmakers prepare to revisit the CLARITY Act.

Armstrong Lays Out Two Paths to Clarity

Armstrong posted on X on August 21 that “clarity is coming either way,” pointing to September 15 and September 16 as possible turning points. He expects more than 60 Senate votes for the CLARITY Act on September 15, or new rules from the CFTC and SEC the following day.

His post quoted CFTC Chairman Mike Selig, who had written hours earlier that his agency would not wait indefinitely on Congress if the CLARITY Act keeps stalling over what he called Democratic obstruction.

Selig said in a video shared with his post that “the CFTC will utilize its existing authorities to begin establishing a regime” for crypto markets, adding that the plan could let both registered firms and non-registered exchanges apply for a new designation permitting leveraged and margin crypto trading under CFTC oversight.

He also said he had directed staff to work with developers of on-chain finance protocols so they can offer their products legally in the US, and warned that if Democrats do not back a bipartisan version of CLARITY, he would move the CFTC’s own rules forward instead.

Armstrong, after Wednesday’s meeting with Trump and crypto executives, called the September 15 vote the thing that would make the administration’s crypto progress durable for decades to come. He credited the administration for the GENIUS Act, the strategic Bitcoin reserve, and, just days earlier, a new SEC proposal that would let crypto companies raise up to $5 million over four years or $75 million within 12 months. That new capital-raising proposal shows what agency-led rules might look like if the bill stalls again.

The Coinbase chief also pointed to hundreds of pages of changes contributed by Democratic senators, pushing back on the idea that support for the bill breaks cleanly along party lines.

Why the Senate Math Is Tight

Senate Majority Leader John Thune filed for cloture on CLARITY before the August recess, setting the September 15 vote in motion, but the bill still needs 60 votes. Republicans hold 53 seats, so at least seven Democrats or independents have to join them.

Galaxy Research recently cut its odds of passage this year from 50% to 30%, citing unresolved fights over ethics provisions, illicit finance rules, and language from the Senate Agriculture Committee.

Meanwhile, a bipartisan proposal from Republican Senator Thom Tillis and Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego, which would tighten restrictions on public officials issuing their own cryptocurrencies and give state attorneys general a bigger enforcement role, has stalled after the White House did not respond to it in time.

The post Brian Armstrong: Crypto Regulatory Clarity Coming by Mid-September appeared first on CryptoPotato.

MANTRA has halted its blockchain after an incident affecting its Cosmos EVM module, sending its native token to a new all-time low on August 21.

The team says two wallet addresses were affected, no user funds were exploited, and a patched release is being tested before a possible network restart later today.

MANTRA Freezes Chain as It Tests a Fix

MANTRA initially said it had halted the chain as a precaution while investigating an incident, with all endpoints and transactions frozen. Deposits and withdrawals to and from MANTRA Chain were also temporarily affected.

A status update later said the network remained halted while developers prepared and tested a remediation. Transactions, transfers and staking operations were unavailable, although MANTRA said user funds were unaffected by the halt itself.

The team has since identified the root cause, saying the incident was isolated to the Cosmos EVM module and affected two wallet addresses before the threat was contained.

“No user funds were exploited,” the team repeated.

They also said they had taken a full network snapshot before beginning the restart process. Its patched v8.4.0 release addresses the underlying vulnerability and is being tested on the DuKong testnet, with the project targeting a coordinated mainnet upgrade and restart later in the day, provided testing finishes cleanly.

Validators have also been told to keep their mainnet nodes offline until the restart is announced.

The native token, formerly known as OM, now trades under the MANTRA ticker after the project completed a 1:4 non-dilutive redenomination and ticker change in March this year, meaning holders received four MANTRA tokens for each former OM token without changing their overall value at the time of conversion.

After the chain was halted, the token plunged more than 18%, going from about $0.0050 to $0.0041 to set a new all-time low.

However, at the time of writing it had managed to claw back some of that value and was changing hands near $0.0046, which still put MANTRA about 82% below its March 4 all-time high of $0.02627.

OM Collapse Still Hangs Over MANTRA

Recall that OM fell from above $6 to below $1 in less than an hour on April 14, 2025, wiping out roughly 90% of its market value, with liquidations exceeding $70 million.

At the time, CEO John Patrick Mullin blamed the collapse on what he described as “reckless forced closures” by centralized exchanges.

The fallout continued into January 2026, when MANTRA announced staff cuts across several teams. The company said its rapid expansion through 2024 and early 2025 had left its cost base too high after a difficult market period and the events surrounding the token’s collapse. Mullin also pledged to burn 300 million OM tokens after the April 2025 crash, with the burn completed later that month.

MANTRA says a full post-mortem will follow. For now, the chain remains paused while the patched software undergoes testing, leaving users with limited information beyond the team’s update.

The post MANTRA Freezes Blockchain After Cosmos EVM Incident as Token Hits New Low appeared first on CryptoPotato.

BTC broke above $70,000 after a fast recovery on August 20, with experienced trader Sykodelic putting $67,000 as the mark that bulls need to defend.

The idea is straightforward: a close above $67,000 for a week may be a sign of bottoming out for Bitcoin, allowing bulls to target $74,000.

Bitcoin Clears Levels That Analysts Have Watched

Bitcoin first reclaimed $69,000 and then started a determined move upward that, at the time of writing, had taken it above $72,000, leading to Sykodelic’s comment. In a post on X, he wrote “Hold above $67,000 this week, and $74,000 comes fast,” while adding that $60,000 had been “a strong low.”

Before that, the trader had posted, explaining why $67,000 and $69,000 matter to his setup. The latter is Bitcoin’s previous 2021 all-time high and the current cost basis for short-term holders. That cost basis represents the average price paid by recent buyers, and Bitcoin holding above it would leave many short-term holders in profit.

The analyst also compared the current move with previous bear markets, with Bitcoin historically needing several attempts to hold this area before a lasting bottom formed. He explained that the current attempt would be the third.

Another technical signal that Sykodelic noted was Bitcoin’s closing of its first daily candle above the 200-day simple moving average since November 2025. He claimed every previous break above that average in the cryptocurrency’s history coincided with the end of a bear market. However, he still wants to see the weekly close before declaring victory.

“As long as we are above $67,000, we are golden,” he wrote.

A view that fit Sykodelic’s argument came from trader Nik. While responding to a question from an X user on how to read a chart with “absolutely no structure,” they said they see no resistance until $74,000, with the next major wall around $80,000 to $83,000, and identified $65,000 to $67,000 as the more important support zone.

However, neither trader treats the move as a straight path higher, and Nik specifically warned that Bitcoin could see more “fuckery” before reaching higher levels.

Bitcoin’s run to $70,000 also came with heavy forced selling, described as its largest short-liquidation candle on record, with more than $1.2 billion in leveraged positions liquidated within an hour, $1.14 billion of that being shorts.

Crypto Market Grows By More Than $200 Billion

At the time of writing, BTC was still making huge strides, up more than 11% in 24 hours to put it above $72,000. Other timeframes were also similarly green, with the asset gaining over 12% in seven days and more than 10% in two weeks, while its one-month jump was 8%.

Nonetheless, it’s still in the red across one year at almost 37% and sits 43% below its all-time high.

The broader market has moved with the OG cryptocurrency, adding about $200 billion within 24 hours, as CryptoPotato reported. Ethereum briefly jumped past $2,300, and HYPE gained around 25% to $74, with several other large tokens turning green alongside them.

The post Bitcoin Eyes $74K After Rally as Analyst Flags $67K Support appeared first on CryptoPotato.

X is exploring stablecoin payments for content creators as it replaces its long-running Revenue Sharing program with a new rewards system.

The talks could put USDC at the center of creator payouts just as X expands its broader payments offering.

X Explores Stablecoins for Creator Payments

CoinDesk reported on August 20 that X is discussing the use of stablecoins such as Circle’s USDC to pay royalties to influential users for their content.

The conversations are still ongoing, according to a person familiar with the plans who also works with other social media platforms testing stablecoins for influencer commissions, suggesting X is not alone in weighing the move.

The report comes as X changes how creators earn money on the platform. The company announced early this month that it is ending new enrollment for its Revenue Sharing program and introducing the Original Content Rewards Program.

Under the new system, eligible creators earn money from qualified impressions generated by their original content. Those impressions must come from Premium users on the Home Timeline, with at least half of the post visible. Creators need at least 500 verified followers and 500,000 Home Timeline impressions from verified users during the previous 90 days. They must also subscribe to X Premium, Premium+ or Premium Business and maintain an account in good standing.

Existing Revenue Sharing participants can continue earning through September 7, but X plans to begin allowing such users to apply for Original Content Rewards from September 8, with their first payment under the new program scheduled for September 25. The stablecoin discussion could therefore affect how these payments are eventually delivered.

X Money Adds Another Piece

Stablecoins now carry a combined market value of over $300 billion and are already used by businesses to move money across borders faster and more cheaply than traditional banking rails allow.

X’s interest in the fiat-pegged digital assets for creator pay follows Elon Musk’s broader financial ambitions for the platform. In March, he confirmed that X Money, the app’s in-house payment product, would open to early public access within weeks, a step toward what he called an “everything app” that folds financial services into social media.

The product launched to a limited group of US Premium+ users in June before expanding to a wider set of paid subscribers by late July. It currently works as a dollar-based wallet, letting eligible users hold balances, send free instant transfers to other X Money users, receive direct deposits, and spend through a Visa debit card, with up to 6% annual yield on balances and cashback on purchases.

However, it does not yet support crypto or stablecoins, despite heavy speculation before its launch. Some of Musk’s other companies have leaned on the technology before, including SpaceX, which reportedly collects cross-border payments from Starlink customers in emerging markets using stablecoins, a precedent that makes X’s interest less of a surprise.

The post X in Talks to Use Stablecoins for Content Creator Royalties: Report appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Ethereum jumped roughly 20% in the past 24 hours, a move large enough to rank as the 8th-biggest single day for the token since January 2018.

Historical data compiled by analyst Jamie Coutts suggests such moves have been unreliable over 30 days but have produced better results over three to six months.

Where This Move Ranks, and What Tends to Happen Next

Coutts published a table of every ETH day that gained 15% or more since 2018, sixteen of them completed and now trackable against what came after. Ethereum’s August 19 print landed at plus 18.5%, just behind an 18.8% day in November 2022 and ahead of a 17.5% day in December 2018.

The biggest on record is still May 2021’s 24.5% single-day gain, which was followed by a rough month (down 25.3% in 30 days) before turning positive by 180 days (up 68%). That pattern repeats across the dataset.

Of the sixteen completed cases, only 8 were higher 30 days later, but 10 were higher after 90 days, and 12 were higher after 180 days. Average returns climbed the same way: plus 20.6% at 90 days, plus 59.3% at 180 days.

Coutts summed it up on X, saying the numbers show odds that “skew meaningfully higher over the next 3 to 6 months.”

At the time of writing, ETH was trading near $2,280 after going past $2,300 during the last 24-hour period. CoinGecko data shows a nearly 18% daily gain, an almost 19% rise over seven days, and a just about 17% increase over 30 days. Its 24-hour trading volume has climbed to about $32 billion, up 439% from the previous day.

That move also puts ETH well ahead of Bitcoin over the same period. BTC gained about 9% in 24 hours and slightly more than that in seven days, with Ethereum’s stronger performance lifting the ETH/BTC ratio by about 9% over the latest 24-hour period.

Meanwhile, the buying pressure was unusually large, as noted by CryptoQuant contributor MorenoDV_, who reported that ETH taker-buy volume reached $2.55 billion in one hour on August 19, the third-highest reading since February 7. However, the figure does not distinguish between new long positions and short positions being closed.

Technical Recovery Meets a Broader Crypto Policy Rally

Sykodelic wrote on August 20 that ETH had moved back above its 200-day simple moving average before Bitcoin. The trader had also earlier identified the $2,400 area as the next major range level.

The wider rally came after the August 19 White House crypto meeting, where President Donald Trump pushed Congress to advance the CLARITY Act, leading to Bitcoin spiking toward $70,000.

The SEC’s August 18 crypto fundraising proposal added another policy catalyst. It includes exemptions for offerings of up to $5 million over four years or $75 million over 12 months, alongside a conditional safe harbor for certain tokens.

The post ETH’s Rare Double-Digit Surge Could Be Just the Beginning appeared first on CryptoPotato.

David Schwartz, Ripple’s CTO emeritus, has warned that government rules around AI safety and copyright could give authorities unprecedented control over political and social speech.

His argument centers on who gets to decide what AI systems can create, know, and discuss.

Two Legal Fights, One Argument

Schwartz laid out the case in a reply thread on X that started almost by accident. On August 18, he quote-posted a Change.org UK campaign asking the British government to limit how much coverage any one person can receive in the press, a petition launched after 249 articles covered sociology professor Jason Arday in the 22 days before his death on August 14.

Schwartz’s response to that campaign was a question: which poses more of a threat to free speech, artificial intelligence or, as he put it, natural stupidity.

When a user named Athena asked what he actually meant, Schwartz explained that AI has become the most effective tool for producing speech that exists, and that governments are currently fighting on multiple fronts over how much they can regulate it.

He then spelled out two specific fights. The first is over whether training an AI model on copyrighted material counts as infringement. Since Congress controls what exceptions to copyright law exist, a ruling against AI companies would mean the most powerful speech-generating tool in existence could only be used in ways Congress permits, effectively letting lawmakers decide what speech looks like.

The second fight is over AI safety regulation itself, which Schwartz argued follows the same logic: if the government sets the rules for what counts as safe, the most powerful tool for producing political and social speech becomes usable only in the ways officials allow.

“Again, a totally unprecedented threat to freedom of speech,” he wrote.

A Recurring Argument on X

This is not the first time Schwartz has pushed this line of thinking. In late July, Bitcoin advocate and ShapeShift founder Erik Voorhees argued on X that states should not get to decide what forms of intelligence count as safe, warning that a rule against discussing something as narrow as bioweapons could eventually expand into a broader government veto over speech and even encryption. Schwartz replied to that post with a simple agreement at the time.

The broader question of who gets to police speech-enabling technology has come up elsewhere too. Telegram founder Pavel Durov, already facing terrorism-related charges tied to content on his messaging app, drew a fresh international arrest warrant from Russia’s security service in late July, adding to a case that started with his 2024 arrest in France over similar allegations.

The debate also extends to proposals for government-backed AI testing after Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis previously proposed a federally backed body to test and certify advanced models. While OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella expressed support for the idea, Coinbase chief Brian Armstrong took the opposite view, contending that existing laws covering fraud, torts, and consumer protection could already address harms caused by AI systems.

The post Ripple CTO Emeritus: AI Safety Rules and Copyright Laws Pose Threat to Free Speech appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Analyst Crypto Patel says Bitcoin has followed the exact same cycle three times in a row, and he is betting the current downturn sets up another run worth ten times the cryptocurrency’s price from here.

The call, posted Wednesday, arrives as Bitcoin traded at around $65,000 before it exploded to $70,000, down almost half from its October 2025 all-time high, with trading activity thinning to levels not seen since the last bear market.

The Pattern, According to Patel

Crypto Patel posted his analysis on X, describing what he calls the “BTC Cycle Blueprint.” His comparison begins with Bitcoin’s first major cycle, when it reached $19,666 before falling 84% and later rallying to $69,000.

The second cycle followed a similar sequence. Bitcoin fell 77% from its $69,000 peak before finding support around a bullish order block and fair value gap. It then climbed to a record $126,000.

Patel believes the current cycle is following the same structure. Bitcoin went past $126,000 before entering a decline that he estimates at 69%, with the expectation that the market will form another bullish order block around $50,000 to $40,000.

“Each Cycle: Smaller Drawdown. Higher High. Same Playbook,” the analyst wrote, adding that Bitcoin is currently sitting near the area he believes will become that bullish order block. He then assigned a projected target of 1,000% upside.

Patel’s argument rests heavily on repetition. According to him, the pattern has “NEVER failed,” although the post does not provide a statistical test of the pattern or explain how the 1,000% target is calculated. The forecast therefore remains a technical thesis rather than a confirmed market path.

The OG cryptocurrency has traded in a tight band this week, moving between roughly $62,500 and $65,000 over the past seven days, and Ted Pillows noted earlier today that BTC needs to hold $65,500 or risk another leg down to $62,500.

Others are also watching for another Bitcoin decline, although their targets differ. One of them, Tony Research, said that traders should not short Bitcoin at current levels. They expect a move toward $68,500 to $69,400 and then $72,000 before a possible final drop in late August or September. They also expect selected altcoins to gain 40% to 100% if Bitcoin reaches the higher targets.

Where the Bigger Picture Stands

But not everyone agrees the four-year cycle Patel is describing still applies, with market watchers, including Scott Melker and Arthur Hayes, previously questioning whether the pattern holds this time around.

Bitcoin has not closed above $100,000 since November 13, 2025, and SkyBridge Capital’s Anthony Scaramucci told CNBC this week that the next halving, expected around April 2028, should “tighten prices” enough to push the asset back over that mark. Scaramucci made a similar call before the 2024 halving, predicting BTC would reach $170,000, but it peaked at just over $126,000 instead.

The post This Bitcoin Cycle Pattern Could Set Up a 1,000% Rally: Analyst appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Arthur Hayes has said that he is coming out of retirement to lead Flop Labs, a new project centered on a token called $FLOP that aims to work as a kind of currency for AI agents.

The announcement doubled as a defense of the move: Hayes, who has spent months warning that AI investment is a bubble, argued the excess sits in the debt piling up to build data centers, not in the underlying technology his new venture is built on.

A Fair Launch and a Compute-Backed Token

Hayes described $FLOP as “food for your AI agent” and said the token would launch without a presale or venture capital funding. “100% fair launch,” he wrote, adding that he expects a “massive airdrop in Q4” followed by a genesis block in the first quarter of 2027.

Flop Labs’ announcement describes the network as a proof-of-useful-inference protocol. Its stated goal is to give AI agents a native currency for buying computing power and storing memories. The project uses floating-point operations, or FLOPs, as the basis for its economic model. Miners would provide computing power and receive $FLOP through block rewards and inference payments.

Validators would verify that miners delivered the computing work requested by agents. They would also store agent memories and receive $FLOP through block rewards and inference payments.

On their part, AI agents would spend the token on computing and memory services, while community partners could receive $FLOP based on network activity.

Flop Labs stresses that the network has not launched and remains under development. Its current design can change, and the project makes no guarantees about receiving tokens or making money.

The AI Bubble Argument

Before announcing Flop Labs, Hayes had compared the AI buildout to the 2008 housing crisis, arguing that lenders, private credit funds, and governments are financing data centers on the assumption that demand keeps climbing without limit.

He expects AI capital spending to slow in 2027 before contracting, which he said would force governments into bailouts larger than those that followed the 2008 financial crisis, sending new money into crypto markets and potentially pushing Bitcoin toward $1 million.

When asked why he would build an AI project while calling AI a bubble, Hayes said the excess lies in debt used to fund data centers and in the shares of hyperscalers and frontier labs that are not yet profitable, not in agentic technology itself.

“Price is what you pay, value is what you get,” he wrote, adding that the compute overcapacity built on borrowed money strengthens his case for Flop Labs.

Hayes’s bet on an agent-native currency also arrives against thin real-world usage elsewhere. Analyst Jamie Coutts reported on August 12 that daily settlement volume on x402, the Coinbase-built payment protocol for AI agents, is down 93% year-to-date, with the seven-day average around $41,800, well below the $800,000 to $1 million peaks seen in late 2025.

Coutts called the drop a “reality check” on claims that the agentic economy has arrived, though he expects volume to climb again in the fourth quarter.

The post Arthur Hayes Called AI a Bubble, Now He’s Launching an AI Project appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed a new rule on August 18 that would let crypto companies raise money through two exemptions from standard securities registration.

The plan, called “Regulation Crypto Assets,” sets one path capped at $5 million every four years and another at $75 million per year, alongside a safe harbor that could pull certain crypto assets outside the legal definition of a security.

Two Paths to Raise Capital

Under the proposal, the smaller exemption is a one-time offering worth up to $5 million over a four-year period. Issuers using it would need to give investors narrative disclosures about the offering, written in plain language rather than the dense form typical of a full registration statement, and the requirements stay fairly informal by comparison.

The larger exemption goes up to $75 million in any 12-month stretch, but it comes with more paperwork: financial statements and ongoing reporting obligations for as long as a company keeps raising money under it.

The rules also includes a conditional safe harbor removing certain crypto assets from the “investment contract” definition found in both the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

If a project meets the conditions, largely tied to whether management has finished or permanently stopped the work it promised investors, the token would no longer count as an investment contract, and by extension, not a security. Chairman Paul Atkins said the change would apply “once an issuer has completed or permanently ceased all essential managerial efforts” it promised.

“Congress designed our securities laws to amplify – within specific guardrails – opportunities for entrepreneurs to innovate and build new products,” Atkins added. “Advancing this regulatory framework is a key element in our strategy to advance the rule books for the modern era and another step by the Commission to onshore innovation in crypto asset markets for generations to come.”

The rule further preempts state securities registration and qualification requirements for offerings made under either exemption, plus some secondary market sales.

The Backdrop in Washington

The proposal builds on the SEC interpretation from March 2026 that first laid out how federal securities law applies to certain crypto assets and transactions. It also landed one day before a White House meeting scheduled for August 19, where executives from Ripple, Coinbase, Chainlink, Paradigm, Kalshi and a16z are expected to sit down with regulators as CryptoPotato had earlier reported.

President Donald Trump is reportedly expected to attend, and Atkins himself is also expected to show up, per updates from journalist Eleanor Terrett. Reports have suggested that some traditional finance executives could join too, though there is no official confirmation of a full guest list.

That meeting comes as the CLARITY Act, the broader bill meant to draw a line between SEC and CFTC authority over digital assets, sits stalled in Senate. Lawmakers left for their August recess without a vote, and Majority Leader John Thune has filed cloture for a vote on September 15.

Unresolved disputes over ethics provisions, anti-money laundering rules and stablecoin rewards for customers have slowed things down, with banks lobbying against the reward idea because it could pull deposits out of traditional systems.

The SEC will take public comments on Regulation Crypto Assets for 60 days once the proposal is published in the Federal Register.

The post SEC Unveils ‘Regulation Crypto Assets’: New $5M and $75M Path for Token Offering appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin is struggling to hold its June range floor after $390 million left US spot BTC ETFs last week, according to Wintermute’s newest market update.

The trading firm says falling rate-hike odds have failed to lift BTC, while ETF redemptions and miner selling have left the market without a strong source of fresh demand.

ETF Flows Fail to Sustain Bitcoin’s August Recovery

As Wintermute pointed out, July CPI came in at 0.1% month-on-month, cutting September rate-hike odds from roughly even to about one-in-three, with retail sales also posting their steepest decline since May 2025.

Almost nothing rallied on it: the S&P 500 added just 0.40%, long-dated Treasuries fell 0.87%, and BTC sat at the bottom, down 3.12%. CoinGecko data shows the cryptocurrency is currently around $64,000, up 1.2% over 24 hours. However, it is down nearly 1% over 30 days and 49% below its October 2025 all-time high.

Brent crude jumped 7.91% as Hormuz ship transits collapsed from 31 the prior weekend to five Saturday and zero Sunday, with the 60-day ceasefire expiring and talks stalled. A re-escalation that holds Brent near $89 puts the August CPI print at risk.

For Wintermute, that combination matters. Lower rate-hike expectations would normally improve the case for risk assets, but Bitcoin failed to respond. The firm said the market was moving toward a situation where “the inflation problem seems to be moving from the Fed’s hands to oil’s.”

The ETF picture was also weak. Roughly $390 million left US spot Bitcoin ETFs between August 10 and 14, the largest weekly redemption since early July. As CryptoPotato reported, Bitcoin ETFs recorded only one positive session last week, with Monday seeing $145 million leave the funds, followed by $61 million on Wednesday, $131 million on Thursday, and nearly $58 million on Friday. Tuesday brought just under $5 million of net inflows.

“An asset that cannot rally on good news while its dedicated vehicles bleed is telling us the marginal seller is back, which weakens the depletion argument we have been carrying since W31,” wrote the trading company.

Miner Selling Adds Another Problem

Wintermute also pointed to Riot Platforms as evidence that miners may remain a source of Bitcoin supply. The firm sold 4,300 BTC during the second quarter after selling 3,778 BTC in the first quarter. Its treasury fell to 11,380 BTC as mining costs approached $91,000 per unit. Bitcoin was trading below $64,000, contributing to Riot’s $237 million quarterly loss.

Riot is also shifting part of its business toward AI data centers, with the miner reportedly agreeing to supply 191 megawatts of capacity to Anthropic under a 20-year contract worth $9.1 billion.

The ETF picture is not uniformly negative, though, as Jane Street disclosed more than $1 billion in US spot Bitcoin ETF holdings as of the second quarter, including about $828 million in IBIT. However, the filing only shows quarter-end holdings and does not capture the firm’s full derivatives exposure.

The post Wintermute: Bitcoin Range Breakout Delayed by ETF Outflows and Miner Selling appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Nasdaq plans to add overnight stock trading from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. ET in December 2026, subject to SEC approval and other technical requirements.

BitGo CEO Mike Belshe and crypto analyst Nate Geraci say the move shows traditional markets are adopting ideas that crypto exchanges have used for years.

Nasdaq Plans 23-Hour Trading Five Days a Week

Nasdaq is seeking regulatory approval to run a nearly continuous trading week, 23 hours a day, five days a week. The plan adds an overnight session from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. ET, on top of the extended hours Nasdaq already runs, from 4 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. to 8 p.m, with the core 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. session staying the primary pricing window, and the opening and closing crosses still setting official prices.

The overnight session runs from 9 p.m. Sunday through 8 p.m. Friday, with a one-hour daily pause for processing. Nasdaq is targeting Sunday, December 6, 2026, for the launch, pending SEC approval and readiness of the industry’s Securities Information Processor.

Some order types, including unpriced market orders and opening and closing auction orders, won’t be available overnight, and any order still open at 4 a.m. gets canceled automatically. Nasdaq Texas, PSX, and Nasdaq’s options exchanges keep their current schedules.

Geraci posted his reaction to the announcement, writing on X that traditional finance exchanges are now “playing by crypto’s rules” and predicted that major exchanges could eventually move toward 24/7 trading.

Belshe made a similar argument. He pointed to longer stock-market hours, perpetual futures, stablecoins, and tokenized loans as examples of crypto ideas that are finding applications in traditional finance.

“Even if you are skeptical about crypto,” the BitGo CEO wrote, “you can’t deny our industry’s innovations have already made real change in traditional markets.”

Crypto Markets Already Trade Beyond Traditional Hours

The comparison comes as crypto platforms expand access to traditional assets, with a recent CryptoQuant report revealing that equity perpetual futures reached $250 billion in monthly volume in July, up from roughly $15 billion in April.

Binance accounted for about 76% of that activity. The products give traders exposure to selected stocks through contracts that trade continuously, although activity remains concentrated in technology and semiconductor-related names.

Tokenized equities are another part of the shift. As CryptoPotato reported earlier in the year, Nasdaq has been working with Kraken on tokenized stocks, with Kraken’s xStocks infrastructure intended to support Nasdaq issuer-sponsored equity tokens.

Stablecoins are also moving deeper into mainstream payments, with PayPal reporting $486.4 billion in payment volume for the second quarter and placing stablecoins under its expanded digital asset strategy. However, its PYUSD stablecoin has about $2.75 billion in supply, down from more than $4 billion in March, with the entire stablecoin market cap at just over $300 billion per DefiLlama.

Nasdaq’s move does not make stock markets 24/7. Still, its proposed 23-hour schedule puts a traditional exchange closer to the always-on model that crypto markets have operated under for years.

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Wallet activity related to XRP has become heavily weighted toward withdrawals.

Data shared by Analyst Amr Taha shows that Coinbase recorded a seven-day net wallet count of -14,300.

Coinbase Accounts for 47.3% of the Imbalance

Net wallet count is just a simple score that shows whether more people are putting crypto into an exchange or taking it out, and per Taha’s data, some of the largest crypto trading venues are all negative for this metric.

On Binance, the number is -3,270 net wallets, and on Crypto.com, it stands at -2,680. Interestingly, the two exchanges first moved below zero on July 18, almost a week after Coinbase did the same, suggesting the imbalance wasn’t just down to a spike from one day of trading.

What this essentially means is that there are more wallets withdrawing XRP on these trading venues than those making deposits, and Coinbase has been the biggest hit.

According to the data Taha shared, as of August 18, the American exchange accounted for exactly 47.3% of the total absolute 7-day net wallet imbalance, which happens to be its highest level since July 2024.

Binance’s share also jumped, going from nearly zero on July 16 to about 10% of the current total. But such activity seems to have dropped on Upbit, whose share went from 40% in June to around 12% today.

XRP Struggling Below $1

Taha’s reading has come just as XRP once again went below the $1 level, with analysts like Crypto Patel suggesting things could get much worse before they improve. According to him, the sixth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap could yet drop by a further 20% to 40%, taking it to an accumulation zone between $0.85 and $0.65.

Meanwhile, another market watcher, ChartNerd, has said the asset is currently repeating the same coiling pattern it formed before a major bull run in the past, just on a bigger scale. He predicts there could be a strong breakout from the current retest zone toward $8, $13, and $27, as long as the ascending support holds.

XRP was still trading just under the $1 mark at the time of writing, with CoinGecko data showing it had barely moved in 24 hours but had dropped by slightly more than 1% over seven days.

Every other chart bled red, with the asset down 7% in two weeks and 9% across 30 days. However, the biggest come-down was on the yearly chart, which showed that the Ripple token has plunged well over 66% from where it was 12 months ago.

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BitMart’s Chinese-language account has demanded answers from founders Sheldon Lee and Yi Li over frozen user funds and unpaid employee salaries, giving them until August 19 to respond publicly.

The statement also calls for verifiable asset disclosures and a detailed repayment plan as questions grow over what happened to funds held on the exchange.

BitMart Faces Questions Over User Funds and Withdrawals

In a post published on August 17, the account said many users still cannot withdraw their funds, while some employees have yet to receive their final salaries or compensation.

“This isn’t some business dispute that can be brushed off with a single ‘ceasing operations’ statement,” it wrote.

The statement demanded evidence showing BitMart’s current wallets, assets, liabilities, and usable reserves. It also asked management to explain who restricted withdrawals, when the decision was made, and when executives first knew users could no longer withdraw normally.

The account further questioned whether BitMart continued encouraging deposits or trading after management became aware of withdrawal problems. It called for an investigation into affiliated accounts, related companies, trusts, and other arrangements involving BitMart-related funds. The statement also raised questions about accounts allegedly linked to Yi Li that may have held tens of millions of dollars and recorded batch withdrawals.

However, the account stressed that the allegations had not been proven and said that potentially criminal conduct should not be alleged before the evidence is complete. It nevertheless demanded explanations about the source and destination of funds if the accounts existed.

Employee compensation was another focus, with the post contending that rank-and-file workers did not decide how company funds were managed or when operations would end; thus, salaries and outstanding compensation should be paid in full.

The August 19 deadline also covers a repayment plan detailing remaining assets, total liabilities, expected user recoveries, repayment order, start and completion dates, oversight arrangements, and potential independent audits.

Sheldon Lee responded, saying the material cited by the Chinese account consisted of “fabricated rumors.” According to him, BitMart had collected evidence and would file a police report during US daytime hours, alongside a lawyer’s letter to X seeking technical and data forensics.

Blockchain investigator ZachXBT questioned why BitMart would not simply return the funds if it had sufficient liquidity. He also criticized the lack of transparency around users’ access to their money.

But in a later update, Lee claimed that the account had been hacked and the issues raised had not been posted by current employees.

Shutdown Timeline Adds Pressure

The dispute comes shortly before BitMart’s planned shutdown, with a July 26 notice informing users that the exchange would discontinue trading services on August 26, and its official shutdown is scheduled for January 31, 2027.

That announcement placed BitMart alongside other crypto platforms preparing to close during a difficult market period, including BitMEX, which told its customers on July 23 that it would stop operations by September 23. According to analysts like Ran Neuner, the exchange shutdowns are part of a broader market clean-up.

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