What happened in crypto in the past week? This week Bitcoin was quiet, and whales are still buying cheap. ETH's new roadmap is ready. USDT is Shariah compliant. I found a way to expose myself to BTC via BlackRock, using Freetrade. Feel free to check them. What else? Read below:
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Bitcoin: Bitcoin whales have been quietly accumulating since December. Dormant Bitcoin movement fell to its lowest level since Q3 2022 in the second quarter. Bitcoin is having its quietest trading month since late 2023. Hyperscale Data, a Bitcoin miner, sold 100 BTC and opened a Bitcoin-backed credit facility on July 30 to fund an AI data center campus in Michigan. Trump Media moved $165M in BTC, but nothing was sold yet. Saylor just signalled that Strategy is buying BTC again. Then they sold 1638 BTC worth $108M before August 2, with proceeds split between preffered stock dividents and STRC repurchases, pushing the company's US dollar reserves to $4B, raising a total of $761M if you count the 6.59 MSTR shares sold last week. Russia signed a decree banning Bitcoin mining across Moscow, Moscow Oblast and Kursk Oblast, from August 15 through end-2032. A March 2021 Coldcard firmware error routed seed phrase generation to a software randomised instead of the hardware chip, made the private keys recostructible online, as the attackers stole 1367 BTC worth $89M from 4585 addresses in three different waves, with a final count that can be close to $130M. American Bitcoin mined 932 Bitcoin in Q2 2026, growing its treasury to 8002 coins, even if the company completed a reverse stock split in July, to maintain its Nasdaq listing. Bitgo moved $7B in WBTC away from LayerZero after the $292M KelpDAO exploit. Bitwise projected Bitcoin to reach $1.3M per coin by 2035, and the scary thing is that 1% allocation from global institutional assets estimated at $100-200 trillion would be enough for this to happen. BTC did split into two competing chains, the minority one having 2.53 miner support. BlackRock says that Bitcoin is decoupling from stocks. A Swedish Bitcoin firm acquired two Norwegian companies adding 2455 BTC to its treasury, up to a total holdings of 3505 BTC. Goldman Sachs bought its way into Bitcoin ETFs, acquiring NEOX investments for up to $2.23B on August 12, gaining three crypto-focused ETFs including the Bitcoin High Income ETF with over $1B in assets. NEOS uses covered call strategies to generate money income from BTC and ETH exposure.
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Ethereum: Morgan Stanley launched ETH and SOL ETFs on NYSE on July 28, tickers MSSE and MSOL, charging 0.14% annually. Bitmine now holds nearly 5% of all Ethereum as they added another 10.99 ETH before August 3, bringing its treasury up to 5.79M ETH. Italian bank Intesa Sanpaolo cut its iShares Bitcoin Trust position by 94% and tripled its staked Ethereun ETF stake to $7.1M. Ethereum researchers release EIP 8361, which seeks to reduce issuance to zero once more than 50% is staked, among other changes. Vitalik upgraded Ethereum's roadmap with privacy and quantum safety, native rollups and a potential replacement of the EVM itself. Fidelity filed to add staking payouts to its Ethereum ETF.
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Altcoins and stablecoins: A big one, Tether's gold token just got certified for Islamic Finance as Shariah-compliant. ZCash activated the Ironwood upgrade on July 28, permanently closing the Orchard shielded pool after a counterfeeiting vulnerability that has been present since 2022 was discovered. A ZCash miner cut its production costs nearly in half, from $70 to $40, after they bought a new 12-megawatt facility online in Nebraska on July 28, its first self-built mining site. Binance just added Gold and Silver options. Gold hit its highest price in over a month. Stablecoin remittances can cost ranging from 0.3% to 9%, but the fiat conversion fees drove the wide variation, not the blockchain transaction costs. Tether got its first full audit from KPMG, confirming that its reserves exceeded its liabilities by $6.8B. Ripple invested in two UK tokenization firms, Zilo and Liquido, both enabling tokenized funds to serve as collateral from the moment they are issued. Solana is about to burn up to 14 times the current rate and double the annual dissinflation rate. The proposal sat roughly 3M SOL short of its August 18 support threshold. XRP Ledger is adding encrypted transfers for institutions. Crypto ETFs had their best inflow since April. Standard Chartered set a price target on Chainlink, $200 by end-2030. Moneygram brought cash on-ramps for Solana. Kalshi started streaming live market data to trading firms. Hong Kong's first licensed stablecoin, HKDAP, went live on August 12, as a Hong Kong dollar pegged stablecoin, backed by Standard Chartered infrastructure. EtherFi turned its DEFI App into a full neobank, with 500K members and a $2B annual transaction run rate.
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NFTs and blockchain games: On Splinterlands Escalation - the latest mini-set from the Conclave Arcana collection is now closed. Axie seems to get some cool upgrades, but they are still not convincing me. Fanatics bought Water Street Labs and CX Clearinghouse from BGC Group, giving the sports platform a CFTC-regulated exchange and clearing house for prediction markets, removing Fanatics' dependency on outside structure and they are available now in 23 US states and 4 territories. POAP winds down after 5 years of operations.
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Good news: The Bank of England Digital Pound Lab trialed stablecoins for use in cross-border finance for small medium enteprises. Figure Technology, the blockchain lending platform doubled its revenue in Q2 2026. The CFTC warned prediction markets again on filing shortcuts, with Kalshi, Coinbase, Polymarket and Crypto.com being on the list. South Korea's biggest bank is moving payments to JPMorgan's blockchain, covering trade flows across ten countries. Metaplanet is building a Bitcoin bond market from Japan. Securitize Capital registered a a full SEC-approved investment adviser. Swiss crypto bank Amina is working with Cantor to evaluate public listing options. Samsung is building stablecoin and AI payment structure partnering with Upbit operator Dunamu. Samsung announced at Galaxy Unpacked 2026 that Samsung Wallet will add native stablecoin support across 61 countries. Dinari expanded its platform on August 4 to let eligible US investors buy and sell all 724 tokenized US equities, including the full S&P 500. Visa wired stablecoins ina a billion-endpoint network. Tokenized real world asset deposits across lending platforms and DEXs more than tripled from $2.3B to $7.4B year to year. Hyperliquid's RWA contracts now rival its BTC trading volume. Tether is bringing real extate tokenization to Saudi Arabia. The SEC is about to propose a Token Safe Harbor for early-stage sales. This is needed. Wintermute is spending one billion dollars to enter traditional finance, focusing on AI infrastructure and high-frequency trading across stocks, commodities, and foreign exchange.
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Bad news: A data breach puts nearly 14K Trezor customers at phishing risk. If yuo ordered a Trezor between May 10 and August 8, be very careful! Bitmart announced on July 26 that it will wind down its trading platform after nine years of operation, trading ending on August 26. One single trade on SK Hynix perpetual contract triggered $60M in liquidations on Hyperliquid. The Federal Reserve held rates at 3.50% to 3.75% on July 29, but three Fed members voted for an immediate hike. On top of that, JPMorgan warned that the crypto bill delay is a real risk. US perpetual traders may face an unexpected tax bill. The crypto bill had days left before Senate recess. Eventually, the vote was pushed to September the earliest. Custodia Bank is taking the FED to the Supreme Court. A fake Flare Network staking site up for just 8 days managed to steal 3.4M XRP from 71 investors. MICA deadline is exploited by scammers impersonating European financial regulators to steal funds from users of platforms that lost their right to operate on July 1. Crypto holders lost $30m to physical attacks this year in 46 violent incidents, 30 of them in France alone. Home invasions account for 37% of the incidents, up from 14% last year. Brazil ordered a 24 hour delay on large crypto transfers to prevent fraud cases where victims funds are moved irreversibly before recovery is possible. eToro acquired US online brokerage TradeZero for up to $231M as crypto revenue fell.
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Joke of the week: Russia largest bank, Sberbank, is building a crypto trading platform, most probably aiming to confiscate all the crypto at a further date. Wanna bet? They published draft regulations covering how crypto exchanges and a new class of digital depositories would operate, following parliament's approval of the underlying bill, as they only approved BTC, ETH and USDT as eligible for public trading. Second on the list? The current encryption level may become a joke, as Claude Mythos model identified a weakness in HAWK, a digital signature scheme under NIST's post-quantum cryptography evaluation, in just 60 hours. HAWK was supposed to be one of the best, post quantum, and was not even deployed yet. Moonpay connected its payment vault to ChatGPT and Claude, is that wise?
All the best,
George
Why not...
...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands- a Hearthstone-like card game) (Golem Overlord - a Play2Earn game on Hive) (Holozing - a Pokemon-like game)and ( Chain of Legends - with a hint of Heroes of Might and Magic).
...get crypto while writing on the Publish0x blog. I am also writing for crypto on Hive.
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