Bitcoin hit month-to-date highs above $65,000 as risk-assets gained on low US nonfarm payrolls data. Bitcoin (BTC) hit new August highs into Friday’s Wall Street open as markets reacted to weaker US jobs numbers. Key points: Data from TradingView showed BTC/USD hitting $65,340 on Bitstamp, up 1.3% on the day, as fresh US labour-market data was released. Read more
Crypto business is converging with banking as stablecoin reserves, tokenized funds, Treasury income and balance sheet management become key profit drivers. At first glance, this week’s biggest business stories could have come straight from Wall Street. BlackRock launched tokenized money market funds for stablecoin reserves. Tether generated another $1.5 billion in profit from its US Treasury holdings. Tokenized gold continued gaining traction, though its use in decentralized finance remains limited. Even Bitcoin (BTC) mining was defined by production costs, profitability and balance sheet management rather than the price of Bitcoin. The digital asset industry’s business model is increasingly converging with traditional finance. Stablecoin reserves, tokenized money market funds and onchain collateral are emerging as some of the industry’s most important revenue drivers, signaling that blockchain’s next phase may be shaped as much by financial infrastructure as by digital assets themselves. Asset manager BlackR...
Ethereum’s proposed EIP-8363 staking overhaul aims to reduce issuance, but critics say it could hurt DeFi, decentralization and institutional adoption. Ethereum researchers just wanted to reduce staking incentives. Instead, they sparked one of the biggest debates over the network’s economics since the Merge. Ethereum Improvement Proposal EIP-8363, or “Tapered Issuance Burn,” would gradually reduce staking rewards as more and more Ether is locked up to secure the network — eventually cutting new protocol issuance to zero once 50% of ETH’s supply is staked. Its authors, including Ethereum Foundation’s Justin Drake and Ethereum Community Conference (ETHCC) co-founder Jerome de Tychey, argue that Ethereum has reached the point where additional staking provides diminishing security returns, while diluting holders who choose not to stake. Read more
Dice entropy may become the new gold standard after the Coldcard hack In light of the catastrophic low-entropy bug in Coldcard hardware wallets, linked to publicly observed thefts beginning on July 30, Bitcoin holders have started to re-evaluate the trust assumptions in their hardware wallet setups. The Coldcard devices were equipped with apparently functional STM32 “true random number generators” (TRNGs) that rely on physical processes to produce an unguessable seed phrase. However, after Coldcard creator NVK decided to initiate a firmware rewrite to switch from a GPL-licensed free software model to a read-only model, a serious vulnerability appears to have been introduced. Read more