Coins, wallets and the slow move of money onto the internet, explained in plain language and read with a skeptical eye.
The Binance hack drained about $6.3 billion across ten blockchains, most of it in around 20 minutes, on 29 October 2026, the largest crypto theft ever recorded. The FBI has tied it to North Korea. Here is what is confirmed, what is still an estimate, and whether your funds are safe.
A covert chip hidden inside some Ledger wallets read owners' recovery phrases off the screen and beamed them out over a mobile network, before the devices were ever plugged into a computer. Here is what Ledger has confirmed, what is still only an estimate, how to tell if you are exposed, and whether cold storage is still worth trusting.
The CLARITY Act, the crypto industry's top legislative priority, failed a Senate cloture vote on 15 September, reportedly 49 to 50, well short of the 60 needed to advance. It was not a vote on the bill's merits but a procedural gate, and what jammed it was a conflict-of-interest fight, not a disagreement about market rules. The industry's record lobbying spend bought a floor vote, not the votes to win it. Here is what happened and what fills the gap now.
Alpenglow is the biggest change to how Solana reaches agreement in the network's history: it retires Tower BFT, aims to cut finality from about 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds, and is rolling out to validators in stages through September. Here is what is actually changing, when, and the caveats behind the headline numbers.
Circle's Arc is scheduled to open its public mainnet on 16 September: an EVM-compatible Layer 1 where the USDC stablecoin itself pays for gas, secured by a closed set of institutions including BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard and DTCC. It is open to build on and closed to validate, and the separate ARC token is not the gas and has no confirmed trading date. Here is what is actually launching.
Blockstream's Liquid Network was drained of roughly 4,000 BTC through a software bug, and the attackers returned about 85 per cent, branding themselves 'white hats.' Here is what the Liquid Network is, why this is not a hack of Bitcoin itself, and what was actually lost.
On 30 August, validators froze the Crypto.com-linked Cronos chain and rolled it back about two hours to reverse a lending exploit. The headline says $75M, but only $6.3M actually left. The bigger story is a chain choosing to rewrite settled history, and the argument that restarts every time one does.
Grayscale filed to convert its Zcash Trust into a spot ETF on NYSE Arca under ticker ZCSH, expected to trade around 25 August. It would be one of the first US spot ETFs tied to a privacy coin. It charges 2.5 percent a year, and the token has been sharply volatile.
After cancelling a public meeting, the SEC approved a crypto-offering proposal on 18 August by seriatim vote. The text is now public: a tiered fundraising exemption up to $75 million, a $5 million startup path, and a safe harbour that turns on ceasing 'essential managerial efforts.' A proposal, not law, unlikely before 2027.
Riot Platforms, a major listed Bitcoin miner, signed a 20-year lease worth about $9.1 billion to host a frontier AI lab at its Texas campus; the filing does not name the tenant, but reports say Anthropic. It is among the clearest signs miners are pivoting to AI as mining margins collapse.
On 12 August an attacker exploited a consensus-verification flaw on the Harmony blockchain to mint roughly 4 billion ONE tokens, inflating supply about 26 percent and crashing the price by a third. The realised haul was only a few million dollars, but tokens minted from nothing is the real alarm.
Michael Saylor's Strategy, which turned 'never sell your Bitcoin' into a creed, has sold Bitcoin repeatedly in 2026, some below cost. That is a real regime change, but it is discretionary, not a forced fire sale, and the deeper story is the collapse of the premium that made the model work.
More than 100 crypto projects have shut down, gone bankrupt or gone dark this year, and in one late-July week four big names fell at once, capped by BitMEX saying it will close. Not just a price crash but a shakeout, clearing the speculative wave and leaving the projects that earn real money.
US spot Ethereum funds can finally stake the ETH they hold, paying investors a reported yield of roughly 3%, something Bitcoin funds structurally cannot do. Meanwhile the 'ETH is flipping Bitcoin' headlines are mostly hype: Ethereum has actually fallen further than Bitcoin this year. Here is what is real, what is narrow, and what is just narrative.
On Friday the SEC votes on whether to propose 'Regulation Crypto,' a set of token-fundraising rules it has been sketching since 2025, now arriving as the CLARITY Act sits stalled in the Senate. Here is what tomorrow's vote actually decides (less than the headlines suggest), what the rules would do, and why nothing changes on Friday.
In August 2026, Wells Fargo became the latest giant to say it will tokenise customer deposits, joining JPMorgan, Citi and Bank of America in a shared network due in 2027. Wall Street calls it 'tokenisation,' but a tokenised deposit is not a stablecoin, and the change is smaller than the word suggests.
The Coldcard hack of July 2026 emptied cold-storage wallets that never went online. The culprit was not a phishing link or a stolen device, but a randomness flaw that quietly sat in the firmware since 2021. Here is exactly what happened, who is affected, and what it does and does not mean for self-custody.
Bitcoin has fallen from a $126,000 record to the low $60,000s, and $2 trillion has been wiped off the crypto market. It feels like a crash. It is also, by Bitcoin's own brutal history, the mildest big drawdown it has ever had. Here is what actually drove it, and the honest case on both sides.
AI plus crypto is the hottest narrative in the market, and most of it is nonsense. A handful of projects solve a genuine problem, the rest borrowed the letters A and I to pump a token. Here is how to tell the difference, with no hype and no financial advice.
In Venezuela, Argentina, Nigeria and Turkey, dollar-pegged crypto has quietly become everyday money for salaries, savings and groceries. Here is where it is happening, the real numbers, and the catch nobody advertises.
Buying crypto is easy. Buying it without getting robbed is the part that trips people up, and in 2025 that cost Americans over $11 billion. This is the safe way to do it, step by step, plus the scams that actually get people. It is a how-to, not investment advice.
Wallet-drainer phishing still stole $83.85 million from 106,000 people in 2025, and almost all of it was signed away, not hacked. We tested the popular self-custody wallets on the moment that decides everything: the signature.
The right exchange depends on two things above all: where you live, and what you want to do. We compare the five that matter on fees, safety and regulation, and say plainly which is not available where. This is a tool comparison, not investment advice.