Morning Edition · Friday, July 31, 2026
Crypto
Coldcard Mk3 Owners Told to Move Coins After 594 Bitcoin Swept From Dormant Wallets
Analysts trace the roughly $38 million drain to faulty randomness in seed generation, which turned supposedly unguessable private keys into guessable ones.
Macro
BIS Moves Real Central-Bank and Commercial-Bank Money On-Chain in 28-Lender Payments Test
Project Agorá settled about $1 million across six currencies in roughly 80 seconds, tokenizing bank money rather than issuing a stablecoin.
Geopolitics
CLARITY Act Heads Toward August Recess Without the Votes to Pass
Senator Cynthia Lummis and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent blame Democrats over an ethics provision, while Senate leadership signals the bill likely misses its window.
Markets
Strategy Books $8.22 Billion Quarterly Loss as Bitcoin Falls Below Its Cost Basis
The company says it now holds a $3.75 billion cash reserve, enough for more than two years of preferred dividends, after investors questioned its funding model.
Tech
Privacy Layer-2s Push Confidential Smart Contracts Onto Ethereum as Aztec and Miden Ship
Aztec's Alpha V5 proves a fully private transaction in about 2.5 seconds on a laptop, while Miden presents practical privacy as a prerequisite for serious on-chain use.
Crypto
Aave Proposes to Shut Deployments on Six Chains That Earn Almost No Revenue
A governance proposal would close markets on Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium and Aptos and retire 50 asset markets, with deposits on some down more than 90%.
Tech
Blockstream's Simplicity Goes Live on Liquid Mainnet With Post-Quantum Signatures
The formally verifiable contract language, eight years in development, now runs real financial logic, and banks including Swisscom's and a Swiss cantonal lender are writing lending contracts on it.
Crypto
DeFi Total Value Locked Fell $43.4 Billion in the First Half of 2026, Binance Research Says
Layer-1 valuations and layer-2 activity contracted together while prediction markets grew, and on-chain data now puts total DeFi value near $75 billion.
Crypto
DeFi Exploit Drains Roughly $578,000 as Seoul Police Break Up $19 Million Staking Fraud
A reward-recycling manipulation drained a BNB Chain protocol while South Korean authorities arrested three people over a fake XRP staking platform, part of a steady series of mid-size crypto thefts.
Markets
Coinbase Falls After Posting a Second-Quarter Loss and Lower Revenue
The exchange reported $1.22 billion in revenue, down from $1.5 billion a year earlier, even as it cited record market share and growth in stablecoins and derivatives.
Geopolitics
US Sanctions Iranian Firms Accused of Taking Bitcoin for Strait of Hormuz Passage
The Treasury designated two maritime entities over an alleged Revolutionary Guard extortion scheme, one cited for accepting digital assets to settle premiums.
World
Bitchat Mesh App Keeps Running in India After a Cybercrime Notice, Spreading Peer to Peer
The open-source tool works without internet or central servers, and protesters used it during network restrictions before authorities targeted it.