Morning Edition · Friday, August 7, 2026
Macro
US Economy Sheds 23,000 Jobs in July, Cutting Odds of a Fed Rate Hike as Bitcoin Nears $65,000
Wage growth slowed to its weakest annual pace in years and the unemployment rate slipped to 4.1 percent, even as government payrolls fell by 53,000 and private hiring alone still grew.
Crypto
Bitcoin's BIP-110 Advances Toward Activation Despite Near-Zero Miner Backing
The user-activated soft fork (UASF), aimed at restricting non-financial data such as Ordinals inscriptions, is set to lock in around block 965,664 near September 6 even though signaling miners have never exceeded roughly 1 percent support.
Crypto
Coldcard Entropy Flaw Pushes 210,000 Bitcoin Out of Old Wallets as Losses Reach $116 Million
A firmware build error routed seed generation through a software pseudorandom generator instead of the hardware's own randomness source, cutting effective entropy from 128 bits to as low as 40 bits on affected devices.
Crypto
Ethereum Researchers Model a Multi-Dimensional Fee Market Ahead of the Glamsterdam Upgrade
One proposal would price state growth, data, and execution as separate resources instead of a single gas unit, while a companion design paper benchmarks a leaner data-availability-sampling scheme intended to shrink what full validators must store.
Crypto
Cryptographers Dispute the Security of Poseidon, the Hash Function Underpinning Ethereum's Zero-Knowledge Proofs
One researcher put Poseidon's quantum preimage resistance at just 63.75 bits, well below common security targets, while a rival proposal called Ashlar is inviting cryptanalysts to try to break it before it is trusted with real value.
Crypto
Aztec Ships Alpha V5, Cutting Private Ethereum Transaction Proving Time to 2.5 Seconds on a Laptop
The privacy-focused layer-2 network says the update halves its proving-cost parameter, cuts the gas needed to verify a rollup proof by roughly 40 percent, and now proves a fully private transaction directly on a user's own device.
Crypto
Miden Launches Guardian, a Privacy Tool That Lets Institutions Enforce Compliance Without Holding Users' Keys
Built with OpenZeppelin on Miden's Private State Manager, Guardian offers multisig approval workflows and account recovery for shared accounts while keeping the underlying activity confidential by default.
Crypto
Blockstream Swept 25,935 Parameter Sets to Shrink a Post-Quantum Bitcoin Signature Scheme by a Quarter
The research effort refines SHRINCS, a hash-based signature design that already produces signatures roughly 24 times smaller than the U.S. government's SLH-DSA post-quantum standard, and published an open-source tool so anyone can verify or improve the parameter choices.
Crypto
Security Roundup: Abandoned StrongBlock Governance Drained, North Korean Hackers Hijack Telegram Accounts to Scan Crypto Wallets
StrongBlock lost roughly $72,000 in tokens after an attacker exploited a deprecated governance contract, while the North Korea-linked group BlueNoroff has compromised more than 100 crypto professionals across 20-plus countries through fake Zoom and Teams meetings.
Crypto
CLARITY Act Vote Slips to September as Senate Leaves for Recess Without Resolving Ethics Dispute
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said the market-structure bill will be "queued up first thing" when lawmakers return, but Democrats are still pressing for stronger ethics rules covering officials' crypto holdings, including the Trump family's crypto ventures.
Crypto
Wintermute Wins US Broker-Dealer Status, Opening a Path Into Tokenized Stocks and Crypto ETFs
The market maker's U.S. arm can now trade American stocks and options and self-clear digital-asset securities, with tokenized-equity trading planned once further regulatory approval and market infrastructure are in place.
Geopolitics
Russia's FSB Arrests More Than 20 in Raids on Unlicensed Moscow Crypto Exchanges Tied to Ukraine
Officials say the gray-market exchanges laundered funds stolen by phone-fraud call centers based in Ukraine, with one detained operator claiming up to $2 million moved through a single office in one day.