Morning Edition · Sunday, August 9, 2026
Crypto
Bitcoin's BIP-110 Chain Splits Off With 2.6% of Miners, Mines Two Blocks and Stalls
The breakaway chain inherited bitcoin's full mining difficulty with almost no hashpower behind it, and because both chains accept identical transactions, holders who move coins risk having those transactions replayed.
Crypto
BTCPay Server Patches Flaw That Let Attackers Take Lightning Node Credentials From Merchants
Stolen macaroon files stay valid after the update, so operators who patch without regenerating credentials remain exposed, and the bug was found only after a wallet developer lost money and read his logs.
Crypto
Coldcard's Five-Year Entropy Defect Accounts for Roughly a Tenth of 2026's $1.2 Billion in Crypto Theft
Firmware shipped in March 2021 generated seeds with a software pseudorandom number generator instead of the device's hardware chip, and attackers used the resulting weak keys to take 1,816 BTC from more than 5,200 addresses.
Crypto
Aztec Publishes the Proving-System Flaw It Held Back Until Its Private Execution Upgrade Shipped
The company said the defect affected the proving system as a whole and could not be caught by validator re-execution, which is the specific safety net most zero-knowledge rollups rely on.
Geopolitics
Bybit Wins a US Court Freeze on Assets From the $1.5 Billion Theft It Attributes to North Korea
A federal judge found the exchange likely to succeed on the merits and barred unnamed holders from moving the identified funds, testing whether a civil judgment can reach assets on a ledger no court controls.
Crypto
Senate Leaves for Recess Without the Clarity Act as Brussels Prepares to Reopen MiCA in 2027
The majority leader started the procedural clock to keep the bill alive in September, while European officials concluded their own crypto rulebook cannot handle non-EU issuers and stablecoins as written.
Crypto
Brazil's Central Bank Will Let Exchanges Hold Large Crypto Transfers Abroad for 24 Hours
The rule covers transfers above $10,000 and smaller ones the exchange flags as risky, importing a delay mechanism from conventional payments into a settlement layer designed not to have one.
Crypto
A Governance Timeout, a Flash-Loan Oracle Trick and an Unvalidated Parameter: Three New Exploit Proofs Published
Panther Protocol lost 5.12 million ZKP on Base after nobody bonded against a malicious proposal, and researchers added working reproductions of two further attack classes to the public exploit archive.
Crypto
XRP Ledger Validators Vote on Encrypted Institutional Transfers as Privacy Becomes a Product Requirement
The Confidential Transfer amendment would hide balances and amounts for tokenised assets using elliptic-curve encryption and zero-knowledge proofs, and needs 80% validator support for two consecutive weeks to activate.
Crypto
Spot Crypto Funds Take In More Than $1 Billion in a Week While Bitcoin Trades Near $65,000
BlackRock accounted for about 80% of the inflow, and the money arrived during a year in which crypto has lagged gold, silver and United States equity indices.
Crypto
Four Years After FTX, Exchange Proof-of-Reserves Still Omits the Half That Matters
Inclusion proofs show a customer's balance was counted and show the exchange holds coins, but they do not prove that liabilities are complete, and BitMEX spent two years looking for a buyer before deciding to close.
Crypto
Researchers Propose Binding Machine Payments to Proof That the Work Was Actually Done
The x402 payment standard lets a software agent pay for a server call but never checks whether the server delivered, and a new reference design uses zero-knowledge proofs to make settlement conditional on correct execution.