Morning Edition · Monday, August 17, 2026
Crypto
Aztec Discloses Critical Proving-System Flaw in Its Live Privacy Layer-2
Core contributors found that an attacker could build a proof that passes verification for a transaction the network is supposed to reject, a defect that the validator committee's re-execution does not catch.
Crypto
JPMorgan Now Takes Bitcoin and Ether as Collateral for Dollar Loans
Institutional clients can pledge digital assets through the bank's Kinexys platform with a third-party custodian holding them, placing crypto on the same collateral schedule as Treasuries and large-cap equities.
Crypto
Buterin Credits Bitcoin's Utreexo as Ethereum Researchers Test Native UTXOs
The design under discussion would let nodes validate transactions while holding only a few kilobytes of state, with recursive proofs aggregating validity in the mempool instead of every node re-executing every transaction.
Crypto
Bridge Keys and Payment Wallets Drive the Summer's Confirmed Crypto Losses
Coinsbuy lost about $7.9 million across Ethereum and Tron with proceeds laundered through Monero, weeks after validator-key compromise drained $24.15 million from AFX Trade and a repeat bridge exploit took $7.54 million from Verus.
Crypto
Coldcard Entropy Defect, a SafePal Data Leak and a macOS Bug Widen the Custody Attack Surface
Rekt now counts roughly $130 million tied to a 2021 firmware change that routed a hardware wallet's randomness through a guessable software fallback, while attackers with root access on exposed Macs installed Monero miners.
Crypto
A Post-Quantum Chain Runs on a Laptop, and Researchers Ask Whether the Standards Even Agree
One developer built and launched a public testnet where authorization, state transitions and validity from genesis all run on a single post-quantum proof stack, as a new paper argues cross-implementation agreement on standard test vectors is rarely stated precisely enough to verify.
Crypto
Bitcoin Treasury Companies Are Selling Coins and Still Facing Their Maturities
One issuer sold 600 BTC to cut debt and still owes $60 million in December against $19.1 million in cash, while a former solar company holding $4.118 million of Bitcoin reports $166,000 in cash and an unresolved going-concern problem.
Crypto
US Crypto Rules Wait on a September Vote as the SEC Cancels Its Own Meeting
Senate Majority Leader John Thune filed cloture on 8 August for a first procedural vote on 15 September, and hopes that regulators would act independently faded when the securities regulator pulled its planned crypto rulemaking.
Macro
The Fight Over Who May Pay Yield on Stablecoins Reaches $307 Billion in Supply
Banks want the statutory ban on issuer interest extended to affiliates and third parties, a rule that would decide whether dollars sit in deposits or in tokens as national debt approaches $40 trillion.
Crypto
Privacy Teams Reframe Confidentiality as Infrastructure, Not an Add-On
Miden argues most chains are not private and that practical privacy needs account recovery, multisignature security and configurable disclosure built in, rather than a mixing layer bolted on top.
Crypto
Armstrong Says Software Agents Need Crypto Rails as Investors Return to Usage Metrics
The Coinbase chief executive calls crypto "the currency of agentic finance," a claim that only holds if fees and settlement times fall to levels machine-to-machine payments can bear.
Crypto
Bitcoin Holds Near $64,000 While Every Major Asset Is Lower on the Week
XRP is trading near $1 with futures open interest at $2.78 billion and social sentiment at a three-month low, and an analyst estimates 3.56 million Bitcoin have not moved in over a decade.