Morning Edition · Friday, August 21, 2026
Crypto
Aztec Discloses a Second Critical Proving-System Flaw, This Time on Its Live V5 Network
Core contributors found the defect through internal artificial-intelligence-assisted auditing and say an attacker could construct a proof that passes verification for a transaction the network should reject.
Crypto
Ethereum's Glamsterdam Devnet Extends the Execution-Payload Window From Two Seconds to About Nine
The public test network lets validators and infrastructure teams rehearse the client, builder and gas changes that unblock a far higher gas ceiling before the fork reaches established testnets.
Crypto
CFTC Chairman Says His Agency Will Build a Crypto Regime by Rule if the Senate Bill Fails
Mike Selig told the agency's new Innovation Advisory Committee it will use existing authorities, and Coinbase's Brian Armstrong put a date on it: a Senate vote on September 15 or agency rules the day after.
Crypto
Bitcoin Trades Above $75,000 as Two Days of Short Liquidations Reach About $3.8 Billion
CoinDesk reports Thursday's short liquidation figure was the largest in records going back to 2021, and more than $222 million of shorts closed in a single hour overnight.
Crypto
MANTRA Halts Its Entire Chain While Researchers Publish a Working Attack on Bridge Attestations
The real-world-asset network froze validators, endpoints and transfers without naming a cause, as a new proof-of-concept showed how an Allbridge cross-chain path could be made to credit deposits that never happened.
Crypto
The Coldcard Entropy Failure Turns Into a Fight Over Source-Available Bitcoin Software
A firmware build error from March 2021 cut effective key strength to as little as 40 bits, and critics argue a restrictive license kept the code out of the hands of reviewers who might have caught it.
Crypto
Ethereum Foundation Opens a Machine-Checked Challenge on the Math Behind Hash-Based Proofs
better.codes takes a self-contained problem from the $1 million Proximity Prize research, formalizes it in the Lean proof assistant, and puts its soundness bounds up for open competition.
Crypto
CZ Argues for Tokenizing Everything on Every Chain While Banks Move Deposits Onto Closed Ones
The Binance founder accepts fragmented liquidity as the cost of speed, but the institutions actually issuing tokenized deposits are choosing permissioned systems for privacy and compliance reasons.
Crypto
Digital-Asset Treasury Companies Report Cash Balances Far Smaller Than Their Commitments
BTCS ended the quarter with $317,000 in cash against an $89.3 million balance sheet, Datavault wants to buy a bank with $1.4 million on hand, and HIVE needs $185 million to deliver a $350 million artificial-intelligence contract.
Crypto
Privacy Chains Package Confidentiality With Recovery, Multisignature and Compliance Controls
Miden's Guardian layer combines on-chain privacy with account recovery and configurable disclosure, an attempt to make confidential settlement acceptable to institutions that cannot accept irreversible key loss.
Crypto
Ripple Backs an Institutional Credit Fund Denominated in RLUSD Before the Ledger Features It Needs Are Live
Clearpool and Cicada Partners are building the lending product, but the XRP Ledger functions underpinning it still await activation by validators.
Geopolitics
United States Charges 17 Iranian Nationals Over a Cyber Campaign That Included a $6 Million Bitcoin Extortion Demand
The Justice Department alleges the Mabna Institute group stole 31 terabytes of academic and corporate data, and the State Department is offering up to $10 million for information on five defendants.