Morning Edition · Wednesday, September 23, 2026
Crypto
Solana Begins Public Testing of Alpenglow, Replacing Its Consensus Protocol
Votor removes the long chain of on-chain votes in favor of direct validator voting, with Anza estimating median finality near 150 milliseconds against 12.8 seconds today.
Crypto
Aztec Discloses Proving-System Defect That Could Let Invalid Transactions Pass Verification
Core contributors found the flaw through internal artificial-intelligence-assisted auditing and say funds, applications and contract state on Alpha V5 should be treated as exposed until the fix ships in V6.
Crypto
Cronos Rolled Back 10,961 Blocks to Recover $111 Million After Tectonic Collateral Attack
An attacker inflated the price of the TONIC token roughly 300 times and borrowed $120.4 million against it, and $9.19 million left the chain before validators reorganized the ledger.
Macro
European Central Bank Asks Brussels to Delete MiCA's Stablecoin Bank-Deposit Rule
The European System of Central Banks wants the 30 to 60 percent deposit floor replaced with one-day and five-day liquidity tests, arguing the current rule exposes banks to a stablecoin run.
Crypto
A Shared Cosmos Defect Drained Four Networks, With Nesa Losing About $50 Million
An attacker bridged 257.7 million NES tokens to Ethereum in an incident consistent with the same upstream bug that hit TAC, KiiChain and MANTRA, while a separate flaw at Nomic minted unbacked bitcoin claims.
Crypto
XRP Ledger Retries Upgrades After Fixing a Signature Check That Skipped Signers
An early-return bug in the shelved Batch amendment would have let a forged entry authorize another account's transaction, and a separate delegation amendment could activate Oct. 5 if support holds at 80 percent.
Crypto
BitMEX Stops Trading After 11 Years as Perpetual Futures Volume Settles Elsewhere
The exchange that introduced the perpetual swap closed at 04:00 UTC with withdrawals still open, while on-chain venues Hyperliquid and Lighter added double-digit percentage gains in value secured over seven days.
Crypto
White Hats Route 52 Bitcoin From the Coldcard Entropy Failure Into a Recovery Trust
The transfer covers 2.8 percent of an exploit that reached roughly $130 million after a firmware defect made seed generation fall back to a weak software random number generator.
Geopolitics
US Prosecutors Examine Whether Binance Allowed Iran-Linked Trades, Bloomberg Reports
The inquiry comes three years after a $4.3 billion settlement that covered roughly $898 million in trades between United States and Iranian users, and lands as Binance closes its Ukrainian hryvnia rails.
Crypto
Miden Launches a Private Finance Stack and a Self-Custodial Wallet That Proves on the Device
The PriFi stack covers identity, custody, banking, compliance, real-world assets and settlement, with balances and counterparties kept off the public ledger.
Crypto
Ethereum Researchers Reopen the Hash Choice After New Proof Systems Make Standard Hashes Cheap
With the binary-field prover Flock able to prove tens of thousands of standard hash compressions per second on a single core, the constraint that pushed Ethereum toward Poseidon no longer binds.
Crypto
Bitcoin Holds Near $86,000 Into a $16 Billion Options Expiry as ETF Buying Returns
United States spot bitcoin funds took in $999 million on Monday according to Farside data, while 38 of the 100 largest digital assets tracked by CoinDesk fell on the day.