Flash News

The U.S. Senate is set to hold a procedural vote on the Clarity Act on Sept. 15, following Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s move to seek cloture on the crypto market structure legislation.

Lawmakers will take up the measure when the Senate reconvenes following its August break. Cloture requires 60 votes. With unanimous Republican backing, the threshold could only be reached with additional support from at least seven Democratic or independent senators.

Meanwhile, negotiations remain underway over ethics provisions, illicit finance rules and the inclusion of language developed by the Senate Agriculture Committee.

Source: The Block

Grayscale Head of Research Zach Pandl said the CLARITY Act is unlikely to pass this year, citing constraints in the Senate calendar and election-year politics.

Pandl said a failure to enact the legislation would have little immediate effect on Bitcoin, major blockchains or the expansion of stablecoin payments.

The SEC and other regulators are expected to continue addressing gaps through rulemaking, particularly in areas involving tokenized securities, he said. 

Pandl warned, however, that without a comprehensive U.S. market structure framework, a larger share of new investment and developer activity could move overseas.

Source: Grayscale

Strategy founder Michael Saylor said the company sold Bitcoin when the cryptocurrency was trading around $59,000 to $60,000 to challenge market assumptions that disposing of its holdings would trigger a decline in the token’s price.

Speaking in an interview with The Diary Of A CEO, Saylor said investors had believed Strategy was effectively unable to sell Bitcoin because doing so could push BTC lower. That scenario, he said, could leave the company in a “doom loop,” forcing it to raise capital through stock sales to cover dividend payments.

Instead, Bitcoin rose after Strategy sold some of its holdings, Saylor said.

Strategy’s break-even point is about 3.2%, according to Saylor. If Bitcoin appreciates by that amount, the company can sell a portion of its BTC holdings to cover dividends without having to continue issuing equity, he said.

Bitcoin was trading at $65,196 at the time of the update, up 4.3% over the previous seven days.

Source: The Diary Of A CEO Podcast

Michael Saylor estimates miners supporting the BIP-110 branch account for only about 0.15% of Bitcoin’s total hashpower. 

Only two blocks have been produced on the minority branch since the fork, Saylor said, leaving it more than 80 blocks behind Bitcoin’s main chain. 

Saylor said the branch’s present rate of block production would put its first difficulty adjustment roughly 25 years away.

BIP-110 sought to temporarily limit the use of Bitcoin transactions to store non-financial data. According to Saylor’s estimate, miners representing the remaining 99.85% of network hashpower continued on the main chain.

Source: Michael Saylor

The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is working on infrastructure that would enable tokenized securities to be settled on-chain, President Lynn Martin said, as the exchange examines blockchain technology for use across financial markets.

NYSE was also involved in a July tokenization pilot conducted by DTC, according to Martin.

Martin said the exchange will continue to evaluate the technology for potential use in the core infrastructure underpinning global financial markets, including connections between traditional finance (TradFi) and decentralized finance (DeFi).

Source: Digital Asset

Grayscale withdrew registration statements for three proposed crypto exchange-traded funds (ETFs), according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

In particular, the asset manager submitted three Form RW filings on Aug. 7 covering the Grayscale Cardano Trust ETF, Grayscale Polkadot Trust ETF, and Grayscale Hedera Trust ETF.

The filings withdraw the S-1 registration statements for the three products.

Source: Grayscale

Bitcoin and Ethereum spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) recorded net inflows of $854 million and $245 million, respectively, from Aug. 3 through Aug. 7, extending their run of weekly inflows to five consecutive weeks.

Spot ETFs tracking other cryptocurrencies also attracted capital during the period. In particular, Solana spot ETFs posted net inflows of $144,900, while XRP products took in $1.01 million.

Moreover, HYPE spot ETFs recorded $2.84 million in net inflows over the same period.

Source: SoSoValue

Empery Digital reduced its Bitcoin holdings to 1,279 BTC after disposing of 1,635 BTC for approximately $102.2 million between July 1 and Aug. 6.

The company has 325 BTC that are unrestricted, compared with 1,375 BTC on June 30. A further 954 BTC is pledged against $35 million in debt.

A data center property acquisition could require Empery Digital to commit an additional $62.1 million.

Source: CryptoSlate

A dispute among Bitcoin BIP Editors has escalated after Murch called for Luke Dashjr to be removed from the editorial group in a recommendation submitted to the Bitcoin Development Mailing List.

The recommendation is based in part on how Dashjr allegedly handled the BIP110 process. Murch said a related pull request was merged within minutes of being opened and cited efforts to obtain a BIP number for the proposal before discussion on the mailing list had taken place.

Murch also attributed a major role in BIP110’s creation and implementation to Dashjr, saying the proposal ultimately resulted in a Bitcoin fork.

Beyond BIP110, Murch alleged that Dashjr had applied his editorial authority inconsistently and said coordination and communication between him and the other BIP Editors had deteriorated.

Source: Murch

Harry Yeh, the founder of Quantum Fintech Group who was involved in projects on the Fantom blockchain, has died in Paraguay, where authorities are investigating the circumstances surrounding a fall from a high-rise apartment building.

Yeh fell from the 30th floor of a luxury residential building in Asunción. Investigators have yet to establish how the fall occurred, and police are considering multiple possibilities, including an accident, suicide, and the involvement of another person.

An apartment associated with Yeh was found open, with signs that the interior had been extensively disturbed, according to the information available.

Yeh’s involvement in digital assets dated to 2013, when he invested in Bitcoin. He later became a Fantom Foundation member and assumed control of the Tomb Finance team, while also incubating several projects in the Fantom ecosystem.

He had publicly put the value of digital-asset investments under his management at more than $2 billion. The claim has not been independently confirmed.

Source: International Business Times

UMX, or The Unified Market Exchange, launched an invitation-only public beta on Monday, the platform announced.

Incubated by Li Lin’s Avenir Group, UMX describes itself as a “crypto-friendly securities platform” and plans to offer cryptocurrency trading alongside real U.S. stocks through a single platform, with a focus on cross-asset capital efficiency. 

Avenir Group is a major institutional holder of Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in Asia and has expanded its investments across traditional finance (TradFi) and digital assets.

Source: The Unified Market Exchange

WuBlockchain Data Center data showed that 22.7% of the 22 Bitcoin mining machine models it monitors were operating at a daily loss on Aug. 6.

The profitability estimates use current assumptions for electricity costs and Bitcoin network conditions.

Under those assumptions, $46,787 is the estimated BTC shutdown price for the machine with the highest energy efficiency. A drop below that level would bring even the strongest-performing equipment close to break-even.

Bitcoin was trading at $65,117 at the time of writing, up 1% over the preceding 24 hours.

Source: Wu Blockchain

Coinkite, which develops the Coldcard Bitcoin hardware wallet, is prioritizing assistance for customers affected by a security incident and plans to release a post-mortem after completing its investigation, Bloomberg reported. 

The company said it would not speculate on the extent of customer losses while the investigation remains underway. According to Coinkite, its products are designed with privacy protections that prevent the company from independently verifying loss estimates calculated by outside parties.

Recent outside research has put estimated losses from the attack at about $130 million.

Source: Bloomberg

Grayscale has filed an amended trust agreement for its Ethereum Staking Mini ETF that would allow the fund to stake substantially all its ETH once specified tax conditions are met.

Under the amended terms, staking rewards would be converted into cash and distributed to shareholders at least quarterly.

Grayscale may also impose a separate staking fee, the amount of which will be disclosed at a later date.

Source: SEC Filing

Firmus has raised $2 billion in equity funding at a post-money valuation of over $10.5 billion, as the AI infrastructure company expands its operations in Australia and Asia, Reuters reported.

Coatue Management and Nvidia returned as investors in the funding round, while funds managed by Blackstone and Jane Street participated as new backers.

The company plans to use the capital to accelerate the buildout of its AI factories in Australia and fund further expansion across Asia.

Firmus previously operated as a Bitcoin miner before moving into AI infrastructure.

Source: Reuters

Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan said DeFi projects are increasingly directing revenue toward token holders, a shift he believes has yet to be fully reflected in valuations.

Hougan told Cointelegraph that Hyperliquid uses 99% of its platform revenue to buy back its token, an approach he said the market has rewarded.

He also pointed to changes across other DeFi projects. Uniswap is increasing value capture for UNI, while Aave has removed the separation between its equity and token. Morpho and Chainlink are also improving their tokenomics, according to Hougan.

Hougan said the market has not fully repriced the changes, leaving some DeFi assets trading at what he considers relatively low valuations.

Source: Cointelegraph

NYDIG received Bitcoin transfers valued at about $37.37 million from miners MARA and Riot Platforms, with the two companies moving 581 BTC in total, according to blockchain analytics platform Lookonchain.

MARA sent 200 BTC, valued at about $12.86 million, around 19 hours earlier. The miner holds 36,303 BTC worth approximately $2.34 billion.

The other 381 BTC came from Riot Platforms and was valued at roughly $24.51 million at the time of the transfer.

Source: Lookonchain

Pump.fun sold 84,789 Solana (SOL) worth about $6.25 million across several transactions on Thursday, according to blockchain analytics platform Lookonchain.

The latest transactions bring Pump.fun’s total SOL sales to 4,823,325 tokens, worth about $807 million at an average sale price of $167.40 per SOL. 

The transactions come as Pump.fun’s PUMP token was trading at $0.002302 at the time of the update, having gained 56% over the past month. Over the same period, SOL declined 4.7% to trade at $73.62.

Source: Lookonchain

The exploiter behind the June 21 theft from MEV bot jaredfromsubway lost about $505,000 after selling and subsequently repurchasing Ethereum (ETH) at a higher price, according to blockchain analytics platform Lookonchain.

The exploiter stole $7.7 million in assets, including 1,583.5 ETH valued at $2.75 million, 2.87 million USDC, and 2.09 million USDT, before converting the stolen funds into 4,427 ETH.

From that ETH position, the exploiter later sold 2,327 ETH for $3.94 million at an average price of $1,695 per token. The wallet then spent the same $3.94 million to buy back 2,063 ETH at $1,912 each about 10 hours ago.

The sell-and-buyback transactions left the exploiter with 264 fewer ETH, worth roughly $505,000, according to Lookonchain.

Source: Lookonchain