Bitmine (BMNR), the largest Ethereum treasury firm, bought just 7,430 ether (ETH) last week, dialing back its buying spree as it redirected capital to a stock buyback.

The latest purchase, worth about $14 million at ether’s current price of $1,879, lifted BitMine’s holdings to 5,78 million ETH, or roughly 4.8% of Ethereum’s circulating supply, according to a Monday company update.

BMNR was 2.4% higher in pre-market trading.

The purchase marks one of firm’s smallest weekly additions since launching its Ethereum treasury strategy in June 2025. By comparison, the firm bought more than 111,000 ETH during one week in May and had regularly acquired tens of thousands of tokens throughout the first half of the year. The firm is nearing its goal to corner 5% of ETH supply.

Chairman Thomas “Tom” Lee attributed the slowdown to the company’s decision to repurchase approximately 5.5 million shares at an average price of $15.62 under its previously authorized $4 billion buyback program.

“The reduced pace of buys reflects that Bitmine repurchased 5.5 million common shares,” Lee said. He added that the company has purchased ETH every week since adopting its treasury strategy just over a year ago.

Veteran trader Peter Brandt says he has pinpointed the exact day in 2026 when he expects Bitcoin to hit the bottom of this market cycle.

“I’ll go out on a limb and say we bottom on October 4th. So we’ll see,” Brandt tells Cointelegraph during an interview for Trade Secrets. 

Of course, picking the exact day of a market bottom is a tough ask, but the 51-year trading veteran has held firm on his October prediction for Bitcoin’s cycle low for quite some time.

He says Bitcoin could fall below $50,000 and potentially into the high-$40,000 range before establishing what he expects will be the cycle low.

“Whether it’s at these kinds of current levels, or we crash through and really blow people out and move into the 50s, possibly the high 40s… You know, you have to remember that every major bear market in Bitcoin’s history since its inception has been an 80% plus correction. If you take Bitcoin’s high in the 120s, that would indicate that,” Brandt says.

Bitcoin is trading at $63,661 at the time of publication. Source: CoinMarketCap

Many traders believe Bitcoin’s current level around $60,000 could be the cycle bottom, but Brandt isn’t convinced. He says there is still too much optimism that prices will bounce back.

“Right now it’s neutral [sentiment]. Markets don’t bottom on neutral sentiment. Markets bottom on panic and volume.”

“The same people that are saying Bitcoin’s bottom at some point in time will be giving up on Bitcoin, throwing in the towel, and saying we’re done with Bitcoin, we’re going on to other assets, the Bitcoin phenomenon is done,” Brandt says.

Brandt says Bitcoin is a better bet than AI stocks

While some in crypto have blamed the AI boom for pulling money away from Bitcoin and the broader market, Brandt isn’t convinced the AI trade can keep climbing forever.

“I do not believe that somebody who goes all in on AI stocks right now will be very happy with that investment two, three years from now,” Brandt says, explaining that if he had $10,000 right now he would split it 50% between Bitcoin and precious metals.

“I think precious metals are closer to a bottom price-wise; I think Bitcoin may be closer to a bottom time-wise,” he says.

Brandt says Bitcoin won’t reach its cycle peak until 2029, forecasting a price between $250,000 and $300,000. If he’s right, Bitcoin would have just a year to climb from that range to the far more ambitious $1 million target projected by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood for 2030.

It adds new capabilities to Plutus, the platform developers use to write Cardano’s smart contracts, unifying the built-in functions available across the platform’s three versions so older applications gain newer features.

The upgrade also tightens several of the ledger’s validation rules, including one guaranteeing that no two stake pools can reuse the same cryptographic identity key.

“As well as Plutus improvements and Plutus Cost Model enhancements, this upgrade lays the foundation for the next upgrade, the Dijkstra era hard fork, which will introduce Ouroboros Leios to Cardano,” Input Output wrote in a development report on Friday.

Ouroboros Leios is a scaling proposal for the proof-of-stake consensus model that Cardano runs. It is expected later in 2026 and aimed at sharply increasing transactions per second without weakening the protocol’s security guarantees.

Van Rossem is the procedural groundwork for Ouroboros, both in the ledger changes it ships and in the precedent it sets: that Cardano can now upgrade itself by vote.

The hard fork is named for Max van Rossem, a Cardano governance contributor who helped shape the network’s constitution and died in October 2025.

What the hard fork means for a Cardano user

There are no visible changes for someone casually holding or spending ADA. Transactions work the same way, wallets do not need updating and the fee to send ADA is unchanged. The upgrade does not alter how the network looks or feels to use.

SWIFT built a ledger for them. JPMorgan settles billions with them. The FDIC is writing rules about them. Tokenized deposits are the banking system’s answer to stablecoins, and understanding the difference decides how you read the next five years of digital money.

The most consequential money on blockchains this year is not a cryptocurrency and not a stablecoin. It is ordinary bank deposits, the money in checking accounts, wearing a token as a coat. In July, SWIFT switched on the 17-bank ledger built for this instrument with 17 of the world’s largest banks built specifically to move this instrument. JPMorgan already settles institutional payments with its own version. A consortium of American banking giants is building a shared network for 2027, and the FDIC’s stablecoin rulemaking carves out space to address how deposit insurance applies to it. The instrument is the tokenized deposit, and the reason it deserves twenty minutes of any crypto reader’s attention is that it is the banking system’s structural answer to the $300 billion stablecoin sector: a digital dollar that does everything a stablecoin does while never leaving the bank. Whether that is the point or the problem depends on where you sit, which is exactly what this guide unpacks.

The definition, precisely

A tokenized deposit is a digital representation of a claim on a commercial bank, recorded on a blockchain or distributed ledger, issued by the bank that holds the deposit, and redeemable one-to-one against it.

Every clause is doing work. It is a claim on a bank, the same legal object as the balance in a checking account, which means it is commercial bank money, the kind that makes up the overwhelming majority of what people and firms actually use as dollars. It is issued by the bank itself, not by a third party holding the bank at arm’s length. It maintains one-to-one correspondence with a deposit that remains on the bank’s balance sheet, so tokenizing a million dollars does not move a million dollars anywhere; it changes the record-keeping technology for money that stays put. And it lives on a ledger, which is what gives it the properties deposits never had: settlement in seconds, availability at 3 a.m. on a Sunday, and the ability to be composed into programmable payment logic.

The cleanest way to hold the concept: a stablecoin is a new kind of money issued by a new kind of company, while a tokenized deposit is the oldest kind of money with a new kind of plumbing. For readers who want the other side of the comparison, crypto.news has also explained the competing model.

How it differs from a stablecoin, mechanically

The two instruments look identical at the point of use, a dollar-denominated token that moves on a ledger and settles fast, and are opposites underneath. Three differences carry all the weight.

Where the money sits. When a customer buys a stablecoin, dollars leave their bank account and land in the issuer’s reserve portfolio, Treasury bills, repo, money funds, custodial accounts, outside the banking system. The bank loses a deposit; the reserve assets sit sterile with respect to lending. With a tokenized deposit, nothing leaves. The deposit stays on the bank’s balance sheet, funding loans exactly as before, while the token circulates as its mobile representation. Multiply across a sector and this is the difference between digital dollars that drain bank funding and digital dollars that preserve it, which is why the Federal Reserve’s research treats stablecoins as a disintermediation risk and tokenized deposits as the banks’ countermove.

Who stands behind it. A tokenized deposit carries the full apparatus of banking: deposit insurance up to statutory limits, the bank’s capital and supervision, and, behind the bank, access to the Federal Reserve’s discount window. A stablecoin carries the issuer’s reserves and, under the GENIUS Act, a legal priority for holders in insolvency plus full-reserve requirements, real protections, but no insurance and no central bank. The FDIC has confirmed the insurance line between the two: stablecoin wallets get no pass-through deposit insurance, while the FDIC’s own stablecoin rulemaking addresses insurance treatment of tokenized deposits precisely because they are deposits.

What it may pay. The GENIUS Act prohibits payment stablecoin issuers from paying interest on the coin itself, a line Congress drew to stop stablecoins from becoming uninsured savings accounts. A tokenized deposit is a deposit; a bank can pay interest on it the way it pays on any account. In a world of meaningful rates, that asymmetry is not a footnote, it is a business model, and it is one reason banks believe the institutional corridor is winnable.

The distinction inside the category

Here the vocabulary gets sloppy across the industry, and one analytical cut, articulated most clearly by researcher Noelle Acheson, brings it into focus: a tokenized deposit is not the same thing as a deposit token, and the difference is transferability.

In the strict model, a tokenized deposit moves only between customers of banks in the network, and when it moves between banks, the banks settle behind the scenes, the token a customer of Bank A holds is always a claim on Bank A, and transferring value to a customer of Bank B means Bank A’s token is burned, interbank settlement occurs, and Bank B mints its own. This is account money with better rails: the customer relationship, the compliance perimeter, and the claim structure all stay intact, which is why regulators are comfortable with it and why SWIFT’s ledger, which coordinates exactly this burn-settle-mint choreography across institutions, is built this way.

In the looser model, a deposit token is a bearer-style instrument: freely transferable to anyone with a wallet, circulating like a stablecoin while claiming deposit status. This version makes bank money composable with open networks, and it makes regulators nervous, because a freely circulating claim on a bank held by strangers to the bank starts to blur into a bank-issued stablecoin, raising exactly the insurance, run-risk, and know-your-customer questions the strict model avoids. Where each jurisdiction draws this line will quietly determine whether tokenized deposits remain an interbank instrument or grow into a public one, and it is the single most important open design question in the category.

Who is building what

The category crossed from white papers to production over roughly eighteen months, and three architectures now compete.

The single-bank model is live. JPMorgan’s Kinexys settles institutional payments with tokenized deposits today, has extended onto public infrastructure including Base and the Canton network, and proves the concept at the only scale that matters, real money, real clients. Its structural limit is reach: one bank’s token moves one bank’s money, and every large bank running its own rail recreates the fragmentation problem that correspondent banking exists to solve.

The shared-network model is the answer to that limit, and it launched in earnest on July 9, when SWIFT’s blockchain-based ledger went live for initial use with 17 banks across six continents, Citi, HSBC, UBS, BNP Paribas among them, built on Hyperledger Besu in nine months. The ledger validates and coordinates tokenized-deposit movements between member banks around the clock, with final settlement through existing rails, and its pitch is distribution: SWIFT connects more than 11,000 institutions, a footprint no single bank or startup can match. A parallel American effort through The Clearing House, backed by JPMorgan, Bank of America, Barclays, and BNY, targets a 2027 launch, meaning even the shared-network lane already has competing networks.

The public-facing frontier is where the deposit-token question lives: experiments in making bank-issued tokens usable in open on-chain environments as settlement assets and collateral. This is the smallest lane today and the one with the largest implications, because it is where bank money and DeFi composability would actually meet.

The honest limitations

The category’s advocates describe it as stablecoins without the risk. The description omits four things.

Tokenized deposits are permissioned by construction. Every holder is a bank customer inside a compliance perimeter; there is no permissionless access, which means the instrument does nothing for the populations and corridors where stablecoins found their strongest product-market fit, users the banking system serves badly or not at all. A fintech in Lagos paying a supplier in Shenzhen holds USDT because it cannot hold a JPMorgan deposit; that fact does not change when the deposit grows a token.

They are also only as good as the network effects they achieve. Money is useful in proportion to who accepts it, and a tokenized deposit accepted inside one consortium is a better wire transfer, not a new form of money. The proliferation of competing networks, SWIFT’s, The Clearing House’s, each mega-bank’s own, raises a real fragmentation scenario in which the category succeeds technically and still fails to produce a unified instrument.

Insurance is bounded. Deposit insurance covers up to the statutory limit per depositor per bank, which protects retail balances fully and institutional balances barely; a corporate treasurer holding nine figures in tokenized deposits is an uninsured creditor of the bank above the cap, exactly as with ordinary deposits. The instrument inherits banking’s protections and also banking’s fine print.

And the model is untested in a run. Tokenized deposits settle at all hours, which cuts both ways: the same rails that move corporate treasury on Sunday morning can move a panic on Sunday morning, faster than any deposit flight in history. Bank supervisors have noticed; it is one reason the strict, non-transferable design keeps winning approvals.

What could still go wrong

A category moving this fast earns a section on its failure modes, and tokenized deposits have four worth taking seriously, none of them exotic.

The first is the interoperability trap. Every architecture described above, single-bank rails, SWIFT’s shared ledger, The Clearing House network, mints tokens that work within its own perimeter. History’s parallel is instructive: early wire transfer and card networks fragmented for decades before consolidating, and the consolidation was driven by merchants and users refusing to hold seventeen incompatible instruments. A corporate treasurer offered JPMorgan tokens, SWIFT-coordinated tokens, and consortium tokens, each with different settlement finality and legal terms, may reasonably decide the pilot era is someone else’s problem and keep wiring. The category’s success requires the networks to interconnect, and the incentives to interconnect are weakest for exactly the largest banks whose participation matters most, because a proprietary rail that works is a moat.

The second is the run-dynamics question, which deserves more respect than the marketing gives it. A tokenized deposit inherits the bank’s credit risk, and always-on settlement means the deposit can leave at any hour a holder gets nervous. The 2023 regional banking crisis showed what smartphone-speed withdrawals do to a bank funded by concentrated, sophisticated depositors; token rails compress the same dynamic further. Supervisors have levers, the non-transferable design, settlement windows, position limits, but every lever traded against the always-on convenience that is the product’s selling point. The instrument’s safety case and its value proposition are, at the margin, the same dial turned in opposite directions.

The third is regulatory divergence on the deposit-token boundary. If one major jurisdiction blesses freely transferable deposit tokens while another confines banks to the strict interbank model, bank money itself forks: a transferable claim on a Singapore or London bank circulating on open networks while American bank tokens stay walled. That is not hypothetical, jurisdictions are already writing different answers, and the arbitrage it invites, banking migrating to wherever bank money is allowed to be most bearer-like, is the kind regulators historically respond to late and harshly.

The fourth is the quiet dependency on stablecoin rules. The competitive case for tokenized deposits leans on asymmetries the law that bans stablecoin interest created, stablecoins cannot pay interest, stablecoins carry no insurance, and asymmetries written by one Congress can be rewritten by another. A future amendment permitting yield-bearing regulated stablecoins, an idea already circulating in the CLARITY Act fights over activity-based rewards, would collapse the banks’ cleanest advantage overnight. The banks are building on ground the law currently tilts toward them, and the tilt is a policy choice, not a property of the technology.

None of these kill the category; each shapes what version of it survives. The strongest honest forecast is conditional: tokenized deposits win the regulated institutional corridor if the networks interconnect, if supervisors hold the transferability line without strangling the product, and if the legislative tilt endures. Three ifs is not a guarantee. It is, however, a much shorter list than the one stablecoins faced a decade ago, which is the fairest way to size the two contenders.

Why the fight matters

Strip the technology away and the tokenized-deposit-versus-stablecoin contest is a fight over the two-tier monetary system, the arrangement where central banks serve banks and banks serve everyone else, and every reader in crypto has a stake in the outcome.

If tokenized deposits win the institutional corridor, on-chain finance gets absorbed into banking: programmable settlement arrives, but issuance, access, and control remain with chartered institutions, and the deposit-funding model that finances lending survives digitization intact. If stablecoins win it, a parallel monetary layer keeps growing outside bank balance sheets, with narrower backing, broader access, and the disintermediation consequences the Fed’s researchers keep modeling. The likeliest outcome is partition, banks holding the regulated core, stablecoins holding the open edge, with the boundary contested for years at exactly the seams this guide has mapped: transferability rules, insurance treatment, and the interest-rate asymmetry the GENIUS Act wrote into law.

For now, the practical takeaways are three. A tokenized deposit is bank money with new rails, insured and supervised, and structurally unavailable to anyone outside a bank relationship. A stablecoin is new money with open rails, reserve-backed and uninsured, and structurally available to anyone with a wallet. And the institutions that spent a decade dismissing blockchains have now committed, with 17 banks, a 53-year-old cooperative, and the world’s largest asset managers in the room, to putting the oldest money in the world on them. Whatever else that signals, it settles one argument: the rails were never the controversial part. The money was. For the adjacent cash-market structure, crypto.news has also explained the other regulated cash instrument on-chain.

Frequently asked questions

Disclaimer: This article is for information and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or legal advice. Product structures, insurance treatment, and regulatory rules described here vary by jurisdiction and are subject to change. Always do your own research. Information is accurate as of July 20, 2026.

A North Korean dev and suspected mole who worked on MetaMask’s core wallet code for a whole month was reportedly flagged by a Lazarus Group security page almost a year ago.

The developer was reportedly hired by MetaMask’s parent firm, Consensys, as a consultant while posing under the alias “Tyler Knapp.” He reportedly made GitHub contributions to MetaMask’s wallet until he was ousted by the company in April. 

However, DeFi security analyst Zun claims that Knapp had already been flagged on a public Lazarus Group operative tracking site back in September 2025. 

The page, run by the Security Alliance, creates profiles for known remote Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) IT workers in the hopes that it will help companies to identify them before they’re hired. 

Read more: Crypto has become Kim Jong-Un’s lifeline — and Russia’s secret weapon

On the Lazarus Group site, Knapp appears under the name “Mauro Liu.” He also appears to have worked for Web3 game firm MagicCraft in 2022, and DeFi product firm Napier Finance in 2023. 

His other listed firms include Ankr, Pickle Finance, Harmoney, Gamerse, Clover Network, DEPO, Sifu Vision, Oxytocin, Tomodachi, and Blueberry. 

He’s linked to MetaMask through the GitHub username “imyugioh.” 

Zun claims MetaMask hired him as a developer without a “proper background check that would have caught him.”

Consensys says North Korea dev didn’t steal any assets

DropSite reports, based on internal Slack messages, that Knapp was also contributing to code involving the conversion of crypto and fiat currency by third-party payment firms.

Consensys’s General Counsel, Matt Corva, told DropSite, that Knapp “was introduced to us through an existing relationship with a reputable third-party service provider.”

They said, “Very quickly after being introduced, we discovered the threat, followed our security protocols, immediately terminated any access and launched a comprehensive investigation that confirmed there was no misappropriation of assets or data, no malicious code deployed, and no impact to user safety and security.”

Last April, a North Korean mole called “Moo” was named by crypto sleuth ZachXBT and was fired from Solana-based DEX Stabble. 

The firm subsequently encouraged all of its users to withdraw all their funds. 

Moo, real name Keisuke Watanabe, was, by its own admission, employed by Stabble for a whole year. 

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