South Korea’s Seoul Southern District Court has sentenced Delio CEO Jeong Sang-ho to 15 years in prison after finding him guilty of fraud involving nearly 70 billion Korean won ($49.2 million) in customer crypto assets. The 11th Criminal Division, presided over by Judge Jang Chan, handed down the sentence on August 13.

The court also ordered Sang-ho to be detained due to concerns that he could flee.

15 Years Behind Bars

The prosecution had initially sought a 20-year prison term, but the court rejected some of the prosecution’s evidence after accepting arguments from Sang-ho’s side that the search and seizure of the server of outsourcing company Gabia was conducted unlawfully.

According to the court, prosecutors failed to guarantee Delio’s right to participate in the search and did not provide a list of seized items, which rendered the company’s database information and related secondary evidence inadmissible.

Upon sentencing, the court stated,

“The defendant committed a crime of embezzling a large amount of money from numerous victims, and considering the circumstances and details of the crime, the means and methods used, and the scale of the damage, the nature of the offense is very serious. He has not received forgiveness from the victims who suffered serious economic losses as a result of this case.”

At the same time, the court acknowledged that external factors had contributed to the case and noted that Sang-ho did not have a prior criminal record involving a punishment greater than a fine. The ruling represented a significant reduction from the prosecution’s original case, which alleged fraud involving approximately 250 billion won (worth around $176 million) and around 2,800 customers.

After excluding evidence related to the larger allegation, the court instead found Sang-ho guilty under the prosecution’s alternative indictment involving approximately 70 billion won and over 1,078 victims.

Crisis Linked to Haru

Delio used to offer high returns on cryptocurrency deposits and promoted itself as a digital asset bank. Its subsequent collapse was closely linked to the downfall of crypto yield platform Haru Invest. Delio had reportedly placed a portion of customer assets with Haru to generate returns, which left the South Korean lender exposed when the latter abruptly suspended withdrawals in June 2023 after citing problems involving its service provider, B&S Holdings.

This forced Delio to halt withdrawals shortly afterward, which ended up triggering a liquidity crisis that ultimately contributed to its bankruptcy.

The post Delio’s Jeong Sang-ho Handed 15-Year Sentence Over 70B Won Crypto Scandal appeared first on CryptoPotato.

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Jeff Booth spent about 15,000 hours trying to kill Bitcoin. He failed. The Canadian entrepreneur says the attempt left him more convinced the network cannot be broken.

Booth is a founding partner at Ego Death Capital and a director at Core Scientific. He wrote the 2020 book The Price of Tomorrow. His conclusion is that he was the weak link, not the code.

Why a 20-Year Tech Veteran Set Out to Kill Bitcoin

Booth did not start as a believer. He co-founded the online building supplier BuildDirect in 1999 and ran it for 18 years. When his book landed in January 2020, Bitcoin (BTC) got a single paragraph.

The problem was not the math. It was the power he expected to come after it. At that stage he doubted the network could stay decentralized and secure against a determined state.

So he tried to break it. He ran a node. He modeled the attacks a government, a rival, or a large miner would use.

“I spent about 15,000 hours trying to say, ‘How do I kill Bitcoin? What does that look like?’” Booth said in an interview with the Wolf of All Streets, Scott Melker.

The timing of that verdict matters. BTC currently trades near $63,000 with a market value around $1.27 trillion. That is roughly 50% below the record $126,198 it set on October 6, 2025.

Booth argues price and security are separate questions. One moves daily. The other has not moved at all.

What 15,000 Hours of Attacks Actually Found

Every scenario ran into the same wall. Blocks kept arriving on schedule, and each one cost real energy to produce.

“…every 10 minutes there was a new block bounded by energy decentralized and secure and it would emerge exactly like the internet…”

The comparison is deliberate. Early internet protocols stayed narrow, so anyone could build on top without asking permission. Booth reads Bitcoin the same way.

The rulebook backs him up on one point. Roughly 24,000 reachable nodes enforce the same consensus rules today, and the 21 million supply cap survived another public round of debate this month after Adam Back rejected a proposal to lift it.

“Do I think Bitcoin is decentralized and secure right now? Yes, I do.”

His money follows the conclusion. Booth helped found Ego Death Capital in 2022, a fund that backs software companies built on Bitcoin rather than miners or tokens.

It closed a $100 million second fund in July 2025. He has also sat on the board of Core Scientific since the mining firm left Chapter 11 in January 2024.

The Risks Booth Still Names

He does not claim the network is finished or flawless.

“Mining pools are a risk. Centralization mining is a risk.”

Both risks are measurable. Three pools produced about 61% of all blocks over the past month. Roughly 80% of reachable nodes run one client, Bitcoin Core, which leaves a single codebase carrying most of the network.

Booth expects competition to grind those numbers down without any protocol change. His argument is that expensive miners simply go bust.

The math supports the pressure. Riot Platforms spent $90,631 per coin last quarter once depreciation is counted, far above the current market price. Hashrate has fallen about 22% from its October 2025 peak as miners leave the network or rent their power to AI tenants instead.

Core Scientific shows the shift in one line of accounts. It drew 83% of second-quarter revenue from colocation and only 13% from mining its own coins.

Where Other Voices Disagree

Not everyone reads the same data the same way. Venture investor Chamath Palihapitiya has called the energy shift toward AI a structural problem for miners rather than a healthy cleanout. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong disputes that reading.

The governance fight is also live rather than settled. A group of developers pushed BIP-110, a temporary softfork that would have forced blocks to signal support or be rejected. The chain split at block 961,632 on August 8.

That breakaway BIP-110 fork has since found four blocks. Bitcoin has found more than 1,100. Mining pool OCEAN still runs a separate endpoint for the minority chain, carrying 1.15 exahashes per second against 19.22 on its main endpoint.

Users have taken real losses in the meantime. The Coldcard wallet hack and a BTCPay Server exploit both drained funds this summer. Neither touched consensus, which is the distinction Booth keeps drawing.

That leaves one failure case in his framework, and it is human rather than technical. Booth argues Bitcoin only fails if people collectively keep pouring their time and money into the system he says takes from them.

He still expects broad adoption, and he refuses to put a date on it.

“I think it’s inevitable. It’s just a matter of timeline.”

The next test arrives soon. BIP-110 backers have floated September 1 for a proof-of-work change and a separate coin. Whether anyone follows them will say more about Bitcoin’s governance than 15,000 hours of theory ever could.

The post 20-Year Tech Veteran Spent 15,000 Hours Trying to Kill Bitcoin, What Did He Find? appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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A meme coin trader turned $120 into more than $205,000 within hours, according to on-chain data documented by the tracking account Lookonchain.

The story went viral, though most of that gain still exists only on paper. The trader might not be able to even sell the coins to realize the massive profit.

How the Trade Actually Unfolded

The meme coin is called Niu Lai. It runs on BNB Chain and draws from a low-budget Chinese animated film that went viral. The purchase landed at exactly the right moment. She acquired 19.1 million tokens for $120 when the project’s market cap was barely $6,270.

A partial sale followed shortly after. She liquidated 9.1 million tokens for roughly $25,900, locking in a real gain. The rest remains unsold. She holds 10 million tokens valued at nearly $180,200, a figure that fluctuates with every price move..

The combined return exceeds 822x the initial investment, totaling $205,800 across realized and unrealized positions. The trader identified herself on X as @saracrypto_eth. She explained that years of trading meme coins taught her to spot where money is flowing.

“Yes, that ‘trader’ is me. for a lot of people, making $200k sounds absolutely insane. but when you’ve spent enough time in this space, you start to understand where the money flows and how the game is played. that’s when you realize how many opportunities there really are…,” Sarah Milady said on X.

Her personal story amplified the reach. She described working double shifts at a restaurant years ago and now supporting her retired parents.

Follow us on X to get the latest news as it happens.

What These Viral Stories Never Show

Token context explains the speed. Niu Lai launched in mid-August 2026, riding the film’s viral momentum across social platforms. The climb proved vertiginous. Market cap jumped from a few thousand dollars to peak near $20 million, according to CoinGecko data.

What these stories omit deserves equal attention. The vast majority of such tokens lose over 90% of their value within days or weeks. Risks extend well beyond volatility.

Liquidity problems, potential rug pulls, and price manipulation form standard features of the territory.

“100% insider or dev wallet. For every $120 lotto ticket like this, 999 people get rekt providing their exit liquidity,” one user noted.

Selling presents its own difficulty. Unwinding large positions without collapsing the market becomes nearly impossible in tokens with thin depth. That limitation applies directly here. The $180,200 she still holds could evaporate within minutes if the price collapses.

Survivorship bias completes the picture. Nobody posts screenshots of trades that went wrong, so only extraordinary wins circulate publicly.

For most participants, a total loss of capital remains the most likely outcome.

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The post A Meme Coin Trader Turned $120 Into $205,000: Luck or Strategy? appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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A new academic study has identified 65,340 high-risk address misuse cases on Ethereum and BNB Chain, linked to about $574.8 million in lost crypto.

The research shows how ordinary mistakes involving testnet addresses, reused contract addresses, and exposed private keys can become permanent losses, while newer tools such as EIP-7702 give attackers another way to exploit them.

Address Mistakes Account for Millions in Losses

The study, led by researchers from Sun Yat-sen University, Zhejiang University, Peking University, and other institutions, describes two forms of address misuse: Contract Account (CA) Misuse and Externally Owned Account (EOA) Misuse.

CA Misuse happens when users treat a non-contract address as though a smart contract exists there. The researchers found 49,344 such cases, involving 22,738.41 ETH and 8,681.41 BNB in losses.

One example involved a Uniswap V2 router address widely used on Ethereum’s Sepolia testnet. The address had more than 102,000 views across Stack Exchange posts and was used frequently for testing, but on Ethereum mainnet, it had no contract code at the time, yet users still sent function calls and ETH to it. The transactions succeeded as simple transfers, leaving the funds trapped.

EOA Misuse accounted for another 15,996 cases, which involved addresses whose private keys had been exposed, often through public code repositories or developer Q&A sites. The study found losses of 104,224.53 ETH and 9,045.29 BNB.

The researchers examined more than 10 million candidate addresses and 16 million exposed private keys, then analyzed about 2.5 million transactions on Ethereum and BSC. Manual checks gave the detection system an overall precision of 99.11%.

The study also found that attackers actively exploit these mistakes. In 469 CA misuse cases, attackers used cross-chain address reuse to place malicious contracts at addresses where users had already trapped funds, resulting in 3,446.37 ETH and 431.79 BNB in losses.

Another 17,270 cases involved EIP-7702, which lets an externally owned account delegate execution to a smart contract. The researchers found attackers using the mechanism to control exposed accounts and automatically redirect incoming funds.

Why Familiar Addresses Can Become a Trap

The findings add a different type of risk to the security problems already affecting crypto this year. A Blockaid report published on August 1 found $1.1 billion stolen across 212 incidents during the first half of 2026, with three separate attacks that caused more than $35 million in losses occurring in one day in late July.

The address misuse study points to a less obvious problem: a transaction can succeed while still producing a loss. Users may assume that a successful transaction means they interacted with the intended contract, even when the address has no code on that particular network.

According to the researchers, people ought to check the network before using an address and rely on official project documentation while keeping test accounts away from production funds.

They also called for wallets to warn users when an address has no contract code on the current chain or has a known exposed private key.

The post Study Finds $575M Lost Through Ethereum and BNB Chain Address Errors appeared first on CryptoPotato.

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Global bond yields have reached levels last seen in July 2008. Bitcoin (BTC) did not exist then. The asset has never traded through borrowing costs this high, and it is not benefiting now.

Gold rose 32% over the past year. Bitcoin fell 46%. Investors who expected a debt squeeze to lift a scarce asset backed the wrong one.

Bond Yields Return to a Level Bitcoin Has Never Seen

A bond yield is what a government pays to borrow. Those costs are now the heaviest in almost two decades.

A Bloomberg gauge of long-dated government debt hit its highest yield since July 2008 in May. It tracks sovereign bonds maturing in 10 years or more.

Bitcoin’s whitepaper appeared that October. The first block followed on January 3, 2009, six months after the peak.

Satoshi Nakamoto stamped that block with a newspaper line.

“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,” source, genesis block.

Bitcoin was built as an answer to failing government finances. Those finances are strained again. This time the answer is the asset falling.

The move is global, though not uniform. UK 10-year gilts pay 5.05%, the highest of the major markets. Germany sits at 3.21%, a high only since 2011.

Japan pays 2.88% after decades pinned near zero.

“We’re seeing a broader repricing of duration driven by fiscal realities, persistent inflation risks and some political uncertainty,” Bloomberg reported, citing Barclays strategist Patrick Coffey, who named the driver when the gauge first broke out.

Why Elevated Real Yields Cap Bitcoin

Compare the two eras directly. The US 10-year paid 2.46% on January 2, 2009, per Treasury records. It now pays 4.69%. The long end moved further. The 30-year paid 2.83% in Bitcoin’s first week.

The Treasury sold $25 billion of the same bond on August 13 at 5.216%, the highest since 2001.

Demand was soft, part of the global bond selloff. Bids covered the auction 2.39 times against a 2.43 average. Dealers absorbed 11.6% instead of the usual 10.6%.

Real yields make the squeeze concrete. A real yield is what a bond pays after inflation. The 10-year real yield reached 2.41% on August 14. Two years earlier it paid 1.77%.

That is the bar Bitcoin has to clear. Investors can now beat inflation using government debt and take almost no risk. Bitcoin pays nothing. BTC traded at $63,072 with a market value of $1.27 trillion, down 46% in a year.

Foreign yields bite the same way. Japanese and European investors can now earn at home, which shrinks the global risk pool crypto draws on. Japanese government bond losses show the strain.

What Would Flip the Setup

Cause decides the outcome. Yields driven by growth punish Bitcoin. Yields driven by doubt over solvency should favor a scarce alternative.

Gold has taken that trade. The metal traded for $4,376 as of this writing, after a 32% year, even as U.S. debt interest costs keep climbing.

So watch auctions, not charts. Stronger demand for long-dated debt would ease the pressure on the Bitcoin price.

Until then the test is simple. Bitcoin was designed for a moment like this. It has never had to prove that at these yields.

The post Bitcoin Has Never Faced Global Bond Yields This High Since It Was Born appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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A seed phrase can be replaced. A password can be reset. A home address cannot. The SafePal data breach disclosed Sunday exposed nearly 40,000 of them.

Three days earlier, Trezor leaked 13,689 more. Together the two hardware wallet makers put 53,487 customer records into the open. Neither company lost a single coin.

What the SafePal Data Breach Exposed

SafePal said 39,798 customers were affected. The leak covered names, emails, phone numbers, shipping addresses, and order details.

The cause was a flaw in the plugin SafePal uses to track orders. In some cases, one customer could open another customer’s record.

Affected orders ran from March 2, 2025 to April 11, 2026. That window stayed open for more than 13 months.

Seed phrases, private keys, bank details, and card numbers were not touched. SafePal has patched the flaw and cut order data retention to 90 days, according to its disclosure.

SafePal Token (SFP) barely moved on Sunday, trading near $0.23. That is the point. Nothing financial happened here.

Why Leaked Addresses Outlast Leaked Passwords

Trezor learned of its own customer data breach on August 10. Its shipping partner, ShipMonk, had been compromised.

Full details leaked for 11,742 Trezor buyers, according to the company’s notice. Names, emails, phone numbers, and home addresses all went out.

The two failures differ at the root. Trezor’s data left through a supplier. SafePal’s left through a system it ran itself.

However, both lists are worth the same to an attacker. Buying a hardware wallet suggests you hold enough crypto to move it off an exchange.

So these records are narrower than a typical exchange leak. They match a likely self-custody holder to a confirmed front door.

Prosecutors Have Already Seen This Playbook

In May, US prosecutors announced charges against three Tennessee men over a $6.5 million robbery spree across California.

The men posed as delivery people to reach victims inside their homes, the indictment says.

A leaked shipping record hands that script to the next crew. It names the buyer, gives the address, and says what arrived in the box.

Phishing is the smaller problem. SafePal has removed more than 30 fake websites and scam links tied to the stolen data.

Real notices came from security@safepal.com. Anything from another address should be treated as an attack.

Ledger shows how long this tail runs. Its 2020 breach exposed roughly 272,000 postal addresses, names, and phone numbers, per the company’s statement.

Six years on, Ledger still warns customers about phishing letters arriving by post. The company does not tie those letters to the 2020 leak.

Scam domains come down. Inboxes get filtered. Addresses do not expire.

Trezor now plans an anonymous delivery option, reaching the European Union in September and the US by year end. It arrives too late for the 53,487 records already in circulation.

The post Over 53,000 Crypto Owners Lost Something This Week That Isn’t Money appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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