Crypto World
BeInCrypto Stage at Rio Innovation Week: Where TradFi and Crypto Meet
The BeInCrypto Stage returned to Píer Mauá for the fourth year in a row at Rio Innovation Week 2026, turning Wednesday morning into a showcase of the agenda now drawing banks, exchanges, and card issuers closer together.
Executives from companies including Binance, Visa, Nubank, BNY, Crypto.com, Mercado Bitcoin, and Bitso, among others, shared the stage to discuss stablecoins, financial superapps, prediction markets, and the infrastructure underpinning the next phase of digital assets in the country.
BeInCrypto launches “The Exodus Economy” report
BeInCrypto opened its own chapter of the day by unveiling “The Exodus Economy,” the first edition of a research effort by BeInCrypto Intelligence that maps how Latin American money finds a new financial home. The study followed 12 years of dollar flows on-chain, wallet by wallet, and audited 60 billionaire addresses against their Forbes profiles.
The report puts hard numbers behind a phenomenon usually told through headlines about departing millionaires. According to the study, Brazilians hold US$ 654 billion abroad, by their own central bank’s count, and 26.9 million Latin Americans already live outside their home countries. It also shows that roughly US$ 63.2 billion was sent home to Mexico over the last 12 months, with a crypto rail beside it already running at about half that size. One of its more counterintuitive findings is that all 14 Mexican billionaires tracked still live at home, evidence that the exodus is real but far from uniform.
The edition was reviewed alongside a Latin American Finance Council that includes Caio Fasanella, Head of Investments at Nomad, Antônia Souza, Director of Digital Currencies for Latin America and the Caribbean at Visa, Michael Rihani, Director of Crypto at Nubank, and Bruno Grossi, Head of Emerging Technologies at Banco Inter.
Binance unveils its first Brazil-only yield product on stage
The tone was set in the opening keynote. Thiago Sarandy, general manager of Binance in Brazil, took the stage to announce Binance Rende+, the platform’s first yield product built exclusively for the Brazilian market. It is a real-denominated investment yielding 120% of the CDI, backed by Treasury bonds, allowing deposits of up to R$ 100,000 and delivering daily returns that include Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays.
“Binance Rende+ combines features Brazilians already know, such as CDI-linked yield, with the advantages of digital assets, like earning 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, with the ability to redeem at any time. This significantly improves the potential of investors’ portfolios. People’s money can no longer be limited to business hours,” Sarandy said during the keynote “Everything Your Money Wants to Be: The Financial Superapps.”
The executive used the stage to reveal another line of expansion. Still in August, Binance will launch a tool in the Brazilian market that will let users buy stocks listed in the United States directly from the platform’s app, with access to more than 7,000 shares of U.S. companies.
According to Sarandy, the move consolidates Binance’s evolution beyond the crypto market, gathering into a single ecosystem solutions such as Binance Card, Pix integration, the new Binance Rende+ and, soon, investment in foreign equities.
The global figures he presented helped frame the scale behind the strategy. Binance today counts more than 325 million users, moved over US$ 34 trillion in trading volume throughout 2025, holds roughly US$ 160 billion in assets under custody, and can process up to 4.4 million transactions per second.
Sarandy also stressed that the company is currently the crypto platform with the largest number of regulatory licenses across different jurisdictions worldwide. Those interested in Binance Rende+ can already sign up for the pre-launch list on the company’s website.
Stablecoins and the tension between access and protection
If the Binance keynote placed the financial superapp at the center of the conversation, the panel “Money Never Sleeps Again: Stablecoins and the New Global Financial Infrastructure” brought the regulatory temperature into the debate. The table gathered Nelson Leite, from Binance, Eduardo Abreu, vice president of Visa in Brazil, and Sabrina Zaparroli, Public Policy Senior Expert at Nubank, moderated by Luís de Magalhães, BeInCrypto’s Latin America lead.
Sabrina Zaparroli, from Nubank, offered one of the morning’s densest reflections when she addressed the supposed democratization of the dollar through stablecoins. For her, ease of access cannot be confused with the absence of risk.
“I see this democratization as an important reduction of barriers. For many people, especially in lower-value international transactions, the possibility of accessing a virtual asset referenced to a strong currency and moving it at any time can mean more predictability, more speed and less friction. But it is important not to confuse access with the absence of risk,” she said.
Zaparroli argued that democratizing access also means democratizing information and protection. She contended that a stablecoin does not automatically become equivalent to a dollar in a bank account merely because it maintains a value reference, and that users need to understand the issuer’s obligations, how reserves are held, and what protection exists in the event of a failure.
“The simplicity of the interface cannot hide the nature of the product. We need to combine innovation with transparency, controls proportional to risk and communication that allows the client to make an informed decision,” she added.
The executive said she prefers to speak of more efficient access to dollar-denominated services, rather than an automatic replacement of the local currency.
Eduardo Abreu, from Visa, highlighted the collaborative nature of the debate, which brought together companies from different links of the chain.
“It was a great experience to be in a place where you see innovation, content and networking with high-level people. And to be on a panel with companies from different sectors, right? Us as Visa, the bank as issuer, Binance as exchange. It is really cool and it shows how this world has to be collaborative,” said the vice president.
BNY and the infrastructure argument
The institutional view gained reinforcement in the remarks of Carlos Xirau, Head of Latin America at BNY, who tied the debate to the idea that mass adoption depends less on technology and more on solid foundations.
“We are living through the convergence between traditional finance and the digital economy. The mass adoption of digital assets will depend less on technology and more on the ability to create a robust and reliable infrastructure, capable of meeting the demands of investors, companies and financial institutions. That is the path to changing the market’s scalability,” Xirau said.
Prediction markets enter the agenda
Another block that energized the stage was the one dedicated to prediction markets, a theme gaining ground in discussions about new financial primitives. The CEO of Rain Protocol summed up the stance he believes the sector must adopt toward a tool still under construction.
“Prediction markets are a new frontier. We need to understand how they work before jumping in. There are new and exciting possibilities ahead. To block this new tool is not the answer, to understand is,” the executive said.
He described prediction markets as a completely new market primitive, in which probabilities themselves become tradable assets, unlocking entirely new ways to price risk, coordinate information, and build financial products.
For the Rain Protocol CEO, Brazil embraced innovation throughout the event and holds the talent, curiosity, and entrepreneurial spirit to become one of the global leaders in shaping the future of the sector.
“The quality of the discussion reflected the energy and openness of the Brazilian ecosystem,” he noted.
An agenda that cements the convergence
The fourth edition of the BeInCrypto Stage at Rio Innovation Week confirmed the movement running through every panel: the border between traditional finance and digital assets is growing ever thinner. On one side, exchanges such as Binance are advancing into fixed-income products and equities. On the other hand, banks and issuers like Nubank and Visa are folding stablecoins and onchain rails into their operations, while institutions such as BNY defend infrastructure as the precondition for scale.
To read “The Exodus Economy” report, click here.
The message that emerged from Píer Mauá is that the conversation is no longer about whether convergence will happen, but about how to build it with transparency, user protection, and rules proportional to risk.
The post BeInCrypto Stage at Rio Innovation Week: Where TradFi and Crypto Meet appeared first on BeInCrypto.
Minor damage was observed on the aircraft after it landed in Hanover, the capital city of Lower Saxony, Germany.
The southern runway at Leipzig/Halle reopened on Wednesday at 6:46 p.m, local time, an airport spokesperson told TIME, adding that “flight operations have been running without restrictions” since then.
What have German officials said about the incident?
Dobrindt said Germany’s authorities are investigating what appears to be “a professional” explosive device. “We are not dealing with amateurs, but with professional actors,” he stated.
Saxony’s Interior Minister Armin Schuster told ZDF he would describe the incident as “a suspected attack scenario, because this is the first time we’ve had a drone that was also loaded with explosives.”
German authorities have stated that the perpetrators of the incident at the airport have not yet been identified.
Roderich Kiesewetter, a member of the German Bundestag, said he is “assuming” the incident was a “targeted attack attempt directed by Russia” and suggested Germany “initiate Article 4 consultations in NATO.”
As a lifelong lover of reptiles, Eric Goode has known about the world of exotic reptile smuggling for decades. “I didn’t become acutely aware of the criminality of it until probably into the late ‘80s,” says the director of Tiger King and Chimp Crazy ahead of his latest documentary, another foray into wildlife crime, Monsters of God. The five-episode HBO series is Goode’s most ambitious project to date, surveying the explosion of endangered reptiles trafficked into the country in Florida from the 1970s until today. The series guides us through the web of feuding smugglers and law enforcement crackdowns that connect the Sunshine State to the fauna of Madagascar, Indonesia, Malaysia, and many more countries.
Through remarkable archival footage and an incredible range of interviews, Monsters of God digs into the egotistical and ruthless mentalities that supported competing criminal empires and the undercover operations that dismantled them. The series points a finger at animal lovers who felt uniquely connected to exotic creatures while also treating them as a commodity to be exploited and abused.
“We were really intentional about not making it a traditional true crime doc,” says Jeremy McBride, an executive producer on the series. “It’s really a portrait of how obsession drives people to get the rarest of the rare, no different than the pathology of people collecting baseball cards, or stamps, or rare coins.” There is one difference: baseball cards can’t bite.
The introduction to Monsters of God’s stolen world
Monsters of God’s first episode, airing Aug. 6, ushers us into the world of reptile smuggling through a major rivalry: Tommy Crutchfield and Hank Molt. Based in Philadelphia, Molt’s obsession with exotic climates and wildlife led him to search the world for exotic reptiles in the 1960s and sell them from his newly acquired Pennsylvania pet store. Molt is considered a crucial figure in the growth of reptile houses in American zoos, which at the time were a rare attraction. He prepared and distributed a price list of rare reptiles—including snakes, turtles, lizards—and sold them to a wide variety of eager customers and competitive zoos. Molt often carried them into the country in suitcases, easily circumventing the relatively lax customs regulations. When the Endangered Species Act came into effect in 1973, Molt’s smuggling business boomed—declaring a reptile species as “endangered” also meant it was rarer and more valuable, allowing Molt to fetch a higher price.
In Molt’s view, Crutchfield rode his coattails. Crutchfield is a Florida native whose introduction to the reptile business began in high school capturing snakes for the “Snake-a-torium” in Panama City Beach. As the smuggling market grew, Crutchfield graduated to the big leagues by mimicking Molt’s established business plan, selling smuggled reptiles to collectors, pet owners, and zoos. Crutchfield and Molt’s rivalry is explored in the book Stolen World by Jennie Erin Smith—like Monsters of God’s first episode, the author uses the two men as a window into how smuggling has fuelled the popularity of reptiles in modern America.
Crutchfield is also a certified braggadocio, at one point referring to himself as “John Dilligenger, Bonnie and Clyde all wrapped up in one”. But it’s true that his criminal activities attracted serious heat—in 1997, the threat of his third round of criminal charges as part of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) five-year-long “Operation Chameleon” made Crutchfield flee to Belize.
When Molt went to prison at the tail end of the 1970s, Crutchfield took his place at the top of the food chain—something his former mentor resented when he was released. According to Maria Palladini, former special agent for the Fish and Wildlife Service, Molt had a habit of taking couriers and dealers under his wing only to betray them. While Crutchfield’s business was soon dominating Molt’s—raking in millions in reptile sales and trades every year—his reckless spending and imports soon put him squarely in the Feds’ crosshairs.
In 1995, Crutchfield asked Molt to help hide an import of endangered Fiji Island iguanas so they weren’t discovered by the Fish and Wildlife Service. Molt agreed—and according to Crutchfield, Molt took his revenge by killing the iguanas. (Molt denies causing them harm.) When USFWS informed Molt he was being charged along with Crutchfield, Molt handed over the dead iguanas and cut a deal to avoid being charged. Crutchfield pled guilty—his second of three criminal convictions in the ‘90s—and cut all ties with Molt.
Monsters of God’s wider gallery of rogues
Don’t expect Tommy and Hank to lead every episode of Monsters of God. Rather than zeroing in on one unstable dynamic like Goode did in Tiger King and Chimp Crazy, Monsters of God expands its scope to the entire reptile trafficking ecosystem throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s.
“This was more of a history lesson about the reptile trade in the United States, so it was a very different kind of storytelling—much more nuanced and complex,” says Goode. “We also really wanted to make sure that we got all sides of the story: law enforcement, the big zoos that were complicit, the reptile dealers, the consumers. It was a global story.”
Subsequent episodes reveal who defined Florida’s exotic reptile trade. Ray Van Nostrand, a New York-born collector and seller who moved to Florida in the ‘70s, took advantage of the power vacuum left by Crutchfield and Molt and smuggled huge quantities of illegal reptiles into the country. His son Mike—one of Monsters of God’s most memorably cantankerous interviewees—took over with a legal, legitimate reptile selling business, euphemistically named “Strictly Reptiles,” until he too was tempted by smuggling’s illicit rewards.
But this went way bigger than just reptiles. Ray was in business with returning Tiger King character Mario Tabraue, a “Cocaine Cowboy” druglord with his own exotic animal sanctuary who would smuggle both reptiles and drugs into Florida in the same shipments. On the other side of the law is former DEA agent Larry Loveless and USFWS special agents George Morrison and Ken McCloud, whose respective “Operation Cobra” and “Operation Chameleon” form a clear dramatic backbone to two episodes.
But all these smugglers pale in comparison to Anson Wong, a Malaysian smuggler who was dubbed the “Pablo Escobar of animal trafficking.” Wong had been smuggling illegal animals and products through his export company based in Penang since the ‘80s and gained a reputation as an incredibly elusive and dangerous figure. Wong haunts the stories of the Floridian smugglers, connected to many of the feuds and undercover operations. He emerged as the thread on Goode’s evidence board, tying together the pieces of the director’s most complex documentary so far.
“We had over 174 interviews. We had 1,500 hours of footage. We had Eric’s personal archive and research. We needed a pace that could get people through it, we needed this propulsion, and Eric’s quest trying to get to Anson Wong is that propulsion. Anson Wong is this sort of throughline in all of our characters’ stories, like Keyser Söze,” says McBride.
Monsters of God was a different beast to produce
Each episode of Monsters of God is packed with talking heads who talk candidly about their criminal exploits and feuds, but that doesn’t mean it was easy to get them all to talk—compared Joe Exotic and Tonia Haddix, the subjects of Tiger King and Chimp Crazy, the reptile community is far more paranoid. “Joe and Tonia were unique in that way, where they just wanted to be peacocks. They desperately wanted the attention. The reptile world, for the most part, is much more guarded,” says Goode.
While some people had ongoing charges and declined to speak until their cases were adjudicated, others had already been convicted and were willing to talk because double jeopardy protected them from being charged a second time. Others were happy to put everything on the table. “Hank Molt was proud that he could smuggle the way he did, he enjoyed circumventing the laws, and he liked that there were laws because it made it more of a challenge, like Catch Me If You Can with Leonardo DiCaprio,” explains Goode.
In Tiger King and Chimp Crazy, the wildlife crimes spiralled out of control while cameras were rolling. “The story unraveled contemporaneously with the filming, so we didn’t know that Joe Exotic was going to try to kill Carol Baskin, that he would get arrested and go to prison. We just happened to be filming different people, and then they all intersected in real time,” says Goode. By contrast, Monsters of God is interested in how the present was shaped by history, so it’s exclusively concerned with reconstructing the past.
The sheer breadth of the material meant that, according to McBride, the shape of each episode wasn’t clear at first, leading them to evolve their true crime storytelling. “What makes this series so distinctive is this psychological character study and this high-stakes true crime documentary, and within all of that, you have this chronology that we analyze with bigger themes involving the extinction crisis and our impact on this planet,” says McBride. “We wanted to draw these big ideas to an everyday person and how it touches their life, how this world overlaps with culture and criminality in a way that a lot of shows don’t touch on.”
The beating heart of Monsters of God
“This story for me is deeply personal,” Goode says in voiceover at the beginning of the series. “I was part of the problem.” But he was definitely the right man for the job: while Goode used to buy reptiles from shady dealers, he had turned a new page by 2003, when he co-founded The Turtle Conservancy to protect the many species of turtles who risk extinction from poachers and smugglers. His reptile expertise made him the ideal filmmaker to handle the cautious and shifty characters wary of appearing on camera—as Goode says, “I can speak their language about reptiles very fluently.” He knows the history of exotic animal collections and menageries in America and Europe, and the hypocrisy displayed by the subjects of Monsters of God—on both sides of the law—infuriates him.
Monsters of God expands on a theme from Goode’s previous docs—that a cultural obsession with rare animals leads to rampant commodification that exploits wildlife, encouraging animal lovers to embrace becoming consumers in a violent and exploitative transaction. Although Monsters of God looks to history, Goode isn’t convinced enough has been done to stop wildlife from being commodified. “It’s become more popular because of pop culture. Films like Jurassic Park can trigger these things. Finding Nemo—everyone wanted to buy a clownfish. Or Harry Potter. When I went to Southeast Asia, all the bird markets in Jakarta had baby owls everywhere. Hopefully this show doesn’t fuel interest in reptiles and bring in more illegal animals.”
The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange will conduct a major scheduled upgrade on Saturday that will pause certain trading activities.
The second major statement from the firm outlined the delisting of numerous trading pairs, one even against BTC.
An Upgrade and Delistings
Binance revealed that it will temporarily halt US stock trading on the platform on August 8 due to a scheduled system upgrade carried out by a partner broker. The process is set to be completed in approximately three hours, and during this period, users will not be able to access such services.
The company has the habit of briefly pausing operations to support certain improvements. Not long ago, it performed wallet maintenance for the Tron Network, making TRX deposits and withdrawals unavailable for about an hour. It also supported a Zcash hard fork, temporarily suspending ZEC deposits and withdrawals.
Binance also regularly checks all listed spot trading pairs available on its platform and scraps those that no longer meet important criteria like adequate liquidity and volume. Based on its latest analysis, it will delist QNT/BTC, RPL/USDC, SIGN/BNB, and SKL/USDC on August 7.
“The delisting of a spot trading pair does not affect the availability of the tokens on Binance Spot. Users can still trade the spot trading pair’s base and quote assets on other trading pair(s) that are available on Binance,” it clarified.
The Previous Announcement
The aforementioned disclosure did not cause a significant decline in the involved cryptocurrencies, which is rather normal, as such a reaction is usually witnessed in the event of a total delisting. Being the leading crypto exchange, withdrawing support from Binance leads to reduced availability, thinner liquidity, and reputational damage.
Earlier this month, Binance said goodbye to Across Protocol (ACX), Hashflow (HFT), PIVX (PIVX), Vulcan Forged PYR (PYR), Vanar (VANRY), and Viction (VIC), and their prices headed south by double digits.
Prior to that, the company terminated all services with Alchemix (ALCX), Ardor (ARDR), NFPrompt Token (NFP), and Marlin (POND), triggering a similar collapse for the affected tokens.
The post Binance Pauses Services and Delists Several Crypto Pairs: Who Is Affected? appeared first on CryptoPotato.
Demand for US spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) picked up over the past week, according to Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas, with multiple products posting inflows on every trading day since the Coldcard wallet exploit. The timing has sparked fresh discussion about whether some investors are reassessing the risks of self-custody.
Balchunas said that BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), Fidelity’s Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund (FBTC), Bitwise’s Bitcoin ETF (BITB), ARK 21Shares’ Bitcoin ETF (ARKB), and Defiance Daily Target 2X Long MSTR ETF (MSBT) all recorded inflows every day since the weekend breach. The combined total was roughly $620 million, aligning with Cointelegraph’s earlier reporting on an ETF inflow streak.
Key takeaways
- Bloomberg’s Eric Balchunas attributes the latest run of daily inflows (about $620 million) to several major spot Bitcoin ETFs starting after the Coldcard exploit.
- TRM Labs estimates the Coldcard attack drained more than $116 million in Bitcoin from over 5,200 wallet addresses.
- Balchunas cautioned that a direct connection between the hack and ETF buying is unproven, but acknowledged some investors may be shifting toward regulated custody.
- Industry figures including Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao argued that, based on available data, exchange custody may be “statistically safer” than self-custody—though underreporting remains a concern.
- Broader security debates are intensifying as AI-assisted exploits accelerate the pace at which vulnerabilities are identified and attacked.
Spot Bitcoin ETFs see daily inflow streak after Coldcard exploit
In his update shared on X, Balchunas highlighted a multi-day pattern of inflows across several leading spot Bitcoin ETFs. The list included large, established issuers (including BlackRock and Fidelity) as well as other active fund providers. Per Balchunas, inflows have continued every trading day since the weekend of the Coldcard exploit, with the group’s cumulative figure landing at roughly $620 million.
Cointelegraph previously reported on the continuation of a Bitcoin ETF inflow streak, noting that the latest totals were consistent with that trend. Together, the data suggest that recent capital flows have been persistent rather than limited to a single “reaction” day after the incident.
Still, Balchunas explicitly framed the connection as speculative. “I’m not saying it’s connected, we just don’t know,” he wrote, while adding that over the long term he can’t imagine there aren’t investors who choose to migrate away from self-custody after incidents like this.
Coldcard hack highlights exposure even for hardware wallet users
The renewed self-custody debate traces back to the Coldcard wallet exploit. Cointelegraph reported that the incident involved an attack against the Coldcard ecosystem, draining more than $116 million worth of Bitcoin from over 5,200 wallet addresses, according to blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs.
For many participants in the market, hardware wallets are viewed as a last line of defense—designed to keep private keys offline and reduce the risk of direct theft through compromised online environments. However, the Coldcard incident underscored that end-to-end security still depends on firmware integrity and operational handling, and that even users of advanced self-custody tools may be vulnerable if software components are compromised.
Self-custody vs regulated custody: CZ’s “statistically safer” argument
The Coldcard hack fed into a longer-running argument about the relative risks of self-custody and centralized exchange (CEX) custody. Binance co-founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao weighed in, suggesting that storing crypto on centralized exchanges could now be “statistically safer” than self-custody.
Zhao pointed to analysis by Willy Woo, claiming that cumulative Bitcoin losses from self-custody incidents have surpassed losses from exchange hacks. In his X post, Zhao also argued that differences in reporting make direct comparisons difficult: “Hack data is easier to collect on the CEX side, usually major news. It is harder on the self-custody side, where hacks, lost coins, etc are often not reported.”
That framing matters for investors because it shifts the conversation from a purely technical question (“Which custody model is more secure?”) to an evidentiary one (“Which system’s failures are more visible and therefore easier to measure?”). Until self-custody incidents are tracked with the same completeness as major exchange events, any conclusion about relative safety remains inherently asymmetric.
Security pressure is mounting as AI-assisted attacks evolve
Beyond the Coldcard case, the broader cyber threat landscape is intensifying. Cointelegraph earlier reported that on Monday, Bitcoin swap service Boltz suspended its non-custodial bridge after citing a steady rise in AI-assisted exploits. The service said attackers were using artificial intelligence to identify and exploit vulnerabilities faster than its team could patch them.
While that suspension does not confirm a direct link to the Coldcard incident, it reinforces a common theme across current security discussions: defenders face a faster and more adaptive attack cycle. For ordinary users, this can translate into a growing sense that the gap between “known risks” and “unknown vulnerabilities” is narrowing.
For ETF investors, the implication is more indirect but still important. Regulated investment products typically centralize custody with institutional providers and established operational controls, meaning some risks are moved away from individual users and into broader compliance and security frameworks. Whether that results in higher safety in practice is difficult to quantify, but the market’s recent capital flows suggest that at least some investors are paying close attention to custody trade-offs after high-profile self-custody failures.
Going forward, readers should watch whether the daily inflow pattern persists beyond the immediate post-incident window, and whether additional analysis clarifies how (or if) the Coldcard exploit influenced investor behavior. The key open question is whether the ETF buying reflects a short-term narrative shift or a longer-term reallocation toward regulated custody.
United Wholesale Mortgage at the NYSE, January 22, 2021
Source: The New York Stock Exchange
Shares in UWM Holdings, parent of United Wholesale Mortgage, plunged 40% on Thursday after the biggest U.S. mortgage lender suspended its dividend and raised fresh capital.
UWM announced a $2.05 billion equity investment from Oaktree Capital Management and SFS Group Capital LLC, a newly formed investment vehicle owned by family of CEO Mat Ishbia. The family is also the majority owner of the NBA’s Phoenix Suns.
Pontiac, Michigan-based UWM also said it suspended its quarterly dividend to preserve capital.
“We’re taking decisive action to make UWM stronger, more liquid and better positioned to win for years to come,” Ishbia said in a statement.
UWM shares have now collapsed about 85% from their 52-week high, set in September 2025.
UWM Holdings year to date
The capital raise comes as UWM’s financial position weakened during the latest quarter. Total equity fell to about $1 billion as of June 30 from $1.6 billion at the end of March, while available liquidity stood at approximately $1.3 billion, including $498 million in cash and borrowing capacity.
The moves come as mortgage lenders continue to grapple with one of the toughest operating environments in years. Investors have recently pushed up Treasury yields amid renewed expectations that benchmark Federal Reserve lending rates could stay where they are or even move up in the face of stubborn inflation. Elevated mortgage rates that are tied to the Treasury market have in turn kept homebuyers on the sidelines and limited refinancing activity, further dimming the outlook for the housing market.
UWM lost $451.9 million on revenue of $888 million in the second quarter, reversing net income of $170.4 million in the first quarter and a profit of $314.5 million a year earlier.
Mortgage originations totaled $39.7 billion in the second quarter, down from $44.9 billion in the prior quarter but were essentially unchanged from a year earlier.
Demand for US spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) has accelerated over the past week, with a string of daily inflows coinciding with the Coldcard wallet hack — timing that has prompted speculation about whether some investors are reconsidering self-custody.
According to Bloomberg senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas, BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund (FBTC), Bitwise Bitcoin ETF (BITB), ARK 21Shares Bitcoin ETF (ARKB) as well as Defiance Daily Target 2X Long MSTR ETF (MSBT) have recorded inflows every trading day since the weekend exploit, totaling roughly $620 million. The cumulative figure is consistent with Cointelegraph’s recent reporting on the ETF inflow streak.
The Coldcard exploit drained more than $116 million worth of Bitcoin from over 5,200 wallet addresses, according to blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs.
“I’m not saying it’s connected, we just don’t know,” Balchunas said in a post on X. “[Although] long-term I can’t imagine there aren’t some who migrate over.”
Source: Eric Balchunas
Related: Bitcoin Red Team reports 5K findings in sweeping security audit
Coldcard exploit renews debate over self-custody risks
The Coldcard hack renewed concerns that even hardware wallet users can be exposed to firmware flaws and software vulnerabilities, highlighting the operational risks that come with self-custody.
The incident also reignited debate over the trade-offs between holding Bitcoin directly and gaining exposure through regulated investment products such as spot Bitcoin ETFs, where asset custody and security are handled by institutional providers.
Binance co-founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao also weighed in on the debate, arguing that storing crypto on centralized exchanges may now be “statistically safer” than self-custody, citing data from analyst Willy Woo that cumulative Bitcoin losses from self-custody incidents have surpassed those from exchange hacks.
Source: Changpeng Zhao
“Hack data is easier to collect on the CEX side, usually major news. It is harder on the self-custody side, where hacks, lost coins, etc are often not reported,” CZ said.
The debate comes as AI-assisted cyberattacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated. On Monday, Bitcoin swap service Boltz suspended its non-custodial bridge, citing a steady rise in AI-assisted exploits that were allowing attackers to identify and exploit vulnerabilities faster than its team could patch them.
Magazine: Do the Coldcard attacks mean all hardware wallets are now insecure?
This morning, Jefferies slashed its price target on SanDisk stock 42% from $3,000 to $1,750. ZeroHedge laughed out loud at the drastic action.
Just six weeks ago, on June 26, analysts at the investment bank had set their $3,000 price target. Nonetheless, SanDisk stock price is down, even after the AI chipmaker reported the best quarterly earnings in its history yesterday.
Its most recent quarterly revenue was a 372% year-over-year gain to $8.97 billion, far surpassing its own guidance range of $7.75-8.25 billion.
Non-GAAP gross margin landed at 84.6%, dwarfing the prior year’s 26.4% and beating its guidance range of 79-81%. Non-GAAP earnings of $39.25 per share beat a FactSet consensus of analysts’ estimates by more than 12%.
Numbers from the blockbuster quarter were invariably positive. Data center revenue, the business SanDisk spent a year building, grew 103% in a single quarter to $2.98 billion.
Chairman and CEO David Goeckeler told analysts the company “delivered record revenue, gross margin, and earnings per share, each above the high end of our guidance, and repurchased $4.5 billion of company stock.”
Then, the board authorized another $14 billion of share buybacks.
SanDisk has lost a quarter of its value in a month
Despite these celebratory figures, SanDisk’s stock has crashed by 25% over the past month.
Analysts cut estimates. Susquehanna reduced 6%; Evercore trimmed to $2,800 from $3,100; Citi dropped from $2,500 to $2,100; Jefferies cut 42%, the deepest of them all.
Read more: Amazon gained the market cap SpaceX lost in six weeks
Today’s reduction to $1,750 is Jefferies’ first interruption of an up-only trend.
Its analyst, Blayne Curtis, has raised Jefferies’ price target on SanDisk seven times since July 2025 from $60 to $3,000. His rating was “buy” at every rung.
Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore reached his $1,750 price target on June 3 and left it alone through Sandisk’s record earnings report and the stock’s slide.
Jefferies has now spent nine weeks traveling to the same number via $3,000.
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Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s chief technology officer, will replace Hassabis at the helm of DeepMind, though in a senior vice president position rather than as CEO, Google boss Sundar Pichai wrote in a memo on Wednesday.
Kavukcuoglu had been taking responsibility for the development of Gemini long before Wednesday’s news. In company briefings, Kavukcuoglu would lead Gemini discussions, and Hassabis had been absent from many day-to-day meetings about Gemini, attending only for the most significant ones, one DeepMind employee tells TIME. Meanwhile, Hassabis was regularly present for meetings about post-AGI readiness, safety, and AI governance, the person said, and was spending more of his time working with governments, including attending the recent G7 summit.
“Koray’s philosophy has always been clear: advancing the frontier of AI and building it responsibly are the exact same mission,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “Frontier model safety has lived directly within the Gemini team from the very beginning, under Koray’s leadership. His teams collaborate closely with the safety and policy teams across Google and Google DeepMind, and that will continue.”
Banco Santander, the Spanish banking group with more than $16 billion in disclosed U.S. equity holdings, reported a stake in BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust for the first time, according to a 13F filing submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday. The filing shows 129,615… Read the full story at The Defiant
A federal appeals court has issued its mandate affirming Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud conviction, 25-year prison sentence and $11 billion forfeiture order.
Summary
- The Second Circuit formally upheld seven felony convictions against the former FTX chief.
- Bankman-Fried’s 25-year prison sentence and roughly $11 billion forfeiture order remain in place.
- The court rejected claims that FTX’s later asset recovery weakened the government’s fraud case.
- A Supreme Court petition or presidential clemency now represents his clearest remaining options.
Second Circuit closes Bankman-Fried appeal
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit filed its mandate on Aug. 4, putting its June 12 judgment into effect and returning jurisdiction over the case to the lower court.
The mandate formally affirmed the judgment issued by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. A jury convicted Bankman-Fried in November 2023 on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy tied to the collapse of FTX and its affiliated trading firm, Alameda Research.
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan sentenced him to 25 years in federal prison in March 2024. Kaplan also imposed a forfeiture order of approximately $11 billion.
The three-judge appellate panel unanimously rejected Bankman-Fried’s effort to overturn both his conviction and sentence. Judges Barrington Parker, Eunice Lee and Maria Araújo Kahn found no reversible error in the trial court’s evidentiary decisions or jury instructions.
“For the reasons set forth below, we affirm the judgment of the district court,” the panel said in its June opinion.
The mandate adds no new legal reasoning. It makes the earlier appellate ruling official and closes the regular proceeding before the three-judge panel.
FTX repayments did not erase the fraud
Bankman-Fried argued that the trial court unfairly restricted evidence suggesting FTX held assets that could eventually make customers whole. His defense maintained that the exchange had sufficient value and that creditors’ losses were not necessarily permanent.
The Second Circuit rejected that argument. It ruled that wire fraud occurred when customer funds were transferred to Alameda without authorization, regardless of whether Bankman-Fried believed the money could later be repaid.
“As the district court made clear, FTX customers were defrauded as soon as Bankman-Fried transferred their money to Alameda regardless of how strongly he believed he might later return the money,” Parker wrote.
The court also found that evidence about the subsequent value of FTX-linked investments was not relevant to whether the initial transfers constituted fraud. Prosecutors presented evidence that customer assets funded investments, political donations and real estate purchases while Bankman-Fried publicly claimed the deposits were safe.
The decision separates Bankman-Fried’s criminal liability from the recovery creditors may receive through FTX’s bankruptcy proceedings.
FTX creditor payments continue separately
As crypto.news reported, FTX scheduled its fifth creditor distribution for July 31, with nearly $900 million expected to reach claimants holding approved Convenience and Non-Convenience Class claims.
Eligible creditors had to complete the exchange’s pre-distribution requirements by the June 16 record date. Kraken, Payoneer and BitGo were among the approved providers handling payments.
The distributions arise from FTX’s Chapter 11 reorganization plan and do not reverse the criminal findings against Bankman-Fried. The appeals court said later repayment or asset appreciation could not excuse the original misuse of customer funds.
The distinction is relevant to U.S. creditors, some of whom may recover approved bankruptcy claims while Bankman-Fried continues serving his federal sentence.
Supreme Court or clemency remain possible
Bankman-Fried can still ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case. The Supreme Court accepts only a small share of petitions, and filing one would not automatically suspend his sentence or overturn the appellate mandate.
Presidential clemency provides another route outside the courts. Bankman-Fried has publicly said he wants a pardon, but President Donald Trump said in January that he was not considering one.
Political resistance has also grown. In July, the U.S. Senate passed a nonbinding resolution by unanimous consent opposing a pardon, commutation or other form of federal clemency for the former FTX executive.
The resolution does not limit the president’s constitutional pardon power. However, it signals bipartisan opposition to reducing Bankman-Fried’s punishment as FTX continues returning recovered assets to creditors.
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