Bitcoin is facing renewed criticism from investment adviser Ross Gerber, who questioned the cryptocurrency’s practical utility on Aug. 16 and argued that physical gold remains easier to use in many places.

Gerber wrote in an X post that it was “probably easier to use gold than bitcoin in most places still.” He also questioned what lasting products the crypto industry had built despite years of claims about Bitcoin’s monetary use cases. The comments represent Gerber’s opinion and do not establish that gold is objectively more useful than Bitcoin.

Bitcoin criticism marks a shift for Gerber

Gerber’s stance is notable because his firm has previously embraced digital assets. Gerber Kawasaki says it partnered with Gemini in April 2021 to provide digital asset exposure to clients, while Gerber himself spent years speaking positively about Bitcoin.

His tone has become increasingly skeptical in 2026. Gerber recently wrote that Michael Saylor “kinda makes me over Bitcoin” and said the asset was becoming difficult for him to take seriously. Those remarks are personal assessments rather than evidence that Strategy’s activity has damaged Bitcoin’s network or long-term value proposition.

As crypto.news previously reported, Gerber accused Saylor’s leveraged Bitcoin strategy of hurting the market, although he provided no data showing Strategy alone caused Bitcoin’s price declines.

Strategy has continued selling Bitcoin in 2026

One detail in earlier coverage requires correction. Strategy did not sell 32 BTC in April. Its SEC filing shows the company sold 32 BTC between May 26 and May 31 for roughly $2.5 million at an average price of $77,135. It was Strategy’s first disclosed Bitcoin sale since December 2022.

The company has since made larger disposals. Strategy sold another 1,638 BTC for $104.7 million during the week ending Aug. 2, then sold 1,690 BTC for $108.6 million between Aug. 3 and Aug. 9. The latter proceeds funded repurchases of its STRC preferred stock. Strategy held 840,447 BTC as of Aug. 9 at an aggregate purchase cost of $63.36 billion.

In related coverage, crypto.news reported that Strategy’s first 32 BTC sale broke a nearly four-year accumulation streak.

Bitcoin miners are shifting capacity toward AI

Gerber has also questioned Bitcoin mining as companies redirect infrastructure toward artificial intelligence workloads. That shift is real among several listed miners, although it does not mean Bitcoin mining is disappearing.

Core Scientific, for example, said in April that it was converting a Pecos, Texas facility with 300 megawatts then used for Bitcoin mining into an AI data-center campus. Its second-quarter filing showed colocation revenue rising to $136.7 million while digital asset self-mining revenue fell to $21.5 million.

As crypto.news reported, Bitcoin miners are increasingly converting power infrastructure into AI data centers as demand for high-performance computing grows. That business shift supports part of Gerber’s observation about miners, but it does not prove his broader claim that Bitcoin’s strongest period has passed.

Bitcoin traded around $63,528 on Monday, up roughly 0.8% from the previous close. There is no evidence that Gerber’s remarks caused the move.

Gerber’s comments instead add to an ongoing debate over whether Bitcoin should primarily be judged as a payment network, store of value or investment asset. His criticism also comes as Strategy continues managing Bitcoin alongside preferred-stock obligations and major miners increasingly weigh Bitcoin economics against AI infrastructure revenue.

Volume, meanwhile, is dead simple as it measures the number of contracts that changed hands during a given period. Think of it as measuring how many times the front door of that exclusive club opened and closed over a given period, regardless of who stayed. It thus represents the degree of churn or liquidity available to manage positions.

So, the latest case of volume falling far behind OI is like a large club with a tiny exit door. What happens if a large number of people try to rush out?

Because overall investor positioning is massive, a sudden catalyst could trigger a wave of contract closures, such as forced liquidations due to margin shortages. Without the underlying daily volume to provide liquidity, the market may not be able to absorb the rush smoothly, leading to volatile, exaggerated price swings.

“The risk is mechanical. When open interest towers over daily volume, liquidations meet little resting flow to absorb them, and adverse moves extend further than they otherwise would. Traders have added substantial risk, most of it long, into a market that shows no matching demand,” blockchain analytics firm Glassnode said in a report.

The risk of an exaggerated move is particularly likely to the downside because of weakening demand and a lack of resting bids or buy orders at lower price levels.

Binance has overtaken CME Group in Bitcoin futures open interest for the first time since late 2023, holding roughly 148,500 BTC against CME’s 102,840. The reversal unwinds two years of institutional dominance narrative and raises questions about whether traditional finance is retreating from crypto derivatives or simply relocating.

For two years, a single chart told the story of Bitcoin’s institutional coming of age. CME Group, the Chicago exchange where pension funds, sovereign wealth managers, and hedge funds trade everything from corn to crude oil, held more Bitcoin futures open interest than any venue on Earth. That lead over Binance, the offshore exchange synonymous with retail speculation, became the most cited proof point for the “institutions are here” thesis.

That chart has now flipped. Binance holds roughly 148,500 BTC in open interest, worth approximately $9.6 billion. CME has dropped to around 102,840 BTC, or $6.7 billion, its lowest reading since February 2024. The gap is not narrow. It is roughly 45,000 BTC wide and growing.

The shift did not arrive overnight. CME open interest has fallen for five consecutive months, accelerating through the second quarter of 2026 as the profitability of the basis trade collapsed and institutional appetites shifted. What looked like a permanent structural change in Bitcoin market microstructure may have been, at least in part, an arbitrage play dressed in institutional clothing.

Understanding what happened, why it matters, and where it leads requires following the money through a maze of basis spreads, regulatory upheaval, and the evolving definition of what “institutional” even means in crypto.

The basis trade machine and how it broke

The centerpiece of CME’s rise to the top of the Bitcoin futures leaderboard was not directional conviction. It was the cash and carry basis trade, a delta neutral strategy older than most of the people trading it.

The mechanics are straightforward. Buy spot Bitcoin, or more commonly after January 2024, buy shares of a spot Bitcoin ETF like BlackRock’s IBIT. Simultaneously sell Bitcoin futures on CME at a premium to the spot price. The difference between the futures price and the spot price, the basis, represents annualized yield. When Bitcoin was rallying through 2024 and the first half of 2025, that basis regularly exceeded 15% to 20%, dwarfing anything available in traditional fixed income.

Hedge funds, proprietary trading desks, and institutional players rotated capital into this trade at scale. According to CFTC Commitments of Traders data, leveraged funds held persistent net short positions on CME Bitcoin futures throughout most of 2024 and 2025, the signature footprint of the basis trade. They were not bearish on Bitcoin. They were harvesting yield from the contango.

Ripple shipped zero-knowledge privacy for tokenized assets on the XRP Ledger. The feature encrypts balances and transfer amounts while keeping accounts visible, a design that separates it from every privacy coin on the market and raises a question regulators have not yet answered.

Ripple has spent most of 2026 building infrastructure that major financial institutions are willing to touch. JPMorgan settled a tokenized Treasury redemption on the XRP Ledger in under five seconds. Deutsche Bank deepened its integration with Ripple Payments. SBI launched RLUSD, Ripple’s dollar-pegged stablecoin, in Japan after securing regulatory approval. The stablecoin itself has grown to a $1.6 billion market cap, making it the third-largest regulated dollar stablecoin in the United States.

None of those milestones solved a problem that institutional treasurers and compliance officers keep raising: every token balance and every transfer amount on the XRP Ledger is visible to anyone with a block explorer. For a bank moving $50 million in tokenized bonds, that transparency is not a feature. It is a competitive liability.

The XRP Ledger 3.3.0 release is Ripple’s answer. It ships five amendments in a single package, but the one that matters most for institutional adoption is Confidential MPT, a cryptographic layer that encrypts token balances and transfer sizes while preserving the public, auditable nature of the ledger itself. What makes this design unusual is not just the privacy it offers, but the privacy it deliberately withholds.

What confidential MPT actually does

The Confidential MPT amendment, formally specified as XLS-0096, replaces plaintext per-account Multi-Purpose Token balances with EC-ElGamal ciphertexts. When a user sends tokens, the transfer amount is encrypted on-chain, and both the sender and receiver balances update as ciphertext values that cannot be read by third parties scanning the ledger.

Validators do not need to decrypt anything to confirm a transaction is valid. Instead, the protocol relies on a layered zero-knowledge proof system. Each confidential transfer includes a compact sigma proof binding all ElGamal ciphertexts under a single Fiat-Shamir challenge, a pair of Pedersen commitments that encode the transfer amount and the remaining balance, and an aggregated Bulletproof range proof confirming that no balance has gone negative and that the total supply remains intact.

The cryptographic payload is not trivial. A Ripple research paper authored by Murat Cenk, Aanchal Malhotra, and Joseph Ayo Akinyele, published through the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) in 2026, details the mathematical foundations. The system includes a linkage proof that binds the ElGamal ciphertext used for the transfer to the Pedersen commitment used for the range proof, preventing a class of attacks where a malicious sender could submit valid proofs for a different amount than the one actually transferred.

The proof system is designed to prevent two specific attack vectors that plague simpler confidential transaction schemes. First, without the linkage proof, a sender could generate a valid range proof for one amount while the ElGamal ciphertext actually encrypts a different amount, effectively creating tokens out of thin air. Second, the protocol requires a proof of knowledge during account registration to prevent rogue key attacks, where a malicious party registers a public key derived from another user’s key to manipulate aggregate ciphertexts.

Validators process these proofs without learning anything about the underlying values. The verification cost is logarithmic in the range size thanks to Bulletproofs, keeping transaction validation efficient even as the proof payload grows. According to the IACR paper, a single confidential transfer proof adds roughly 1.5 kilobytes to the transaction, a manageable overhead for a ledger that already handles thousands of transactions per second.

Critically, the amendment is opt-in at the issuer level. A token issuer creating a new MPT can choose whether balances and transfers should be confidential. Issuers who opt in retain the ability to designate authorized parties, such as auditors, regulators, or compliance officers, who can decrypt and verify the underlying amounts. Freeze and clawback controls, the same mechanisms issuers already use for standard MPTs, remain fully functional.

What stays visible is equally important. Sender and receiver account addresses are public. The token type being transferred is public. The fact that a transaction occurred is public. Only the amount and the resulting balances are hidden.

How this differs from Monero and Zcash

The comparison to privacy coins is inevitable, but the architecture is fundamentally different in ways that matter for both regulators and users.

Monero treats privacy as a default that cannot be turned off. Every transaction hides the sender, receiver, and amount using ring signatures, stealth addresses, and RingCT. After the FCMP++ upgrade in early 2026, tracing a Monero transaction requires analyzing the entire unspent output set, more than 1.8 million outputs, making it computationally infeasible. No blockchain analytics firm has publicly shown reliable XMR tracing at scale since that upgrade.

Bitcoin traded around $63,460 during Asian hours on Monday, Aug. 17, recovering 0.7% over 24 hours but remaining 2.3% lower over seven days as the cryptocurrency market entered another week with limited momentum. 

Bitcoin’s market capitalization stood near $1.27 trillion.

The broader crypto market was valued at roughly $2.24 trillion, while Bitcoin dominance remained close to 57%. Most large-cap cryptocurrencies posted modest daily gains, but weekly performance remained mixed after Bitcoin fell from above $65,000 during the previous week.

Bitcoin price remains below last week’s highs

Bitcoin’s latest rebound has yet to erase the decline from last week’s $65,400 area. BTC fell as low as roughly $62,500 on Friday before stabilizing through the weekend and moving back above $63,000.

Ethereum was trading around $1,900.64, up 1% in 24 hours but 0.8% lower over seven days. XRP remained near $1.00 and was down 2.8% for the week. Solana traded around $75.47, down 0.1% daily and 1.4% weekly. BNB held near $605.63 and was 0.6% higher over seven days.

TRON changed hands near $0.332, gaining 0.4% daily and 0.7% weekly, while Dogecoin rose 0.6% to about $0.070.

The subdued Bitcoin performance follows another reversal in U.S. institutional flows. Spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded roughly $390 million in combined net outflows between Aug. 10 and Aug. 14, with Fidelity’s FBTC accounting for about $153 million. Spot Ethereum ETFs recorded a smaller $2.26 million weekly net outflow.

That marked a sharp change from the previous week, when, as crypto.newspreviously reported, Bitcoin ETFs attracted $853.5 million across five consecutive inflow sessions.

HYPE and LINK outperform major altcoins

Hyperliquid’s HYPE remained one of the strongest large-cap performers. The token traded around $58.81, gaining 3.4% over 24 hours and 8.7% during the past seven days. Its market capitalization stood near $13.1 billion.

Chainlink posted an even larger weekly increase among the top 20 cryptocurrencies. LINK traded near $9.45, gaining 0.7% on the day and 15.7% over seven days. Monero also outperformed Bitcoin, rising 4.9% weekly to around $413.84.

HYPE’s performance follows a period of renewed activity around Hyperliquid. In related coverage, crypto.newsreported that Hyperliquid generated $169 million in second-quarter revenue and directed $141 million toward HYPE buybacks.

Among the broader top-100 market-cap group, Bitway was the strongest daily performer in the latest crypto.news snapshot, rising 22.3%. Ether.fi followed with a 7.9% increase.

On the downside, Stable fell 3.7%, Quant lost 3.6%, and Canton declined 2.7%. Uniswap remained one of the weakest weekly performers among larger assets, falling 18.4% over seven days despite gaining 1.3% Monday.

Bitcoin tests resistance after steady recovery

Bitcoin’s daily chart shows BTC consolidating after its sharp June pullback, with price hovering near $63,490 and posting a modest 0.94% intraday gain. Despite the short-term uptick, BTC continues to trade below the key resistance band around $65,000–$66,000, keeping the broader structure tilted to the downside compared with earlier cycle highs. In the near term, price action remains confined to a range, with $60,000 acting as the main support floor.

The Aroon Oscillator sits in positive territory at 42.86, suggesting that recent upward moves are currently outweighing recent lows. This points to mild bullish momentum in the short term, though the signal is not strong enough to indicate a confirmed trend shift.

Momentum indicators, however, remain weak. The MACD continues to reflect bearish conditions, with the histogram at approximately -124.49 and the MACD line near -236.26, still positioned below the signal line around -111.77. This setup indicates that downside momentum has not fully dissipated despite the recent price recovery.

Overall, Bitcoin is stabilizing after its decline but has yet to establish a convincing bullish reversal. A sustained breakout above the $65,000–$66,000 resistance zone would strengthen the recovery case, while a breakdown below $60,000 would likely reintroduce stronger bearish pressure.

Fed minutes and White House meeting come into focus

Macro policy returns to the foreground this week. The Federal Reserve will publish minutes from its July 28–29 meeting on Wednesday, Aug. 19, at 2 p.m. ET. Officials voted 9–3 to maintain the federal funds target range at 3.5%–3.75%, with three members preferring a quarter-point increase.

Markets have since reduced expectations for another rate increase. Futures pricing pointed to roughly a 30% probability of a September hike heading into Monday, according to the Financial Times.

Crypto traders will also watch Washington. As crypto.news reported, Coinbase, Ripple and other crypto and prediction-market executives are expected at an Aug. 19 White House meeting as policymakers continue discussing digital asset regulation.

For Bitcoin, the immediate question is whether Monday’s move can extend beyond the $64,000 region and recover last week’s highs. Until then, BTC remains below its recent range peak while selected altcoins, notably LINK, HYPE and XMR, continue to outperform.

Apple has patched a critical macOS Screen Sharing vulnerability after attackers exploited internet-facing Macs to gain root access and install Monero mining software, according to an updated warning from the Netherlands’ National Cyber Security Centre.

The Dutch NCSC updated its advisory on Aug. 12 to confirm active exploitation of CVE-2026-65400 on multiple systems with port 5900 exposed to the internet. In every reported case, attackers obtained root access and installed a Monero miner. The agency did not disclose how many Macs were compromised or identify the attackers.

Apple Screen Sharing flaw bypasses authentication

Apple patched CVE-2026-65400 on Aug. 6 in macOS Tahoe 26.6.1, Sequoia 15.7.9 and Sonoma 14.8.9. The company described it as an authentication flaw caused by improper state management that could allow an attacker on the network to access Screen Sharing without valid credentials.

Security firm Huntress found that the flaw affects the Secure Remote Password authentication process used by macOS Screen Sharing. Its analysis showed an attacker could cause the service to treat an unauthenticated connection as authenticated and obtain privileged access.

Because exploitation occurs before normal authentication, Huntress said changing a Screen Sharing password, disabling legacy VNC authentication or removing authorized user accounts does not address the vulnerability. The recommended fix is installing Apple’s latest security update or disabling Screen Sharing until the system can be patched.

Tens of thousands of Macs may have been exposed

Huntress researcher Ryan Dowd said a Censys search identified “tens of thousands of potentially vulnerable hosts.” That estimate covers Macs that appeared exposed to the internet and should not be interpreted as tens of thousands of confirmed compromises.

The risk is particularly relevant to hosted bare-metal Macs, including Mac minis rented for remote workloads. Huntress said some hosting environments expose Screen Sharing services on newly provisioned machines, increasing the attack surface when systems have not yet received Apple’s Aug. 6 patches.

The flaw now carries a 9.8 critical CVSS score from CISA’s vulnerability analysis, with no privileges or user interaction required under its current assessment. The National Vulnerability Database shows that CISA upgraded the scoring on Aug. 14 after initially assigning a lower severity assessment.

Hackers used compromised Macs to mine Monero

The Dutch cases involved cryptojacking rather than reported theft of wallet credentials. Attackers used the compromised Macs’ computing resources to mine Monero after obtaining root control. The NCSC has not disclosed the mining software, pool addresses, attacker wallets or resulting XMR proceeds.

Monero has repeatedly appeared in cryptojacking campaigns because it can be mined using general-purpose computing hardware. As crypto.news previously reported, a Darktrace investigation found malware quietly deploying cryptocurrency mining software after attackers gained access to Windows systems.

Apple devices have also faced other crypto-related malware campaigns. In related coverage,North Korean hackers targeted macOS users with malware aimed at crypto companies using fake meetings and malicious software updates.

Meanwhile, Monero (XMR) traded at around $414 at press time, indicating less the 1% increase in the past 24 hours and almost 5% in the past 7 days (according to crypto.news market data)

What happens next

The immediate priority is patching Macs running vulnerable versions of Sonoma, Sequoia and Tahoe. Systems exposed directly to the internet through Screen Sharing face the clearest documented risk, although Huntress recommends updating Macs even when administrators believe the service is disabled.

The Dutch NCSC has confirmed exploitation but has not attributed the campaign or published indicators identifying the Monero mining infrastructure. Further disclosures from incident responders could clarify how widespread the attacks became before Apple’s Aug. 6 fix.

Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis Government Solutions has filed a legal challenge against a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) decision to award a sole-source contract to rival TRM Labs. The dispute centers on ICE’s procurement choice for forensic blockchain analysis tools used in Homeland Security Task Force investigations.

According to CourtListener records, Chainalysis Government Solutions brought the case to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims on July 27. The filing—accessible through CourtListener’s RECAP archive as of Sunday—contests the award as unlawful and seeks court review of the procurement outcome.

Key takeaways

• Chainalysis Government Solutions sued the U.S. government after ICE awarded a sole-source contract to TRM Labs for forensic blockchain analytics and support services.
• The federal award notice values the contract at about $94.6 million for one year of work covering July 1, 2026 to June 30, 2027.
• Chainalysis alleges ICE’s decision was “arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable,” arguing it responded to a notice of intent related to TRM.
• The complaint is under seal due to confidential and proprietary information, limiting public visibility into the precise arguments and requested remedies.
• TRM intervened in the case; government and TRM responses are due Friday, with oral argument scheduled for Sept. 2.

The contract at the center of the lawsuit

The contract described in the award notice is valued at approximately $94.6 million and is intended to provide forensic software and support services for Homeland Security Task Force investigations. The period of performance spans one year, starting July 1, 2026 and ending June 30, 2027.

Chainalysis and TRM both operate in the same government-adjacent niche: they supply blockchain analytics tools that agencies can use to trace cryptocurrency-related activity and support investigations into alleged criminal behavior. This overlap is part of what makes the procurement decision consequential for vendors competing for public-sector work.

Chainalysis claims ICE ignored fair process

In its motion and complaint filings, Chainalysis Government Solutions characterized ICE’s decision as “arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable.” The filing states that Chainalysis submitted a capability statement after receiving an ICE notice of intent seeking forensic software and support services from TRM.

While the public docket does not spell out Chainalysis’s specific objections in detail—largely because the court allowed the complaint to remain under seal—the company’s challenge indicates it believes the sole-source award did not follow the proper standards for federal procurement decisions.

The sealed nature of the lawsuit is important for readers to understand what is and isn’t yet visible. CourtListener notes that the complaint remains under seal because it contains Chainalysis’ confidential and proprietary information and trade secrets. The Court of Federal Claims granted Chainalysis permission to keep the complaint under seal on July 31.

TRM intervenes as the case moves toward argument

TRM Labs intervened in the case on July 28, according to CourtListener docket activity. Intervention typically means the awarded vendor is directly involved in defending the procurement decision and responding to allegations raised by the plaintiff.

Procedurally, the court has scheduled responses from both the U.S. government and TRM for Friday. Oral argument is set for Sept. 2. The government has requested a decision by Sept. 10, reflecting an expectation that the court can resolve the dispute on a relatively expedited timeline.

However, the public filings do not include detailed information about what remedy Chainalysis is seeking, nor do they lay out the full factual and legal basis of the company’s challenge in the open record.

Why the fight matters for crypto enforcement and vendors

This case sits at the intersection of crypto enforcement needs and federal procurement rules. Government agencies rely on blockchain analytics platforms to identify transaction flows, associate addresses with entities, and produce investigative leads that can be used in broader cases. When contracts are awarded without competitive bidding—sole-source procurement—vendors often scrutinize whether the process complied with procurement requirements and whether the government had a defensible basis for selecting a single provider.

For Chainalysis and TRM, the lawsuit is also a signal of how competition may play out in a market where government contracts can be large and operationally important. Even when both companies sell overlapping toolsets, the legal standards around how agencies choose among vendors can become decisive.

For other firms watching the space, the dispute underscores that procurement decisions in blockchain analytics—particularly for forensic use—can face formal challenges that may affect contract timelines, oversight, and how agencies structure future solicitations.

TRM Labs declined to comment. Chainalysis and ICE did not respond to requests for comment before publication.

As the sealed arguments begin to take shape through upcoming filings and scheduled court responses, investors, builders, and competing vendors will likely watch whether the court focuses on the procurement process itself (such as the justification for a sole-source award) or on more granular disputes tied to the parties’ capability submissions and the standards applied by ICE.