Crypto World
CLARITY Act’s real obstacle: Trump’s crypto business
The CLARITY Act has the votes and the momentum to become law, having cleared the House and a key Senate committee. It is stuck anyway. The deepest reason is not crypto skepticism but a fight over the president’s own crypto empire, estimated in the billions, and whether the rules should restrain it.
Summary
- The CLARITY Act, the U.S. crypto market-structure bill, has cleared the House and the Senate Banking Committee and reached the Senate calendar, yet it remains stuck.
- The deepest obstacle is not crypto skepticism but an ethics fight over President Trump’s family crypto interests, estimated at roughly $2.3 billion or more, spanning World Liberty Financial, the USD1 stablecoin, and the TRUMP memecoin.
- Democrats led by Senator Gillibrand say there is no bill without ethics language restricting officials from profiting on digital assets, and a committee amendment to that effect failed on a party-line vote.
- The White House argues that ethics limits must apply uniformly and not single out the president, and a target to sign the bill by July collapsed when the ethics talks broke down.
- With a hard deadline before the August recess and a 60-vote threshold that needs several Democratic votes, the bill’s fate now turns on whether credible ethics language can be agreed, not on crypto policy itself.
The CLARITY Act is the bill the American crypto industry has wanted for years, the one that would finally settle how digital assets are regulated in the U.S., and by the ordinary logic of legislation it should be on a path to becoming law.
It passed the House of Representatives with bipartisan support, cleared the Senate Banking Committee on a 15-to-9 vote, and was placed on the Senate calendar, formally eligible for a floor vote. The industry is mobilized behind it, with hundreds of companies urging passage, and analysts have spent the year handicapping when, not whether, it would be signed.
And yet it is stuck.
The reason it is stuck has surprisingly little to do with crypto policy itself, on which a workable consensus largely exists, and a great deal to do with something the bill’s authors never intended it to be about: the president’s own crypto business.
President Trump and his family hold crypto interests estimated in the billions of dollars, and the question of whether a law regulating crypto should also restrain officials who profit from it has become the obstacle that crypto policy alone never was.
This piece explains how a bill with the votes to pass got trapped by the president’s crypto empire, and why that fight is harder to resolve than any technical dispute over digital assets.
This is a politically charged subject, and the aim here is to lay out the situation factually and fairly, presenting what each side argues rather than taking a position. The dispute touches genuine disagreements about ethics, executive power, and the proper scope of a market-structure bill, and reasonable people land in different places on all of them.
What follows covers what the CLARITY Act would do, the two obstacles blocking it, the scale and nature of the president’s crypto holdings, the conflict-of-interest concerns that critics raise, the responses from the White House and its allies, why the impasse is so hard to break, and the deadline that now governs the bill’s fate.
The goal is to make a complicated and contested situation legible, not to argue for an outcome.
A bill that should pass, and cannot
Begin with the puzzle, because it is genuinely strange.
The CLARITY Act has cleared the procedural hurdles that kill most legislation. It advanced through the House with broad bipartisan support, survived markup in the Senate Banking Committee with two Democrats crossing over to join Republicans in a 15-to-9 vote, and landed on the Senate legislative calendar, meaning it is formally ready for floor consideration.
Behind it stands an unusually unified industry. Hundreds of crypto companies and organizations have publicly pressed Senate leaders to bring it to a vote, arguing that clear federal rules are needed to keep digital-asset innovation in the U.S.
By the normal measures of legislative momentum, this is a bill on track.
And yet it has not moved to a floor vote, and the window to do so is closing. The reason is not that the Senate cannot agree on how to regulate crypto.
The core architecture of the bill, which divides oversight between regulators and gives the market the legal certainty it has long wanted, commands fairly broad support.
As crypto.news previously explained in the bill explained in full, the CLARITY Act is designed to create defined lanes for digital assets rather than leave the market trapped between agencies.
The bill is stuck on two provisions that have little to do with that core architecture, and the deeper of the two has nothing to do with crypto regulation at all.
It concerns ethics, specifically whether the law should restrict government officials, up to and including the president, from profiting on the very digital assets the law would legitimize.
That question has fractured the fragile coalition the bill needs, and it has done so at the worst possible moment, against a hard deadline.
The bill that should pass cannot, because it has become entangled with the president’s personal financial interests in a way its authors did not design and cannot easily escape.
What the CLARITY Act would do
To understand what is at stake, it helps to know what the bill actually does, because the prize is substantial and explains why the industry is so eager.
The CLARITY Act creates a comprehensive federal framework for digital assets, resolving the long-running uncertainty over which regulator oversees what.
In broad terms, it grants the commodities regulator primary jurisdiction over the spot markets for digital commodities, assets that function more like commodities than securities, while leaving the securities regulator in charge of assets sold as investment contracts.
For tokens like the major cryptocurrencies, this would provide the clear legal classification the industry has sought for years, removing the cloud of uncertainty that has hung over the market and deterred some institutional participation.
The bill also creates new pathways for crypto projects to raise money and operate within defined legal boundaries, including a tailored exemption that lets certain projects raise capital from the public without the full weight of traditional securities requirements, subject to disclosure rules and caps.
The overall effect would be to bring the American crypto market inside a defined regulatory perimeter, with clear rules for who is overseen by whom, how tokens are classified, and what protections apply to consumers.
For an industry that has spent years operating amid legal ambiguity, and watching some activity move offshore as a result, this clarity is the entire point.
It is why hundreds of companies are lobbying for passage, and why supporters argue that failing to pass it would leave the U.S. behind as other jurisdictions write their own rules.
That comparison matters because how other regions wrote their rules has become part of the pressure campaign in Washington. Europe has MiCA, stablecoin issuers have the GENIUS Act framework, and the U.S. market still lacks a full digital-asset structure.
The substance of the bill, in other words, is broadly what the industry wanted. The trouble lies in the provisions attached around it.
The two obstacles
Two distinct disputes have blocked the bill from a floor vote, and it is worth distinguishing them, because they are different in kind.
The first concerns a provision, carried over from a separate piece of legislation and folded into the bill, that shields software developers who do not control customer funds from being treated as money transmitters subject to certain financial-crime obligations.
The crypto industry considers this provision essential, arguing that developers who merely write code, without ever holding anyone’s money, should not face the legal exposure of a money-transmitting business. Without this protection, builders argue the broader bill would fail to deliver the certainty they need.
Opposing it, several law-enforcement organizations and other groups have warned that the exemption is too broad and could create blind spots that sophisticated criminals exploit, making it harder to trace illicit activity.
This is a substantive policy disagreement, and it is negotiable in the ordinary way, through tighter drafting and compromise language.
The second obstacle is the one this piece focuses on, because it is deeper and far harder to resolve.
It concerns ethics, and specifically whether the law should bar senior government officials, including the president, the vice president, and members of Congress, from issuing, promoting, or profiting from digital assets while in office.
This dispute is not really about how to regulate crypto. It is about whether a crypto law should constrain the people writing and enforcing it, at a moment when the most powerful of those people has a large personal stake in the industry.
Where the developer-shield fight is a technical disagreement that careful drafting might bridge, the ethics fight runs into something structural and personal: the president’s own crypto business, and the question of whether the rules should touch it.
That is why, of the two obstacles, the ethics one has proven the more intractable, and why it, more than anything in the bill’s actual crypto provisions, now threatens to sink the whole effort.
The president’s crypto empire
To understand the ethics fight, you have to understand the scale and nature of the president’s involvement in crypto, which is unprecedented for a sitting head of state and which both sides acknowledge as a fact even as they dispute its significance.
President Trump and his family hold crypto interests that have been estimated at roughly $2.3 billion, with some broader estimates running considerably higher.
The holdings span several ventures. There is World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture the Trump family launched in 2024, in which the family holds a large ownership stake and which issues a dollar stablecoin called USD1.
There is the TRUMP memecoin, a token bearing the president’s name that trades largely on political news and has been highly volatile. And there are further crypto-adjacent ties through the family’s media company, including an arrangement involving a major exchange.
That is why the USD1 stablecoin at issue is not just another stablecoin in this debate. It sits at the intersection of crypto policy, payment regulation, and presidential financial exposure.
Several features of these holdings have drawn particular scrutiny.
The stablecoin venture received a large investment from a fund linked to a foreign government for a significant ownership stake, a transaction that routed substantial sums to entities associated with the family, and the same stablecoin was used in a multibillion-dollar transaction involving a major exchange whose founder was later pardoned by the president.
Critics point to the timing and structure of these deals as raising questions about whether regulatory and policy decisions and private financial interests have become entangled.
Supporters and the White House dispute that characterization.
What is not in dispute is the basic situation: a sitting president and his family have a large, active financial stake in the crypto industry, at the same time that the president’s administration is shaping crypto regulation and enforcement.
It is that overlap, unprecedented in modern times, that the ethics fight in the CLARITY Act is ultimately about.
The conflict at the center of the bill
The concern that critics raise is, at its core, a conflict-of-interest argument, and it is worth stating in the terms its proponents use.
The objection is that the same administration writing and enforcing crypto rules is personally exposed to those rules, which creates at least the appearance, and potentially the reality, of decisions being shaped by private financial interest rather than public good.
Ethics experts, watchdog organizations, and Democratic lawmakers have argued that a president whose personal wealth is tied to crypto ventures has an incentive to favor policies and enforcement choices that benefit those ventures.
They also argue that allowing such an arrangement to stand without guardrails sets a troubling precedent.
Some have characterized specific transactions, particularly the foreign investment in the stablecoin venture, as self-dealing, and have warned about the entanglement of a sitting president’s personal finances with assets the government regulates.
From this vantage, the logic of insisting on ethics provisions in the CLARITY Act is direct.
If the law is going to legitimize and regulate digital assets, the argument goes, it should also ensure that the officials overseeing that regulation cannot personally profit from it, precisely because the current situation shows how real the conflict can become.
Democratic senators have made this case the basis of their conditional support, with one prominent senator stating flatly that there is no version of the bill she will support without ethics language addressing it.
The concern, in this framing, is not partisan obstruction but a principled insistence that a law regulating an industry should not enrich the people enforcing it.
Whether one finds this argument compelling or overstated, it is the substance of the objection, and it is what has made the ethics provisions a condition rather than a preference for the senators whose votes the bill needs.
The White House and Republican response
The other side of the dispute deserves equal weight, because the White House and its allies have substantive responses, and the disagreement is genuine instead of one-sided.
The central counterargument, advanced by the administration’s crypto policy lead, is that ethics limits should apply uniformly to all officials and should not be written to single out the president or his family.
From this view, crafting provisions targeted at one administration is itself improper, a politicization of what should be a neutral market-structure bill, and the appropriate approach is general ethics rules applied evenly instead of bespoke language aimed at a particular person.
The White House has stated directly that the president has acted in the public interest and that there are no conflicts of interest, rejecting the premise of the critics’ case.
Republicans have added a jurisdictional argument, contending that sweeping ethics provisions restricting officials’ financial conduct fall outside the proper scope of a banking and market-structure bill, and belong, if anywhere, in dedicated ethics legislation instead of bolted onto a crypto framework.
They have also emphasized the cost of letting the ethics dispute sink the whole bill, arguing that the country needs the regulatory clarity the CLARITY Act provides and that allowing a fight over the president’s holdings to block it would harm the broader industry and cede ground to other jurisdictions.
The companies and individuals named in connection with specific transactions have, for their part, disputed the characterizations of those deals as conflicts, offering their own accounts of how and why they occurred.
The result is a real clash of principles: one side insisting that a crypto law must restrain officials who profit from crypto, the other insisting that singling out the president is improper and that the bill’s substance should not be held hostage to that fight.
Both positions have coherent logic, which is part of why the impasse has been so difficult to resolve.
Why this is so hard to break
The reason the ethics dispute has proven nearly intractable, where the technical disagreements in the bill are negotiable, is that it sits on a genuine structural conflict that compromise language struggles to dissolve.
The fault line runs straight through the coalition the bill needs.
Because passage in the Senate requires clearing a 60-vote threshold, the bill needs support from several members of the minority party, and the Democratic senators whose votes are in play have tied their support to meaningful ethics guardrails.
Meanwhile, the White House and Republican leadership have resisted provisions they see as targeting the president.
These positions are not easily reconciled, because the thing one side considers essential, language that would restrain officials including the president from profiting on crypto, is close to the thing the other side considers unacceptable, language singling out the president.
An attempt to write a provision strong enough to satisfy the senators demanding guardrails tends to be exactly the kind of provision the White House rejects, and vice versa.
The negotiations have borne this out. A committee amendment that would have barred senior officials from holding crypto business interests failed on a party-line vote, signaling that the dispute splits cleanly along partisan lines instead of admitting an easy middle.
A separate effort to craft an enforcement mechanism collapsed when it was withdrawn, leaving the central question unresolved.
Each attempt to find compromise language has run into the same wall: the gap is not really about wording but about whether the rules should reach the president’s business at all, and that is a question of principle, not phrasing.
Add the personal and political stakes, in which any provision becomes a referendum on the president’s crypto dealings, and the difficulty compounds.
This is why a bill that commands broad agreement on its actual crypto provisions cannot get to a vote.
The obstacle is not a drafting problem that a skilled negotiator can solve over a weekend. It is a structural conflict between the votes the bill needs and the interests of the administration whose cooperation it also needs.
The clock, and what comes next
All of this is now racing against a hard deadline, which is what gives the impasse its urgency.
The practical window to pass the bill runs up against the Senate’s summer recess, and the consensus among those tracking it is that if the CLARITY Act does not clear the Senate before that recess, its prospects deteriorate sharply.
Some of the bill’s own architects have suggested that a failure to act could push comprehensive crypto legislation back by years.
Negotiators have set out a compressed timeline, aiming to publish updated text and then move to floor action within weeks, but the ethics dispute has already caused a target to sign the bill earlier in the summer to collapse.
The calendar is unforgiving, with the Senate facing competing legislative demands for its limited remaining time.
The market for predictions reflects the uncertainty. Wagering on whether the bill passes this year has fallen sharply over the course of a month, from comfortable odds to roughly a coin flip, as the ethics and developer-shield disputes hardened.
Independent analysts have likewise moved toward viewing passage as genuinely uncertain instead of likely.
The path forward, if there is one, runs through some compromise on the ethics language credible enough to win the Democratic votes the bill needs without provoking the White House into withdrawing support, a needle that has so far proven extremely difficult to thread.
What happens next will be decided not by any argument over how to regulate digital assets, on which the bill is largely settled, but by whether the parties can resolve a fight about the president’s personal crypto interests under intense time pressure.
If they can, the U.S. gets its long-awaited crypto framework. If they cannot, the most consequential crypto legislation in years may die not over crypto, but over the crypto business of the man whose signature it would require.
That is the irony at the center of the whole affair, and it is the truest summary of where the CLARITY Act stands: its obstacle was never the technology. It was the president’s stake in it.
Frequently asked questions
What is the CLARITY Act?
The CLARITY Act is a U.S. crypto market-structure bill that would set up a comprehensive federal framework for digital assets. It resolves which regulator oversees what, broadly granting the commodities regulator primary jurisdiction over digital-commodity spot markets while keeping the securities regulator over assets sold as investment contracts, and it would create defined pathways for crypto projects to raise money and operate.
For the industry, it would deliver the long-sought legal clarity that removes regulatory uncertainty. It has cleared the House and the Senate Banking Committee and reached the Senate calendar, but it has not yet received a floor vote.
Why is the CLARITY Act stuck if it has the votes?
Because two provisions attached around the bill’s core have fractured the coalition it needs, and the deeper one concerns ethics instead of crypto. The core crypto framework commands fairly broad support, but the bill has stalled over a developer-protection provision that law enforcement opposes and, more intractably, over whether the law should restrict officials, including the president, from profiting on crypto. The second dispute runs into the president’s own large crypto holdings, making it a fight about personal financial interests instead of crypto policy, which is far harder to resolve through ordinary compromise.
What are the president’s crypto holdings?
President Trump and his family hold crypto interests estimated at roughly $2.3 billion, with some estimates higher. They include World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture in which the family holds a large stake and which issues the USD1 stablecoin, the TRUMP memecoin, and further crypto-adjacent ties through the family media company.
Particular scrutiny has fallen on a large investment in the stablecoin venture from a fund linked to a foreign government, and on the stablecoin’s use in a major exchange transaction. The basic fact, undisputed by both sides, is that a sitting president has a large active stake in the industry his administration regulates.
What is the conflict-of-interest concern?
Critics, including ethics experts, watchdog groups, and Democratic lawmakers, argue that the same administration writing and enforcing crypto rules is personally exposed to those rules, creating at least the appearance, and potentially the reality, of decisions shaped by private financial interest.
They contend a president whose wealth is tied to crypto has an incentive to favor policies benefiting those ventures, and that a law legitimizing digital assets should ensure officials cannot personally profit from it. Some have characterized specific transactions as self-dealing. This concern is the basis for Democratic senators conditioning their support on ethics guardrails.
How does the White House respond?
The White House and its allies argue that ethics limits should apply uniformly to all officials and not be written to single out the president, viewing targeted provisions as an improper politicization of a neutral bill. The White House has stated that the president acted in the public interest and that there are no conflicts of interest. Republicans add that sweeping ethics provisions fall outside the proper scope of a market-structure bill and belong in dedicated ethics legislation, and they warn that letting the dispute sink the bill would harm the industry and cede ground to other countries. Parties named in specific deals dispute that they were conflicts.
What happens if the CLARITY Act does not pass soon?
The practical deadline is the Senate’s summer recess. The consensus among those tracking the bill is that if it does not clear the Senate before then, its prospects deteriorate sharply, and some of the bill’s own architects have suggested failure could delay comprehensive crypto legislation by years. Passage requires a 60-vote threshold needing several Democratic votes, which are tied to ethics guardrails the White House resists. Prediction markets have moved from comfortable odds toward roughly a coin flip. If a credible compromise on the ethics language cannot be reached under time pressure, the bill may not pass this year.
This article is information, not legal, financial, or political advice. It describes a contested and fast-moving legislative situation, and presents the positions of the parties involved instead of endorsing any of them. Vote counts, holdings estimates, deadlines, and negotiations reflect reporting available as of June 26, 2026, and can change quickly. Verify current developments through primary sources.
Bitcoin recently traded around $64,000, pausing after a rally that saw it rise from $62,600 on Monday. The largest cryptocurrency has dropped 0.6% since midnight UTC, trailing after Nasdaq 100 index futures, which lost 1.1% as U.S. Treasury bond yields and oil prices rose.
Ether lost around 1% since midnight and coins including SUI, XLM and TAO also dropped.
The increase in yields reflects unease ahead of the Federal Reserve minutes release due Wednesday after two consecutive softer inflation prints. Brent crude oil rose back to $94 per barrel after a 60-day US-Iran ceasefire expired Monday without a deal.
Also on Wednesday, U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to attend a meeting with crypto CEOs at the White House, with U.S. policy being a key driver of price action of late, contributing to the stop-start nature of bitcoin’s range-bound performance.
Derivatives positioning
- Taker ratio flips bullish: With BTC outperforming U.S. stocks on Monday, the long-short taker volume ratio in crypto futures flipped decisively from neutral to bullish, with longs accounting for over 51% of flow. Takers are traders who buy or sell at available prices, pulling liquidity from the order book.
- Funding rates confirm the chase for longs: BTC traders are chasing bullish bets, as evidenced by annualized perpetual funding rates surging to a 20-month high, according to data source CryptoQuant. Positive funding rates mean futures are trading at a premium to spot price, reflecting a bullish bias.
- BTC OI holds steady despite the move: Overall open interest (OI) in bitcoin futures remains near 750,000 BTC, a level it’s largely held for weeks.
- SOL sees a pickup in activity: OI in SOL futures rose to 66.88 million tokens, the most since July 10. Funding rates remain near zero.
- XLM shows a clear bearish tilt: The token has dropped nearly 3% to 15 cents since midnight, its lowest since May 27, reversing a pop to 27 cents at the end of May. Traders appear to be shorting the dip: OI in XLM futures rose 3.5% over the past 24 hours, the highest level since June 4. With annualized funding rates at -28%, that indicates a strong bearish bias. A negative 24-hour OI-adjusted cumulative volume delta (CVD) reinforces this picture, suggesting sellers are trading more aggressively via market orders rather than passive limit orders.
- Other notable OI movers: CC, DOGE and SUI are also among the notable OI gainers, though prices of all three are trading little-changed to negative. HBAR and CRO are notable OI losers.
- Bullishness looks selective, not broad-based: BTC is buoyant and showing buyer leadership, with a positive 24-hour CVD. Most of the other major cryptocurrencies, including ETH, SOL, LTC, LINK and DOGE, show negative CVD, suggesting the bullish sentiment is concentrated in BTC.
- Low volatility is inviting fresh positioning: Bitcoin and ether’s 30-day implied volatility indexes remain at the year’s lows. Trading firm TDX Strategies suggested using this low-vol environment to build tactical positioning favoring December optionality across BTC and select altcoins such as SOL and HYPE.
- Options flow leans toward upside bets: On Deribit, calls struck above BTC’s spot price continue to dominate 24-hour volume rankings. The $70,000-strike call expiring Sept. 25 is the most-traded bitcoin option of the past 24 hours. For ether, the $2,080 call expiring Aug. 28 leads.
Token talk
- PUMP rose 1.31%, holding a portion of Monday’s 7.8% surge that came alongside a 55% jump in daily trading volume to $90 million. The token has now stabilized above $0.00277.
- XMR added 0.59% since midnight to $417, taking the seven-day gain to more than 11%. The privacy coin has been one of August’s outperformers.
- SUI is the biggest laggard since midnight, sliding 4.62% to 64.36 cents, reversing a stretch of relative strength that had seen it outperform most layer-1s through late July.
- FET has shed 2.10% since midnight to 12.13 cents, extending a run of underperformance that has seen AI-adjacent tokens give back much of their late-July gains.
- LINK is down 1.45% at $9.39, retracing some of the gains that followed Standard Chartered’s prediction that called for it to rise by 2,000% by 2030. It remains up by 8% since that forecast.
Bitcoin price analysis is at a standstill, with BTC trading at $63,500 as of this writing, up around +1% on the day, a print that tells you almost nothing and everything about where this market sits right now. Rangebound is where we’re at right now, and only a significant catalyst, good or bad, can break Bitcoin out of its lull.
Jane Street’s disclosure of a $990M bitcoin ETF stake, coming on the heels of a reported $15Bn loss elsewhere in its book, has traders wondering if the near-billion-dollar BTC exposure is as bullish as it seems.
The broader tape backs that skepticism. Spot ETFs logged back-to-back outflows for the first time since late July, and BTC has slid from roughly $65,000 into the $63,000–$63,500 zone over the past week, about a 3% weekly drawdown. BTC feels trapped near $63,500 and capped below $64,000 through Monday’s session.
Layer in a 30-year Treasury yield hitting its highest level since 2007, and risk assets broadly are getting squeezed by a tightening liquidity backdrop that doesn’t discriminate between stocks and crypto.
Bitcoin Price Analysis: Can BTC USD Hit $65,000 This Week?
At $63,500 and up, just +0.8% over the past 24 hours, Bitcoin remains locked in the same range that’s defined trading since mid-August. CoinGecko data flags $62,600–$62,700 as the zone where dip-buyers keep stepping in, with $63,800 acting as near-term resistance on the way back up.
Zoom out and the wider structure holds: $62,000 as the key downside reference, $65,000 as the resistance level everyone’s watching on social feeds.
Volume hasn’t confirmed a breakout in either direction, which is the tell here. Miner selling and long liquidations have added friction on dips, while ETF outflows cap enthusiasm on bounces.
Bull case: a reclaim above $64,500, with volume follow-through, opens the door to a retest of $65,000.
Base case: continued chop between $62,800 and $64,000 while the market digests Jane Street’s position and waits on macro clarity.
Bear case: a break below $62,000 with rising Treasury yields accelerating outflows, dragging BTC toward the low-$60,000s. For a deeper technical breakdown on where support could give way next, this recent BTC forecast is worth a look.
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Maxi Doge Targets Early Mover Upside as Bitcoin Tests Key Levels
The current Bitcoin price analysis highlights a market where the largest asset can’t clear $65,000, despite a near-billion-dollar institutional stake, which tells you something about the appetite for size.
Big positions moving at Jane Street’s scale don’t translate into 10x moves from here; the market cap is too large for that kind of convexity. That’s precisely the calculation driving traders toward earlier-stage plays where upside isn’t capped by nine-figure liquidity requirements.
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A Maxi Fund treasury backs liquidity and partnerships, and the meme-first marketing, gym-bro humor, “never skip leg-day, never skip a pump”, is clearly aimed at the same degenerate-trader demographic that made DOGE a household name.
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The post Bitcoin Price Analysis: Can BTC Break Out of This Range and Hit $65K? appeared first on Cryptonews.
BitBox has released a firmware update fixing two severe vulnerabilities that could have exposed hardware wallet users to malicious firmware or caused Bitcoin to be locked to an unintended address.
Summary
- BitBox has patched two severe vulnerabilities affecting its BitBox02 and BitBox02 Nova hardware wallets.
- One flaw could have allowed malicious firmware installation, while another could have locked Bitcoin to an unintended address.
- BitBox said neither vulnerability had been exploited and no user funds were reported lost.
- The fixes follow a Coldcard firmware flaw linked to more than $112 million in Bitcoin thefts.
BitBox said in a security disclosure on Monday that the first vulnerability involved memory corruption affecting unconfigured Multi editions of the BitBox02 and BitBox02 Nova, while a second flaw affected the wallet maker’s Silent Payments implementation.
The company said it had found no evidence that either vulnerability had been exploited and had received no reports of users losing funds because of the flaws.
BitBox vulnerability could have allowed malicious firmware
For the first vulnerability, BitBox said a malicious host connected to an affected wallet could exploit memory corruption to execute arbitrary code before the device had been configured with a wallet.
Successful exploitation could potentially allow the host to install malicious firmware, creating a route through which funds could later be compromised, according to the company.
The exposure was limited to Multi editions of the BitBox02 and BitBox02 Nova that had not yet been set up. BitBox classified the vulnerability as severe because arbitrary code execution could undermine protections designed to prevent unauthorised software from running on the hardware wallet.
Firmware controls how a hardware wallet handles cryptographic operations, verifies transactions and communicates with a connected computer. BitBox said the vulnerability could therefore put funds at risk if an attacker managed to use the flaw to install malicious firmware on an affected device.
Similar hardware and firmware weaknesses have surfaced at other wallet makers in recent months. In June, crypto.news reported on a flaw in the TROPIC01 Secure Element used by Trezor Safe 7 devices after Ledger Donjon researchers carried out a laser fault injection attack during laboratory testing.
Trezor said its Safe 7 remained protected because the device uses three independent hardware security layers. According to the company, compromising TROPIC01 alone did not provide access to a user’s PIN, wallet or funds.
Tropic Square had provided the chip to Ledger Donjon for independent testing, with researchers notifying the company in January that they had extracted some chip secrets and bypassed firmware signature checks using the laboratory attack.
Another hardware attack disclosed in July allowed Ledger Donjon researchers to reset the password on a Tangem wallet card using a targeted laser pulse against its secure element.
Ledger Donjon said the attack required physical possession of the card, invasive preparation, specialist knowledge and laboratory equipment costing about $250,000. Tangem described the everyday risk to customers as “virtually non-existent,” while advising users to keep their wallet cards physically secure.
Silent Payments flaw could have locked Bitcoin
BitBox’s second severe vulnerability affected Silent Payments, a Bitcoin privacy feature that allows users to receive payments without publishing a new address for each transaction.
According to BitBox, a malicious host could exploit the implementation to cause Bitcoin to be locked to an unintended address.
Direct theft was not possible through the vulnerability, the company said. An attacker could instead leave the victim unable to recover the Bitcoin without cooperation and potentially demand a ransom in exchange for helping unlock the coins.
Such an attack would not automatically transfer control of the affected Bitcoin to the malicious host, but BitBox said the vulnerability could still put funds at risk by making them inaccessible to their owner.
The company addressed the problem through its latest firmware update and said it had received no reports of the Silent Payments flaw being exploited.
BitBox has dealt with other security issues through firmware updates this year. Its Oeschinen update in July included several security fixes, including one for a buffer out-of-bounds write affecting the BitBox02 firmware and bootloader.
According to the company’s disclosure at the time, a USB request accepted a length value without properly checking it against the size of the destination buffer, creating a potential route for a malicious host to trigger an out-of-bounds write.
BitBox said no working exploit had been demonstrated for that vulnerability, although an effect on control flow could not be completely ruled out.
Earlier in January, the company also patched two BitBox02 Nova vulnerabilities reported through its bug bounty programme. BitBox classified the issues as minor and moderate because exploitation required advanced physical access and applied only under specific conditions.
Coldcard firmware flaw has put wallet security under scrutiny
BitBox’s update follows the disclosure of a separate Coldcard firmware flaw linked to more than $112 million in stolen Bitcoin after the vulnerability remained undetected for more than five years.
Galaxy Research said Friday that Coldcard-related losses had exceeded $112 million, with approximately 1,778.6 BTC swept from more than 8,600 addresses.
The vulnerability was traced to a firmware change introduced in March 2021 that affected the randomness used to generate wallet seeds. Attackers could brute-force impacted seeds and derive the corresponding private keys without obtaining physical access to the hardware wallet, according to research into the incident.
A wallet seed is used to derive the private keys controlling its cryptocurrency. Weaknesses that reduce the randomness used during seed generation can therefore reduce the number of possible combinations an attacker needs to test.
For users whose wallets were created with affected Coldcard firmware, updating the device alone would not repair a seed that had already been generated with weak randomness. Moving funds to a wallet created from a newly generated secure seed would be required to remove exposure associated with the compromised seed.
The incident affected a hardware wallet line that received its first major hardware revision in several years earlier in 2026. Coinkite launched the Coldcard MK5 in March, with the device becoming the first hardware update to its flagship MK series since the MK4 arrived in 2022.
The MK5 retained the previous model’s dual secure-element architecture using chips from two different vendors and kept private keys air-gapped. Its main changes included a 1.54-inch Gorilla Glass display, redesigned physical buttons and improved NFC functions.
Coinkite said at the time that the five major MK5 upgrades focused on usability while preserving the security architecture used by the previous model.
Customer data leaks have created separate phishing risks
Hardware wallet owners have also faced security incidents outside the devices themselves, with recent breaches involving Trezor and SafePal exposing customer and order information belonging to more than 53,000 people.
Trezor attributed the exposure of information belonging to 13,689 customers to shipping provider ShipMonk. SafePal separately said an authorisation flaw in an order-tracking plug-in exposed details connected to 39,798 customers.
Neither incident compromised the companies’ hardware wallets, private keys or recovery phrases, according to the respective disclosures. Both companies warned that exposed personal and order information could instead be used for targeted phishing and impersonation attempts.
Such information can give attackers details needed to make wallet-related scams appear more credible. Earlier in February, attackers sent physical letters impersonating Trezor and Ledger and instructed recipients to complete supposed authentication or transaction checks.
The physical phishing campaign used official-looking correspondence containing QR codes that directed recipients to malicious websites. Some letters created urgency by claiming users had to complete an authentication process to avoid problems accessing their wallets.
The websites asked victims to enter 12-, 20- or 24-word recovery phrases under the pretence of verifying ownership. Once submitted, the phrases were transmitted to the attackers, allowing them to recreate the wallets and gain control over the associated funds.
Trezor and Ledger said legitimate hardware wallet providers do not ask customers to enter, scan, upload or share recovery phrases through websites or other external channels. Recovery phrases should only be entered directly on a hardware wallet when restoring a wallet, according to the companies.
Crypto exchange Kraken has launched trading in more than 7,000 U.S.-listed stocks for eligible customers across the European Economic Area, placing traditional shares alongside more than 700 tokenized xStocks and over 600 crypto assets in the same account.
Summary
- Kraken has launched trading in more than 7,000 U.S. stocks for eligible customers across the EEA.
- Customers can access traditional U.S. shares alongside more than 700 xStocks and over 600 crypto assets.
- The stock service is provided through Kraken’s MiFID II authorised Cyprus investment firm.
- xStocks have generated more than $38 billion in total transaction volume since launching in June 2025.
The Block reported on Aug. 18 that the service has become available across the EEA after Kraken quietly began introducing stock trading to customers in Germany, the Netherlands and France in recent days.
The rollout takes Kraken’s traditional equities business outside the United States, where the exchange first entered stock trading in 2025, while giving European customers two ways to gain exposure to U.S.-listed companies through the same platform.
Kraken said eligible EEA customers can buy traditional shares or use xStocks, its blockchain-based products tied to listed equities and exchange-traded funds. Both products can be accessed without transferring funds between separate platforms.
“With U.S.-listed stocks and xStocks available side-by-side in a single regulated account, customers can choose how they access the same underlying exposure — whether through traditional shares or tokenized representation — without moving capital or changing platforms,” Mark Greenberg, chief commercial officer of Kraken parent Payward and head of Payward Services, said in a statement.
Kraken U.S. stock trading reaches eligible EEA customers
Access covers more than 7,000 traditional U.S. stocks through the desktop and mobile versions of Kraken Pro as well as the main Kraken mobile app.
Kraken said stock trades will carry no trading commission, subject to its applicable terms. Eligibility will not be automatic for every existing customer, however, as users must accept additional terms and conditions before the equities feature becomes available.
The service is being provided by Payward Europe Digital Solutions (CY) Limited, a Cyprus investment firm authorised under the European Union’s Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II, or MiFID II.
Alongside the conventional securities offering, customers can access more than 700 xStocks and over 600 crypto assets through their Kraken accounts. The company said xStocks have processed more than $38 billion in total transaction volume since launching in June 2025.
Kraken describes the setup as distinct from European platforms that provide only one form of U.S. equity exposure. Bitpanda offers traditional U.S. stock trading, while platforms including Robinhood and Crypto.com have introduced tokenized U.S. equity products for European users.
Crypto.com, for example, recently launched tokenized stock derivatives tracking about 1,500 U.S. stocks and ETFs for eligible EEA customers and users in other approved markets. Its products provide synthetic price exposure and do not give buyers legal or beneficial ownership of the underlying securities.
xStocks have moved into more parts of Kraken’s trading system
Kraken has continued adding functions to xStocks since the products were introduced in June 2025, taking them beyond instruments used solely to track the price of conventional equities.
In July, crypto.news reported on Kraken allowing eligible users to post selected xStocks as collateral for futures and margin positions on Kraken Pro. Ten assets initially qualified, including tokenized versions of Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, Strategy, Robinhood, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF and the Invesco QQQ ETF.
Futures collateral was made available to qualifying clients outside the United States, including customers in the EEA. Margin collateral was offered outside the U.S. but excluded EEA clients.
Kraken had also developed dedicated onchain infrastructure for the product earlier in 2026. Its xStocks platform introduced xChange in March, an execution layer initially supporting more than 70 tokenized equities across Ethereum and Solana.
At that point, xStocks had generated about $25 billion in total trading volume, including $3.5 billion in onchain transactions, while more than 80,000 onchain holders had interacted with the products. Each token was described as fully collateralised and backed 1:1 by its corresponding underlying security.
Kraken’s current figures put total xStocks transaction volume above $38 billion, showing how quickly activity has increased since the March tally.
Payward is taking xStocks into more international markets
Payward has also been preparing to add equities from markets outside the United States to the xStocks system.
A July partnership with GTN set out plans to begin with Hong Kong-listed shares before adding securities from the United Kingdom, Europe, South Korea and other markets, subject to the necessary licences and regulatory approvals.
Under the agreement, GTN is providing execution, custody, ledgering and record-keeping infrastructure across more than 90 financial markets, while Payward continues to supply the tokenization infrastructure used to create the blockchain-based assets.
At the time of the July announcement, xStocks supported more than 500 tokenized assets and had generated over $37 billion in transaction volume. Payward also said GTN could eventually distribute xStocks to institutional customers once the required approvals are secured in individual markets.
The latest EEA rollout concerns conventional U.S.-listed securities alongside existing xStocks, while Kraken said it plans to take the combined traditional-stock and tokenized-equity service into additional markets over the coming months.
Tokenized equities have taken a larger share of RWA activity
The expansion comes as tokenized equities have become a larger part of the real-world asset market.
According to figures cited by The Block, tokenized equities now account for about 15% of the RWA market, around three times their share at the start of 2026. The segment has reached roughly $2.8 billion in total market capitalisation, with Ondo Finance, Binance’s bStocks and Kraken’s xStocks accounting for a combined 77%.
Kraken has also expanded what holders can do with the securities represented through xStocks. Earlier in August, the platform extended shareholder voting rights to more than 125,000 xStocks holders, allowing eligible investors to instruct the underlying custodian on how votes should be cast at company shareholder meetings.
The feature changed the original structure of xStocks, which did not provide voting rights when the products launched in June 2025. The arrangement relies on the custody structure operated by Backed Assets (JE) Limited, according to the report.
Kraken parent Payward, meanwhile, reported $508 million in adjusted revenue for the second quarter, up 17% from the same period a year earlier. Adjusted EBITDA reached $23 million for the three months ended June 30.
Total platform transaction volume fell 13% year over year to $310 billion during the quarter, while Payward reported that the composition of trading activity moved toward equities and tokenized equities.
The distinction between ugliness and vulgarity feels important now. Beauty often depends on proportion and on how well a building, an object, or an image relates to the world around it. Ugliness can challenge expectations and still be intelligent, deliberate, and even beautiful in its own way.
Vulgarity is different. It begins when scale, excess, or attention-seeking overwhelms context altogether.
Architecture, automobiles, and commercial environments make claims on people who have no part in choosing them. When houses squeeze into their lots, vehicles grow more imposing, and storefronts battle for attention, the problem is no longer simply whether something is beautiful or ugly. Vulgarity becomes consequential when it overwhelms the environment everyone shares.
The objects we design and consume reveal what we value, and more and more of them seem to reflect an increased appetite for more. Which leaves me wondering about one of design’s oldest and most human questions: How much is enough?
Bitcoin scored a rare achievement on Monday by outperforming the S&P 500.
The largest cryptocurrency rose 2.6% to over $64,000, registering its best daily performance in over a month, according to CoinDesk data. Wall Street’s benchmark equity index, S&P 500, fell by 0.52%.
Bitcoin, therefore, not only outpaced equities but moved in the totally opposite direction. This was once a norm. Bitcoin has spent most of its history being the higher-beta asset relative to stocks, meaning it typically moves more than stocks in both directions.
“BTC outperformed the stock market today. This has become a less common occurrence lately. 1/2 In fact, BTC only outperformed the S&P 500 on around one third of trading days over the last three months,” blockchain analytics firm Glassnode said in a Telegram chat.
Underperforming two-thirds of the time means BTC has been acting less like a higher-beta asset relative to stocks and more like a laggard. Key reasons for that include the AI stock frenzy on Wall Street that has sucked out capital from other corners of the financial market, including cryptocurrencies.
The bear market phase of bitcoin’s self-fulfilling four‑year cycle has also played a role in keeping demand for BTC subdued. BTC peaked above $126,000 in October last year and quickly entered the bear market, which is expected to bottom out by October this year.
Bitcoin (BTC) short liquidations hit their highest in almost one month as it hit $64,500 on Monday, new data reveals.
Key points:
- Bitcoin passed $64,000 thanks to a short squeeze on derivatives markets, CryptoQuant says.
- An ongoing downward funding-rate reset from 0.006% to 0.003% over 24 hours could mean further short squeezes.
- The absence of spot demand raises doubts whether the upside is sustainable after a week of $267.2 million in net ETF outflows.
Bitcoin short liquidations near one-month high
BTC/USD rallied after Sunday’s weekly close, gaining up to 3% on Monday to top out at one-week highs of $64,550 on Bitstamp.
BTC/USD one-hour chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView
Examining the impetus behind the latest BTC price gains, onchain analytics platform CryptoQuant pointed to illiquid markets and funding-rate imbalances among exchanges.
Before rebounding on Monday, BTC circled near $62,750. Around this level, funding rates between exchanges began to diverge. Shorts were dominant on major platforms such as Binance, Bybit, OKX and Deribit, while the funding rate on HTX briefly spiked to 0.05%.
Funding rates refer to periodic payments exchanged by long and short traders on Bitcoin derivatives markets in order to maintain their positions. Positive aggregate funding rates show that long traders are actively paying shorts, with the reverse true for negative funding rates.
“This crowded short positioning served as the primary catalyst, fueling a short squeeze that drove prices higher,” CryptoQuant continued.
BTC/USD one-hour chart with exchange funding-rate data (screenshot). Source: CryptoQuant
Data puts total Bitcoin short liquidations at 637 BTC for Monday, the largest single-day tally since July 21.
Describing the event as a “low-volume liquidity trap,” CryptoQuant nonetheless suggested that the market could see more short squeezes next, with funding rates already declining again as traders increase short exposure.
Bitcoin short liquidations. Source: CryptoQuant
Crucial spot demand remains absent
Previously, Cointelegraph reported that Bitcoin futures markets accounted for the majority of trading volume in the current range, with spot traders broadly uninterested.
Related: BTC price loses 200-week trend line as 2022 repeats: Five things to know in Bitcoin this week
In further analysis on Monday, CryptoQuant called the lack of spot demand the primary hurdle to sustained upside, alongside the lack of inflows to the US spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
“A break below $60K alongside rising exchange inflows would weaken the structure and increase downside risk toward $50K. Selling pressure is cooling, but demand still needs to return,” it commented.
Recent buyers who remain underwater on their BTC allocation have helped cement the current trading range. Short-term holders — wallets holding a UTXO for less than 155 days — have their cost basis at around $68,700, reinforcing that level as resistance.
“If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the sh-t out of them,” Trump told Fox News reporter Trey Yingst on Monday.
Trump later told reporters, “I don’t think they [Oman] behaved very well, but we’d handle them very easily, just like we do other things.” It’s unclear what exactly Oman has done to upset the U.S. President. TIME has reached out to the White House for comment.
Tehran has said the Strait’s administration should remain strictly between the two coastal states. Iran also previously proposed collecting fees for passage through the waterway, while Oman proposed a system with voluntary fees in late July.
U.S.-Iran diplomacy meanwhile appears tenuous, with Iranian officials denying any direct talks and contradicting Trump’s claims that Iran is eager to make a deal. The 60-day deadline for the U.S. and Iran to negotiate a comprehensive peace agreement to end the war expired Monday without a deal. The two countries signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on June 17, which included the lifting of the U.S. naval blockade on Iran and toll-free passage through the Strait of Hormuz. The MOU stated that Iran would discuss with Oman the future administration of the waterway.
HTX said on Aug. 18 that it is investigating small cryptocurrency transfers received by several addresses after community members attributed the deposits to the exchange.
Summary
- HTX said its internal review found no official transfers or testing activity behind reported deposits.
- Users reported receiving small USDT deposits from addresses labeled as HTX wallets by blockchain services.
- HTX is examining whether address labels or transaction attribution errors created a misleading origin trail.
- No transaction list, verified victim count, confirmed loss, or poisoning campaign operator has been disclosed.
- Reports of frozen accounts remain unconfirmed by HTX and lack publicly available supporting case details.
The exchange said its initial internal review found that its official channels had not initiated the transfers or conducted related testing. HTX is now examining the origin of the transactions and whether blockchain address labels or attribution methods produced a misleading connection.
Some users have described the transactions as “address poisoning.” Others reportedly said their accounts faced restrictions after receiving the funds. Neither description has been independently confirmed through transaction records, platform notices or findings from a blockchain security company.
HTX says it did not initiate the disputed transfers
HTX responded after community members circulated screenshots of small deposits that appeared to come from exchange linked addresses. One user reportedly received 7.5 USDT in a Coinbase account before being asked to explain the source of the funds, according to a report.
A request for information does not necessarily mean an account has been frozen. Coinbase has not publicly addressed the reported case, and no affected user has published a complete platform notice showing a permanent restriction linked to the transfer.
HTX said it had “not conducted any related transfers or testing activities.” The exchange added that it would not speculate before completing its investigation. It promised to provide the community with confirmed information, although it did not set a deadline.
The statement did not identify the blockchain involved, the sending addresses or the transaction hashes. It also did not disclose how many recipients had reported deposits or whether any customer assets were at risk.
Small deposits do not prove address poisoning
Address poisoning normally involves an attacker creating an address that resembles one previously used by a target. The attacker then sends a small or zero value transaction so that the lookalike address appears in the target’s transaction history.
The attacker hopes the user will later copy the planted address without checking every character. Chainalysis describes this transaction history manipulation in its security guide.
Small unsolicited transfers alone do not establish address poisoning. Investigators would need to determine whether the sender resembles a trusted counterparty and whether the transaction was intended to manipulate a recipient’s address history.
The current reports contain no verified evidence that recipients later sent assets to lookalike addresses. No losses have been confirmed. No security researcher has publicly connected the disputed transfers to a specific operator.
As previously reported, a user recently lost 100,000 USDT after copying a planted lookalike address from their transaction history. That case included a confirmed misdirected payment, unlike the activity HTX is investigating.
Wallet labels may explain the apparent HTX connection
Blockchain transactions identify addresses, but they do not automatically identify the legal entity controlling each address. Explorers and analytics companies assign labels using disclosed ownership information, transaction patterns and address clustering.
Those methods can produce useful leads, but a displayed label is not conclusive proof that the named exchange authorized a transfer. Deposit addresses, consolidation wallets, payment processors and intermediary services can further complicate attribution.
HTX said its investigation would consider “address tagging” and the identification of onchain transfer sources. This leaves open the possibility that third party services attributed a sender to HTX incorrectly or without enough supporting evidence.
The exchange previously published a scam warning about unsolicited 0.001 USDT transfers. It advised users to inspect complete wallet addresses instead of relying on shortened address displays or transaction histories.
The present case also arrives amid wider concerns about automated compliance screening. In related coverage, users reported blocked transactions and frozen funds after compliance services flagged exposure to HTX linked addresses. Those earlier restrictions involved sanctions screening and do not prove a connection to the latest deposits.
Account freeze reports require further evidence
Claims that some accounts were “frozen” remain unverified. No exchange has confirmed imposing restrictions because of the disputed transfers, and the available reports do not provide case numbers, notices or affected wallet addresses.
A platform may request information when an automated monitoring system detects an unfamiliar counterparty or a link to a flagged address. Such a review can delay access without proving misconduct by the recipient or the sending address.
The distinction matters because describing every compliance check as a freeze could overstate the event. It could also wrongly suggest that HTX users conducted a coordinated poisoning campaign when neither HTX nor an independent investigator has reached that conclusion.
HTX’s investigation will need to identify the sending addresses, establish who controlled them and explain why they made the transfers. Publishing transaction hashes would allow independent analysts to test the exchange attribution and search for lookalike address patterns.
Until then, users should avoid copying destination addresses from transaction histories. They should verify the full address, use saved address books where available and preserve transaction hashes or account notices for support teams. Interacting with an unsolicited token or unfamiliar contract may introduce separate security risks.
HTX said it would share further findings once confirmed. The exchange has not announced when the review will end or whether it plans to publish a technical report.
BitBox, the Swiss hardware-wallet provider, has released a firmware update aimed at correcting two security vulnerabilities it characterized as “severe.” According to a security disclosure published on Monday, the patches address issues that could theoretically allow a malicious host to interfere with device behavior and, in one case, affect how Bitcoin is routed during Silent Payments.
Key takeaways
- BitBox says its new firmware fixes a “severe” memory corruption issue affecting Multi editions of BitBox02 and BitBox02 Nova when the device has no wallet configured.
- The company also patched a “severe” weakness in its Silent Payments implementation that could potentially cause Bitcoin to be locked to an unintended address.
- BitBox reported receiving no claims that either vulnerability has been exploited in the wild or caused user losses.
- The update arrives amid heightened scrutiny of hardware-wallet supply chains and device security after high-profile wallet-related incidents.
What BitBox says the firmware update changes
In its disclosure, BitBox describes one vulnerability as a form of memory corruption involving Multi editions of BitBox02 and BitBox02 Nova. The issue is tied to scenarios where the device has not been configured with a wallet, meaning it’s in a state where it could be more vulnerable to abnormal interactions.
BitBox warns that a malicious host could exploit the flaw to execute arbitrary code and potentially install malicious firmware. If such an attack succeeded, it could compromise the device’s ability to protect user funds. As part of its disclosure, the company states it has not received reports indicating the vulnerability has been used to harm users.
Silent Payments patch: risk of unintended locking
The second vulnerability affects BitBox’s Silent Payments feature. BitBox says that while the flaw would not directly enable theft, it could allow a malicious host to lock Bitcoin to an address chosen by the attacker rather than the intended recipient.
In practical terms, BitBox frames the threat as leverage instead of direct extraction: an attacker could potentially demand a ransom to cooperate with restoring access to the coins. BitBox also says it has not seen reports of this issue being exploited or leading to lost funds.
Why the timing matters for self-custody security
BitBox’s firmware release lands at a moment when the hardware-wallet ecosystem is being tested on multiple fronts: device firmware integrity, secure generation of wallet data, and even the protection of customer and order information around wallet products.
Earlier coverage tied a Coldcard hardware-wallet issue to a March 2021 firmware change that remained undetected for more than five years. That vulnerability reportedly affected wallet-seed randomness, enabling attackers to brute-force impacted wallet seeds and derive private keys without physical access. Galaxy Research said last Friday that Coldcard-related losses had exceeded $112 million, with about 1,778.6 BTC reportedly swept from more than 8,600 addresses. (The earlier analysis is described in Cointelegraph’s reporting: Coldcard’s 5-year flaw reveals hardware-wallet testing gap.)
Beyond device bugs, separate incidents also drew attention to the broader risk surface of hardware-wallet businesses. Cointelegraph previously reported data breaches involving Trezor and SafePal that exposed customer and order information for more than 53,000 people. Those cases did not compromise device security, private keys, or recovery phrases. Instead, they raised concerns about targeted phishing and impersonation attempts—risks that can be especially dangerous for users who can be tricked into handing over seed material or signing approvals.
What users should watch after installing updates
Hardware-wallet vulnerabilities are not always limited to “theft bugs.” As BitBox’s disclosure shows, threats can also emerge from interaction patterns—such as how a device behaves before a wallet is configured—or from optional features like Silent Payments, where errors can affect the destination of funds rather than enabling immediate draining.
For BitBox users, the key next step is straightforward: install the firmware update and confirm the device is operating under the latest version recommended by the vendor. Readers may also want to review their operational habits around Silent Payments usage and ensure they are comfortable with how their wallet constructs and verifies outputs before signing.
More broadly, the pattern across recent incidents suggests that self-custody security depends on a full chain—not only the cryptography inside the hardware, but also firmware correctness, feature-specific logic, and the surrounding processes that keep customer interactions from becoming an entry point for social engineering.
With BitBox now shipping a fix and reporting no known exploitation, the remaining question for the market is whether broader scanning and third-party auditing will surface additional edge-case weaknesses in similar workflows across other devices and features. Users should treat firmware updates as an ongoing part of operational security, not a one-time task.
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