Crypto World
Mark Zuckerberg META AI Predicts Incredible XRP Price by End of 2026
There is a phrase tucked into the bear case of this XRP price prediction that almost undercuts the entire downside scenario before it even gets going. The downside is cushioned by a strong base of holders and legal precedent. Meta AI essentially predicts that, even in its worst-case scenario, XRP has structural support that most assets in a bear scenario simply do not have.
That is an unusual thing to write into a bearish paragraph, and it tells you how much weight the SEC resolution still carries in how this asset gets modeled, more than a year after the case actually closed.
The bull case targets $3.50 to $5.00 by the end of 2026 from the current $1.12, a path Meta AI builds on three distinct catalysts.

Regulatory clarity from Ripple’s SEC case resolution, unlocking US institutional adoption and exchange relistings, is the foundation, but it is the other two that add real texture.
Utility dominance through RippleNet ODL volumes and CBDC partnerships, accelerating real-world cross-border settlement positions, XRP specifically as the bridge asset for tokenized FX, a narrower and more defensible claim than generic crypto adoption.
And the third catalyst, a spot XRP ETF approval combined with post-Bitcoin halving liquidity, is framed as potentially mirroring 2021 altcoin beta, the kind of environment where capital rotates aggressively into the names perceived to have the most room to run.
Stack all three together, and Meta AI sees a path not just back to the old high but a retest and breach of the $3.84 all-time high.
The bear case keeps the downside surprisingly tight. If macro liquidity tightens, CBDCs bypass public ledgers entirely rather than partnering with them, or Ripple adoption simply stalls, XRP risks stagnating in the $0.70 to $1.00 range with high volatility.
That is a stagnation scenario, not a collapse scenario, and the cushion Meta AI describes is doing real work in keeping that floor from sliding lower.
XRP Price Prediction: Three Catalysts, One Stubborn Range
XRP is at $1.12727 today, and the daily chart shows price sitting at the lower edge of a range that has now held for nearly five months without breaking down meaningfully further.
The collapse from the $3.65 peak last July was severe and fast, but what followed was not a continuation of that crash; it was a long, choppy consolidation between roughly $1.20 and $1.55 that has trapped the price since February.
The June low near $1.05 marked the first real test of the bottom of that range, and the bounce since then, while modest, has held above it rather than breaking through.
That structure matters directly for Meta AI’s framing. The $0.70 to $1.00 bear case zone sits well below where this current range has actually been trading, which means for that bearish scenario to play out, XRP would need to break a floor it has not seriously tested in nearly half a year.
The more immediate technical question is whether $1.20 holds as resistance the way it has on every approach since February, or whether this bounce finally clears it and opens the door toward the $1.55 region that capped the range from above.
The RSI sits at 38.56 with the signal line at 37.17, a gap of just under 1.5 points, among the tightest and most neutral readings in this entire prediction series.
Momentum is essentially flat, neither confirming a bottom nor signaling further weakness, which fits a chart that has spent months going nowhere in particular. That flatness is the honest technical picture underneath Meta AI’s three catalysts.
None of regulatory clarity, ETF approval, or ODL volume growth has yet shown up forcefully enough in price to break this range in either direction, which means the $3.50 to $5.00 bull case and the $0.70 to $1.00 bear case both remain entirely dependent on catalysts that have not arrived yet, rather than momentum that is already building.
LiquidChain Is Catching the Attention of XRP holders: Meta AI Predicts It’s the Next 100x
When the market leaders stall, smart money starts looking elsewhere.
BTC, ETH, and XRP are all grinding under resistance right now. The catalysts that unlock the next leg up, macro relief, and sustained institutional inflows, have not arrived. Waiting on them means waiting on things you cannot control.
Early-stage infrastructure plays exist in a completely different universe. The upside is not priced in yet. A relatively small amount of capital can move the needle significantly. That asymmetry is the entire point.
LiquidChain is building something the current multi-chain environment desperately needs. Right now, liquidity across Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana sits in isolated silos. Moving between them costs money, takes time, and breaks the user experience. LiquidChain collapses all 3 into a single execution layer. Developers deploy once. Users interact across all 3 ecosystems without ever feeling the seams.
The presale is at $0.01454 with just over $700,000 raised. That is not a late entry. That is the ground floor.
The risks are real and worth naming. Post-launch adoption, liquidity depth, and execution are all unproven. No early-stage project comes without those question marks. The question is whether the potential justifies the uncertainty.
Established assets offer a smoother ride toward a ceiling that is already visible. LiquidChain offers a much earlier seat at a table that has not been set yet.
Explore the LiquidChain Presale
The post Mark Zuckerberg META AI Predicts Incredible XRP Price by End of 2026 appeared first on Cryptonews.
Crypto World
2026 FIFA World Cup saw $20 billion in prediction market volume
The 2026 FIFA World Cup generated a record $20 billion in prediction market volume, according to blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis.
The figure encompasses activity across nearly 400,000 wallets starting in January 2026 with $5.7 billion in volume generated during the tournament itself, Chainalysis said in a Thursday report.
Markets ranged from the simple question of who would win the international soccer tournament to whether Portugal legend Cristiano Ronaldo would cry when his team was eliminated (he did).
The World Cup, held in June and July, represented by far the biggest prediction market event in terms of volume, shattering the $3.6 billion traded during the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. Other notable events were Super Bowl 60 in February and the NCAA’s basketball tournament known as March Madness, both of which eclipsed the $1 billion mark.
Prediction markets offer derivatives contracts on the outcome of future events, and settle when the relevant event takes place.
Market leader Polymarket runs on blockchain rails with trades and settlement in stablecoin USDC. As a result, the platforms have become one of the ways in which blockchain technology has gained significant mainstream attention.
Crypto World
Ripple Just Got Full MiCA Authorization in Europe But Fed’s Hawkish Tone Is Keeping XRP Capped at $1.10
In the latest XRP News, XRP price is trading at $1.07, down 0.57% in the last 24 hours, as the asset continues to wrestle with the $1.10 resistance that has capped three consecutive sessions of attempted recovery.
The setup looks deceptively calm on the surface, but the macro and on-chain picture underneath tells a more complicated story. Whether this range resolves with a clean break or a reversal depends on factors that are moving fast right now.
The Federal Reserve held rates steady in the 3.50%–3.75% range, but Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s hawkish post-meeting tone, insisting the Fed “will deliver the 2% target”, reinforced a risk-off undertone across liquid assets.
Despite that headwind, on-chain data from Santiment shows mid-tier holders (10,000–100,000 XRP) lifting their cumulative share to 11.9% of total supply, up from 11.64% on July 1, while the 100,000–1M XRP cohort climbed to 11.75% over the same window.
Ripple also secured full MiCA Crypto-Asset Service Provider authorization in Europe this week, a regulatory milestone with direct implications for institutional XRP payments flowing across the EU. Perpetual futures open interest sits at 2.27 billion XRP, just below this week’s peak of 2.29 billion.
The combination of a hawkish Fed, a technically capped chart, and a meaningful regulatory unlock creates a binary setup worth examining closely.
Discover: What traders are pricing for the Fed’s next move on Kalshi
XRP News: Can XRP Price Break $1.10 Resistance This Week?
XRP is trading at $1.07, pinned below the Bollinger Band midline near $1.10 and every key exponential moving average.
The 50-day EMA at $1.13 converges with the upper Bollinger Band around $1.14, creating a dense overhead zone that has rejected every intraday push so far. The 100-day EMA at $1.21 and the 200-day EMA at $1.41 confirm the broader structural trend still leans lower. Those levels are not in play unless near-term momentum shifts materially.

Momentum reads soft. Daily RSI hovers near 45, technically neutral but drifting toward weak. MACD is fractionally negative, signaling fading bullish attempts rather than any fresh accumulation pulse. Trading volume and open interest below this week’s high both undermine the idea that a breakout is imminent.
$1.00 remains the primary support level traders are watching. A close below it invalidates the current recovery thesis outright.
MiCA follow-through driving institutional flow, open interest expanding above 2.29 billion, and XRP clearing $1.10 with volume opens a run toward $1.13 to $1.14.
Range-bound consolidation between $1.05 and $1.15 continues while the market waits on ETF flow headlines and any exchange listing catalysts, the more likely near-term path. A daily close below $1.00 signals distribution is winning and the mid-tier accumulation data becomes irrelevant.
Discover: Live odds on the Fed’s next rate decision
The post Ripple Just Got Full MiCA Authorization in Europe But Fed’s Hawkish Tone Is Keeping XRP Capped at $1.10 appeared first on Cryptonews.
Crypto World
3 US Stocks To Watch In August 2026 After Big Earnings Week
The latest earnings week has handed investors a clear shortlist of US stocks to watch in August. Three of the market’s largest companies just reported, and Wall Street split its verdict between reward and punishment.
The divide came down to one test, which AI spender could prove that customers are paying for the build. It left the winners with strong setups and one laggard facing a cautious road into August.
Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT)
Microsoft soared about 15% to near $451 after its July 29 results, its biggest jump in months. Trading volume, the number of shares changing hands, hit its highest since June 22, which shows strong conviction behind the buying.
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Yet the rally is not fully convincing. That volume still sits below the heavy selling of late June, so buyers have not fully overpowered sellers.
The Chaikin Money Flow (CMF), a gauge of whether institutional money is flowing into or out of a stock, shows the same doubt. It nearly turned negative before earnings, then rose to 0.04 as big investors reacted. It still sits below its July 24 peak, and it must reclaim that level to confirm institutions are truly buying.
The fundamentals explain the jump. Microsoft spent $41 billion on capital expenditure, the cost of building AI data centers, but backed it with a $678 billion book of signed customer contracts. That locked-in demand proves the spending is funded by real orders, which is the bullish case. It also guided Azure cloud growth toward 45%, and faster growth at that scale points to rising future revenue.
Wall Street agrees. The stock holds a Strong Buy rating, with 24 of 25 firms on Buy, signaling broad expectations of more upside.
Only Barclays trimmed its target, a lone caution that matches the soft volume.
Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN)
Amazon carries the strongest analyst support of the three, making it one of the more bullish US stocks to watch into August. All 28 covering firms rate it Buy, with none on Hold or Sell, and every major desk raised its price target after earnings. That rare unanimity gives Amazon the cleanest bull case of the week.
Options positioning backs that optimism. The put-to-call volume ratio, which compares bearish bets against bullish ones, fell from 0.74 to 0.54 into the print, meaning traders bought far more calls and leaned bullish.
The open interest ratio, the standing option contracts already in place, held steady at 0.66. That shows longer-term money has not fully committed yet, which leaves room for new buyers to lift the stock in August.
The business explains the confidence. Amazon Web Services, its cloud arm, reaccelerated, and the company disclosed a $496 billion backlog of signed customer demand. When Alphabet and Meta raised their AI spending, investors sold both stocks, fearing spending with no proven payoff. Amazon raised spending too, but its backlog proved customers had already agreed to pay, so the stock rose instead.
There is a catch worth knowing. Amazon’s headline $5.75 per share reads like a huge beat, but most of it came from a one-time paper gain on its Anthropic stake, not from the core business. Strip that out, and profit still rose a healthy 43%, so the bull case holds. The real pressure is cash, because heavy AI spending has pushed free cash flow, the money a company keeps after building, into the red over the past year.
Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META)
Meta is the outlier among the top US stocks to watch. The stock fell about 8% to near $539 and now sits roughly 23% below its mid-July high.
The problem is cash, not sales. Revenue grew 28%, but free cash flow collapsed to $784 million from $8.55 billion a year earlier. Capex nearly swallowed all the cash the business generated, so Meta leaned on about $25 billion of new debt to keep funding its dividend, which unsettles investors.
Unlike Microsoft and Amazon, the other two US stocks to watch, Meta disclosed no backlog of signed demand, so it cannot yet prove the AI build will pay off. Its core apps also earned less, as Family of Apps operating income, the profit from Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, slipped to $23.4 billion from $25 billion. The strongest ad engine on earth delivered a weaker bottom line.
The chart warns of more risk. Meta’s CMF trended lower even as the price climbed from early June to mid-July, and a deep correction followed. It still has not cleared the 0.05 line that would confirm buyers are back, so the same bearish drop could repeat.
Analysts stay loyal but nervous. Meta keeps a Strong Buy, yet at least ten firms cut price targets overnight, including Citi to $800 from $850.
That lower ceiling with unchanged ratings signals near-term caution even from believers.
The post 3 US Stocks To Watch In August 2026 After Big Earnings Week appeared first on BeInCrypto.
Crypto World
Tom Lee vs Jordi Visser on the AI Trade: Both End Up at Ethereum
Fundstrat’s Tom Lee says the artificial intelligence (AI) trade is not finished. He argues the next leg runs through crypto payment rails built for software agents rather than people.
Veteran macro investor Jordi Visser argued the opposite this week. Lee also chairs the largest corporate holder of ether, which gives his version of the thesis a direct financial stake.
Why Lee Says Chips Were Only the First Leg
Lee, co-founder and head of research at Fundstrat, made the case on a panel hosted by the firm. He covered mobile phones as an analyst in the early 1990s.
Motorola and the infrastructure suppliers led that cycle early. The larger winners arrived later, namely the tower companies spun out of the carriers, and Apple.
Lee expects the same shape now, with financial services as the downstream market. He has already called AI capital spending fears a bullish market tell.
The Four Reasons Banks Cannot Bank Agents
Lee listed trust, proof of funds, lending, and tax collection as the reasons people built commerce around banks. Agents need none of those, he argued.
“It’s a mistake to think that this is going to be built on traditional financial rails,” Lee said.
Bank ledgers must settle in a single national currency. Money is becoming code, according to Lee, so equities, gold, and tokens could all clear as payment.
Part of that rail already exists on paper. ERC-8183, a proposed Ethereum standard filed on Feb. 25, locks an agent’s payment in escrow until a designated evaluator signs off.
Ethereum Foundation researcher Davide Crapis co-authored it with three Virtuals Protocol engineers. It carries Draft status, so nothing about it is final.
Where Tom Lee and Visser Split on the AI Trade
Visser leads AI research at 22V Research and spent two decades at Weiss Multi-Strategy Advisers, latterly as chief investment officer. He says AI’s easy money is over.
He now expects roughly 30% a year instead of the seven or eight times investors once chased. Lee reads the same compression as rotation.
The two converge on the destination. Both expect fee-earning networks to absorb the flow, and both name Ethereum.
Ethereum trades near $1,873 after gaining 19.7% over 30 days. It still sits 51% lower across 12 months, and just over 2% below its trading price the previous day.
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Lee’s $11.8 Billion Reason to Prefer Ethereum
Lee chairs BitMine Immersion Technologies, the largest corporate holder of ether. The company disclosed 5.79 million ETH on July 27, close to 4.8% of circulating supply.
Crypto and cash holdings reached $11.8 billion. BitMine states the dependency plainly in its own investor materials.
“So our future price for Bitmine stock is heavily dependent on the future price of Ethereum,” Lee said in the July chairman’s message.
Lee puts the correlation between BitMine shares and ether at 90%. Anyone weighing his agent thesis is also weighing that balance sheet, which rallied this month on its ETH treasury bet.
The Numbers Do Not Match the Story Yet
Jansen Teng, co-founder and chief executive of Virtuals Protocol, shared the panel with Lee. His platform lets agents hold wallets and pay each other onchain, and his figures undercut the timeline.
Teng said the launchpad for agent tokens has cleared about $15 billion in trading volume. Agent-to-agent commerce has settled roughly $500 million in a year.
Speculating on agents is therefore some 30 times larger than agents transacting. Both figures are company-reported and have not been independently verified.
Teng said the agents kept $2.5 million in profit, and that the product has not reached product-market fit (PMF). Virtuals commissioned the Fundstrat research and is a client of the firm.
Its VIRTUAL token trades near $0.56, down 89% from a January 2025 peak, even after agents started trading tokenized stocks onchain.
So the question is not whether the AI trade ended. It is whether machine payments arrive before the balance sheets betting on them need the story to work.
The post Tom Lee vs Jordi Visser on the AI Trade: Both End Up at Ethereum appeared first on BeInCrypto.
Crypto World
Coinbase’s (COIN) weak quarter leaves Wall Street split on timing of a recovery
Coinbase said it captured a record 10.3% share of global crypto trading volume during the quarter, its third consecutive quarterly gain. Analysts at Benchmark, Oppenheimer, Clear Street and Cantor all highlighted the figure as evidence that trading activity is consolidating onto larger regulated exchanges during periods of market stress.
Several also pointed to derivatives, where Coinbase reported flat trading volumes despite management saying the broader derivatives market declined by double digits.
Diversification shows progress, but isn’t enough
Analysts viewed Coinbase’s push beyond spot trading as encouraging, even though the newer businesses remain too small to offset weakness in core trading revenue.
The company is trying to diversify through prediction markets, derivatives, subscriptions, stablecoins and its Base blockchain. Prediction markets surpassed a $100 million annualized revenue run rate, while Coinbase One topped one million paid subscribers. Its Circle partnership for USDC also renewed on existing terms, removing a key concern for investors.
Still, there was broad agreement that diversification has not yet become large enough to replace lost trading revenue.
Clear Street noted new businesses continue gaining traction but remain “optionality” rather than meaningful earnings contributors. Barclays was more critical, arguing prediction markets and retail derivatives “did not” provide the boost they offered last quarter. Compass Point similarly said emerging businesses “barely moved the needle.”
Crypto World
Iran-linked crypto network moved $4B through Dubai exchange
“This is by far the biggest Iranian illegal gambling network ever discovered and one of the biggest in the world,” said John Wojcik, a former researcher at Infoblox and now senior analyst at TRM Labs, who spent seven years investigating illegal gambling for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
It is also one of the largest Iranian sanctions-evasion networks discovered since 2016, when the U.S. broke up a roughly $20 billion IRGC gold-for-oil operation based in Turkey. Separately, the U.S. seized $1 billion in crypto from Iran in May.
“It’s an IRGC operation, and that’s plain as day,” Rich Sanders, an independent blockchain researcher and investigator focused on Iran, said of Shelbit. Reuters said it could not determine whether the IRGC directly controlled Shelbit or the gambling network.
The IRGC, founded in 1979, is the country’s most powerful and influential military, political and economic institution that answers directly to the country’s supreme leader, Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei.
Shelbit also interacts directly with Iran’s central bank, wallets linked to the IRGC by the Israeli government, and Nobitex, an Iranian exchange that the U.S. government sanctioned earlier this year after a Reuters investigation revealed its ties to the government. Some of the crypto flowing to Shelbit came from what the two investigative firms described as an Iranian bitcoin mining operation that creates new digital coins.
Crypto World
Why Russia Is Choking Ukraine’s Black Sea Ports
European support for Ukraine remains strong, and governments suffering from higher prices are more likely to blame Moscow than Kyiv. But Putin is now so anxious for battlefield wins that he will stay the course even without a clear-cut victory. Nor should we expect a revival of the agreement brokered by the United Nations in July 2022 that restored safe maritime traffic to and from Ukrainian ports.
Just as the standoff in the Strait of Hormuz has sent neighboring countries scrambling for new ways to move oil out of the Persian Gulf, Ukraine may be able to move grain through the Danube, via Romanian ports, and by rail, as it did in the war’s early days. But as before, diversions are costly and logistically complicated.
For all these reasons, the shape of Russia’s war on Ukraine will continue to shift as each side searches for new ways to break the battlefield stalemate in its favor. And the economic damage, felt well beyond Ukraine and Russia, will continue.
Crypto World
RWA perps will outpace tokenization
Traders have no way to react to events after markets close on TradFi venues. Perps on the other hand run 24/7. The Iran conflict was reflected in oil perps on Hyperliquid before CME reopened. Perps offer a continuously running, efficient market in a simple interface. Futures and options come with expiry dates, complicated greeks and interfaces. Perps remove all of that while keeping the speculative upside potential intact.
Martin Lee is Market Insights Lead of DWF Labs, one of the most active market makers and investors in digital assets.
Derivatives always outgrow spot
Derivatives volumes always outgrow their underlying spot market. It’s what we see in equities, commodities and crypto. RWAs are following the same trend. Equity perp volume on Hyperliquid ran 13-20x tokenized equity spot volume between March and May 2026.
You could argue that the number of traders matter more, a metric that spot usually wins out across most markets (except commodities). Looking into the numbers, tokenized equities have the bigger base: 180,845 wallets against 24,378 for equity perps. But perp holders are compounding at roughly 33% a month against spot’s 17%. Even in the domain where spot dominates, perps are rapidly closing the gap.
Perps innovate faster
The biggest factor driving the acceleration is the rapid rate of experimentation that RWA perps are able to have. Launching tokenized assets takes much longer and is more legally complex than launching a new perp market. The ease of launching perp markets creates opportunities for novel synthetic markets to be spun up. Markets that unlock fresh opportunities that didn’t exist before. A true 0 to 1 moment.
Crypto World
Recent Pi Network (PI) Updates, Solana (SOL) Warning, and More: Bits Recap July 31
The team behind Pi Network set a deadline for its next big upgrade, while Solana’s native token risks plunging to as low as $50.
Bitcoin (BTC) may also head south, but interestingly, some analysts believe such a move could actually benefit the bulls.
Pi Network’s Announcement
The Core Team has been on a tear since the start of 2026, unveiling several major ecosystem improvements. The latest was the migration to protocol version 25, which was supposed to be deployed earlier this month.
Pi Network’s team did not disclose the move on X or on its website, yet multiple users claimed that it was in effect. The project has now shifted its attention to the next protocol update (version 26), setting August 11 as the deadline.
“All Mainnet note operators must complete the upgrade before the deadline to remain connected to the network,” the post reads.
The team also shared additional details about its Pi Launchpad model. It explained that in this ecosystem, projects issue tokens as tools to acquire users for their applications and integrate those coins directly into product functionality, such as rewards, payments, access, and governance.
“Instead of being taken by the issuing project, the proceeds of Pi from their token launch go to a liquidity pool with the ecosystem token, which bootstraps a healthy liquidity foundation from the start,” the team added.
PI, which was bleeding heavily prior to the aforementioned announcements, managed to rebound and now trades at around $0.08. Still, it remains down roughly 97% from its all-time high of $3 registered last year.
SOL at Risk
Solana’s native cryptocurrency has slipped by 3% over the past week, currently trading at around $73.50. This means that it has plunged below the $73.75 mark, which the popular analyst Ali Martinez recently described as a “make-or-break” level.
He believes that a sustained close under this key zone might trigger further selling pressure and result in a collapse to $60 and even $50 in the near future.
However, not all are pessimists. X user Crypto Zenkai argued that buying SOL below $80 is like investing in Bitcoin (BTC) in 2010, while Lucky told his nearly 2 million followers that the asset’s plunge under $75 might represent a “juicy dip.”
BTC Needs to Fall?
As of press time, the primary cryptocurrency is worth approximately $63,800, a 2.5% decline on a weekly basis. And while bulls eagerly await a resurgence, Martinez claimed they should actually welcome a potential drop to $60K.
He believes that a plunge to that level would validate the formation of a classic inverse head-and-shoulders pattern that is typically seen as a precursor to a rally. The analyst opined that completing the setup, combined with a confirmed breakout above $66,500, could set the stage for a rally to a two-month high of $74K.
Not long ago, Martinez predicted that BTC’s bear market (assuming the 4-year cycle holds) may conclude between October 6 and October 16. Until then, many industry participants expect the asset’s price to plunge below $50,000 and even $40,000. The most bearish forecast came from X user BATMAN, who claimed that BTC’s recent performance mirrors that of the autumn of 2022, which was followed by a giant collapse to roughly $16,000.
The post Recent Pi Network (PI) Updates, Solana (SOL) Warning, and More: Bits Recap July 31 appeared first on CryptoPotato.
Crypto World
Coldcard attack: 25 minutes, 500 wallets, $38M in BTC gone
Someone likely used AI to drain almost 600 BTC, worth $38 million, from roughly 500 dormant wallets yesterday as part of a seed phrase exploit targeting Coldcard hardware wallets.
The attack took just 25 minutes to move the BTC from 500 single-signature addresses into a single address, and reports suggest the exploit will likely continue.
Coindesk reports that the affected BTC was dated between 2021 and 2026, and much had remained dormant for years. Of the 594 coins stolen, 562 remain in the same address at the time of writing.
Coldcard maker, Coinkite, confirmed hours after the exploit that seed generation within its Mk3 wallet, and its subsequently updated versions beyond March 2021 (version 4.0.1), may not have been random at all.
Coldcard initially claimed that its Mk3 devices were at risk, and that the Mk4, Q, and Mk5 are “not affected based on our early analysis.”
Read more: Credit default swaps forecast AI bankruptcies
Block, formerly known as Square, found different results in its published analysis while one of its team members, Max Guise, found flaws between Mk2 and Mk5 Coldcard models.
The payments company traced the bug to a mis-written compile-time check. The newer devices, Block found, carry a smaller, but real, version of the same flaw.
Coinkite believes AI was used to discover exploit
Coinkite’s recent analysis deduced that, because Coldcard’s source code is open and public, someone likely used AI to exploit it.
It said that a few weeks before the attack, it couldn’t spot the bug even with Coinkite’s use of “the best available AI models.”
It added, “Both attackers and defenders have the same AI tools, but today it did not help us, and only helped the bad guys.”
Pseudonymous owners of Bitcoin.org website, Cobra, also expressed that they have “very bad feeling AI was involved,” and noted, “For whatever reason some addresses are only being partially drained despite the private key being compromised. Strange.”
Read more: Apple threatens Sparrow bitcoin wallet dev with App Store termination
Crypto developer Stephen DeLorme claims he was able to use AI model Claude Opus 5 to sniff out the Coldcard vulnerability after cloning the firmware’s repository.
“All our software is insecure, and we’re painfully figuring that out in realtime with AI agents,” DeLorme said.
The technicalities behind the Coldcard BTC theft
BTC wallets need genuinely random numbers to generate an unguessable private key. Coldcard’s firmware was supposed to pull that randomness from a hardware generator built into its STM32 chip.
According to Block, a codebase check tested only whether a macro called MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG was defined, not what value it held.
Coinkite’s software build set that macro to zero on purpose. Because the character was set to zero, and not a variable symbol, the check was flawed.
Despite this, the flawed check passed anyway during software operations. Firmware fell back to Yasmarang, a MicroPython pseudo-random number generator never meant for real-world cryptographic protection.
Read more: The number of BTC wallets holding more than 0.1 BTC hasn’t grown in two years
Bitcoin Core developer Gregory Sanders reproduced the attack using setup button-press counts, and confirmed its impact on Mk3 and Mk2 models. His own response to his findings was, “Sorry, this is the time to panic.”
Sanders first wrote, “confirmed. Mk2/3 vuln, I don’t think mk4 is but can’t be certain,” before following up an hour later with “mk4 is probably not much better.”
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The post Coldcard attack: 25 minutes, 500 wallets, $38M in BTC gone appeared first on Protos.
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