SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce warned on July 22 that moving crypto activity onchain does not erase its securities duties. She cautioned that vaults and lending strategies with active management can trigger registration requirements.

Her statement, titled “Headstands and Summervaults,” builds on an earlier warning that tokenized securities remain securities. Peirce extended that principle to a newer generation of onchain yield tools.

Vaults Risk Investment Company Rules

Vaults let users deposit crypto assets into smart contracts that route funds toward staking or lending. Peirce noted that they range from fully automated allocations to setups in which a manager actively selects strategies.

That spectrum ranges from purely programmatic vaults to those that depend entirely on a manager’s discretion, she wrote.

That distinction matters. A vault could become an investment contract when depositors expect profits mainly from a curator’s efforts. Similarly, that standard mirrors the crypto asset taxonomy the SEC-CFTC joint rule formalized earlier this year.

Some vaults may resemble mutual funds, too, as actively managed vault curator strategies are gaining traction in decentralized finance (DeFi). Active vault managers may trigger investment adviser obligations, a separate compliance layer beyond fund registration.

Lending Platforms Face SEC Note Test

Onchain lending strategies raise separate concerns for regulators. Depositors lend assets to borrowers through smart contracts. Meanwhile, platform operators often set interest rates, loan-to-value limits, and liquidation thresholds.

Those choices can make a loan resemble a security-style note, Peirce wrote, regardless of which asset backs it. Courts have applied a similar note test since the 1990 Reves v. Ernst & Young ruling, she noted.

Her office had flagged similar tensions before this statement. She previously disputed proposed wallet broker rules and limited a tokenized stock exemption she carved out in May. These asset deployment tools could still become mainstream portfolio management options if built carefully, Peirce added.

SEC Invites Compliant Collaboration

Peirce did not mince words about attempts to dodge the rules.

“If you do headstands, backflips, and other gymnastics to read the law so that it does not apply to crypto assets and activities that are well within the scope of the federal securities laws, you will have a painful fall,” said Peirce.

She invited vault operators and lending platforms to contact the agency directly. The invitation comes ahead of her own planned departure from the SEC later this year. The commissioner asked whether existing rules block innovation. She wants SEC adjustments that do not weaken investor protection.

Whether vault designers accept that offer, rather than risk enforcement, may shape onchain yield products through the rest of 2026. Regulators and builders alike have a stake in getting that balance right.

The post SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce Warns Against Crypto Vaults and Lending appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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Bitcoin (BTC) briefly surged over $66,800 this week, its strongest level in more than a month, before slipping back. Consecutive ETF inflows have pulled money back into the market after a prolonged period of outflows.

Still, every bounce revives the same question. Is this the low, or another bear-market rally that fades? 

Why the Bitcoin Rebound Looks Fragile

The ETF channel bled through May and June as investors pulled out. That trend has now reversed. Roughly $981.2 million in net inflows returned across 7 trading days from July 14, according to Santiment.

The last inflow streak of a similar length occurred ahead of Bitcoin’s October 2025 rally, though such streaks do not guarantee a repeat.

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The rebound, however, reveals a growing divergence beneath the surface. While spot Bitcoin ETFs are once again absorbing supply, other market indicators point to more cautious positioning among professional traders.

ETF Buyers and Professional Desks Pull Apart

The Coinbase Premium Index has remained negative for more than 900 cumulative hours, the longest stretch in 2 years. 

A negative premium suggests relatively weaker demand, or stronger selling pressure, on Coinbase than on Binance, pointing to continued caution among professional market participants.

Analyst Darkfost tied that caution to sticky inflation, rising oil prices, and a less transparent Fed under its new chairman.

“This combination is what’s keeping institutional selling pressure going, as we’re still seeing today,” the analyst noted.

Together, these signals suggest ETF inflows are supporting prices, but the recovery has yet to gain confirmation from broader spot market demand, leaving the rally vulnerable if ETF inflows begin to fade.

Four-Year Cycle or Macro Asset

The divergence feeds a broader debate over what drives Bitcoin today. In a July 22 research note, Grayscale outlined 2 lenses for the bear market.

The four-year cycle view, tied to halving events, points to further downside and a possible bottom in September or October. Grayscale argued instead that Bitcoin has matured into a macro asset.

“The current bear market has also featured a major shift in Fed policy expectations and rising real interest rates. Naturally, if macro factors are in the driver’s seat, Bitcoin’s price could bottom when these macro factors turn around,” Zach Pandl, Grayscale Head of Research, said.

Meanwhile, Glassnode drew the line that settles the near-term argument.

“This is still a bear-market rally until the market proves otherwise, and the proof has an address,” the firm wrote.

Bitcoin trades below the Short-Term Holder Cost Basis near $69,000. A reclaim on steady inflows opens room toward $84,000. Rejection sends the price back toward the $63,000 demand shelf.

The next test is whether ETF buying persists and professional caution eases. Until Bitcoin reclaims $69,000, the burden of proof stays with the bulls.

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The debate over when Bitcoin’s bear market will end is largely split between two views. One camp still holds on to the traditional four-year cycle, while the other believes that the bottom may already be in.

Grayscale, for one, favors the latter.

Macro Over Market Cycles

The supporters of the four-year cycle theory see Bitcoin halving events as the main driver of price movements and expect the current downturn to follow the same pattern as previous bear markets. Historically, the crypto asset has reached its bottom around one year after a cyclical peak and roughly two and a half years after a halving event, with cumulative declines averaging about 80%.

Based on that framework, Bitcoin’s price could still fall further and reach a bottom in September or October. Grayscale, however, said it subscribes to an alternative view that BTC has matured as an asset and is now increasingly driven by broader macroeconomic forces, similar to other major asset classes.

The firm noted that previous bear markets have coincided with periods of slowing economic growth and rising real interest rates, and added that this year’s downturn has unfolded alongside shifting expectations for US Federal Reserve policy and higher real interest rates.

Under this macro-driven framework, Grayscale said the asset’s price could find its bottom when those broader economic conditions begin to improve. The firm even added that if the Federal Reserve refrains from further rate hikes and economic growth remains resilient, BTC’s price may have already reached its low, making a further decline unnecessary despite expectations under the four-year cycle model.

Grayscale is not the only one arguing that the cryptocurrency could be approaching a turning point.

More Analysts Back Early Bottom Thesis

Crypto trader Killa also said Bitcoin’s market structure suggests the bottom may already be in, although he remains “50/50” because of the cycle’s timing. The trader explained that BTC has now “swept the dead cat base low” and completed the same five-wave corrective structure seen throughout previous bear markets. However, earlier bear markets took roughly 365 days to reach their final trough, whereas the current cycle would have bottomed in around 260 days.

Despite this, Killa said the “mistake is assuming” cycle lengths never change and believes Bitcoin is more likely to form higher lows than make significant new lows.

Earlier this week, crypto analyst Ali Martinez said the monthly chart is displaying the same combination of technical signals seen near the end of the 2015, 2019, and 2022 bear markets. While Martinez acknowledged that on-chain metrics such as MVRV and CVDD still leave room for a decline toward the $40,000-$50,000 range, he observed the current technical setup has historically identified a dominant accumulation zone with a favorable risk-to-reward profile for spot BTC buyers.

A similar argument was made by crypto analyst Doctor Profit, who warned that investors waiting for a traditional four-year cycle bottom in September or October could end up missing the market’s next move. While Bitcoin could still revisit the $54,000 area, the analyst said he does not expect a drop below $50,000 and believes gradual accumulation already offers an attractive risk-reward profile.

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No one can say exactly when quantum computers will break Bitcoin (BTC), but two experts warn the industry is treating a trillion-dollar risk far too casually. The right question is not the date, but the odds and the cost.

Stefano Gogioso and Daniela Herrmann made the case during the latest BeInCrypto Experts Council. Both call themselves optimists, yet both argue that preparation cannot wait for proof.

Q-Day Could Break a Trillion-Dollar Industry

Readers ask constantly when “Q-Day” will arrive. That is the day a quantum computer can break Bitcoin’s cryptography. Speaking on the BeInCrypto panel, Gogioso argued that fixating on a date misses the point.

“The question isn’t ‘will it be 2030?’ It’s what’s the probability of a tail event by 2030, and how much would we lose. Even at 2%, the impact on Bitcoin and crypto, if we’re not prepared, is essentially most of crypto going to zero. That’s trillions of dollars. And even 1% of that is more than enough to pay every cryptographer in the world to spend six months fixing it.”

Stefano Gogioso, a quantum computing lecturer at the University of Oxford and co-founder of Spooqy, said.

The logic is insurance, not prediction. You do not insure a house because you expect a fire. You insure it because the loss would be ruinous, and the premium is small. The same math turns a distant science story into a decision for today.

When Quantum Computers Could Break Bitcoin

The estimates for practical quantum computing keep shrinking. Herrmann has watched them fall in real time.

“In 2024, I was on stage and we said quantum computing will be here in 30 years. Then in 2025 it dropped to 15 to 20 years. Then in 2026, three to five to ten. And suddenly, in October, we hear two years, one year. The market moves faster, innovation moves faster, than it was communicated,” Daniela Herrmann, CEO and co-founder of Dynex, said.

Her advice was blunt. Stop naming a year, and prepare for the surprise instead. Gogioso explained why progress speeds up. The hardest step is the first one, not the last.

“The difference between no logical qubits and one logical qubit is an enormous gap. The difference between one and a million is a smaller gap. Once you get it to work, scaling up is actually quite easy.”

The research supports him. In May 2025, Google researcher Craig Gidney showed that breaking RSA-2048 might need fewer than 1 million qubits. That was down from his own 2019 estimate of about 20 million.

The next result aimed straight at crypto. In March 2026, Google Quantum AI worked with the Ethereum Foundation and Stanford. The team estimated that breaking Bitcoin’s elliptic-curve cryptography could take fewer than 500,000 physical qubits.

It studied secp256k1, the exact curve behind Bitcoin and Ethereum (ETH) signatures. That figure is roughly 20 times lower than the previous best estimate.

The reductions are steep across both targets.

One caveat keeps the picture honest. Gidney has said he does not expect another tenfold drop without new assumptions. Each reduction also shifts the burden onto harder engineering problems that remain unsolved.

Why 2% is Enough to Act On

Whether the machine lands in 2030 or 2035 matters less than the asymmetry. A small chance of total loss still justifies action. The cost of preparing is trivial next to the cost of being wrong.

Migration is also slow. Moving a financial system to new cryptography takes years. So the work has to begin well before any machine exists.

The clearest signal comes from the builders. Google has set an internal 2029 target to move its own products onto quantum-resistant encryption. When the leading quantum lab treats this as a this-decade problem, delay looks reckless.

How Quantum Computers Would Break Bitcoin

The popular image of Q-Day is a single dramatic morning. The reality the panel described is quieter and more dangerous. The damage lies in belief, not in the code.

The mechanism is now clear. When you spend Bitcoin, your public key is briefly exposed. A capable quantum computer could then derive your private key.

Google’s figures suggest the core computation could run in about nine minutes. Bitcoin’s average block time is roughly 10 minutes. That narrow window is the whole attack surface.

Gogioso stressed that the real weakness is psychological.

“It’s not a technical problem. It’s a PR problem. The moment one Satoshi-era coin moves off its wallet with ‘you’ve been quantum punked’ in the message, that’s it. It doesn’t matter that 75% of coins are protected, they’ll be worth nothing. Everybody panics and exits.”

Herrmann reached for a historical parallel, the tulip mania. Belief can stay near-universal until the instant it breaks.

“The moment one coin moves, it’s the end of the story. Imagine you’re an institutional asset manager. You wake up and your portfolio isn’t secure anymore. You have an obligation to get rid of it, if you still can. And if you can’t, you’re done.”

The March 2026 result was disclosed with care. Google published the resource estimates but hid the circuit designs behind a zero-knowledge proof. That choice signals a live risk, not a thought experiment.

Why No One Is Fixing It

If the threat is real and the fix is cheap, why has Bitcoin not moved? Gogioso pointed to governance, or the lack of it.

“Bitcoin has a completely different governance structure, in that it doesn’t have one. Some of those independent voices fall into quantum denialism. They don’t believe it’s a threat. There’s a conservative tendency. They don’t want to make changes they don’t have to. But this is a change you have to make.”

Ethereum offers a contrast. Vitalik Buterin has urged migration to quantum-resistant cryptography within about four years. He warned that elliptic-curve cryptography could be at risk around 2028.

His team published a formal roadmap in early 2026, following the Ethereum Foundation’s creation of a dedicated post-quantum research group.

The wider clock is also ticking. The US standards body NIST plans to deprecate the current elliptic-curve signature standard by 2030 and disallow it by 2035. Bitcoin has no equivalent body to coordinate such a change.

Gogioso’s warning about denial was sharp.

“It might be tomorrow. For all you know, it’s already happened.”

What Preparing Now Looks Like

None of this means Bitcoin is doomed. Both guests were firm optimists about the technology. Herrmann said solutions already exist in outline.

“There are already concrete ideas for transitioning from Bitcoin to a quantum-secure Bitcoin. Ways to move from the old coins to the new ones, with an offset between them. It’s never a linear consequence.”

The tools for a migration are on the table. What is missing is the will to start. For most large organizations, Herrmann noted, the threat is not yet part of strategic planning. A large institution cannot change course the day the danger appears.

The panel did not call for panic. It calls for treating a low-probability, high-impact event seriously, while the fix is cheap and the timeline is still generous. The one thing no one can promise is that the timeline will stay the same.

The post Q-Day: When Will Quantum Computers Actually Break Bitcoin? appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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The US government put China’s newest AI model through a hacking test. It found that Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 falls well short of the best American models.

The Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), a US agency, ran the tests with a British partner. The results came just one day after Washington accused Moonshot of building Kimi K3 with stolen US technology.

Kimi K3 Falls Short on US Cyber Benchmarks

The Commerce Department shared the results on Thursday. It said Kimi K3 ranked well below the top US models, citing a joint test with British experts.

Moonshot launched Kimi K3 on July 16. Demand was so high it had to pause new signups within two days.

The launch also shook US chip stocks and raised fresh doubts about America’s AI lead.

One test, called ExploitBench, uses real Chrome browser bugs built by Carnegie Mellon University. Kimi K3 scored 32%. That topped China’s GLM-5.2 at 24%. But it trailed the top US models, which hit about 76%.

The hardest step is taking full control of a target machine. Kimi K3 failed that step on all 41 tests. The best US models pulled it off on 20.

Another test, called The Last Ones, is a fake company network attack with 32 steps. A human expert needs about 20 hours to finish it. Kimi K3 reached step 17 on average. The top US models reached step 28.5. Kimi K3 finished the whole thing just once in 10 tries.

The best US systems reportedly did it six or seven times.

But the Gap May Look Bigger Than It Is

But the numbers do not tell the whole story. The report’s own fine print holds several catches.

First, the US models were tested with their safety filters turned off. That setting shows their full power. The public versions keep those filters on. So the US scores are a best case, not real life.

The team also called the work early and limited. It scored Kimi K3 on just one test and ran only part of the full set. So its rating is shaky. Some tests are private too, so outsiders cannot check the work.

There is also a basic mismatch. Kimi K3 is an open model that anyone can download. The US models are locked, private systems. The UK institute found that open models usually run four to seven months behind the best closed ones. It will give Kimi K3 the full test only after Moonshot releases it to the public.

These tests are not real attacks either. The fake network had no human defenders and no alarms to trip. Even so, Kimi K3 beat the last top open model. And it did finish the full attack once.

The timing and the source also raise questions. CAISI used to be the US AI Safety Institute. The Trump administration renamed it in June 2025. It sits in the same department that limits US chip sales to China. And its report on a Chinese rival came just a day after the theft claim.

Weak Safeguards Still Raise the Stakes

Still, low scores do not mean Kimi K3 is safe. The test found its guardrails did not block it from trying to build hacks or attack systems.

That matters because of what comes next. Moonshot plans to release the full model on July 27. Once it is out, it cannot be pulled back. Anyone can download it and remove the safety filters.

The test also comes after a theft claim. Washington says Moonshot built Kimi K3 on stolen US AI tech. White House tech chief Michael Kratsios said the firm secretly copied Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5. The trick, called distillation, trains a new model on a stronger one’s answers.

Anthropic backs the claim. In February, it traced over 3.4 million Claude chats to Moonshot through hundreds of fake accounts. It warned that copied models lose the safety controls of the original. That is the same weak spot this test just found.

The US still spends 23 times more on AI than China. Yet Chinese labs keep closing the gap. The real test comes when Kimi K3 goes public and outside experts can check the claims themselves.

The post US Cyber Assessment Finds Kimi K3 Trails Top American AI Models: Facts or Politics? appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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Elon Musk says it is too late to stop AI. Even he could not halt it, the xAI founder told The Economist.

Musk spoke to The Economist’s Editor-in-Chief Zanny Minton Beddoes in an interview recorded on Monday, before OpenAI disclosed that one of its frontier models went rogue.

Why Musk Thinks It’s Too Late to Stop AI

This is a reversal. In March 2023, Musk signed the Future of Life Institute’s open letter urging a six-month pause on AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. Months later, he launched his own AI company, xAI. Today he sees no brakes at all.

“I mean honestly, there seems to be just inexorable progress here in AI and in robots that even if I wanted to stop it, I couldn’t.”

The danger has not shrunk in his eyes. Musk stood by his earlier estimate of a 10% to 20% chance that killer robots would wipe out humanity.

“I still think there’s risk associated with AI and robots. It’s not zero.”

Still, he argued against pulling the plug. Even if a stop button existed, he said, “we probably shouldn’t press it” because the most likely outcome is abundance for all. His new philosophy fits in one line.

“Yeah, I mean, yes, pretty much, let’s enjoy the ride, is my philosophy at this point.”

Superintelligence in Five Years

Musk also put a date on it.

“I think AI may exceed the sum of human intelligence in about and around five years.”

Within 10 years, he argued, humans will likely no longer be in charge. He compared the coming intelligence gap to the one between humans and chimpanzees.

Musk admits he helped build this momentum. He co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as “essentially a counterweight to Google.” Anthropic later spun out of OpenAI. Both now race ahead of regulators, and Washington just cleared OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 for broad rollout.

“So it just seems like all roads lead to acceleration of AI. So then I’m like, OK, well, you can just sort of be sad about it or join the club, I suppose.”

The stakes reach well beyond Silicon Valley. The AI boom has already pulled capital away from crypto listings, while AI tokens swing on every breakthrough. Now the world’s richest man has declared the race unstoppable.

The interview is live at economist.com.

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