US-based crypto exchange ABFinance, founded by ByBit’s former CEO Helen Liu, closed its doors last week before it ever opened.

ABFinance announced last Friday that the exchange’s planned launch will no longer go forward and that it is “winding down in an orderly manner.”

ABFinance lasted six months

Liu founded the exchange in March before stepping down from her ByBit co-CEO role on April 30, 2026. 

After ABFinance’s closure, Liu thanked her team and said: “It’s difficult to see this chapter come to an end.”

Over the last six weeks, BitMart, BitMEX, and AscendEX have also announced that they will be closing shop. 

The approach rested on simple logic. If cosmic radiation were truly driving cancer among air crew, the signal should appear specifically in the cancers that radiation is known to cause (breast, prostate, melanoma, and certain leukemias), and the signal should not appear in cancers like colon cancer that aren’t caused by this type of radiation. We would also expect to see higher rates of radiation-associated cancers among other types of workers exposed to radiation, like nuclear technologists. Meanwhile, unless something about aviation other than flying was associated with these cancers, we wouldn’t expect to see higher rates in aviation workers who remain on the ground, like aircraft mechanics and assemblers.

The pattern was hard to miss. Among all 503 occupations, flight attendants and pilots had the highest and second-highest share of deaths from radiation-related cancers—6.9% and 6.7%, respectively, after accounting for differences in age, sex, and other factors—a proportion that exceeded that of nuclear technologists. For cancers unrelated to radiation, aircrew sat near the middle of the pack. And our comparison groups fell exactly where the radiation hypothesis predicted; nuclear technologists ranked near the top, while ground-based aviation workers did not.

Cryptocurrency broker Bits of Gold said personal data belonging to roughly 200,000 customers was stolen by hackers, the company reported.

The Tel Aviv, Israel-based company reported the security breach on Sunday, saying a hacker gained unauthorized access to a third-party data analytics network and,gained access to customers’ names, national ID numbers, emails, phone numbers, IP addresses, bank account details, and public wallet addresses.

“Upon detection of the incident, we blocked access and disconnected the system from the information sources, so this access ended,” the company stated.

Bits of Gold said no funds, private keys, passwords, CVV codes, or scanned ID documents were exposed. The broker said its initial findings indicate the attack was part of a broader global incident that hit other companies simultaneously.

It is the third data breach reported within the crypto industry in the last week. Data from nearly 40,000 SafePal users was stolen on Sunday after a third-party vendor suffered a security breach. In a similar attack, personal data from almost 14,000 Trezor wallet customers was exposed on August 13 after its fulfillment partner, ShipMonk, was compromised.

Hardware wallets are somewhere in between a paper wallet and a browser-based hot wallet. They’re harder to hack than software, harder to lose than paper, but they’re not infallible. They can be lost or stolen, and users need to be able to trust the device to create their keys properly in the first place.

“Air-gapped systems help, but they are not a perfect fix,” Bobby Gray, founder of TEXITcoin, told CoinDesk. “Security has to begin with how the keys are generated and continue through every part of the custody process.”

This is, unfortunately, where things went wrong for Coinkite, the maker of the Coldcard wallet.

A bug in the system

In March 2016, the Toronto-based bitcoin company told customers it was sunsetting its hosted hot wallet. Running an online financial services company had brought persistent floods of junk internet traffic aimed at knocking their services offline, along with mounting legal costs and regulatory complications.

Instead, Coinkite said it wanted to try something different. It wanted to build decentralized hardware and “software-not-as-a-service.” That was early in crypto’s history, before Bitcoin’s second halving, when one entire bitcoin was trading slightly above the $400 mark.

Coinkite’s pivot first produced Opendime in April 2016. The small USB stick generated and concealed a private key, allowing bitcoin to be passed from one person to another like a physical bearer instrument. Physically breaking the device’s seal revealed the key and allowed the funds to be spent.

Tom Lee’s Bitmine Immersion Technologies, an Ethereum treasury company, resumed its Ether purchases last week, bringing it closer to a key business target of owning 5% of the second-biggest cryptocurrency’s supply despite challenging market conditions.

The company disclosed Monday that it acquired 9,926 Ether (ETH) during the week ending Aug. 16, bringing its total holdings to roughly 5.82 million ETH, or about 4.8% of Ethereum’s circulating supply. At an ETH reference price of $1,893, Bitmine’s Ether holdings were valued at roughly $11 billion. However, much of the company’s ETH was acquired at significantly higher prices.

Ether’s price was little changed on Monday, sitting just above $1,900.

The latest purchase puts Bitmine within striking distance of its long-term “Alchemy of 5%” target of holding 5% of the total ETH supply.

Bitmine’s conviction has been tested by a prolonged bear market for Ether, which has sharply eroded the value of its digital asset treasury. The company is sitting on more than $8.4 billion in unrealized losses on its ETH holdings, according to industry data.

With a portfolio value of more than $11 billion, BitMine’s unrealized losses are around 43%. Source: DropsTab

Still, Bitmine has continued accumulating Ether, making purchases every week since launching its ETH treasury strategy in June 2025.

Related: Ethereum devs to narrow 66 proposals tied to Hegotá upgrade

Bitmine’s staked Ether approaches $10 billion in value

Although Bitmine is sitting on large unrealized losses on its Ether holdings, its staking operations continue to generate yield. The company said it is staking more than 5 million ETH, worth roughly $9.6 billion at current prices.

That staking has enabled Bitmine to earn protocol rewards for helping secure the Ethereum network, providing a predictable source of yield regardless of short-term ETH price movements. Based on a seven-day staking yield of 2.61%, Bitmine projects annualized staking rewards of roughly $287 million, according to Lee.

Related: Crypto Biz: Bitcoin’s $116M self-custody wake-up call

“DeFi is a remarkable innovation; however, it has achieved limited institutional adoption,” Schnarch said in a statement. “Current product offerings fall short of meeting the traditional finance bar, especially as it pertains to compliance and technical requirements.”

The move is a logical response to the shift in DeFi’s user base, according to Ran Hammer, chief business officer at Orbs.

“Retail participation is a fraction of what it was, and the chain has quietly become a venue for settlement, execution and interaction between financial institutions,” Hammer said. “Since DeFi summer, the space has turned into something completely different, essentially a new financial layer for institutions. So bringing in leadership that speaks that language is exactly the right direction.”

The size of the allocated budget, the largest approved by Compound’s decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), may help underline its commitment.

“The $52 million and a bench with that much institutional experience is a serious move, and it should improve its execution,” said Himanshu Sahay, co-founder and chief technology officer of crypto lending firm Arch Lending, but institutions will want more than credentials. They “aren’t underwriting teams, they’re underwriting structures.”