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The Coldcard hack proves reputation is not a security model

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The Coldcard hack proves reputation is not a security model

Nobody can measure how much licensing pressure shaped the scope or speed of that rewrite, and the overhaul also pursued legitimate technical goals. The documented facts are narrower and still damning: a license change made to restrict competitors preceded a rushed replacement of battle-tested cryptographic code, and the replacement contained the flaw now draining wallets. Free and open-source software principles exist precisely to keep security from depending on any one company’s choices. Those principles cannot come with a personality exception.

Zach Herbert is co-founder and CEO of Foundation.

Researchers learned not to look

The deeper failure is what happened to the people who did look. In August 2020, researchers from Shift Crypto and Nunchuk disclosed a multisig verification flaw in Coldcard. Coinkite acknowledged the bug and shipped a fix, and NVK, on the Citadel Dispatch podcast simultaneously branded the disclosure “PR terrorism” and questioned whether a researcher without a CVE counted as a professional. In 2023, when the WalletScrutiny project reported problems reproducing older Coldcard builds, the response labeled the project incompetent or malicious and floated litigation. Independent follow-up later found genuine reproduction problems in older releases and concluded nobody had acted in bad faith.

Every public attack on a researcher changes the math for the next one. Independent review is slow, difficult, and usually unpaid. A researcher weighing months of that work against the prospect of ridicule, blocklists, and legal threats will often spend their time elsewhere. Nobody can prove this culture caused the entropy bug to go unnoticed. What can be said with confidence is that security depends on people being willing to look, and the environment around Coldcard punished looking.

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Binance Shared Russian Client Data in Terror Financing Case

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Crypto Breaking News

Binance has reportedly shared Russian law enforcement with detailed transaction records and personal identity information tied to a man accused of funding terrorism through cryptocurrency donations linked to Ukrainian fundraising efforts. The disclosure, according to law enforcement documents reviewed by Reuters, became part of the evidence used in Russia’s case against an IT specialist awaiting trial.

Reuters reports that investigators requested the data from Binance and received information connecting the suspect to crypto transfers, along with sensitive personal details such as date of birth, address, phone number, and passport number—along with copies of his documents. Binance, in response to coverage, said it cooperates with lawful information requests subject to applicable legal, privacy, and regulatory requirements, while declining to comment on the specific matter.

Key takeaways

  • Reuters reviewed documents indicating Russian authorities asked Binance for a customer’s transaction history and received personal identity details.
  • The Russian Investigative Committee alleges the suspect sent more than $700 in crypto between January 2023 and March 2024 to Ukrainian military-related efforts and a banned group.
  • Binance’s reported response included links to specific transfers as well as copies of a Russian passport and a Bulgarian residency permit.
  • Binance says it generally cooperates with lawful information requests, but it declined to comment on the particular case.

What Russian investigators say the data was used for

Russia’s Investigative Committee alleges that IT specialist Yuri Belenkiy made cryptocurrency transfers totaling more than $700 between January 2023 and March 2024. The allegation is that the funds were directed to the Ukrainian military and to an organization identified by Reuters as the group known at different times as the Azov Brigade and the Azov Regiment.

According to Reuters’ review of law enforcement documents, investigators relied on information attributed to Binance in building the case. Belenkiy was detained in September 2025 and is currently awaiting trial in Russia.

Binance reportedly provided transaction trails and identity documents

The evidentiary link described by Reuters centers on a formal request from Russian authorities to Binance for Belenkiy’s transaction history. Reuters says the company’s response connected him to the alleged transfers.

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Beyond blockchain-related activity, the response reportedly included personal identifying information commonly required for law enforcement verification: Belenkiy’s date of birth, address, phone number, and passport number. Reuters also reports that the material provided included copies of a Russian passport and a Bulgarian residency permit, suggesting the request extended beyond tracing crypto flows into confirming the suspect’s identity.

For investors and users, the case underlines a recurring reality of crypto compliance: even when transactions are pseudonymous on-chain, centralized exchange records and customer due diligence can materially shape investigations.

Why Binance’s Russia exit does not remove the data link

Binance announced a full exit from Russia in September 2023, selling its local business to CommEX, according to a Cointelegraph report. That corporate shift did not erase the underlying compliance trail described in the Reuters account—namely, that transaction history and customer information tied to a specific user can remain relevant to later investigations.

This distinction matters. “Exiting” a market typically addresses future operations and licensing, but it does not necessarily eliminate retention or earlier records associated with accounts created and used while a platform operated there. The Reuters reporting implies that the relevant data existed in a form Russian authorities could request, even years after the public announcement of Binance’s exit.

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Binance’s response and the broader compliance tension

Reuters says a Binance spokesperson declined to comment on specific confidential law enforcement requests or on the details of individual cases. In a broader explanation given to Cointelegraph, Binance stated that it does not make or enforce laws, determine charges, or decide how any government uses information in legal proceedings. The company added that, like other global financial institutions, it cooperates with lawful information requests from law enforcement worldwide, subject to applicable legal, privacy, and regulatory requirements.

That formulation reflects a familiar compliance tension for crypto exchanges operating at the intersection of financial privacy, customer protection, and state requests. While platforms often frame cooperation as bounded by law and privacy rules, public reporting like this highlights how those safeguards function in practice—particularly when requests target individuals connected to politically sensitive conflicts.

It also raises practical questions for customers and the wider ecosystem: what categories of data exchanges retain; how long they retain it; and how cross-border identity and documentation checks can be combined with transaction history in court filings. The Reuters account does not detail those internal policies, but it shows the end result—law enforcement having both a behavioral trail (transfers) and a personal dossier (identity documents).

What to watch next

As Belenkiy’s case moves forward, attention will likely center on what precisely the court accepts as admissible evidence and whether the exchange-supplied materials are used narrowly for transaction tracing or more broadly for identity verification. More broadly, the episode is a reminder that even after major exchange restructuring or market exits, compliance data can still surface years later when investigators pursue crypto-related allegations.

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U.S. Treasury Department proposes GENIUS Act stablecoin rule

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Banks seek to slow down implementation of crypto's GENIUS Act on stablecoin oversight

However, the proposal notes, “Treasury believes that the Act evinces a clear intent for payment stablecoins to serve as an effective means of payment and settlement, including across borders, and application of traditional investment rules to payment stablecoins may frustrate that goal.”

Monday’s action is a follow-up to the Treasury advance notice of the rule, which it issued in September of last year on what was meant to be a tight timeline. The public and the growing industry of stablecoin issuers now have 60 days to weigh in with comments, and the department will be expected to take further months to review them before issuing a final rule.

The proposed rule poses dozens of questions about the best approach to interpreting the law, each of which must be answered before the final sign-off. The industry will pay special attention to how it approaches foreign issuers, such as industry leader Tether. It set a deadline for responses in mid-October.

The law’s one-year target to have its rules implemented passed last month, without the administration meeting the requirement. The next mark is the effective date of the law, which is supposed to come by January 18. It’s unlikely that all the rules will be finalized by then, and new regulations usually come with runways allowing an industry to transition into them.

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Bitpanda Receives Austria’s First MiCA Penalty in Published Case

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Crypto Breaking News

Austria’s financial regulator has issued its first final penalty under the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA), fining crypto platform Bitpanda 70,000 euros (about $82,000) for breaching MiCA’s publication and marketing disclosure rules. The Austrian Financial Market Authority (FMA) said the case was handled under an expedited procedure and that the decision is final.

According to the FMA, the issue centered on Bitpanda’s timing and compliance with mandatory pre-publication and disclosure requirements for a crypto-asset white paper.

Key takeaways

  • The FMA fined Bitpanda 70,000 euros for failing to submit the required crypto-asset white paper at least 20 working days before publication.
  • Regulators also said Bitpanda issued marketing communications before the white paper was filed.
  • Another alleged breach involved marketing material that omitted MiCA-mandated disclaimers, including that it had not been reviewed or approved by a competent authority and that Bitpanda is responsible for the content.
  • The penalty was issued as the first published final enforcement under MiCA, signaling the EU framework is moving from licensing and guidance into outcomes.
  • Bitpanda stated the problems were limited to formal timing and documentation requirements, and said customer funds and platform security were not affected.

FMA details: white paper submission and marketing timing

In a notice published Friday, the FMA said Bitpanda did not submit a crypto-asset white paper to the regulator at least 20 working days prior to its publication, as MiCA requires. The regulator also reported that Bitpanda distributed a marketing communication before publishing the required white paper.

The regulator’s explanation is significant because MiCA’s approach to investor protection depends heavily on structured disclosures. The white paper is intended to provide standardized information before the public is exposed to an offering or related marketing materials.

Disclosure gaps in marketing materials

The FMA further alleged that another marketing communication failed to include mandatory disclosures. Specifically, the regulator said the content did not state that the material had not been reviewed or approved by a competent authority, and that the crypto-asset provider alone was responsible for the content. The regulator also said the marketing communication lacked required contact details, including a telephone number and email address.

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These points matter for compliance teams because they show that regulators are not only checking whether documents exist, but whether the surrounding communications include the specific legal language and contact information required under MiCA.

Expedited proceedings and final decision

The FMA said the case was concluded under an expedited procedure and that the penalty decision is final. While the fine amount is comparatively small relative to some large-scale financial enforcement actions, the regulatory significance is larger: this is presented as the watchdog’s first published final penalty under MiCA.

For market participants, the outcome suggests that formal compliance lapses—such as filing timelines and required statement formatting—are actionable under MiCA, even when the core product or platform functionality is not necessarily implicated.

Bitpanda’s response: timing and formal requirements only

Bitpanda told Cointelegraph that the concerns raised by the FMA related exclusively to the timing and formal requirements surrounding the publication of the white paper and an accompanying information document. The company said customer funds and platform security were not affected and that customers suffered no financial harm.

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Bitpanda added that it corrected the issues after receiving notice from the FMA, and it opted for a swift, consensual conclusion of the proceedings.

That framing may influence how investors and users interpret the case. The regulator’s enforcement narrative emphasizes process compliance, while Bitpanda points to the absence of customer impact. Still, the penalty itself indicates that regulators are prepared to treat disclosure mechanics and marketing rules as enforceable obligations under the new regime.

Why this is a broader MiCA signal

MiCA created a harmonized regulatory framework for crypto assets across the European Union, including disclosure standards, marketing requirements, and authorization conditions for crypto companies. The FMA’s action reinforces that MiCA compliance is not limited to licensing status or long-form disclosures alone; marketing materials and document submission timelines are also subject to scrutiny.

Earlier coverage of the implementation of MiCA licensing timelines and transitional measures (including references to the end of certain grace periods) highlighted that firms would eventually face stricter enforcement as operational readiness deadlines were crossed. This penalty fits that pattern: once formal requirements are in effect, regulators can convert guidance into penalties.

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For the wider industry, the main uncertainty going forward is how frequently regulators will pursue similar “paperwork” cases and whether enforcement will focus on specific categories of issuers or on any instance of noncompliance with pre-publication timing and mandated marketing language. Market participants should watch for more final decisions across member states as regulators test the boundaries of MiCA’s disclosure and communications requirements.

Readers should pay attention to the next enforcement steps from Austria and other EU jurisdictions—particularly whether additional cases involve similar white-paper submission delays and missing mandatory marketing disclaimers, or whether regulators begin targeting other parts of MiCA compliance such as authorization obligations and ongoing disclosure practices.

Risk & affiliate notice: Crypto assets are volatile and capital is at risk. This article may contain affiliate links. Read full disclosure

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The People Building a Way to Slow Down the AI Race

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The People Building a Way to Slow Down the AI Race
Amodo Design engineer Carl Heimann stands before a rack of Nvidia chips at an Amodo facility in Sheffield, England. —Courtesy of Tom Milton—Amodo

In the corner of a nondescript office in Sheffield, a city in the north of England, a compact server full of Nvidia chips is whirring away.

It’s a microcosm of the huge data centers springing up all over the globe: town-sized, energy-guzzling computers that are the worldly manifestations of frontier AI models.

Here in Sheffield, on these eight chips, engineers from the consultancy Amodo Design are piloting a monitoring system that they hope, one day, might find its way into every data center, allaying the fears of AI researchers who are concerned that the technology they are building may destroy the world.

In late July, more than 1,300 employees of frontier AI companies signed an open letter warning that their AI is quickly becoming so powerful that humans may soon no longer be able to control it. Slowing the pace of AI development, they warned, may become vital in order to allow more time for safety research, and thus avert catastrophe. But slowing down, they wrote, is essentially impossible, due to intense competition between companies and countries. The AI race is stuck in an arms-race dynamic, these top scientists say, in which one team slowing down would only hand victory to rivals that don’t.

The letter’s main request—one so important to 1,300 of the world’s top AI researchers that they called publicly for it—was for the U.S. government to support an international effort to build tools that would enable all sides to slow down the AI race. 

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So far, only a small group of people are working on this effort. There are fewer than 50 engineers in the world working full-time on building so-called “AI verification” tools, Amodo CEO Tom Milton estimates—nine of them at Amodo—plus a few dozen more policy researchers scattered among a handful of companies and research institutes. Meanwhile, trillions of dollars, and the combined might of the world’s biggest tech companies, are now dedicated to making AI systems more powerful as quickly as possible. Efforts to build slowdown tools are funded mostly by academia and philanthropy. (Amodo’s work in this area is funded by the Survival and Flourishing Fund and Longview Philanthropy, two grantmakers that have donated heavily toward reducing AI-related risks.) 

“It is surprising that very few people are doing it,” says Milton, a 28-year-old who fell into the field almost by accident several years ago, when Amodo was commissioned to do some work in the area. 

In Sheffield, three workers are huddled around their compute cluster, under an air conditioning unit that is running on full-blast. Their small-scale prototype may be running hot, but it isn’t ready yet. Many technical obstacles remain in its way, plus a bigger political one: it won’t be useful unless the U.S. and China come to the table and agree on an AI slowdown treaty, Milton says.

For now at least, such an agreement looks unlikely. But Amodo’s engineers are keenly aware that political choices are downstream from what is possible. Treaties that curtailed the Cold War arms race were only possible because new technologies, like satellites and seismometers, allowed each side to verify the other’s compliance. Milton expects a similar moment to arrive for AI. When that moment comes, he wants to be ready. 

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Read More: Can the Cold War Teach Us How to Slow Down AI?

Halfdan Holm, an Amodo staffer, adjusts the server rack that is running Amodo’s recomputation algorithm in Sheffield, England —Courtesy of Tom Milton—Amodo

How AI verification might work

Nobody knows how an AI slowdown treaty might look, but Amodo’s engineers believe it will probably require monitoring data centers, given that these are the places where AI physically lives. 

The current prototype that Amodo is building could make it possible to gain two assurances about a data center that might be helpful in the years to come, Milton says. 

First, that a data center is only being used for inference. That means the running of existing AI models, rather than the training of new, more powerful ones. 

Second, that a data center is running a particular, agreed-upon model—for example, one that has passed certain safety tests, perhaps ones that have been set down in law.

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To demonstrate how this might work, an Amodo engineer logs into the whirring server rack, where he spins up two separate systems, each containing an open-source AI model made by OpenAI. 

Think of the first system, he says, as an AI model that a company would normally run in a data center. The second system is the “verifier,” he explains. Its job is to sample snippets of data from this data center and rerun them on its own version of the model, thus confirming that the model is the one the data center operator claims it to be.

When he demonstrates it, the system works—at least on its own terms. The verifier performs some calculations on the outputs of the original AI model, and spits out a high certainty score that this model is GPT-OSS-120B, which is exactly correct.

A rack of Nvidia chips at an Amodo facility in Sheffield, England —Courtesy of Tom Milton—Amodo

The limitations

There are several significant problems that point to Amodo’s solution not yet being ready for prime time. 

For now, it only works with unencrypted data, which makes it unfeasible for the most sensitive workloads, which are routinely encrypted. (Milton says the next version of Amodo’s prototype will utilize “zero-knowledge” cryptography, which would significantly reduce the amount of unencrypted data needed.)

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A second limitation is that a system like this would require data centers to be retrofitted, including a process ominously named “network tapping,” which involves copying data from working chips onto other verification systems within the same building. Given that these are some of the highest-security buildings on earth, housing trillion-dollar intellectual property and masses of private data, that’s access that no leading AI company is likely to be willing to grant, at least today. 

But it doesn’t have to be as scary as it sounds, Milton says. There are precedents in the history of arms control—including nuclear and chemical weapons—for international bodies to carry out inspections of sensitive facilities. These inspections can guarantee that a facility is compliant with international law, without revealing the secrets of how it works to adversaries. Amodo hopes to build on these principles, aiming to build a system that would only send low-information signals like “passed” or “failed” outside of the data center’s secure walls.

(Amodo says it plans to open-source all of its work on AI verification, so that all sides can interrogate it, understand exactly how it works, and be confident it lacks security vulnerabilities.) 

Another limitation is that the verifier system requires computing power in order to run. That could substantially reduce the total capacity, and thus profitability, of any data center that hosts it. The system witnessed by TIME required computing power equal to between one-third and one-fifth of the AI model it was monitoring. Amodo’s engineers say they expect to find substantial further efficiency gains, in particular because the system could theoretically be set to monitor only random samples of a data center’s computation, rather than every single calculation, in order to achieve its intended result. 

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Milton acknowledges that for now at least, Amodo’s tech isn’t perfect. The idea, he says, is for it to improve significantly over time, ultimately reaching a point where it becomes minimally invasive and maximally privacy-preserving. “We tend to be of the mind that verification mechanisms will ladder up, and they won’t be perfectly trustable and perfectly secure on day one,” he says. “Over time, we can get to systems that can be verified in much more detail.”

There are many individual AI researchers, Milton says, who are paid more than the single-digit-million dollar budget for his entire project. A full-scale effort, of the kind that AI workers asked for in the open letter, might quickly result in more sophisticated tools. 

“It is insane for us to think that we are even a noteworthy participant in this,” Milton says. “Let alone one of the largest projects.”

Sam Reynolds, an Amodo engineer, adjusts a server in Sheffield, England —Courtesy of Tom Milton—Amodo

Is it politically possible?

While AI verification tech remains nascent, the acceleration of AI capabilities in recent months has led to a surge of interest in the field.

The Institute for Progress, a think-tank, recommended in August that the U.S. government collaborate with frontier AI labs, chipmakers, and hyperscale data center builders, plus other governments, to accelerate the development of AI verification tools. “If the nuclear arms control precedent is any indication, the ability to verify that agreements are being upheld is often necessary for parties to enter into them in the first place,” it wrote. “Better verification technology would unlock a broader space of possible agreements.”

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It is a view shared by the authors of AI 2040, a follow-up to the widely-read essay AI 2027. Their so-called “Plan A” for humanity to navigate the arrival of superintelligent AI safely makes heavy use of data center monitoring technologies. 

And Anthropic recently announced it would devote resources to “help build the systems that a credible slowdown or pause would require.” Those systems, it said in a June blog post, “would enable frontier AI developers to verify that others globally have actually stopped or slowed, and that a bad actor could not use the auspices of a coordinated slowdown to jump ahead in secret.”

Milton says Amodo has held some preliminary discussions with governments about its work, although he declines to say which governments, or to share specifics.

For now, at least, it seems clear the U.S. government does not share the enthusiasm.

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“We totally reject global governance of AI,” the director of the White House office of science and technology policy, Michael Kratsios, said in February. “We believe AI adoption cannot lead to a brighter future if it is subject to bureaucracies and centralized control.”

It’s true that since that speech in February, the White House has slightly moderated its approach to AI regulation, having been spooked by the cyber-warfare capabilities of recent models into testing some frontier models before their release. But White House officials remain highly skeptical of heavy-handed interventions in the AI industry, especially ones that might be perceived as allowing for ground to be lost to China. “We refuse to stifle [AI] innovation with overly burdensome regulation,” President Trump wrote in the introduction to a June executive order.

China, meanwhile, appears to still be pursuing its strategy of releasing open-weight models in an attempt to catch up to the U.S. frontier. 

In other words: neither great power is exactly clamoring to agree on an AI treaty. Officials from the U.S. and China are planning to meet in September to discuss the growing risks of AI, Reuters reported, though that meeting is more likely to focus on immediate security issues.

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Milton is unfazed by what appears, for the moment, to be the political unfeasibility of putting this technology to use. He expects that more powerful AI models will soon arrive, with scarier capabilities. At that point, he expects, both the U.S. and Chinese governments will be “sufficiently scared”—and might come to the table. That possibility, he says, is likely enough “that money should be spent on building the optionality for it.”

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Harmony plans rollback, wiping 109,000 transactions after ONE exploit

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Harmony plans rollback, wiping 109,000 transactions after ONE exploit

Harmony plans rollback, wiping 109,000 transactions after ONE exploit

Harmony said selectively restoring transactions could create inconsistent chain state, as Ravencoin faces a separate rollback dispute after an exploit.

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How Pakistan Crushed Protests in Kashmir

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How Pakistan Crushed Protests in Kashmir

The trouble with military hegemony

The dominant role of Pakistan’s military further constrains political space. Pakistan is governed by a hybrid regime in which civilian governments function within boundaries imposed by the military, which continues to exert tutelary control over national security, foreign policy, and even political competition. Pakistan-administered Kashmir reflects a concentrated version of this wider political order.

The geopolitical stakes of the Kashmir dispute are high, leaving the room for independent political action quite narrow. The Pakistan Army’s 12th Infantry Division, commanded by a major general and headquartered in the hill town of Murree, exercises operational control over the region, giving the military a direct hand in maintaining security.

Human rights observers have long documented the influence and the abuses of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services in the territory. The JAAC and rights activists argue that organized political activity and free expression are readily treated as security threats, narrowing the room for dissent. Elected institutions, they say, are reduced to a facade while the security apparatus determines whether political discontent can be expressed and mobilized.

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Strategy raises $334M through stock sales but buys no Bitcoin

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Strategy raises $334M through stock sales but buys no Bitcoin

Strategy raises $334M through stock sales but buys no Bitcoin

Proceeds funded STRC dividends and repurchases, while $149.1 million was added to Strategy’s US dollar reserve, which reached $4.8 billion.

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BitMine Cuts Weekly Buyback to 1.7M Shares as ETH Treasury Hits 5.82 Million

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BitMine Immersion Technologies (BMNR) has repurchased 1.7 million common shares in the week ending August 16. This is the smallest weekly buyback since the program began on July 1 and the third consecutive weekly decline, while the company’s Ethereum (ETH) treasury grew to 5,815,164 tokens.

Total crypto, cash, and “moonshot” holdings came to $11.4 billion, down from $11.6 billion a week earlier, even though BitMine added 9,926 ETH over the period. The company marked its ETH at $1,893 per token on August 16, against $1,928 a week before. As reported, BitMine purchased a 7,391 ETH batch that took the treasury past 5.8 million tokens last week.

“We are encouraged to see the ETH/BTC ratio at 0.02994 and rising,” stated Thomas “Tom” Lee, Chairman of BitMine, who linked the move to tokenization and agentic-AI applications.

Buyback Slows for Third Week

BitMine’s holdings equal 4.8% of the 120.7 million ETH supply, leaving it 96% of the way to its stated target of owning 5%. Lee said the company has bought ETH every week since the treasury strategy began on June 30, 2025.

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BitMine has repurchased 20.8 million common shares since July 1 under a $4 billion authorization. Weekly totals disclosed in its filings peaked at 6.1 million shares in the week to July 26, then fell to 4.5 million, 3 million, and 1.7 million. Lee has called the stock undervalued or attractively valued in each of those three releases, and described the program as the largest ever executed by any crypto digital asset treasury.

Back in July, BitMine cut its weekly ETH buying to 7,430 tokens from more than 30,500, a slowdown Lee attributed at the time to capital redirected toward repurchasing shares.

Cash Falls to $78 Million

Total cash and marketable securities stood at $78 million on August 16, a line that has declined in every weekly disclosure since June 28, when BitMine reported $527 million, passing through $482 million, $385 million, $268 million, $173 million, and $104 million.

Alongside the ETH, the company reported 210 Bitcoin (BTC), a $180 million stake in Beast Industries, and a $73 million stake in Eightco Holdings (ORBS).

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BitMine’s board declared seventeen weekly cash dividends on its 9.50% Series A Perpetual Preferred Stock on August 14, most at $0.1847 per share, payable from September 4 through December 28.

That security trades on the NYSE as BMNP against a $100 stated value.

The post BitMine Cuts Weekly Buyback to 1.7M Shares as ETH Treasury Hits 5.82 Million appeared first on CryptoPotato.

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L3Harris Replaces CEO After Conduct Investigation, Shares Retreat

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L3Harris Replaces CEO After Conduct Investigation, Shares Retreat

L3Harris stock retreated early Monday after the defense contractor abruptly parted ways with CEO Christopher Kubasik due to conduct violations. L3Harris (LHX), maker of aircraft components and weapons systems, on Monday said it departed ways with Christopher Kubasik, chairman and CEO, effective immediately. The defense contractor said Kubasik engaged in “conduct that was not consistent with the values of the…

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Gerber Warns Strategy’s Bitcoin Leverage Could Trigger a Selloff

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In Bitcoin news today, Ross Gerber questions BTC utility, criticizes Strategy’s model, and warns miner shifts toward AI could pressure BTC

In Bitcoin news today, Ross Gerber, CEO of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management, argued this week that gold remains easier to use for everyday transactions than Bitcoin, reviving a long-running debate over the asset’s real-world utility.

The comments arrived alongside a sharper attack on Michael Saylor’s Strategy Inc. (NASDAQ: MSTR), which Gerber warned could “nuke” Bitcoin if its leveraged accumulation model unwinds, according to a note shared with Benzinga.

Gerber’s utility argument centers on a simple observation: gold can be exchanged in far more physical settings worldwide than Bitcoin, even after years of industry claims about the cryptocurrency’s payment potential.

Trader Scott Melker pushed back on that framing, arguing that crypto-linked Visa and Mastercard cards already allow holders to spend Bitcoin at nearly any point of sale that accepts plastic.

That distinction matters for anyone tracking Bitcoin payments adoption, since card-rail spending routes through a custodian converting BTC to fiat at the point of sale rather than merchants accepting Bitcoin directly on-chain.

Bitcoin News: Saylor’s Leverage Model Draws Fire

In Bitcoin news today, Ross Gerber questions BTC utility, criticizes Strategy’s model, and warns miner shifts toward AI could pressure BTC
SOURCE: Yahoo Finance

Gerber’s more pointed criticism targets Strategy’s approach of selling equity to fund Bitcoin purchases. He questioned why an investor would accept diluted exposure at a premium to the underlying asset, a dynamic visible in Strategy’s stock, which trades at roughly 1.61x its Bitcoin holdings.

“The fact they can sell stock at some inflated valuation to then buy Bitcoin is crazy bad math for the investor. Why would you buy $100 of Bitcoin for $200?”

Gerber said Bitcoin’s periodic hard corrections could force Strategy into selling if its debt-funded structure comes under pressure, calling that scenario the mechanism that could “nuke” the cryptocurrency.

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Strategy has countered that its shift toward perpetual preferred stock, which carries no maturity date, insulates the company from forced liquidations even in an 80% drawdown.

The company held 629,376 BTC worth more than $72Bn as of its latest disclosure, after adding 430 BTC for roughly $51.4M, yet its stock has lagged Bitcoin’s own price performance over the same stretch.

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Bitcoin Miners Betting Big on AI

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In other Bitcoin news, Gerber also questioned whether Bitcoin’s network foundation is weakening as major miners redirect infrastructure toward artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.

That trend is documented rather than speculative: several listed miners have already converted mining capacity into AI hosting contracts, a shift detailed in coverage of Riot Platforms’ recent AI leasing arrangement.

Core Scientific, for example, has been converting a 300-megawatt Texas facility, once used for Bitcoin mining, into an AI data center campus, with colocation revenue now outpacing its digital-asset self-mining revenue.

CoinShares projections cited in coverage of the trend suggest mining revenue could fall from roughly 85% of total revenue in early 2025 to under 20% by the end of 2026 for miners with significant AI contracts, according to crypto.news.

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That reallocation of capital doesn’t signal the disappearance of Bitcoin mining, but it does mean the economics increasingly favor AI hosting over pure hash-rate production, a tension that supports part of Gerber’s broader skepticism without proving his claim that Bitcoin mining AI conversions have permanently capped the network’s upside.

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The post Gerber Warns Strategy’s Bitcoin Leverage Could Trigger a Selloff appeared first on Cryptonews.

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