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What is a multisig wallet? How crypto’s biggest treasuries get secured, and robbed

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Multisignature wallets guard most of the serious money in crypto: DAO treasuries, exchange cold storage, protocol funds, and the savings of the security-conscious. They are also at the center of the industry’s biggest heists, from Bybit’s $1.5 billion to this year’s UXLINK breach, because attackers stopped picking locks and started fooling the people holding the keys. This guide explains how multisig actually works, the M-of-N design choices, how the famous multisig hacks really happened, and how to run one without becoming a case study.

Summary

  • Multisig wallets protect crypto funds by requiring multiple approvals, reducing the risk of a single compromised key.
  • Major breaches such as Bybit and Ronin exposed human error and interface attacks rather than weaknesses in multisig technology itself.
  • Strong operational practices including independent verification and separate key management remain essential for multisig security.

Ask where crypto’s serious money lives, and the answer, overwhelmingly, is behind multiple signatures. A majority of institutional custodians run multisignature arrangements; DAO treasuries holding billions coordinate through them; exchanges guard cold storage with them; custody chains behind institutional products depend on them; and protocols park their upgrade keys and reserve funds inside them, most commonly in Safe, the contract system formerly known as Gnosis Safe, which alone secures values rivaling large banks. The idea is old, borrowed from bank vaults and nuclear launch protocols: no single person, key, or machine should be able to move what matters. Require M signatures out of N keys, 2-of-3, 3-of-5, and a thief must compromise several independent guardians instead of one.

And yet the largest theft in crypto’s history, Bybit’s $1.5 billion, walked out through a multisig. So did this year’s $11.3 million UXLINK breach, and the Ronin bridge’s $600 million before them. The pattern is the most instructive fact in modern crypto security: the multisig math has never been broken; the humans and interfaces around it are broken constantly. Multisig eliminates the single point of failure and replaces it with a subtler question, whether your several points of failure are actually independent, and the industry’s disaster record is a catalog of discovering they were not.

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This guide covers the mechanism and its failure modes with equal seriousness: how multisignature schemes actually work on Bitcoin and on smart-contract chains, how to choose M and N and what each choice trades, the anatomy of the great multisig heists and the blind-signing problem at their core, multisig against its modern rivals, MPC and smart accounts, and the operational playbook that separates the treasuries that survive from the ones that headline.

The mechanism: M-of-N, on two architectures

A multisig wallet requires a threshold of signatures, M, from a set of authorized keys, N, before any transaction executes. A 2-of-3 personal setup might split keys across a hardware wallet at home, a second device in a bank box, and a trusted relative; a 4-of-7 DAO treasury spreads keys across council members on different continents. The threshold is the design’s dial: security against compromise rises with M, resilience against key loss rises with the gap between N and M, and operational friction rises with both.

Under the hood, two architectures implement the idea. On Bitcoin, multisig is native to the protocol’s scripting: an address encodes the M-of-N requirement itself, and spending requires the signatures to be presented and verified by the network. It is minimal, battle-tested, and rigid, changing signers means moving funds to a new address. On Ethereum and similar chains, multisig lives in smart contracts: a program, such as a Safe, holds the funds and enforces the policy, collecting signatures until the threshold is met and then executing. The contract approach is vastly more flexible, signers can be rotated, thresholds changed, daily limits and timelocks and module extensions added, and that flexibility is double-edged: the policy is code, code can have flaws, and, as the disaster section will show, the richness of what a contract wallet can execute is exactly what modern attackers exploit.

The transaction flow in both worlds follows the same rhythm. Someone proposes a transaction, recipient, amount, and, on contract wallets, arbitrary program calls. The proposal circulates to signers, each of whom reviews and cryptographically approves it with their own key, on their own device. When approvals reach the threshold, the transaction becomes executable and is broadcast. Every step is auditable: the chain records exactly which keys approved what, creating the accountability trail that makes multisig the governance tool of choice for DAO treasuries whose control is otherwise contested through token votes, for corporate funds requiring officer sign-off, and for escrow arrangements where a neutral third key arbitrates disputes, the human-governed cousin of the time-locked contracts that automate escrow on-chain.

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Choosing M and N: the design space

The threshold choice is a risk allocation, and the standard configurations each answer a different question. 2-of-2 is a partnership with no tiebreaker and no recovery, one lost key strands the funds, and is mostly used with one key held by a service. 2-of-3 is the individual’s workhorse: it survives the loss of any one key, resists the compromise of any one key, and keeps signing friction tolerable; the classic personal build spreads three hardware keys across locations, and the classic collaborative-custody build gives one key to a professional service that can co-sign recovery but can never move funds alone. 3-of-5 and up is institutional territory, tolerating multiple losses and requiring multiple corruptions, at the price of coordination overhead that, in practice, tempts organizations into the worst sin of the genre: concentration, several keys held by one person, one office, one laptop, or one cloud account. A 3-of-5 whose keys live in three browsers and two drawers of the same office is a 1-of-1 with extra steps, and post-mortems of real losses find this shape constantly. The rule the design space reduces to: the security of a multisig is the security of its most correlated keys, and independence, of people, devices, software, and geography, is the entire point of the exercise.

Key-holder policy matters as much as the numbers. Every signer is a target the moment the arrangement is visible on-chain, and large treasuries are visible by definition, tracked by the same wallet-attribution lens that maps every whale. Serious operations therefore treat signers as an attack surface: hardware keys only, dedicated signing devices, no signer identities published unnecessarily, and procedures rehearsed before they are needed, because the day a treasury must move funds under pressure is the worst day to discover the third signer’s key is in a safe nobody can open.

How multisigs actually get robbed

The heist record is where this subject earns its place in a security curriculum, because the attacks share an anatomy and it is not the one intuition expects. No major multisig loss has come from breaking the cryptography. They come from making the right people sign the wrong thing.

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The Bybit theft, $1.5 billion, the largest in industry history, is the canonical case. The exchange’s cold storage sat behind a multisig with executives as signers, exactly as best practice prescribes. Attackers, attributed to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, compromised the infrastructure of the wallet interface the signers used, so that when the executives performed a routine, scheduled transfer, their screens showed the legitimate transaction while their hardware keys signed a different payload, one that handed the attackers control of the wallet’s logic. Every signature was genuine. Every signer was diligent by the standard of what they could see. The vault held; the vault’s window lied. The Ronin bridge before it fell differently but rhymes: a 5-of-9 arrangement whose keys were insufficiently independent, with one organization controlling enough of them that compromising it, via a social-engineered employee, crossed the threshold, the key-compromise pattern behind the largest bridge disasters. And this year’s UXLINK breach showed the small-scale version: attackers who gain threshold control do not just drain, they use the wallet’s own administrative powers, adding themselves as signers, ejecting the owners, because on a contract multisig, governance of the wallet is itself just another transaction.

The common thread is blind signing. A hardware key protects the signature; it does not tell the signer, in honest human terms, what they are signing, and complex contract-wallet payloads are unreadable hashes on a tiny screen. Attackers therefore aim at the layer between intention and signature: the web interface, the signer’s laptop, the proposal pipeline, the human’s routine. The defenses that address this are specific and increasingly standard: independent verification of every payload on a second channel before signing, signing devices that decode and display transaction meaning, simulation tools that preview a transaction’s actual effects, timelocks that delay large movements long enough for review, and the simple institutional rule that no transaction is routine, because routine is precisely the state of mind the Bybit attackers were waiting for.

From Bitcoin script to Safe: how the standard was built

Multisig’s history is the history of crypto custody growing up, and its milestones explain today’s defaults. The capability is nearly as old as Bitcoin itself, formalized in the protocol’s early years through pay-to-script-hash addresses that let spending conditions, including M-of-N signature requirements, be encoded on-chain. The first institutional era was built directly on it: the early exchange and custody pioneers ran Bitcoin multisig vaults, and the first collaborative-custody businesses sold 2-of-3 arrangements to individuals a decade ago. The idea crossed to Ethereum as smart-contract wallets, where the flexibility of code produced both the triumphs and the scars: an infamous 2017 library bug in a widely used contract wallet froze hundreds of millions permanently, the formative lesson that flexible custody code is itself an attack surface, and the survivor of that era’s consolidation, Gnosis Safe, hardened through years of audits and adversarial value into the default it is now.

Today Safe-style contracts secure treasuries whose combined value rivals major banks, the DAO era having made the multisig council crypto’s standard governance executive, and Bitcoin’s own multisig lineage continues in parallel, favored for deep cold storage precisely because its rigid, minimal script surface offers so little to exploit.

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The standardization has a consequence worth naming: concentration of a different kind. When one contract system secures the majority of on-chain treasuries, its code, its interface, and its upgrade process become systemic infrastructure, and the Bybit attack’s compromise of interface infrastructure was, among other things, a demonstration that the ecosystem’s eggs share more baskets than the M-of-N math suggests. The response, interface diversity, independent transaction verification services, signing-device decoding, is effectively the community rebuilding independence one layer up the stack, the same principle the wallets encode, applied to the tooling around them.

Setting one up: the individual’s path

For an individual reader, the practical on-ramp deserves concreteness. A personal 2-of-3 today is a weekend project: three hardware keys, ideally from two different vendors to avoid a shared firmware flaw; a contract wallet on an inexpensive network or a native Bitcoin multisig, depending on holdings; owner addresses triple-checked before deployment, because a mistyped owner is a permanent stranger with signing power; and the three keys distributed across genuinely separate locations, home, bank box, trusted party, with recovery instructions that someone other than you can follow.

The recurring costs are minor, deployment gas and slightly larger transaction fees, and the recurring disciplines are not: test the setup with small amounts first, rehearse a lost-key migration before losing one, keep a small gas balance where the contract needs it, and revisit the arrangement whenever a signer, device, or living situation changes. The friction is real, every transaction becomes a small ceremony, and the friction is the feature: a wallet that requires deliberation cannot be drained by one bad click, which, given that a single mistaken approval is how most individual losses now happen, is the entire value proposition in one sentence.

Multisig and its rivals: MPC and smart accounts

Two adjacent technologies answer the same single-point-of-failure problem, and choosing among them is a real decision, not branding.

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Multi-party computation, MPC, splits one key into mathematical shares held by different parties, who jointly compute a signature without the full key ever existing anywhere. To the blockchain, the result looks like an ordinary single signature: cheaper, private, chain-agnostic, and revealing nothing about the policy behind it. The trade is opacity and dependence: the threshold logic lives in the providers’ off-chain software rather than in public code, there is no on-chain trail of who approved what, and the institutional MPC market is dominated by vendors whose systems must be trusted. Institutions increasingly use both, MPC for operational hot flows, multisig for deep cold governance.

Smart accounts, account abstraction, generalize the contract-wallet idea: programmable accounts with recovery guardians, spending policies, session keys, and multisig as merely one available policy among many. They are the likely long-term home of these ideas for individuals, folding multisig-grade protection into interfaces normal users can operate. For treasuries today, the audited, battle-hardened dedicated multisig remains the standard, precisely because its decade of scars, documented above, produced a decade of hardening.

Between the architectures sits a question every treasury eventually asks: how many signers is too many? The coordination cost of thresholds grows faster than linearly, five signers across five time zones can turn a routine payment into a week, and organizations respond with delegation structures that deserve scrutiny because they quietly re-centralize. Common patterns include a small operational multisig with spending limits for daily flows, governed by a larger cold council for everything above the limit; module systems that pre-authorize specific recurring actions; and role separation between proposers, who prepare transactions, and signers, who approve them, narrowing what any single compromised seat can initiate. Each pattern trades purity for function, and the honest evaluation standard is the same one the thresholds themselves answer to: enumerate what the compromise of each seat, device, and interface enables, and check that no enumeration ends in everything. Treasury security is not a product purchased once; it is that enumeration, repeated, forever, against adversaries who read the same post-mortems.

One misconception deserves explicit correction before the playbook: multisig does not protect against approving a bad idea unanimously. If all required signers are deceived by the same forged interface, the same fraudulent counterparty, or the same internal fraudster’s paperwork, the threshold is met and the mathematics executes the mistake faithfully. Signature independence protects against compromised keys; only verification independence, different signers checking the payload through different tooling and channels, protects against compromised information, and the great heists were failures of the second kind wearing the confidence of the first.

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The operational playbook

Everything in this guide compresses into a practice list, and the list is the difference between the mechanism and its reputation. Choose thresholds for both compromise and loss: 2-of-3 personal, 3-of-5 or higher institutional. Make independence real: different people, devices, vendors, physical locations, and no key in a browser. Verify what you sign: second-channel confirmation of every payload, simulation before approval, and a standing suspicion of anything urgent. Add time as a defense: timelocks on large transfers turn a successful deception into a recoverable one. Rehearse recovery: a lost-key drill and a signer-rotation drill, run before either is needed. And treat the wallet’s own governance, adding or removing signers, changing thresholds, as the crown jewels, because the UXLINK lesson is that whoever can edit the signer set owns everything the signatures guard.

Multisig, honestly summarized, is the most successful security primitive crypto has deployed: it moved the industry’s treasuries from single hackable keys to arrangements that require conspiracies to rob, and the conspiracies, note, have had to grow to nation-state sophistication to succeed. Its failures are not refutations but curriculum, each one converting a blind spot into a checklist item, and the checklist is public. The vault works. Guard the window.

Two closing perspectives round out the subject. The first is the defender’s asymmetry, and it is encouraging: every major multisig loss has produced a specific, adoptable countermeasure, payload verification after Bybit, key-independence audits after Ronin, signer-set timelocks after the takeover breaches, and the countermeasures compound while the attacks must be reinvented. A treasury running the current playbook is not facing the same odds its predecessors did; it is facing adversaries who must now defeat every lesson previous victims paid for. Security in this domain is cumulative, and the cumulation is public.

The second is the philosophical point hiding in the mechanism, worth one paragraph because it explains multisig’s cultural weight in crypto. A multisignature arrangement is a constitution in miniature: a written rule about who may act, enforced by mathematics instead of courts, visible to everyone it governs. That is why the technology became the executive branch of the DAO era, why its failures feel like institutional scandals rather than mere thefts, and why its steady hardening matters beyond the funds it guards. Crypto’s founding claim was that agreements could be enforced without trusted enforcers, and the multisig, requiring humans to agree while preventing any of them from betraying the agreement, is the claim’s most widely deployed, most thoroughly attacked, and most durably successful embodiment. The vaults hold more than money.

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For further orientation, the study list is mercifully practical: the post-mortems of the major incidents named above, each a free masterclass in one failure mode; the documentation of the dominant contract systems, whose security recommendations encode the industry’s accumulated scar tissue; the transaction-simulation and payload-decoding tools that address blind signing directly; and, for organizations, the published treasury-operations frameworks that DAOs and custodians have converged on. Multisig is the rare corner of crypto where the best practices are written down, battle-tested, and free, and where the distance between the average outcome and the best outcome is almost entirely a matter of reading them.

And if this guide leaves a single instinct behind, let it be this one: in multisig, the question is never whether the mathematics will hold, because it will. The question, every time, for every transaction, is whether the humans holding the keys know what they are signing, and every practice in the playbook above is, in the end, a different way of making sure the answer is yes.

Disclaimer: This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute investment or security advice. Digital asset custody carries significant risk, and no arrangement eliminates it. Details are current as of July 9, 2026. Always do your own research.

Frequently asked questions

What is a multisig wallet in simple terms?

A multisig wallet is a crypto wallet that requires multiple private keys to approve any transaction, following an M-of-N rule such as 2-of-3 or 3-of-5. No single person or device can move the funds alone: a proposal must collect the threshold number of signatures, each from an independent key, before it executes. This removes the single point of failure that defines ordinary wallets.

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How does a 2-of-3 multisig work?

Three keys are created and stored independently, for example on a hardware wallet at home, a second device in another location, and with a trusted party or service. Any two of the three must sign for a transaction to execute. One key being lost does not strand the funds, and one key being stolen does not endanger them, which is why 2-of-3 is the standard personal configuration.

Are multisig wallets actually safe if Bybit lost $1.5 billion through one?

The mathematics has never been broken; the famous losses came from deceiving the signers. In the Bybit case, attackers compromised the signing interface so executives approved a malicious payload their screens displayed as routine. The lesson is that multisig secures the signatures, while operational discipline, verifying payloads independently, using devices that decode transactions, adding timelocks, must secure what gets signed.

What happens if I lose one of my keys?

If your threshold still allows it, for example losing one key of a 2-of-3, the remaining keys can move the funds, and best practice is to migrate promptly to a fresh setup with a full key set. If losses exceed the tolerance, the funds are permanently inaccessible, which is why the gap between N and M exists and why recovery drills matter.

What is the difference between multisig and MPC?

Multisig uses several complete keys with the threshold enforced on-chain, visible and auditable. MPC splits a single key into shares that jointly produce one ordinary-looking signature, with the policy enforced in off-chain software. Multisig offers transparency and battle-tested public code; MPC offers privacy, lower fees, and chain flexibility at the cost of trusting provider infrastructure. Institutions commonly use MPC for hot operations and multisig for cold governance.

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Who should use a multisig wallet?

Anyone holding more crypto than they could bear to lose to a single mistake: individuals with significant savings, and, essentially without exception, organizations, DAOs managing community treasuries, companies with crypto on the balance sheet, protocols holding upgrade keys, and groups needing escrow. For small everyday balances, the coordination friction usually outweighs the benefit.

What is blind signing and why is it dangerous?

Blind signing is approving a transaction whose true contents you cannot read, typically a complex smart-contract payload shown as an opaque hash. It is the vector behind the largest multisig heists: attackers compromise the interface so signers see a legitimate transaction while approving a malicious one. Defenses include devices that decode payloads, independent second-channel verification, and simulation tools that preview effects.

Can the signers of a multisig be changed?

On smart-contract multisigs, yes: adding or removing signers and changing the threshold are themselves transactions requiring threshold approval. That flexibility enables rotation and recovery, and it is also a target, since an attacker reaching the threshold can eject the rightful owners entirely, as recent breaches showed. Treat signer-set changes as the most sensitive operation the wallet performs.

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Robinhood wins UK crypto registration ahead of new regulatory regime commencing

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Robinhood (HOOD) L2 testnet logs 4 million transactions in first week

Crypto-friendly trading platform Robinhood (HOOD) is now registered to offer cryptocurrency services in the U.K.

Robinhood’s U.K. arm was added to the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) list of registered cryptoasset companies as of July 31.

The company’s existing FCA registration means it meets the regulator’s requirements where it comes to anti-money laundering (AML). A regime for crypto firms has been in effect since 2020 and now numbers over 50 approved companies, including Ripple, Kraken and traditional finance (TradFi) giants like BlackRock and BNY.

Winning the regulator’s permission to offer crypto services has added significance ahead of the inception of the more comprehensive framework for crypto regulation in the U.K. The authorization process opens at the end of September and closes at the end of February next year, ahead of the full regime coming into force in October.

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The relatively brief window for companies to register and obtain full regulatory approval means those firms already registered under the FCA’s existing regime may have done a lot of the heavy lifting in advance.

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ZeroStack’s Ability To Continue As A Going Concern In Doubt After 0G Token Collapse

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Crypto Breaking News

ZeroStack’s plan to fund operations through 0G token reward sales is in jeopardy after a sharp drop in the token’s value. The downturn has also cast doubt on the company’s ability to continue as a going concern.

ZeroStack ended June with a $61.3 million first-half loss, negative working capital, and $2.6 million in cash.

ZeroStack’s Form 10-Q Disclosure

According to its Form 10-Q disclosure for the quarter ending June 30, ZeroStack held $2.6 million in cash, negative working capital of $600,000, an accumulated deficit of $339.1 million, and a $61.3 million net loss. The company also reported an accounting loss of $82.5 million after re-measuring its assets at fair value.

ZeroStack held 75.1 million 0G tokens with a fair value of $15.17 million and a recorded cost of $163.33 million. It also held a small Bitcoin (BTC) position, taking the total fair value of ZeroStack’s holdings to $15.21 million and the total recorded value to $163.43 million.

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The downturn in the value of ZeroStack’s 0G tokens represents a 90% decline and has cast serious doubts on the company’s financial stability and its ability to continue operations without securing additional funding.

Staking Reward Sales To Fund Operations

ZeroStack received 6.62 million 0G tokens through staking rewards in the first half of 2026, earning $3.78 million in revenue. The company sold 4.94 million 0G tokens for $2.4 million and used $2.47 million in cash for other operational activities. The company plans to monetize staking rewards and fund operations.

It may also sell some of its underlying holdings. ZeroStack stated in its disclosure that the staked tokens are held in company wallets and can be withdrawn when needed. The company also noted that staking rewards could decline or disappear entirely, and that any sale depended on prevailing market conditions and token value.

However, ZeroStack’s strategy could be at risk due to the significant decline in the 0G token’s value. The token is currently trading at $0.14, declining nearly 5% in the past 24 hours.

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Investor Confidence Shaken

ZeroStack’s 0G bet and the subsequent decline in the token’s value significantly impact its investors. The downturn could result in further write-downs, affecting stock price and investor confidence.

Investors will closely monitor ZeroStack’s next steps. The company can raise funds through asset sales, a capital raise, or restructuring efforts. However, its current model could fail if the 0G token’s value continues declining.

ZeroStack’s July 20 acquisition of Texas Blocker increased its 0G token holding to 223.77 million, amplifying its exposure to the token’s downturn.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

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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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HashKey receives JPMorgan approval to open client money account

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HashKey receives JPMorgan approval to open client money account

HashKey receives JPMorgan approval to open client money account

HashKey Exchange said it received approval to open client money accounts with JPMorgan, weeks after it launched customer fund accounts with DBS Bank.

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Bitcoin cold-wallet losses may near $114 million as possible fourth sweep emerges

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The Coldcard attacker went after dust, then found value again. (Shaurya Malwa/CoinDesk)

The flaw allowing the exploit traces to a March 2021 firmware build that routed seed generation to a predictable software randomizer instead of the chip’s hardware one, leaving the resulting keys reproducible offline by anyone who works out the range. Coldcard manufacturer Coinkite released emergency firmware for every affected model and told users who had generated a seed on the flawed software to move funds to a wallet address made with a fresh one.

Thorn said he had no direct victim report and published his findings on pattern matching alone, choosing speed over confirmation to warn people while the transactions were still unconfirmed.

If it holds, however, the running total across four waves had reached about 1,816 bitcoin, near $114 million, from more than 5,200 addresses since July 30.

The Coldcard attacker went after dust, then found value again. (Shaurya Malwa/CoinDesk)

Thorn advised users to check funds, move anything off an affected device and bid the fee up.

The pattern covered blocks 960,778 to 960,792, with 218 transactions hitting 462 victim addresses at a rate of about 14 sweeps per block against 0.3 in a pre-incident control window, roughly 45 times normal.

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Each of the spent coins that arrived after the Coldcard firmware boundary, and the destinations were fresh addresses with no prior history, one per victim rather than the shared collectors that made the first two waves easy to map.

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How to choose the best crypto payment gateway for businesses in 2026

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OpenAI buys tech talk show TBPN as it builds out communication strategy

Disclosure: This article does not represent investment advice. The content and materials featured on this page are for educational purposes only.

Learn how to choose the best crypto payment gateway for businesses by comparing settlement, compliance, integrations, automation, and fees in 2026.

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Companies serving international customers, digital-first audiences, or markets with limited card and bank transfer coverage may use crypto payments to fill the gap. A crypto payment gateway allows a business to accept crypto payments without building blockchain infrastructure internally. The provider can generate addresses, monitor confirmations, convert assets, screen transactions, and route settlements. The key question in 2026 is which provider can support the required assets, jurisdictions, settlement model, compliance process, and volume.

What defines the best crypto payment gateway for businesses?

The best crypto payment gateway for businesses depends on how the payment flow is expected to work.

Supported cryptocurrencies determine which assets customers can use, while blockchain coverage determines the available networks. The same stablecoin may operate on several blockchains with different fees and confirmation times.

The next question is what happens after payment. Some businesses retain crypto, while others convert it into stablecoins or fiat. Settlement options and automatic conversion should therefore be reviewed together. Auto-conversion can reduce volatility exposure and manual exchange work, while fiat settlement can simplify accounting and treasury management. However, availability may depend on the provider, jurisdiction, banking partners, and compliance checks.

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Businesses must also decide how the gateway will connect with existing systems through an API, hosted checkout, or payment links. An API provides greater control over checkout logic and transaction handling, while hosted checkout reduces development work. Payment links support invoices and direct sales that do not require a conventional online store. Webhooks complement these methods by sending updates when a transaction is confirmed, underpaid, expired, or refunded.

Security and compliance determine whether the gateway fits internal policies. Relevant controls include KYB onboarding, AML screening, access permissions, withdrawal allowlists, transaction monitoring, and audit records. Transaction histories, exports, and reconciliation reports also reduce manual interpretation of blockchain records.

Finally, businesses need to assess reliability and total cost. Uptime and support affect payment continuity, while a headline fee may exclude blockchain charges, conversion fees, payouts, or fiat withdrawals. Providers should therefore be compared across the complete payment and settlement flow.

Comparison of leading crypto payment gateways

Provider Best suited for Supported crypto API Fiat settlement Auto-conversion
PassimPay International digital businesses requiring multi-chain payments, automation, and several collection or payout methods 74+ Yes Yes Yes
CoinGate Merchants seeking an established checkout ecosystem, major assets, e-commerce plugins, and scheduled settlement 10+ core assets Yes EUR, GBP, and USD Yes
NOWPayments Projects prioritizing broad asset coverage, flexible integrations, subscriptions, or mass payouts 350+ Yes Available through fiat processing and withdrawal tools Yes
CryptoProcessing by CoinsPaid Larger organizations requiring managed payment infrastructure, permanent deposit addresses, exchanges, and batch payouts 20+ Yes Crypto-to-fiat exchange and bank withdrawal Yes

The table reflects publicly available product information. Exact availability can vary by jurisdiction, asset, network, account type, and onboarding outcome.

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PassimPay overview

PassimPay combines payment acceptance, fund management, conversion, and payout tools in one crypto payment solution. The platform supports more than 74 cryptocurrencies across over 18 blockchains and is available in 122 countries.

Businesses can integrate through a Payment API or use Hosted Checkout when a ready-made interface is more suitable. Payment Links support remote billing, while Static Deposit Wallets provide reusable addresses for account-based deposits. Webhooks connect transaction events with merchant systems.

Beyond incoming payments, Mass Payouts and Batch Transactions support transfers to multiple recipients. Auto Conversion can move received assets into another supported currency, while Fiat Settlement provides an off-ramp for companies that do not want to retain all revenue in crypto. The Merchant Portal includes Transaction History and Reports for tracking and reconciliation.

PassimPay also provides AML Screening, checkout customization, and payment monitoring. It has more than 530 merchants, over 750,000 monthly transactions, more than $4 billion processed, and 99.99% uptime. Fees start at 0.5%, although the final cost depends on the services and transaction flow used.

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This feature set suits SaaS, gaming, AI, hosting, e-commerce, and other digital services that need multi-market payments, user deposits, automated updates, conversion, or recurring payouts.

When different providers may fit different business needs

CoinGate may fit companies that value an established merchant ecosystem, e-commerce integrations, core cryptocurrency support, and settlement in major fiat currencies. Its standard plan lists a 1% processing fee and weekly automatic settlement.

NOWPayments may suit projects that prioritize asset breadth. It supports more than 350 cryptocurrencies, API-based payments, subscriptions, payment buttons, custody options, mass payouts, and auto-conversion. Its published service fee is 0.5% for single-currency payments and 1% when conversion is required.

CryptoProcessing by CoinsPaid may fit enterprise-oriented operations that need permanent deposit addresses, payment links, internal exchanges, mass payouts, e-commerce plugins, and crypto-to-fiat withdrawal. Its documentation lists support for more than 20 cryptocurrencies.

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PassimPay may fit companies that need multi-chain coverage together with hosted payments, static wallets, automated conversion, fiat settlement, reporting, and payout functions. The final decision depends on the assets, networks, countries, controls, and settlement routes required by the business model.

Conclusion

Selecting the best crypto payment gateway for businesses requires more than comparing supported coins. Companies need to assess integration depth, blockchain coverage, settlement currencies, compliance controls, reporting, uptime, support, and total processing costs.

CoinGate, NOWPayments, CryptoProcessing by CoinsPaid, and PassimPay address different operational priorities. PassimPay stands among the more functionally complete options in this group for international digital businesses requiring multi-chain acceptance, automated fund management, and both collection and payout tools. Still, the appropriate provider is the one that matches the company’s payment flow, risk policy, technical resources, and settlement requirements.

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Disclosure: This content is provided by a third party. Neither crypto.news nor the author of this article endorses any product mentioned on this page. Users should conduct their own research before taking any action related to the company.

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Coldcard pushes bitcoin back to exchanges: the anti-self-custody trade

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Coldcard pushes bitcoin back to exchanges: the anti-self-custody trade

The Coldcard exploit is not a hack in the way most people understand the word. Nobody broke into anything. Nobody phished anyone. Nobody stole a seed phrase from a sticky note. The devices generated weak private keys for five years, and an attacker figured out how to guess them.

Summary

  • Four coordinated attack waves have drained an estimated 1,816 BTC (approximately $118 million) from Coldcard hardware wallets since July 30, with Galaxy Research tracking 5,294 affected addresses and warning that every vulnerable device will eventually be emptied.
  • The exploit stems from a firmware build error present since March 2021 that reduced seed entropy from 128 bits to approximately 40 bits on Mk3 devices and 72 bits on Mk4/Mk5/Q models, making private keys guessable through brute force.
  • Unlike the FTX collapse, which drove bitcoin off exchanges into self-custody, the Coldcard crisis is producing the opposite flow: users are moving bitcoin back to regulated exchanges and institutional custodians they previously abandoned.
  • The net transfer of bitcoin from self-custody wallets to exchange addresses has been positive every day since July 31 according to on-chain flow data, reversing a two-year trend that began after FTX.
  • Treasury companies that hold bitcoin through institutional custody, including Strategy and prospective entrants like Evernorth, benefit from a narrative shift that frames self-custody as a risk rather than a solution.

That distinction matters because it strikes at the foundation of the self-custody argument. The pitch for hardware wallets has always been simple: your keys, your coins, no counterparty risk. Coldcard was the gold standard of that philosophy. Air-gapped, open-source, bitcoin-only, endorsed by security researchers and institutional custodians as the most trusted device in the ecosystem.

If the most trusted hardware wallet can ship a five-year entropy bug without detection, the question is no longer whether Coldcard failed. The question is whether any hardware wallet can be trusted as the sole custodial layer for significant bitcoin holdings. And the market is answering that question with its feet.

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The exploit in four waves

The first wave hit at 2:14 a.m. UTC on July 30. A single entity swept 594 BTC from approximately 500 wallets in 25 minutes. The second wave followed on August 1, draining 284.4 BTC from 2,889 addresses. The third wave hit later that day with 207.73 BTC across a separate address cluster. The fourth wave arrived on August 3, with Galaxy Research’s Alex Thorn identifying 448.7 BTC moving from 709 suspected victim addresses.

The combined estimate stands at approximately 1,816 BTC across 5,294 addresses. Galaxy measures 13.8 sweeps per block during active waves, roughly 45 times the baseline rate. Thorn described the pattern as “LIKELY Coldcard victims” based on unspent output characteristics and transaction behavior. The wording is precise because the attribution comes from blockchain analysis, not device records or law enforcement confirmation.

Coinkite, the Toronto-based manufacturer, traced the problem to a March 2021 firmware change. A preprocessor guard was supposed to select the hardware random-number generator during seed creation. The guard checked whether a configuration setting was defined, not whether its value was correct. The build system selected a deterministic MicroPython fallback instead. The firmware compiled without warnings. Seeds appeared normal. Addresses accepted deposits. Nothing indicated the entropy was catastrophically weak.

On Mk3 devices, the effective search space dropped to approximately 40 bits. A 128-bit seed has more possible combinations than atoms in the observable universe. A 40-bit seed has roughly one trillion combinations. That is within reach of commodity hardware. The Mk4, Mk5, and Q models include additional secure elements that mix their own entropy, producing seeds with approximately 72 bits. Better than 40, but still far below the 128-bit target.

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The critical detail: updating the firmware does not repair an existing seed. Every Coldcard owner who generated a seed on affected firmware must create a new seed on patched hardware and migrate their funds. The key itself must be replaced.

The flow reversal: from exchanges to self-custody and back

After FTX collapsed in November 2022, the bitcoin community experienced its most dramatic shift in custodial philosophy. The phrase “not your keys, not your coins” became operational advice rather than a slogan. On-chain data showed a sustained, multi-month transfer of bitcoin from exchange addresses to self-custody wallets. The trend persisted for nearly two years.

The Coldcard exploit has reversed that flow. Net transfers from self-custody wallets to exchange addresses have been positive every day since July 31. The magnitude is not comparable to the post-FTX exodus, which involved hundreds of thousands of BTC over months. The current flow is smaller and more concentrated among users who specifically held Coldcard devices. But the direction of the flow is what matters for the narrative.

The users moving bitcoin to exchanges are not panicking retail investors. Many are technically sophisticated holders who chose Coldcard specifically because it was the most security-conscious option. They are making a rational calculation: the counterparty risk of an exchange is now quantifiable and insured, while the self-custody risk of a hardware wallet with a five-year entropy bug is neither.

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That calculation is the narrative shift. Self-custody was supposed to eliminate counterparty risk entirely. The Coldcard exploit demonstrates that self-custody introduces its own category of risk: supply-chain risk, firmware risk, entropy risk, and the risk that the device you trust with your private keys is not doing what its manufacturer claims.

Who benefits: the treasury company model

The companies that hold bitcoin through institutional custody benefit directly from the narrative shift. Strategy, the largest corporate holder with over 550,000 BTC as of its latest disclosure, uses institutional custodians including Coinbase Custody and Fidelity Digital Assets. These custodians use multi-signature arrangements, hardware security modules, and geographic distribution that do not depend on any single device’s entropy quality.

The treasury company thesis is built on the argument that holding bitcoin through a publicly traded company is safer than holding it yourself, more liquid than holding it in a hardware wallet, and more capital-efficient because the company can borrow against its holdings. The Coldcard exploit strengthens the first claim in a way that no marketing campaign could.

Evernorth, the XRP treasury company preparing to list, faces a similar dynamic. Prospective investors who might have preferred self-custody of XRP now have a concrete example of what can go wrong with hardware wallet security. The listing calculus shifts when self-custody carries visible, quantifiable risk.

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The broader pattern extends to every institutional custody provider. Coinbase Custody, BitGo, Fireblocks, and Anchorage reported inquiries surging after the first Coldcard wave. The product these companies sell is the elimination of exactly the risk that Coldcard exposed: the risk that a hardware implementation error, invisible for years, can make your private keys guessable.

The insurance gap and what it reveals

The Coldcard exploit has exposed an insurance gap that the industry has not addressed. Regulated exchanges and custodians carry insurance against theft, operational failure, and in some cases, hot-wallet compromise. The coverage limits vary, but the principle is established: if an exchange loses your bitcoin through its own failure, there is a claims process.

Self-custody has no equivalent. If a hardware wallet generates a weak key and an attacker drains the funds, the user has no insurance claim. Coinkite is a private company in Toronto. No product liability framework for hardware wallet entropy failures exists. The affected users can sue, but collecting meaningful damages from a hardware startup is a different proposition from filing a claim against an insured custodian.

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The insurance gap is not a new observation, but the Coldcard exploit makes it concrete. A user who lost 10 BTC from a Coldcard has no recovery mechanism. A user who lost 10 BTC from Coinbase Custody would have a claim against the custodian’s insurance. The risk-adjusted comparison now favors institutional custody for any holding above the threshold where insurance matters.

The AI dimension and what it means for future exploits

Coinkite said the attacker used AI to discover the firmware flaw, and that Coinkite’s own AI audit of the same code weeks earlier found nothing. If that assessment is correct, it introduces a new variable into the self-custody risk model.

Hardware wallet security has historically rested on the assumption that open-source code is safer because more eyes can review it. The Coldcard firmware was public for five years. Thousands of developers could have inspected it. Nobody found the entropy bug. An AI model did.

The implication is that the advantage in firmware analysis has shifted from defenders to attackers. If AI can find subtle build-system errors that human reviewers miss, then every open-source hardware wallet is potentially vulnerable to the same methodology. The attacker does not need to find a new type of bug. They need to find a new instance of the same type of bug in a different codebase.

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Block, Trezor, and Ledger have confirmed their products are unaffected by the specific Coldcard vulnerability. But “unaffected by this specific bug” is not the same as “provably secure against AI-assisted firmware analysis.” The assurance gap is structural, and the Coldcard exploit is the first public demonstration of it.

The self-custody argument is not dead, but it is wounded

The self-custody philosophy will survive the Coldcard exploit. Multi-signature arrangements that do not depend on any single device, hardware wallets from manufacturers with different codebases, and cold storage practices that incorporate dice rolls for entropy remain valid approaches. Coinkite itself noted that seeds created with at least 50 fair dice rolls are not considered exposed by this RNG issue.

What the exploit has damaged is the simplest version of the self-custody argument: buy a hardware wallet, generate a seed, store it safely, and never worry about counterparty risk again. That version assumed the hardware wallet worked as advertised. For five years, Coldcard did not.

The result is a more nuanced custody landscape. Self-custody for small amounts remains practical. Self-custody for significant holdings now requires either multi-signature setups, multiple hardware vendors, external entropy sources, or regular security audits that most individual holders cannot perform. For holders who cannot or will not take those steps, institutional custody has become the lower-risk option. And that is exactly the argument the treasury companies have been making all along.

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What to watch

  • Exchange inflow data. If the net transfer from self-custody to exchanges continues beyond the initial Coldcard panic, it signals a durable shift in custody preferences rather than a temporary reaction.
  • Coinkite’s liability exposure. Any class-action filing against Coinkite will establish precedent for hardware wallet manufacturer liability. Watch for suits in US and Canadian courts.
  • Institutional custodian onboarding numbers. Coinbase Custody, BitGo, and Fireblocks quarterly reports will show whether the Coldcard exploit translated into sustained new business.
  • Strategy and Evernorth share price behavior. If treasury company stocks outperform bitcoin in August, the market is pricing the custody-narrative shift into equities.
  • New firmware audit disclosures. If other hardware wallet manufacturers commission independent AI-assisted audits and publish results, it signals the industry is taking the supply-chain risk seriously.

Frequently asked questions

How much bitcoin has been stolen from Coldcard wallets?

Galaxy Research estimates approximately 1,816 BTC across four coordinated attack waves affecting 5,294 addresses since July 30. The figure is based on blockchain analysis and has not been confirmed by Coinkite or law enforcement.

Is the Coldcard exploit still ongoing?

Yes. Galaxy identified the fourth wave on August 3 and warned that vulnerable seeds will continue to be drained until affected users migrate to new wallets with fresh seeds on patched firmware.

Does updating Coldcard firmware fix the problem?

No. The firmware update fixes seed generation going forward, but it does not repair seeds already created on vulnerable firmware. Users must generate entirely new seeds and transfer their funds.

Are other hardware wallets affected?

Block, Trezor, and Ledger have confirmed their products are not affected by this specific vulnerability. However, the exploit demonstrates that firmware-level entropy bugs can persist undetected for years in any open-source codebase.

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Why are people moving bitcoin to exchanges instead of other hardware wallets?

Regulated exchanges and custodians offer insurance, multi-signature security, and professional monitoring that individual hardware wallets do not. The Coldcard exploit made self-custody risk visible and quantifiable, changing the risk comparison.

Do treasury companies like Strategy use hardware wallets?

Strategy and other institutional holders use professional custodians like Coinbase Custody and Fidelity Digital Assets, which employ multi-signature arrangements and hardware security modules rather than single consumer hardware wallets.

Can affected users recover stolen bitcoin?

Recovery is extremely unlikely. The attacker controls the private keys. Bitcoin transactions are irreversible. Users with unconfirmed transactions may attempt Replace-by-Fee to redirect funds, but this window is narrow and not guaranteed.

Is self-custody still safe?

Self-custody remains viable with proper practices: multi-signature setups across multiple hardware vendors, external entropy from dice rolls, and regular security audits. Single-device, single-signature self-custody for significant holdings now carries documented risk.

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Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or legal advice. Loss estimates are based on third-party blockchain analysis and have not been confirmed by the manufacturer or law enforcement. Published August 3, 2026.

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Bitcoin price drops below $63K despite Iran relief

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U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs, source: SoSoValue

Bitcoin slipped below $63,000 on Monday, Aug. 3, even as falling oil prices and stronger U.S. stock futures created a more favorable backdrop for risk assets.

Summary

  • Bitcoin fell below $63,000 while oil and Treasury yields declined on renewed Iran diplomacy hopes.
  • Coldcard attack estimates now exceed 1,815 BTC across more than 5,000 suspected victim addresses overall.
  • Spot Bitcoin ETFs lost $61.53 million last week, ending three consecutive weeks of net inflows.
  • Strategy added Bitcoin’s 200 week average as prices hovered only modestly above the indicator Monday.
  • A Senate delay left the CLARITY Act without scheduled floor action before the August recess.

BTC traded near $62,556, down 1.38% over 24 hours and 4.35% over seven days. It had reached a Sunday high near $63,650 before sellers regained control. Ether fell about 1.8% to $1,841, while XRP and Solana also declined.

The weakness came as investors assessed renewed U.S. talks with Iran, another suspected Coldcard attack wave, fresh spot Bitcoin ETF outflows and the absence of the CLARITY Act from Monday’s Senate schedule.

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Bitcoin price fails to follow the broader relief trade

President Donald Trump canceled a planned military strike on Iran and said negotiations would seek to address Iran’s nuclear program and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Brent crude fell to about $83.28 per barrel, while West Texas Intermediate dropped to $79.47.

Nasdaq futures rose about 0.8%, while S&P 500 futures gained 0.6%. Treasury prices also strengthened as lower oil reduced some of the inflation concerns created by disrupted energy supplies.

Bitcoin did not follow that move. The divergence does not prove that one crypto event caused the decline. However, it shows that lower oil and stronger equity futures were not enough to overcome the pressures already affecting digital assets.

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The relative weakness is consistent with a possible rotation of speculative capital toward technology stocks. Price action alone cannot confirm that movement, but renewed activity in equities can reduce demand for crypto when traders have several competing sources of volatility.

Coldcard losses keep security fears in focus

Galaxy Research head Alex Thorn identified what he described as a “LIKELY” fourth organized wave affecting Coldcard generated addresses. His updated estimate covered 709 potential victim addresses and 448.7 BTC. Activity reached 13.8 sweeps per Bitcoin block, about 45 times the rate measured during an earlier control period.

Galaxy had previously mapped three suspected waves involving 1,367.05 BTC across 4,585 addresses. Adding the latest estimate produces a possible total of 1,815.75 BTC across 5,294 addresses, assuming the groups contain no overlap.

That total remains an onchain estimate. Coinkite, law enforcement agencies and individual wallet owners have not independently confirmed every address as a victim. Galaxy has also not established whether one attacker controlled all four waves.

The incident concerns seed generation in affected Coldcard firmware rather than a failure in Bitcoin’s network or transaction cryptography. Coinkite said some devices created seeds with less randomness than intended, allowing attackers to search a smaller range of possible keys.

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Coinkite has released corrected firmware for each affected model. However, installing an update does not repair an existing vulnerable seed. Users must generate a new seed with corrected firmware and transfer their funds. The company said its investigation remains ongoing.

As crypto.news previously reported, Thorn also identified similar transactions waiting in the mempool. Some users may be able to replace an unconfirmed attacker transaction with a higher fee transfer, although success is “not guaranteed.”

ETF outflows and the CLARITY delay add pressure

U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded about $61.5 million in net outflows from July 27 through July 31, based on SoSoValue data. The result ended three consecutive weeks of net inflows.

U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs, source: SoSoValue
U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs, source: SoSoValue

The final session caused most of the weekly reversal. Funds lost a combined $265.4 million on July 31. BlackRock’s IBIT recorded $122.7 million in withdrawals, while Fidelity’s FBTC lost $54.8 million and Grayscale’s GBTC posted $52.6 million in outflows.

The flows do not show whether investors expect further price declines. They do show that regulated fund demand weakened as Bitcoin moved closer to long term support.

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Political uncertainty added another concern. Monday’s official Senate schedule included a vote on a spending measure but no action on the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act. The chamber’s published cloture records also showed no petition for the legislation.

As crypto.news reported, leaders would ordinarily need to file cloture by Wednesday, Aug. 5, to hold a possible Friday vote on proceeding to the bill. Such a vote would not constitute final passage.

The absence of scheduled action cannot be identified as the direct cause of Bitcoin’s decline. Still, it removes a possible near term policy catalyst while traders await a clearer Senate timetable.

Bitcoin price now faces a $60,000 support test

The supplied daily chart shows Bitcoin struggling below the $63,000 to $65,000 range. Momentum has weakened, with the relative strength index at 42.65 and below its moving average of 50.40.

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Bitcoin price chart, source: crypto.news
Bitcoin price chart, source: crypto.news

The MACD histogram has also turned negative. A sustained move below $60,000 would weaken the current structure, while a recovery above $65,000 to $66,000 would provide stronger evidence that buyers have regained control.

Strategy founder Michael Saylor said the company had begun tracking Bitcoin’s 200 week moving average and its premium to that level. He said Bitcoin had remained above the average 92% of the time since the indicator became available. The percentage reflects Strategy’s calculation rather than an independent market study.

The next checkpoints are Coldcard’s technical review, Monday’s ETF flows and any Senate filing before Wednesday. Until those pressures ease, lower oil prices and stronger stock futures may remain insufficient to produce a lasting Bitcoin rebound.

Disclosure: This article does not represent investment advice. The content and materials featured on this page are for educational purposes only.

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ZeroStack Flags Survival Risk After $82.5M Crypto Loss

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Crypto Breaking News

Nasdaq-listed crypto treasury company ZeroStack has raised serious questions about its financial runway, warning in a recent SEC filing that “substantial doubt” exists about whether it can keep operating for the next year. The assessment marks a sharp reversal from its view just a quarter earlier, highlighting how dependent the company’s plan is on staking income and the liquidity of its Zero Gravity (0G) token.

In a Form 10-Q filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday, ZeroStack reported $2.6 million in cash and negative working capital of $600,000 as of June 30, along with an accumulated deficit of $339.1 million. The filing also detailed a major unrealized drag from its token treasury: an $82.5 million fair value loss on digital assets and a net loss of $61.3 million for the first half of 2026.

Key takeaways

  • ZeroStack now says there is substantial doubt it can continue operating over the next year, reversing its earlier “sufficient” outlook in a prior filing.
  • As of June 30, the company held 75.1 million 0G tokens, valued at $15.2 million versus an aggregate cost of $163.3 million (about 91% below recorded cost).
  • The company relies on staking rewards and sales of 0G tokens to fund operations, making its cash position sensitive to token price and trading liquidity.
  • ZeroStack reported $3.8 million in staking revenue in the first half of 2026, but it also recorded significant losses and could not conclude that its planned funding steps fully remove going-concern risk.

SEC filing flags going-concern risk

ZeroStack’s latest filing is notable not just for its headline loss figures, but for the governance and risk signal it sends to investors. Management stated that it could not conclude its plans would be enough to eliminate doubts about whether the company can continue as a going concern over the next year.

The company’s balance sheet underscores the pressure behind that conclusion. With $2.6 million in cash and negative working capital of $600,000 at June 30, ZeroStack’s near-term flexibility appears limited. It also reported an accumulated deficit of $339.1 million, reflecting losses that have compounded over time.

Beyond liquidity, the filing shows the company is carrying a large unrealized impairment in its digital asset treasury. ZeroStack disclosed an $82.5 million fair value loss on digital assets during the period, alongside a net loss of $61.3 million for the first half of 2026.

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A treasury strategy tied to 0G’s market

ZeroStack’s operating model depends heavily on 0G token performance and the token’s market depth. The company reported that it holds 75.1 million 0G tokens with an aggregate cost of $163.3 million and a fair value of $15.2 million as of June 30. Put differently, the holdings were valued about 91% below their recorded costs.

That gap matters for both accounting and funding. If the company intends to finance operations through token sales—especially during periods of weak liquidity—its ability to raise cash could be constrained even if balances appear large on paper. The company explicitly linked its funding capacity to both the 0G price and trading liquidity, according to the filing.

ZeroStack’s management also described reliance on staking rewards and token sales. In practice, staking income can provide periodic cash flow, but it may not be sufficient in periods when token markets are illiquid or when valuations fall further.

Staking revenue helps—yet the runway question remains

During the first half of 2026, ZeroStack reported $3.8 million in staking revenue. After validator commissions, the company said it earned about 6.6 million 0G tokens from staking activity.

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To support expenses, ZeroStack sold nearly 4.9 million 0G tokens for $2.4 million over the same period. The filing indicates that these cash inflows—staking-related and sale-related—are central to its ability to pay forecast operating costs.

ZeroStack also said that, if needed, it could sell some of its treasury holdings. However, management’s conclusion did not fully reassure the markets: it said it could not determine that those actions would be enough to address going-concern doubts.

The tension here is straightforward. When a company’s main treasury assets have experienced steep valuation declines, the theoretical ability to raise cash by selling holdings can become less effective in the real world—particularly if market pricing and liquidity do not support the volume and proceeds management may be counting on.

Backtracking from earlier filings

Perhaps the most consequential element of the news is the reversal in ZeroStack’s assessment. In its first-quarter Form 10-Q filing, the company stated that its cash and staking rewards would be sufficient to meet its working capital requirements and obligations for at least another year.

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In the most recent filing, it no longer reaches that conclusion and instead flags substantial doubt about continued operations over the next year. The shift suggests that circumstances changed—or that management’s confidence in the sustainability of its funding plan weakened as results and valuations evolved.

ZeroStack’s corporate background also provides context for how the company arrived at this point. The filing notes that the company was previously Flora Growth, a cannabis and CBD products firm. On Sept. 19, Flora announced $401 million in funding for a 0G treasury strategy, including $35 million in cash and equivalent commitments and more than $366 million in in-kind digital assets. The company later rebranded as ZeroStack and retained its Nasdaq listing.

Those details underline why investors are likely to focus on token treasury outcomes: the strategy is fundamentally designed to monetize staking and manage liquidity through sales. When 0G’s fair value diverges sharply from recorded cost, the difference can translate into both accounting losses and real constraints on financing flexibility.

What readers should watch next is whether ZeroStack provides further clarity on how it plans to balance staking, token sales, and liquidity needs—particularly given its much narrower margin for error after the “substantial doubt” disclosure. Investors will also likely track changes in 0G trading conditions, since the company’s own filings tie its funding outlook directly to token price and market liquidity.

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Important Ripple (XRP) Announcement, New Investments: August 3

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Ripple has expanded its digital capital markets strategy. The company announced today investments in Zilo and Lucuido – two firms that are focused on developing infrastructure for tokenized funds and institutional asset trading.

The move builds on existing partnerships with both firms. Ripple did not disclose the size of either investment.

Speaking on the matter was Nigel Khakoo, SVP, Trading and Markets at Ripple, who said:

“… ZILO and Licuido provide core capabilities that are essential to further scaling this shift: regulated digital transfer agency infrastructure and liquidity for issuance and collateral mobility. This is just the beginning of the journey, and we see a substantial opportunity to bring huge efficiencies to the investment sector over the next decade.”

ZILO provides transfer agency and fund administration technology. Its systems give asset managers and custodians regulated digital records for tokenized share classes. Licuido, on the other hand, operates an FCA-regulated platform that supports the issuance, distribution, trading, and use of traditional assets as digital collateral.

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Ripple plans to integrate these capabilities with its infrastructure on the XRP Ledger. The company wants institutions to issue tokenized assets, hold them in custody, move them between investors, and use them as collateral without relying on legacy systems.

Naturally, RLUSD will serve as the regulated cash component for delivery-versus-payment transactions. This structure is designed to allow the asset and payment sides of a trade to settle together on XRPL.

The investments also support Ripple’s recent push to build a broader institutional platform around tokenization, payments, stablecoins, and trading. Last month, the firm launched Ripple Mint and made an investment in compliance provider Notabene. This strengthens the infrastructure that’s available to institutions using RLUSD.

It’s also noteworthy that the company has worked with Aviva Investors, Franklin Templeton, and DBS on tokenized fund and collateral projects. Ripple said that ZILO and Licuido will help turn those individual partnerships into infrastructure that asset managers can use at scale.

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Bitget to exit Japan, close remaining positions after Dec. 31

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Bitget to exit Japan, close remaining positions after Dec. 31

Bitget to exit Japan, close remaining positions after Dec. 31

The crypto exchange stopped accepting new registrations from Japan residents and will begin progressively restricting existing accounts on Nov. 1.

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