The FBI and Japan’s National Police Agency issue a joint warning about North Korea linked hackers running a massive device infection campaign.
Investigators say the hacking group infects more than 30,000 devices across over 100 countries as part of an ongoing operation targeting crypto workers.
The campaign specifically targets employees at cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, and NFT firms by posing as legitimate recruiters offering attractive job opportunities.
Victims receive fake interview invitations and coding assignments that secretly install malware, granting hackers persistent access to company systems and personal devices.
Authorities report the hackers successfully steal funds from more than 7,000 individual crypto wallets during this extended and coordinated campaign.
Total losses linked to this specific operation reach approximately $10.71 million, according to figures shared by investigators tracking the group’s activity.
This tactic mirrors well documented North Korean cyber strategies. State linked groups routinely pose as recruiters on LinkedIn and other professional networks.
Previous campaigns used similar methods to breach wallet software companies and exchanges, sometimes resulting in losses reaching hundreds of millions of dollars.
Security researchers note that fake job offers remain one of the most effective social engineering tools used by North Korean hacking collectives.
The malware deployed often masquerades as pre-employment coding tests, tricking developers into running malicious scripts on machines with sensitive system access.
United Nations officials have previously stated that North Korea relies heavily on cryptocurrency theft to fund its sanctioned weapons and missile programs.
Crypto companies are urged to strengthen hiring verification processes and train staff to recognize suspicious recruitment outreach before it leads to a breach.
Crypto exchanges wipe out roughly $571 million in bullish futures positions within 24 hours after the US Senate fails to advance the Clarity Act. Bitcoin and Ether longs absorb the bulk of the damage.
Data from CoinGlass shows Bitcoin and Ether longs losing close to $190 million each as leveraged positions get force-closed across major exchanges. Traders who bet on a positive outcome pay the price.
The Senate cloture motion on H.R. 3633 fails 49-50, falling eleven votes short of the sixty needed to close debate. The result triggers an immediate wave of selling across digital asset markets.
XRP longs lose around $30 million in the selloff, while Solana longs account for roughly $22 million in liquidations. Long positions dominate the losses, with short liquidations totaling only about $100 million.
CoinGlass figures mark the highest level of long liquidations since Aug. 22, according to data reviewed by market trackers. The numbers can shift as the rolling 24-hour window continues to update.
Futures positions get force-closed when market swings create losses large enough to push posted collateral below an exchange’s required threshold. Traders can add funds to avoid liquidation, but many fail to react in time.
Bitcoin trades near $75,834 as Wednesday’s early session gets underway, down two percent over the past day. Its 24-hour range runs from roughly $75,038 to $77,703 on trading volume close to $39.3 billion.
Ether changes hands near $2,483, slipping around 1.5 percent over the same period. The token moves between approximately $2,479 and $2,608 during the preceding day as the broader market absorbs the news.
Bitcoin had climbed from around $77,000 on Monday toward nearly $80,000 ahead of the vote as traders positioned for a favorable outcome. The rally begins reversing once cloture prospects start looking shakier.
Coinbase and Circle shares fall as much as ten percent during Tuesday’s session as the vote outcome becomes clear. Republican Senators Susan Collins, Josh Hawley, Jerry Moran and Thom Tillis vote against cloture.
The Clarity Act remains on the Senate calendar despite the failed procedural test, and lawmakers could revisit the bill later. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong says regulators can still advance crypto rules without new legislation.
U.S.-listed spot Bitcoin ETFs pulled in $730.9 million in net inflows on Wednesday, their biggest single-day haul since mid-January, as Bitcoin staged a sharp rebound.
BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) led the way, absorbing $454 million — more than 60% of the day’s total — and pushing its lifetime inflows to nearly $64 billion. ARK Invest and 21Shares’ ARKB brought in a further $138 million, while Fidelity’s FBTC added roughly $74 million and Grayscale’s two Bitcoin products together attracted $57 million. Only VanEck’s HODL and WisdomTree’s BTCW saw money leave, shedding a combined $25 million or so.
The rush of buying coincided with Bitcoin’s price jumping between 5.7% and 5.9% on the day, lifting the combined net assets of the U.S. Bitcoin ETF market to roughly $103.3 billion — equal to just over 6% of Bitcoin’s total market value. Wednesday’s inflow dwarfed anything seen during an 11-day stretch of positive flows in late August, coming in more than three times larger than any single day in that run.
The swing highlights just how choppy demand has been lately. The funds had shed $236 million just two trading days earlier, with IBIT alone accounting for about $201 million of that outflow, before flows flipped positive again and then surged on Wednesday. It’s part of a broader pattern this year: after eight straight negative weeks heading into July, the ETFs have alternated between multi-day buying streaks — including an $853.5 million run in early August and a $2.8 billion streak spanning eight sessions later that month — and sudden bouts of selling, such as the $202 million pulled out on August 28 that snapped a nine-day inflow run.
Analysts at QCP Capital have noted that much of Bitcoin’s recent price strength has been driven by spot buying rather than leveraged futures positions, pointing to a decline in futures open interest even as the price climbed — a sign, they suggest, that the rally has firmer footing than one built purely on leverage.
Circle Internet, issuer of the USDC stablecoin, becomes the new principal partner and front-of-shirt sponsor of Chelsea Football Club starting this season.
The Circle and USDC brands appear across Chelsea’s men’s, women’s, and academy shirts, marking the club’s return to having a named sponsor after a three-year vacancy.
Chelsea debuts the new kit at Stamford Bridge this Sunday against Brighton and Hove Albion, the club’s first home Premier League fixture of the campaign.
Financial terms of the deal remain undisclosed. Reports earlier this year suggested Chelsea sought around sixty five million pounds annually for the sponsorship slot.
That figure converts to roughly eighty eight million dollars a year, though neither Circle nor Chelsea confirms whether the final agreement lands near that mark.
The partnership marks the first time a cryptocurrency financial services firm takes the principal shirt sponsorship of a Premier League club rather than a secondary placement.
Crypto brands previously entered English football through smaller sleeve deals. OKX sponsors Manchester City’s sleeve, while Kraken holds a similar arrangement with Tottenham Hotspur.
OKX’s sleeve agreement reportedly cost seventy million dollars per year when it launched in 2023, giving some sense of scale for crypto sports sponsorships.
Circle holds an electronic money license from the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, a distinction the company is likely to lean on given recent regulatory scrutiny.
In June, the FCA warned Premier League clubs about partnering with unauthorized crypto firms, flagging potential breaches of financial promotion rules for unlicensed operators.
Circle frames the tie-up as a branding exercise built around global reach. Both companies describe the goal as connecting stablecoin money with a worldwide football audience.
The announcement makes no mention of Chelsea supporters using USDC to buy tickets or merchandise, so the deal appears limited to sponsorship exposure for now.
Stablecoins have pushed toward mainstream financial use throughout 2026, and this sponsorship gives Circle a highly visible platform to extend that momentum into sports marketing.
Less than a month after announcing it was closing entirely, BitMart is now walking that back — partially. The exchange has hired White & Case as restructuring counsel with a roadmap due by September 9, a reversal that follows its July 26 shutdown announcement, which had originally cited market conditions and strategic reasons for closing.
The language shift is the real story here. BitMart is now considering a plan that could combine distributions to creditors with a phased restart of some operations rather than a full wind-down. Notably, the exchange’s own wording explicitly references “distributions to creditors,” a departure from its prior public messaging.
Timeline-wise, nothing about the original shutdown has been cancelled yet. BitMart suspended new registrations and deposits on July 26, put futures accounts into reduce-only mode, and scheduled full discontinuation of spot and futures trading for August 26 — with complete platform shutdown originally set for January 31, 2027. That August 26 trading cutoff still stands even as the restructuring option is explored, meaning the roadmap due September 9 arrives after user-facing trading ends, not before it.
On the advisory side, White & Case will work alongside BitMart’s other advisers to build out the restructuring framework — covering both how individual services could resume and how creditor distributions would be handled — with everything still subject to further legal, financial, operational and regulatory assessment.
Why it matters: this is the classic “orderly wind-down vs. restructuring” fork that mid-tier exchanges hit when liquidity problems surface, and the September 9 date is a disclosure deadline, not a payout date — anyone reading it as “money back by then” is getting ahead of what BitMart has actually committed to.
XRP surges more than 15% over 24 hours, trading near $1.15 and briefly touching $1.16, joining a broader crypto rally that also carries bitcoin above $72,000.
The move follows months of unusually large orders moving through XRP markets without producing much visible impact on the token’s price during that stretch.
New ledger data now shows roughly 23% of all XRP changing hands on the XRP Ledger occurs within a specific three-hour trading window each day.
That window spans the London afternoon and New York morning, the only stretch when both major financial centers operate simultaneously with full liquidity overlap.
A year ago, that same three-hour period accounted for only about 14% of daily XRP activity, according to data reviewed by treasury firm Evernorth.
Since the window represents just 12.5% of a full trading day, activity inside it now runs at nearly twice the rate expected from evenly spread trading.
The pattern shows up consistently across all three major ways XRP moves through the ledger, including its order book, its automated market maker pools, and cross-currency payment routing.
Every hour within the London-New York overlap now carries roughly twice the transaction volume of an average hour outside that window, ledger data confirms.
Evernorth frames the shift as consistent with growing institutional participation in XRP markets, though the firm maintains a direct financial interest in that narrative.
The company runs an active XRP treasury strategy backed by Ripple and other investors, with filings describing plans for over $1 billion in gross proceeds and a Nasdaq listing.
Public blockchain records reveal transaction timing, size, and routing details clearly, but they generally stop short of identifying which specific participants sit behind each trade.
Earlier this month, a separate report found that average XRP spot order sizes stayed within whale-level territory throughout the token’s slide from around $2.40 in January.
That earlier pattern suggested large holders were absorbing supply during the decline rather than triggering an immediate breakout, setting up the conditions for the current rally.
Retail traders and automated strategies remain fully capable of producing the same activity pattern, since crypto markets trade continuously and never formally close.
The overlap window also coincides with the heaviest period for breaking crypto news and the busiest hours for U.S. exchange retail volume, complicating any single explanation.
BitGo swung to a net loss in the second quarter even as revenue climbed sharply, the publicly listed digital asset infrastructure firm reported this week. The company posted a $19 million net loss for the quarter despite revenue surging nearly 80% year on year to $4.3 billion.
The loss marks an improvement from earlier in the year. BitGo’s net loss narrowed from $60.7 million in the first quarter, while revenue rose 14.7% quarter over quarter.
Unrealized losses on digital assets drove much of the year on year swing. An $18.8 million unrealized loss on digital assets compares against a $55.8 million unrealized gain in the same period last year.
BitGo chief executive Mike Belshe addressed the shortfall directly on the earnings call. He said Q2 performance fell short of expectations, adding that profitability was hurt by lower margins and an unfavorable revenue mix.
Belshe pointed to two specific pressure points behind the margin squeeze. He cited lower spreads on certain spot transactions along with a smaller contribution from derivatives trading.
Management is responding with cost discipline rather than just watching the numbers. BitGo authorized a share repurchase program of up to $50 million alongside cost cutting measures expected to save about $15 million annually.
Staffing cuts made earlier this year form part of that effort. The company expects expenses to decline in the third quarter following a workforce reduction of about 15% in June.
Markets reacted modestly to the mixed results. BitGo shares fell 1.8% in overnight trading to $4.90 after closing the prior session up 0.6% at $4.99.
The results land amid a broader wave of belt tightening across crypto infrastructure firms this year. Rivals have leaned on similar playbooks, pairing headcount reductions with buyback programs to reassure shareholders.
Revenue growth at that scale still stands out relative to peers, even with the bottom line under pressure. BitGo’s management is betting the cost cuts announced this year will translate into steadier margins by the fourth quarter.
BTCPay Server has confirmed that attackers exploited a critical vulnerability and successfully stole funds from users running outdated versions of the software.
The open-source, self-hosted bitcoin payment processor pushed an emergency update to version 2.4.2 to close the hole. It urged every operator to update immediately.
The flaw allowed an unauthenticated remote attacker to obtain macaroon credential files tied to LND, a widely used Lightning Network implementation.
Stolen macaroon files can hand an attacker effective control of an LND node. From there, funds can be moved directly out of the node without the owner’s involvement.
BTCPay Server said the vulnerability affects every version released before 2.4.2, including release candidates for that version.
The team confirmed plainly that users were affected and that funds were stolen. It said technical details would remain withheld temporarily so operators have time to patch before attackers can study the writeup.
Hardware wallet maker Foundation and bitcoin publication Citadel21 both reported Lightning nodes swept clean, with channels force-closed before the public warning went out.
Operators unable to update right away were told to take their BTCPay Server offline entirely. That step is meant to block unauthorized access until the patch can be applied.
The vulnerability was disclosed to BTCPay by the Bitcoin Red Team, a volunteer security group that has been auditing open-source Bitcoin infrastructure.
BTCPay Server’s own on-chain and hot wallets are not affected by this specific issue. The exposure is isolated to LND-based Lightning deployments.
Updating alone does not fully close the door for affected operators. The team also advised revoking LND macaroons and moving any funds sitting in a BTCPay-generated on-chain hot wallet as an added precaution.
The incident lands amid a broader wave of scrutiny across Bitcoin infrastructure. It follows a separate Coldcard exploit that Galaxy Research says has cost users roughly 1,719 BTC, worth close to $111 million.
The SEC has suspended its approval of Nasdaq’s cash-settled bitcoin index options — ticker QBTC — putting the product on hold while it reviews a jurisdictional challenge from rival exchange operator CME Group.
Nasdaq’s Phlx exchange had won conditional SEC approval for the options in May on an expedited basis, with contracts designed to track the Nasdaq Bitcoin Index, itself derived from the CME CF Bitcoin Real Time Index. CME filed a formal challenge in mid-June, arguing that because bitcoin is legally treated as a commodity, any options tied to its value should fall under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s exclusive authority rather than the SEC’s. The full SEC commission has now granted CME’s petition for review, staying the earlier approval and opening a public comment period running through August 24.
CME’s position centers on the fact that it already operates its own regulated bitcoin futures and options markets, and that allowing Nasdaq’s product to launch without registering under the CFTC framework governing CME would let a securities exchange compete for the same order flow while sidestepping commodities oversight. The petition also flagged a broader concern: that letting the approval stand could set precedent for securities exchanges to list derivatives on other commodities more generally.
If CME’s argument prevails, Nasdaq would either need to register QBTC under CFTC rules or redesign the contracts entirely to reference a security, such as a spot bitcoin ETF, instead of the commodity itself. Until the commission rules, the product remains shelved — another sign of how listed bitcoin derivatives increasingly sit at the boundary between the SEC’s and CFTC’s overlapping authority.
South Korean police escalate an investigation into former Incheon Mayor Yoo Jeong-bok, carrying out search and seizure operations at his home and city hall offices.
Investigators from the Incheon Metropolitan Police Agency’s Anti-Corruption and Economic Crime Investigation Unit conducted the searches, collecting mobile phones, computers, and other evidence.
The probe centers on allegations that Yoo and his wife failed to disclose approximately 21,000 units of cryptocurrency during South Korea’s June 3 local elections.
Authorities allege the couple transferred the crypto holdings to an overseas exchange before submitting mandatory asset disclosures required of all public election candidates.
Election officials had previously flagged that Yoo’s reported assets appeared understated by roughly 78 million won compared to his actual holdings at the time.
Police have already questioned Yoo, his wife, identified only by her surname Choi, and individuals connected to the original complaint against the couple.
The complaint reportedly originated from someone linked to a rival campaign during the local election cycle, adding a political dimension to the investigation.
No formal charges have been filed so far in the crypto disclosure matter, which remains an active police investigation without a set timeline for resolution.
Under South Korea’s Public Official Election Act, a conviction carrying a fine above a certain threshold can strip an elected official of their seat.
That legal consequence is part of why cases involving asset disclosure violations draw such close scrutiny from both regulators and the public in Korea.
The case highlights a persistent gap in South Korea’s financial transparency rules, since holdings on foreign crypto exchanges are harder for regulators to trace.
Domestic, real-name-verified crypto platforms already give South Korean authorities clearer visibility into asset movements than exchanges based outside the country’s jurisdiction.
Seoul has been working to narrow that blind spot, pulling cross-border crypto transfers under closer Bank of Korea monitoring through a revised Foreign Exchange Transactions Act.
Regulators are also tightening disclosure obligations for individuals and firms that actively promote cryptocurrency investments to the public across South Korea.
The Yoo case now stands as a concrete test of how effectively these new oversight measures can close the offshore visibility gap going forward.
Legal observers say the outcome could shape how aggressively Korean authorities pursue similar disclosure cases involving public officials and undisclosed foreign crypto holdings.