Crypto card spending tops $1bn, with stablecoins funding most of it
Tracked card volume more than tripled in a year and USDC and USDT funded over 70% of it. In the UK, each of those purchases is a CGT disposal.
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Leading today: The SEC’s crypto custody rewrite has reached the White House. Every story we publish, newest first.
Stablecoin issuers can freeze and move your coins. Most already can
Justin Sun says USD1's live contract lets its issuer move frozen balances. Tether and Circle hold similar powers. Here's what those functions actually do.
MANTRA blames shared code as its chain stays offline
MANTRA says it found the root cause and contained the threat, but its chain is still halted and no patch note, loss figure or all-clear has been published.
SEC’s plan for the $123m Terra investor fund is due on 20 August
A Jump Crypto subsidiary has already paid the $123.1m. The SEC's 20 August filing decides who is eligible to claim from it and how losses get counted.
Binance handed a user’s data to Russian authorities, and an arrest followed
CoinDesk reports that Binance passed user information to Russian authorities, contributing to the arrest of a Ukrainian donor. The exchange left the Russian market in 2023, but the records it collected before then did not go with it.
Phishing campaign aimed at 885,000 phone numbers, security firm says
Rapid7 says a crypto phishing operation targeted 885,000 numbers with texts leading to fake wallet sites. Here is what the pages ask for, and where to report.
HSBC and Standard Chartered make first live transfer on Swift’s blockchain
HSBC and Standard Chartered have completed the first live bank-to-bank tokenised deposit transaction on Swift's blockchain ledger. It's a real piece of plumbing, and it's closed to everyone outside the banking system.
Solana blocks are about to arrive faster and carry less. That mostly cancels out
Solana is cutting its target block time from 400ms to 350ms, and trimming how much work each block can hold. Faster blocks that do less isn't the same as more capacity, and it probably won't make your transactions cheaper.
Bitcoin’s jump to $70,000 was decided by the US bond market, not by crypto
Bitcoin went from $64,100 to nearly $70,000 in hours after the US Treasury doubled its bond buybacks. A lot of that move was bearish traders being forced to buy, not new demand.
BitBox found the flaws before anyone lost money
The Swiss wallet maker says two severe firmware bugs have been patched, with no reports of anyone being exploited. It's the opposite ending to the Coldcard story, and the fix only works if owners install it.