Cryptoccino — Wednesday 12 August 2026

Bitcoin stalls below $65k as Strategy sells and Hormuz hopes fade. BTC slipped toward $63,500 with two headwinds converging: Strategy offloaded a further $108M in BTC, its second consecutive week of selling, while geopolitical optimism around the Strait of Hormuz unwound. ETF inflows are providing a partial offset but not enough to break the range before Wednesday’s US CPI print. coindesk theblock decrypt

Riot Platforms surges 20% pre-market on a reported $9.1B Anthropic colocation deal. Bernstein estimates AI colocation now represents 84% of Riot’s target enterprise value versus 11% for bitcoin mining, and sees 80% upside from current levels. The pivot signals how quickly the miner-to-AI-infrastructure thesis has repriced former crypto-pure-plays. coindesk theblock

Trump Media books $361M in unrealised digital-asset losses for the first half of the year. The Truth Social parent held BTC and CRO worth $597.7M at June 30, but falling prices drove a $238M quarterly loss and a cumulative $360.6M H1 hit. The position size makes it one of the more concentrated corporate crypto bets outside the treasury-company cohort. theblock decrypt

Twenty One Capital posts a $414M Q2 loss as its new CEO looks beyond the bitcoin treasury playbook. The loss is largely mark-to-market on its BTC holdings, but the new chief executive is publicly framing a shift toward revenue-generating products rather than pure accumulation. How that squares with a treasury structure built entirely around BTC price appreciation remains unclear. theblock

Erebor, the crypto-friendly bank, is in talks to raise $1.5B at a $9.5B valuation. The Financial Times reports the round, which would make Erebor one of the most highly valued de novo banking franchises targeting digital asset clients. The raise comes as UK lawmakers simultaneously pressure high-street banks over crypto account denials, underlining the gap a specialist lender is trying to fill. coindesk

Ravencoin mulls a four-day chain rollback after a critical block exploit. A flaw in block validation allowed bad blocks onto the chain; two major mining pools are already rebuilding from before the first bad block. A successful rollback would erase four days of settled transactions, raising the kind of finality questions that haunt smaller proof-of-work networks. RVN dropped roughly 20% on the news. coindesk decrypt

Luke Dashjr removed as Bitcoin BIP editor following the BIP-110 fork’s collapse. The soft fork he championed launched on Saturday, mined two blocks in eight hours, and halted. The broader Bitcoin BIP process subsequently stripped him of his editor role. The BIP-110 chain is now 300 blocks behind mainnet and, on current trajectory, roughly six years from resolving the difficulty mismatch. coindesk decrypt cryptobriefing

eToro acquires TradeZero for up to $231M as its crypto revenue falls. Q2 net contribution rose 9% year-on-year to $229M, but crypto revenues dropped sharply versus 2025 as token restrictions squeezed that segment. The TradeZero deal is a deliberate pivot toward US equities, though the stock fell 10% on announcement as investors weighed the price against uncertain synergies. theblock coindesk decrypt

BTCPay Server offers a $190k bounty after LND wallets connected to payment servers are drained. Attackers gained access to Lightning Network Daemon wallets linked to BTCPay instances; the exact attack surface has not been publicly confirmed. The bounty is aimed at recovering the stolen bitcoin rather than identifying a vulnerability. coindesk decrypt

SEC and CFTC jointly charge Goliath Ventures with running a $400M crypto Ponzi. Regulators allege the Florida-based firm promised returns from crypto liquidity pools, instead paying earlier investors with new deposits while the founder funded personal luxury spending. The CFTC separately named the CEO in a $397M fraud action citing $48M in direct misappropriation. cointelegraph_regulation theblock cftc_enforcement

Coldcard hardware wallet exploit drives a spike in new Bitcoin address creation. New Bitcoin addresses jumped from roughly 260,000 to 330,000 daily, a sharp reversal of the year-long declining trend, as affected users migrate funds to fresh keys. The scale of the address migration offers an indirect measure of how widely the compromised Coldcard firmware was deployed. theblock

Microsoft patches nearly 400 vulnerabilities in its August Patch Tuesday release. One flaw is already being actively exploited in the wild and two others were publicly disclosed before today’s fix. Operators running Windows infrastructure alongside crypto node or custody tooling should prioritise this cycle. krebsonsecurity

CLARITY Act faces a punishing calendar: 36 Senate session days left before year-end. Senate Majority Leader Thune pushed the initial vote to September, leaving a narrow window that shrinks further with midterm-cycle politics. Three Democratic women are flagged as the pivotal swing votes if any bipartisan deal is to be assembled; see the lead for the SEC’s administrative alternative. cointelegraph_regulation theblock coindesk

CFTC invokes emergency authority to keep Kalshi running as New York seeks $36B in damages. The state lawsuit accuses the prediction market platform of operating unlicensed gambling; the CFTC’s order directly overrides state action and asserts federal primacy. A parallel suit from FlightAware claims Kalshi misused its proprietary flight data to build cancellation markets, adding a separate data-licensing front to the legal stack. coindesk theblock cryptobriefing

Russia’s central bank proposes regulated exchange trading in BTC, ETH and USDT. The proposal follows a law signed by President Putin last week and sets a liquidity bar that excludes XRP and most altcoins from the initial retail-eligible list. It is a significant formal step for a jurisdiction that has historically swung between crackdown and tolerance. cointelegraph_regulation decrypt

UK lawmakers write directly to bank CEOs demanding answers on crypto account denials. The All-Party Parliamentary Group has asked lenders to detail their current policies and explain how the incoming FCA crypto regime might change them, calling banking access one of the single biggest barriers to sector growth. The inquiry adds parliamentary pressure ahead of the FCA’s new authorisation framework coming into force. theblock coindesk decrypt

What else is grinding?

• Itaú Unibanco, Brazil’s largest lender, is piloting tokenised bonds and funds on-chain, adding institutional weight to the country’s already active RWA ecosystem. coindesk cryptobriefing
• Coinbase launched derivatives for UK professional investors, offering perpetuals, futures and options with up to 50x leverage after securing its MiFID licence. theblock decrypt
• Broadridge’s Distributed Ledger Repo platform processed $8 trillion in July volume, a quiet reminder that institutional DLT rails are scaling well outside the token-price narrative. theblock
• ENS tokenholders voted to hand the ENS Foundation administrative control of its $65M endowment and a five-member board, formalising the DAO’s operational structure. theblock
• Australia’s financial intelligence watchdog suspended Cryptolink’s registration, forcing 96 crypto ATMs offline as the regulator tightens AML oversight of cash-to-crypto infrastructure. coindesk
• North Korea is increasingly routing stolen crypto proceeds through third-party crime networks, blending proliferation finance with ordinary scam money in ways that make exchange-level screening harder to separate, per a new RUSI paper. decrypt

Last sip. Wednesday’s CPI print will either give the range a reason to break or confirm that $65k is a ceiling for longer than anyone priced in.