Home Blog Page 98

U.S.-Iran hostilities send BTC price lower even as ETF flows show demand: Crypto Daily

info@uweb3.io
-
0
U.S.-Iran hostilities send BTC price lower even as ETF flows show demand: Crypto Daily

Bitcoin is hovering near $63,000 after falling more than 1% since midnight UTC amid a wider wave of risk-off sentiment following the U.S. and Iran mutual airstrikes over the weekend.

Brent crude futures rose more than 3% to approach $79 a barrel as the renewed fighting raised concerns over shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital oil passageway. Higher energy prices add inflationary pressure and reduce the scope for easier monetary policy, a link that weighed on bitcoin during earlier oil shocks.

“This week, crypto markets will experience a ‘tug-of-war’ between macro and geopolitics,” Taran Dhillon, head of digital assets at Kula, told CoinDesk.

U.S. inflation data coming this week will shape interest-rate expectations, Dhillon said.

Still, spot bitcoin and ether ETFs just broke eight-week streaks of outflows, a sign of growing demand for the two largest cryptocurrencies.

Regulatory clarity may add further tailwinds, Dhillon noted, as the Clarity Act advances. While ethics provisions are still being discussed, “even incremental progress matters,” he said.

Bitcoin slips below $63,000 in an Asian-session leverage flush

info@uweb3.io
-
0
Bitcoin slips below $63,000 in an Asian-session leverage flush

Digital assets posted a third consecutive quarter of losses in Q2 2026, the longest losing streak since the 2022 bear market, as institutional capital rotated into AI equities and Bitcoin ETFs recorded their largest quarterly outflow since launch. Our report examines what drove the divergence, where structural adoption continued regardless, and what Q3 signals to watch.

Thailand Central Bank Audits USDT Amid Gray Money Crackdown

info@uweb3.io
-
0
Thailand Central Bank Audits USDT Amid Gray Money Crackdown

Thailand’s central bank is stepping up stablecoin surveillance as part of a wider effort to crack down on money laundering, illicit finance and “gray money” in the country.

The Bank of Thailand is working with the Kingdom’s Securities and Exchange Commission to audit high-volume stablecoin transactions, with a focus on USDt (USDT), cash transactions and currency exchanges, to identify and stop illicit financial flows.

“The measures we are implementing are not short-term fixes; they require the continuous deployment of multiple parallel strategies,” Bank of Thailand Governor Vitai Ratanakorn said, according to local media outlet The Nation on Saturday.

Thailand is targeting the “gray economy,” which largely consists of cash that may have come from suspicious origins, such as scam call centers that have proliferated in the region. While there are no reliable figures for the gray economy, scam losses were 115 billion THB ($3.4 billion) in 2025, with around 173 million scam calls and texts recorded. 

Stablecoins have become a popular method of transferring large amounts due to near-instant cross-border settlement. 

Cash, forex and gold trading targeted

The move will expand commercial bank compliance duties across cash networks, currency exchanges, gold bullion trading and “suspicious stablecoin transactions” in an effort to prevent regulated entities from facilitating corruption or shadow economies, it reported.

High-value cash transactions will also require a source-of-funds declaration, and exchanges of large volumes of big banknotes for smaller denominations without a clear business reason will also be monitored. Cash deposits of more than 5 million baht ($150,000) also require full disclosure. 

Related: Thailand crypto platforms freeze 10K accounts in AML crackdown: Report

Thailand has often been touted as a crypto haven, but digital asset and stablecoin payments are still outlawed by the central bank and there has been regular rule tightening on crypto businesses. 

Crypto trading remains legal, with the country’s largest exchange, Bitkub, seeing about $26 million in daily volume. However, almost 40% of that is forex, with the USDT/THB pair being the most popular, according to CoinGecko. 

Scammer crackdown gone wrong

Thailand’s banks imposed sweeping account restrictions and froze three million bank accounts in 2025 as part of its crackdown on mule accounts, gray capital and suspicious activity.

However, thousands of individuals and legitimate businesses were caught in the dragnet in what media reports described at the time as a “scammer crackdown gone wrong.” 

Features: Robinhood L2 sparks ETH optimism, Saylor ‘muddies waters.’ Hodler’s Digest

What recent U.S.-Iran strikes mean for bitcoin, ether, solana

info@uweb3.io
-
0
What recent U.S.-Iran strikes mean for bitcoin, ether, solana

The moves priced a single fear, that a wider war keeps oil elevated and forces the Federal Reserve to hold rates higher for longer. Minutes of the Fed’s June meeting show a few policymakers saw a case for raising rates before backing a hold. Gold fell because a higher-for-longer path lifts real yields and dulls the appeal of metal that pays nothing, and bonds fell for the same reason.

But bitcoin sat all of it out. Ether was little changed at about $1,800, up 2% on the week, and the rest of the majors barely moved on the day, with Solana the weakest at $76, down 5% over seven days. XRP held $1.09 and dogecoin sat near $0.07.

The one crypto-relevant thread runs through Korean stocks. SK Hynix shares plunged 12% in Seoul after the chipmaker’s U.S.-listed shares surged 13% on their Friday debut, a reversal that helped drag the Kospi down 7%. That chip trade drove the rally that lifted bitcoin on Friday, and its sharp reversal on Monday still left crypto flat, in either direction.

Bitcoin has now held a tight range through a weekend of strikes, a Monday selloff in every asset that usually reacts to war, and a hawkish repricing of the Fed. That is a marked change for a market that once sold off fast on a single Hormuz headline. It is no longer trading the war at all, taking its direction from dollar liquidity and the chip cycle while oil, gold and rates do the reacting.

Signs of life?: State of Crypto

info@uweb3.io
-
0
Signs of life?: State of Crypto

But the 2026 midterm election is coming up quite soon — Nov. 3, so less than four months from now — and lawmakers will have to face their own base and flanks after they break for the summer recess and go into the final campaign swing.

That means that U.S. President Donald Trump and the $1.4 billion he made off crypto will be a key factor in the floor vote. More specifically, if there isn’t an ethics provision, it’s unlikely that sufficient Democrats will vote for the bill in the Senate. If the text that drops next week doesn’t even include a placeholder to address the ethics portion, that may even be counterproductive to getting full bipartisan support for the bill, an individual said.

That means that Trump will still need to sign off on an ethics agreement. Several of the sources CoinDesk spoke to last week said the White House had not been as engaged recently as it had earlier in the summer, but another individual told CoinDesk in early July that it may just be a matter of waiting to see whether all the other outstanding issues are resolved first.

One bright side for the bill’s proponents: Assuming the President did not veto the housing bill sitting on his desk sometime between this newsletter’s filing and 12:00 a.m. on Saturday, a provision banning the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency for at least four years will have taken effect. There was concern from industry players that House lawmakers might push to include a CBDC ban in Clarity if the Senate advanced the bill, which would further strain the negotiation process and timeline. But that issue should be resolved for now through at least until 2030, with the inclusion in the housing bill.

Bitcoin nears the $58,000 floor that has marked every cycle bottom since 2015

info@uweb3.io
-
0
Bitcoin nears the $58,000 floor that has marked every cycle bottom since 2015

Jurrien Timmer, Fidelity’s director of global macro, says bitcoin is drifting toward the bottom edge of the model he has used to track it for years.

That model is the power law, which plots bitcoin’s entire price history on a logarithmic chart bounded by three curves — an upper resistance line, a middle trendline, and a lower support line that has caught every major bottom since 2015.

On Timmer’s latest chart the support line sits near $58,000, and bitcoin at about $62,700 is closing in on it.

The lower panel is where he expects accumulation. It tracks how far bitcoin trades above or below the power law trendline, and that gap has swung to negative 56%, a depth the chart labels the accumulation zone and one that lined up with the 2018 and 2022 lows. The 52-week reading on the bitcoin-to-gold ratio has fallen just as far, to around negative 100%.

Timmer is not calling a bottom just yet. He has said the speculative premium that pushed bitcoin past $120,000 last year is largely gone, that global money supply growth is slowing, and that he sees no catalyst for a reversal until liquidity returns.

Stablecoins see biggest drop since 2022 crypto winter led by Tether (USDT), Circle’s USDC decline

info@uweb3.io
-
0
Stablecoins see biggest drop since 2022 crypto winter led by Tether (USDT), Circle’s USDC decline

The combined market capitalization of major stablecoins fell from roughly $166 billion in March 2022 to $122 billion by September 2023, RWA.xyz data shows — a decline of over 26% as investors pulled money from the digital asset market.

Tether’s USDT fell from $78 billion to $65 billion between March and November 2022. For USDC, the downtrend took much longer to play out, falling from $55 billion in July 2022 to below $24 billion by November 2023, exacerbated by its banking partner Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse in 2023 March.

The implosion of TerraUSD, the algorithmic stablecoin of the Terra-Luna crypto project, also wiped out $18 billion from the stablecoin market.

The current decline is only a temporary setback in a long-term uptrend, one analyst said.

“The recent decline in stablecoin market cap represents a relatively small pullback in what we believe is a long-term growth market,” said Paul Howard, senior director at trading firm Wincent.

“Short-term fluctuations in liquidity are normal, but they don’t change our view that stablecoins will continue to play an increasingly important role in the digital asset ecosystem,” he added.

Increasing stablecoin competition

Looking beyond the headline decline, the trend appears more nuanced.

Part of the slowdown reflects a changing competitive landscape. As stablecoins move beyond crypto trading and into mainstream payments, new issuers have entered the market following regulatory progress such as the GENIUS Act in the U.S.

Cambridge Compares Ethereum Energy Use With PoS Networks

info@uweb3.io
-
0
Cambridge Compares Ethereum Energy Use With PoS Networks

A new Cambridge study placed Ethereum near the lower end of energy intensity among major proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains, although the network still used more electricity overall than most of the PoS networks studied.

The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance estimated that Ethereum consumes about 7.87 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity annually. When adjusted for market value, the network used roughly 33 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per $1 million, the second-lowest figure among the proof-of-stake networks assessed, behind BNB Chain.

Solana used the most electricity among the PoS networks studied, at about 13.48 GWh per year. Its energy intensity was roughly 283 kWh per $1 million of market value, around 8.5 times Ethereum’s, while the networks in the comparison consumed about 38 GWh combined.

The report provides one of the most detailed assessments yet of Ethereum’s post-Merge footprint, giving policymakers and investors a more current basis for comparing blockchain sustainability.

Illustration of post-Merge Ethereum consumption. Source: Cambridge

New estimates map Ethereum’s energy use

Cambridge measured how much electricity Ethereum nodes used at the wall across 20 combinations of the network’s main software clients. It found that a typical home setup used about 18 watts, while a more powerful workstation used roughly 153 watts.

Using Ethereum’s mix of residential and professionally hosted nodes, the researchers estimated an average power draw of about 105 watts per node. Cambridge counted around 8,522 discoverable full nodes, with 64% running in cloud or enterprise facilities and 36% on residential connections.

Cambridge said Ethereum’s remaining emissions are now driven mainly by the electricity grids supplying its nodes. The study estimated that about 56.4% of the network’s electricity mix came from renewable and nuclear sources, compared with 43.6% from fossil fuels.

Related: Vitalik Buterin shares priorities for new ‘Lean Ethereum’ strawmap

Ethereum moved from proof-of-work mining to proof-of-stake validation through the Merge in September 2022. The Merge replaced miners competing with one another using energy-intensive computing equipment with validators who secure the network by staking Ether.

After the Merge, energy estimates showed that the upgrade had reduced the network’s electricity use by more than 99.9%, as the mining process used to secure the blockchain was removed. 

Magazine: Bitcoin nearing late stages of bear market: Jamie Coutts, Real Vision

Zapper to Shut Down Aug. 3 After Nearly Seven Years

info@uweb3.io
-
0
Zapper to Shut Down Aug. 3 After Nearly Seven Years

The DeFi portfolio tracker once handled $13 billion in transaction volume and 2 million monthly users before deciding an orderly wind-down was its best option.

Zapper, the DeFi portfolio tracker and dashboard, will shut down entirely on August 3rd, co-founder and CEO Seb Audet said in a post on X Wednesday. The company’s website, mobile apps and API services will all go offline.

Audet said the team “evaluated a number of different options, pursued some to the fullest extent possible,” before concluding that an orderly wind down is the best course of action. Existing API users will receive transition guidance by email, he said.

Seven-Year Run

Zapper launched in 2019 as a simple portfolio tracker Audet built for himself while exploring early DeFi, before scaling into a broader dashboard for tracking liquidity pools, yield farms and claimable rewards. At its peak, the platform served more than 2 million monthly active users and processed over $13 billion in transaction volume, according to Audet.

The company raised a $1.5 million seed round in early 2020 after winning a Kyber DeFi hackathon, then closed a $15 million Series A in May 2021 led by Framework Ventures, with participation from Mark Cuban and Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures. The Defiant covered Zapper’s growth in 2021 and again in 2022 as it expanded into NFTs and web3 social tools.

Audet said he is fielding interest in hiring the Zapper team, describing them as having “deep onchain engineering expertise” and operational experience running a product at scale.

MARA Buys Texas Site From HIF in $600M Bitcoin, AI Deal

info@uweb3.io
-
0
MARA Buys Texas Site From HIF in $600M Bitcoin, AI Deal

The 1,200-acre Matagorda County site was previously slated for a $7 billion HIF Global e-fuels plant backed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott before HIF pivoted to power computing instead.

MARA Holdings said Thursday it signed a definitive agreement with HIF to acquire a powered land site of more than 1,200 acres in Matagorda County, Texas, in a post on its official X account. The site will carry up to 1 gigawatt of grid capacity by October 2027 and up to 2 gigawatts by April 2028, subject to approval from Texas grid operator ERCOT.

The deal is not an upfront cash purchase. It is structured as up to $600 million in milestone-based payments tied to regulatory approvals, land access and eventually a signed data-center tenant, according to an SEC filing MARA disclosed, as reported by The Block. MARA shares rose roughly 14% in early trading Thursday on the news, The Block reported.

HIF Global had promoted the site as the first large e-fuels plant in the United States, a roughly $7 billion project backed by Texas Governor Greg Abbott that would split water to make cleaner shipping fuel, BeInCrypto reported. HIF had already secured full permits and grid rights for about 1.8 gigawatts before the deal, and will retain a minority stake in the site once MARA signs a high-performance-computing tenant.

Doubling The Power Pipeline

MARA plans to develop the campus through its existing partnership with Starwood Digital Ventures, which handles design, construction and tenant sourcing. Combined with MARA’s pending Long Ridge Energy gas-plant acquisition, full energization of the Texas site would push the miner’s total power portfolio to roughly 4.8 gigawatts, The Block reported. MARA Chairman and CEO Fred Thiel said sites with access to reliable, scalable power will become increasingly valuable, according to the same report.

1...979899...1,316Page 98 of 1,316