The Cryptonomist

📊 Kraken launches US stock trading for clients in the European Economic Area.

📊 Strategy sold 3.46 million $MSTR shares for $333.7 million last week. No purchases or sales of $BTC.

⚡ JUST IN: Goldman Sachs rules out a Fed rate hike in September: weak retail sales, decreasing inflation, and sluggish employment.

⚖️ People turn to AI for mental health. California wants to ban it.

💰 Bank Leumi customers won't need to leave their banking app to buy Bitcoin: the bank will launch crypto trading in 2027. 📊 Three assets supported — $BTC, $ETH and $SOL — with Galaxy Digital handling execution and custody via GalaxyOne Institutional. 🔑 Fees and access requirements are still undisclosed: will that be enough to compete with existing exchanges? https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2026/08/15/bank-leumi-crypto-trading-israel/

🤖 Eight years of dedicated research on Poseidon pile up, but adoption stays at zero: Ethereum drops it for SHA-2 and BLAKE2s. 📊 The switch works now because binary-field SNARK advances made SHA-2 and BLAKE2s fast enough to replace Poseidon in proof systems, according to Justin Drake. 🔑 A smooth migration of existing zk-rollups would confirm this reading; fragmentation across Ethereum's ZK ecosystem would undercut it. https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2026/08/15/ethereum-hash-upgrade-security/

🤖 Until now, state espionage and crypto fraud were treated as separate worlds — Jewelbug runs both from the same platform, XG-Web. 📊 Symantec tracked 580,000 stolen cookie sets, 2,300 exfiltrated emails, and hundreds of AI-generated domains cloning Binance and OKX. ⚖️ If other groups start renting Jewelbug's infrastructure, the merger of state espionage and crypto crime will be confirmed at industrial scale. https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2026/08/13/jewelbug-crypto-fraud-exposed/

📊 The largest Bitcoin treasury company in Brazil, @OranjeBTC, aims to list on B3 the ETF $DIGY11, composed of 95% $STRC and 5% preferred shares of $SATA.

📊 JUST IN: Securitize drops 16% after disappointing results: revenue from tokenization is down.

⚖️ Prediction market platforms must now prove their incentive programs aren't fueling wash trading: the CFTC demands transparent filings, no more shortcuts. 🎯 Under scrutiny are bonuses for high-volume traders and fixed rebates for market makers — the same schemes used by platforms like Kalshi. 🔑 The crackdown is already in force, while Kalshi remains locked in a legal fight with New York State: platforms that can't prove transparency risk losing ground on both fronts. https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2026/08/13/cftc-prediction-markets-incentives/

⚖️ JUST IN: Forward Industries reports a net loss of $69 million for the quarter ending June 30, due to $65 million in impairments on digital assets.

📊 Goldman Sachs acquires NEOS for $2.25 billion and immediately gains a ready-made Bitcoin income ETF business.

🚨 Harmony hit by a new exploit: an attacker minted 4 billion $ONE tokens by exploiting empty blocks on the network. 📊 $ONE crashed 34% in 24 hours to $0.0008, with 97% of the illicit tokens already dumped on exchanges — an estimated $3.2M in damage. ⚖️ It's Harmony's second major breach in four years, after the $100M Horizon bridge hack in 2022 attributed by the FBI to the Lazarus Group. https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2026/08/12/harmony-one-exploit-minting/

📊 National Bank of Canada disclosed its crypto ETF holdings in a Form 13F filed with the SEC. 💰 $6.4 million in $BTC ETFs from ProShares and Fidelity, versus just $330,000 in Bitwise's $XRP ETF. 🔑 No direct token custody: the 20:1 ratio shows traditional banks still favor regulated Bitcoin exposure over altcoins. https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2026/08/12/national-bank-canada-crypto-etf/

📊 The Bank of Russia has published a draft directive capping retail crypto purchases at 300,000 rubles (about $3,630) per year. ⚖️ The whitelist includes only $BTC, $ETH and $USDT: $XRP is excluded under the strict five-year trading history requirement. 🔑 Public consultation runs until August 24, with entry into force expected September 1 — positioning the central bank as gatekeeper of legal digital assets. https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2026/08/12/russia-crypto-purchase-cap/

Just in: Crypto.com Launches the Future of Trading with Tokenized Stocks

📊 July 2026 report on exchange spot volumes: a total of $429.0 billion, down 21.7% month-over-month.

⚡ JUST IN: Trump Media's results show huge losses: bets in Bitcoin on DJT turn out to be a failure.

📊 Standard Chartered initiates coverage on $LINK with a $200 target by 2030. 🔑 Chainlink already secures over $110 billion, or 70% of DeFi's oracle market. 🚀 After a $292 million LayerZero exploit, $14.6 billion migrated to Chainlink's CCIP — traditional finance is now pricing DeFi infrastructure as essential plumbing. https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2026/08/10/chainlink-price-forecast-2030/

💰 JUST IN: Anthropic signs a $9 billion agreement with Bitcoin miner Riot for computing power.