itez

Crypto hackers are attacking more often, but stealing less. Here's what changed in 2026 ⚡️ Where the real risk in crypto shifted: from code to keys, people and AI.

⚡️SafePal and Bits of Gold both disclosed data breaches almost simultaneously, affecting 40,000 and 200,000 customers respectively SafePal named the cause: an authorization flaw in an order-tracking plugin that let anyone view other customers' orders just by changing the number in the URL. The breach covered orders placed between March 2025 and April 2026, exposing names, addresses, and contact details, seed phrases, keys, and payment data weren't touched. At Bits of Gold, Israel's largest regulated crypto broker, the cause runs wider: the breach hit not the company itself but a third-party support analytics vendor, the same attack was recorded at hundreds of companies worldwide, making Bits of Gold a supply-chain casualty rather than a direct target.

⚡️SpaceX is buying Cursor for $60 billion The deal was signed on June 16, four days after SpaceX's IPO, and takes effect on August 14. Cursor shareholders will receive SpaceX Class A stock at a rate set by the volume-weighted average price over the 7 days before closing. SpaceX had an option since April to either pay $10 billion for a partnership or buy the company outright. Cursor, meanwhile, grew fast: from $100 million in annualized revenue in early 2025 to $4 billion by June 2026. Microsoft considered buying it before this deal, OpenAI got turned down twice. In February, SpaceX had already absorbed xAI, renaming the division SpaceXAI. Cursor brings distribution among developers and data for training code models. The first result is already out: Grok 4.5, trained using Cursor's data.

⚡️13,689 Trezor customers were hit by a data leak, devices and funds untouched The breach wasn't at Trezor itself, but at ShipMonk, the company's logistics partner. Names, addresses, phone numbers, and order numbers were exposed for customers across seven countries, covering orders placed between May 10 and August 8. Trezor stresses that its own systems weren't compromised, private keys were not affected. The real danger is different: attackers now have a precise list of people who own a crypto wallet, along with their real addresses. A similar leak at Ledger in 2020 led to direct threats of physical violence against some of those affected. CertiK recorded 52 physical attacks on crypto holders in the first half of 2026, up from 39 a year earlier.

⚡️Grok Bot keeps working in the cloud even after you close your laptop SpaceXAI launched the agent in beta on August 11 for $120/month. Each agent gets a persistent cloud computer with a browser and terminal, signing into sites and apps the way a human would, including services with no API. Multiple bots can work in parallel and coordinate with each other, with one bot able to assign tasks to others. The company's internal example: a sales bot researches contacts overnight, an ops bot processes invoices from email. It's part of a broader race - OpenAI has a similar ChatGPT Work, Anthropic has had Claude Cowork since January. Meanwhile, Anthropic remains one of SpaceX's largest compute customers, product competitors that are simultaneously infrastructure partners.

⚡️Head of digital assets research at VanEck believes CLARITY Act passage will trigger a powerful rally in crypto Matthew Sigel says regulatory clarity remains the key threshold without which institutional capital won't fully enter the sector. He holds the position that Bitcoin's four-year cycle is still alive, unlike the more cautious consensus inside VanEck itself. The logic behind the cycle is simple. If the pattern repeats, the bear market bottom lands in Q4 2026, followed by a new three-year bull cycle. Sigel advises clients to build their position gradually and reach full size by October. Institutions, in practice, aren't ramping up at the pace expected after last year's elections. Major players are increasingly moving toward permissioned blockchains with predictable fees rather than open networks directly.

⚡️Harmony's network printed 4 billion extra ONE tokens through a flaw in empty blocks, crashing the price by a third The amount equals 26% of the token's total supply. ONE's price crashed more than 30%, hitting an all-time low, as 2.8 billion of the newly minted tokens flowed onto exchanges to be sold. Harmony confirmed the exploit, released an emergency patch for validators, paused its Horizon bridge, and asked exchanges to freeze funds from four addresses. The team is considering a network rollback, but a rollback would also undo every legitimate transaction that happened after the attack. The attacker managed to sell almost everything, with only 115 million ONE left to sell, the remaining 97% had already made it onto exchanges. The same Horizon bridge was already robbed of nearly $100 million back in 2022.

in light of the recent Coldcard events...

⚡️Nvidia has turned its chips into an asset that Wall Street is backing with $500 billion On August 10, the company signed memorandums with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to set up joint financing platforms. Separate capital pools are being created, from which Nvidia's customers will be able to borrow at attractive rates specifically to buy compute capacity. According to Huang, the chips are no longer just a product: they can be resold to another customer, repurposed for a new task, and it's that long service life that makes them suitable collateral for financing at this scale.

⚡️Institutional demand for ETH is nearly triple the daily issuance of new coins Real Vision analyst Jamie Coutts puts the exact figure at 2.8x. Bitcoin's demand is running 23% below issuance, meaning BTC and ETH are moving in opposite directions right now. The main demand channel is spot ETFs: $244 million in weekly inflows, the fifth straight positive week. Treasury companies are buying only lightly, the marginal buyer right now is a regulated product, not a corporate balance sheet.

⚡️EU is preparing to revise MiCA by 2027 The current rules only regulate issuers registered within the EU. Major foreign stablecoin issuers like Tether formally remain outside the regulatory perimeter, even though their tokens are widely used in Europe. Circle's EU strategy director called this a significant gap: users are either unprotected or cut off from the asset. The trigger was the US GENIUS Act and the growth of dollar-backed stablecoins, which already make up 95% of the market. EU diplomats cite direct pressure from the ECB and call reopening the file practically inevitable. Public consultations run through September 30, with a formal revision expected in 2027. Three areas are in focus: foreign stablecoin issuers, tokenized payments and deposits, and rules for the multi-issuance model, where a single stablecoin is issued by several entities across different jurisdictions.

⚡️Coinsbuy wallets were drained of $7.9 million across two different blockchains simultaneously The attack happened on August 9, with Ethereum and TRON hit almost in sync. Analysts suspect compromised hot-wallet private keys rather than a smart contract exploit, the attack was too coordinated across two networks for that. The stolen funds were routed through 1inch into ETH, split into chunks, and spread across more than 30 addresses, then laundered through Monero. Coinsbuy, with help from ChangeNOW, managed to freeze only a six-figure sum, less than 2% of the theft. The company paused deposits and withdrawals, then resumed operations, but hasn't issued an official statement with details yet. It's unclear whether the stolen funds belonged to the company or to clients.

⚡️Hackers are hiding malicious commands inside BNB Smart Chain smart contracts Compromised websites load JavaScript that queries a smart contract for the next attack stage. The technique, EtherHiding, is known since 2023, but Microsoft just issued a dedicated warning. Only the wallet owner who deployed the contract can change its contents, so there's no server to take down. Victims get tricked through a fake CAPTCHA: instead of a human-check, they're asked to paste text into the Windows command line and hit Enter, running the malicious command themselves. The attack delivers five payload types, including Lumma Stealer and AsyncRAT, up to ransomware.

⚡️Tether is entering Saudi Arabia to tokenize real estate On August 6, the company announced a partnership with First Data and BKN301. Hadron provides the technology for issuing and managing the tokens, First Data acts as issuer and market operator, BKN301 connects the banking and compliance infrastructure. Pricing, launch timing, and specific properties haven't been named yet. The regulatory groundwork is already in place: Saudi regulator REGA has been running a sandbox since February 2026 with a track for real estate tokenization, with testing periods of 6 to 24 months. Tether previously exited the MiCA-regulated USDT market in Europe, which makes a Gulf jurisdiction with an explicit blockchain mandate a more convenient base for this new business. The company already tokenizes gold through XAUT, worth $2.6 billion, and plans to expand the model into energy and infrastructure.

⚡️Saylor is promising $10 million per bitcoin, while his company hasn't bought any in five weeks Under Saylor's formula, Strategy holding 5% of BTC supply pushes the price to $1 million per coin, 7.5% pushes it to $10 million. The logic: the more you buy, the more expensive the next purchase gets. Reality looks different. The last purchase was during the week of June 15-21, 520 coins for $35 million. Silence since then, and instead of buying, the company sold $218 million worth of BTC this year to cover dividends and stock buybacks. Strategy's own stock has lost 74% of its market cap over the year, twice bitcoin's decline over the same period.