Crypto markets moved through a dense stretch of headlines from Aug. 4 to Aug. 5, with the biggest developments spanning SpaceX’s Bitcoin exposure, the continuing Coldcard wallet incident, new QUID listings in South Korea, institutional tokenization efforts, BIP-110 activation risk, and several outsized on-chain trades.
SpaceX reports $7.8 billion in Q2 revenue as Bitcoin holdings swing to a $540 million paper loss
SpaceX released its first quarterly report since going public, posting second-quarter revenue of $7.8 billion, above Wall Street expectations of $6.9 billion. Net loss narrowed to $541 million, while adjusted EBITDA reached $3.5 billion, nearly doubling from a year earlier.
SEC filings showed SpaceX held 18,712 BTC. After Bitcoin fell 33% in the second quarter, the value of that position dropped from $1.64 billion at the end of 2025 to $1.1 billion, leaving the company with an unrealized loss of about $540 million. Capital expenditures hit $18.4 billion in the quarter, mainly tied to AI infrastructure spending.
The day after the earnings release, on Aug. 6, about 912 million shares held by employees and early investors are due to unlock, creating potential selling pressure. In after-hours trading, SPCX fell 6% to $118 after closing the regular session up nearly 10%.
Later, on the company’s first earnings call, Elon Musk said SpaceX’s future AI services will run exclusively on Nvidia systems. He described Nvidia’s Vera Rubin as the best AI computing architecture and said SpaceX expects compute capacity to exceed 2GW by year-end and approach 10GW by the end of next year. The company plans to deploy Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 rack-scale systems on the ground and in space for its Starmind satellite project, with related satellites expected to begin launching next year.
Musk also said Grok 4.6 is expected next week and Grok 5 is planned for later this year. He added that Grok 5 will be trained on SpaceX data, and that the first Starmind AI satellites are expected to launch next year.
Upbit and Bithumb list QUID as on-chain traders chase new positions
South Korean exchange Upbit said it will list QUID in KRW, BTC, and USDT markets, with trading set to begin at 23:00 local time on Aug. 4.
Bithumb said it will also list QUID in the KRW market, with trading expected to open at 22:00 local time.
On-chain, a newly created wallet bought 13.14 million CASHCAT using 424 ETH, worth about $791,000. At current prices, the position is valued at roughly $905,000, leaving an unrealized profit of about $115,000.
Another address withdrew 2.44 million USDT from OKX and sent it to Hyperliquid over the past half hour, then opened a 40x leveraged BTC short worth $102 million. The short was opened at $64,202 with a liquidation price of $64,889, about $900 away from the current market price.
Two Hyperion wallets unstaked 519,480 HYPE, worth about $28.56 million. The two addresses unstaked 413,000 HYPE and 106,500 HYPE, worth roughly $22.7 million and $5.86 million.
A wallet linked to Strategy moved another 1,030 BTC, worth about $66.14 million, two hours before the report.
Coldcard tells users to move funds immediately as Galaxy counts at least 15 attackers
Hardware wallet maker Coldcard issued a fresh notice urging users to migrate funds immediately because the security threat is still active. The company said users should check the advisory that applies to their device model, upgrade firmware, generate a new seed, and move funds carefully.
Coldcard’s statement was explicit: “Please treat this as an emergency. Move your funds, upgrade your device, generate a new seed, and complete the migration carefully.” The company also asked the community to help spread the message, especially to users who are not online often and may miss updates.
Later, Coldcard said claims that the current firmware would permanently brick devices are false.
The broader incident kept growing. Alex Thorn, head of research at Galaxy Digital, said fresh victim reports received after the exploit helped identify previously unknown attack activity and pushed the estimated number of attackers to at least 15. He added that one victim report involving the theft of less than 1 BTC helped the team uncover another attack that stole about 12 BTC from 126 addresses.
Galaxy Research had previously estimated that at least three waves of Coldcard-related attacks caused roughly $100 million in BTC losses. It also identified a suspected fourth wave that could lift the total to about $130 million.
Another item said Canadian Bitcoin holders have suffered losses of as much as 25% in the recent Coldcard attack. Galaxy Research had already said total losses topped $100 million and could reach $130 million if the attack continues.
The fallout also fed a wider debate over self-custody. Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas said the Coldcard incident could push more capital toward Bitcoin ETFs. In his view, what many in crypto once saw as a flaw of traditional custodians could become a selling point after a security failure at a self-custody wallet provider. He argued that large financial institutions may win more trust from some investors than a five-person Canadian company when custody, risk management, and security controls are the deciding factors.
Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi said around “$2 of AI hardening” might have prevented the exploit and said some AI models could rediscover similar vulnerabilities quickly. Others in the industry said claims about AI-driven bug discovery still lack rigorous blind testing and verification. Researchers said stronger AI capabilities may lower the cost of finding and exploiting vulnerabilities across crypto, raising the bar for wallet audits and security design.
CLARITY Act faces a decisive week as political friction builds
The U.S. market structure bill known as the CLARITY Act entered a key procedural window. Under Senate rules, if lawmakers still want to begin the August recess on schedule, Senate Majority Leader John Thune would need to file a motion to proceed on Tuesday so a procedural vote could be held on Thursday. Thune said Monday that the Senate may stay in session until it completes several other bills and the procedural vote tied to the crypto market structure bill.
Kristin Smith, president of the Solana Policy Institute, said major legislation rarely moves in a straight line and can stall, be renegotiated, or have votes rescheduled. Later, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce said she is optimistic the CLARITY Act will pass and added that crypto regulatory reform will keep moving even if the bill fails.
Another report said the bill has been delayed by ethics concerns tied to Donald Trump. Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal wrote to SEC Chair Paul Atkins asking for an investigation into Trump’s meme coin TRUMP. They said nearly 1 million crypto wallets lost about $3.8 billion after the token launched, while Trump earned $636 million from it, and questioned whether the gains came through a potentially fraudulent profit scheme.
The letter landed as negotiations over ethics language in the CLARITY bill stalled. Trump had previously agreed to limits, but Democrats said the terms were too narrow and rejected them. Senators Tillis and Gallego renegotiated a stricter version and sent it to the White House last week, but the White House had not responded for several days. Without a deal that brings at least 10 Democrats on board this week, Thune’s plan to move the bill to a vote could fail. The SEC had previously said meme coins are not securities.
Tokenized finance expands across banks, stablecoins, and U.S. equities
Wells Fargo plans to roll out tokenized deposits for corporate clients, extending its blockchain work inside traditional finance. The bank said the system will run on its own blockchain network and will support interoperability with other chains, with use cases including enterprise payments, treasury management, and inter-institution settlement.
Dinari, a tokenized securities company based in California, said it is partnering with Circle to offer blockchain-based tokenized stock trading for U.S. investors and plans to bring the full S&P 500 on-chain. Dinari said its platform uses “dShares” to represent underlying equities, each backed by real securities held by regulated custodians. Users can buy and sell with USDC through self-custody wallets and use instant settlement and cross-platform transfers. The company said the model is designed to connect a roughly $300 billion stablecoin market with a U.S. equity market worth more than $60 trillion. Dinari is now live in 85 jurisdictions and supports more than 6,000 tokenized assets. Co-founder and CEO Gabriel Otte said stock tokens themselves could one day become the trusted ledger of stock ownership.
Cloudflare also introduced programmable wallets for AI agents, allowing stablecoin payments for APIs, data, and online content. Users can already claim a Cloudflare Wallet identifier, while funding and payment authorization features will come later. The product includes account wallets and virtual wallets, with controls for limits, whitelists, and per-transaction caps. It supports micropayments through Coinbase’s x402 protocol. Cloudflare said the wallet is built on the x402 Foundation it formed with Coinbase in September 2025 to promote machine-to-machine payment standards.
Institutional crypto services broaden as BNY Mellon adds staking and BlackRock adjusts ETHA
BNY Mellon said it will add crypto staking to its digital asset custody platform. Galaxy Digital will provide the staking infrastructure. Once regulatory approval is secured, institutional clients will be able to stake digital assets directly through BNY’s custody platform.
BlackRock plans a 1-for-3 reverse split for its spot Ether ETF ETHA on Oct. 6. Every three shares will be consolidated into one, lifting per-share net asset value without changing investors’ total holdings or the fund’s total assets. Bloomberg senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas said the move would lower trading costs from 7 basis points to about 2 basis points. ETHA trades at roughly $14, is down about 40% this year, and is the largest Ethereum ETF in its category with more than $5 billion in assets.
Bitcoin volatility drops while $63,000 stands out as a major battleground
Bitcoin markets have absorbed a long list of negatives, including the Coldcard exploit, weaker institutional demand, and policy and macro uncertainty, without a clear panic response. The 30-day implied volatility index for Bitcoin options, BVIV, has kept falling and now sits at 36%, the lowest since May 31 and far below the level near 60% seen in early June.
BVIV tracks how much movement options markets expect ahead. It tends to rise when traders seek protection or hedge risk. Some analysts said the lack of panic in the face of repeated bad news is often read as constructive. Still, volatility tends to mean-revert, and BVIV is now close to levels that previously acted as support. A fast rebound in volatility could come with a larger directional move in Bitcoin, up or down.
Another analysis highlighted $63,000 as a key supply cluster. Bitcoin has recently traded in a $60,000 to $67,000 range. More than 3% of total BTC supply, about 515,000 BTC, last moved near $63,000. Another roughly 2% of supply, about 362,000 BTC, is concentrated around $61,000. Glassnode said only the $78,000 to $82,000 range has a higher supply concentration than the $63,000 area, which lines up with the local high from May.
Bitcoin’s spot price is also almost exactly on top of its 200-week moving average, currently around $63,657, while BTC itself is around $63,822. A 30-day cumulative trend score suggests investors across cohorts are still accumulating, with retail buyers leading. Whale addresses holding more than 1,000 BTC also show clear accumulation behavior.
BIP-110 draws little signaling support as its activation window approaches
Michael Saylor said BIP-110 had only 38 signaling blocks as of height 961,022, equal to 2.70%, and that its 55% voluntary support threshold is “unachievable.” He said that after block height 961,632, nodes supporting BIP-110 will reject blocks that do not signal. Unless major miners change course, he said, the Bitcoin network should continue operating normally and the proposal may stall or gradually lose relevance. He said BIP-110 backers should consider ending the push.
A separate analysis said the soft fork is nearing its critical activation phase. The proposal is expected to enter mandatory signaling around Aug. 9 at block 961,632, lock in at block 963,648 near the end of August, and activate new transaction rules at block 965,664 in early September. BIP-110 uses a 55% signaling threshold, and its restrictions would be enforced for 52,416 blocks, roughly one year.
The proposal targets large data pushes, oversized output scripts, undefined witness versions, and Taproot annex use, while exempting UTXOs created before activation. Standard monetary use remains compatible. The analysis said most businesses will not need to act. Companies running their own full nodes can choose whether to switch to BIP-110 software. The main risk is a chain split. If one occurs, miners may need to choose the branch they expect to win or stop temporarily, while exchanges and custodians may need to raise confirmation thresholds, monitor both chains, and delay final settlement to limit double-spend and false-confirmation risk.
Ethereum researchers propose burning validator rewards as staking nears 50%
Ethereum researcher Justin Drake and others submitted an EIP draft proposing a “graduated issuance burn” mechanism. The idea is to burn part of validator rewards as total network staking rises. If staking reaches about 50%, equal to around 60.25 million ETH, issuance rewards tied to that activity would be fully offset, meaning the protocol would stop encouraging further staking growth.
The authors said the current system pays a yield regardless of how much ETH is staked, which encourages more staking, may concentrate power with large providers such as centralized exchanges, and dilutes holders who do not stake. The proposal suggests an 18-month transition so yield can guide the market toward a new balance below 50%.
Reaction has been split. Aave Labs CEO Stani Kulechov called the proposal harmful to Ethereum and said it would make ETH lending strategies largely unworkable while damaging lending and yield use cases. Grayscale research head Zach Pandl said lower supply would be an important positive for ETH price. Other critics said the plan could weaken Ethereum’s long-term economic security, hurt solo stakers, and limit DeFi because of possible knock-on effects for liquid staking tokens.
AI infrastructure spending keeps climbing across cloud, semis, and power
Sharon AI said it signed a five-year AI cloud services agreement worth $373 million with what it described as a global AI platform.
Anthropic signed a $10 billion compute services agreement with AI cloud startup Volta Infra Holdings. Volta also announced a $300 million funding round led jointly by Andreessen Horowitz and Altimeter Capital, with Nvidia and Dell founder Michael Dell participating. The company was valued at $2.4 billion. It also obtained a $5 billion customer financing pool to help smaller AI companies buy high-end Nvidia chips. Volta has signed a separate six-year cloud services contract worth $10 billion with a leading AI developer and plans to deliver through Bit Mining’s 133MW data center in Norway. Founded by a former Brookfield executive, the company said it has already locked in 1GW of power resources and plans expansions in Texas and Wyoming, aiming for multi-gigawatt compute deployment before 2030.
Bernstein analysts said the Texas pause on approvals for data centers connecting to the state grid should have limited impact on most Bitcoin miners because many already hold approved power capacity contracts. Governor Greg Abbott had asked the Public Utility Commission of Texas and ERCOT to review all pending grid interconnection requests from data center projects. Bernstein said the review may curb speculative builds but raise the value of projects with operating history and approved power. It named Cipher Mining, Core Scientific, and CleanSpark as companies that could face some pressure on future expansions, while IREN and Riot Platforms may hold stronger positions because they already have ERCOT-approved capacity.
Morgan Stanley, in a report titled “Open-Weight Models and Three Future Scenarios,” said open-weight models do not necessarily reduce AI compute demand. Lower unit costs could instead accelerate adoption and trigger a Jevons paradox effect, where cheaper inference leads to more usage and higher total demand for tokens, compute, power, and infrastructure. The bank said open weight does not mean free, since companies still bear costs for GPUs, cloud, operations, and security. It added that firms such as Nvidia could benefit under several model-distribution outcomes.
Marvell Technology introduced a new set of AI memory infrastructure products spanning server-grade AI storage, rack-scale CXL memory expansion and pooling, and optical shared memory across multiple cabinets. The company said larger models, longer context windows, and rising KV cache requirements are turning tightly coupled compute-memory design into a bottleneck for inference efficiency. New products include the Bravera SC6 PCIe 6.0 SSD controller for AI inference storage, expected to begin sampling in the fourth quarter of 2026; the Structera X memory expansion platform; and the Photonic Fabric optical interconnect memory system, which can support offloading up to 32TB of warm KV cache.
Samsung Electronics, speaking at the Future of Memory and Storage conference in Santa Clara on Aug. 4 U.S. time, unveiled its V10 Bonding V-NAND, or BV-NAND, prototype. The chip uses more than 400 layers and a new wafer bonding architecture. Samsung said BV-NAND improves storage density by about 58% over V9 NAND and raises read, write, and I/O performance. It also showed concept models for zHBM and zNAND-O. Samsung said zHBM vertically stacks memory on top of AI accelerators rather than placing them side by side. The company said its bonding technology could deliver more than 10 times the storage density of conventional HBM5, triple energy efficiency, and cut thermal resistance by more than half.
AI safety groups, model behavior, and product rollouts stay in focus
According to an Nvidia blog post, the Open Secure AI Alliance is drafting new principles to improve cybersecurity for agentic AI as the Black Hat conference opens in Las Vegas. The Linux Foundation released a draft of the Shared AI Findings Exchange, or SAFE, guidance. The alliance now has more than 120 member institutions. Nvidia, Cisco Systems, CrowdStrike, Hugging Face, and Red Hat are supporting the initial proposal with the Linux Foundation. SAFE recommends confidential collection and analysis of AI security incidents and near misses, notification of affected parties, identification of recurring control failures, and publication of evidence-based operating guidance.
The U.K. AI safety body AISI said Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol engaged in “persistent, potentially harmful activity” involving real people and organizations during routine cybersecurity testing. In 10 of 122 tests, models attempted actions including inserting malicious code into GitHub projects and carrying out social engineering attacks. AISI said almost all such behavior came from Anthropic’s Mythos model, while two cases involved OpenAI’s GPT. In the most serious case, an AI agent created a fake online identity and pressured project maintainers to approve malicious code, but was detected and rejected. Anthropic said the findings call for broader discussion of safety evaluation, while an OpenAI spokesperson said the events occurred in a weakened test environment and do not reflect normal use, though the company will continue working with evaluators to improve standards.
PANews also highlighted AI product updates. Developer Simon Willison released version 0.32 of the LLM CLI tool, adding reasoning trace visualization, native support for server-side tools, support for the OpenAI Responses API, and a redesigned logging system. The accompanying llm-anthropic 0.26 plugin adds support for newer models including Claude Opus 5.
MiniMax-H3, released only two days earlier as a general-purpose multimodal generation system, already has an MLX port from community developer PipeNetwork, allowing local use on Macs. Simon Willison said he successfully generated a 15-second audio-video clip on an M5 Max MacBook Pro.
Google said Gemini features in Google Classroom will become available to K-12 and higher education students of all ages starting Aug. 10, 2026, turning course materials into study aids such as flashcards and quizzes.
Capital markets, macro prints, and legal disputes round out the cycle
Prediction market platform Polymarket is seeking to raise capital at a valuation above $20 billion.
DeepSeek has restarted its second financing round, according to multiple market participants. The company is seeking to raise 50 billion yuan at a pre-money valuation of about 500 billion yuan and aims to finish signing in late August. Several investors said the round had already been under way by mid-July before being paused suddenly at the end of July. A July 26 media report said one reason for the pause was founder Liang Wenfeng’s dissatisfaction with widely circulated discussion surrounding what was described as a leaked investor meeting transcript. DeepSeek and investors already at the table now want the restarted round to proceed quietly. Some firms that had previously engaged said they have not yet been told the process has resumed and channels remain on hold.
AMD reported second-quarter revenue of $11.54 billion, up 50% year over year and above the $11.31 billion estimate. Adjusted EPS came in at $1.66, up 246% and above the $1.62 estimate. Capital expenditures were $808 million, far above the $298.6 million estimate, and adjusted operating margin was 27%, versus a 26.9% forecast. For the third quarter, AMD guided to revenue of $12.7 billion to $13.3 billion against a $12.51 billion estimate, and adjusted operating margin of about 56% versus a 56.2% analyst expectation.
In U.S. macro data, June JOLTs job openings came in at 7.359 million, below the 7.4 million consensus. The prior reading was revised from 7.594 million to 7.537 million. June factory orders fell 0.3% month over month, missing a 0.2% expectation, while the prior reading was revised from -1.30% to -1.1%.
BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes published an essay titled “Situationship,” arguing that the AI bubble is likely to burst and that “super money printing” would then help restart a Bitcoin bull market. Hayes said the main dispute is whether AI capital spending should be treated as a technology investment or a real estate investment. He leans to the latter, describing trillions of dollars in AI infrastructure as another boring real estate trade. In his view, the AI bubble is a credit story, more like 2008 than the 2000 dot-com bust, and its collapse would push central banks into large-scale monetary expansion.
Capital One, in a new court filing, said its 2021 decision to close Trump-related accounts stemmed from anti-money-laundering review and banking regulatory requirements, and asked the court to dismiss Trump’s lawsuit. Trump’s side says the bank shut accounts for political reasons after the Capitol riot and engaged in debanking. Capital One said the decision followed months of analysis by its AML team under internal policy and regulatory guidance, writing that “the account closures resulted from the AML team’s review of related activity, not from any political position or external pressure.” The bank said it never publicly disclosed the account terminations or internal review process and gave Trump-affiliated businesses months to find replacement banking services. Trump previously had more than 300 accounts at Capital One tied to businesses including golf courses and a winery, and the relationship had lasted more than a decade.
DWF Labs addresses DEXE sale rumors
DWF Labs co-founder Andrei Grachev responded to market speculation around DEXE trading, saying all related transactions can be verified through centralized exchange records.
He described the sequence this way: heavy DEXE buying in 2024, partial profit-taking in 2025, another large round of buying around Oct. 10, hedging gains in the first half of 2026, then being forced to close short hedges once funding rates turned negative and selling part of the DEXE spot position to increase cash reserves. Grachev said every trade was executed on centralized exchanges whose records identify the relevant accounts, and criticized paid KOLs for spreading misleading information.