Strategy may be nearing a return to Bitcoin purchases after a 10-week pause, according to how traders interpreted recent posts from Executive Chairman Michael Saylor. The company has not added to its BTC holdings since June 22, when it bought 520 Bitcoin at $67,068 each, and it has sold Bitcoin four times since then. In August, Strategy raised $3.28 billion in new funds, but kept the proceeds in U.S. dollar cash rather than deploying them into BTC. Three financial changes are drawing attention. Strategy now holds about $6.69 billion in cash against roughly $6.71 billion in convertible note debt, leaving net leverage at just 0.1%, according to the company. The gap between cash and debt that had worried traders over the summer has effectively disappeared, and MSTR rose 12% last week. At the same time, the company’s dividend reserve increased from $3.75 billion in July to $5.1 billion. Another key variable is STRC, Strategy’s 12% dividend preferred stock, which is intended to trade around $100. It closed at $97.33 on Aug. 28, up from a 12-month low of $71.25. CEO Phong Le said the company plans orderly repurchases if STRC trades below $100. Any money used for buybacks cannot be used to buy Bitcoin, so the stock’s move closer to par is being watched closely ahead of the next weekly report expected on Aug. 31.

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission said on Aug. 28 that it had sanctioned former White House teleprompter operator Gabriel Perez for using advance access to President Donald Trump’s speech drafts to trade prediction market contracts. The agency said Perez must disgorge $107,500 in illicit gains, pay a $65,000 civil penalty, and stay out of trading for three years. According to the CFTC, Perez had access to Trump’s speech text before public appearances while working in the White House from December 2025 to February 2026. The regulator found that he misused nonpublic information to trade “mention market” event contracts tied to words or phrases the president might say in a speech. The CFTC also thanked Kalshi, identified as KalshiEX, for assisting with the investigation. The input states that Kalshi had flagged Perez’s unusual trading pattern, which later led to scrutiny and the loss of his White House job. The case adds to a string of CFTC actions this year involving alleged insider trading and compliance concerns in prediction markets.

Binance said it will support cash dividend distributions through bStocks for holders of QCOMB, PYPLB and GOOGLB, which track Qualcomm, PayPal and Alphabet respectively. According to the exchange’s announcement dated Aug. 31, the net dividend amount, after applicable withholding tax, fees, costs and other related expenses, will be reinvested into the corresponding underlying securities. Users will then receive the dividend in the form of QCOMB, PYPLB and GOOGLB bStocks. Eligibility will be determined by asset snapshots. For QCOMB holders, the snapshot is set for Sept. 3, 2026 at 00:00 UTC. For PYPLB and GOOGLB holders, the snapshot time is Sept. 4, 2026 at 00:00 UTC. Binance added that spot trading for all three tokens will remain unaffected. Still, token conversion, deposits and withdrawals will be suspended on a temporary basis: QCOMB services will pause at 23:30 UTC on Sept. 2, while PYPLB and GOOGLB services will pause at 23:30 UTC on Sept. 3. The exchange said those services will resume after the dividend distribution is completed.

Anthropic is facing renewed criticism over how it describes usage limits for its Claude Max plans. The company offers a $100 Max 5x tier and a $200 Max 20x tier, labels that can easily be read as implying the higher-priced plan delivers four times the total allowance of the lower one. According to Anthropic’s own documentation, however, the 5x and 20x multipliers apply only to each five-hour usage window, not to overall weekly capacity. That distinction has become a point of friction because all paid plans also carry weekly limits, and Anthropic has not disclosed how those weekly caps compare with the Pro plan. A recent reverse calculation shared by a Reddit user estimated that, during the current temporary capacity increase, the Max 20x plan offers only about 2.25 times the weekly total of Max 5x. The issue has also reached court. A proposed class action filed in June alleges that Max 20x delivers only 6 to 8 times Pro’s actual total usage, while Max 5x is roughly 3.5 times Pro. On that basis, the gap in weekly usage between the two Max tiers would also be only about twofold. The case is still pending, and no court has found that Anthropic engaged in false advertising.

Techub News reported that Anatoly Popov, deputy chairman of Sberbank, said regulated cryptocurrency exchanges in Russia are expected to record at least $46.43 billion in trading volume during their first year of operation. The estimate is tied to Russia’s recently approved crypto regulatory framework. According to the report, the framework is designed to move digital asset trading into formal supervised channels. Popov’s comment points to the scale Russian authorities and financial institutions may be preparing for as the new rules take effect. The report cited @WuBlockchain as the source of the update.

Goldman Sachs used its Aug. 25 review of second-quarter earnings in the U.S. internet sector to make a simple point: investors are still willing to fund AI spending, but they are asking much harder questions about timing, payback and margin pressure. The bank said the quarter confirmed three themes across the sector — rising AI investment, resilient digital consumption and a tougher balancing act between growth spending and profit discipline. Internet stocks gained 9% during the period, trailing the S&P 500, which rose 11%. The report also previews Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia technology conference in San Francisco, scheduled for Sept. 8 to Sept. 11. Forty public and private companies are set to appear, with the OpenAI CFO opening the event and executives from Google Cloud, SpaceX and Uber also on the agenda. Across digital advertising, e-commerce, cloud computing, travel, ride-hailing, streaming, gaming, dating and online betting, Goldman said the central debate has shifted from whether companies should invest in AI to how clearly management teams can explain the return profile. In cloud, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services reported massive backlog growth and ongoing capacity constraints. In consumer-facing internet segments, spending held up, though higher-income and lower-income users are behaving differently.

microduck, a meme project on the Robinhood chain, posted a sharp intraday spike on Aug. 31, according to GMGN market data. The token climbed from around $0.013 to an intraday high of about $0.0188, with its gain at one point exceeding 40%. At that peak, its market capitalization was close to $19 million. The move did not hold for long. After the surge, the token quickly gave back part of its gains and fell back to around $0.0145. Its market capitalization also dropped to about $14.55 million. Based on the figures provided, that put the token roughly 23% below its session high. The move highlights a brief but pronounced burst of volatility in microduck trading during midday hours.

Iceland held a referendum on Aug. 30 in which 52.8% of voters, or 105,339 ballots, opposed restarting negotiations to join the European Union. The outcome leaves Iceland in the European Economic Area while remaining within the Schengen framework. Because Iceland is an EEA member rather than an EU member state, the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation, or MiCA, does not automatically apply there at this stage. Crypto-related activity in Iceland is still mainly governed by general financial laws. The report added that MiCA is expected to be incorporated into the EEA Agreement in the future, but no formal timetable has been set so far, according to Bitcoin.com News cited by Odaily.