Losing your keys is supposed to be the nightmare. This week the nightmare was keeping them. After roughly $90 million in Bitcoin was drained from Coldcard hardware wallet users, smaller holders bolted for the supposed safety of centralized exchanges and alternative custody.
The panic showed up on-chain. Bitcoin transfers below 1 BTC hit their highest daily level since 2022 on Friday, with 39,600 BTC moved, according to figures shared by CryptoQuant head of research Julio Moreno. That sits just 300 BTC shy of the 39,900 BTC that changed hands on November 16, 2022, in the days after FTX collapsed.
Galaxy Research pegged the damage from the weekend’s third wave of attacks at 1,367 BTC, about $88.6 million, spread across 4,585 addresses. Galaxy’s head of firmwide research, Alex Thorn, warned the attack was still live and told anyone holding funds on Coldcard-generated addresses to move them without waiting. The flaw reportedly sits in the wallet’s seed generation, which failed to use a genuinely random number generator. If your entropy isn’t random, your keys were never really yours.
Clarity Act clock running out: no vote, or ‘no’ vote?
The Clarity Act is running out of runway. President Trump is weighing a revised ethics proposal drafted by Senators Thom Tillis and Ruben Gallego. The version Trump originally backed would have barred elected officials from endorsing or profiting from crypto projects, enforced by the Department of Justice. Democrats, not trusting the DoJ to police it, wanted state attorneys general to enforce instead. The compromise lets state AGs sue the DoJ over lax enforcement rather than go after officials directly.
With five days left, the odds of even a single Senate vote are slipping, never mind the multiple votes passage would require. Trump’s reported $1.4 billion in crypto profits remain the sore point. Ethics isn’t the only snag either: banks are still fighting any yield on stablecoins, and law enforcement groups are split over the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, with some arguing its developer protections would kneecap money laundering probes. White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt dismissed proposed changes to the bill outright, saying the two sides weren’t remotely close.
Crypto’s ‘no earnings’ season
Second-quarter reports made one thing clear: nobody’s minting money right now. Coinbase pulled in about $1.2 billion in net revenue, down 19% year over year, and posted a $359 million net loss, far wider than the roughly $122 million analysts expected. Transaction revenue, subscriptions, and adjusted EBITDA all missed.
Strategy’s habit of buying every Bitcoin top caught up with it, producing an $8.22 billion quarterly loss driven almost entirely by unrealized losses on its stack. The company did note it has built a $3.75 billion dollar reserve, enough to cover more than two years of preferred dividends and interest. Robinhood, meanwhile, is doing fine, just not because of crypto: record revenue and earnings even as crypto transaction revenue fell 38% year over year, from $160 million to $100 million.
Crypto enters its biggest consolidation phase yet
ARK Invest’s Lorenzo Valente thinks the industry is entering its largest consolidation ever, with revenue pooling into a few dominant protocols. He noted that Hyperliquid and Pump.fun together account for around 67% of all crypto application revenue, and adding Ethena pushes the top three near 80%. Valente expects more mergers, Chapter 11 filings, shutdowns, and acqui-hires ahead. His conclusion may raise an eyebrow: he called all of it extremely bullish for the space.
World Cup drove $20B in prediction market volume
The 2026 FIFA World Cup was a monster for on-chain betting. Chainalysis reported $20 billion in blockchain prediction market volume tied to the tournament, plus $24 million in digital collectible trades, with more than 400,000 wallets taking part. Roughly $5.7 billion of that was wagered during the five-week event itself, and World Cup markets made up about 63% of all prediction market activity in that window.
Winners and losers
Bitcoin closed the week down 3% at $63,350, Ether off 3.5% at $1,879, and XRP down 2.3% at $1.08, with total market cap at $2.18 trillion. Among the top 100, the week’s biggest gainers were Cardano at 14.7%, Uniswap at 8%, and Pi at 3.2%. The heaviest losers were Stable at -16%, Venice Token at -14.6%, and Lido DAO at -14.1%.
Prediction of the week: has Bitcoin already bottomed?
Grayscale floated the idea that Bitcoin may have bottomed ahead of its usual four-year cycle, which would put the low in September or October. Head of research Zach Pandl argued that Bitcoin has matured into a macro-driven asset, and that if the Fed holds off on rate hikes and growth stays firm, the bottom may already be behind us. Worth a grain of salt, though. This particular hope has been recycled for months, from K33 pointing to more than half of supply held at a loss, to Swan’s Cory Klippsten citing record long-term holder balances near 14.7 million BTC. Play the odds long enough and eventually someone calls it right.
Top FUD of the week: Russia and Australia come for Durov
Telegram founder Pavel Durov landed on an international wanted list this week. Russia’s FSB said it had charged him with facilitating terrorist activity and issued an arrest warrant, accusing Telegram of failing to remove channels allegedly used to coordinate attacks and run cyber fraud. Durov, unbothered, suggested the Russians had gotten confused about who gets to ban whom from the internet. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner piled on separately, taking Telegram to court over civil penalties for allegedly leaving up terrorism-related content.
Pump.fun’s awkward timing
Pump.fun reportedly fired staff two months before they were set to receive PUMP tokens worth millions. Per a Sandmark report, at least one employee was in line for a seven-figure allocation. The layoffs reportedly came in April, just ahead of a token vesting schedule tied to 2025 agreements. Read into that what you will.
And finally, a White House teleprompter operator accused of using nonpublic information to win more than $100,000 on Kalshi markets tied to Trump’s speeches no longer works for the federal government. Insider trading, but for prompters.
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