What has been happening this week in the world of blockchain and cryptocurrencies? Current events and background reports in our weekly review.
Selected articles of the week:
Hardware wallets are considered the safest form of Bitcoin storage because they never go online. This week showed that offline storage alone offers no protection. On Coldcard devices from manufacturer Coinkite, the gap sat in key generation itself. A disabled hardware random number generator forced the firmware onto weak substitute sources: the serial number of the microcontroller, a system counter and registers of the real-time clock. Those values are not secret, which made the private keys they produced correspondingly predictable. Affected are seeds created since March 2021 on models from Mk2 through Q. Attackers drained around 1,816 BTC (about USD 116 million) from more than 4,500 addresses in several waves. Coinkite shipped corrected firmware, halted shipments and destroyed vulnerable inventory. The loss of trust nonetheless runs deep, both in the company and in hardware wallets in general.
A Coldcard vulnerability made the Bitcoin keys of affected hardware wallets computable. Around 1,367 BTC have flowed out so far.
US Senate pushes the crypto market bill into the fall
The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act will not come to a vote before the summer recess. Majority Leader John Thune has not scheduled a cloture vote, and the bill is around ten votes short of the 60 required. The road to this point was long: the House of Representatives approved the text in July 2025 by 294 to 134 votes. The responsible Senate committees followed only in January and May 2026, after numerous delays. In substance, futures regulator CFTC would take primary jurisdiction over digital commodities, while securities would remain with securities regulator SEC. Three points are blocking the text. Senators Ruben Gallego and Thom Tillis want to bar federal officials and their spouses from holding their own tokens. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto considers the money laundering provisions too porous. Cory Booker is also negotiating over the Agriculture Committee’s text. Senate staff speak of a standstill and name September as a realistic date. Until then, only an interpretive guideline from the SEC and CFTC applies, which any future administration can withdraw.
The Senate has scheduled no cloture vote on the Clarity Act before the summer recess. Ethics and money laundering concerns remain unresolved.
Justin Drake wants to cut Ethereum’s staking rate to zero
While Washington argues over jurisdiction, Ethereum is shifting its rules within the protocol itself. Researchers around Justin Drake of the Ethereum Foundation propose burning staking rewards step by step. The draft carries the name Tapered Issuance Burn and has been on the table since mid-July, with the forum discussion running since early August. Net issuance would fall to zero once around 50% of the ETH supply is staked, that is roughly 60.25 million ETH. Currently around 40 million ETH is deposited, and the yield on the consensus layer stands at about 2.62% per year. After a rollout over 18 months, some 1.2% of that would remain. Anyone who intervenes only after the threshold has been crossed would have to correct a considerably larger imbalance, argues co-author Jérôme de Tychey. Objections come from across the industry. For one, the Ethereum Foundation ignores the entire range of secondary effects in the DeFi sector. For another, the already considerable effort would be compensated even less for a staking rate of a manageable 2.62% per year.
An EIP draft would burn staking rewards on Ethereum and cut net issuance to zero once 60.25 million ETH sit in the validator set.
Strategy props up its own capital structure with Bitcoin sales
The largest listed Bitcoin holder is reducing its holdings further. Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, sold 1,638 BTC for around USD 104.73 million in the week to early August. The average price came to USD 63,957 per Bitcoin. Holdings stand at 842,138 BTC worth around USD 52.6 billion. They were acquired for around USD 63.5 billion, which leaves an unrealized loss of about USD 11 billion. The proceeds are flowing into the restructuring of the balance sheet: the company raised its dollar reserve to USD 4 billion and bought back STRC preferred shares 11% below par. The basis is the Digital Credit Capital Framework announced in June, totaling USD 2 billion. The pressure is visible: a net loss of USD 8.22 billion accrued in the second quarter, and the stock lost 75% over twelve months. CEO Phong Le describes the move as a shift from capital accumulation to ongoing management of the capital structure.
Strategy sells Bitcoin worth around USD 104.73 million, issues 3.01 million new shares and buys back STRC preferred stock at a discount.
Mastercard brings stablecoin settlement in-house
In addition: Mastercard completed its acquisition of stablecoin payment provider BVNK in early August. The purchase price stands at USD 1.5 billion, plus performance-based earn-outs of up to USD 300 million. That makes it the largest takeover in the segment to date, ahead of Stripe’s purchase of Bridge for USD 1.1 billion. BVNK was founded in London in 2021 and processed around USD 30 billion in payments annually as of the end of 2025, across more than 130 countries. Its customers include Worldpay, Deel and dLocal. For Mastercard, regulation counts alongside volume: BVNK brings an EU e-money license and a MiCA authorization from February. The technology is to feed into four areas, among them B2B payments, remittances and corporate treasury flows. The move complements the crypto partner program from March and the recently launched card settlement in USDC, PYUSD and RLUSD.
The Mastercard BVNK acquisition, worth up to $1.8 billion, expands the card network’s stablecoin infrastructure for B2B payments.
