Bitcoin ownership is estimated at about 5% of the world’s population, with India accounting for the largest number of holders, according to figures published by on-chain analyst Willy Woo. Woo’s country-level table, posted on September 1, places worldwide adoption in a range of 4.5% to 6%, equivalent to roughly 370 million to 500 million people. India is estimated to have about 68 million Bitcoin holders, representing 4.6% […]
Blockchain networks are moving from experimental infrastructure towards a broader role in digital finance as developers increasingly raise transaction capacity and institutions test tokenised settlement at scale. The shift is being driven by advances in layer-two networks, data-availability systems and higher-capacity base chains to overcome the congestion, cost and latency that have limited blockchain use beyond cryptocurrency trading. Ethereum is pursuing simultaneous expansion of its main network […]
Two Thai businessmen have sued stablecoin issuer Tether in a New York court, alleging it froze $42.4 million in USDT months before US authorities obtained a seizure warrant. Nutthawat Rukthammachalern and Natthawat Kasamvilas filed the complaint in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York on August 31, challenging Tether’s decision to blacklist 10 Ethereum addresses containing 42,417,785.62 USDT. The plaintiffs allege Tether acted […]
South Korea’s Financial Services Commission has set February 2027 as the starting point for a three-stage expansion of tokenised securities, with the programme ultimately intended to support on-chain settlement linked to stablecoins. The roadmap, announced after a public-private consultative meeting on September 4, covers conventional assets including stocks, bonds and funds as well as fractional investment products. It is tied to amendments to the Act on Electronic […]
The International Monetary Fund has confirmed that all bitcoin added to El Salvador’s official holdings since June 2025 came from private donations, with no public resources used to expand the country’s cryptocurrency position. The disclosure was contained in an IMF statement issued after staff reached agreement with Salvadoran authorities on the combined second and third reviews of the country’s $1.4 billion Extended Fund Facility. The Fund said […]
Trading in stocks and commodities through cryptocurrency platforms surged to about $778 billion in August, underscoring the rapid expansion of traditional-market products on venues built originally for digital assets. The total reflects a sharp rise in activity across perpetual futures and other products linked to equities, precious metals and commodities, as major crypto exchanges broadened their offerings beyond Bitcoin, Ether and other tokens. August data showed stock […]
Bitcoin jumped about 5% to around $81,000 on Thursday as a sharp rebound forced leveraged traders betting on lower cryptocurrency prices to close positions, accelerating gains across the digital-asset market. The move lifted the world’s largest cryptocurrency back towards the upper end of its August trading range after it had spent much of the day around $77,000-$78,000. Market data showed heavy short-side liquidations as Bitcoin pushed through […]
Polymarket has formally opened perpetual futures trading across cryptocurrencies, stocks, equity indices and commodities, adding leveraged directional trading to a platform best known for prediction markets. The international Polymarket platform is offering leverage of up to 20 times on eligible perpetual contracts, allowing traders to take long or short positions without a fixed expiry date. Its live perpetual-futures pages list markets tied to Bitcoin, Ether, major technology […]
Standard Chartered has begun offering institutional clients spot trading in Bitcoin and Ether through its Dubai International Financial Centre entity, extending its regulated digital-asset business in the UAE from custody into trade execution. The bank said on Thursday the service makes it the first global systemically important bank to provide institutional digital-asset spot trading in the UAE. Eligible clients can trade the two largest cryptocurrencies through Standard […]
Russia’s new federal framework regulating cryptocurrency circulation took effect on Tuesday across the country’s financial sector, establishing a supervised domestic market for digital assets while retaining a ban on cryptocurrency payments inside the country. Federal Law No. 282-FZ entered into force on September 1 after President Vladimir Putin signed it on August 4. The State Duma approved the legislation on July 21 and the Federation Council endorsed […]
European Central Bank Executive Board member Isabel Schnabel has called for central bank money to become a native programmable asset on distributed-ledger platforms, arguing that smart contracts could make monetary policy operations faster and more flexible as finance becomes tokenised. Speaking at the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium on August 28, Schnabel said central banks need to extend their operational reach into tokenised markets rather than leave […]
A US high-school student has made about $20,000 by selling a Telegram digital collectible awarded for his performance at this month’s International Olympiad in Informatics. Telegram founder Pavel Durov said Jonathan He, who won a gold medal and finished seventh overall at IOI 2026, sold his Algorithm Cup for 15,000 Grams, valuing the transaction at roughly $20,000. The collectible was among a limited set distributed to medal-winning […]
Russia’s largest lender Sberbank is preparing to expand corporate lending secured by cryptocurrencies, with plans to accept Bitcoin, Ethereum and Tether’s USDT as collateral once the country’s new digital-asset rules take full effect and regulators permit the assets’ public circulation. Anatoly Popov, deputy chairman of Sberbank’s management board, said the bank intends to continue developing loans backed by digital assets and broaden the collateral it accepts beyond […]
Polkadot’s DOT token fell below $0.85 on Saturday as selling pressure returned after a brief August rebound, leaving the cryptocurrency struggling to reclaim the psychologically important $1 level despite favourable network decentralisation metrics. DOT was trading near $0.84, down about 4 per cent over 24 hours and roughly 9 per cent over seven days. Its market value stood near $1.42 billion, with about 1.7 billion tokens circulating. […]
Ripple is moving ahead with a four-phase programme to prepare the XRP Ledger for post-quantum cryptography, targeting a transition to quantum-resistant signatures by 2028 while testing security mechanisms before a large-scale quantum threat becomes practical. The roadmap, set out by Ripple in April and detailed by its engineering team, is designed to protect accounts and transactions if powerful quantum computers eventually become capable of breaking the elliptic-curve […]
Google DeepMind has completed what it describes as the world’s first double-blind evaluation of a proprietary frontier-class artificial intelligence model, testing Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite while preventing both the developer and external evaluators from accessing each other’s confidential material. The pilot represents a significant attempt to address benchmark contamination, one of the most persistent weaknesses in measuring advanced AI systems. Under conventional testing arrangements, model developers may gain […]
A Russian-speaking ransomware operation has used the Cursor artificial intelligence coding agent to support intrusions into corporate networks, exposing how commercial AI assistants can be manipulated to accelerate hacking once attackers gain access to a target. Operators linked to the Aurora ransomware group employed Cursor Agent during hands-on exploitation of at least 10 organisations between April 8 and May 21, 2026. The AI system helped with network […]
PayPal-linked exchange-traded funds suffered steep losses on Friday after Stripe and Advent International abandoned their pursuit of the payments company, wiping out much of the takeover premium that had built into PayPal-related investments. PayPal Holdings shares closed 12.7% lower at $53.66 on August 28 after reports that the consortium had stopped pursuing a transaction valued at more than $50 billion. The sell-off was amplified in leveraged ETFs […]
Issac John The Silk Road Finance & Technology Forum concluded in Tashkent with a proposition that carries important implications for the UAE: Central Asia wants its historic trade routes transformed into new corridors for money, payments, technology and investment. For a country whose prosperity has been built partly on functioning as the commercial and financial crossroads between East and West, that raises an intriguing question. Does the […]
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JPMorgan Chase has evaluated launching its own stablecoin as major banks reconsider their approach to blockchain-based money amid growing demand for digital payments and clearer US regulation. The deliberations mark a potential shift for the world’s largest bank by market capitalisation, which has so far concentrated on tokenised bank deposits rather than issuing a conventional stablecoin. JPMorgan already operates JPM Coin, a dollar-denominated deposit token designed for […]
Claims that outgoing White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed a Donald Trump-branded “Golden Token” can be exchanged at Bank of America for $3 million have no substantiated basis, with official government information and the bank’s published material showing no such redemption programme exists. The allegation has circulated through social-media and messaging accounts promoting purported Trump Golden Tokens as an extraordinary wealth opportunity. Some posts claim holders […]
The Linux Foundation has taken TRACE, an open specification designed to create hardware-backed evidence of how artificial intelligence agents operate, under vendor-neutral governance as companies seek stronger controls over increasingly autonomous AI systems. TRACE, short for Trust, Runtime Attestation and Compliance Evidence, creates cryptographically verifiable records showing what software executed, the policies governing it, the class of data it accessed and the tools it called. The initiative […]
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