Author: NBTC

Oil traders usually get weekends off. Futures pits close, exchanges go dark, and whatever happens in the world simply waits until Monday to get priced in. But when the United States and Israel launched an aerial assault on Iran on the last Saturday of February, that pause didn’t actually stop the market from moving — it just moved somewhere else. While the world’s benchmark oil exchanges sat closed, a small blockchain-based platform kept pricing crude in real time, offering an early glimpse of how blockchain 24/7 markets are starting to reshape the rhythm of global commodity trading. Key takeaways Traditional…

ARK Invest and Glassnode published a joint study on Sept. 1 that found three entities could cross the measured block-production thresholds for both Bitcoin and Ethereum, while Solana required 19. The 32-page report, titled The Decentralization Spectrum: Design Tradeoffs in Digital Assets, compares the networks across ownership, exit fluidity, verification costs, critical resilience, reconstruction costs and infrastructure distribution. The findings do not mean three companies control Bitcoin or Ethereum. The metric counts mining pools and staking platforms as entities, even when the underlying hardware, stake or node operators belong to separate participants who may withdraw or redirect their resources. Bitcoin’s…

KPMG U.S. issues unqualified audit opinion on Tether’s 2025 financial statements – the most positive form of opinion an independent auditor can issue 13 August 2026 – Tether, the largest company in the digital asset industry, today announced the successful completion of a full independent audit of Tether International, S.A. de C.V.’s financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2025, conducted by KPMG U.S. The audit, completed in accordance with applicable professional standards, represents one of the most significant milestones in Tether’s history, it is also the largest inaugural financial audit in history. Completed at a scale and within…

At USENIX Security on Aug. 12, researchers presented a Solana Proof-of-History clock attack they had disclosed privately to Solana developers in December 2025. Anza’s 50,000 $SOL Alpenglow competition closed seven days later, and its rules appear to place the attack outside the scope. The paper describes a protocol-valid way for a scheduled leader to stretch its effective block window and suppress honest leaders’ proposals in a fork-assisted version. The path relies on Proof-of-History and TowerBFT, the machinery Alpenglow is intended to replace but had not yet displaced on mainnet in Agave 4.2. The finding creates both a contest-scope story and…

The Taliban has effectively banned cryptocurrency trading across Afghanistan, shutting down exchange shops and threatening prosecution for traders and related businesses. The crackdown marks a significant shift for a country where digital assets had become a financial lifeline after the collapse of the Western-backed government and the subsequent freezing of international reserves. Scope of the ban and enforcement According to reports, authorities have closed more than 20 crypto exchange shops in Herat, a key trading hub near the Iranian border, and arrested at least 13 traders. The Taliban’s Ministry of Finance and central bank have classified digital assets as fraudulent,…

Coinbase, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the United States, has announced the addition of two new tokens to its spot trading platform: Basecat ($BASECAT) and Detrilifbot (DRB). The listings, confirmed on [Date of announcement], mark the latest expansion of Coinbase’s digital asset offerings, which now span a broad range of tokens from established cryptocurrencies to newer, niche projects. Details of the New Listings According to Coinbase’s official announcement, trading for $BASECAT and DRB will commence on [specific date or timeframe] on supported platforms, including Coinbase Exchange, the Coinbase Android and iOS apps, and the company’s professional trading interface,…

Bitcoin’s hashrate has spent 316 days below its record as miners redirect power toward AI. The seven-day network average stood near 914 exahashes per second on Aug. 31, about 20.6% below its October 2025 peak of 1,151.6 EH/s. The stretch without a new high is the longest in a decade, exceeding the previous 252-day maximum in the same Blockchain.com series. The decline followed months of weak mining economics, summer power curtailments and a growing shift by some operators toward artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. Twenty One Capital CEO Raphael Zagury has described the episode as Bitcoin’s first sustained “economic hashrate…

“Accessibility” has always been one of the biggest bridges between Wall Street and digital assets. From this perspective, the SEC’s move to reopen the regulatory framework around tokenized equities through an “innovation exemption” naturally brings 24/7 trading back into focus. The idea is simple: Give investors access to equities without market-hour restrictions, while bringing more liquidity to the market. Against this backdrop, it’s no surprise the move has triggered a frenzy, with the SEC potentially launching the initiative as early as Friday. But the bigger question for market participants is what this means for crypto. Notably, tokenization is already being…

TRON has released GreatVoyage v4.8.2, codenamed Pyrrho, as a mandatory network upgrade, requiring node operators to update before 23:59 Singapore Time on Aug. 16 to avoid affecting block synchronization. The release was detailed in a TRON developer announcement that lists the upgrade’s core changes. Mandatory upgrades in the GreatVoyage series are a regular part of operating the TRON network, and missing the deadline can cause a node to fall out of sync with the chain, with knock-on effects for the services that depend on it. Ethereum compatibility at the virtual-machine level The headline change is TVM compatibility with Ethereum’s Pectra…

It is the question every Bitcoin holder is asking after a brutal 2026: is the bottom in? Coinbase’s CEO says the low was near $60,000. Bitwise’s CIO agrees. Standard Chartered still sees $100,000 by year-end. And yet Bitcoin dipped below $58,000 weeks after those calls, and ETFs are still down billions for the year. This guide lays out the actual evidence on both sides, the signals that would confirm a bottom, and why the honest answer is more useful than a confident one. Where Bitcoin stands Bitcoin trades near $64,000 in late July 2026, roughly 50% below its October 2025…