Bitcoin Nodes Split Off Over a Data Fight, and a Real Hard Fork Arrives in Under Two Weeks

Bitcoin hit a specific block over the weekend that triggered one of the strangest governance standoffs in years, with a minority of node operators effectively splitting from the network over how much data a transaction should be allowed to carry.

Meanwhile, spot crypto funds pulled in over a billion dollars across their best week since April.

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Market-Moving News

Three things worth your attention. A long-running argument about what Bitcoin is actually for reached its decisive moment this weekend, and the outcome was lopsided in a way that still managed to be interesting.

Institutional money came back hard, with the best week for crypto funds in nearly four months and one firm taking the overwhelming majority of it.

And a genuine hard fork lands in under two weeks, which is a different animal entirely from what happened over the weekend.

Prices barely moved through any of it, which is becoming a theme.

TradFi

Robinhood Puts 50+ Cryptos Beside Stocks in UK App

Robinhood has begun rolling out crypto trading to eligible UK customers, bringing more than 50 digital assets into the same app used for stocks, ISAs, options, and futures.

Trades are executed through Bitstamp UK, the exchange Robinhood acquired for $200 million in 2025.

The launch includes assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, and HYPE. Robinhood says crypto trades carry no commission or custody fee, although foreign-exchange charges can still apply.

Bitstamp Becomes the Crypto Engine

The rollout turns Bitstamp from an acquisition into operating infrastructure inside Robinhood’s consumer brokerage. UK customers can move between traditional investments and digital assets without maintaining a separate crypto trading app. 

Bitstamp provides the crypto execution layer while Robinhood controls the customer interface and distribution. Its UK registration covers cryptoasset activity under anti-money-laundering rules rather than providing government protection for the assets themselves.

Crypto Moves Onto the Main Screen

Robinhood is also introducing Cortex Digests for Crypto, combining market data, news, and technical indicators to explain movements in individual assets.

The bigger shift is product placement. Crypto now sits beside mainstream investments inside one portfolio instead of being separated into a specialist platform. 

Take: Putting crypto beside stocks removes another barrier between digital assets and everyday investing. The real test comes when trading activity shows whether you treat those 50-plus tokens as a regular portfolio category rather than a separate crypto account.

Corporates

Strategy Sells $108.6M in Bitcoin to Retire Preferred Stock

Strategy sold 1,690 BTC for $108.6 million last week, using the proceeds to repurchase preferred shares tied to its expanding capital structure.

The Bitcoin was sold at an average price of $64,262 between August 3 and August 9. Strategy used the full proceeds to retire 1.15 million STRC preferred shares. Its Bitcoin holdings now stand at 840,447 BTC, acquired for about $63.36 billion at an average cost of $75,385 per coin.

Bitcoin Becomes a Funding Source

Strategy spent years issuing securities and raising capital to accumulate Bitcoin. Today’s filing shows that relationship working in reverse. BTC can now provide liquidity when management wants to reduce obligations created around the treasury.

The sale does not signal an exit from Bitcoin, but it shows the asset is becoming part of active balance-sheet management. Strategy still controls roughly 4% of Bitcoin’s maximum supply.

Cash Reserves Keep Growing

The company separately sold 6.59 million MSTR shares for $653.1 million. Strategy directed $650 million into its dollar reserve, lifting the balance to $4.65 billion. 

The reserve supports preferred dividends and interest payments on outstanding debt.

Common-stock issuance is therefore building the cash cushion while Bitcoin is being used selectively to retire preferred securities.

Take: Strategy’s financing machine now gives you something new to track, when Bitcoin shifts from the asset being accumulated to the liquidity used to manage liabilities.

Selling 1,690 BTC does not change the treasury thesis, but it shows the capital structure can influence when coins leave the balance sheet.

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Security

North Korean Hackers Build AI Into Crypto Attack Stack

North Korea-linked hacking group Kimsuky is integrating private AI tools into cyber operations targeting crypto and financial organizations, according to new threat intelligence released today.

Researchers found local installations of Ollama, GPT4All, and Msty alongside RAG systems, AI coding software, and development libraries.

The group also used malicious documents built around virtual assets, investment strategies, and financial services to deliver malware through disguised shortcut files.

AI Moves Behind the Phishing Screen

Running models locally gives attackers more control than relying on public chatbots. Kimsuky can analyze stolen documents without uploading them to outside services, while RAG tools can search captured information for useful names, credentials, or financial details.

Researchers also found speech-to-text software and AI development libraries that could support malware creation and automate parts of reconnaissance. The evidence does not show Kimsuky training its own foundation models or operating fully autonomous malware.

Old Attacks Get Faster Tools

The underlying playbook remains familiar: malicious ZIP files, PowerShell commands, scheduled tasks, remote-access malware, and Git-based infrastructure.

One shortcut contained an obfuscated PowerShell command around 3,800 characters long. The resulting malware established a scheduled task that began within minutes and repeated every 30 minutes. 

Take: The real shift is AI moving inside the attack stack, where faster research and data analysis can shorten the defender’s reaction window.

Crypto firms now have to assume tactics may be rewritten and stolen information processed before you ever see the next lure.

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Future Forward

Congress is away, which strips out the usual source of headline risk. What is left is a Bitcoin calendar with two hard dates on it.

What Matters Next:

⛓️ BIP-110 lock-in deadline later this month, the last point at which the weekend’s attempt could technically still activate

⛓️ The eCash hard fork in under two weeks, which will create an actual separate chain

📊 Whether ETF inflows extend into a second consecutive strong week

Coming Up:

📅 Coinfest Asia later this month in Bali, with tokenization and stablecoins as headline tracks

📅 Bitcoin Asia in Hong Kong at month’s end

Crypto Know-How: Soft Forks, Hard Forks, and Why One Creates a New Coin

Two Bitcoin forks are in the news right now, and they work in opposite directions. Understanding the difference explains why one fizzled out over a weekend, and the other will definitely happen.

Every Bitcoin node runs software containing the rules for what makes a valid block. A fork is any change to those rules, and the direction of the change determines everything that follows.

A soft fork tightens the rules. Something that used to be allowed becomes forbidden. The crucial consequence is that blocks built under the stricter rules are still valid under the old ones, because they are a subset of what was previously permitted.

Nodes that never upgrade keep accepting the new blocks without noticing anything changed. That backward compatibility is why soft forks are considered the safer path, and why most Bitcoin upgrades have used them.

A hard fork loosens the rules. Something previously forbidden becomes allowed, which means blocks built under the new rules look invalid to any node that has not upgraded. There is no backward compatibility.

Old nodes reject the new blocks outright, the network permanently separates into two chains, and everyone who held coins before the split holds coins on both sides.

That is how Bitcoin Cash came into existence in 2017 and how eCash will come into existence later this month.

Here is the part that trips people up. A soft fork can still cause a split if a minority of nodes enforce stricter rules that the majority of miners ignore, which is precisely what happened this weekend.

The minority nodes rejected perfectly good blocks, formed their own chain, and found almost no hashrate willing to build on it. Two blocks, then nothing.

The practical takeaway: hard forks are scheduled events you can prepare for.

Soft fork splits are contingent on how many people actually run the software, which makes them far less predictable and usually far less consequential.

Everything Else

• A small-cap research guide breaking down the early signals most investors miss is worth ten minutes of your time before the names on this list end up on everyone's watchlist.

• Roughly 890,000 bitcoin moved on-chain over a seven-day stretch according to research firm K33, a high for the year, with analysts attributing much of the activity to holders relocating funds to new custody arrangements after the hardware wallet disclosure rather than to selling. 

• Hardware wallet sales in Russia have more than doubled as the country’s new crypto rules approach, with retail buyers moving to self-custody ahead of a framework that will route most trading through licensed domestic intermediaries. 

• Bubblemaps, a token tied to on-chain analytics and wallet-clustering tools, gained more than one hundred sixty percent in a single session, one of the sharpest moves in the market over the past day. 

• Ether funds have now recorded five consecutive positive weeks, their longest such run this year, and hold roughly ten and a half billion dollars in net assets against a larger cumulative inflow figure, leaving them modestly underwater on a mark-to-market basis.

• Large ether holders have been accumulating aggressively according to CryptoQuant, with wallets holding between ten thousand and one hundred thousand ETH raising their balances to a record level well above where they sat in mid-2025.