Bitcoin Splits From the Nasdaq, and an Attacker Buys a Protocol Instead of Breaking It

Treasury buybacks did the heavy lifting last week, not anything happening on-chain. Which is why a speech in Wyoming on Friday morning matters more to your positions right now than any protocol update you’ll read this week.

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Market-Moving News

The Fed’s new chair makes his Jackson Hole debut Friday, and the symposium has organized itself around digital payments for the first time in four decades.

Bitcoin has stopped tracking the Nasdaq, climbing while tech futures fell, which has reopened an old argument about what it actually is. And a lending protocol lost eight figures to someone who didn’t break a single line of code.

Bitcoin gave back a chunk of its highs this morning after Trump announced 50% tariffs on Canadian autos and steel. Consider that a preview of how twitchy this week gets.

Corporates

Strategy Raises $2B, Buys No Bitcoin and Builds $1.6B Cash War Chest

Strategy raised roughly $2 billion through MSTR share sales last week, but none of the proceeds went toward a fresh Bitcoin purchase. The company sold 18.26 million shares between August 17 and August 23, then directed most of the cash into balance-sheet liquidity. 

About $1.59 billion went into a newly created USD Cash pool, while $300 million increased its existing USD Reserve. Another $136.4 million funded repurchases of STRC preferred stock.

Cash Gets a Bigger Role

The move breaks with the pattern that made Strategy famous, issuing equity and rapidly converting much of the proceeds into Bitcoin. The new USD Cash pool gives management far more flexibility. 

Funds can later support Bitcoin purchases, debt repayments, preferred dividends, securities repurchases, or additional liquidity reserves. Strategy still owns 840,447 BTC acquired for roughly $63.4 billion, so the company remains overwhelmingly tied to Bitcoin.

A More Flexible Bitcoin Treasury

The difference is that Strategy is now building a much larger dollar cushion around that position. Its existing USD Reserve has grown to about $5.1 billion, while the separate $1.59 billion pool can be deployed across a wider range of corporate needs.

No Bitcoin purchase this week does not signal an exit from the strategy. It does show that raising capital no longer means the next step has to be an immediate BTC buy.

Take: Strategy is adding financial flexibility without shrinking its enormous Bitcoin exposure. When you see $2 billion raised with zero BTC purchased, the bigger shift is how much optionality the company now wants around its treasury.

TradFi

Standard Chartered Becomes First Bank to Distribute Hong Kong’s Regulated Stablecoin

Standard Chartered has become the first bank to distribute one of Hong Kong’s regulated stablecoins, connecting Anchorpoint’s HKDAP directly with institutional banking clients.

The bank will initially help eligible clients integrate the Hong Kong dollar-backed token before expanding commercial applications over the coming month.

Planned uses include fund subscriptions, asset-manager settlement, cross-border payments, and transfers through Standard Chartered’s global banking network.

A Bank Becomes the Distribution Rail

HKDAP launched earlier this month through Anchorpoint Financial, a venture backed by Standard Chartered, HKT, and Animoca Brands. Its current circulation remains small, at roughly HK$522,000 as of August 19. The larger development is the infrastructure now sitting behind it.

Instead of relying entirely on crypto-native exchanges or wallets, institutions can access and integrate the stablecoin through an established international bank with roughly $850 billion in assets.

Stablecoins Move Into Banking Workflows

The use cases also push HKDAP beyond crypto trading.

Fund subscriptions and asset-manager settlement could place tokenized cash directly inside institutional capital flows, while cross-border payments offer another route for testing whether regulated stablecoins can improve traditional settlement.

HKDAP is still operating through a limited rollout, so adoption will determine whether those applications gain meaningful scale.

Take: A stablecoin becomes far more interesting once a global bank starts putting it inside ordinary institutional workflows.

If HKDAP begins handling real settlement for fund managers and corporate clients, you are looking at Hong Kong’s experiment crossing from regulatory approval into functioning financial infrastructure.

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Industry

Gemini Taps Apex as Crypto Prediction Markets Race Toward $24B a Month

Gemini has signed a letter of intent with Apex Fintech Solutions that would bring its regulated crypto prediction markets into Apex’s brokerage distribution network.

Under the proposed structure, Gemini Titan would serve as the exclusive CFTC-regulated venue for crypto event contracts distributed through Apex’s futures commission merchant.

Gemini would handle execution and clearing, while Apex would connect the products to participating brokerage platforms.

The deal targets a market that has grown rapidly, with monthly prediction-market volume reaching nearly $24 billion by April.

Distribution Becomes the Next Battleground

Gemini already has much of the regulatory infrastructure in place. Gemini Titan received its designated contract market license in December 2025, while Gemini Olympus secured its clearing license in April. 

The Apex agreement would extend that infrastructure into brokerage systems serving hundreds of financial firms and tens of millions of end investors. Brokerages would not need to build their own prediction exchange or clearing operation from scratch.

A $24B Market Pushes Toward Brokerages

Prediction-market volume has climbed from below $5 billion in September 2025 to nearly $24 billion per month, driven largely by platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket.

Gemini is now trying to compete through regulated brokerage distribution rather than relying only on crypto-native access. The agreement is still a letter of intent, so commercial terms and rollout details remain unfinished.

Take: Prediction markets are moving from specialized platforms toward the same distribution systems that already power mainstream brokerage accounts.

You get a much bigger competitive shift once Gemini’s contracts can reach investors through brokerage platforms they already use, because distribution starts mattering as much as the market itself.

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Future Forward

A week that front-loads its data and saves the speech for last.

On the Radar:

📊 Core PCE and revised Q2 GDP Wednesday, with Nvidia earnings the same day

🏛️ Warsh’s Jackson Hole keynote Friday morning, the week’s main event

📊 Whether ETF flows carry the rally now that the short squeeze has burned out

Coming Up:

📅 ETH Belgrade midweek in Serbia

📅 Bitcoin Asia in Hong Kong at the end of the week

Crypto Know-How: How You Buy a Protocol Instead of Hacking It

The Term Finance loss deserves a proper look, because the attack wasn’t technical, and neither are the defenses against it.

Most DeFi protocols hand control to token holders.

Holders vote on proposals covering which strategies vaults can run, where funds get deployed, and sometimes who can withdraw what. It reads as democratic, and in a protocol with wide ownership and people who actually vote, it broadly is.

The failure mode shows up when neither condition holds. If a governance token trades thinly and most holders never participate, the number of tokens needed to control an outcome can be startlingly small.

An attacker buys or borrows his way to that threshold, submits a proposal redirecting vault assets somewhere he controls, votes it through with the majority he just purchased, and executes.

Every step is a legitimate function doing exactly what it was built to do.

What makes the whole thing viable is one comparison. If controlling the protocol costs less than the assets the protocol holds, the trade works. Term’s vaults held more than the votes required to command them, and somebody ran that math.

Two defenses matter. A timelock forces a gap between a proposal passing and executing, which gives users time to withdraw and the team time to react.

Quorum requirements set a participation floor so a small group can’t quietly pass anything unopposed. Neither is exotic, and plenty of protocols still ship without either.

Before depositing anywhere, look up the timelock duration and the top ten holders. No delay plus concentrated supply means you’ve priced the smart contract risk and missed the bigger one.

Everything Else

• Physical AI is where intelligent software meets real-world machinery and these 7 stocks are positioned across the healthcare, manufacturing, and industrial sectors driving adoption.

• ENA jumped roughly 48% in a day and 77% on the week after Ethena announced a $1 billion secured warehouse facility with FalconX, with volume hitting around $1 billion, close to three-quarters of the token’s entire market cap.

• ZEC climbed roughly 70% on the week and traded above its January 2018 peak after Grayscale filed a fifth amended application to convert its Zcash Trust into a spot ETF. 

• HYPE hit a record high after Trump said at last week’s White House meeting that the CFTC is working to bring Hyperliquid onshore in a fully compliant and legal fashion, capping a roughly 35% week.

• INJ rose about 27% after Injective secured SEC transfer agent registration, which lets it handle recordkeeping for regulated tokenized assets rather than just trading them.

• BNB Smart Chain activates its Pasteur hard fork tomorrow, targeting validator and cross-chain security while meaningfully increasing usable block capacity.