The SEC Cancels Its Own Meeting, Tether Passes an Audit With an Asterisk, and a Shipping Leak Turns Ugly

The SEC was set to open its first real crypto rulemaking this morning but canceled the meeting late Thursday, providing no new date and a one-sentence explanation.

Tether, meanwhile, cleared a full KPMG audit, which is a genuine milestone, though the figure everyone’s quoting dates to December 2025.

Free hotlist (Sponsored)

Frontier AI's Tipping Point

"Frontier AI" could be the point of no return—when AI surpasses human intelligence.

Elon Musk warns that tipping point could arrive by the end of 2026, and according to my research, it may have already happened.

As this technology reaches a select group of companies, some stocks could surge while others struggle.

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Market-Moving News

Bitcoin’s been pinned near $63,000 all week with volatility close to nonexistent. Underneath that flat tape, it’s been a busy few days.

A regulator that spent months positioning itself as the one adult in the room pulled its own meeting hours before it was due. Tether produced the audit it’s been promising for the better part of a decade.

And a hardware wallet breach stopped being about phishing and started being about people’s home addresses.

Corporates

Hyperscale Sells 685 BTC to Fund AI Expansion

Hyperscale Data has sold approximately 685 BTC for about $43 million, using its Bitcoin treasury to strengthen liquidity for its Michigan AI data-center buildout.

The company also reduced debt by roughly $30 million and now holds about 275 BTC. The sale means Hyperscale disposed of more than 70% of the Bitcoin represented by its pre-sale and remaining positions.

Management says the move does not signal an exit from Bitcoin. Hyperscale plans to keep mining and may rebuild its holdings as liquidity permits.

Bitcoin Turns Into Working Capital

Hyperscale has experimented with more than one way to extract value from its BTC.

The company previously borrowed roughly $30 million against Bitcoin through Morpho, allowing it to raise cash without selling the underlying assets. It also sold about 100 BTC in July to support the same Michigan project.

Today’s much larger sale shows management choosing immediate capital for infrastructure over retaining most of its treasury exposure.

AI Wins the Capital Competition

Bitcoin miners and data-center operators increasingly face a choice between dedicating power to mining or securing longer-term AI infrastructure revenue. Hyperscale is putting real balance-sheet weight behind the second option.

The company still needs to turn construction spending into operating cash flow, making execution the next test.

Take: A Bitcoin treasury becomes more than a passive reserve once management starts using it to finance another business.

The key signal for you is whether $43 million of liquidity produces enough AI growth to justify giving up most of the company’s BTC position.

TradFi

Israel’s Largest Bank Brings Crypto Trading Into Its App

Israel’s Largest Bank Brings Crypto Trading Into Its App

Bank Leumi has partnered with Galaxy Digital to become the first Israeli bank planning to offer direct cryptocurrency trading inside its existing investment platform.

Leumi and PEPPER customers will eventually be able to buy, hold, and sell Bitcoin, Ether, and Solana through the Leumi Trade app.

GalaxyOne Institutional will provide the trading infrastructure, while Galaxy Custody Infrastructure will support the technology used to safeguard digital assets.

The Bank Stays the Front Door

Customers will not need to move into a separate crypto exchange environment to access digital assets. Leumi keeps control of the banking relationship and investment interface, while Galaxy supplies the crypto infrastructure underneath it. 

The setup places digital assets beside conventional investments inside an account customers already use.

Bank Leumi and Hapoalim together represent nearly half of Israel’s banking-system assets, giving the planned rollout considerably more reach than a standalone fintech launch.

Galaxy Moves Behind Traditional Finance

Galaxy already provides institutional crypto trading and custody services to more than 1,700 counterparties and reports roughly $8 billion in assets on its platform.

The Leumi deal gives that infrastructure another route into mainstream banking rather than requiring Galaxy to acquire retail customers directly. The service is expected to launch in early 2027, so customers cannot trade through Leumi yet.

Take: Crypto adoption changes character when a bank puts digital assets beside stocks instead of sending customers elsewhere.

Early 2027 will show whether giving you one familiar investment screen can turn occasional crypto interest into regular portfolio activity.

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A Gold Revaluation Could Change Everything

There is speculation that Trump could sign an order updating how America's gold reserves are valued, a figure that has not changed since 1973.

Past resets of this kind have historically led to strong moves in related assets.

See what the order could mean for your money.

Regulation

Binance Cuts Transaction Links to 11 Crypto Platforms

Binance will restrict transactions involving HTX and 10 other crypto platforms starting August 23 as sanctions and compliance rules move deeper into exchange infrastructure.

The list includes Rapira, Aifory Pro, ABCeX, WhiteBird, NoOnecrypto, Tradex, Monease, BitPapa, Exnode, EXMO, and HTX.

Transfers involving the affected services can be held for compliance review, while connected wallets may face additional restrictions during that process.

Sanctions Reach the Transaction Layer

Several platforms on the list have already faced restrictions linked to Russia sanctions and cross-border financial activity. The UK has designated entities connected to HTX, Rapira, Aifory, and BitPapa.

European regulators have also expanded their ability to restrict crypto providers used to bypass sanctions. Binance is now turning those government actions into controls inside its own payment and transfer systems.

Crypto Liquidity Gets More Fragmented

The restrictions do not shut the named platforms down globally. They do, however, make it harder for funds connected to those services to move through Binance. That can isolate users and businesses from one of crypto’s largest sources of liquidity.

The broader effect reaches beyond these 11 companies. Exchanges increasingly have to judge not only which tokens they support, but which counterparties and transaction routes remain acceptable.

Take: Sanctions stop being abstract once they determine whether a crypto transfer can clear. If you send funds through a restricted platform, access to larger pools of liquidity can disappear before the transaction reaches its destination.

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The 2030s Market Warning

Wall Street banks are warning that the next market crisis could be unlike anything investors have seen in decades.

If Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are right, portfolios could remain under pressure for 10 years or longer.

After repeated market shocks since 2022, some experts believe the instability could continue well into the 2030s.

See How to Defend Your Portfolio Now

Future Forward

With the SEC meeting off the board, the regulatory action moves to a different agency. The rest of the month belongs to the conference circuit.

On the Radar:

🏛️ CFTC advisory meeting next week on crypto and prediction markets, now the nearest real regulatory event

🏛️ A replacement SEC date, which nobody has announced

📊 Senate returns mid-September, when the market structure cloture motion ripens

Coming Up:

📅 Coinfest Asia next week in Bali

📅 ETH Belgrade and Bitcoin Asia in Hong Kong before month-end

Crypto Know-How: Why Tether’s Critics Never Accepted the Quarterly Reports

Tether has spent ten years under attack over the gap between two words that sound interchangeable. Now that it’s cleared the harder one, the distinction earns five minutes.

An attestation is narrow. A firm examines one claim, usually reserve balances on a single date, checks it against supporting documents, and reports whether it holds.

It’s a snapshot. It says nothing about how the business operates, whether internal controls function, where income comes from, or what happened on either side of that date.

A full audit is a different exercise. The auditor works through the balance sheet, income statement, cash flows and equity changes across an entire year.

It tests transactions, traces ownership, examines how assets are valued, and assesses whether the company’s own systems can be relied on. Emerge from that clean, and you receive an unqualified opinion, which, despite sounding like criticism, is the highest grade available.

That gap is why the quarterly reports never satisfied anyone. An attestation confirms money existed on a Tuesday. An audit examines how the business runs.

Here’s what an audit still can’t do. It looks backward. The opinion attaches to a specific year-end, and everything after that date falls outside its scope.

It also certifies nothing about legal compliance, so a company can hold spotless statements and still fall short of what a regulator requires. Two questions worth asking of any audit headline: what date does it cover, and what has happened since?

Everything Else

• An AI ranks every stock across Buffett quality, deep discounts, macro trends, and big money movement and delivers the top 10 rated names to your inbox daily free.

• The ShipMonk breach traced back to a zero-day SQL injection flaw in Metabase, an analytics platform it used, meaning the leak passed through two vendors before reaching a customer, and ShipMonk held a recognized security certification throughout. 

• Chainalysis puts losses from violent physical attacks on crypto holders above $30 million for the first half of this year, already on pace to exceed the $58 million recorded across all of last year.

• Tether’s audited holdings included roughly $141 billion in US Treasuries alongside more than 146 tons of physical gold, placing it among the larger private holders of American government debt anywhere.

• The Senate’s cloture motion on market structure legislation ripens at a fixed time in mid-September, making that afternoon the first genuine procedural test the bill has faced rather than another delay.