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Goldman Sachs is set to gain BTCI, the roughly $1 billion NEOS Bitcoin High Income ETF, through its planned acquisition of options-based ETF manager Neos, Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas said. Balchunas added, "goldman sach's about to acquire $1b bitcoin income etf $btci via its purchase of neos, so now it makes sense why they didn't launch the bitcoin covered call thing they filed for a few months ago."

SKALE Labs has launched Agent Pit, a simulated prediction market that mirrors Polymarket’s structure so AI agents can train and test trading strategies in a virtual environment, The Block reported. The service mirrors Polymarket’s order book, market settlement mechanism and real-time event data feeds.

Nasdaq-listed Bitcoin financial services firm Fold sold a total of 832 BTC in the first half to repay debt and fund operations, CryptoSlate reported. Its holdings have now fallen sharply to 194 BTC. Fold posted a $15.6 million operating loss and a $38.8 million net loss in the first half alone, raising concerns that additional share issuance or further Bitcoin sales may become unavoidable.

Coinbase to delist 10 perpetual futures, including SAND, on Aug. 26 Coinbase announced the delisting of MEME, SAND, BIRB, BLUR, KAT, SPX, ZORA, AXS, AI, and ZRO perpetual futures on Aug. 26.

Nasdaq is hiring a principal protocol engineer for the Nasdaq Token Design Standard, a standard for representing on-chain stocks, ChainCatcher reported. The role covers token issuance, compliance, corporate actions, chain selection and the buildout of trading infrastructure for institutions. The salary range is $155,000 to $287,000.

Miden plans to launch USDCx, a privacy-enhanced stablecoin backed by Circle’s xReserve infrastructure, alongside its mainnet rollout later this month, CoinDesk reported. The zero-knowledge proof-based blockchain network said USDCx will be natively issued on the Miden network and backed by USDC deposited 1:1 into xReserve smart contracts. It is designed to remain private by default while allowing selective disclosure to auditors, regulators, or counterparties when required.

Santander expects the Federal Reserve to still raise interest rates in September and also sees another rate hike in December, according to Walter Bloomberg. The bank said July CPI is unlikely to sway the Fed’s September policy decision and maintained its existing view.

President Donald Trump has been sued over the sale of faster access to Truth Social posts, Bloomberg reported. CoinNess previously reported that high-frequency trading firms were paying $60,000 to $100,000 a month to monitor posts from key Truth Social accounts in real time.

New York City has opened an investigation into prediction market platforms Kalshi, Polymarket, Coinbase and Gemini Titan, The Block reported. Julie Menin, speaker of the New York City Council, said in a statement that prediction markets aggressively entice consumers to gamble and place bets on sports, politics, culture, weather and nearly everything else.

Kalshi has started offering a real-time order book data feed through DoubleZero Edge, a market data transmission service built on a dedicated global fiber-optic network, The Block reported. It marks the first use of an ultra-low-latency multicast feed in the prediction market sector. Institutional traders had previously faced delays and the added step of rebuilding order book conditions from API responses. The service will initially provide order book depth data for major sports events and cryptocurrency perpetual futures contracts.

Nick Timiraos, often described as the Fed whisperer, said the July inflation report matched market expectations, easing some pressure on the Federal Reserve to deliver another rate hike next month, while hawkish voices remain. He said Wall Street paid particular attention to the consumer price index released today because Fed officials have signaled they are also watching the data more closely. According to Timiraos, Fed officials had spent the past year expecting inflation to return to the 2% target without additional rate hikes, but some now favor keeping rates higher for longer. He added that other officials have signaled they could join that hawkish minority if upcoming data make the current outlook harder to maintain. Timiraos said that earlier view was based on the belief that current rates were already restrictive enough and that persistently high inflation reflected external shocks rather than overly loose monetary policy. He added that there had also been an earlier expectation that tariff-driven cost increases would be one-off and that energy prices would fall alongside oil prices as Middle East tensions eased, but those shocks have instead persisted and, together with a surge in demand tied to the AI infrastructure investment boom, have pushed up prices for tech equipment and software.

The three major U.S. stock indices opened higher today. - S&P 500: +0.49% - Nasdaq: +0.90% - Dow Jones: +0.33%

Nasdaq-listed Bitcoin miner MARA Holdings said on Aug. 12 it borrowed a total of $750 million against 18,750 BTC, according to a quarterly report filed with the U.S. SEC. The company said the proceeds will be used to expand its energy generation and AI infrastructure businesses. MARA Holdings signed Bitcoin-backed loan agreements with two firms. Under its agreement with Coinbase Credit, the company consolidated and refinanced an existing $150 million credit facility while securing $300 million in new funding. A second loan provided $300 million from Two Prime Lending. That put the total principal across the two loans at $750 million, while net new funding came to $600 million after excluding the refinancing of the existing $150 million loan. The 18,750 BTC pledged as collateral was initially valued at about $1.2 billion when the agreements were signed.

Nasdaq-listed Cypherpunk Technology (CYPH), which has been accumulating ZEC, said through an official channel on Aug. 12 that it posted about $39.4 million in net income for the second quarter, swinging from a $16.6 million net loss a year earlier. The return to profit stemmed from about $46 million in unrealized gains tied to the fair-value remeasurement of its ZEC holdings. ZEC rose to $400.09 from $243.35 over the same period. As of Aug. 11, Cypherpunk held 323,394.38 ZEC, worth about $129.4 million and equal to 1.92% of ZEC’s circulating supply. Its average purchase price for ZEC was $341.83. According to CoinMarketCap, ZEC was recently trading at $490.64, up 0.31%.

Marinade Finance said a routing failure at Solana staking infrastructure provider Teraswitch temporarily pushed 28.83% of staked SOL on the Solana network offline, a level close to the 33.34% threshold for halting transaction confirmation. The outage affected about 90 validators. Marinade Finance said AS20326 held 118.9 million SOL, equal to 27.34% of the network’s total staked SOL, and 94% of that amount went offline at the same time. Traffic normalized about 33 minutes later, and the affected validators missed a combined 333 SOL in staking rewards. Marinade Finance said the incident highlighted concentration risks tied to ASNs, data centers and validator failover infrastructure, and plans to review its concentration cap standards.

Anchorpoint Fintech, led by Standard Chartered Bank Hong Kong, has begun a phased rollout of the Hong Kong dollar stablecoin HKDAP for institutions and professional investors, The Block reported. Anchorpoint plans to use HKDAP for cross-border payments and for payments and distribution tied to tokenized real-world assets.

Wintermute plans to invest about $1 billion over the next five years in high-frequency trading and artificial intelligence data center infrastructure as it diversifies into traditional finance, Bloomberg reported. In an interview with Bloomberg, Wintermute CEO Evgeny Gaevoy said the firm is seeking to reposition itself as a dealer trading equities, commodities and foreign exchange, using major firms such as Jane Street Group and Citadel Securities as benchmarks, adding that it is competing with companies that have spent decades optimizing technology and infrastructure for the market and that the scale of investment is naturally significant.

Harmony said via its official X account that it had identified 10,288 anomalous transactions across 409 wallets that received 4 billion unauthorized ONE tokens, after an exploit today led to the illicit minting of tokens equal to 26% of total supply. Harmony added that it had alerted exchange partners and blocked hundreds of suspected hacker deposits to centralized exchanges. The project also said 53% of validators had applied a patch banning unauthorized minting, while a rollback appeared to be the most favored solution so far. JackXBT, a well-known on-chain analyst, had previously declared a boycott of Harmony after its first hack, saying there had been no rewards for people who helped trace the stolen funds. Following the hacking disclosure, ONE was trading at about $0.0007458, down around 40%, according to CoinMarketCap.

A senior Iranian source told Reuters there are currently no discussions at all on extending a ceasefire between Iran and the United States. The source said Iran does not see any need for an extension because, from Tehran’s perspective, the ceasefire has no effective start date, and added the United States violated a temporary agreement 48 hours after signing it before withdrawing from the deal a few days later. The source also said one of the issues under discussion is a U.S. return to the memorandum of understanding, or MOU, and setting a time frame for Washington to fulfill related commitments.

Whale Alert reported that 216,741,629 USDT has been transferred from an unknown wallet to OKX. The transaction is valued at about $217 million.

Four whale addresses active on decentralized perpetual futures exchange Hyperliquid opened BTC short positions worth a combined $340 million at entry prices around $64,000, according to an analysis by on-chain analyst The Data Nerd. He added, "In just the past few days, four whale wallets all opened short positions on Hyperliquid." The positions were 1,792 BTC ($114 million), 1,576 BTC ($100 million), 1,200 BTC ($76.5 million), and 806 BTC ($51.4 million), respectively.

The Bank of England is testing whether private stablecoins and a central bank-issued digital pound can be used together in a single payment process, CoinDesk reported. The central bank has expanded its digital pound research into a second phase and is examining whether stablecoin infrastructure and central bank money can operate simultaneously in trade finance settlement. Polygon Labs, the developer behind Polygon (POL), is participating in the second-phase research, according to the report. The Bank of England has studied central bank digital currencies and distributed ledger technology since 2024, and the latest test is part of broader efforts by central banks to explore how private stablecoins and state-issued digital currencies could be applied together within existing financial systems.

An anonymous whale on Hyperliquid, identified by an address beginning with 0xff84, is nearing forced liquidation on a 40x leveraged short position of 1,543 BTC worth about $98.97 million as Bitcoin rebounds in the short term, according to a Lookonchain analysis. The whale opened a 1,600 BTC short position on Aug. 5 at an entry price of $64,202 and later cut part of the position at a loss to avoid liquidation during Bitcoin’s continued rebound. The whale’s current short entry price is $63,999, with a liquidation price of $64,225.35. Based on CoinMarketCap data, BTC was trading near $64,100, leaving the position about $125 away from forced liquidation.

Binance and Bybit BTC perpetual futures volume has fallen to its lowest level since 2023, while spot volume has dropped to its lowest level since February 2024, according to crypto research firm K33 Research. K33 Research said the market remains constantly exposed to the risk of sharp price swings driven by forced liquidations, as open interest has stayed relatively large despite the decline in trading volume.

Coinbase’s Bitcoin premium index has remained negative for 86 straight days since May 19, extending its longest streak on record, according to CoinGlass. The latest reading stood at -0.1027% as of 8:30 a.m. UTC on Aug. 12. The previous longest stretch of negative premium lasted 40 days, from Jan. 16 to Feb. 24 this year. With buying pressure from U.S. investors relatively weak, the duration of the negative premium has continued to set fresh records. Historical data shows prolonged negative premium periods have often coincided with slower buying by U.S. investors and weaker institutional demand.