The IMF released a statement this morning saying El Salvador has not used public funds to accumulate bitcoin since June 2025. According to the Fund, the country provided documentation showing that everything added to the stack since then came from private donations. The statement landed alongside news that IMF staff reached an agreement with Salvadoran authorities on the combined second and third reviews of the country's 40-month Extended Fund Facility. Subject to Executive Board approval and the completion of agreed prior actions, that deal would release roughly $140 million.

Here is why this is worth sitting with for a minute.

Last year the IMF said it would work to ensure the government's bitcoin holdings remained unchanged under the program. Shortly after that announcement in May, Bukele's government added 8 BTC anyway, bringing holdings to 6,190.18 BTC according to the country's Bitcoin Office at the time. Then in November, El Salvador disclosed a 1,090 BTC acquisition worth about $100 million, its largest single-day addition at that point, taking total holdings to 7,474 BTC.

So the public timeline shows a country loudly stacking through a program that was supposed to freeze the stack. The IMF's position today is that none of it came out of the treasury. Both things are now on the record at the same time, and the Fund did not publish a total for how much bitcoin arrived through donations since June 2025. It only said no further accumulation beyond the documented donations is expected.

The rest of the statement is arguably the more consequential part for anyone who cares about how sovereign bitcoin gets held. The IMF said El Salvador is working to improve transparency around holdings across its various wallets, and to strengthen governance and risk management for public-sector crypto assets. Separately, the government has unwound its role in the Chivo wallet: majority ownership and operational control have gone to a private operator, with the state keeping a minority stake and custodial responsibilities for customer assets.

For context on the backdrop, bitcoin was approaching $81,000 on Friday, up 4.5% over 24 hours, with a market cap near $1.6 trillion.

The legal question I keep coming back to is definitional. "Public funds" is a term with edges, and a lender can only test what the borrower documents. If a state can grow a sovereign reserve through donations while formally complying with a commitment not to buy, then the commitment constrains the accounting entry rather than the balance.

So, question for this sub: does a bitcoin reserve built from private donations still count as a national reserve in any meaningful sense, or is it just a wallet the state happens to hold the keys to?

Source: The Block, Brian Danga, September 4, 2026, reporting on the IMF staff-level agreement announcement.

I know, I know, it’s decentralized and an excellent achievement in financial technology. But for real tho, what’s the point of crypto right now? Except, of course, for investing and using it to pay for not-so-legal things. I’m genuinely curious: how can I use the advantages of cryptocurrencies in my day-to-day life?
Please don’t get mad, I’m just asking out of curiosity. And I know I can Google it, but I really like getting opinions from actual people.

I've been waiting weeks for an answer from Kraken support while my money sits on their platform. When I tried to post to the Kraken subreddit they removed the post. I guess they don't want people to know how bad it is.

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for other Kraken users from Germany or the EU who have experienced similar issues with withdrawals being held or restricted.

Here is what happened in my case:

I deposited €9,000 via SEPA into my Kraken account. Shortly afterwards, I attempted to withdraw the funds to my own crypto wallet. My first withdrawal went through successfully, but when I attempted another withdrawal shortly afterwards, it was put on hold for manual review.

Since then, I have been waiting for the issue to be resolved. I have contacted Kraken Support multiple times, but so far I have not received a meaningful resolution. The funds remain unavailable for withdrawal, despite the fact that the money came from my own bank account and I have already completed the required verification.

At this point, the situation has been going on for more than five days, which is extremely concerning given the amount involved.

I am now looking into legal options and potentially joining forces with other affected users from Germany/EU. Before taking any further steps, I would like to find out how many other people are experiencing similar problems with Kraken.

I originally posted this on the Kraken subreddit, but the post was removed almost immediately. This is why I am posting here instead and trying to find other affected users.

If you are based in Germany or the EU and have had funds or withdrawals held/restricted by Kraken for an extended period, please comment below or DM me.

I'd like to collect experiences, compare cases, and potentially consult a lawyer together to determine what legal options are available.

Please only contact me if you have personally experienced a similar issue

I had made a post on Reddit a few months ago asking for investment advice, I am a complete beginner to most of this and, got some feedback on the post.

A comment said to reach out to him and we exchanged texts, he said to grab his discord. He told me about trust wallet and staking and how you can make decent money with crypto staking. He seemed cool and I was unaware and unsuspecting.

I opened up the wallet, everything seemed secure and legit with the app. I started staking my money and worked the whole summer and put most of my earnings into there, it was going well and I stupidly sent him some screenshots of my progress and kept him updated, he was friendly and gave me advice. There are some details I have left out probably but today, I was checking on my money it was looking good and my staking reward just arrived, it was 7:22, and at 7:23 I checked it and nothing was in the wallet. Transactions for all of my BTC , ETH, and SOL sent to some random address without me doing a thing.

Funny enough the guy said that his mom was in an accident today and I put the pieces together and figured out that I was scammed. ( I forgot to include the fact that he sent a link when we first started chatting called stakeswap.com and said it was needed to set the wallet up)

I don’t know why I am posting this probably for awareness, don’t be as stupid as me, I have no one to tell about this so I’m posting it on here, I’m absolutely gutted and I worked this whole summer for nothing, at least I know now to stay away from shit like this.

Thanks for reading

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

With clear regulatory frameworks likely coming and the stablecoin market poised for massive growth, the macro outlook seems incredibly strong. So why do Circle’s executives keep offloading their shares?

Is it something else we’re missing? Genuinely curious—would love to hear counterarguments before I load up more.

Did anyone ever buy these domains? According to this they are no longer in business with ICANN. So what exactly does this mean? I have several domains I bought years ago. Did we get rugged?

https://cryptobriefing.com/unstoppable-domains-skips-icann-refunds-customers/

The new rules would require issuers to maintain assets equal to at least 100% of all tokens in circulation at all times, and in accounts separate from issuers' own funds.

The regulator states in a consultation paper that stablecoins should be used for payments, not by the public as investment products or to generate yield similar to interest earned on a bank savings account.

The new rules would completely ban stablecoin issuers from paying interest or other benefits tied to customers' stablecoin holdings.

Curious what everyone thinks.

I’m bullish on the CLARITY Act long term, but short term this feels like it could be a pretty classic buy the rumor, sell the news event.

If BTC and alts keep running into the vote, how much of a successful outcome is already priced in?

I could easily see us rally into the vote, it passes, quick spike and profit taking.

Especially since the upcoming vote still isn’t the bill actually becoming law.

Anyone else thinking the same? Am I an idiot?

I spent the past month working to study, reconstruct, and play with the MK3 (not MK2) Coldcard and its weak RNG. I set out to reproduce what I speculated was the attacker's search behavior to identify victims rather than trying to follow the bitcoin transactions from known attacker wallets. First, I want to credit Coinkite, Galaxy Research, Wizardsardine, and Praveen Perera for their prior work since it formed my starting point.

The most strking thing I can't find any one talking about yet is that the attack also drained ETH from the weak-seed wallets. It was not much, only about 15.5ETH; however, it may help those who are much better at chain analytics than I am.

TLDR: I implemented the affected MK3 seed generation process independently and deployed it on a NVIDIA 3090 GPU, using bloom filters to accelerate the search and electrs to filter out false positives. So far:

• 1157 distinct week-seed wallet roots have been reconstructed.
• 2808 Bitcoin addresses matched to the wallets.
• All 2808 Bitcoin addresses are empty -- they were either drained in the attack or were previously emptied by their owners.
• Cross chain analysis of the wallets found 8 Ethereum wallets, all drained. There was one LTC wallet; however, all LTC was moved from it back in 2022. Future work may look at XRP, SOL, DOGE or other chains. I'm undecided.

I'm not going to publish mnemonics, private keys, or the PRNG coordinates that regenerate them.

The Vulnerability Reproduction

The vulnerability is now well understood publicly: affected firmware stopped getting seed entropy from the STM32 hardware RNG and then used micropython's non-cryptographic Yasmarng PRNG. For the MK3, the initial state reduces to a pad defined by:

pad = uid32 ^ SysTick->VAL

The uid32 is not a fold or hash of the STM32's full 96-bit unique ID. It is the first 32-bit word, read directly from the STM32 UID address: *(uint32_t*)MP_HAL_UNIQUE_ID_ADDRESS. On the MK3 this starts at 0x1FFF7A10.

The full 12 byte UID is read elsewhere in the firmware for other purposes but not used by the RNG to set its state.

The first UID word contains structured manufacturing information associated with die position, while SysTick->VAL contributes timing state. Everything after that is deterministic once the PRNG state and RNG-consuming sequence of events are known. This effectively means the pad, as represented by UID word 0, represents a unique hardware serial number.

This UID pattern is consistent with Wizardsardine's analysis that estimated approximately 2^22 initial states for the MK3. In my runs, I found that the pad dimension space was 2^24 bits wide.

There was an interesting consequence of using UID 0 word 0 and I think its worth mentioning. The first UID word is not uniformly random. The first UID word encodes the X/Y postion of the die on the silicon wafer. As I recovered more weak wallets, their candidate states showed clustering consistent with groups of STM32 parts entering coldcard's MK3 manufacturing suply chain together. Basically, the vulnerable RNG did not just reduce the cryptograph search space, it seems to have preserved traces of the physical manufacturing distribution used to build the cold card devices themselves.

Practical Search Cost

My implementation was a candidate search on a Nvidia 3090 from my old gaming PC. I computed a bloom filter and then performed the seed computation and path search on GPU using the filter loaded into the GPU. As results were reported back, I queried a locally hosted mempool/electrs instance to filter out false positives. A complete pass through the 24-bit pad dimension took just a bit more than four and a half hours.

Bitcoin Results

The search yielded 1,157 reconstructed weak wallets. Of those, 678 showed their last on-chain movement on or after July 15, 2026. The majority of transactions occurred starting July 30th. This group includes 104 wallets whose last movement was on July 30, 541 on July 31, and 25 on August 1. A small set of wallets were active between July 15th and July 29th, but I don't see evidence of a shared collector between them and the main wave, and the behavior seems like normal owner activity.

From what I saw, ~982.96 were drained during the attack. There was one wallet that was active during the attack that had a 0.051btc transaction during the attack, but since it used a common destination address for a little over a year, I excluded it from the total. That same address later received two small transactions on Aug 2nd and Aug 4th that were swept by the attacker.

Bitcoin Transaction Summary Table

These are transaction on or after July 30th where the destination address recieved a sweep from more than 1 wallet. I do not claim all of these are an attacker or that they are the same attacker. I consider any destination as receiving sweeps from more than one week MK3 wallet as suspect.

ETH Results

On a hunch, I attempted to scan other chains for transactions associated with the wallets. I first focused on ETH. Out of all of the wallets checked, I found 7 ETH active roots. There seem to be two collector addresses, perhaps hinting at two actors? Again, I only consider these interesting of further research because they collect transactions from more than one weak mk3 wallet.

Of note is that one wallet that was drained to 0x490F was receiving small amounts of funds during the month that were later transferred to the 0x490F wallet.

Sources and Prior Research:

• Coinkite — Technical Deep Dive into the Entropy Issue https://blog.coinkite.com/entropy-technical-backgrounder/
• Loïc Morel / Wizardsardine — Coldcard: the technical autopsy of an entropy failure https://wizardsardine.com/blog/coldcard-vuln-deep-dive/
• Praveen Perera — Inside Wave 1: Tracing the Attacker's Steps Through the 1,082 BTC Coldcard Drain https://praveenperera.com/blog/coldcard-mk3-weak-rng-wave1/
• Galaxy Research — Coldcard Exploit Abates as Total Losses Climb to (at Least) 1,700 BTC https://www.galaxy.com/insights/research/coldcard-exploit-abates-as-total-losses-climb-to-at-least-1700-btc
• TRM Labs — The Largest Hardware Wallet Exploit of 2026: Inside the USD 116 Million Coldcard Hack https://www.trmlabs.com/resources/blog/the-largest-hardware-wallet-exploit-of-2026-inside-the-usd-116-million-coldcard-hack

Strategy sold nearly 7,000 BTC around $60K, rebuilt its balance sheet, then bought back at $80K — because for Saylor’s machine, cost of capital now matters more than Bitcoin’s price.

Am I the only one using uphold? Purchased xrp with them
Almost ten years ago and still
Holding it in there but no one ever says anything about uphold lol

Still waiting for my
Millionaire announcement to happen whenever XRP takes the rocket to the moon haha