Hi! In today’s edition:
⛏️ Bitcoin's editors reshuffled who controls the proposal process after the weekend's fork
⚖️ The CFTC has decided a New York court does not get the final word on Kalshi
🇦🇪 Coinbase found a regulator willing to treat stock tokens as actual shares
✈️ The lawsuit that was supposed to switch off Kalshi's newest market did not survive the week
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Two Blocks Cost Luke Dashjr His Editorship
Luke Dashjr is out as a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal editor, two days after the soft fork he championed peeled off onto a chain that mined two blocks and stopped. BIP 3, the document governing the process, now lists five editors instead of six.
Fellow editor Mark "Murch" Erhardt filed the motion Sunday with four grounds: a conflict of interest on BIP-110, almost no recent editorial work, advocacy for a contentious fork, and a breakdown in communication. He wrote that Dashjr left fewer than 1% of editor comments since April 2024. The removal went through Monday, roughly a day later.
Signaling for BIP-110 topped out at 2.53% of blocks against the 55% it needed. Dashjr called the removal an abuse of power and said he is taking a sabbatical from Ocean, the pool where he is chairman and CTO.
Washington Tells Kalshi to Ignore New York
The CFTC invoked emergency powers Tuesday and ordered Kalshi to keep running its exchange normally, even if a New York court grants the temporary restraining order Attorney General Letitia James is seeking. Kalshi alerted the CFTC on August 1, the day after the suit landed.
New York wants Kalshi barred from offering contracts on sports, culture, elections and other events in or from the state, plus disgorgement, triple its profits, and at least $36 billion in compensatory damages. Because Kalshi is headquartered in New York City, the CFTC argues, that order would switch off its event contracts everywhere.
Chairman Michael Selig said Congress never intended derivatives exchanges to answer to a patchwork of state gaming laws. It is the second time in a month the agency has used its emergency power to shield Kalshi from a state court.
Coinbase Puts Its Tokenized Stocks in Abu Dhabi
Coinbase received a Financial Services Permission from Abu Dhabi's Financial Services Regulatory Authority on Tuesday, clearing it to arrange deals in investments and hold client assets for tokenized securities issued inside Abu Dhabi Global Market.
The pitch is that these are the real thing. Tokens are fully backed by the underlying shares under FSRA supervision, and verified holders get shareholder rights including dividends and voting. No brokerage account or correspondent banking relationship is needed to hold or trade them, though redemptions still require somewhere to send the cash. Every transfer runs through continuous sanctions screening, and Coinbase can freeze or seize assets at the wallet level.
Brett Tejpaul, co-CEO of Coinbase Institutional, said no major financial center has yet built a framework treating tokenized equities as securities and composable onchain tokens at the same time.
FlightAware's Kalshi Lawsuit Lasted One Day
FlightAware dropped its lawsuit against Kalshi on Tuesday, one day after filing it. The notice of voluntary dismissal covers all four Kalshi entities and is without prejudice, so the flight tracker can bring the case again.
Nothing in the docket explains why. What did change is Kalshi's copy: markets that told traders outcomes were "verified from FlightAware" now credit a "Primary Source Agency," with the trademark gone and a disclaimer saying the products are not endorsed. A day earlier, FlightAware had been asking for a temporary restraining order to switch those markets off.
🚨 UNEASY MONEY LIVE TODAY 🚨
This week on Uneasy Money, Kain Warwick and Taylor Monahan cover a brutal week onchain: researchers who spun up a fake DeFi startup to hire North Korea's operatives and watch them work, the OpenAI agents that broke into Hugging Face on their own, and Bitcoin's BIP-110 fork that died after two blocks.
Plus Hyperliquid's RWA perps eating into HYPE's buybacks.
Live today, Wednesday at 4pm ET.
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🔒 Ravencoin warned of a rollback after a consensus flaw let invalid blocks onto the chain starting at height 4,487,776 on Aug. 7, with pools 2Miners and RavenMiner now mining a branch that excludes them. the project told exchanges to suspend deposits and withdrawals until the chain stabilizes.
📉 Twenty One Capital posted a $413.5 million net loss for the second quarter, with $401.5 million of it from the falling value of its 43,514 bitcoin. New CEO Raphael Zagury used his first shareholder letter to argue the company has to become more than a bitcoin treasury, listing five priorities including operating businesses, M&A and a bitcoin lending arm.
⚖️ CFTC charged Goliath Ventures and CEO Christopher Delgado in Florida federal court over a crypto Ponzi scheme that took at least $397 million from roughly 1,600 customers. Delgado pleaded guilty to related criminal charges in June, and the SEC filed its own civil case Tuesday.
💼 Bitwise cut 14% of staff last week, taking its global headcount to about 155, CEO Hunter Horsley told The Block. Net assets in its Bitwise 10 Crypto Index Fund dropped 31% over the first seven months of 2026.
🗳️ ENS tokenholders approved a restructuring that turns the ENS Foundation into a staffed organization with a five-member board and administrative control of the roughly $65 million Endowment. Endowment transactions now clear a nine-day timelock the Security Council can cancel, and the DAO keeps its 54.6% of ENS supply apart from a one-time transfer of 1 million ENS for staff pay.
🇬🇧 UK lawmakers wrote to bank CEOs on Tuesday asking whether FCA authorization will change how they assess crypto firms, warning that restricted banking access "could be one of the single biggest barriers to growth." FCA applications open Sept. 30 and the regime takes effect Oct. 25, 2027.
🚢 Shipfinex partnered with ADI Chain to tokenize vessel-backed credit and charter income, starting with a pipeline of about 35 ships worth roughly $500 million and settlement in dirham- and dollar-denominated stablecoins. The target market is a commercial fleet valued near $2.17 trillion at the end of 2025, though Shipfinex holds only in-principle approval from Dubai's virtual asset regulator and has issued no tokens publicly yet.
🇧🇷 Itaú joined a tokenization initiative with infrastructure provider OpenAssets, built around ANBIMA's pilot for issuing, trading and settling debentures and investment funds on distributed ledgers. Latin America's largest bank by market capitalization brings the market expertise while OpenAssets supplies the tokenization stack.
🌐 MoneyGram took Ramps live on Solana, opening its cash-in and cash-out network to Solana wallets, exchanges and developers through one API. The service supports cash deposits in more than 25 countries and withdrawals in more than 170, with AI trading app Rift the first Solana wallet to integrate it.
💰 Erebor is in talks to raise about $1.5 billion at a roughly $9.5 billion valuation, the Financial Times reported, with Lux Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Human Capital and SV Angel expected to commit. Deposits at the year-old bank climbed from $1.1 billion in March to $4.6 billion by the end of July, and the round would more than double the $4.35 billion valuation it fetched earlier this year.
🤝 eToro agreed to buy TradeZero for up to $231 million in cash plus as many as 2.5 million newly issued Class A shares. TradeZero generated about $80 million in revenue at 81% gross margins in the year to June 30, and the deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027.
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