Crypto News: Bitcoin and Ether ETF Inflows, BitMart Restructuring, Coldcard Firmware

Hi! In today’s edition:

📈 Something shifted in crypto ETF flows last week
🏚️ BitMart has changed its story
🔐 Coldcard's new firmware asks something of you that no software should be able to fake

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Crypto ETFs Snap Out of Their Slump

US spot bitcoin and ether ETFs pulled in a combined $2.6 billion in net inflows last week, their strongest showing since October 2025. Bitcoin funds took $1.9 billion, ether funds $697.2 million, according to SoSoValue data, their biggest weekly hauls of the year.

That reversed hard from the prior week, when the same funds bled a combined $392 million, a swing of roughly $3 billion in seven days. Trading volume across the two categories more than tripled to $29 billion as bitcoin climbed above $79,000 on Friday.

BlackRock's IBIT did most of the heavy lifting, absorbing $503 million on Thursday alone. Even so, both categories remain underwater for the year: bitcoin ETFs are down roughly $2.9 billion and ether ETFs about $191.8 million. The week did help bring the combined deficit down from $5.7 billion.

BitMart Reverses Course Days Before Closing

BitMart told users Friday it is developing a potential restructuring plan that could pair a phased restart of some operations with distributions to creditors. That is a reversal from July 26, when the Cayman Islands-based exchange said it would shut down after nine years.

The exchange said it has appointed White & Case as restructuring counsel and promised a roadmap no later than Sept. 9.

The potential about face comes with just before the Aug. 26 deadline Bitmart had set for trading. The exchange had said it would close by Jan. 31, 2027.

Users have reported blocked withdrawals since July, purported employees have alleged unpaid July salaries, and founder Sheldon Xia dismissed an open letter demanding a reserves audit as fabricated rumors from a hacked account. BitMart's BMX token is down over 86% this year.

Coldcard Ships Its Post-Hack Firmware

Coinkite shipped new Coldcard firmware Thursday, three weeks after the seed-generation failure that let attackers steal more than $114 million in bitcoin. The company said it used AI models, including Kimi, to review the whole system rather than just the broken randomness code, and turned up unrelated bugs in transaction approval, USB data handling and firmware validation.

New seeds now require entropy the owner supplies by hand: 65 key presses at unpredictable intervals, 50 rolls of a six-sided die or 128 coin flips. Coinkite also replaced its backup random number generator, swapping the Yasmarang algorithm for one built on SHA-256.

Updating does not fix a seed already generated on affected firmware between 2021 and July 2026, which is the catch. Those users still need a fresh seed and a full migration of funds. Mk4 and Mk5 owners want version 5.6.1; Q owners need 1.5.1Q.

🚨 DON’T MISS OUR LIVESTREAMS TODAY 🚨

NEAR Protocol co-founder Illia Polosukhin and Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet join Unchained to grade the crypto industry's readiness for quantum computers, after last fall's criticism that Bitcoin wasn't moving fast enough.

Guillemet lays out Ledger's new ML-KEM and ML-DSA algorithms, which produce keys and signatures 30–50x bigger than today's, and the tradeoffs of fitting them onto a hardware wallet. Tune in for how both companies landed on the same defense: lattice-based cryptography.

Live today at 3:30pm ET.

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Austin Campbell, Ram Ahluwalia, and Chris Perkins dig into bitcoin's surge past $75,000 and whether Treasury's decision to double its long-end bond buybacks is the start of a real bull market or just a short squeeze.

They also break down the increasingly public fight between CME's Terry Duffy and Kalshi's Luana Lopes Lara over who gets to regulate prediction markets.

Live today at 4:30pm ET.

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⚡ Solana cut its slot time to 350 milliseconds from 400 in a Friday mainnet upgrade, the first of four planned 50ms steps toward a 200ms target under SIMD-0525. Epochs now run about 42 hours instead of 48, and developers will monitor block skip rates before cutting further.
⚖️ Grayscale filed a fifth amendment to its Zcash registration statement on Friday, renaming the trust The Zcash ETF and setting a 2.5% sponsor fee ahead of a planned NYSE Arca listing under the ticker ZCSH. It would be the first US spot ETF tracking a privacy asset if the SEC signs off.
🇺🇾 Tether abandoned a mining project in Uruguay that one person with direct knowledge put at roughly $120 million, after a dispute with state utility UTE over how much power its two sites were entitled to, Reuters reported. UTE cut power in July 2025 after Tether's local entity stopped paying its bills and its representatives skipped the signing of a revised contract.
🔒 The Sandbox halted bridging to Base and BNB Smart Chain after an attacker hijacked delegate permissions to mint unbacked SAND, which Blockaid put at a nominal $49 billion face value across more than 400 transactions. The company said actual impact was under 0.01% of supply, and Bithumb and Upbit suspended SAND deposits and withdrawals.
🔒 Term Finance lost about $8.5 million on Sunday when an attacker exploited the custom governance wrapper around its Ethereum vaults, according to PeckShield and CertiK. That is roughly 68% of the vault product's total value locked, and Term has not said why its seven-day timelock and LP veto failed to stop the transactions.
🔒 BounceBit will retire its blockchain and reissue BB as a BEP-20 token on BNB Chain after an authorization flaw in its Evmos-based stack let an attacker move 286.5 million BB, worth roughly $3 million, from nine wallets. No private keys were compromised, and holders are set to be made whole from a pre-attack snapshot.
🇯🇵 Laser Digital secured registration as a crypto asset exchange service provider in Japan on Friday, the first new entrant to clear the bar in four years. The Nomura-backed firm will start by supplying liquidity to domestic virtual asset service providers, with institutional trading services planned later.
🤖 Erik Voorhees is preparing a rewards program that would take a slice of Venice users' payments, buy VVV on the open market and hand it back to customers who stick around. He told Unchained's Uneasy Money podcast the plan is not yet deployed and sits alongside a wider goal to "burn all the tokens in existence."

🇰🇷 Shinhan Asset Management signed a four-party MOU with the Solana Foundation, Etherfuse and Orca to run a proof of concept for a Korean won-denominated tokenized fund. The manager, which oversees roughly $96.6 billion, modeled the structure on BlackRock's BUIDL, with South Korea's security token framework due to take effect in February 2027.

💰 Fasset raised $68 million in a round led by Japan's SBI Group at a $1 billion valuation, three months after a $51 million raise brought its 2026 total to $119 million. CEO Mohammad Raafi Hossain told CoinDesk revenue is up roughly six-fold year over year and the stablecoin neobank has been profitable for 12 straight months.