Bitcoin’s sharpest weekly rise in years led a busy run of crypto developments. Short liquidations reached billions, Ethereum mapped out major protocol changes, TON activated collators, and U.S. regulators advanced work on stablecoins and crypto derivatives. Elsewhere, TikTok code revealed a possible payment feature, while corporate and on-chain data raised fresh questions for investors. Let’s get into the latest updates.
Bitcoin climbed above $79,000 on August 21, extending a rapid market-wide rally that lifted Ether, XRP and several other major tokens. BTC gained more than 25% from last Monday’s levels before easing below its intraday peak. XRP rose nearly 40% over the week, while HYPE, ZEC and LINK each advanced more than 30%.
Several forces drove the move. The U.S. Treasury doubled its planned buybacks of long-dated government bonds, which briefly lowered yields and supported risk assets. A weaker dollar also made scarce assets more attractive. At the same time, U.S. spot Bitcoin products recorded $520 million in net inflows on Wednesday, showing that fresh demand came from more than leveraged trading.
Short covering added speed. Traders who had bet on lower prices had to close positions as BTC broke out of its recent range. Regulatory news provided another lift after President Donald Trump urged Congress to advance the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act.
Reuters reported that Bitcoin first moved above $70,000 as Treasury buybacks and regulatory optimism supported crypto assets. The rally later carried BTC past $79,000 and produced its largest weekly dollar gain on record.
Ethereum developers have selected Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists, known as FOCIL, as the main feature for the planned Hegotá upgrade in 2027. The mechanism aims to stop block builders from repeatedly excluding valid transactions. That makes transaction inclusion more reliable and reduces censorship risk at the protocol level.
The Hegotá roadmap also includes two privacy-related proposals under consideration. EIP-8141 would introduce Frame Transactions, which can divide one action into as many as 64 separate frames. Wallets could use those frames for validation, gas approval and execution. The design could support custom signatures, sponsored fees, key rotation and native account abstraction.
EIP-8182 proposes a protocol-managed pool for private ETH and compatible ERC-20 transfers. It would use separate proofs for the pool state and spending authority, giving users one shared privacy system instead of several smaller application-level pools.
These additions have not secured the same priority as FOCIL. Ethereum’s wider privacy plan also depends on private data retrieval, client-side proof generation and zero-knowledge virtual machines. Hegotá can add core building blocks, but wallets and supporting tools must complete the user experience.
Crypto traders lost $2.74 billion in short positions during a 24-hour period ending August 20, as a fast market rally forced exchanges to close heavily leveraged bearish bets. The total followed $1.44 billion in short liquidations reported for August 19, although the two figures cover different time windows.
Liquidation data showed how quickly leverage amplified the price move. Bitcoin traded at $68,424 on August 19 after gaining 5.54%, while Ether reached $2,087.87 following an 8.8% increase. Solana added about 6.4%, and total crypto liquidations reached $2.99 billion late that day.
A short liquidation happens when rising prices reduce a trader’s margin below an exchange’s required level. The platform then closes the position, which may create additional buying and push prices higher. That feedback loop helped accelerate the rebound.
The rally also received support from U.S. Treasury bond-buyback plans, inflows into spot Bitcoin ETFs and positive regulatory signals. Liquidations show the scale of forced position closures, but they do not measure direct spot demand. For comparison, the largest historical total-liquidation event cited by WisdomTree reached $19.2 billion on October 10, 2025.
The Open Network activated its new collator architecture on mainnet on August 17, changing how the blockchain creates and checks blocks. Dedicated collator nodes now assemble blocks, while validators focus on verification. TON designed the split to reduce production delays and increase throughput, especially under its planned Sub-Second mode.
TON’s network update builds on Accelerator work and uses in-memory collators to raise the maximum transactions per second on a single shardchain. The change affects block assembly rather than final approval, so validators still protect consensus and decide whether blocks enter the chain.
Node operators had to update mytonctrl to commit 7e90e26 and their node software to commit 140320b. TON also scheduled a validator vote for 08:00 UTC on August 21. The ballot covered dispatch-queue activation, transaction-executor changes and a higher minimum split threshold.
The rollout followed the v2026.07 release on August 3, which added QUIC broadcast improvements, new metrics and stability fixes. Infrastructure providers began deploying that build in early August. User-facing speed will depend on the configuration choices approved after the collator handover, not on the architecture switch alone.
Monad’s disclosed token structure places early investor allocations under a four-year vesting schedule, with the first unlock due on November 24, 2026. The arrangement covers about 19.7 billion MON assigned to investors from an initial supply of 100 billion tokens. A one-year cliff applies after the token generation event, followed by equal monthly releases.
The terms matter after a claim circulated that Monad had offered early investors a $60 million cash exit. Monad’s published sale details describe locked allocations and gradual vesting. They do not include a tender-style cash-exit program.
Monad opened its airdrop claim portal on October 14, 2025, and kept it available through November 3. The project linked distribution to the token generation event at mainnet launch. A public sale on Coinbase followed from November 17 through November 22, 2025.
That sale offered up to 7.5 billion MON at $0.025 per token, implying a fully diluted valuation of $2.5 billion. These conditions limit immediate investor liquidity and spread later releases across several years, making the November 2026 cliff the next important date for circulating supply.
U.S. regulators are working on a compliant path connected to Hyperliquid, while an existing Coinbase Derivatives filing points to HYPE futures as one possible route. President Donald Trump said on August 19 that Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Michael Selig was working to bring Hyperliquid into the United States “in a fully compliant and legal fashion.”
The comment quickly affected the market. HYPE climbed 21.58% that day and reached $71.35 as traders priced in the possibility of wider U.S. access.
The regulatory route may rely on a product tied to the token rather than direct access to Hyperliquid’s offshore trading venue. Coinbase Derivatives submitted a Regulation 40.2(a) self-certification to the CFTC on May 18. Submission 2026-33 covers “HYPE Perp Style Futures” and names June 8, 2026, as the earliest intended trading date.
A regulated derivatives listing would let eligible U.S. traders gain price exposure through a registered exchange. It would not automatically bring Hyperliquid’s spot or perpetual platform onshore. Trump’s statement did not include a timetable or describe a separate program, so the Coinbase filing remains the clearest operational step linked to the proposed U.S. pathway.
The U.S. Treasury has proposed a $10 billion issuance ceiling for payment stablecoin companies that want to remain under state supervision. An issuer would qualify only if its total consolidated stablecoin supply stays at or below that amount and its state regulatory system meets a federal “substantially similar” standard under the GENIUS Act.
The proposed rule applies the limit across a corporate group, not only to one token or subsidiary. That approach prevents companies from dividing issuance among affiliates to stay below the threshold. Treasury did not pre-approve individual states or name specific issuers that would qualify.
The department announced the proposal on April 1, 2026. Publication in the Federal Register followed on April 3 under notice 91 FR 16844, opening a 60-day public comment period that ended June 2.
Treasury plans to use broad principles when comparing state frameworks with federal requirements. This gives states room to meet the standard through different laws and supervisory systems. However, staying below $10 billion will not be enough on its own. The relevant state regime must also pass Treasury’s similarity review before an issuer can use the state-level route. The proposal still requires a final rule before these conditions take effect.
TikTok’s U.S. iPhone app contains code for person-to-person payments inside direct-message conversations. The internal text shows a recipient tapping to accept money and a sender receiving updates as the transfer moves through different stages. The design points to TikTok Pay as the likely payment system behind the feature.
Details found in the app build outline a working interface, but TikTok has not started testing the function in any market. The company has also provided no launch date. App code can support future development without leading to a public product.
TikTok already uses TikTok Pay for Shop purchases in parts of Southeast Asia. Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand are among the markets where the system handles checkout payments. Direct transfers between users would extend that infrastructure from commerce into chat-based payments.
The feature could place payments directly inside one of the world’s largest social platforms if TikTok decides to launch it. Users would not need to leave a conversation to send or accept money. However, the code alone does not establish which payment partners, transfer limits or compliance controls TikTok would use in the United States. For now, it shows the product flow the company has prepared inside its iOS application.
The European Union’s transaction ban covering HTX and several other non-EU crypto services took effect on August 23, 2026. The Council adopted Decision (CFSP) 2026/1849 on July 23 and added the named companies to an annex of sanctioned entities. HTX appears under the legal name Huobi Global SA.
The EU measure also lists Rapira, Aifory Pro, ABCeX, WhiteBird, NoOnecrypto, Tradex, Monease, BitPapa, Exnode, Exnode Pay and EXMO, among other services. Chainalysis counted 14 crypto-related platforms across the package.
The decision prohibits covered transactions with the listed entities. Crypto exchanges, payment providers and other businesses that serve EU customers must apply sanctions screening and block transfers involving those counterparties. Retail and institutional users may therefore encounter rejected deposits or withdrawals when funds move directly to or from a named platform.
The ban creates a practical compliance boundary for cross-platform transfers involving EU persons and companies. Users who rely on several exchanges must check the counterparty before initiating a transaction, while platforms need controls that identify both direct and routed exposure. The legal effective date comes from the Council decision rather than from a separate cutoff created by any individual exchange.
N3XT expanded its Digital Dollar on August 18 to support instant, around-the-clock settlement for institutional business payments. The product is a U.S. dollar deposit token that moves on-chain, allowing companies to settle transfers outside traditional banking hours.
N3XT’s update places live token infrastructure in the market while Swift prepares controlled tests of its own shared ledger. Swift said on July 9 that its blockchain-based system was ready for initial use. Seventeen banks across six continents are preparing pilots involving bank-issued tokenized deposits.
Both projects target a similar problem. Conventional international payments can slow down when banks, settlement systems and time zones do not operate on the same schedule. Tokenized deposits can move value at any hour while keeping the asset connected to a regulated bank deposit.
N3XT has switched on the settlement capability for institutional clients. Swift, by contrast, remains at the pilot-preparation stage with participating banks. Its system aims to coordinate transfers across different institutions rather than issue one common token. The next practical test will show whether banks can move tokenized deposits from end to end through Swift’s ledger layer while maintaining existing compliance and account controls.
Eric Trump denied a widely shared claim that U.S. President Donald Trump was preparing to launch another cryptocurrency. He responded on August 23 after an X account called Whale Scan told its followers that a new Trump coin was close to an official release.
The post attracted nearly two million views, increasing the risk that traders could treat the rumor as a genuine token announcement. Eric Trump called the claim false and warned that anyone promoting such a launch was running a scam. His statement directly addressed the circulating post rather than announcing a new project.
The rumor gained attention because the Trump family already has links to memecoins. Donald Trump launched Official Trump, or TRUMP, on Solana shortly before beginning his second presidential term in January 2025. The token has a total supply of one billion units. Melania Trump later introduced the MELANIA memecoin.
Those earlier launches produced heavy trading and sharp price swings, while token distribution and potential insider advantages drew criticism. The social-media claim used that history to appear credible. Eric Trump’s response gives users a reason to avoid tokens or presales presented as a new Trump launch without an announcement from the family’s official channels.
Strategy sold 3,458,866 shares of MSTR between August 10 and August 16, raising about $333.7 million without purchasing additional Bitcoin. The company kept its holdings at 840,447 BTC during the reporting period.
An SEC filing detailed how Strategy allocated the proceeds. It used $52.4 million to fund dividends on STRC preferred stock and spent $132.2 million on STRC repurchases through its Digital Credit Securities Repurchase Program. The remaining $149.1 million went into its U.S. dollar reserve, increasing that balance to roughly $4.8 billion.
Strategy acquired its Bitcoin position for about $63.4 billion at an average cost of $75,385 per coin. With Bitcoin near $63,540 when the figures were reported, the holdings had a market value of around $53.4 billion.
The company also has a $1 billion program for repurchasing digital-credit securities and a separate $1 billion common-stock buyback authorization. Its expanded Bitcoin Monetization Program permits up to $5 billion in BTC sales if it needs funds for reserves or other obligations. That authorization did not result in a sale during the period. Common shareholders absorbed new dilution while the amount of Bitcoin backing the company stayed flat.
Bitcoin held on centralized exchanges moved above its 200-day simple moving average in mid-August, interrupting a reserve decline that had lasted for roughly two years. The change means a larger share of available BTC now sits within easier reach of the market.
The reserve data appeared while Bitcoin traded near $63,010 and market sentiment remained in the fear zone. Exchange balances do not show that owners have decided to sell. However, coins transferred to trading platforms can enter the market faster than assets kept in private wallets or long-term custody.
That distinction matters because the earlier decline in exchange reserves supported a scarcity argument. Fewer immediately tradable coins can reduce available supply when demand rises. A sustained increase changes that balance and may give sellers more inventory during weak market conditions.
Whale flows will help determine the significance of the crossover. Continued large deposits could increase selling pressure and make support levels harder to defend. Stable or falling inflows would weaken that signal. The 200-day average also reacts slowly, so one move above it does not establish a lasting reversal. Still, the crossover gives traders a concrete supply metric to compare with price, volume and exchange net flows.
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