Podcast is back · One bug cost $116m · Arendalsuka starts — Sun 9 Aug

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Whether you read every Daily this week, only a few, or none at all — here's the shape of the week, seen from a distance.

In this week's Digest:

🎧 Kaupr Weekly is back — The Internet of Money Is Here
💎 Onchain finance becomes infrastructure, and infrastructure is invisible
💎 One bug, and the people who kept their own keys lost $116 million
💎 Money is going onchain ahead of shares, and there is a reason
💎 The CLARITY Act now has a date, which is not the same as a majority
💎 The Nordic industry crossed borders both ways, and Arendalsuka starts tomorrow

— Morten

Kaupr Weekly is our short weekend audio commentary — around ten minutes, hosted and written by Morten Myrstad, connecting the dots across a week of onchain finance rather than interviewing anyone about it. It has been off since the summer. This is the first episode back.

This one opens with an admission, and works through what changed.

You can also listen on Spotify

The clearest thing about this week is that almost none of it was aimed at people who care about crypto.

The chain, kept out of sight. Fireblocks moves money for banks and fintechs that rarely mention blockchain in public. Co-founder Idan Ofrat says stablecoins now account for around 65% of that volume — more than crypto. Institutions want the front end to feel like traditional finance, he argues, with the chain hidden behind it.

Underneath somebody else's product. BlackRock launched two tokenized money market funds built to serve as stablecoin reserves. Reserve assets are the least visible part of a stablecoin and the part supervisors care about most. Whoever supplies them sits underneath the whole market.

No longer a choice the customer makes. Wells Fargo will launch tokenized deposits this autumn and route corporate payments through them automatically wherever that settles faster — rather than asking clients to move money into a separate account.

Sent to people who never asked. Western Union and card issuer Rain launched a wallet and Visa card in 37 markets, letting people receive remittances as a dollar stablecoin and spend the balance anywhere Visa works. The recipients are not crypto users and have no reason to become any.

Distribution by whoever owns the screen. Analysts expect Samsung's plan to add stablecoin support to Samsung Wallet could make it one of the largest distributors of tokens such as USDC, with 800 million Galaxy phones as the channel. BCG's global banking lead made the same point from the other direction: the contest is not stablecoins against deposits, but over who owns the screen the customer taps.

And now the machines. Cloudflare began rolling out wallets that let AI agents pay for data and services in stablecoins, bounded by an allowance, an approved-merchant list and a maximum transaction size. An agent can find a service, pay for it and use it without a person approving each step.

Six companies, and not one of them is selling crypto to anybody. That is what adoption looks like when it stops being a story about adoption.

A firmware build shipped in March 2021 told Coldcard hardware wallets to skip their random number generator and fall back to software, seeded from the chip's serial number and clock — neither of them secret. The seeds it produced were guessable. Five years later, somebody worked out how.

What changed over the week was not the number. It was the explanation.

Chainalysis found the opening sweep was ordered by value rather than taken at random. More than $30 million left in the first ten minutes, one owner losing around $1.8 million. The pattern suggested someone had mapped the vulnerable keyspace before starting.

Boltz, a non-custodial bridge routing swaps between bitcoin's mainchain, Lightning and Liquid, disabled its service indefinitely. Nothing had been stolen. Months of automated, AI-assisted probing had produced several exploits, each contained — and the team concluded attackers now iterate faster than a team its size can patch.

Galaxy Research counted three confirmed waves plus fourteen smaller incidents, and attributed them to numerous separate attackers rather than a single operator. By then the total stood at roughly 1,600 bitcoin from more than 7,300 wallets, and it kept climbing.

US spot bitcoin ETFs took in around $620 million over the same days, with inflows every trading session. Bloomberg's Eric Balchunas, who first noted the timing, also cautions that the flows may have nothing to do with the exploit.

A single attacker eventually exhausts the profitable part of a keyspace. A crowd working in parallel does not — which is why this ran for a week rather than an afternoon.

Tokenization is usually discussed as one project. This week it split cleanly in two, and only one half was moving.

Cash and funds. BlackRock's two new money market products. Franklin Templeton at a record $1.8 trillion under management, with $18.4 billion of long-term inflows in the quarter. Wells Fargo tokenizing deposits. Ten European institutions launching Regulated Layer One, a shared settlement network owned as a cooperative, timed for the Eurosystem's Project Pontes going live next month.

Shares, in older wrapping. Clear Street opened pre-IPO access to Databricks — but buyers get a stake in a vehicle holding an interest in a fund that owns the stock, not shares from the company, which says it has no relationship with Clear Street. Robinhood listed its second venture fund as a business development company on the NYSE. Neither used a token for anything.

Where the difficulty actually sits. Hong Kong spent the week agreeing a shared standard for tokenized securities, built on ERC-3643, which embeds eligibility rules inside the token itself rather than in a separate database. Public chains treat every wallet identically; securities law does not. No issuances have run on it yet.

A dollar is a dollar. A share carries voting rights, dividends, corporate actions and rules about who is allowed to hold it. Money went first because money is the easy part.

The CLARITY Act now has a date. The US Senate left for its August recess without voting on crypto market structure. A first procedural vote is set for 15 September, the day after the chamber returns — a vote on whether to take the bill up, not on the bill itself. The disputes that kept it off the floor, over ethics rules and stablecoin yield, are unresolved. A date is not a majority.

Everyone else wrote rules. Japan gave crypto its own supervisory division, effective Friday, and raised the maximum sentence for running an unregistered crypto business from three years to ten. Russia's framework takes effect on 1 September, banning domestic crypto payments while explicitly permitting exporters and importers to settle foreign trade in digital assets. Nigeria approved tokenized shares, bonds and property, aimed at businesses the banking system does not reach. South Africa published draft rules for moving crypto offshore.

S&P started marking the homework. The ratings agency published its first summary of stablecoin stability assessments: six of eleven can adequately hold their peg, two were revised lower over three quarters, and Tether's USDt sits at the weakest level on the scale.

Mastercard bought the plumbing. Its acquisition of BVNK closed at a reported $1.8 billion, its largest digital asset purchase to date. Visa has taken the other route — expanding settlement and investing alongside partners.

Circle's usage and revenue stopped moving together. Onchain USDC volume rose 151% to $14.8 trillion in the second quarter, while revenue and reserve income came in below estimates. When income comes from interest on reserves, the rate environment decides the top line.

Europe's MiCA transition has a fraud problem. With 323 authorised firms on ESMA's register against more than 3,000 operating before, French and Dutch watchdogs report criminals posing as regulators to direct customers to fake websites.

Two moves this week, running opposite ways across the same borders.

Out. K33 took over the executive management of Sixty Six Capital, the Canadian bitcoin treasury company it has held 46% of since March. The practical effect is that 317 bitcoin are now directed from one place.

In. Bitcoin Suisse named the Nordics as the first market for its European entity, appointing two general managers hours apart, six weeks after taking a MiCA licence in Liechtenstein.

Ownership and control are not the same instrument, and neither is a licence and a market. Both companies made that distinction this week.

We went through what sits behind both in Nordic moves, this week's Onchain Growth — including why Liechtenstein is the part worth watching, and two new MiCA register tools built by Nordic firms.

Norway's equivalent of Almedalsveckan and Folkemødet runs 10–14 August. Six events touch bitcoin, payments and capital.

Firi opens Monday with the digital wallet, on the premise that more Norwegians under 40 own cryptocurrency than own shares. BPI Norge holds two debates the same afternoon, on bitcoin in trade under sanctions and on money in Palestine, with K33's Vetle Lunde on the panel. On Wednesday, Stø places crypto against fiat in a duel alongside Norges Bank, Visa, Nets, Nordea and Revolut — the sector on the payments establishment's terms rather than its own.

Three separate events ask whether the payment system is prepared, largely featuring the same people. Two more ask why Norway's capital market is the smallest in the Nordics, with no onchain company in either room.

The full run-through, with links to every programme →

Fati Hakim and Morten Myrstad set out the reasoning on video, from the same starting point on both sides: blockchain in the Nordics gets discussed as finance and cryptocurrency, while what is built outside that goes largely uncovered.

Watch and read on Onchain Build → · The full story on kaupr.io →

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Wishing you a good Sunday. Daily subscribers, welcome back tomorrow morning — and everyone, welcome back for a new Kaupr Digest next weekend.

Best regards Morten Myrstad Founder & Editor