Bitcoin may be slumping — along with the Nasdaq in general — but one technology investment seems to be doing well: publicly-traded mining companies. 

Top U.S. Bitcoin mining companies — Hut 8, CleanSpark, and MARA — all experienced gains between 3-7% on Thursday, despite a sell-off across other assets. 

The Bitcoin price was down about 2% Thursday, trading for $64,760. Major stock indices also took a hit — including the tech heavy Nasdaq — but a handful of miners continued to rally on new deals related to high-powered computing and artificial intelligence. 

Hut 8 announced Monday that it had signed a second 15-year lease for 352 megawatts of IT capacity at its Beacon…

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BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, has chimed in on the crypto-quantum debate — and is surprisingly optimistic.

The firm, which manages over $15 trillion in assets, said in its new report, Quantum Computing and Blockchains, that upgrading existing cryptography to quantum-resistant standards is a far easier task than actually building a functional quantum computer capable of breaking that cryptography. 

“In our view, PQ migration for cryptocurrencies is eminently addressable from a technical

standpoint, and the key challenge is one of timely coordination and implementation,” the report read. 

The crypto community has sounded the alarm about hypothetical…

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Goldman Sachs chairman and CEO David Solomon has thrown his support behind the Clarity Act, the crypto market-structure bill moving through the Senate, a stance that sets one of Wall Street’s largest banks apart from rivals lining up against it.

“I’m very supportive of moving the Clarity Act forward, so we can get some market structure in place and start to move the innovation process along,” Solomon said in an interview with Politico. He called the bill imperfect, and said its value lies in creating “a level playing field to enhance market stability and allow these markets to develop appropriately.”

Solomon spoke after Senate Republicans began circulating new text of the…

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Coinbase is preparing for future scenarios where quantum computers may be able to crack Bitcoin’s current cryptography.

America’s biggest crypto exchange said Thursday that while the threat isn’t imminent, hard problems — such as migrating millions of users and coordinating protocol upgrades across decentralized systems — need to be solved. 

Quantum computers are still experimental and make mistakes but some in the crypto community have sounded the alarm about hypothetical advancements in the machines that could in the future be able to break Bitcoin’s cryptography. 

“There’s a lot of noise about quantum computing right now,” Coinbase said. “Some of it is hype….

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Kazakhstan has laid out a plan to build a national strategic crypto reserve fed by its bitcoin miners, part of a two-step push by President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to pull the country’s large mining industry into a regulated, state-supervised system.

A presidential decree signed July 7 sets the frame, and a government resolution approved July 18 supplies the mechanism. The government cleared the rules for strategic digital mining under Government Resolution No. 638, published in the PRG.kz legal database.

Together the two measures aim to route mining output and crypto trading through Kazakh infrastructure, with the state taking a share of mined coins for a sovereign reserve.

The…

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Crypto exchange BitMEX will close down in September, according to a Thursday announcement on the company’s website. 

The exchange said that after “a strategic review of the business and the broader crypto industry, the board of HDR Global Trading Limited, owner and operator of BitMEX, has decided to close the exchange.” 

BitMEX did not give further information on why the exchange was closing but told users to withdraw their funds “as soon as practical.” 

“The BitMEX platform has always remained grounded to the true ethos of Bitcoin — neutrality, transparency, and decentralisation, which is evident through our peer-to-peer operations and a top priority focus on user…

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Nine of the largest names in institutional Bitcoin launched the Bitcoin Security Consortium on Thursday, a group backed by $15 million in member pledges over three years to fund work on the network’s long-term security, including preparation for a future era of quantum computing.

Founding members are Anchorage Digital, ARK Invest, BlackRock, Block, Blockstream, Coinbase, Fidelity Digital Assets, Galaxy, and Strategy, a lineup that spans holders, custodians, exchanges, infrastructure and payments providers, and asset managers. 

The consortium’s day-to-day work falls to Mike Schmidt, executive director of the developer non-profit Brink, who serves in a volunteer role.

Schmidt…

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BancaStato, the cantonal bank of Ticino in southern Switzerland, has launched regulated crypto trading, a service that lets clients buy, hold, and sell bitcoin from the bank’s existing web and mobile apps, the digital asset bank Sygnum said on Thursday.

The bank connected Sygnum’s application programming interface to its Avaloq core banking system and digital channels, a setup that places bitcoin trading inside the same apps clients use for traditional accounts. 

At launch, clients can trade bitcoin (BTC) and other crypto with market orders placed by quantity or U.S. dollar value.

Bitcoin sits at the center of the offering, a pattern across the wave of European banks that have…

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Zhibao Technology, a Shanghai-based insurance-technology firm listed on the Nasdaq, said Wednesday it has signed a non-binding term sheet for a stock sale that would be paid for in bitcoin — some 3,500 coins, worth near $220 million at current prices.

The deal, a private investment in public equity known as a PIPE, would have a buyer named Joyertech and Information OPC subscribe for Zhibao shares with consideration the company expects to include about 3,500 BTC. 

The figure remains subject to final valuation, custody arrangements, an audit, regulatory review, and definitive agreements. Zhibao stressed that the term sheet binds no one, and that the transaction may change or…

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The crypto industry may be relatively small in terms of employers — but the economic contribution is big. 

That’s according to a new report published by the National Cryptocurrency Association and the Pragmatic Policy Group, which reveals that while only 34,000 people are employed by crypto companies, the industry will contribute $55 billion in 2026 to the U.S. economy. 

The report, “Crypto at Work”, which claims to be the first to comprehensively analyze the crypto industry’s footprint in the U.S. labor market, said that jobs in the space also average $133,000 a year — more than double the $64,000 national median wage, and ahead of average pay in tech of and…

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