Bitcoin drops over 2% in short-term trading, breaking below $78,000.

Tom Lee commented on the U.S. Treasury’s potential move to deploy nearly $1 trillion to support U.S. Treasury bond repurchases. This development is positive for "long-term assets"—including stocks, cryptocurrencies, gold and real estate. The U.S. Treasury’s large-scale repurchase of long-term Treasury bonds will push down long-term interest rates, thereby enhancing the valuation appeal of duration assets, a move that should be regarded as a marginal improvement in the liquidity environment.

Aethir today announced the launch of its ACCELERATE strategic project, securing access rights to 10 AI data center sites in the U.S. and Europe, with a total capacity of up to 20 megawatts. The company disclosed that the total contract value of these sites upon full completion will exceed $2 billion, with up to $700 million in contracts expected to be secured by the end of 2026. The sites support NVIDIA B300 and GB300 clusters, with node sizes ranging from 64 to 256 units, and deployment timelines measured in months, rather than the multi-year construction cycles of traditional data centers. Aethir also announced an update to its IDC token economic policy, introducing a burn mechanism and a floating platform fee. The Aethir Foundation holds equity in Axe Compute.

According to GMGN data, following liquid staking protocol Kinetiq’s announcement of the launch of the new Hyperliquid L2 network Elysium, its governance token KNTQ rallied over 25% in a short period, with market capitalization surpassing $260 million and a 24-hour gain of 45.8%. BlockBeats reminds users that token prices are highly volatile, so caution is advised when investing.

According to OnchainLens monitoring, crypto market maker Wintermute’s short exposure on Hyperliquid has risen from the prior $190.77 million to $211.53 million, while its HYPE short position has shrunk from $11.43 million to $5.6 million. Its current major short positions are approximately $70.8 million in BTC, $53.83 million in ETH, $17.63 million in SOL, $7.41 million in XRP, and $6.79 million in DOGE. It currently has an unrealized loss of around $4.12 million, and has earned a total of $2.27 million in funding fees. Notably, amid a broad rally in crypto assets, market maker addresses including Wintermute were forced to absorb large sell orders rather than actively shorting. For details, see: 90% of tokens are rising—why does Wintermute hold $160 million in crypto shorts?

On-chain detective ZachXBT stated that after reviewing relevant evidence, he suspects two U.S. crypto investment platforms, BitcoinIRA and iTrustCapital, suffered data breaches this year, though neither has publicly disclosed the incidents. The leaked information reportedly includes user profiles, portfolio holdings, banking details, custodian information, and verification statuses. ZachXBT added that in June 2026, an attacker exploited the compromised database information to target a BitcoinIRA user, stealing over $1.2 million in assets. He contacted both firms for comment on August 21, but has not received a response as of press time.

Arthur Hayes has shared a four-step detailed airdrop guide for his new venture Flop Network. The steps are: 1) Generate an Ed25519 DID key pair for the AI agent, formatted as did:key:z6Mk..., which will serve as the agent’s on-chain identity and future airdrop receiving address; 2) Publish the public key to the Technocore Registry to let the network recognize the identity; 3) The agent signs a check-in message with the private key and sends an HTTP GET request to /lobby; 4) Securely store the private key locally to claim the airdrop allocation during the Q4 snapshot. Earlier on the 19th, Hayes announced in a post that he would end his retirement to lead Flop Labs and launch the FLOP token. He stated that FLOP will act as "food for AI agents", with no presale or VC involvement, adopting a 100% fair launch model to build a currency for the Agentic Economy. More project details will be revealed later, with a large-scale airdrop expected in Q4 2026.