Invest ideasNews
20 Feb 2026, 17:30
Bitwise Targets 2028 Presidential Race With Binary Outcome ETFs
Bitwise Asset Management has asked the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to approve six exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that would let investors wager on the outcomes of the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election—straight from their brokerage accounts. Wall Street’s Election Bet: Bitwise Seeks Approval for Prediction Shares ETFs Filed on Feb. 17, the Bitwise
20 Feb 2026, 17:03
Ethereum-based Aztec explodes 70% as privacy narrative heats up
AZTEC, the token for the Aztec network, an Ethereum-based privacy-focused L2 rollup, has been on a positive wave since it launched, emerging as one of the standout performers in its category and in the broader market. The privacy token is gaining traction at a time when crypto natives are pushing back against what they perceive as the EU’s desire to further infringe on online privacy via acts like the Chat Control Act. Aztec rides the hot hand According to data from CoinMarketCap , the AZTEC token is up more than 70% in the past 24 hours, making it one of the best-performing tokens, especially in the privacy sector. The token hit a new all-time high today, February 20, at around $0.033, with online chatter peaking at different points during the month. Aztec is gaining fans among privacy enthusiasts because it builds directly on Ethereum, which means it benefits directly from its liquidity, security, and extensive developer ecosystem, rather than competing as a separate chain, the way non-ETH tokens are doing. Aztec also appears to be a beneficiary of the growing demand for privacy triggered by increasing regulatory scrutiny, surveillance concerns, and the push for confidential DeFi or stablecoins. South Korean listings and proposed upgrade spark rally The surge of the AZTEC token coincides with listings on top Korean exchanges like Upbit and Bithumb after its TGE on February 12. While the token witnessed some dicey price action at launch time, it has since reverse d its tr ajectory and is now making new all-time highs. Aside from the exchange listings that are driving traffic and liquidity, there is also an upcoming milestone for the Aztec network known as the Alpha Network for full private smart contracts. It is often called the Alpha rollout and is expected to bring the activation of full programmable private smart contracts on the platform’s live mainnet infrastructure. It is the next agenda on the list after the Ignition Chain, which was launched in November 2025 and focused on decentralizing consensus and block production with sequencers. The Alpha rollout will enable things like hybrid, public-private state, and will be useful in confidential DeFi, private voting/governance, identity systems, gaming, and cross-chain privacy bridges. The rollout is expected to happen within Q1 of 2026. Aztec jumps to head of privacy queue The privacy narrative on Ethereum is not as strong as it could be, while Monero and Zcash , which rode the privacy train last year, have taken a step back along with the broader market. While Railgun has proven DeFi privacy middleware, the Tornado Cash legacy mixer has a lot of baggage that often discourages users and investors. Cryptopolitan reported that major platforms, including Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, OKX, Huobi, and Bitstamp, have delisted or restricted Monero , citing regulatory and traceability concerns. Zcash has had its troubles recently too. The Electric Coin Company (ECC) responsible for the development and maintenance of the Zcash protocol, walked out in January, citing irreconcilable governance conflicts and board disputes. Privacy narrative pushed as solution to online infringement The privacy sector continues to gain momentum in the face of regulatory scrutiny and legislation. Different countries and jurisdictions have different approaches to cryptocurrency regulation, but the EU has been singled out for stifling privacy. The EU has adopted new Anti-money laundering (AML) rules under the Anti-Money Laundering Regulation, which effectively bans the use of privacy-focused tokens like Monero and Zcash within its regulated financial system. It also prohibits anonymous crypto accounts where regulated service providers are concerned. Those rules are a part of a broader AML package, which complements the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation. The provisions will apply from July 1, 2027. People like Elon Musk have had choice words for the EU across different episodes of what they perceive as the bloc overstepping the boundaries of sovereignty. When the EU fined X £120 million ($140 million) for breaching the Digital Services Act, Musk initially reacted with an X post saying that the decision was “bullshit,” before later calling for the EU to be abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries so that their governments can better represent the people. The smartest crypto minds already read our newsletter. Want in? Join them .
20 Feb 2026, 16:49
Binance’s CZ Says He Played a ‘Tiny’ Part in UAE’s Embrace of Bitcoin as Store of Value
Changpeng Zhao (CZ), founder and former CEO of the world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance, has revealed his role in the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) Bitcoin adoption. In a tweet highlighting information that the UAE has formally recognized bitcoin (BTC) as a store of value similar to gold, CZ disclosed that his advocacy contributed to the development. CZ Influenced the UAE’s Bitcoin Adoption “I might have done a tiny bit of advocacy for this,” the Binance founder said. It is no news that CZ established his primary residence in Dubai in 2021, due to the city’s pro-crypto and forward-thinking environment. His presence in the city and influence on prominent figures have certainly affected their stance on Bitcoin and the crypto industry as a whole. Over the years, the UAE has increased its Bitcoin exposure through mining and the purchase of exchange-traded funds (ETFs). By 2022, Abu Dhabi’s royal family had ventured into Bitcoin mining through its affiliated firm, Citadel Mining. The royal family, through Citadel, established large-scale mining operations on AI Reem Island and has since amassed over $450 million in bitcoin. Earlier today, the market intelligence platform, Arkham, revealed that the UAE has mined $453.6 BTC. On-chain data shows the entity has been holding the majority of BTC produced, with its last outflow recorded 4 months ago. The royal family is now $344 million in profit on their BTC, minus energy costs. UAE’s Bitcoin Exposure Crosses $1B Besides the Bitcoin mining ventures, two major Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth entities, namely Mubadala Investment Company and Al Warda Investments, have purchased millions of shares in spot Bitcoin ETFs. By the end of 2025, the companies had amassed more than $1 billion in combined holdings of BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT). Separate 13F filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) revealed that by the end of last year, Mubadala held over 12.7 million shares in IBIT. On the other hand, Al Warda owned at least 8.21 million shares of the same product. The shares were worth $631 million and $408 million, respectively. Although the value of the ETF shares has plummeted alongside bitcoin’s price, the combined Bitcoin exposure for the UAE remains well above $1 billion. With the government recognizing BTC as a store of value, the cryptocurrency is likely to be treated as a permanent reserve asset going forward. The post Binance’s CZ Says He Played a ‘Tiny’ Part in UAE’s Embrace of Bitcoin as Store of Value appeared first on CryptoPotato .
20 Feb 2026, 16:13
Can Bitcoin Handle the Threat from Quantum Computing?
Quantum computing has recently become one of the biggest open questions in Bitcoin, particularly for institutions . Not because a breakthrough is considered imminent, but because long-horizon tail risks matter. If quantum machines ever reached the right scale, they could theoretically target the cryptography upon which Bitcoin relies, raising uncomfortable questions not only about security but what happens to long-dormant coins if key recovery ever becomes feasible. What’s changed isn’t the underlying risk model — it’s that the ecosystem is now starting to treat it as an engineering and governance problem, not just a thought experiment. That includes everything from emphasising basic wallet hygiene to longer-range upgrade paths like BIP 360. Before any of that, though, it’s worth being clear on what quantum actually threatens — and how. What Quantum Changes: Shor vs. Grover Bitcoin ownership relies on digital signatures — ECDSA historically, with Taproot supporting Schnorr signatures ( BIP340 ). Both rely on the same elliptic curve, secp256k1. Private keys generate public keys through elliptic-curve mathematics. Reversing that relationship — deriving a private key from a public key — is considered infeasible for classical computers. A fault-tolerant quantum computer capable of running Shor’s algorithm at cryptographically relevant scale, however, could theoretically solve the elliptic-curve discrete logarithm problem, allowing an attacker to forge valid signatures and steal funds. Of secondary concern is Grover’s algorithm . It doesn’t “break” SHA-256 , but it could reduce the work needed to find a valid proof-of-work output, potentially altering mining economics and introducing centralisation concerns — though only if a quantum miner can outpace today’s ASICs, an engineering feat well beyond running Grover itself. Shor-related concerns are therefore considered more urgent because they target Bitcoin’s ownership layer in a more immediate sense in the event of any meaningful quantum breakthrough. Exposure Profiles: Long vs. Short Shor is only relevant, however, once a public key becomes visible on-chain. Coins vulnerable to long exposure are those whose public keys are visible when a UTXO is created or remain visible for extended periods. These include early Bitcoin P2PK (pay-to-public-key) outputs, reused addresses that tie funds to keys revealed during earlier spends, and Taproot (P2TR) outputs, which commit to a (tweaked) public key in the UTXO itself. In these cases, public keys are visible well before any spend, representing a “harvest now, attack later” threat if quantum capability matures. Modern wallet outputs such as P2PKH (legacy) and P2WPKH (SegWit) use hashed-pubkey constructions that only reveal the public key once the output is spent. The exposure window here is far shorter — and less practical at scale — requiring an attacker to derive the private key and broadcast a conflicting spend within the few blocks needed for the legitimate transaction to confirm. Estimates of how many coins are exposed vary. Some analyses claim that 20–50% of supply could be vulnerable under broad threat assumptions. Others argue this conflates theoretical exposure with practical exploitability, especially where risk is limited to short “mempool race” windows or where exposed coins are dispersed across many smaller UTXOs. One widely cited report places the concentrated, materially exposed subset closer to ~10,200 BTC. The key takeaway is that the threat is real but not uniform — and the attack surface, in practice, narrower than it sounds. The Fault-Tolerance Bottleneck All of the above presupposes fault-tolerant quantum computers operating at cryptographically relevant scale. Breaking Bitcoin’s elliptic-curve signatures would likely require millions of physical qubits operating with sufficient error correction to yield the stable logical qubits such attacks depend on. One recent report suggests this could require machines roughly 100,000× more powerful than those publicly known today. Views on when — or even whether — this will happen vary, with many serious discussions clustering in the mid-2030s to mid-2040s. What is less disputed is that if meaningful capability ever materialises, any response will need to have been coordinated well in advance. Migration and Post-Quantum Standards The main challenge to any response lies in how Bitcoin transitions to something resilient to quantum threats under throughput limits, uneven incentives and contentious governance trade-offs. In 2024, NIST finalised post-quantum standards including lattice-based ML-DSA (Dilithium) and SLH-DSA (SPHINCS+), anchoring the candidate set large systems are converging on. For Bitcoin, any migration would likely be staged: introducing new, safer output types and wallet defaults, and potentially a transition period involving hybrid spends that require classical and post-quantum proofs. Trade-offs are unavoidable — post-quantum signatures tend to be larger and heavier to verify, increasing bandwidth and validation costs. There are multiple plausible directions beyond any single proposal, including new post-quantum-capable output types, hybrid signature policies during transition, and wallet-default shifts designed to reduce long-lived public-key exposure over time. A soft fork is the most likely mechanism for introducing new output types. A hard fork is possible, but it is a messy solution risking chain splits if stakeholders disagree. BIP 360: P2MR as Incremental Hardening BIP 360 — recently merged into the BIPs repository — is the most concrete attempt yet to translate “quantum readiness” into an incremental, Bitcoin-native proposal. It introduces a new output type, Pay-to-Merkle-Root (P2MR), designed to operate similarly to Taproot but with key-path spending removed. Specifically, it aims to reduce reliance on long-lived embedded public keys most at risk from “harvest now, attack later,” without forcing Bitcoin to immediately select and deploy heavyweight post-quantum signature schemes. Conceptually, P2MR is “Taproot-like script trees, but no key-path.” Spends must reveal a script path and a Merkle proof, which is less compact than a Taproot key-path spend. The trade-off is larger witnesses in exchange for reducing a long-exposure pattern threatened by Shor. BIP 360 frames P2MR as foundational rather than final. It directly addresses long-exposure patterns, while mempool-race scenarios and the broader shift to post-quantum signatures would require separate follow-on work. Crucially, the proposal also surfaces an issue any credible migration plan must reckon with: even with opt-in upgrades and changing wallet defaults, a meaningful portion of the UTXO set may remain on legacy outputs for a very long time. Dormant holdings, lost keys, institutional custody constraints, and simple inertia create UTXOs that may never voluntarily move. If cryptographically relevant quantum capability ever arrives, some long-exposed coins whose owners are unreachable could, in principle, be swept by whoever can derive their keys. Even if that is “just” theft rather than protocol failure, the consequences could be severe: it would undermine confidence, trigger emergency policy responses, and — in the case of large dormant clusters — raise fears of sudden supply becoming liquid. Proposals to freeze or otherwise treat unmigrated coins differently, however, raise politically explosive questions about immutability, neutrality, and property rights. Proposals to freeze or otherwise treat unmigrated coins differently, however, raise politically explosive questions about immutability, neutrality, and property rights. The risk of deadlock is why planning early matters, even if timelines remain uncertain. Risks, Reality and Readiness Quantum is a real, long-horizon challenge for Bitcoin. It isn’t, however, an existential cliff edge. The risk is uneven, tied to specific exposure profiles and subject to hardware timelines that remain genuinely uncertain. Importantly, it’s not arriving into a vacuum: developers are already sketching credible migration paths: the kind of long-range planning that matters as much to institutions as it does to anyone holding Bitcoin for the long term. The hardest part for now is coordination. Any transition will be slow — potentially taking years — contested and complicated by coins that never move. But Bitcoin is conservative by design, and that conservatism is a feature, making staged, opt-in change possible without forcing everyone onto a single rushed deadline. Taproot is a recent reminder that meaningful upgrades can ship when the case is clear and incentives align. Taken together, that points to the only posture that really makes sense for now: as with everything, preparation beats panic — and Bitcoin still has time to prepare. The post Can Bitcoin Handle the Threat from Quantum Computing? appeared first on Bitfinex blog .
20 Feb 2026, 16:10
Coinbase Offers 3.5% Annual Yield on USDC Balances With Subscription Service
Coinbase will offer a 3.5% annual yield on USDC balances for Coinbase One subscribers. The yield is available on all subscription tiers, paid weekly in USDC or Bitcoin. Continue Reading: Coinbase Offers 3.5% Annual Yield on USDC Balances With Subscription Service The post Coinbase Offers 3.5% Annual Yield on USDC Balances With Subscription Service appeared first on COINTURK NEWS .
20 Feb 2026, 16:03
North Korean hackers shift from infiltration to launching their own crypto platforms
Threat actors from DPRK are still one of the top risks for crypto. Nearly a year after the record-breaking Bybit hack, North Korean hackers are evolving their tactics. DPRK hackers are still a threat to crypto, and they may be adding new approaches to infiltration. A year after the record-breaking Bybit hack , similar operations continue on a smaller scale. Recent research by Elliptic found that the DPRK crypto asset operations continued, despite the bear market, with no signs of slowing down. The main attack vector was social engineering and various forms of infiltration. The main difference is that DPRK hackers now move beyond simply infiltrating IT and crypto projects and create their own platforms. This approach was the main cause of the Tenexium incident, which directly hurt all users who connected their wallets. As Cryptopolitan reported , hackers were also becoming more efficient and faster in moving and laundering their crypto hauls. Bybit hack was an inflexion point for DPRK hackers A year after the Bybit hack, almost all the funds have been laundered, with the exception of a small fraction that was intercepted. Elliptic noted the hackers used novel laundering tactics, including the strategic use of refund addresses, the creation of worthless tokens, and the diversified use of mixing services. Over $1B of the Bybit funds were laundered in just six months, and that mixing toolset created an inflection point for DPRK hackers and their campaigns. The hackers did not rest after the record-breaking windfall, but continued with an elevated pace for all of 2025. Elliptic tallied up $2B in DPRK hacks for 2025, and total exploits could be over $6B. The funds may be playing a role in North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile programs, giving hackers a strong motivation to continue. According to Elliptic, the trend continued in 2026, with double the number of exploits compared to January 2025. While the DPRK hacks are technically sophisticated, they also rely on social engineering and human error. Are DPRK hackers launching crypto products? Elliptic reported the case of Tenexium, a project built within the Bittensor (TAO) network. The Tenexium project caused chaos on January 1, becoming the first hack for 2026. Tenexium used the usual approach to building a permissionless project as part of Bittensor’s ecosystem. The relatively minor project still attracted liquidity, but at one point, the website disappeared, and the project market experienced suspicious outflows of $2.5M. Tenexium was supposed to be a neutral trading protocol, but it turned out some of the project’s team may be made up of DPRK hackers posing as IT workers. What was different this time was that the DPRK IT persona may be the very founder of the project. The identity of Tenexium’s creator has not been confirmed. However, the case raises the issue of smaller DeFi projects, vaults, and copycat permissionless apps. As Web3 tools are still alive, hackers may directly try to tap end users with poisoned apps, meme tokens, or other new launches. The best approach is to vet teams and platforms or use the more established DeFi hubs. Claim your free seat in an exclusive crypto trading community - limited to 1,000 members.
