Bitcoin traded at $77,994 (up 7.7% over 24 hours) on the site CoinGecko snapshot fetched at 00:21 UTC on August 22, 2026, with ether at $2,502.58 (up 8.6%) and solana at $93.68 (up 7.4%). XRP was up 15.8% at $1.43. Global crypto market cap sat near $2.65 trillion, bitcoin dominance was about 59.0%, and 24-hour volume was about $173 billion.
Japan’s Financial Services Agency added Laser Digital Japan to its crypto-exchange register dated August 21. Bitcoin Standard Treasury Company ended its Cantor SPAC combination and agreed to pay 15 million dollars in cash. Coinkite shipped COLDCARD 5.6.1 after the July seed flaw. MANTRA remains halted at block 17449398 while it stages an EVM patch.
Japan lists Laser Digital Japan as crypto exchange 00032
Japan's Financial Services Agency published an updated crypto-asset exchange register dated August 21, 2026. Laser Digital Japan appears as Kanto Local Finance Bureau registration 00032 with that same date, and the sheet counts 27 operators nationwide. The row names bitcoin, ether, XRP, bitcoin cash, litecoin, and SHIB as the coins it may handle. Nomura's same-day release said the firm is now authorized as a Crypto Asset Exchange Service Provider under the Payment Services Act, will first add liquidity for local VASPs, and has not yet set a launch date, so the PDF is a register rather than a product go-live.
BSTR ends its Cantor combination and agrees to pay $15 million
BSTR Holdings and Cantor Equity Partners I signed a Termination and Release Agreement on August 20, 2026, ending the July 16, 2025 business combination agreement that had been amended on March 25, 2026. The 8-K says the seller will pay CEPO, or ask Blockstream Capital Partners to pay CEPO, 15 million dollars in cash: 10 million dollars on September 19, 2026 and 5 million dollars on December 1, 2026. Ancillary documents terminate automatically, with mutual releases subject to stated exceptions. The companion press release, signed by Adam Back as president, says listed bitcoin treasury vehicles have been under pricing pressure and that the team still wants to run active bitcoin treasury strategies, which means this is a terminated deal rather than a completed listing.
Eightco reports 16,278 ETH and 301.97 million WLD in its stack
Eightco Holdings (Nasdaq: ORBS) furnished an August 20 press release with holdings as of 6:00 pm ET on August 19, 2026. The stack includes 16,278 ether, 301,971,219 Worldcoin (WLD) marked at 37 cents per token on Coinbase, about 132 million dollars of cash and stablecoins, a 90 million dollar indirect OpenAI stake through SPVs, and an 18 million dollar Beast Industries stake, for about 389 million dollars in total holdings. The company also said it bought back about 14 million common shares under a previously announced 125 million dollar repurchase program. These are company-reported marks, not independently audited net asset value.
Coinkite ships COLDCARD 5.6.1 after the July seed flaw
Coinkite published a COLDCARD security update on August 20, 2026 telling Mk4 and Mk5 users to install 5.6.1 and Q users to install 1.5.1Q from the official downloads page. New seeds now require one user-sourced entropy method: at least 65 timed key presses, 50 rolls of a six-sided die, or 128 coin flips. The device re-checks a staged PSBT immediately before signing and displays Transaction modified if a connected host changed the payment. Installing the update does not repair a seed generated on affected firmware from 2021 through July 2026, so users still have to create a new seed and move coins.
Ethereum Foundation opens the better codes SNARK challenge
The Ethereum Foundation Formal Verification team posted on August 20, 2026 that the better codes challenge is live. The open project, built with Yukon and zkSecurity, puts a Lean-formalized Reed-Solomon proximity problem called koalaIRS12 on a public leaderboard. Solvers, including AI agents, try to raise a machine-checked soundness bound toward a 128-bit target, and the Lean kernel checks each submission. The post ties that work to hash-based SNARKs used in zkrollups, zkVMs, and Ethereum's post-quantum roadmap, and it is a research leaderboard rather than a mainnet fork or client release.
MANTRA's status page says mainnet mantra-1 remains halted at block 17449398 after an incident, with a full state snapshot taken before the halt. The team says it identified a root cause in the EVM module used in the exploit, and that no third-party user, exchange, or partner funds were directly impacted. Release 8.4 is in pre-release, with empty store upgrades and no state migrations, while operators coordinate a single restart. The page has not posted a restart window, so this remains a chain halt rather than a completed recovery.
Kraken ends Arbitrum Nova deposits and withdrawals
Kraken's status page says that as of August 20, 2026 it no longer supports deposits or withdrawals through the Arbitrum Nova network. The notice says the change affects only Arbitrum Nova and that Arbitrum One remains unaffected. The incident feed listed the notice at 07:00 UTC on August 21. This is a venue rail sunset, not an Arbitrum One outage.
