Bitcoin ‘anti-spam’ BIP goes nowhere fast
Supporters of the BIP-110 soft fork hoped to eradicate spam from the blockchain, but after a lengthy and heated debate the proposal has been pronounced Dead On Arrival. After securing just 2.5% support ahead of entering mandatory signaling on Saturday, it split off into a minority chain that mined just two blocks in eight hours before stalling.
This is probably no surprise given it’s just as difficult and expensive to mine on the new chain as it is on Bitcoin — but without any hope of being able to sell the block reward to recoup the costs. The difficulty would have adjusted downward if they’d managed to mine through another 2,014 blocks.
BIP-110 aimed to rid Bitcoin of non financial transactions, such as Ordinals, but opponents saw it as imposing censorship on the chain and it faced opposition from prominent Bitcoin advocates. Strategy executive chairman Michael Saylor said he shared the proposal’s objectives but argued that its approach threatened Bitcoin’s neutral rules and consensus.
Blockstream CEO Adam Back warned that the consensus-level change could damage Bitcoin’s credibility and potentially make certain unspent transaction outputs unspendable. Bitcoin Core developer Murch has subsequently proposed removing BIP-110 backer Luke Dashjr from his position as a BIP Editor.
Clarity vote gets punted to September
Senator Tim Scott, who chairs the Senate Banking Committee, said on Thursday a procedural vote on the CLARITY Act should happen before the August recess “without any question.”
Senator Cynthia Lummis also raised hopes of a last minute vote. But despite hopes the Senators would locked in a room and forced to compromise before leaving for the August break, Senate Majority Leader John Thune declined to force the issue and later scheduled the cloture vote for September 15.
“The Dems are insistent on no Clarity vote,” Thune told Cointelegraph. “I worked with sponsors of the bill. Senator Lummis was great, and we’re getting that queued up first thing when we come back.”
Crypto lobbyists have until then to shore up the 60 votes required by negotiating on ethics rules, the stablecoin yield issue, and protection for developers in the BRCA. The real question though is whether it will be a serious attempt to pass the legislation, or if the vote has been called simply “to get people on the record” ahead of the mid-term elections as Lummis suggested.
Bitcoiners form ‘red team’ to battle AI-assisted hacks
A Bitcoin security group made up of 16 volunteers said mid-week it had found nearly 5,000 potential issues during a rapid AI-assisted review of projects in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
By the weekend that number had grown to 7,958 issues, with 168 critical flaws and 1,120 high severity issues.
Bitcoin Red Team is a volunteer security effort that includes Rob Hamilton, CEO of AnchorWatch and Bitcoin developer Calle, which has been using AI tools and human review to scan open-source Bitcoin-related repositories for vulnerabilities.
“We’re averaging on the order of 1 critical exploit per hour per person,” said Calle in a post.
The team sprang into action as a result of the Coldcard hardware wallet hacks, which developer Coinkite suggested were the result of an AI analysis of its source code. More than $100 million has been stolen by 7300 wallets, due to flaws in the random number generated used to generate seed phrases. It has become the third largest crypto hack in 2026 and helped push July’s crypto thefts total to $247 million.
The incident helped shine a light on the trust required with using a hardware wallet, and led many Bitcoiners to wonder if any wallet was truly safe?
Many are now determined to use at least 100 manual dice rolls to generate their own seed phrase.
Ethereum researchers want to rein in staking; critics say it could backfire
A group of Ethereum researchers and developers have proposed changing the network’s issuance policy to cut validator rewards more sharply as the proportion of staked ETH rises.
Tapered Issuance Burn (AKA EIP-8363) would cut rewards entirely as the percentage of supply staked crossed the 50% mark. It’s currently at 34% with a huge queue of ETH waiting to enter, and there are fears this may continue to snowball while providing progressively less benefit for the security of the network.
Despite offering some compelling arguments in favor of the proposal, it has been met with a fierce backlash, especially from DeFi protocols. Ether.fi founder Mike Silagadze suggested Ether.fi would get out of staking entirely if it goes through. He said:
“This is so disappointing on every level. […] This is bad for decentralization, this is bad for Ethereum adoption, and this is bad for the credibility of the network.”
Happy days are here again as Bitcoin ETFs see best week in four months
The spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds registered their third-strongest showing since October as institutional demand…
cointelegraph.com