Crypto’s biggest developments through August 10, including the CLARITY Act, Russia-linked A7A5 stablecoin reaching nearly $140 billion in turnover, Wall Street tokenisation, corporate Bitcoin treasuries, Circle, Wells Fargo, BlackRock, Bitdeer and the Coldcard security crisis.

Summary

The most important crypto development on Monday, August 10, came from an unexpected corner of the stablecoin market.

The rouble-backed A7A5 stablecoin has generated close to $140 billion in cumulative turnover since its February 2025 launch, according to PSB Bank chief executive Pyotr Fradkov. The token has become the largest non-dollar stablecoin and is being used as part of a cross-border settlement network serving companies trading particularly with Asian markets. Its associated infrastructure and entities have been targeted by Western sanctions.

That makes A7A5 much more consequential than its market capitalisation alone suggests. Stablecoins are evolving not only into payment instruments but into geopolitical infrastructure capable of routing trade outside conventional correspondent-banking networks.

In Washington, meanwhile, the Senate kept comprehensive US crypto legislation alive. Senate Majority Leader John Thune filed for a procedural vote on the CLARITY Act, positioning the market-structure legislation for possible action after lawmakers return from the August recess. The bill still faces political disputes involving stablecoin rewards, federal regulatory jurisdiction and restrictions on crypto interests held by public officials.

Institutional adoption continued on several fronts. Wells Fargo plans tokenised deposits for corporate clients, BlackRock expanded tokenised money-market fund infrastructure in Europe, and Circle reported USDC circulation of $73.3 billion alongside sharply higher onchain transaction volume.

Corporate Bitcoin strategies are simultaneously becoming more complicated. Strive disclosed today that it bought another 147 BTC, while other treasury companies are increasingly having to demonstrate that their financing structures can survive weaker crypto markets.

Bitcoin mining is also changing. Bitdeer reported second-quarter revenue of $228.8 million today as miners increasingly position themselves at the intersection of Bitcoin, power infrastructure and artificial-intelligence computing.

Security remains the uncomfortable counterweight. The Coldcard hardware-wallet exploit has been linked to approximately 1,816 stolen BTC, while a separate malware campaign disclosed today is targeting crypto developers through malicious Solidity-related Visual Studio Code extensions.

The defining theme of the week is therefore bigger than Bitcoin price action. Blockchain-based money is becoming embedded in banks, asset managers, international trade, corporate balance sheets and software infrastructure at the same time that regulation and security controls struggle to catch up.

Bitcoin Holds Near $65,000 as Infrastructure News Outruns Price Action

Bitcoin was trading around $64,700 on Monday afternoon, August 10, with Ether near $1,625 and Solana close to $78.

The relatively subdued market is noteworthy because institutional developments surrounding crypto have been anything but quiet.

The disconnect reinforces an important distinction for investors.

Blockchain adoption and crypto-asset appreciation are not the same trade.

A bank can tokenise deposits without buying Bitcoin. An asset manager can record money-market fund ownership on blockchain infrastructure without creating substantial demand for ETH. A payment network can use stablecoins while abstracting the underlying chain entirely from its customers.

The market increasingly needs to determine which crypto assets actually capture economic value from the financial infrastructure being built around them.

A7A5 Turns Stablecoins Into Geopolitical Infrastructure

The most consequential fresh development of August 10 came from Russia-linked financial infrastructure.

A7A5, a stablecoin backed by rouble deposits, has processed almost $140 billion in cumulative turnover since launching in February 2025, according to PSB chief executive Pyotr Fradkov. Reuters reported that the token is now the largest non-dollar stablecoin.

The A7 settlement system reportedly serves around 15,000 regular business clients and processes as many as 2,000 payments per day. Its primary use case is facilitating cross-border transactions, particularly trade involving Asian counterparties including China.

That makes A7A5 fundamentally different from the majority of stablecoins launched for crypto trading.

It is infrastructure for international commerce.

Why A7A5 Matters

Stablecoins originally found product-market fit as dollars that could move between crypto exchanges.

Their second major use case was cross-border remittances.

A7A5 points toward a third and politically more significant application: financial settlement between companies operating outside the dominant Western banking system.

The United States, European Union and United Kingdom targeted entities associated with the project with sanctions during 2025. Yet the infrastructure has continued operating.

This does not make A7A5 immune from sanctions. Access points, counterparties, exchanges, banks and businesses can still face enforcement risks.

But it demonstrates why stablecoins are becoming relevant to geopolitics.

Blockchain settlement can reduce dependence on correspondent banks and payment networks that traditionally gave Western governments considerable visibility and leverage over international finance.

The Dollar Stablecoin Paradox

The development also creates an interesting contradiction.

US policymakers have increasingly viewed dollar stablecoins as potentially strengthening international demand for the dollar.

At the same time, countries seeking alternatives to dollar-based financial infrastructure can adopt exactly the same technology using their own currencies.

Stablecoins may therefore reinforce dollar dominance in some markets while simultaneously making it easier to build alternatives elsewhere.

DN Take: A7A5 is one of the strongest demonstrations yet that the stablecoin story is no longer simply about crypto trading. Programmable currencies are becoming instruments of trade policy, sanctions policy and monetary competition.

The CLARITY Act Lives to Fight Another Day

Washington provided the most important regulatory development of the week.

Before the Senate left for its August recess, Majority Leader John Thune filed a motion setting up procedural consideration of the CLARITY Act when lawmakers return.

That does not mean the bill has passed.

It does not even guarantee that the Senate has the 60 votes required to clear the relevant procedural threshold.

But it materially changes the position from several days earlier, when failure to complete the legislation before the recess raised fears that comprehensive crypto market structure could slip into the 2026 election calendar.

What Is Still Being Negotiated

CLARITY attempts to establish rules determining when crypto assets fall under securities or commodities law and how exchanges, issuers and decentralised protocols should be regulated.

One of the most contentious issues concerns stablecoin rewards.

Banks worry that interest-like rewards could encourage consumers and businesses to move deposits out of traditional banking institutions and into stablecoins. The Senate framework has sought to distinguish passive yield on stablecoin balances from rewards generated through transactions or other activity.

Political ethics are another unresolved issue.

Democratic lawmakers have sought stronger restrictions governing crypto interests held by senior government officials, amid scrutiny of President Donald Trump and his family’s involvement in digital-asset businesses.

The result is that US crypto legislation has become entangled with three much bigger questions: who controls deposits, who regulates securities markets, and how conflicts of interest involving public officials should be managed.

Why September Matters

The industry now has another window.

But every delay pushes legislation closer to the November midterm elections, when legislative incentives become more political and congressional attention becomes harder to secure.

DN Take: The procedural move is a positive signal, not regulatory clarity itself. September could determine whether the United States establishes a durable market-structure regime in 2026 or carries another major crypto-policy fight into the next Congress.

Wells Fargo Chooses Tokenised Deposits

Wells Fargo plans to begin offering tokenised deposits to corporate and commercial customers this autumn.

The initial system will represent US-dollar and British-pound bank deposits as blockchain-based tokens, allowing businesses to transfer and settle funds around the clock.

The distinction between a stablecoin and a tokenised deposit is becoming one of the most important structural questions in digital finance.

A fiat-backed stablecoin such as USDC represents a claim within a reserve-backed structure operated by a stablecoin issuer.

A tokenised bank deposit remains a liability of the bank.

That difference matters enormously to banks.

If corporations hold billions of dollars in third-party stablecoins, those funds can leave conventional bank deposits.

If the banks themselves tokenise the deposits, they can offer programmability without necessarily losing the underlying funding relationship.

The Banks Have Entered the Stablecoin War

Wells Fargo joins a broader institutional movement involving JPMorgan, Citigroup and other financial institutions experimenting with blockchain-based bank money.

The battle for digital cash is consequently becoming a competition between:

• Fiat-backed stablecoins
• Tokenised commercial bank deposits
• Tokenised money-market funds
• Central-bank settlement infrastructure
• Potential central bank digital currencies

Each provides a different combination of liquidity, yield, regulatory protection and programmability.

DN Take: Banks no longer need to defeat blockchain. Their preferred strategy may be to put conventional banking liabilities on blockchain infrastructure themselves.

BlackRock, Schroders and JPMorgan Push Funds Onchain

Tokenisation also moved deeper into asset management.

BlackRock recently expanded tokenised access to selected European money-market funds using JPMorgan’s Kinexys infrastructure.

Schroders has separately secured approval from the Central Bank of Ireland for a tokenised share class of a US-dollar money-market fund, also using JPMorgan’s tokenisation technology.

This is one of the clearest institutional trends of 2026.

Asset managers are discovering that money-market funds are unusually well suited to tokenisation.

They already function as cash-management instruments for institutions. Putting fund ownership onto programmable infrastructure creates the possibility of using those positions directly in settlement and collateral workflows.

An institution could potentially hold an income-generating money-market instrument, transfer it digitally and use it as collateral without first converting back into conventional cash.

That is considerably more useful than tokenising an asset simply for the novelty of placing it on a blockchain.

DN Take: The institutional tokenisation race is increasingly converging around cash equivalents, collateral and settlement assets. These markets have far stronger economic reasons to move onchain than many of the tokenisation experiments of the previous cycle.

Circle Shows the Scale of the Regulated Stablecoin Economy

Circle’s second-quarter results provided another important data point.

USDC circulation reached $73.3 billion, up 19% from a year earlier, while onchain transaction volume increased 151%. Circle reported $701.3 million in revenue for the quarter.

The results also exposed one of the less discussed risks in the stablecoin business model.

Reserve yields declined to approximately 3.5%.

Stablecoin issuers holding government securities and other short-duration reserve assets earn substantial income from prevailing interest rates. When central-bank rates decline, that income can fall even when the number of stablecoins in circulation rises.

This means stablecoin issuers cannot rely indefinitely on the simple economics of earning Treasury yields while token holders receive little or none of that return.

The strategic response is already visible.

Circle increasingly wants USDC embedded inside payments, capital markets, tokenisation and machine-to-machine transactions.

DN Take: Stablecoins are graduating from reserve-management businesses into financial networks. Distribution and utility could ultimately matter more than which issuer can earn the highest return on Treasury reserves.

Strive Buys Another 147 Bitcoin

Corporate Bitcoin accumulation has not disappeared.

Strive disclosed on August 10 that it purchased 147 BTC between August 3 and August 7, paying an average price of approximately $64,812 per Bitcoin, including fees and expenses.

The disclosure is noteworthy because corporate treasury strategies are now being tested under far less forgiving market conditions than during the strongest phase of the accumulation cycle.

The broader lesson is that investors should not rank treasury companies simply by the number of Bitcoin they hold.

The relevant analysis increasingly includes acquisition cost, cash reserves, leverage, preferred-stock obligations, dilution, debt maturity schedules and the company’s ability to raise fresh capital when its shares trade poorly.

Recent Bitcoin sales by Strategy to meet preferred-security obligations have already demonstrated why liability structure matters.

DN Take: Corporate Bitcoin ownership remains a significant source of structural demand, but the second generation of the treasury trade will be judged by balance-sheet durability rather than headline BTC accumulation.

Bitcoin Mining’s Second Business Is Now AI Infrastructure

Bitdeer reported fresh second-quarter results on Monday, providing another signal that Bitcoin mining and artificial-intelligence infrastructure are increasingly converging.

The company reported $228.8 million in Q2 revenue, compared with $155.6 million in the same quarter a year earlier.

The strategic significance extends beyond Bitdeer.

Bitcoin miners spent years assembling precisely the assets now demanded by the AI infrastructure boom:

grid connections, large electricity contracts, industrial sites, cooling infrastructure, data centres and expertise managing power-intensive computing.

As mining economics tighten, companies can compare the expected return from deploying a megawatt toward Bitcoin mining against leasing that capacity to AI and high-performance computing customers.

That creates a new valuation framework.

A mining company’s power portfolio may sometimes be worth more than its existing mining fleet.

The strongest businesses will be those capable of demonstrating real contracted AI revenue rather than simply adding artificial-intelligence terminology to investor presentations.

DN Take: Bitcoin miners increasingly look less like pure crypto companies and more like energy-allocation businesses deciding which form of computation provides the highest return.

Coldcard Becomes One of 2026’s Most Important Custody Failures

The Coldcard security crisis remains the week’s most important crypto-native security event.

TRM Labs’ analysis linked approximately 1,816 BTC to the exploit, worth roughly $116 million at the time of its assessment. More than 5,000 addresses were potentially exposed.

The problem was particularly serious because Coldcard is a hardware wallet designed around offline Bitcoin storage.

The incident did not represent a failure of Bitcoin’s consensus mechanism.

Instead, the vulnerability involved wallet seed generation.

If the process used to generate private keys contains insufficient randomness, an attacker may be able to reconstruct potential seeds and search for addresses containing funds.

That defeats one of the assumptions behind cold storage.

Taking a compromised key offline does not make the key secure.

TRM has advised anyone whose seed could have been generated using affected software to create a fresh seed using patched hardware and migrate funds, beginning with a small test transaction.

DN Take: Self-custody eliminates some intermediaries, not operational risk. Hardware provenance, entropy generation, firmware, backups and migration procedures need to be treated with the same seriousness institutions apply to conventional key-management systems.

A New Attack Targets Crypto Developers

A separate security issue emerged on August 10.

Cybersecurity researchers identified a malicious Visual Studio Code extension called Solidity Pro that was designed to steal browser-wallet information, credentials and other sensitive data from developers.

The attack is significant because developers represent particularly valuable targets.

A compromised retail wallet might expose one user’s assets.

A compromised developer environment can potentially expose:

• Deployment credentials
• Private keys
• API credentials
• Source-code repositories
• Cloud infrastructure
• Smart-contract administration keys

Supply-chain attacks are consequently becoming an increasingly important crypto security problem.

A malicious extension does not need to break Ethereum or compromise a hardware wallet. It only needs a developer with sufficiently powerful credentials to install apparently legitimate software.

DN Take: Crypto security is migrating up the software supply chain. Protocol audits cannot compensate for compromised developer machines or signing infrastructure.

A7A5 Changes the Stablecoin Debate

Stablecoin policy has largely been framed as a contest between USDT, USDC and traditional banks.

A7A5 demonstrates that another dimension needs to be added.

Sovereign-aligned stablecoin networks can become parallel settlement infrastructure.

That has consequences for sanctions enforcement, emerging-market capital controls and international monetary policy.

If businesses can settle cross-border obligations using tokenised roubles, dollars, yuan, euros or other currencies without relying on conventional correspondent banking for every step, the architecture of international payments becomes more fragmented.

The dollar still possesses enormous advantages, including liquidity, legal infrastructure and global demand.

But blockchain makes building alternative settlement networks technically easier than constructing an entirely new conventional international banking system.

That is why today’s A7A5 numbers are more important than another crypto company launching a branded stablecoin.

What This Week Means

The week’s developments point to seven structural conclusions.

Stablecoins are becoming geopolitical assets. A7A5 shows that tokenised currencies can support international trade networks designed to operate outside traditional Western payment infrastructure.

Banks have accepted blockchain while rejecting disintermediation. Wells Fargo and other institutions increasingly favour tokenised deposits that deliver programmability while preserving the conventional deposit relationship.

Tokenisation is finding economically useful assets. Money-market funds, deposits and collateral have much clearer reasons to move onto programmable rails than many earlier tokenisation experiments.

US regulation has reached a critical legislative window. The CLARITY Act remains alive, but September is increasingly important as the midterm election calendar approaches.

Corporate crypto treasuries are entering their balance-sheet era. Strive continues accumulating Bitcoin, while the broader sector must demonstrate that leverage, dividends and dilution remain manageable through weak markets.

Bitcoin mining is converging with AI infrastructure. Companies with large power portfolios increasingly have multiple ways to monetise electricity and computing facilities.

Security is moving beyond smart-contract exploits. Coldcard illustrates key-generation risk, while the Solidity Pro campaign highlights developer supply-chain risk.

What to Watch Next

The next phase of the market should be watched for several specific developments:

• Democratic support or opposition to the CLARITY Act before the Senate returns in September
• Any compromise covering stablecoin rewards and political conflicts of interest
• Whether A7A5 turnover continues expanding and whether additional sanctions or enforcement measures target its infrastructure
• New national-currency stablecoins built specifically for cross-border commercial settlement
• Additional tokenised-deposit announcements from global banks
• Institutional adoption of BlackRock and Schroders tokenised money-market products
• USDC circulation and Circle’s efforts to diversify beyond reserve income
• Further corporate Bitcoin purchases or forced treasury sales
• AI infrastructure contracts signed by former pure-play Bitcoin miners
• Additional Coldcard fund movements or revised estimates of affected wallets
• New malicious crypto development tools, browser extensions and software supply-chain attacks

The most important question is increasingly not whether finance moves onchain.

It is which kind of money, which institutions and which networks control the resulting financial system.

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Disclaimer

This article is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, legal, tax or cybersecurity advice. Crypto assets are volatile and can result in substantial or total loss. Products and services discussed are intended for adults aged 18 and over where legally permitted. Conduct independent research before making financial decisions.