Ripple launched Ripple Mint, an institutional platform for automated RLUSD minting, redemption, bridging, and transaction management.
The post Ripple launches institutional RLUSD minting platform with API access appeared first on Crypto Briefing.
Coinbase launched AI agent payments for businesses, expanded automated crypto trading tools and introduced an x402 SDK for developers.
The post Coinbase enables AI agents to pay businesses and execute crypto trades appeared first on Crypto Briefing.
Bitcoin Magazine
Coinbase Builds Post-Quantum Custody System, Funds Bitcoin’s Crypto Upgrade
Coinbase is preparing for future scenarios where quantum computers may be able to crack Bitcoin’s current cryptography.
America’s biggest crypto exchange said Thursday that while the threat isn’t imminent, hard problems — such as migrating millions of users and coordinating protocol upgrades across decentralized systems — need to be solved.
Quantum computers are still experimental and make mistakes but some in the crypto community have sounded the alarm about hypothetical advancements in the machines that could in the future be able to break Bitcoin’s cryptography.
“There’s a lot of noise about quantum computing right now,” Coinbase said. “Some of it is hype. Some of it is fear. And some of it is real.”
The publicly-listed company added that a large-scale quantum computer capable of breaking current cryptography will eventually be built, and so the work to prepare needs to start now, “not when it’s urgent.”
The exchange added that its Independent Advisory Board on Quantum Computing and Blockchain, formed earlier this year, plans to deliver a post-quantum signing pipeline using secure enclaves and threshold cryptography.
Coinbase said that currently, its key management system protects approximately 99.9% of the assets the company custodies. But within the next year, the company will deliver an automated signing pipeline that will allow quantum-safe custody as soon as blockchains begin adopting post-quantum schemes.
It added that it was bringing together Bitcoin core developers, cryptographers and researchers to discuss post-quantum migration strategy, with plans to continue these regularly.
“Preparing Bitcoin for a post-quantum world is one of the most consequential and complex challenges the protocol has ever faced,” the exchange said.
Coinbase is also a founding member of the new Bitcoin Security Consortium — alongside BlackRock, Fidelity Digital Assets, Block, and others — which donates funds and dedicates engineers to open-source work supporting proposals like BIP-360.
Crypto companies and protocols have been planning for a hypothetical future where quantum computers can break top cryptography ever since Google researchers last year said that improvements in the computers may allow them to be able to break the cryptography protecting major cryptocurrencies in just nine minutes.
Some in the community have called the warnings overblown, but others have already started preparing for a post-quantum future by testing quantum-resistant signatures on live sidechains.
This post Coinbase Builds Post-Quantum Custody System, Funds Bitcoin’s Crypto Upgrade first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.
Bitcoin Magazine
BlackRock, Coinbase, Strategy Among Nine Firms Launching the Bitcoin Security Consortium, Pledging $15 Million To BTC Security Development
Nine of the largest names in institutional Bitcoin launched the Bitcoin Security Consortium on Thursday, a group backed by $15 million in member pledges over three years to fund work on the network’s long-term security, including preparation for a future era of quantum computing.
Founding members are Anchorage Digital, ARK Invest, BlackRock, Block, Blockstream, Coinbase, Fidelity Digital Assets, Galaxy, and Strategy, a lineup that spans holders, custodians, exchanges, infrastructure and payments providers, and asset managers.
The consortium’s day-to-day work falls to Mike Schmidt, executive director of the developer non-profit Brink, who serves in a volunteer role.
Schmidt tweeted about the role, saying, “I said yes because supporting Bitcoin’s developers and helping people understand their work are the two things I’ve spent my time in Bitcoin on, through Brink and Optech. This group wants to do both: fund the people already securing Bitcoin, and bring accurate information about that work to audiences it doesn’t currently reach.”
Each member directs its own funding to the developers, researchers, and organizations it chooses; the $15 million figure is an aggregate of independent pledges rather than a pooled fund. The group also plans to serve as a reference point on Bitcoin’s security for investors, the public, and the media, and to publish material it will update as the field develops.
The consortium drew clear limits around its role. It says it does not develop or direct Bitcoin’s protocol, takes no position on specific protocol changes, and does not speak for Bitcoin or its developers.
It casts itself on the model of industry groups that fund the open-source software they rely on without controlling the work.
“Bitcoin’s development is, and will remain, the work of a global, decentralized community of contributors,” the group said.
“As long-term holders, we have every incentive to see Bitcoin remain secure for generations,” said Phong Le, Chief Executive Officer of Strategy. “Funding the people who do this work, and helping inform the conversation around it, is a natural way for us to contribute.”
Robert Mitchnick, BlackRock’s Global Head of Digital Assets, said Bitcoin Core developers “do incredibly important work,” and that the members would make “significant additional funding available to support Bitcoin’s long-term security needs.”
Brink, the non-profit coordinating the effort, has funded open-source Bitcoin work since 2020, including more than $1 million to developers in a single year and the first third-party security audit of Bitcoin Core. Schmidt co-founded the group with developer John Newbery.
Much of the consortium’s stated focus lands on the quantum question. Large-scale quantum computers able to break BTC’s cryptography do not exist today, and credible estimates place such capability years out.
The group frames post-quantum protection as a long-term priority the technical community already works on, and positions itself as a grounded source as that work moves.
That framing matches a wider institutional turn toward the issue. Coinbase has formed a quantum computing advisory board, Galaxy launched its own quantum readiness initiative with developer grants days before, and BlackRock has listed quantum computing as a risk in its spot BTC ETF filings.
Developers, for their part, have proposed migration plans built on schemes such as BIP-360 that would move coins to quantum-resistant addresses, and the Bitcoin Policy Institute has warned the timeline is compressing.
Views on urgency diverge, a split the consortium’s members embody. Adam Back, founder of member firm Blockstream, has called the quantum threat decades away, while other voices place a capable machine within the next several years.
The stakes are large either way, since Coinbase research has estimated that between 20% and 50% of BTC’s supply, much of it in older wallet formats, could face exposure to a long-range quantum attack.
The consortium sidesteps the timeline debate and stakes its role on funding and information rather than a forecast. Its own summary holds that the risk is real, yet the network is preparing.
This post BlackRock, Coinbase, Strategy Among Nine Firms Launching the Bitcoin Security Consortium, Pledging $15 Million To BTC Security Development first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.
Uniswap governance is reviewing a proposal that would route protocol fees from selected Optimism pools toward UNI token burns, testing a more direct connection between deployment-level activity and token economics.
The proposal is specific to Optimism pools. That distinction matters because it is not a protocol-wide fee burn across all Uniswap deployments.
Still, the idea is significant.
UNI holders have long debated how Uniswap’s massive trading footprint should connect to the UNI token. A fee-routing and burn mechanism on Optimism would give governance a narrower test case rather than changing the entire protocol at once.
Uniswap is one of the most important decentralized exchanges in crypto, but its token economics have always been debated.
The protocol processes large amounts of trading volume, yet UNI does not automatically capture value from every trade in a direct, simple way. Governance controls key decisions, but tokenholders have often wanted clearer links between protocol usage and token value.
That is why fee routing matters.
If protocol fees from selected pools can be used to buy and burn UNI, the token may gain a more visible economic connection to exchange activity. Burns reduce supply, at least mechanically, and they are easy for the market to understand.
But implementation is everything.
Which pools are included? How much fee revenue is routed? How are burns executed? What are the legal and governance implications? Could the model expand beyond Optimism later?
Those are the questions governance needs to answer.
Optimism is a useful place to test the idea because it narrows the scope.
Uniswap is deployed across multiple networks. A protocol-wide change would be more complex and more controversial. Testing fee routing on a specific deployment gives governance a way to examine the mechanics without rewriting the entire system.
It also reflects how DeFi is becoming more chain-specific.
Activity on Ethereum mainnet is different from activity on Optimism, Arbitrum, Base, Polygon, or other networks. Fees, users, liquidity, incentives, and trading behavior vary by chain.
A deployment-level test may help Uniswap learn whether fee burns are practical in one environment before considering broader changes.
That does not guarantee the proposal will pass or expand.
But it gives UNI holders a concrete experiment to debate.
The market often likes token burns because they are easy to understand.
Fewer tokens can sound bullish. But burns only matter if the underlying fee stream is meaningful, recurring, and large enough to affect supply over time.
A small burn from limited pools may be symbolically important but economically modest. A larger mechanism could matter more, but it may also raise more governance, liquidity, and regulatory questions.
That is why the Optimism-specific scope is important.
The proposal can show how the process works without overpromising immediate impact. UNI holders should watch the mechanism, not just the headline.
If fees are routed transparently and burns are executed reliably, the model may gain support. If the impact is tiny or the process creates new complications, governance may be more cautious.
The broader issue is value alignment.
Uniswap has strong product-market fit. It is widely used, deeply integrated, and central to DeFi liquidity. But tokenholders still want to know how that usage translates into UNI’s long-term role.
Governance power alone may not be enough for every investor.
A fee burn proposal gives the DAO another possible answer. It connects protocol activity, chain-specific revenue, and token supply mechanics in a way that is easier to track.
That does not mean every Uniswap fee should automatically flow to tokenholders. The protocol also needs liquidity, incentives, legal resilience, and sustainable governance.
But the discussion is important.
It shows that DeFi’s largest protocols are still experimenting with how to align users, liquidity providers, developers, and tokenholders.
For Uniswap, the Optimism proposal could become a small but meaningful test of whether deployment-level fee routing can support UNI economics without disrupting the protocol’s broader market position.
This article is based on the Uniswap governance proposal for Optimism pool fee routing.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
This report is based on information released in disclosures at primary source documentation.
The attack did not appear to stem from a direct breach of Ostium’s smart contract code. Instead, the validated source material points to manipulation of price feed reports through a compromised oracle private key. That distinction matters because it shows the risk was not only in on-chain contracts, but in the off-chain infrastructure feeding data into the system.
Perpetuals exchanges depend on accurate prices. If the price feed can be manipulated, the entire trading venue becomes exposed.
Ostium’s response was to halt trading while investigating the incident.
Perpetuals markets need reliable prices.
A trader’s collateral, liquidation level, profit and loss, funding exposure, and settlement value all depend on price data. If that data is wrong, the market can be exploited even if the core trading contracts behave exactly as designed.
That is why oracle infrastructure is one of DeFi’s most sensitive layers.
It sits between real-world or market data and on-chain execution. A protocol may have audited contracts, but if the data feeding those contracts can be manipulated, the system is still vulnerable.
In Ostium’s case, the issue appears to involve a compromised off-chain oracle key. That means the attacker was able to interfere with the trusted reporting path rather than simply finding a normal contract bug.
That kind of failure can be harder for users to understand because the problem is not always visible in the same way as a contract exploit.
The blockchain may record the transactions, but the weak point may be the infrastructure behind the data.
The distinction between smart contract risk and oracle risk matters.
Crypto users often ask whether a protocol’s contracts are audited. That is important, but not sufficient. A trading protocol also depends on pricing systems, administrative keys, keeper networks, bridges, liquidation bots, front ends, and operational security.
Any one of those layers can become a weak point.
If an oracle private key is compromised, attackers may not need to break the smart contract. They can feed the contract bad information and profit from how the system reacts.
That is why DeFi security has to be broader than code review.
Protocols need key management, monitoring, alert systems, circuit breakers, fallback feeds, and clear emergency procedures. The faster a venue can detect abnormal prices and pause dangerous operations, the more damage it may prevent.
Ostium’s trading halt shows that emergency controls are still essential.
Arbitrum remains one of the most active Ethereum layer-2 ecosystems for DeFi.
That activity brings liquidity, traders, and innovation, but it also attracts attackers. Perpetuals venues are especially attractive because they concentrate collateral and rely on real-time pricing.
An $18.4 million exploit is large enough to matter for the ecosystem, even if it does not threaten Arbitrum itself.
The incident should not be framed as an Arbitrum network failure. The issue is specific to Ostium’s oracle infrastructure. But for users, every exploit adds to the broader question of how safe layer-2 DeFi venues are in practice.
That question matters as more capital moves to faster and cheaper networks.
Layer-2 scaling lowers transaction costs, but it does not remove application-level risk. Users still need to evaluate each protocol’s design, security model, and operational controls.
The immediate priority is investigation, containment, and user communication.
Ostium needs to explain what happened, which systems were affected, whether user balances are recoverable, how trading will restart, and what controls will change before reopening.
For traders, the most important question is whether the oracle system has been rebuilt or secured enough to prevent a repeat.
A trading venue can survive an exploit if the response is transparent and the fix is credible. It becomes much harder if users are left unclear about where the failure occurred or whether the same path remains exposed.
The broader market should also pay attention.
Oracle key risk is not unique to one exchange. Any protocol relying on off-chain signing, price feeds, or privileged reporting paths needs to think carefully about compromise scenarios.
The lesson is straightforward: DeFi systems are only as strong as the weakest trusted component.
Ostium’s contracts may not have been directly breached, but the market still suffered a major exploit. That is why oracle security remains one of the most important issues in on-chain trading.
This article is based on Ostium’s public statement and Arbiscan transaction data.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
This report is based on information released in official primary source disclosures at primary source documentation.
Bitcoin Magazine
Galaxy (GLXY) Commits $5 Million to Prepare Bitcoin for the Quantum Threat
Galaxy Digital launched a Bitcoin Quantum Readiness Initiative today, a program that commits up to $5 million in developer grants, a research effort, and a new advisory council to harden the network against the arrival of powerful quantum computers.
The Nasdaq-listed firm framed the multi-pillar effort as an attempt to close a gap between two worlds moving at different speeds.
“There’s a gap between the quantum computing world, which is moving fast, and the Bitcoin development world, which is just beginning to engage with post-quantum cryptography in earnest,” said Alex Thorn, head of firmwide research at Galaxy, whose team has tracked the threat for Wall Street and cast it as a long-term engineering problem rather than a crisis.
Bitcoin’s security rests on elliptic curve cryptography, a scheme that a machine running Shor’s algorithm could break by deriving a private key from an exposed public key.
An attacker with such a tool could forge a signature and drain a wallet, with nothing on-chain to flag the theft. No such computer exists today, yet the estimated timeline for one keeps compressing, a trend the Bitcoin Policy Institute has warned narrows the window for the network to upgrade.
The grant program forms the first pillar. Galaxy said it would fund work on quantum-resistant transaction proposals, the integration of post-quantum signature schemes, tooling for wallet and custodian migration, and formal security audits of proposed code.
Grants will be judged one at a time and paid on a milestone basis, and the firm expects to open applications without delay through the address quantum@galaxy.com.
A research and publishing arm forms the second pillar, with Galaxy Research set to publish analysis of the threat and the developer response for investors, policymakers, and the technical community.
The third pillar is a Quantum Advisory Council that will guide the research and weigh grant proposals. Its first members are Barry Sanders, professor and scientific director of Quantum City at the University of Calgary; Damien Bérubé, an MIT Sea Grant Knauss Fellow; and Eran Tromer, a professor of computer science at Boston University.
“As leaders in the digital assets space, we believe it’s important that we help be part of the solution to any potential threat quantum computing poses to Bitcoin,” said Mike Novogratz, founder and CEO of Galaxy, a figure known for bold price calls on bitcoin. Sanders said quantum timelines “continue to compress” and that bitcoin should be no exception to the preparation underway across governments and industries.
Old and reused addresses face the sharpest risk, since their public keys sit exposed on the ledger. An estimated 1.7 million BTC rest in legacy pay-to-public-key addresses, a stash with keys on permanent display.
Defenses under review center on migration to quantum-resistant address types and new signature schemes, an approach embodied in BIP-360, a proposal from developer Hunter Beast that removes public-key exposure from standard transactions.
That proposal merged into the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal repository this year, and BTQ Technologies deployed a working implementation on a quantum testnet.
Bitcoin’s decentralized governance turns such changes into a slow process of design, review, testing, and deployment that can span years. Some observers cast that structure as the true obstacle, a governance challenge as much as a cryptographic one, and the pool of developers on the problem stays small next to its scale.
The launch lands in an active warning cycle. Galaxy Research has held that the risk is real yet the countermeasures are advancing, and President Trump signed executive orders that advance U.S. quantum work and set a 2031 federal deadline for post-quantum defense. NIST finalized its first post-quantum standards in 2024.
Galaxy said it welcomes co-funders and other stakeholders, and acknowledged that peers may pledge their own funds toward the same goal. The firm cast that prospect as a benefit rather than a rivalry, with an open invitation to institutions and developers who want to join.
This post Galaxy (GLXY) Commits $5 Million to Prepare Bitcoin for the Quantum Threat first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.
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