TL;DR: Switzerland’s FINMA has authorized a Bitcoin ETF structured as a Swiss-law public investment fund; the approval differs from older exchange-traded crypto products already sold in Europe.
Switzerland has taken a significant step in how Bitcoin exposure can be packaged for ordinary investors. Financial regulator FINMA says it has approved the country's first publicly offered exchange-traded fund that invests directly in Bitcoin under Swiss investment-fund law.
The approval, disclosed October 20, concerns a Swiss-law collective investment vehicle categorized as an alternative investment fund carrying particular risks. It is not the first time Europeans have been able to buy a Bitcoin-linked exchange-traded product. The regulatory difference is the underlying fund structure and the protections attached to it.
Europe has hosted Bitcoin exchange-traded notes and other cryptocurrency securities for years. Some are debt instruments issued by a company, so the investor's legal claim differs from owning units in a regulated collective investment fund whose assets are held under a particular custody structure.
FINMA's announcement emphasizes safeguards around custody, operational risks and investor disclosures. The regulator says the asset manager and supervised institutions must take measures to reduce risks inherent in holding Bitcoin, alongside clear explanations of the fund's exposure.
The regulator has also allowed an exception to certain risk-diversification requirements, recognizing Bitcoin's long trading history and comparatively substantial liquidity among crypto assets. An exception is not a judgment that Bitcoin prices are stable; FINMA expressly warns that market risk remains very high.
Approval permits the product to move toward market launch, but investors should check a particular fund's prospectus, trading venue, fees, redemption structure and custody arrangements before assuming it is equivalent to another Bitcoin vehicle.
For Swiss brokers and advisers, a locally authorized fund may fit more naturally into existing compliance and suitability processes than a foreign debt instrument. For asset managers, it opens a regulatory template that others can study when designing competing products.
The regulatory press release does not assert that buying the fund eliminates wallet or counterparty risk. Investors still face Bitcoin's price volatility, while intermediaries must manage the separate risks of fund administration, settlement and custody.
It is also worth resisting exaggerated claims about being 'Europe's first Bitcoin ETF' without qualification. FINMA's milestone is the first fund of this specified Swiss-law type, not the invention of European listed cryptocurrency exposure.
The long-term significance will depend on whether this new structure attracts meaningful assets, how closely it tracks Bitcoin and whether the prospectus protections translate into better outcomes during turbulent markets.
Source: www.finma.ch original announcement or data.
Related Reading: Bitcoin; crypto custody; crypto exchanges.
Written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
Personalized mRNA vaccines against melanoma—the deadliest form of skin cancer—reduced the risk of death or recurrence by 42 percent compared to standard treatment in a late-stage trial, pharmaceutical partners Merck and Moderna announced Thursday.
The results are a significant advance in melanoma treatment; Merck and Moderna are already engaging with regulatory authorities to get the vaccine approved. More broadly, the vaccine's success bolsters hope that mRNA vaccines and individualized cancer-targeting medicines offer a new paradigm for cancer therapies.
"From the beginning, we believed mRNA technology could make it possible to develop cancer treatments uniquely matched to each patient’s tumor," Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said in a statement. The trial results "mark a defining moment for that vision and show what’s possible when we rethink how medicines are made." They also "reinforce our conviction that mRNA has the potential to fundamentally change how we treat cancer," he said.
© Getty | Nikolas Kokovlis
Loomerang made its first sale less than 12 hours after it went live in June. A customer in Houston bought a shirt designed by Joe, an independent artist in Japan.
Four months later, the Seattle-based marketplace for artist-designed T-shirts has 40 artists from 15 countries and recently expanded to India.
Loomerang works by handling everything but the art. Artists open storefronts for free, set their own prices, and get 60% of what’s left after manufacturing costs. The company prints, inspects and ships every order, for now out of co-founder Matt Koyama’s garage.
Koyama described Loomerang as an attempt to run a more responsible business in a capitalist system, one built around people who spend their lives working on a craft.
“How can we reward them for that rather than making them feel like they’re being pushed to the margins constantly?” he said.
Loomerang was started in early 2024 by CEO Vijay Roy, a nearly 11-year Amazon veteran. He and Koyama had worked together on Amazon’s print-on-demand book business. Koyama joined as a co-founder a few months later and went full time this spring after leaving Xbox. A third co-founder, Arka Majumdar, leads design.
The company is bootstrapped. Its 14-person team is spread across Seattle, Minnesota and Kolkata, India, and the founders aren’t taking salaries.
Koyama, who also spent time in gaming, sees the same pattern across creative industries.
“The best stuff comes out of the indie space because these are the people that are willing to take risks, to invent, to revolutionize,” he said.
We caught up with Loomerang for this edition of GeekWire’s Startup Spotlight.
In 50 words or less, give us your startup’s elevator pitch?
Talent is everywhere. Opportunity isn’t. Loomerang connects people with the artists and stories behind their clothes: a tattoo artist in Seattle, a painter in Pune, India, an illustrator in Ibaraki, Japan. Artists launch apparel brands for free and keep most of the profit. We print, inspect and ship every shirt.
What problem are you obsessed with solving?
Starting an apparel brand is expensive. You need inventory, a manufacturer, a storefront and a way to reach customers. Most talented artists can’t take that risk. The ones who license their work to big brands usually get a small cut. We want to flip that by removing the upfront cost, handling production with real care, and making sure the artist keeps most of the profit.
What surprised you after talking to customers?
Almost nobody knew who designed their clothes. The exceptions were luxury pieces from designers who were already famous, or a shirt someone bought directly from an artist at a market or art fair. Those people could tell us the artist’s name and why the piece mattered to them. We’re trying to give every Loomerang purchase that same feeling.
How has AI changed the way you build your company?
We’re very intentional when using AI, because it’s a threatening presence for many of the artists we work with. We don’t use it to make art. We use it behind the scenes in our code and operations, and in tools that help artists with practical work like upscaling files. Keeping our overhead low means more of each sale goes to the artist.
What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup?
People think it’s too good to be true. Artists pay nothing to join and keep 60% of the net profit on every sale. The first question is usually, what’s the catch? There isn’t one. The fashion industry has trained artists to expect a small cut of what their work earns. We think that’s backwards.
What’s the toughest decision you’ve made in the past year?
Holding off on new products. We planned to add hoodies and crewnecks before the holidays, but we decided to prioritize our artist roster and our quality promise. We’d rather ship fewer things we can stand behind than have a wide product range we aren’t fully ramped up on.
What’s the one piece of advice you give to other entrepreneurs?
Build something that creates value for people instead of taking it from them. It’s slower and harder, but those are the kinds of companies we need in today’s world. Technology keeps making it easier to cut people out. The best businesses will find ways to bring more of them in and lift them up.
We’ll know our company has made it when…
An independent artist’s first thought for launching a brand is Loomerang, not a big platform that pays them a fraction of what their work is worth. When artists in Seattle, Pune and everywhere else make a real living through us. And when “who made this?” becomes a normal thing to ask about your clothes.
TL;DR: DefiLlama’s chain-revenue figures put Tron at roughly $23.4 million over 30 days, ahead of Ethereum and Solana combined on that specific measure.
A look at blockchain fee revenue offers a different picture of the market from token prices and headline transaction counts. In DefiLlama’s latest 30-day chain figures, Tron recorded approximately $23.4 million, compared with around $6.3 million for Ethereum and $3.4 million for Solana in the same category.
That is a substantial gap, but the category needs explaining. The dashboard’s figures reflect its defined chain-revenue methodology, including TRX fees burned on Tron. They are not a comprehensive comparison of every dollar earned by applications, validators or infrastructure providers across the three ecosystems.
Tron’s position is closely tied to stablecoin usage, particularly USDT. The network has become an important route for moving dollar-denominated tokens, especially in markets where transfer costs and familiarity matter more than the latest DeFi application.
Revenue can tell us something about how much economic activity a network captures, though it does not measure decentralisation, developer adoption or the long-term value of a token. Fee policy also differs considerably between chains.
That’s why the comparison is worth watching rather than turning into a sweeping conclusion about which blockchain has won. A network can generate more revenue in one category while its rivals lead on liquidity, application activity or other measures.
As with all live dashboards, the figures will continue moving after publication.
Written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
TL;DR: DefiLlama’s chain-revenue figures put Tron at roughly $23.4 million over 30 days, ahead of Ethereum and Solana combined on that specific measure.
A look at blockchain fee revenue offers a different picture of the market from token prices and headline transaction counts. In DefiLlama’s latest 30-day chain figures, Tron recorded approximately $23.4 million, compared with around $6.3 million for Ethereum and $3.4 million for Solana in the same category.
That is a substantial gap, but the category needs explaining. The dashboard’s figures reflect its defined chain-revenue methodology, including TRX fees burned on Tron. They are not a comprehensive comparison of every dollar earned by applications, validators or infrastructure providers across the three ecosystems.
Tron’s position is closely tied to stablecoin usage, particularly USDT. The network has become an important route for moving dollar-denominated tokens, especially in markets where transfer costs and familiarity matter more than the latest DeFi application.
Revenue can tell us something about how much economic activity a network captures, though it does not measure decentralisation, developer adoption or the long-term value of a token. Fee policy also differs considerably between chains.
That’s why the comparison is worth watching rather than turning into a sweeping conclusion about which blockchain has won. A network can generate more revenue in one category while its rivals lead on liquidity, application activity or other measures.
As with all live dashboards, the figures will continue moving after publication.
Written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
Bitcoin Magazine
The Architecture of Money: Mapping Financial Power in the Age of Bitcoin
Money determines where we live, what we can afford, and how wealth accumulates across generations. Yet the mechanisms that create and distribute it remain largely occluded, even as their consequences become harder to unsee. For Dutch artist Carlijn Kingma, investigative financial journalist Thomas Bollen, and monetary researcher Martijn Jeroen van der Linden, that disconnect became the impetus for The Waterworks of Money. This ambitious project maps the hidden architecture of the financial system through drawing and animation, rendering it understandable to the people living within it without flattening its complexity.
The Waterworks of Money depicts the financial system as a vast network of reservoirs, channels, and pumps, revealing how money moves through banks, governments, businesses, and households. Some areas receive an abundance of liquidity, while others remain perpetually dry. The resulting drawing operates simultaneously as an artwork, an educational tool, and an examination of financial power.
The project emerged from two years of research, including interviews with more than 100 experts across banking, government, academia, and monetary reform movements. Kingma spent more than 2,200 hours translating that research into an intricate architectural landscape. Bollen, whose investigative journalism examines the workings of the financial system, and van der Linden, whose academic research explores money and monetary reform, helped develop the economic research and narratives behind the work.
One of the project’s scenarios explores a monetary future shaped by bitcoin. As bitcoin enters traditional finance, an alternative monetary system either challenges existing structures of financial power or eventually becomes part of them, and the project’s collaborators have watched both happen.
Ahead of Bitcoin Amsterdam, November 5-6, where Bollen joins two panels, I sat down with all three of the project’s collaborators to discuss making money visible, the relationship between monetary systems and inequality, and bitcoin’s place in Europe’s financial future.
BMAG: The Waterworks of Money illustrates the financial system as a network of reservoirs, pumps, and channels, with some parts of society receiving abundant liquidity while others remain dry. After two years of research and interviews with financial experts, what surprised you most about how money actually works? What do you think the public most fundamentally misunderstands about it?
Thomas Bollen: What surprised me most is that many people inside the system know a great deal about their own corner of it: interest rate derivatives, asset management or mortgage lending. Very few of them can oversee the larger system in which they operate.
What is clearly not well understood is that banks create new money when they make a loan. They are not just intermediaries that pass on the savings of their depositors.
But can you blame ordinary people for that? During the research phase we spoke to many bankers and even a CEO of a major bank who did not know they were working for a money creating institution.
If we want to improve understanding we should start at our schools and universities. Many textbooks still get it wrong, and economics education hardly pays any attention to it. In 2022 even the Riksbank’s prize in economics (the Nobel prize that is not really a Nobel prize) was awarded for research that presents banks as mere intermediaries.
BMAG: One of the central ideas in The Waterworks of Money is that money doesn’t flow evenly through society. Housing affordability has become a major issue in Europe and the United States, while asset prices and financial wealth have increasingly outpaced wages. How much of this inequality results from the design of our monetary system, rather than broader economic forces?
Thomas Bollen: It is impossible to capture that in a precise number, because so many factors play a role. But it is quite clear that the money system exacerbated inequality enormously during all those years when credit was extremely cheap.
Ray Dalio, founder of the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, summed it up in 2019: “Money is free for those who are creditworthy.” For everyone without money or creditworthiness, it was out of reach.
Cheap credit for rich people and large multinationals (who used it for share buybacks and M&A deals) drove up the price of shares, and of houses. Bank money creation produced a specific kind of inflation: asset inflation. Wealthy households and large multinationals, who already owned those assets, profited far more from it than people without them or small businesses that did not have the same kind of access to cheap credit as their larger competitors.
BMAG: The Waterworks of Money is filled with details that help explain how the financial system works. What was the most difficult part of the monetary system to illustrate? Did anything you learned during the research change how you approached the drawing?
Carlijn Kingma: The biggest challenge was the way all the parts are connected. How do you show that clearly?
Water is the obvious metaphor for money, and it takes you a long way. Liquidity, cash flows, money drying up: they are already in the language of finance. It was also great for connecting the different parts of the system, because I could draw the pipes and canals that run between them.
But in some places you need more than that if you want to be completely accurate. Money comes in many forms: commodity money, public money, private credit money, and further out short-term debt and repo contracts can also serve as money or near-money. It was not possible to draw that many different kinds of water running through the system.
BMAG: The Waterworks of Money has been shown to both art audiences and people interested in economics, including at Bitcoin Amsterdam last year. Have you noticed differences in how these audiences respond to the work? Has their feedback influenced how you think about the role of art in explaining complex ideas?
Carlijn Kingma: The response depends on what people already know. Visitors with more financial knowledge usually laugh more, because they catch all the small jokes. We renamed Basel III to “Babel III”, for instance, because the bank rules written after the crisis add up to about three bibles.
In our bitcoin future scenario, The Republic of a Thousand Coins, we put in a lot of jokes about central bankers. You can see Alan Greenspan there as an inflatable doll. That works best if you know who he is, and the bitcoin crowd knows far more about monetary history than the general public.
Above all, we noticed that art opens doors. The drawing gives people a visual starting point for a conversation. Even without any prior knowledge, the metaphor lets you see the social outcomes of how money flows.
BMAG: Your research has examined how financial crises can reinforce the influence of institutions considered too important to fail. More recently, you’ve explored the growing power of asset managers such as BlackRock and Vanguard. Are we witnessing a genuine transformation in how financial power operates, or have the same underlying problems simply taken new forms since 2008?
Martijn Jeroen van der Linden: Following the crisis of 2008, there was a general consensus among mainstream policymakers, think tanks and many economists that the banking sector needed to be repaired. In Europe, the influential de Larosière Group concluded that the causes of the crisis were excessive leverage, opaque securitisation, shadow banking risks, and fragmented supervision in the EU, and argued that “repair is necessary and urgent.” The banking repair consisted of new and stricter regulations, stronger coordinated supervision and new crisis management procedures. The underlying architecture remained unaltered, meaning that fundamental change never occurred.
But the architecture remained fragile. Take, for example, 2023. When Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse got into trouble, the crisis playbooks developed after 2008 stayed in the drawer. The US authorities guaranteed all SVB deposits, including the more than 90 percent above the insured limit. In Switzerland, the state backed the rescue of Credit Suisse by UBS.
Advocates of banking repair often claim to have made the system safer. But the inherent fragility of funding long-term loans with runnable bank deposits is still there. Even with all the regulation, you cannot prevent a bank run, and that fragility is precisely what they refuse to solve. The banking system only survives because of massive public safety nets and privileges given to banks.
Large powerful non-banks have indeed emerged but they do not play a pivotal role in money and payments. This is a key distinction between the two sectors.
BMAG: Bitcoin began as an attempt to create money outside the control of governments and banks. Today, it’s increasingly held through investment funds and traditional financial institutions, including some of the same powerful asset managers examined in your recent work. Does this integration strengthen bitcoin’s ability to change the financial system, or risk reproducing the concentration of power it originally sought to challenge?
Martijn Jeroen van der Linden: As a financial asset, bitcoin has benefited from investments from traditional financial institutions. But the increasing use of bitcoin as an investment has compromised its promise of an alternative payment system.
At the same time, bitcoin and the rise of stablecoins have challenged the banks on their payment infrastructure. The banks are now innovating too: look at Wero, the payment wallet that a group of European banks launched in 2024. That is a change. But it is something different from the structural reform of money and banking.
BMAG: Your project imagines bitcoin as an alternative to the existing monetary system. Amsterdam also has a remarkable history of monetary experimentation, from the development of modern financial institutions to David Chaum’s pioneering work on private digital cash decades before bitcoin. Given that history, how do you see bitcoin’s role in Europe’s financial future? Has your perspective changed since you began working on the project?
Thomas Bollen: What I appreciate about bitcoin’s design is that it resembles full reserve banking. A bitcoin is not a claim on something else, so it carries no risk of a bank run. Bank deposits are: they are a promise that you can withdraw your money at any moment, while the bank can never keep that promise to all its customers at once.
We can learn a lot from our history. The Amsterdamsche Wisselbank, founded in 1609 and often seen as the world’s first central bank, started out as a full reserve bank: every bank guilder was backed by coins in its vault. It went under only after it secretly began lending more and more to the Dutch East India Company.
That is the risk of every monetary experiment: it can go in the wrong direction. In the crypto world, all kinds of companies started copying the banks. They lent out their customers’ bitcoins, while those customers still saw their coin-balances in their accounts. Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX shows how this practice can go horribly wrong.
Thomas Bollen will participate in two panel discussions at Bitcoin Amsterdam on November 6, 2026, on the Treasury Stage. Europe’s Monetary History & Future: Austrian Economics, Banks & Bitcoin (11:00–11:30 AM), alongside Rahim Taghizadegan and Willem Middelkoop, and Staat vs. de Markt: Hoeveel Overheid Hebben We Nodig in Geld? (1:55–2:25 PM), alongside Paul Buitink and Simon Lelieveldt.
Watch the full two-part animated exploration of The Waterworks of Money on YouTube and support the project by purchasing a signed, limited-edition print by Carlijn Kingma or making a donation toward its continued research at waterworksofmoney.com/buy.
The Bitcoin Museum & Art Gallery (BMAG) organizes international exhibitions, auctions, and artist collaborations exploring bitcoin and its cultural implications. Learn more at museum.b.tc.
Join us at Bitcoin Amsterdam, November 5–6, 2026. Get your tickets here and use code BA26-BMAG20 for discounted admission.
This post The Architecture of Money: Mapping Financial Power in the Age of Bitcoin first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Dennis Koch.
Crackdown on North Korean Remote IT Fraud Network On October 13, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice announced coordinated enforcement actions targeting North Korean remote IT worker schemes that generated...
The post Federal Agents Shut Down Fake Remote Tech Worker Network appeared first on Cyber Defense Magazine.
We know [The Action Lab] always has something hands-on. This time, the video shows a toroidal plasma demo and how it relates to nuclear fusion. Plasma has a high temperature, and if you use physical electrodes to excite the plasma, this high temperature tends to destroy the electrodes. But thanks to the relationship between electricity and magnetism, you can create plasma with an alternating magnetic field instead of physical electrodes.
The actual practical device is a 10 MHz source with a coil and a low-pressure globe full of xenon gas. It looks pretty cool. Of course, the little tabletop demo isn’t strong enough to drive a fusion reaction. But if you scale it up and make some modifications, including using hydrogen, you get a tokamak reactor.
The problem, of course, is that current reactors need more energy to operate than they produce. But we keep hearing that nuclear fusion is right around the corner. One day, that’ll probably be true.
Of course, you can build your own fusion device. Just don’t expect to generate net power.
© The Associated Press
Bitcoin Magazine
The Undercurrent: Three European Artists on Making Money Visible
Amsterdam helped lay the foundations of modern finance, but its artists were among its earliest critics. When speculative bubbles burst across Europe in 1720, Amsterdam printers and satirists responded with The Great Mirror of Folly, a collection of engravings and plays exposing the excesses of financial speculation.
Nearly three centuries later, the city hosted another monetary experiment. David Chaum, the cryptographer whose work on anonymous communication helped lay the groundwork for the cypherpunk movement, came to Amsterdam in the 1980s to work at CWI, the Dutch national research institute for mathematics and computer science. Around 1990, he founded DigiCash to develop private electronic cash. The company went bankrupt in 1998, a decade before bitcoin, but the dream of digital money was already taking shape.
Last year at Bitcoin Amsterdam, BMAG exhibited The Waterworks of Money, in which Dutch artist Carlijn Kingma, working with financial journalist Thomas Bollen and researcher Martijn Jeroen van der Linden, depicted the monetary system as a vast irrigation network, with some areas flooded by liquidity while others remain dry. The drawing makes a complex financial system legible, exposing the mechanisms through which money is created, distributed, and concentrated.
This tradition of questioning money and making its hidden dimensions visible continues in the work of three European artists exhibiting at Bitcoin Amsterdam this November. ZETRA, RYR, and Cypherpunk Now draw from graffiti, political printmaking, hacker culture, and early bitcoin communities to explore the changing meaning of money.
Martin Fischer joined the Prague art collective Ztohoven in 2003, a group known for inserting a fictional nuclear explosion into a live Czech Television broadcast. In 2014, the collective opened Paralelní Polis, a hackerspace whose café accepted only bitcoin, and Fischer designed its logo. As he told Bitcoin Magazine’s Aaron van Wirdum in 2020, the arrival of a screen-printing press the following year prompted him to produce his first prints. Since 2020, he has worked under the name Cypherpunk Now, developing a visual record of bitcoin’s evolving culture.
RYR and ZETRA both emerged from Germany’s graffiti scene but approach money from different directions. RYR uses currency itself as material, making paper from shredded banknotes, pigment from their ashes, and concrete grenades filled with shredded cash that he calls “artifacts from the future.” ZETRA, who began painting in the early 1990s and discovered bitcoin in 2017, examines what money can buy. His TOMATOSOUP paintings revisit Andy Warhol’s iconic Campbell’s Soup Cans to chart changing prices in dollars and bitcoin, while THE BIP39 SERIES explores the 2,048 words used in bitcoin wallet recovery phrases, including 1206/NOTE, a collaboration with Polymerbit.
Bitcoin has shaped these artists’ practices, their livelihoods, and the communities around them. Its growing acceptance by banks, investment funds, and corporations has also prompted some difficult questions about the movement’s original ideals and where its culture is heading.
BMAG: Andy Warhol turned Campbell’s soup into an icon of consumer culture, taking an ordinary commodity and elevating it into fine art. Your TOMATOSOUP series returns to that image but introduces something Warhol largely left outside the frame: the changing value of money itself. How did the idea of reworking Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans first come about, and do viewers immediately recognize the commentary on inflation?
ZETRA: We frequently see iPhones and houses in our bitcoin Twitter timelines, showing how they become cheaper in BTC terms. I thought it would be fun to take something from art history instead, something more visually appealing, like Warhol’s iconic Campbell’s Soup Can.
For my TOMATOSOUP painting, I used real stickers placed on the can to show how the price of soup has increased in USD over the past decades, compared with the lower prices we might expect in BTC terms in the decades to come.
Bitcoiners looking at TOMATOSOUP generally understand it immediately. They know they’re in a better position as the purchasing power of fiat money continues to decline through inflation. Other viewers usually need a bit of explanation, and I’m always happy to help them understand.
BMAG: In THE BIP39 SERIES, you draw from the 2,048 words used to generate bitcoin wallet recovery phrases, turning ordinary words into artworks with a deeper significance for bitcoin holders. Can you unpack the different layers of inspiration behind the series and what they reveal about bitcoin, language, and the ownership of money for someone unfamiliar with these concepts?
ZETRA: Everyone who moves their precious sats into cold storage encounters 12 or 24 of these significant words, often early in their journey as a bitcoin newcomer. As mentioned, there are 2,048 words in a carefully curated list representing the power of self-custody.
I started going through the words one by one, imagining how each could be visualized in a physical form: the key visual for the word, its corresponding number, the style, and the medium I would choose. There are millions of possibilities for bringing these words to life through bitcoin art.
1044/LIST was the obvious choice to kick off THE BIP39 SERIES. Naturally, it features all 2,048 words presented as a list. As an ’80s kid, I had to choose 1638/SMILE as the second piece: a proper yellow smiley face, with the number 1638 in place of the eyes. It’s a fine art print on Alu-Dibond beneath a 6 mm acrylic glass cover. So clean.
Another work in the series is 0388/CORN, an obvious homage to Warhol once again. THE BIP39 SERIES will be an ongoing project for many years to come.
BMAG: You shred banknotes into paper and burn them to produce pigment. Artists have long manipulated currency to question where its value resides, but your work goes a step further by making destruction part of the creative process. Is there a contradiction in destroying money to create an artwork that may ultimately be worth much more?
RYR: Money is essentially a narrative system built on collective belief and obedience. It has worked for hundreds of years because we collectively agree on the story it tells and the value it represents. I’ve always been fascinated by that idea, particularly how something as ordinary as a banknote can carry so much meaning, authority, and perceived value.
I was looking for a different way to tell that story, both conceptually and physically. Back in 2017, I had an exhibition title in mind: To Cut a Long Story Short. I liked the cheekiness of it, especially in relation to money and the stories we attach to it. Shredding banknotes became a very literal interpretation of that title, but it also opened up an entirely new artistic medium for me.
Ultimately, I’m not simply destroying money. I’m taking an existing story, cutting it into pieces, and using those pieces to tell a new one.
BMAG: Your concrete weapons are presented as relics from a future in which the fiat wars have already ended. Yet bitcoin is increasingly held through the very financial institutions it was designed to circumvent. Is that a victory for the movement, or have the institutions simply absorbed the alternative?
RYR: I think that’s precisely what makes the story so interesting. When I created the concrete weapons, I imagined a future in which the traditional financial system had already fought its battle for survival. The weapons had become fossils, archaeological artifacts from a monetary conflict that future generations might struggle to understand.
My concrete weapons represent a future in which that battle is already history. Whether bitcoin ultimately wins or becomes part of the very system it challenged remains to be seen.
BMAG: Much of your work is made from the physical remains of money, at a time when currency is becoming increasingly digital and invisible. Do you think people are losing something in their understanding of money as it disappears from everyday physical experience?
RYR: I think we’re losing a physical connection to money, but not necessarily our understanding of it. Money has always been a narrative built on collective trust, whether printed on paper or represented by numbers on a screen. What fascinates me is how something as abstract as value can be represented by a physical object.
I don’t necessarily believe that art has to be authentic or entirely original. Almost everything has been done before. To me, art is a wonderfully human, almost plebeian way of expressing an opinion and giving ideas a physical voice.
Bitcoin will likely evolve into a much broader and increasingly regulated financial asset, but I hope its grassroots culture and artistic identity remain visible. That’s something my fellow artists and I will continue to contribute to, preserving the spirit of a movement that was cultural long before it became institutional.
BMAG: Paralelní Polis wasn’t just a place to discuss alternative monetary systems or a hacker meetup; its café was one of the first to adopt bitcoin as money. What were the early years of Paralelní Polis like, and what has your own experience been selling artwork for bitcoin?
Martin Fischer: Paralelní Polis was founded in 2014, during a bear market. The funny thing is, none of us who founded it even knew what a bear market was. We didn’t think of bitcoin as something that could make us rich. We saw it as uncensorable money and understood the changes it could bring to society. There was no speculation involved, and that’s what made those early days so great.
I sold my first screenprint for bitcoin in 2017, almost ten years ago, and many more since then. But practically every sale was a matter of survival. I spent most of the bitcoin I earned financing my next projects and continuing to make art.
I never managed to accumulate much bitcoin, but looking back, it gave me something far more valuable than investment returns: the freedom to remain an independent artist.
BMAG: Political printmaking has a long history in Europe, from Amsterdam’s financial satires of 1720 to twentieth-century protest posters. Your work emerged from Ztohoven, a collective that famously hacked a live television broadcast to show a fictional nuclear explosion—an audacious intervention, even by today’s standards. Ztohoven challenged institutions through disruption, while bitcoin uses game theory and economic incentives to create an alternative. Do you see bitcoin as a continuation of that same spirit of intervention, and your prints as an extension of it?
Martin Fischer: I think there’s a connection, but I wouldn’t say it’s exactly the same thing. With Ztohoven, we used art to question authority, challenge institutions, and expose how easily reality can be manipulated. Bitcoin doesn’t need to make a statement or provoke anyone. It simply offers an alternative that works without asking anyone for permission. That’s a much more interesting form of disruption to me.
But today, bitcoin has become so corporate and so intertwined with traditional banking that it’s hard to still see it as an anti-establishment movement. I don’t see this as a betrayal of its original ideals, but rather as a natural consequence of its success. That doesn’t mean I like where things are going.
What’s strange is that bitcoin’s fundamental principles haven’t really changed, but the way people perceive and use it certainly has.
And my screenprints? I still work with the original idea of separating money from the state while exploring the myths, memes, and legends of the bitcoin age. That’s what I enjoy most.
BMAG: Your Amsterdam presentation brings together more than a decade of work documenting bitcoin’s evolution from an underground movement to an increasingly institutionalized financial system. Looking across those prints today, has the movement changed more than you expected, or has your own perspective changed? Which of your prints are your favorites?
Martin Fischer: I like remembering the old days, when we were all part of the same tribe and our main enemy was Faketoshi.
Today? We have culture wars over JPEGs, Ordinals, BIPs, OP_RETURN, over what’s spam and what should or shouldn’t belong on bitcoin. What makes me saddest is that people who once fought together against censorship and for freedom now spend enormous amounts of energy fighting each other over what others should or shouldn’t be allowed to do with bitcoin.
Maybe it’s a natural consequence of bitcoin’s success. The bitcoin community has changed enormously, and so has my perspective on it. I’m definitely much more skeptical today of the idea that technology alone can automatically change society for the better.
As for my favorite works, Bitcoin Meteorite is definitely one of them. In this piece, I reworked the meme of banking dinosaurs watching their own extinction, incorporating the abstract from the Bitcoin white paper. It gave me my fifteen minutes of fame when Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert brought it into the spotlight.
Then there’s Cypherpunks of the World. This project is important to me not only as a celebration of the cypherpunks and their legacy, but also because of its complexity. It started as a series of original collages, continued through handmade screenprints, and eventually evolved into animated NFTs and a virtual gallery. It’s one of my most elaborate projects, connecting different techniques and media while staying true to the original idea.
Among my more recent works, I really like Out of Order from 2023. It’s an incredibly detailed screenprint, and the first one where I finally managed to make absolutely no printing mistakes. That alone makes it special to me.
I also love St. Satosius Contra Draconem (2025), which is inspired by the classic depiction of Saint George fighting the dragon, reimagined through bitcoin mythology.
Works by ZETRA, RYR, and Cypherpunk Now, alongside other European artists, will be presented at Bitcoin Amsterdam, November 4–6, 2026, as part of the Bitcoin Museum & Art Gallery (BMAG) programming. Additional artworks and editions will be available through https://shop.museum.b.tc.
Explore more work by the featured artists at ZETRA, RYR, Cypherpunk Now, and www.martin-fischer.cz.
The Bitcoin Museum & Art Gallery (BMAG) organizes international exhibitions, auctions, and artist collaborations exploring bitcoin and its cultural implications. Learn more at museum.b.tc.
Join us at Bitcoin Amsterdam, Get your tickets here and use code BA26-BMAG20 for discounted admission.
This post The Undercurrent: Three European Artists on Making Money Visible first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Dennis Koch.
Investigators stormed 40 locations in Texas and seized 187 laptops used by North Korean IT workers to hide their location.
The post US Arrests Two in Crackdown on North Korean IT Worker Laptop Farms appeared first on SecurityWeek.
Xbox is creating a new team to experiment with technologies that are changing how games are made, ported and played — including some that run counter to how the game industry and its business have traditionally worked.
Microsoft Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced Xbox Labs on Tuesday in a memo to employees, describing it as “a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience.”
The group will be led by Scott Van Vliet, Xbox’s chief technology officer since May. Sharma said the team will build in the open and measure success “by whether more people are playing and creating.”
Sharma pointed to recent examples of games being decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never designed for, as well as Windows PC games translated to run on Apple Silicon or inside a web browser. She called these “unmistakably good outcomes for players, even when (and sometimes because) they challenge our existing business models.”
The memo never uses the term AI (or SI), but it frames the effort in part around AI agents.
“Coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software,” Sharma wrote. “Games share many of those same properties.” She said people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing Xbox games, roughly five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide.
Sharma came to Xbox in February from Microsoft’s CoreAI division. In her first memo as CEO, she said games would be “crafted by humans, and created with the most innovative technology provided by us,” and pledged not to “flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop.”
In May, she pulled Gaming Copilot from mobile and canceled its console launch, saying Xbox would “retire features that don’t align with where we’re headed.”
Microsoft last month cut 268 roles in Xbox Game Studios and moved work on the next Halo game to Activision. It was the latest round in a reset Sharma announced in July, which called for about 3,200 job cuts by the end of this fiscal year, roughly 20% of the Xbox workforce. The company said at the time that the restructuring was about 75% complete.
Xbox’s priorities aren’t changing, Sharma wrote in her new memo, describing Labs as “a way to explore new technology without abandoning the work already underway.”
Something about cooler weather makes smoky, hearty food sound even better. As the days get shorter and cool air settles in, lighter summer meals start giving way to the kind of comfort food you actually want to linger over. That’s where BBQ comes in. Smoky meats, savory sides, rich sauces, and plenty of flavor make it a natural match for fall cravings, whether you’re grabbing dinner after a busy day or settling in for a relaxed weekend meal.
One of the best things about BBQ is that the flavor doesn’t need much explaining. That unmistakable smoky taste comes from time, heat, seasoning, and technique, creating meat that is rich, tender, and packed with character.
Fall is the perfect time to appreciate those deeper flavors. When you’re craving something substantial, a plate piled with smoked meats and your favorite sides feels like exactly what the season ordered.
Of course, you can’t talk about BBQ without talking about the sides. A great meal is about more than what’s coming off the smoker. Creamy, crispy, savory, and tangy sides bring different textures and flavors to the plate and make the whole meal feel complete.
Whether you have a favorite side you order every time or like trying something different, there’s something especially satisfying about building a meal around a combination of smoky meat and comforting sides.
Summer tends to be all about lighter meals, fresh flavors, and eating outside. Fall brings a different mood. You want food that feels warm, satisfying, and worth slowing down for.
That makes BBQ such a natural fit for the season. It works for a casual weeknight dinner, a weekend lunch, a meal with friends, or those evenings when you simply want something hearty without having to cook it yourself.
If you’re ready to lean into those cooler-weather cravings, Code 1 BBQ has plenty of smoky, satisfying options to put on your fall food rotation. From flavorful meats to hearty sides, it’s an easy way to make an ordinary autumn day feel a little more delicious. Stop by, check out our menu, and find the combination that becomes your new seasonal favorite.
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The post Why BBQ Just Hits Different in the Fall appeared first on Code 1 BBQ.
In most cases, hotspot-driven volcanism is relatively sedate, with lava flowing down mountainsides slowly enough that people can walk out of its way. But in a number of locations—Mount Etna, Hawaii, Iceland—lava gets expelled in dramatic fountains that can reach several hundred meters in height.
Right now, we're not sure what powers them. However, thanks to a recent set of eruptions at the Kilauea volcano, we have some of the best documentation yet of erupting lava fountains. In a recent edition of Science, researchers from the US Geological Survey describe what we've seen and compare it with what we might expect based on our best ideas about what powers these fountains of molten rock.
With three active volcanic regions that engage in fountaining, there has been a steady flow of dramatic videos of red-hot molten rock spouting from the Earth. But Kilauea has had only three fountaining episodes since 1823, even though it's the youngest and most active volcano in Hawaii. That activity has led to intensive study, and we have a good idea of the volcano's structure. Previous work has identified a couple of lava residues within a few kilometers of the surface, and the volcano had 35 separate data-gathering stations set up on Kilauea, including "seismic, infrasound, geodetic, gas, and visual and thermal cameras."
© Mike Lyvers
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