Binance is investigating a potential hack that could result in billions of dollars in losses.
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Binance and Polymarket reported potential security breaches on Thursday.
Binance is investigating a possible hack, with over a billion in losses potentially at stake.
Polymarket also temporarily halted trading after a suspected breach.
Two major trading platforms — Binance and Polymarket — were investigating security incidents on Thursday, with the former facing potential losses in the billions. There's no evidence the incidents were related.
Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, said it was actively investigating reports of a "potential security issue."
In an update late Thursday, Binance said that its initial investigation suggested that the incident may involve a compromised development operations engineer's laptop. This allowed an attacker to access a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions.
"We have found no evidence of any wallet private key leak," the company added.
Binance said the estimated total impact is about $6.3 billion, and it has worked with its blockchain partners to freeze around $3 billion in assets so far.
"Binance will cover all losses," Binance said on X. "As a precaution, all deposits and withdrawals are temporarily suspended while our team conducts security checks, freezes funds, and works with law enforcement."
The company did not respond to a request for comment.
Binance founder and former CEO, Changpeng Zhao, said on X a hack seemed likely.
“User funds are safe! It does look like a hack on Binance,” Zhao wrote in a post on X. “I don't manage Binance anymore, but as a shareholder, I expect all user funds will be fully covered.”
Zhao expressed appreciation to Tether and Circle, issuers of cryptocurrencies traded on Binance, for quickly freezing funds.
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said on X the company froze more than $1.5 billion related to the potential Binance hack. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said the company froze over $800 million in connection with the incident and that it was coordinating with law enforcement.
Polymarket also reported a security incident
Also on Thursday, Polymarket, the world's largest prediction market by trading volume, temporarily halted trading after users reported unauthorized withdrawals.
The company said in a statement on X that one of its third-party providers was compromised and that the incident had been referred to law enforcement. It also said trading had resumed by 3 p.m. Eastern time.
A Polymarket spokesperson told Business Insider that the malicious activity occurred in the UK and that the company will reimburse affected users. The company was unable to confirm the amount that may have been stolen.
Polymarket's US exchange was not halted and did not appear to be affected.
A person familiar with the matter attributed the Polymarket hack to a compromised third-party provider called DebugBear, a web performance monitoring platform designed to help businesses optimize website speed. It's unclear exactly how Polymarket uses the platform.
DebugBear did not respond to a request for comment. The company said in an X post on Thursday that it was aware of a security incident and was treating it as a "top priority."
It’s sweeping the world. Stablecoins are the privatized version of CBDCs, or Central Bank Digital Currencies. The Trump family is a major player in the space with World Liberty Financial. The banks fought it tooth and nail at the start, but now they are caving in. The flip side of stablecoins is asset-backed tokens, which are scaling even faster than stablecoins.
I have warned about this in my latest three books, written in the last 12 months. The pinnacle of these, Crucible of Tokens, is required reading if you want to get ahead of the tsunami.
Every token that touches a physical asset – real estate, stocks & bonds, Treasuries, mutual funds – takes the title out of your hands. For the unsuspecting, this ends private property. In 2026 alone, the stock exchanges are being tokenized. Believe me, this will be the biggest heist in the history of the world.⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.
Coinbase reports growing adoption by banks and businesses, even as stablecoin market capitalization remains largely unchanged over the past year.
Stablecoins moved more than $400 million an hour in adjusted transfer volume during the third quarter of 2026, as quarterly activity reached $891 billion, more than quadrupling since early 2023, according to a new report commissioned by Coinbase.
The report found that 73% of screened stablecoin transfer volume occurred outside US banking hours, including nights, weekends and holidays.
Distribution of stablecoin transfer volume by time of day. Source: Coinbase and The Block Research, via Dune Analytics
Seven of the 10 largest US banks have tested stablecoins or tokenized deposits for settlement, while 30% of mid-market companies conducting cross-border business are using or piloting stablecoins, up from 10% in 2024. Business-to-business payment volume also rose 36% year over year.
Conducted by The Block Research, the findings identified 293 million blockchain addresses holding stablecoins, exceeding the combined number of cards issued by American Express and Discover, though researchers cautioned that addresses do not necessarily represent individual users.
The report also estimated that moving 80% of international transactions onto stablecoin networks could add $155 billion to global GDP annually and free up roughly $3 trillion in liquidity currently held by banks to support cross-border payments.
Those projections are based on hypothetical adoption scenarios rather than observed economic gains. Researchers also acknowledged that widespread stablecoin adoption could reduce bank lending, potentially offsetting some of the benefits of faster and cheaper payments.
A separate survey released Monday by the National Cryptocurrency Association found that 42% of US adults, representing approximately 112 million people, would be more likely to open an account with a bank offering crypto services or use that institution for more of their financial needs.
The survey found that 18% of US adults would like to buy or use stablecoins through their primary bank or financial institution. However, 64% said their bank, credit union or financial advisor had never raised the topic of cryptocurrency, while 43% did not know whether their bank offered crypto services.
Americans’ interest in crypto banking services by demographic group. Source: National Cryptocurrency Association, 2026 Crypto at the Bank Report
Greek authorities have requested the freezing of two bank accounts in Ireland and Denmark as part of the tax fraud investigation against the “Horiatiko” bakery chain. While investigation into the mastermindly orchestrated fraud scheme continues, media report on Tuesday of involvement of numerous police officers who would brief the organization in advance before authorities raids […]
Well-known pizza chain Pizza Fan was boasting that “everything was Greek.” Allegedly everything was Greek including the fraud scheme that cost the state 25 million euros in Value Added Tax. On Thursday, teams of the Greek Directorate for Combating Organized Crime raided the headquarters of Pizza Fan, an unknown number of its affiliates stores, houses […]
China’s development of specialized naval auxiliaries designed to transport, launch and recover submarine-sized uncrewed vessels signals an assertive push to project autonomous undersea power beyond the First Island Chain and systematically challenge US submarine dominance in the Western Pacific. This month, multiple media outlets reported visual evidence showing that China has constructed a second dedicated […]
Most Americans know Stripe as the checkout box on a website. That picture is five years out of date.
Stripe reports that businesses on its platform generated $1.9 trillion in total volume in 2025, up 34 percent in a single year. By the company’s own reckoning, that is roughly 1.6 percent of global GDP. It claims 90 percent of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and 80 percent of the Nasdaq 100 as customers.
A private company, owned by insiders and venture funds and answerable to no public shareholder, already clears a measurable share of the world’s commerce. Now it is building the payment system for customers that are not human.
Two Kinds of Token
This writer has spent the past year explaining tokenization: stocks, bonds, real estate, and dollars converted into programmable entries on a digital ledger. That is the first kind of token.
There is a second kind. Every artificial intelligence model consumes and produces “tokens,” the small fragments of text that are the unit of machine computation. Every query to an AI model is metered in tokens and billed in tokens.
Tokens of value and tokens of computation are different things. Stripe is the one company positioning itself to meter, price, and settle both.
Emily Sands, Stripe’s Head of Data and AI, is an economist by training. In a recent interview with Nate B. Jones, she said this about inference tokens:
“Tokens are not yet a currency—maybe they will be, we’ll see—but they are certainly a very valuable asset.”
Stripe’s own AI chief is saying publicly that units of machine computation could become money.
The Pieces, In Order
The factual record comes from Stripe’s own announcements.
Stripe acquired Bridge, a stablecoin platform. Its 2025 annual letter reports that stablecoin payments volume doubled to around $400 billion, that an estimated 60 percent of it was business-to-business, and that Bridge’s own volume more than quadrupled.
With the venture firm Paradigm, Stripe built Tempo, which it describes as “a blockchain purpose-built for payments.”
The Machine Payments Protocol. On March 18, 2026, Stripe launched the protocol alongside the Tempo mainnet. It lets a business tell an AI agent, in machine-readable form, what it sells, what it costs, and how to pay.
Stripe acquired Metronome, a usage-based billing company that meters consumption in real time.
Streaming payments. At its Sessions 2026 conference, Stripe combined the two into “streaming payments.” These are stablecoin micropayments on Tempo, tied to Metronome’s meter, so that a business can “get paid for every token, exactly at the moment it’s used.”
Stripe was candid about why the old system cannot do this: “The amounts are too small and the usage is too fast—existing systems aren’t capable of processing minute sums every few milliseconds.”
A credit card cannot move a penny, because the fees alone exceed the payment. A stablecoin on a purpose-built chain can. Sands was measured about it: “Stablecoins bring us a long way. It is not the only way… but so far stablecoins seem to be an important part of microtransactions.”
Why OpenRouter Matters
In August, the financial press reported that Stripe had agreed to buy OpenRouter for more than $7 billion.
OpenRouter is a switchboard. A developer sends it a task, and OpenRouter routes that task to whichever of some 400 AI models best fits the required cost, speed, and quality. Roughly eight million developers use it.
Every request through OpenRouter is a metered event, and every metered event is a bill. With the acquisition, the company that counts the tokens and the company that collects the money are the same company.
Stripe has always seen the revenue side of a business: who paid, how much, how often. OpenRouter shows it the cost side: which model was used, what it cost, and how well it performed. Sands said it directly:
“You want to maximize profit on both the revenue side and the true-cost side, which requires getting deep into the guts of the underlying intelligence in your product and agent.”
She also gave the acquisition a name: “the rails for intelligence—not the rails for money, but the rails for intelligence.”
Stripe president Will Gaybrick told Payments Dive that the company is evolving from a payments company into “an AI infrastructure player.” He predicted there will not be room “for 100 different AI orchestrators.”
That describes a company expecting the market to consolidate around a few orchestrators and planning to be one of them.
The Permission Layer
The payments are the visible part of the system. The reputation scoring that precedes them matters more.
Sands described how Stripe helped the AI coding company Cursor with a new kind of theft: fraudsters opening accounts to steal free computing credits. No payment had occurred, so there was no transaction to flag. Stripe solved it anyway:
“That allowed us to move from scoring transactions to identifying abusive or risky customers.”
Because Stripe sees across millions of businesses, it can judge a person at the moment he creates an account, before he has bought anything. It then passes those scores to sellers, so that, in Sands’ words, “businesses can make decisions.”
Stripe’s Link wallet, which Sands puts at about 300 million consumers, is becoming “the wallet for agents.” Your identity is attached to it. Your agent spends through it. The human owner sets the spending limits, and every purchase traces back to a named person.
The stated purpose is fraud prevention, and the fraud is real. But a cross-merchant reputation score, run by one private company and applied before any transaction exists, is a permission system whatever its purpose. This writer has documented the same architecture at the Bank for International Settlements and the largest banks. Stripe arrived at it from the commercial side, with no mandate and no public debate.
What This Means for the Individual
Sands made two admissions that deserve attention.
First, on pricing: “There is probably no longer such a thing as a SKU.” The fixed, posted price, the same for every buyer, is giving way to pricing that adjusts continuously by customer and by outcome.
Second, on negotiation between machines:
“Agents are relentless. They are willing to negotiate as long as they need to negotiate… You could imagine consumer surplus being eroded relatively quickly.”
Consumer surplus is the economist’s term for the good deal, the difference between what you would have paid and what you did pay. An economist at the center of this system expects that difference to shrink.
My Thoughts
My inference is as follows. Stripe has assembled, under one private roof, a wallet bound to identity, a reputation score that precedes the purchase, a meter on machine intelligence, a stablecoin, and a blockchain to settle it. Each piece has a reasonable business justification. Together they amount to the ledger, the meter, and the gate for machine commerce.
Technocracy was defined in 1938 as the science of social engineering, with the measurement and accounting of all production and consumption at its core. The original Technocrats had no instrument that could do it. Stripe’s stack, built for ordinary commercial reasons, can.
Whoever owns the meter sets the terms of commerce, and Stripe now owns the meter.
References
CoinDesk, “Coinbase-Backed AI Payments Protocol Wants to Fix Micropayment but Demand Is Just Not There Yet,” CoinDesk, March 11, 2026. Cites Artemis data: about $28,000 daily volume, about 131,000 daily transactions, average payment about $0.20, roughly half of activity self-dealing or wash trading.
Forrester, “Why Stripe’s Machine Payments Protocol Signals a Turning Point for Micropayments,” Forrester Blogs, 2026. Machine Payments Protocol launched March 18, 2026, with the Tempo mainnet, co-created with Paradigm.
Nate B. Jones, “AI Agents Are Starting To Buy. Stripe Is Building How They Pay,” interview with Emily Sands, Head of Data and AI, Stripe, YouTube, 2026. Source of all Sands quotations.
Payments Dive, “Stripe Acquisition May Bolster Its AI Strategy,” Payments Dive, 2026. Reported price above $7 billion (Bloomberg) and up to $10 billion (Wall Street Journal); about 8 million developers and 400 models; Gaybrick statements.
Stripe, “Stripe Publishes 2025 Annual Letter and Announces Tender Offer,” Stripe Newsroom, 2026. $1.9 trillion total volume, up 34 percent; roughly 1.6 percent of global GDP; 90 percent of the Dow and 80 percent of the Nasdaq 100; stablecoin volume around $400 billion; Bridge volume more than quadrupled; Tempo.
Stripe, “Stripe Builds Out the Economic Infrastructure for AI with 288 Launches,” Stripe Newsroom, Sessions 2026. Streaming payments; Metronome metering with stablecoin micropayments on Tempo; Link wallets for agents.
Technocracy Inc., The Technocrat magazine, 1938. Definition of Technocracy as “the science of social engineering.”
AI agents are becoming customers, and most businesses have already decided whether agents can buy from them without realizing it. I went to Stripe to ask Emi...
Failure of the CLARITY Act does not stop the tokenization train, but it will slow it down. The SEC and CFTC will now write the rules by exemption, no-action letter, and enforcement discretion. The GENIUS Act provided the settlement layer in 2025, and the banks have already caved to tokenization. The stock markets are already being tokenized. Get ready for my new book, CRUCIBLE OF TOKENS, to figure out what this means to you, so you can take evasive action. ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.
The Senate on Tuesday failed to advance the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, falling short of the 60 votes needed to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed to H.R. 3633. The vote, held at about 2:15 p.m. ET, was the first floor test of comprehensive crypto market-structure legislation in the chamber. It was not a vote on final passage. It was a vote on whether debate could even begin. The answer was no, with 50 no votes and 49 yes votes.
Every Democrat voted against the measure. Three Republicans – Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Josh Hawley of Missouri and Jerry Moran of Kansas – also voted against the measure
The Clarity Act is the market-structure half of the crypto legal framework Congress began building last year, the companion to the GENIUS Act’s stablecoin rules. It draws the line between digital assets regulated as commodities under the CFTC and those regulated as securities under the SEC, puts spot trading platforms under a federal registration regime for the first time, and sets statutory terms for self-custody, noncustodial software and rewards on stablecoin balances. It cleared the House last July with 78 Democrats and then spent a year in Senate rewrites.
That result effectively freezes the bill in place with almost no calendar left before the midterms. Republicans control 53 seats. They needed at least seven Democrats, and more if GOP holdouts peeled off over bank or law-enforcement concerns. They did not get them.
The House passed its version 294-134 in July 2025. The Senate Banking Committee reported a version 15-9 in May 2026, with Democrats Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland joining Republicans. Tuesday was supposed to be the moment those committee crossovers turned into a floor coalition. Both Gallego and Alsobrooks voted no on cloture. Instead, the first hurdle became the last one of 2026.
BREAKING: 🇺🇸 The Crypto CLARITY Act has failed to pass the Senate cloture vote. pic.twitter.com/0VAw1H9Eyl
Senate Republicans released what they called their “last, best and final” text Sunday night. Sens. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Banking Chair Tim Scott of South Carolina, and Agriculture Chair John Boozman of Arkansas said the draft folded in 126 substantive changes requested by Democrats. The package included new ethics language modeled on a Tillis-Gallego proposal, edits to the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act for noncustodial developers, Agriculture Committee guardrails on affiliate trading and tribal gaming, and a Treasury “circuit breaker” meant to address bank fears that stablecoin yield would drain community-bank deposits.
Lummis’s line was blunt: Democrats got what they wanted; now take yes for an answer.
Democrats did not. Late Monday they sent a counteroffer. According to people familiar with it, they did not reopen the stablecoin-yield fight – sources had described that as a “Republican-only” problem – but they did demand more on ethics (large holdings, dependent children, paid crypto promotions), a narrower BRCA that expressly does not modify criminal law, and tighter Ag-title rules on exchanges and conflicts. Sens. Mark Warner of Virginia, Ruben Gallego of Arizona, and Raphael Warnock of Georgia said the White House-approved ethics language still needed work. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts went further, arguing the enforcement design left the Trump administration too much control and left loopholes around existing presidential crypto interests.
Republicans rejected the counteroffer Tuesday morning. “In response to a significant step in their direction, Democrats have chosen to move the goalposts again,” Senate Banking Committee spokesman Jeff Naft said. “Yet we are hearing the same unreasonable asks and the same refusal to take yes for an answer. The final text is public.” Lummis’s office said the Democratic paper “looks identical to their opening position at the start of recess.”
White House Crypto Council Executive Director Patrick Witt had already signaled there was little room left. “If there are any changes, we’re talking about punctuation at this point or technical changes,” he told Crypto In America on Monday. “I view that as definitely a best and final offer.”
Three fights that never closed
Ethics. This was the political core. Democrats wanted restrictions on large crypto holdings by the president, vice president, members of Congress, judges, and family, plus limits on paid promotions. Republicans added language they said tracked the Tillis-Gallego framework and gave state attorneys general a role in enforcement. Critics said it still left gaps around existing ventures tied to the Trump family and put too much enforcement discretion in the Justice Department. Warren and others treated that as disqualifying. The Democrats who had spent months negotiating the bill, Kirsten Gillibrand, Mark Warner, Cory Booker, Raphael Warnock, Ruben Gallego, Angela Alsobrooks and Catherine Cortez Masto, all voted no, according to Crypto In America’s Eleanor Terrett.
Developer protections and DeFi. The BRCA language was meant to shield noncustodial software developers from money-transmitter registration. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada has been the Democratic face of that fight. Republicans already stripped explicit criminal safe harbors to satisfy her. Her camp still wanted the provision narrowed and a sentence stating that nothing in it changes criminal law. Industry and GOP negotiators called that a second move of the goalposts.
Banks and stablecoin yield. Eight banking trade groups, including the American Bankers Association and the Independent Community Bankers of America, attacked the new circuit breaker as “not a safeguard at all” because it would fire only after deposits had already left. They wanted tighter bans on interest-like payments on stablecoin balances. The White House Council of Economic Advisers published a tool arguing there is “no meaningful relationship between stablecoin growth and community bank deposit flight.” Witt accused the banks of acting in bad faith: “If you oppose the Clarity Act because you just hate crypto, that’s fine. Just say that.”
That bank fight mattered inside the GOP. Sen. John Curtis of Utah said he would vote to proceed but was a no on final passage. Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Susan Collins of Maine – Collins called the bill a “moving target” and flagged community-bank deposits – were publicly undecided going into the vote. Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Josh Hawley of Missouri were widely expected to oppose the bill on substance. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky returned to the floor Monday after a three-month absence and said he would “do my best to be present for tough votes.” Presence was not the same as 60 votes.
What the bill would have done
Clarity is market-structure legislation, the sequel to last year’s GENIUS Act on stablecoins. It would split digital-asset oversight between the SEC and the CFTC, keep securities law from being skirted by labeling tokens as something else, set rules for trading platforms, and try to write a statutory floor under self-custody and noncustodial development. Supporters at BlackRock, Fidelity, Schwab, Goldman, and Coinbase argued the alternative is agency-by-agency enforcement with no durable statute. Opponents argued the draft under-regulated conflicts, illicit finance, and bank-deposit competition.
Majority Leader John Thune framed Tuesday as the “next logical step” after GENIUS. Scott called it the day “everyone [had] to put their cards on the table.” They did. The table did not have 60 cards on it.
Cloture on a motion to proceed is not a funeral by Senate rules. Leadership can file again. Amendments can be rewritten. A lame-duck session still exists on paper.
The calendar does not. The House has already canceled late-September weeks. The Senate has a short September window, then October campaign recess, then a post-election lame duck that will be defined by midterm results. Prediction markets had already repriced the bill before the roll call: passage-this-year contracts on Polymarket and Kalshi ran between the high teens and the mid-30s in the hours before the vote, depending on the platform and the hour. Analysts at TD Cowen and Capital Alpha had the full-year odds in the same neighborhood.
If the 119th Congress does not pass Clarity, the next Congress writes a new bill. Agencies keep making policy by enforcement and rulemaking. The industry stays in the gap between a House-passed statute and a Senate that could not open debate.
Witt said Monday that whether the bill got 60 votes would be “a political calculation, not a policy calculation.” Tuesday proved him right. The policy text was 600-plus pages and a year of talks. The politics were ethics, banks, and a midterm clock. The politics won.
Abra CEO Bill Barhydt joins 'Mornings with Maria' to discuss the impact of the CLARITY Act on tokenization, whether crypto is becoming an asset class or its ...
Before I read this piece, all I knew about tomatoes was that homegrown tastes infinitely better than store-bought. For Offrange, Mitch Hagney educated me on how tomatoes ripen naturally and unnaturally, and how Big Tomato forces the issue in huge warehouses by pumping in ethylene gas. It might just inspire you to grow your own.
Tomatoes are climacteric fruits, like bananas, avocados, and mangos, which means they can be harvested unripe and complete the process later. Ethylene sends the hormonal signal to ripen. When that process happens naturally, cells near its seeds start producing the gas and it diffuses outward through the fruit. Each cell the gas reaches begins its own production, and the cascade softens the flesh and the tomato turns red from the inside out. That allows the fruit to be picked much greener, shipped far, and then ripened when they’re close to their eater.
To do it artificially isn’t complicated, but it is expensive. Ethylene floods the room at carefully calibrated amounts, and the operator compresses what might take weeks into five days. Sensors log temperature, humidity, and gas concentrations around the clock. The tomato turns red from the outside in.
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