GM, frens! ☕️ 🔥 Banks want blockchain, but they want to own it

History remembers surprisingly little. Whole lifetimes get compressed into a name, an invention, a building, a book or sometimes a single decision somebody made at the right moment.

You probably don’t get to choose whether history remembers you, but you do get to choose whether you give it anything worth remembering. Leave a few fingerprints behind. Being here is temporary, but what you do while you’re here doesn’t always have to be 💜 

Here’s what we’re looking at this week:

• 🏦 Banks want blockchain, but they want to own it

• 🪙 The market rallies: the pump reaches coins and stocks

• 🍾 Ambire joins Ethereum and Solana in Serbia

• 🙄 Ledger turns an Ethereum app flaw into a public fight

• 🥷 Polish Olympic head detained over crypto bribes

Come leave a few fingerprints in our Discord too 🤠 

Banks want blockchain, but they want to own it

Thirty nine US state banking associations are planning a shared blockchain for American banks. They want the speed and automation crypto was always showing off, with one difference - they also want the banks themselves to own the network and decide how it works 🤏 

The BankChain Alliance represents banking groups from states including Texas, Florida, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Washington. Together, those groups speak for thousands of community and regional banks that cannot each spend several years building their own blockchain department.

The planned network could support tokenized bank deposits, stablecoins, programmable payments and automated settlement. The alliance wants it running in 2027 and says it should work with other networks while keeping normal banking rules in place 📜 

Though there is still a large blank space where the actual technology should be.

• BankChain has not picked a technology partner, named the blockchain it will use or explained the final governance and regulatory setup. It has not named the individual banks that will join either. Right now it is a large group with a clear goal, not a finished banking network.

• The goal itself should sound very familiar to crypto. Ripple (XRP) wasted more than a decade proposing faster settlement and cross border payments to banks. Stellar was built around cheap transfers and access to financial services. Ethereum, enterprise chains and several smaller networks have all been presented as possible rails for tokenized money and financial assets.

Some of that work found customers. For example, Ripple still serves payment companies and banks in several markets, while public networks now carry stablecoins and tokenized funds.

JPMorgan even put its own deposit token on Base. It would be wrong to say the crypto industry achieved nothing in this regard 🤓 

But it did not become the shared banking layer many projects expected. The BankChain announcement does not name XRP, Stellar, Ethereum, Solana or any other existing network. Its strongest message is repeated several ways: built by banks, owned by banks and governed by banks 🙄 

That tells us where XRP and similar bank focused projects ran into trouble. Banks like payments that settle at any hour and deposits that can be programmed. They are less excited about depending on a someone else’s network where things are decided outside the banking industry.

Banks also need to know who is allowed onto the network, who can see a transaction and who takes responsibility when something goes wrong. They have to follow court orders, freeze funds, handle sanctions and explain every balance to auditors and regulators 💵 

A bank owned network gives them a clear party to blame and a rule book they can change.

There is a business reason too.

• A public stablecoin can pull deposits away from smaller banks. A tokenized bank deposit keeps the money inside the banking system and keeps the customer relationship with the bank 💱 

• Building their own network lets banks copy the useful parts of stablecoins without handing that business to Circle, Tether or a crypto network with its own token.

• Some large banks already chose this route. JPMorgan built Kinexys and JPM Coin for institutional payments instead of waiting for a public coin to become the banking standard 🪙 

• Swift (which is owned by banks) is testing a blockchain based ledger with 17 financial institutions. BankChain is an attempt to give smaller banks something similar without making each one build it alone.

So crypto projects were not wrong at all about what banks needed.

Settlement was too slow, banking hours made little sense for a global economy and the old systems were bad at handling programmable assets. Crypto proved those points. What many projects got wrong was assuming banks would solve them by buying somebody else's bags 🤷‍♂️ 

Wasn’t unexpected, to be frank.

The market rallies: the pump reaches coins and stocks

Crypto has been green in enough places this week to call it a proper market rally. Coins are up, crypto stocks are up and traders are looking beyond BTC again after spending much of the year trying to avoid another beating 🟢 

Coinbase, Strategy, Circle and several mining companies rose alongside the market.

Coinbase benefits when people return to trading, Circle benefits when stablecoins see more use and Strategy still trades like a leveraged bet on its crypto holdings. When all three rise together, stock investors are betting on more activity across crypto rather than one price getting a temporary bump 🤯 

The pump has actually spread much further than those companies 👇️ 

The combined value of crypto outside BTC added around $215 billion between August 19 and August 22, climbing more than 24% and returning above $1 trillion. Ether moved back above $2,500, Solana posted one of the strongest daily gains among the large coins and plenty of smaller tokens ran much harder 🤝 

Some of those gains came from specific news instead of everything rising for the same reason.

SPX6900 gained around 65% to 70% over the week after receiving Korean won trading pairs on Upbit and Bithumb. Polygon climbed roughly 50% before giving some of it back after Sandeep Nailwal proposed replacing inflationary staking rewards with a share of network fees. He also said Polygon revenue had grown ten times this year 💰️ 

• Pudgy Penguins rose between 35% and 60% during the week after CEO Luca Netz posted four emojis that traders decided could be an IPO hint. No IPO has been confirmed and owning PENGU does not give anyone equity in Igloo, but crypto has never required much paperwork before pricing in a rumor. The toys being sold through Walmart and Target at least give the brand something more solid than four emojis 🧸 

• Ethena nearly doubled from its middle of August lows after announcing a $1 billion secured lending facility with FalconX. The plan would use assets backing USDe to fund institutional loans and add another source of revenue. Even after the rally, ENA remains about 90% below its highest price, which gives some useful context to how far it had fallen 😶 

The wider market started turning after the US Treasury said it would increase buybacks of longer term government bonds.

That helped bring yields down and weakened the dollar, making riskier assets more attractive. Better talk from Washington also helped, with the White House pushing for crypto legislation and regulators working on clearer rules for token sales 🪙 

There was plenty of forced buying too. Traders betting against crypto were hit by a huge wave of liquidations when prices jumped, which made the first part of the rally even faster. But that kind of buying ends once the bad positions are gone, so it cannot carry the market forever 🤔 

The better sign is that fresh money followed. US spot funds took in close to $2 billion during five straight trading days, their strongest week of 2026 at the time.

That does not prove the pump will last forever, but it gives the market more support than a squeeze alone 💪 

Ambire joins Ethereum and Solana in Serbia

EthBelgrade and Solana Summit Serbia brought both communities together in the Balkans this week. Several members of the Ambire team joined them in person, with local dancing and a proper rakija welcome helping everyone get acquainted 😅 

Ambire tech lead Kalo also took the stage to discuss a serious wallet security problem.

• Modern apps rely on npm dependencies, which are packages of code added by outside teams.

• These dependencies can often see everything the app can see, so one compromised package may be enough to steal sensitive information or help drain a connected wallet.

Kalo explained how Ambire prevents that access from reaching the wallet itself, protecting users even if a dependency elsewhere in the app turns bad. His short summary covers both the problem and the safeguards Ambire uses 👇️ 

Ledger turns an Ethereum app flaw into a public fight

Ledger has confirmed a flaw in its Ethereum app that could make a device show one transaction while signing another.

The company says it had already found and fixed the problem before an outside security firm warned users, which turned a serious security issue into a public fight over who found it first and who handled it badly 🫠 

• The bug affected clear signing, the part of a hardware wallet that shows readable transaction details on the device before the user approves them. That screen is supposed to protect the user even if the connected computer or app is malicious 🔑 

• According to security company TestMachine, a malicious app with WebHID access could send a second command while the user was still reviewing the first transaction. The screen could continue showing the original details, but pressing approve could produce a signature for the replacement. A small transfer could therefore be swapped for something much worse, such as an unlimited token approval to an attacker 🤯 

• TestMachine said it reproduced the flaw on a Ledger Flex and argued that shared code could put other current devices at risk. Public testing has not confirmed the full claim across every model and no theft has been tied to this particular flaw (yet) 🤔 

Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet said the company's Donjon security team found the bug first with its own AI tools.

Ledger released Ethereum app version 1.22.2 on August 12, around ten days before TestMachine made the issue public. Guillemet said the firm contacted Ledger's bounty program only after the fix had shipped, failed to follow the proper disclosure process and then made it sound as if users were still unprotected 👇️ 

TestMachine disputes that version of events and says it shared and verified the finding with Ledger, although it declined a bounty. The public code does show changes in version 1.22.2 that block a second signing session during an active review and stop approval when the signing state no longer matches.

Ledger's response is weaker when it comes to its own communication.

The company released the fix with almost no useful explanation and did not issue a proper security notice telling users which versions were affected or why they needed to update. If a patch stops a device from signing something different from what its screen shows, that deserves more than a vague changelog entry 🤷‍♂️ 

That missing explanation created the exact space where the public argument grew.

Users could not easily check Ledger's claims because the earliest affected version was not disclosed and the full list of affected models remained unclear. Telling everyone to keep their apps updated is sensible, but it is not the same as giving them a dated notice with the safe version clearly named 🙃 

It’s not hard to see why Ledger's irritation is hard for the community to accept 👇️ 

• In July, Zilliqa suspended native transactions after a separate flaw in its Ledger app was linked to active exploitation. The bug had been present from 2019 through 2026 and produced weak signatures.

• Around five signatures from the same key could give an attacker enough information to reconstruct that key within seconds. The problem was specific to the Zilliqa app and did not break Ledger hardware as a whole, but it still sat in the Ledger app ecosystem for seven years 🤐 

• Ledger customers also started 2026 with another data leak. A breach at checkout partner Global-e revealed names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and order details for some people who bought devices through Ledger's store. Recovery phrases, private keys and payment data were not exposed, but contact details tied to hardware wallet orders are valuable material for targeted phishing (or even worse) 🥷 

Ledger appears to have fixed the technical problem before it became public but handled the explanation much worse.

Security researchers should be careful not to overstate what they tested, but Ledger should not make users piece together a critical update from code changes and an argument on X 🥴 

Polish Olympic head detained over crypto bribes

Polish police have arrested Radosław Piesiewicz, president of the Polish Olympic Committee, over allegations that he accepted bribes connected to sponsorship deals with the failed crypto platform Zondacrypto 😲 

Sports Minister Jakub Rudnicki confirmed the arrest on August 27. Polish Interior Minister said Piesiewicz had become a symbol of corruption in the Olympic movement.

• The case centers on a sponsorship agreement signed between the Polish Olympic Committee and Zondacrypto in October 2025. The deal included crypto bonuses for Polish athletes who won medals at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics in February 2026, although reports say the payments were inconsistent.

• Prosecutors suspect Piesiewicz received benefits from Zondacrypto chief Przemyslaw Kral in return for the sponsorship arrangement and other help. Polish media reported that Kral gave Piesiewicz a Patek Philippe watch worth about €40,000 after Piesiewicz offered to help with an investigation by Poland's competition watchdog into the source of the company's funds 💰️ 

• Piesiewicz says he bought the watch himself and paid Kral back in cash installments. Kral is now reported to be cooperating with prosecutors in hopes of receiving a lighter sentence.

Zondacrypto stopped trading in April 2026. The Polish government estimates that about 30,000 people lost a combined 350 million zlotys, or roughly €80 million, when it disappeared. The business was described as a Ponzi scheme 🫥 

The government has also accused the platform of ties to organized crime, Russian intelligence services and groups close to Poland's nationalist opposition. Zondacrypto's founder, Sylwester Suszek, disappeared in 2022 and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has said he is probably dead 🫣 Kral took over the company afterward.

The investigation began in April and most Polish sports federations called for Piesiewicz to resign, but he stayed in office. His arrest has added a political part to the case because he is considered close to the Law and Justice party, which led Poland's previous government and supported his election to the Olympic committee 🙄 

Piesiewicz is one of several public figures named during the wider investigation. Prosecutors are now looking at how Zondacrypto used sports sponsorships, political ties and media links before the company failed.

Other worthy reads

“Why DeFi Lending Is Harder Than Trading” - Vaish:

“Obfuscation p. III: local mixing” - Vitalik Buterin:

“Social Trading and The Garden of Eden” - Ryan Watkins:

MEMES

That's all for now, frens.

We'll meet in a week! And remember, the market conditions are temporary, but our commitment to building a better Web3 is here to stay. Thanks for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you back next week. Cheers!

Yours, The 🔥 Team

Brought to you by Ambire: The Only Web3 Wallet That You’ll Need!