After multiple days of declining momentum, interest in the Shiba Inu derivatives market appears to be back in flames. Data from Coinglass has shown a notable increase in the Shiba Inu open interest over the last day.

According to the data, the dog-themed meme token has seen its open interest resurge back to a massive 13.93 trillion SHIB after hitting significant lows in the previous days. This marks a significant increase of 4.31% over the last day, signaling renewed optimism among SHIB enthusiasts.

$182 million in SHIB bets

Following the surge in SHIB’s derivatives activities, it appears that SHIB traders are increasingly willing to open new positions to bet on the asset’s price potential. This suggests that confidence has been restored to the SHIB community, posing the price of the token for more upsurge.

Per SHIB’s trading price as of August 27, the total amount of SHIB committed in its active futures contracts is worth over $182 million according to data provided by the source.

Nonetheless, it is important to note that the SHIB open interest indicates the total number of unsettled SHIB futures contracts or options contracts. As such, the aforementioned figure covers the total amount of funds invested by small and large investors in Shiba Inu derivatives as of August 27.

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The surge in SHIB’s open interest coincides with the broad crypto market price rebound which saw the price of the leading meme asset surge as high as $0.00001263 on Wednesday.

While momentum appears to be cooling, data from CoinMarketCap shows that the asset has surged to $0.00001250 as of press time after trading for less in the previous days. As such, SHIB has shown a 24-hour increase of 1.1%.

Nonetheless, its positive on-chain metric suggests that SHIB might be set for higher gains in the short term.

Further data provided by the source shows that leading cryptocurrency exchange Gate has dominated the SHIB derivatives market with 7.37 trillion SHIB registered by its users.

This impressive performance was followed by Bitget, which accounts for 2.44 trillion SHIB out of the total amount of SHIB’s unsettled contracts.

Gemini, a major US cryptocurrency exchange, has officially announced its XRP credit card, which was initially teased earlier this month. 

The owners of the much-hyped card can earn 4% cash back on gas, EV charging as well as public transport. 

It also offers 3% cash back on dining and 2% cash back on groceries. Other purchases will come with 1% cash back. 

That’s it?

The XRP community is not impressed by the introduction of the new product, with some of its members complaining that it does not actually bring anything particularly new to the table (apart from the “XRP” logo). 

The exchange, which is run by the Winklevoss twins, initially announced XRP rewards in March that made it possible to earn up to 4% cashback. Considering that a lot of clients already use the ordinary card, the Monday announcement felt somehow anticlimatic. 

Why XRP? 

As reported by U.Today, the Winklevoss twins have a rather complicated history with the XRP community. After previously dismissing its members as “dumb trolls,” they have made amends with the holders of the third-largest cryptocurrency. 

In its latest blog post, Gemini has clarified that it chose to introduce an XRP-specific card because of the massive gains that the token has recorded over the past year. In fact, $73,700 worth of rewards turned into $407,000.

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Gemini CEO Tyler Winklevoss has stated that the XRP community can express their “passion” and “loyalty” with the help of the new card. At the same time, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse claims that the new product will make crypto “simple” and “approachalbe.”   

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Solana core developers have pushed a sweeping consensus overhaul, “Alpenglow” (SIMD-0326), into the ecosystem’s formal governance track, setting up a validator vote that, if approved, would replace TowerBFT and re-architect finality and validator incentives on mainnet-beta. The proposal’s authors—Quentin Kniep, Kobi Sliwinski, and Roger Wattenhofer—describe Alpenglow as “a major overhaul of Solana’s core consensus protocol,” designed to supplant “the existing Proof-of-History and TowerBFT mechanisms” with a design that targets block finalization “as low as 100–150 milliseconds.”

Voting Process For Solana ‘Alpenglow’ Starts

The governance post lays out a three-phase timeline: discussion through epochs 833–838, stake-weight capture in epoch 839, and a binding vote across epochs 840–842 using claimable vote tokens sent to “Yes,” “No,” or “Abstain” accounts. Passage hinges on a supermajority threshold: Yes must be at least two-thirds of Yes+No, with a 33% quorum that counts abstentions. As of today, Solana is in epoch 834, making the discussion window active and the vote window scheduled several epochs out.

At the heart of Alpenglow is Votor, a direct-vote, leader-pipelined finality protocol that shifts Solana away from on-chain vote transactions and heavy gossip toward off-chain vote exchange with local signature aggregation. Validators vote to notarize or skip blocks; leaders aggregate those votes eight slots later and submit compact proofs. The authors argue this design cuts latency dramatically and reduces bandwidth, while a “20+20” liveliness model aims to tolerate up to 20% adversarial and 20% unresponsive validators without halting progress. “Alpenglow… enables much lower latency, improved fault tolerance, and generally greater protocol efficiency,” the post asserts.

The upgrade also rewires validator economics. Because voting moves off-chain, the SIMD introduces a Validator Admission Ticket (VAT), a fixed per-epoch fee “initially set to 1.6 SOL per epoch,” burned to maintain an economic barrier roughly comparable to today’s on-chain vote-fee regime. Validators are “required to cast exactly one valid vote per slot”; conflicting votes are detectable, and persistent non-participation renders a validator ineligible for rewards and at risk of removal from the active set.

Leaders receive compensation equal to the per-slot vote rewards of the votes they aggregate, plus a flat bonus when they include fast-finalization/finalization certificates. In a follow-up thread post, Wattenhofer explains the 1.6 SOL figure as approximately 80% of current vote costs to ensure no operator is worse off at the “AlpenSwitch.”

If adopted, Alpenglow would make a visible semantic change at the client layer: the authors note that optimistic confirmation would be superseded by actual finality at sub-second timescales. The stated aim is to bring confirmation latencies in line with Web2 user expectations while tightening safety guarantees that were harder to formalize under TowerBFT. The proposal’s documentation points readers to a 50+ page white paper and independent analyses, but emphasizes that the initial rollout focuses on finalization and voting; a new data dissemination protocol, Rotor, would follow in a separate SIMD.

Governance mechanics for the vote mirror Solana’s prior advisory processes but with higher stakes. Vote tokens will be claimable via an adapted Merkle distributor; validators then send those tokens to the designated choice accounts during the epoch-bounded window. The foundation’s governance post states, “If the sum of Yes votes is equal to or greater than 2/3 of the total sum of Yes + No votes, the proposal will pass,” and “Abstain” contributes to quorum but not to the supermajority tally. Stake weights and a public tally script will be published for independent verification.

Community feedback has quickly homed in on operational risk and rollout discipline. One validator-oriented response urges the SIMD authors to embed “a testing, deployment and fallback plan” before a mainnet decision, likening the scope of change to other industry-scale protocol transitions. Others probe specifics around the VAT level, transaction expiry in a post-PoH world, leader equivocation handling, and effects on MEV auctions and client UX when slices of a block are ignored under certain failure modes. These threads underscore that while the performance headline—150 ms finality—is eye-catching, the vote will likely hinge on the comfort level with safety proofs, incentive edge-cases, and the migration path.

At press time, SOL traded at $181.89.

Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com

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The Shiba Inu community is in its most defining moments as it kicks off its first election that will decide an interim president and set the course for the $7 billion token ecosystem’s future. With the fifth “Shib Year” now underway, some community members see the election as a significant step toward decentralization, with debates over leadership, transparency, and accountability heating up across the community. 

What’s Happening Inside the Shiba Inu Community

In an August 4 post titled ELECTIONS, Shiba Inu’s lead developer, Shytoshi Kusama, announced that the community will choose a new lead visionary and councils for each DAO, calling it “the true birth of a network state.” The election announcement has brought long-standing frustrations to the surface, with some community members accusing Kusama of poor leadership, lack of transparency, and keeping too much control in the hands of a few. 

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Woof Swap, a vocal voice in the Shiba Inu ecosystem, has been especially blunt, calling for leadership with “actual ability, not just visibility.” They wrote, “We don’t need an incompetent president,” and stressed that leaders must have the skills, strategy, and resources to guide the project forward.

Other long-time supporters, like Shiba Germany, have raised concerns about broken promises, such as the unfulfilled goal of activating 100 validators and onboarding a billion users. There is also unease about projects like SHY and POE, seen as distractions from Shiba Inu’s core goals, arguing that the election will only work if it leads to leaders aligned with Ryoshi’s original vision of transparency, decentralization, and shared responsibility.

How The Shiba Inu Major Electoral Process Will Work

The Shiba Inu elections will unfold in three main phases. First, open nominations will allow any member of the community to apply. The top ten nominees will move on to a debate stage, with live or recorded sessions hosted across platforms. A second vote will narrow the field to three finalists, who will then face a final vote one week later. The winner will serve as interim president until the position is formally approved, no later than four months after the start of “Shibizenship.”

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Voting will follow a “1 token = 1 vote” system with any SHIB ecosystem token – SHIB, BONE, TREAT, or LEASH. Kusama argues that the voting system is fair by giving more influence to those with the most invested in the ecosystem’s success, as they have the most at stake. But the Shiba Inu Foundation will still hold veto power, a point that has fueled claims the process is more “controlled democracy” than complete decentralization.

The interim president will coordinate the transfer of power, carry out the vision laid out in the “Shib White Paper,” establish the first congress of four DAO councils, and manage the community’s billion token economy. 

Logistical details, including the exact dates for nominations, debates, and voting, will be announced soon. With millions of holders worldwide and billions in value on the line, the outcome of these elections will shape Shiba Inu’s direction for years to come.

Featured image from Unsplash, chart from TradingView.com

A fast‑moving fight over mining power consumed Monero’s weekend after Sergey Ivancheglo used X to promote an “economic” campaign to dominate the network’s hashrate, which was met by community resistance.

The fight escalated after Ivancheglo, the figure behind Qubic and better known as Come‑from‑Beyond (CFB), confirmed the takeover intentions with an incentive-driven 51% attack.

As a response, the community gathered in the “supportxmr.com” pool to hold the majority of Monero’s mining capacity.

The 51% takeover plan

Qubic’s plan surfaced across X and Reddit as a pay‑to‑switch mining campaign. By offering richer payouts than ordinary pools, Qubic aims to attract enough Monero miners to its pool to surpass 51% of the network hash, a threshold that would enable it to orphan rivals’ blocks, delay confirmations, and potentially censor transactions. 

Ivancheglo publicly flagged Aug. 2 to Aug. 31 as a window of elevated risk and urged exchanges to raise Monero deposit confirmations, framing the move as a precaution during their “test.”

On Reddit, Monero miners and users viewed the campaign as a live 51% attack attempt, driven by incentives rather than a code exploit. Posts in forums dedicated to the Monero community on Reddit tracked Qubic’s pool share and warned that concentration could enable orphaned blocks, delayed confirmations, or transaction censorship. 

A thread titled “Qubic/Sergey Ivancheglo 51% attack plans” complained of “silence from most devs,” while another, “The timeline for the 51% attack is August,” claimed the pool had mined 31 of the last 100 blocks and urged a community response.

Community reaction

Analyst Dan Dadybayo explained on an X thread how Monero was under attack through an incentive campaign, arguing that intent is secondary to the risk of centralization when a single pool can outbid the rest of the network for hashpower. 

His follow‑ups described why Monero’s CPU‑friendly RandomX and highly mobile miners make such an attack plausible if incentives are aligned. 

The Monero subreddit’s tone oscillated between alarm and organization.

Members of the Monero community highlighted on X and Reddit Qubic’s rise into the top tier of pools through richer payouts and warned that waiting for 40% and 50% dominance would be too late.

The reaction led to the community rallying behind the mining pool “supportxmr.com” to battle Qubic in an attempt to lead Monero’s mining capacity. As of press time, the 4,970 miners composing the pool accounted for 28.7% of the network hash rate, having mined 36 out of the last 100 blocks.

Nevertheless, a Qubic spokesperson told CryptoSlate that the 51% takeover will still be attempted, adding:

“The goal is not to harm, such as tx reversals, but to make every miner on the Monero network join the QUBIC mining pool.”

Furthermore, Qubic highlighted a June proposal in which the community must decide whether other blocks should be orphaned in the event of a 51% attack. Among what the proposal portrays as benefits are reduced fees for Monero users, boosted revenue for miners, integration with Qubic miners, and a “practical test of a 51% attack and possibility to analyze its impact on XMR price.”

As of press time, there is no commentary in the proposal.

Benevolent attack

Ivancheglo dismissed alarm as “fear‑mongering,” even as his project urged exchanges to increase Monero confirmation thresholds, escalating concern across Reddit and crypto Twitter. 

He framed the effort as industry research. He said he was “trying to find a countermeasure to Qubic’s 51% domination,” a claim that did little to calm Monero users who worried the “demo” could do real damage. 

In addition, Ivancheglo said:

“This is very important to the #cryptocurrency industry because one day we all may face a non-benevolent attack.”

The uneven tone has led to rampant speculation that Qubic may want to normalize a majority‑hash posture while portraying it as benevolent.

The episode highlights that proof-of-work networks can be pressured not only by raw hashrate rentals but also by token-driven incentive loops that outpay organic mining.

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World Liberty Financial, the decentralized finance platform linked to U.S. President Donald Trump’s family, has unveiled a proposal that would allow its WLFI governance token to become transferable and tradeable across the wider crypto market.

Currently confined within its own protocol, the WLFI token cannot be traded externally, restricting price discovery and limiting participation in governance. The team initially hinted at the new proposal last month.

The new proposal aims to shift the project toward a more open and decentralized model by enabling token trading on secondary markets such as decentralized exchanges and peer-to-peer platforms.

If the community endorses the plan, holders of WLFI tokens will gain expanded voting powers over key areas, including token emissions, ecosystem incentives, and treasury management.

The initiative comes as Trump’s deep involvement in digital assets continues to draw criticism from Democratic lawmakers, who have raised concerns over potential conflicts of interest. Transitioning WLFI to a decentralized structure could ease some of the political pressure currently stalling comprehensive crypto regulation efforts in Congress.

The Trump family recently reduced its ownership stake in World Liberty Financial by 20%, down from an initial 75% holding. Financial disclosures filed in June showed that President Trump had recorded $57 million in profits from WLFI alone.

Across his broader digital asset portfolio, including the Official Trump memecoin, non-fungible token sales, and holdings in other cryptocurrencies, Trump’s net worth has grown by an estimated $620 million. Digital assets now account for about 9% of his total $6.4 billion fortune.

In June, Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff introduced the COIN Act in response to the president’s crypto ventures. The act seeks to prohibit the President, executive branch officials, and their immediate families from issuing or promoting specific cryptocurrencies while in office.

WLFI is also conducting an independent audit of its USD1 stablecoin, which is seen as having strong potential to become a significant player in the market. USD1 currently has a circulating supply of $2.2 billion and was recently airdropped to WLFI holders to test on-chain distribution.

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Zak Cole, a leading Ethereum core developer, has launched a new initiative to drive the Ethereum network’s expansion and boost its market value.

In a speech at the Ethereum Community Conference on July 2, Cole introduced the Ethereum Community Foundation (ECF), an independent entity dedicated to supporting Ethereum as an asset and pushing its price to $10,000.

What is the Ethereum Community Foundation?

Cole emphasized that the ECF’s mission is to fund projects aimed at strengthening the Ethereum ecosystem.

The ECF website stated that the project distinguishes itself from the Ethereum Foundation (EF) by focusing on initiatives the EF has been unable or unwilling to pursue.

According to ECF’s website:

“ETH price has been overlooked for too long. The ECF is here to change that. We are mission focused on growing its value through education, funding, outreach, and ecosystem support.”

To achieve its $10,000 ETH goal, Cole explained that the ECF would take a more direct approach in supporting ETH holders and fostering the ecosystem’s growth.

This includes funding projects that aim to enhance Ethereum’s infrastructure, collaborate with governments and institutions, and prioritize actions that maximize ETH value and minimize the issuance of new tokens.

He also pointed out the importance of ETH’s value, stating that the price is about more than mere speculation and actually plays a vital role in supporting validators, securing the network, and enabling ETH to handle global transactions.

According to him:

“ETH to 10K isn’t a meme. It’s a requirement, a benchmark, a mandate. A $1.2 trillion market cap makes ETH competitive with gold’s monetary role. Price isn’t just speculation. It funds validators. It secures the network. It earns ETH the right to settle global value.”

Meanwhile, the creation of the ECF follows criticisms of the Ethereum Foundation, particularly its decision to sell ETH earlier this year, which some believe contributed to a dip in the asset’s price.

In response, the EF has introduced a new leadership team and is now utilizing a more community-aligned approach, including lending ETH for stablecoin liquidity through platforms like Aave to avoid further sales.

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