Ndax Weekly TL;DR Aug 17

Tether completes first-ever Big Four financial audit.

• Stablecoin issuer Tether confirmed KPMG U.S. completed the first full independent audit of its financial statements. KPMG issued an unqualified opinion on Tether International’s 2025 financial statements, meaning the audit team believes they fairly represented the company’s financial position, results, and cash flows in all material respects.(Bloomberg)
• Why it matters: Until now, Tether relied primarily on reserve attestations, which provide a narrower point-in-time snapshot of its assets and liabilities. A Big Four audit provides a broader review and can be seen as a significant step toward greater transparency. It could also remove a major overhang that has surrounded the largest stablecoin issuer and third-largest crypto asset by market cap.

MUFG moves government bond settlement onchain

• Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group launched a proof-of-concept to test onchain settlement of Japanese government bond repo transactions leveraging the Canton Network. The project is exploring whether blockchain infrastructure can produce faster settlement and delivery-versus-payment. Traditional settlement can take between one and three days. (CoinDesk)
• Why it matters: Government bonds are among the most important and liquid assets in the financial system. Reducing settlement time from days to potentially minutes could free up collateral and reduce operational risk. MUFG’s pilot also shows that blockchain technology is not replacing traditional markets, but demonstrating how the underlying technology can be used to improve the process.

Solana came dangerously close to losing finality

• Solana came close to a network freeze last Wednesday after a routing failure at a data-center provider temporarily knocked nearly 29% of the network’s staked SOL offline. Solana stops finalizing transactions if more than one-third of staked tokens are knocked offline. Around 90 validators were affected, although blocks continued to be produced and transactions continued as normal. (Cryptonews)
• Why it matters: Solana’s incident shows how infrastructure problems outside the blockchain ecosystem can become a network-level risk. For a major network like Solana that is counted on to support payments, trading, and institutional activity, the outage brought it dangerously close to a point where transactions would stop reaching finality. Despite that risk, the network continued producing blocks and processing transactions throughout the disruption, meaning it was largely business as usual for users.

Canadian spotlight: Keel, formerly Bitfarms, winds down Bitcoin holdings

• TSX-listed Keel Infrastructure, formerly known as Canadian Bitcoin miner Bitfarms, said it sold 1,085 BTC for roughly C$104 million between April 1 and August 7. The company still held 1,861 BTC as of August 7 as it continues to pivot toward high-performance computing and AI data-center infrastructure. (TMX Money)
• Why it matters: Bitfarms was once one of Canada’s most recognizable publicly traded Bitcoin miners. The company’s pivot away from a Bitcoin-focused strategy was cheered by investors as the infrastructure built during the Bitcoin mining boom can be repurposed for AI and high-performance computing. 

• BTC Weekly Range: $87K-$91K
• ETH Weekly Range: $2.5K-$2.6K

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• August 17: Canada Inflation Rate
• August 18: U.S Housing Starts
• August 19: U.S FOMC Minutes Published 

Crypto markets struggled to gain momentum last week even as U.S. inflation data became somewhat more supportive of risk-on assets. Bitcoin started the week around C$90,500 before dipping toward the C$87,000 range by Friday as investors remained cautious while U.S. spot crypto ETFs returned to net outflows.

U.S. consumer inflation eased slightly in July, while producer prices were unchanged. On Friday, data showed U.S. retail sales unexpectedly fell 0.6%. These two readouts reduced some of the pressure on the Federal Reserve to raise rates in September, but inflation remains above the central bank’s target and higher energy prices continue to cloud the outlook.

The ongoing question remains the same: will softer economic data be enough to improve expectations for liquidity and interest rates, or will weak demand, ETF outflows, and continued geopolitical uncertainty continue to keep risk appetite subdued?

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