Autor Cointelegraph by Christina Comben

For years, the defining characteristic of the artificial intelligence race has been speed.Build a bigger model. Spend more on compute. Release it. Rinse and repeat, with litte regard for the unknown unknowns.The average “p/doom” (probability of AI eventually going catastrophically wrong) among AI researchers was estimated to be between 15% and 20% in 2024. A year later, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei upped the stakes, saying he believed there was a 25% chance “that things go really, really badly.”Even as far back as 2014, xAI chief Elon Musk warned: “We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.” And OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged in 2015 that AI would “probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world,” but that, in the meantime, there would be “great companies created.” With better odds of cheating death playing Russian Roulette, anyone with even a fleeting interest in the topic has had an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of their stomach for a while now.So what’s changed? Why are the companies driving the AI race suddenly asking to slam on the brakes?That’s what happened over the weekend, when Amodei published an essay calling for frontier AI development to be “paced,” warning that AI capabilities are advancing faster than the industry’s ability to understand and control them, and that the internet could get taken over by AI swarms within six to 12 months.Related: Nvidia buys Hugging Face for $12.9B in push into AI softwareAltman broadly agreed, saying the world deserves the “confidence” that the companies developing ever-more capable AI will act “responsibly,” and Musk backed Amodei’s proposal, simply commenting: “Dario is right.”The concern is not confined to the companies building the technology either. On Monday, UN rights chief Volker Türk called for “urgent action” on frontier AI, warning of “unprecedented risks” and saying the world is “on the cusp of irreversible change.” If the companies building the most powerful AI models genuinely believe capability is outrunning control, the p/doom slope would appear to be getting steeper. Or is there another explanation here hiding in plain sight?Have AI labs actually hit a new frontier?Amodei’s essay points to AI systems that are becoming more autonomous, including a recent incident where OpenAI’s AI agents hacked their way out of a controlled testing environment and compromised parts of the AI platform Hugging Face. They conducted “cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack and that were unrelated to the task at hand,” Amodei said.He also highlighted the prospect of recursive self-improvement (RSI), where AI systems become capable of helping build better versions of themselves, which can then help build even better systems, potentially creating a feedback loop in AI development. The people building these systems are also increasingly stepping into the fray, with Anthropic’s Jacob Coxon becoming the latest in a growing list of employees to resign over safety concerns. The AI industry is “gambling with our lives,” he said last week, warning that the AI race is moving faster than the safeguards around the systems. Anthropic’s Jacob Coxon resigns over safety concerns. Source: Anderson Cooper.OpenAI has already said that AI research is becoming increasingly more autonomous, and that coding agents are materially accelerating researchers’ work, using 3.1 agent workdays for every workday of human labor by mid-August. In an interview with Fortune published Sept. 12, Altman said OpenAI would “melt” all its GPUs if that’s what it took to keep humanity alive, to which Satoshi Action Fund CEO Dennis Porter said:“Altman must have peered over the edge into the abyss and saw something that scared the sh*t out of him.”Related: OpenAI says AI models escaped containment to hack Hugging FaceOn Monday, Altman said there are two ways AI progress could go “very badly”: losing control to AI or ending up in a “world with too much concentration of power.”But the question isn’t whether AI is already dangerous enough to shut down, but whether the systems designed to evaluate and control AI are keeping pace, and as Altman said, “pacing” does not mean stopping. It means continuing to develop AI, but more slowly, while safety testing catches up. With spending on AI safety and alignment drastically eclipsed by spending on AI development and capabilities, that gap will be hard to fill.Frontier AI is becoming extraordinarily expensive But what if the calls for a global slowdown are really just a recognition that the economics of the AI race are getting harder to justify? As AI researcher and lecturer, Eli David said:“Perfectly explains Dario’s motivation: Slow down research to cut compute spending that is spiraling out of control, so he can IPO.”AI investor Grant Hummer held a similarly skeptical view, commenting:“Translation: our gross margins are getting competed down to 0 by open source models and our capex burn rate is too high.” The problem is that the race itself is becoming more expensive, with ever more capable models requiring vast quantities of chips, data centers, electricity and capital. Goldman Sachs estimates that global AI investment will reach around $1 trillion in 2026, including roughly $581 billion in the US. Meanwhile, S&P Global says combined capital expenditure from the six largest hyperscalers, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle and SpaceX, is expected to exceed $1.3 trillion by 2027.Global AI investment will reach around $1 trillion in 2026. Source: Goldman SachsOn top of all that, AI companies have yet to prove that those costs can eventually translate into sustainable revenue. On Monday Reuters highlighted the commercial pressure on AI companies to keep pushing despite their calls to slow development down. When every new capability can help justify another funding round, infrastructure investment or higher valuation, halting the gravy train seems like a counterintuitive task.Ed Leon Klinger, co-founder and CEO of AI startup Flock, pushed back on the idea that AI labs are using safety as cover for their commercial interests. He said it makes little sense for frontier labs to invent safety concerns to boost their initial public offerings (IPOs) when that would expose them to heavier scrutiny and potentially delay them going public.“For it to be true, Sam, Dario, Demis, and Elon all have to be lying, along with a big chunk of their execs, chief scientists, and resigning employees… A much simpler explanation at this point: they think the risk is real.”Wall Street and Washington aren’t ready to hit the brakesWith trillions of dollars of investment pouring into the United States and AI infrastructure expected to drive around half of S&P 500 earnings growth this year, neither Wall Street nor Washington appear to be willing to step on the brakes.Global AI stocks balked at the news, with AI-linked Asian stocks falling sharply on Monday following the slowdown calls. SoftBank fell 13.2%, Kioxia 9.8% and SK Hynix 5.3%. The Financial Times reported Monday that President Donald Trump rejected calls for an AI slowdown, arguing that the US needs to maintain its lead over China. He said:“Look, we’re leading China in AI . . . and, frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI, wins.”Trump said guardrails are possible, but he dismissed what he described as exaggerated concerns about AI risks, telling reporters, “They’re bringing up things that won’t happen.”Economist Noah Smith argued that the main objection to “pacing” AI is simple: if American companies slow down, Chinese companies could simply overtake them. That puts the labs in what Smith calls a “Red Queen’s race,” where if they stop building, they fear someone else will build it anyway.AI researchers place the probability of doom between 15% and 20% in 2024. Source: Grace at al.Even if the labs wanted to coordinate a slowdown, that could create another problem. OpenAI has reportedly asked members of Congress whether an industry-wide slowdown could run into US antitrust law, since coordination between competing labs could potentially amount to restricting output. Related: Fears of AI-driven DeFi hack epidemic overstated for now — but not for longFormer White House AI and crypto czar, David Sacks, had a simple response to Amodei and Altman’s call to “pace the frontier”: “go ahead,” he said, arguing that if the labs want to slow down, they are free to do so themselves. Yet, it creates the mother of all catch-22s: if competing AI companies coordinate to slow development, they could run into antitrust rules. If they each slow down independently, they risk losing ground to competitors and countries that keep pushing ahead.So why are they asking to slow down now?Amodei and Altman are not calling for AI to stop. They’re calling for a system where powerful AI models can be developed as safety testing, monitoring and shared standards catch up. “When we talk about “pacing”, we do not mean “stopping,” Altman said, acknowledging that safety cases and monitoring have “significant costs,” but that pacing would be “well worth this cost.”“No amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness, or let capabilities get ahead of alignment and monitoring.”The problem, though, is that these pressures have not disappeared, and with Trump’s dismissal of the AI chiefs’ cries and the US stock market so deeply intertwined with their companies, they are only getting stronger.Now the very companies that spent years pushing the frontier forward now say the frontier may be moving too fast.Magazine: Recovery specialists crack $1B crypto wallet… but find just $10Cointelegraph publishes long-form journalism, analysis and narrative reporting produced by Cointelegraph’s in-house editorial team with subject-matter expertise. All articles are edited and reviewed by Cointelegraph editors in line with our editorial standards. Some articles contain affiliate links, from which Cointelegraph may earn a commission. These relationships do not influence which products we review or our editorial conclusions. Content published in here does not constitute financial, legal or investment advice. Readers should conduct their own research and consult qualified professionals where appropriate. Cointelegraph maintains full editorial independence.

The HIMS token is designed to track shares of the teleheath company Hims & Hers, which trade on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). On Robinhood Chain, traders can buy and sell the tokenized stock alongside other crypto assets like memecoins.And that’s what happened with BONER. The deliberately ridiculous memecoin was paired with HIMS in a liquidity pool, where traders could swap between the two tokens.At one point, the pool contained 31,198 HIMS tokens, which is more than half of the 58,714 tokenized HIMS shares that were in circulation. That imbalance briefly sent the HIMS token on Robinhood to $132.64, more than four times the $28.84 closing price of the real HIMS shares on the NYSE. It is a bizarre glimpse of what can happen when real-world assets are put onchain and made usable in crypto markets. As Thomas Probst, a research analyst at Kaiko, tells Magazine:“A listed stock effectively becomes a composable DeFi asset at an unprecedented scale, in the same way Ether did.”But why would anyone want to trade a memecoin against a tokenized healthcare stock in the first place? And what happens when onchain markets make even more bizarre pairings possible? Onchain finance is for the ‘crazy ones’Cast your mind back to summer 2020, when DeFi pioneers were busy farming for yield, deconstructing legacy finance and trying not to get rugged in the process. As Mike Dudas, co-founder of 6th Man Ventures, puts it: “Onchain finance is for the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in square holes.”Robinhood Chain seems to be the next iteration of this phenomenon, finding new uses for tokenized stocks no one had even considered until now. In less than three months after it launched, traders on Robinhood have created some wild crypto-native pairings like BONER/HIMS, AI/NVIDIA and SPACEHOOD/SPCX.Stock tokens where they are the quote asset. Source: DeFi PrimeThe basic idea is simple: instead of buying and holding a tokenized stock on its own, users can put it into a decentralized liquidity pool alongside pretty much any other token, and traders can swap between the two, creating a market around the pair. Related: Robinhood Chain nears $1B TVL as Uniswap drives liquidity: Standard CharteredOne of the launchpads behind the trend, LONG, says its stock-paired markets generated more than $425 million in trading volume over a 24-hour period on Sept. 2, with almost $12 million locked in stock-token liquidity. Sergej Kunz, co-founder of DeFi aggregator 1inch, tells Magazine:“The opportunity tokenized equities present is much bigger than assets appearing onchain. […] this is not just about changing the venue. It is about creating an asset that can plug into an open financial system.”Angelo Aspris, a finance academic at the University of Sydney, notes that this creates an array of new opportunities. “Once equity exposure becomes programmable, it can be used as a quote asset, collateral, loanable inventory or margin for derivatives.”In other words, once a stock becomes a token, it doesn’t have to remain just a stock; it can become one of the building blocks of entirely new DeFi markets.So, is this actually a new market?Looking under the hood, there’s nothing particularly revolutionary about the plumbing. The markets are built using automated market makers (AMMs), a type of DEX mechanism that uses liquidity pools and algorithms to set prices and which let traders swap one token for another without a traditional order book or a matching buyer on the other side.What is new is what those markets can contain. In a traditional stock market, stocks trade against currencies or other conventional financial instruments. In the wacky world of onchain finance, a tokenized stock can become one half of a market with almost anything else that has sufficient liquidity. Reid Noch, vice president of US equity market structure and electronic trading at TD Securities, says AMMs remain “very novel when compared to traditional markets.” While he finds the idea of making a stock part of the quote and liquidity for another market “interesting,” he says it’s a use case could make institutional adoption a harder sell. He tells Magazine:“As long as they are primarily used to drive liquidity in memecoins, it will be challenging for more traditional players to take them seriously.”Stock-paired markets generated more than $425 million in trading in 24 hours. Source: longdotxyzIt may sound like a strange use for a stock token, but there is a logic to it from a DeFi point of view. Traders don’t really need a reason to pair two assets beyond having a market where they can swap between them. Related: Robinhood takes stakes in Crypto.com, OG.com in prediction markets dealAnd the more important experiment is whether tokenized stocks can become reusable financial building blocks rather than simply digital versions of traditional shares. Does it actually work?The BONER/HIMS episode shows that unconventional pairings can have unconventional results. Aspris says the extreme divergence between the tokenized HIMS price and the underlying stock was largely a consequence of “thin reserves” and “temporarily restricted issuance,” warning: “This creates the conditions for these events and increases the potential for strategic exploitation or manipulation.”Arbitrage would normally pull the tokenized stock price back to the price of the real stock, but that link can break when liquidity is thin or the real-world market is closed, as Probst explains:“Arbitrage relies here on a single actor rather than a continuous competitive mechanism like the one seen in traditional stock markets. These pools can therefore produce unreliable price signals, without any real transmission to the reference market.”Memecoin / stock token pairings are succeeding at scale. Source: @howdymaryNoch is similarly skeptical that these pools will become the primary venue for discovering the price of tokenized stocks: “I still see price discovery happening more in traditional markets, and AMMs being used [by] arbitrageurs to keep the market in line. […] I struggle with how these markets will drive price discovery given their low volumes compared to traditional markets.” Maybe price discovery isn’t the point Memecoin/stock pools may be able to trade around the clock, but these markets are immature and isolated from traditional markets….for now.That said, they’re already generating real demand for tokenized stocks and testing how those assets behave when plugged into DeFi, says Kunz.“Memecoin pairs might not be the number one case for tokenized equities, but are yet another source of demand, volume and liquidity for those assets.”Memecoins may also be just the beginning. If tokenized stocks become established DeFi building blocks, there’s no obvious reason they have to be paired with other stocks or cryptocurrencies. Why not use them against tokenized real estate, commodities, artworks or even tokenized farts? (It’s a thing, look it up).Of course, that doesn’t mean those markets will emerge, or that they would be popular or make economic sense. But the BONER/HIMS experiment shows that once real-world assets become composable onchain, markets can emerge around all kinds of combinations that TradFi would never have dreamed of. Aspris notes we are just at the beginning of this experiment, however: “The experiment is useful and the direction is clear, but calling tokenized equities a finished DeFi primitive would be ahead of the facts.”Magazine: Token buybacks are booming. But are they good for crypto projects?Cointelegraph publishes long-form journalism, analysis and narrative reporting produced by Cointelegraph’s in-house editorial team with subject-matter expertise. All articles are edited and reviewed by Cointelegraph editors in line with our editorial standards. Some articles contain affiliate links, from which Cointelegraph may earn a commission. These relationships do not influence which products we review or our editorial conclusions. Content published in here does not constitute financial, legal or investment advice. Readers should conduct their own research and consult qualified professionals where appropriate. Cointelegraph maintains full editorial independence.

In an industry built on transparency and verifiability, newcomers might assume that crypto and blockchains leave very little room for mystery. They’d be completely wrong of course, because the murky world of digital assets is rife with underhanded dealings, unsolved enigmas and fortunes disappearing behind pseudonyms.From the identity of Bitcoin’s mystery creator to what really happened to a DAI developer on a beach in Puerto Rico, here are 10 crypto mysteries that remain unsolved. 1. Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?More than 17 years after Bitcoin’s creation, the greatest unsolved crypto mystery persists. We still don’t know who Satoshi Nakamoto is, or even whether Satoshi was one person.He, she, or they published the Bitcoin white paper in 2008, mined the genesis block in January 2009 and remained active in its early development before disappearing from public view in 2010. The quest for Satoshi’s identity has since produced an endless parade of possible candidates, from cryptographers and cypherpunks to British academics, early Bitcoin developers and even convicted sex offenders. The latest serious attempt to solve the mystery came in April 2026, when The New York Times published a lengthy investigation naming British cryptographer Adam Back as its leading candidate. Related: Satoshi-era Bitcoin wakes after 16 years of dormancy as 600 BTC movesThe Times claimed there were similarities between his writings and Satoshi’s, their shared cryptographic interests, Back’s work on Hashcash — which was cited in the Bitcoin white paper — and a series of other circumstantial clues, all of which Back strenuously denied.Adam Back’s Hashcash is cited in the Bitcoin Whitepaper. Source: Bitcoin.orgOther suspected candidates over the years have included core developer Peter Todd, cryptographer Hal Finney, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and others. Self-proclaimed Bitcoin creator Craig Wright is the only major Satoshi candidate to have been formally ruled by a UK court not to be Satoshi.There were even some bizarre online claims that notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein could be Satoshi after a newly released tranche of the Epstein files revealed the sex trafficer had been involved in the early crypto industry, and made a 2014 investment in Back’s Blockstream. There is no credible evidence that Epstein was Satoshi, , and so the enigma remains: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto and where is he now? 2. Who was the Patoshi miner?If you thought the Satoshi mystery was strange, try digging into Bitcoin’s earliest blocks like blockchain researcher Sergio Lerner.In 2013, he discovered a pattern in the way Bitcoin’s earliest blocks were mined and linked it to a single miner he later dubbed “Patoshi.”Lerner estimated that the miner had accumulated about 1.1 million BTC across 22,000 blocks, which makes the enigmatic figure the largest holder of BTC today, above Coinbase, BlackRock and Strategy.Satoshi Nakamoto is the top Bitcoin holder. Source: ArkhamWhile Patoshi has never conclusively been proven to be the mysterious Bitcoin creator, the pattern is still one of the strongest pieces of evidence linking a huge stash of early Bitcoin to Satoshi. So who was Patoshi? Was it Satoshi operating a single machine, another early Bitcoin enthusiast, or something else entirely? 3. What happened to Mt. Gox’s missing Bitcoin?When Mt. Gox collapsed in February 2014, it claimed that around 850,000 BTC had disappeared — only to later uncover some 200,000 BTC hiding in old-format wallets it previously believed to be empty. To this day, the rest of the coins’ whereabouts remain a mystery. More than 12 years later, creditors are finally getting some of their money back, but what happened to Mt. Gox’s missing Bitcoin has never been resolved. Related: Mt. Gox moves $739M in Bitcoin from cold wallets: ArkhamInvestigators have traced portions of it, including some coins connected to Russian cybercriminals and the BTC-e exchange. US prosecutors have also alleged that Russian nationals stole and laundered roughly 647,000 BTC from Mt. Gox, yet the full story of the stolen coins has not been completely solved. Russian nationals charged with hacking Mt. Gox. Source: DOJWho stole them? How long had the theft been happening? How much was taken through hacking versus internal failures? And more importantly, where are all those coins now?4. What really happened to QuadrigaCX’s missing funds?Canadian exchange QuadrigaCX shot to the top of crypto’s mystery list in December 2018 after its founder, Gerald Cotten, died suddenly in Jaipur, India.The exchange was unable to access millions of dollars in cryptocurrency that customers had deposited, and it was popularly believed at the time that Cotten had taken the exchange’s private keys with him to the grave.An investigation by the Ontario Securities Commission later found that he had actually transferred millions of dollars of client funds to his and his wife’s personal accounts, and had also used client assets to cover his own trading losses and personal expenses.Was Quadriga a massive fraud that collapsed when its orchestrator died? Did Cotten leave behind wallets nobody has found, or did he fake his death and pocket the funds?5. Where is the CryptoQueen?Few crypto mysteries involve a missing person quite as notorious as Ruja Ignatova, AKA the CryptoQueen.The charismatic Bulgarian founder of OneCoin allegedly helped build one of the world’s biggest crypto scams, with the FBI saying the scheme defrauded victims worldwide of more than $4 billion. In October 2017, Ignatova flew from Sofia to Athens and then promptly disappeared, never to be found again.The FBI added Ignatova to its 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list in 2022 and still offers a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to her arrest and conviction. In a 2026 update, the FBI said she remains at large and described her as “well-funded” and “well-connected.”Rula Ignatova is still at large, according to the FBI. Source: FBISo, is she still doing the crypto conference circuit undercover today, scheming for her next victims? Was she killed, or did she escape with millions of dollars and is living under a new identity with the aid of extensive plastic surgery? Where is Ruja Ignatova? Maybe she’s sipping Mumbai Mules on a beach somewhere with Gerald Cotten.6. Will James Howells ever get his lost Bitcoin back?Back in 2013, Welsh IT worker James Howells accidentally threw away a hard drive containing the keys to what would later become a massive Bitcoin fortune, unwittingly becoming the poster child for how not to self-custody your BTC.Related: Tips for crypto newbies, vets and skeptics from a Bitcoiner who buried $700MHowells insists that the infamous hard drive ended up in a massive landfill and spent years trying to recover it, even proposing to excavate part of the landfill with specialist equipment and AI-powered sorting systems to search the waste.But after years of legal battles and failed attempts to persuade Newport City Council to let him excavate the site, his efforts to recover the drive have been in vain. A High Court judge ruled that he had no realistic prospect of succeeding in January 2025. James Howells’ BTC is still on the blockchain. Source: Mempool.spaceThe Bitcoin itself, however, isn’t gone; it’s still sitting on the blockchain, visible to anyone who cares to look in the natural history museum of self-custody blunders. 7. Who was the DAO hacker?Remember the 2016 DAO hack that would change Ethereum forever? This epic exploit wasn’t just one of crypto’s biggest early hacks; it helped determine what Ethereum would become.An attacker exploited a vulnerability in The DAO’s smart contract to drain more than 3.6 million ETH into a child DAO, siphoning over 30% of the DAO’s funds before the attack stopped.The attacker was never identified, and the aftermath would change crypto history, ultimately splitting Ethereum into two blockchains: the one we all know today and a smaller purist version, Ethereum Classic. In 2022 Laura Shin claimed the attacker was Austrian programmer Toby Hoenisch, but he denied the claims and has never been charged.The DAO hack raised questions that persist today about whether code is law and blockchain transactions are immutable, or whether they can be rolled back if we don’t like them.8. Who really stole the $400 million from FTX?FTX’s collapse was already one of crypto’s biggest disasters when, just hours after the exchange filed for bankruptcy, hundreds of millions of dollars in digital assets began disappearing from its wallets. About $415 million in crypto was ultimately reported stolen.Of course, the timing immediately raised suspicion, with FTX in chaos, employees trying to secure assets, bankruptcy proceedings beginning and different groups racing to determine who actually controlled the exchange’s wallets. The US Department of Justice eventually seized hundreds of millions of dollars in assets linked to FTX and investigators have traced parts of the movements, but the identity of the attacker remains an unsolved crypto mystery. Was it an opportunist outside hacker who happened to strike at the perfect moment? Was it somebody with inside access, or did the swirling chaos around the collapse create an opportunity that someone close to the exchange exploited? To this day, we don’t have an answer.9. What really happened to Nikolai Mushegian?Nikolai Mushegian was an early MakerDAO developer and a co-founder of Balancer who helped shape some of DeFi’s first infrastructure.On Oct. 28, 2022, Mushegian was found dead in the waters off Condado Beach in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Local police said he had been out swimming and was caught by strong ocean currents.Not everybody buys that version of events, however, since Mushegian had taken to Twitter to warn of his impending assassination just hours earlier. In a series of disturbing and paranoid messages, he claimed that the CIA, Mossad and “pedo elite” were involved in a sex-trafficking operation in the area and were planning to frame him and kill him.Nikolai Mushegian alerted his followers of his death before it happened. Source: Nikolai Mushegian The Puerto Rico Justice Department investigated his death for almost a year and determined no criminal involvement, but given his online messages, questions about what happened remain.Was Mushegian really caught by currents, as authorities reported, or was something more sinister going on in his final hours? 10. Why did someone deliberately burn 107 BTC?Perhaps one of the weirdest mysteries of all is why anyone would burn a Bitcoin fortune after HODLing it for more than 12 years? Yet that’s exactly what happened in May 2026.Someone sent 107 BTC, worth about $8.5 million, to a Bitcoin address from which the coins are rendered unspendable, effectively destroying them. The coins had been acquired around 2014, when Bitcoin was trading below $600, making the timing particularly strange. Why would anyone voluntarily destroy millions of dollars in Bitcoin after holding it through a 12,000% rise in its value?Stranger still, one of the five wallets suddenly sent about 20 BTC, worth roughly $1 million, to what appeared to be a large crypto custodian in March. Almost exactly the same amount came back three weeks later, before the Bitcoin was ultimately burned, adding another layer to the mystery. For an industry still in its teenage years, crypto sure has endured its fair share of intrigue. Be careful next time you decide to self-custody your fortune — you might just end up as one of crypto’s next great mysteries.Magazine: Is Bitcoin too volatile to risk your retirement on?Cointelegraph publishes long-form journalism, analysis and narrative reporting produced by Cointelegraph’s in-house editorial team with subject-matter expertise. All articles are edited and reviewed by Cointelegraph editors in line with our editorial standards. Some articles contain affiliate links, from which Cointelegraph may earn a commission. These relationships do not influence which products we review or our editorial conclusions. Content published in here does not constitute financial, legal or investment advice. Readers should conduct their own research and consult qualified professionals where appropriate. Cointelegraph maintains full editorial independence.

You stack sats. You farm yield, and you’d rather sell your car than part with your BTC. But does that mean you should bank your golden years on Bitcoin?Many retirement industry professional such as MIT finance professor Jonathan Parker say there is a sweet spot level for crypto exposure in a diversified retirement portfolio:“Yes, zero.”Parker, whose research spans portfolio choice, personal finance, retirement finance and Bitcoin, is unusually blunt about where the cryptocurrency belongs. But it’s a view shared by the average citizen.A recent survey by the National Institute on Retirement Security found that 77% of Americans consider cryptocurrency in workplace retirement plans as risky. But regulators and investment firms alike have been steadily opening the door to greater crypto exposure in retirement savings in recent years.BlackRock, for example, says a 1%-2% Bitcoin allocation can be reasonable for a diversified portfolio, where investors can tolerate the risk, while Fidelity says allocations of 2%-5% could improve retirement outcomes. A smaller position allows investors to benefit from Bitcoin’s volatility while limiting the downside. But there’s a more interesting question than whether crypto is too risky in the abstract.Can you be a passionate believer that Bitcoin is the ultimate in sound money, or that Ether will be the future of finance — and still decide your retirement savings are better off without it?Bitcoin is already creeping into retirement portfoliosRyan Firth is the founder of Mercer Street Personal Financial Services, a financial planner who specializes in digital assets. He views Bitcoin as something that can sit within a conventional portfolio rather than a stand-alone retirement bet. He says BTC can potentially replace some stock exposure rather than simply being piled on top of it. He tells Magazine:“Bitcoin offers higher return potential than stocks but with more volatility.”Americans have mixed views on cryptocurrency in retirement plans. Source: National Institute on Retirement Security He says his general rule of thumb is that crypto assets shouldn’t make up more than 5% of your investable assets, adding:“The conservative approach is to invest only what you are willing to potentially lose.”Related: US lawmakers push back on Labor Department plans to include crypto in 401(k)sRetirement funds are taking positions themselvesThe average person might think the crypto industry is too risky, but institutional investors see it as an opportunity. Public filings show pension funds and other large investors holding regulated spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), while others have gained exposure through publicly traded companies closely tied to the sector.CalPERS, for example, the largest public pension fund in the United States, has disclosed an investment in Strategy, the largest corporate Bitcoin treasury holder, as part of its index-oriented public equity portfolio. CalSTRS, is the largest educator-only pension fund. While it tells Magazine it has not made direct investments in cryptocurrency it has invested in firms that “some might consider crypto companies,” such as Coinbase, “a publicly traded company that operates a cryptocurrency exchange platform.”That difference here is that institutional investors are trying to gain exposure to the growth of the crypto industry, rather than just making Bitcoin a core retirement asset.Your retirement portfolio has one job Bitcoin doesn’tBitcoin’s frequent drawdowns and year long bear markets make it a tricky asset to hold for those nearing or in their retirement years. BlackRock recommends up to a 2% Bitcoin allocation, where investors can tolerate risk. Source: BlackRockWhen you’re young a drawdown is just a blip among a wider uptrend. When you are retired, spending retirement savings that have fallen significantly in value magnifies the damage considerably. Related: Coinbase launches crypto service for Australian retirement fundsBill Bengen, the financial planner and researcher whose work gave rise to the widely cited 4% retirement withdrawal rule, says capital preservation should be the “primary priority” for retirement portfolios.He tells Magazine that although volatile assets like Bitcoin “can be useful,” he recommends limiting them to no more than 5% of a retirement portfolio to “help prevent a disaster.”Firth says the question is not simply whether Bitcoin will recover, but if investors can afford to wait that long:“Will they stay invested and avoid a knee-jerk reaction when prices inevitably fall? […] What if crypto goes to zero? How would that disrupt their plans and what’s their backup plan?”What if your investment thesis is wrong?This question has crossed the mind of even the staunchest Bitcoin HODLer: how much of your future should depend on one investment thesis being right? A hypothetical allocation framework for those who want to invest in Bitcoin. Source: FidelityWhat happens if you haven’t just wasted your life’s work but your retirement fund, if Bitcoin falls victim to quantum attackers, or if something better than Bitcoin is invented.Bengen says many people believe AI is in a bubble.“Bubbles eventually pop. The same could be said for Bitcoin.”That problem rings true for anyone building a retirement portfolio around a high-conviction investment, since conviction does not eliminate the possibility of being wrong.Parker says investors shouldn’t hold cash in retirement accounts and shouldn’t hold peer-to-peer digital cash either. “Currencies are for transacting, not investing. Bitcoin is no different. People should invest in real assets that pay interest, coupon payments, or dividends.” He says investors who want exposure to the success or failure of the crypto industry should own the equity or debt of companies that generate revenue from it, rather than holding Bitcoin itself.You can believe in crypto without betting your retirement on itIf your retirement savings aren’t in Bitcoin, that doesn’t make you any less committed to its long-term growth. You don’t have to choose between believing crypto is the future and casting it as a speculative gamble with no place in a serious portfolio, as Firth advises:“It doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing proposition.” You can still believe crypto will change the world — without making your retirement depend on being right.Magazine: Recovery specialists crack $1B crypto wallet… but find just $10Cointelegraph publishes long-form journalism, analysis and narrative reporting produced by Cointelegraph’s in-house editorial team with subject-matter expertise. All articles are edited and reviewed by Cointelegraph editors in line with our editorial standards. Some articles contain affiliate links, from which Cointelegraph may earn a commission. These relationships do not influence which products we review or our editorial conclusions. Content published in here does not constitute financial, legal or investment advice. Readers should conduct their own research and consult qualified professionals where appropriate. Cointelegraph maintains full editorial independence.

As the industry matures and borrows more pages out of TradiFi’s playbook, crypto projects are starting to adopt some of the behaviors of public companies.The latest craze rocking cryptoville is token buybacks: using revenue to buy back your own token.So far in 2026, crypto projects have spent about $640 million on the practice, up around 17% from the same period the year prior, and an order of magnitude more than the $366,000 spent in 2024. Hyperliquid and Pump.fun accounting for almost 90% of the current spend.So what’s the sudden appeal? Buybacks can create demand for a token, while burns can reduce the supply making each token more valuable. That dynamic can cause upward pressure on the token price.It also gives holders a more tangible connection to the economic activity on the underlying protocol. Orest Gavryliak, chief legal officer at decentralized exchange aggregator 1inch, tells Magazine:“When projects implement revenue-funded buybacks and burns, they typically have one of two objectives in mind: either to decrease the token supply in circulation or to demonstrate the rationale for investing in protocol revenues.”Gavryliak says that telling users a project has “bought and burned tokens” is “much more straightforward” than explaining how governance rights work, how fees are set, or how the protocol is used. Related: Pump.fun laid off workers before they received millions in PUMP tokens: ReportBut there’s a flipside: every dollar a protocol spends buying its token is a dollar it could have spent hiring developers, expanding the business, strengthening its balance sheet or building the product.So, as buybacks become one of crypto’s hottest tokenomics tools, are they actually good for the projects using them?Why crypto projects are buying themselvesYou might wonder if projects buying their own token is counterproductive. After all, projects typically sell tokens to raise funds to cover costs. Almost, but with an important caveat. Using revenue generated to buy back tokens (and then to hold them or burn them) creates an implicit connection between the success of the protocol and the value of its token. That’s something crypto projects have long struggled with. As Max Shannon, senior research associate at Bitwise Europe, explains:“Buybacks and burns remain an effective way to accrue value to tokenholders: they create a continuous bid in the open market for the token, directly tethering token success to the platform’s adoption.”That marks a sea-change for an industry that has spent the past couple of years chasing narratives or speculating on the greater fool theory — users who bought Fartcoin or Peanut the Squirrel didn’t do so for their sound economic models.Some protocols are taking the idea much further than others. Hyperliquid, for example, has used 99% of its revenue to buy back and burn HYPE and 50% of Pump.fun’s revenue goes toward buying and burning its token, with $446.65 million worth of PUMP already removed from circulation.HYPE Burns. Source: HyperliquidDeFi infrastructure protocol Spark offers a slightly different model, acquiring over 143 million SPK through open-market buybacks funded by protocol surplus, according to co-founder and chief executive Sam MacPherson. But those tokens were not burned, and instead remain in the Spark treasury to reward long-term participants in the ecosystem. MacPherson tells Magazine the point is not simply to reduce supply:“Tokenholders should participate in the long-term economic success of the protocol, rather than simply receive a distribution every time it generates revenue.”He says buybacks allow Spark to create that alignment while “retaining flexibility over how and when the acquired SPK is ultimately deployed,” allowing the protocol to make its token economically relevant rather than “a simple dividend mechanism.”Token buybacks are also a highly tax effective way to return revenue to holders, because users don’t cop a hefty tax bill on dividends or rewards.Is buying the token really the best use of the money?While that all sounds perfectly rational, the bigger question is whether buying your own token is really the best use of a project’s funds? Probably not in every case. MacPherson says:“The question should be: what is the highest-value use of the next dollar of surplus?”If a protocol can reinvest capital at attractive returns, he says, that can be “far more valuable” than simply distributing revenue as it arrives.PUMP Burns. Source: Pump.funBuybacks can support token economics without actually improving the underlying business.There is also no ironclad guarantee that buybacks will translate into higher token prices. Pump.fun has been aggressively buying and burning PUMP since July 2025, but the token is still hovering 50% below its September 2025 all-time high. UNI has also given back around half of the gains it made after Uniswap unveiled its UNIfication proposal in November 2025. Related: Robinhood Chain nears $1B TVL as Uniswap drives liquidity: Standard CharteredShannon points out that “many factors” contributed to those price movements, so they don’t prove buybacks failed, but:“They have prompted investors to debate whether these startup-like projects would be better served by reducing the share of revenue committed to buybacks and burns and reinvesting more in the team and the project itself.”Investors should make a careful distinction between a buyback scheme that pumps prices, and a successful business model.A sustainable protocol that generates genuine surplus may decide that buying its token is the best use of some of that money, but equally a project that’s limping along might simply attempt to buyback tokens to move the price. MacPherson notes:“A buyback doesn’t make an unsustainable protocol sustainable.” When a token starts looking like a stockWhile token buybacks may superficially resemble share buyback program, that doesn’t mean tokens are becoming more like stocks. UNI is down around 50% since it started buybacks and burns. Source: CoingeckoA shareholder owns part of a company and may have voting rights, dividends or a claim on its residual assets. Tokenholders generally do not have those same legal rights, and Orest says that distinction is critical. “This is a market mechanism, not a legally enforceable entitlement,” he says.MacPherson describes SPK as a form of “pseudo-equity” for an onchain protocol. While there isn’t a legal ownership structure in the traditional corporate sense, economically Spark is “trying to create many of the same characteristics: participation in governance, long-term alignment, and a mechanism through which those most committed to the protocol can benefit from its success.” When buybacks start looking like dividendsBut as crypto starts to emulate TradFi buybacks, storm clouds may be gathering on the horizon, as regulators consider what those mechanisms actually amount to.While the Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act of 2025 remains a draft and should not be treated as settled law, Gavryliak says its proposed framework highlights the key question of where a token’s value comes from:“If it stems from the functionality of the network itself, then the asset looks like a commodity. But if the value is based on the efforts of the project’s team in matters of shipping, marketing, or providing returns to token holders, then it is already a security. In the end, don’t put the clothes of a stock on the token and expect it to be a commodity.” At the end of the day, crypto investors want to know what sits underneath a token — revenue, users, sustainable economics — and some credible way for the token to benefit from those things.While buybacks may offer a solution, they can also be just another piece of financial engineering that makes a token look more valuable than it actually is without fixing the issues underneath, as Gavryliak points out:“If the buybacks stopped, would there still be a reason to hold the token? If the answer is no, the problem runs deeper than tokenomics.”Magazine: Mystery surrounds why an OG burned $1M in BitcoinCointelegraph publishes long-form journalism, analysis and narrative reporting produced by Cointelegraph’s in-house editorial team with subject-matter expertise. All articles are edited and reviewed by Cointelegraph editors in line with our editorial standards. 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