The Merkle
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Beyond Search Engine and App Store Scams: 3 Practical Ways to Shield Your Crypto From SparkKitty and Fake Apps
I've written about crypto theft enough times to develop a kind of professional numbness to the dollar figures. This story broke through that numbness anyway, not because of the amount stolen, but because of how avoidable every single piece of it turns out to be once you actually look at the details. Three separate crypto theft vectors surfaced within days of…
AscendEX, Knaken, and Zondacrypto: Anatomy of 2026’s Quietest (and Most Dangerous) Exchange Collapses
I've been tracking exchange collapses for years, and 2026 has quietly become one of the worst years for platform closures I can remember. Five exchanges, from an industry pioneer to a mid-sized regional platform, shut their doors this year alone, and what strikes me most isn't that they failed. It's how differently each one failed, and how each failure expos…
OKX Wallet Trader Mode Complete Review: How CEX-Grade Automation Works (And a Step-by-Step Guide)
OKX Wallet's Trader Mode was supposed to be just another false promise, so I went digging for the inevitable catch. Having tested countess "self-custodial trading" pitches, only to find custody quietly moved somewhere it shouldn't be, I expected to expose this one just as fast.The moment that changed my mind was realizing my key never actually left a hardwar…
Spain’s World Cup Win Liquidates Bettor's $5.2M Crypto Position Amid $4 Billion Polymarket Surge
Spain won the 2026 World Cup with a dramatic 1-0 extra-time victory over Argentina, leaving trader gud.hl empty-handed after risking their entire $5.2 million position on an Argentine win.While crypto traders get wrecked by leverage on bad calls all the time, losing a fortune on a single football match is a whole different level of pain to watch unfold. Acco…
China's Kimi K3 Challenges OpenAI and Anthropic With Five Major Benchmark Wins
Kimi K3, a massive 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model from Moonshot AI, breaks the pattern of unsubstantiated hype by delivering genuine, frontier-level reasoning. Backed by impressive third-party benchmark data, this release marks the first time a Chinese model is actively forcing the industry to re-evaluate where the global AI frontier actually sits.…
The Single Point of Failure Nobody's Asking About In The ZachXBT Wallet Debate
Everyone covering ZachXBT's hardware wallet comments this week is stuck on the same question: which device is safer, a Ledger or an iPhone. I think that's the wrong question entirely. The one nobody's asking is what happens to that crypto the day you're no longer the person who needs to access it. ZachXBT posted on Telegram that he doesn't trust current hard…