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A new report shows Americans prefer debit cards and payment platforms over banks and credit cards when paying their bills. The 2026 ACI Speedpay Pulse Report says debit card use for bill pay hit 52.7% this year, up from 40.6% in 2020. Meanwhile, credit use was 41.3% in 2023 and has now reached 50.3%. Consumers also favor biller websites at 64.5% and biller mobile apps at 39.3%, compared with 31.4% using bank websites. Mobile wallets grew fastest with a 17.6% compound annual growth rate from 2019 to 2025. Generational trends are pronounced, with 75% of Gen Z bill payers using…

In brief Cronos says it reversed approximately $111.2 million tied to the Tectonic exploit by rolling back its blockchain. The intervention discarded 1 hour 54 minutes of transactions, including activity unrelated to the attack. Approximately $9.19 million left the network before validators halted it and remains unrecovered. Cronos, a blockchain network backed by Crypto.com, erased nearly two hours of transaction history to reverse approximately $111.2 million tied to an exploit of lending protocol Tectonic, according to a network post-mortem on Monday.According to the developers behind Cronos, validators reversed completed transactions to protect roughly 92% of affected funds still on the…

Trusted Editorial content, reviewed by leading industry experts and seasoned editors. Ad Disclosure The XRP Ledger’s XLS-66d lending amendment has moved closer to the validator consensus threshold required for activation, with active support reaching 71.4%. The amendment would introduce native uncollateralized lending primitives to XRPL, adding another potential DeFi feature to a ledger best known for payments and settlement. That is a big deal, but it is not live yet. XRPL amendments need sustained validator support before activation. The threshold is 80%, and that support has to hold for 14 days. So 71.4% is close enough to matter, but not…

A surveillance company whose cameras have been deployed across the country is now facing a nationwide class-action lawsuit. Plaintiffs say Flock Safety failed to stop police from using the network to stalk and watch people. The complaint says Flock Group Inc. enabled widespread misuse through weak security features including optional multi-factor authentication that allowed fired officers to retain access. Plaintiffs allege the system of more than 120,000 cameras has facilitated repeated improper searches that went undetected and generated inaccurate data leading to wrongful stops. “Flock has known its system presented recurring risks of both abuse and technological error but repeatedly…

A convenience store in western Massachusetts has sold the largest Megabucks jackpot ticket in the game’s history. The ticket came from King Mart at 494 Westfield Rd. in Holyoke for the September 7th drawing and matches the numbers 21-28-31-34-40-44, says the Massachusetts Lottery. That prize hit $29.71 million and breaks the previous high of $21.7 million set in an October 1985 drawing that eight tickets shared. Winners have one year to claim the top prize. The biggest earlier single-ticket win stood at $16.35 million from a 2022 drawing sold in Ware. Megabucks launched in November of 1982. A 2023 update shrank the…

In brief Strategy repurchased 1,810,885 STRC shares for $176.3 million in the week to September 7. Its board doubled the digital credit securities repurchase program to $2 billion. It bought no BTC and sold no shares under its at-the-market program, a week after a $370 million purchase. Strategy bought no Bitcoin in the week to September 7, a week after ending a two-month BTC purchasing drought, and spent $176.3 million buying back its own preferred stock instead, the Bitcoin treasury company said in a filing on Tuesday.All of it went on STRC, the variable rate perpetual stretch preferred, at 1,810,885…

Crypto trading activity across the Middle East and North Africa is skyrocketing amid the ongoing regional conflict. The Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI) says in a new report that investors in the Middle East are shifting capital into digital assets to protect wealth during disruptions rather than fleeing the region, which has emerged as one of the world’s fastest-growing cryptocurrency areas. Annual on-chain transactions have climbed from approximately $100 billion in 2022 to an estimated $350 billion by 2025–2026, despite the fact that regional conflicts tend to accelerate capital outflows, according to the report. Says BPI, “The Iran conflict displayed a…

Trusted Editorial content, reviewed by leading industry experts and seasoned editors. Ad Disclosure NEAR Protocol’s chain abstraction infrastructure has crossed 50 million lifetime operations, giving the network a fresh milestone in its push to make multi-chain crypto feel less complicated. The idea behind chain abstraction is easy to like because the user problem is obvious. Crypto is too fragmented. People have wallets on different chains, assets in different places, and apps that often require them to think about bridges, gas tokens, networks, and signing flows. NEAR’s pitch is that users should not have to care so much about the chain…

In brief LAPTOP is a meme coin created by Hunter Biden, son of former U.S. President Joe Biden, launching September 9, 2026 on Base. Founders hold 30% of the one billion tokens, locked for six months and vesting fully over two years, according to the Wall Street Journal. A further 20% is reserved for airdrops, with one tranche going to wallets that lost money on TRUMP, President Donald Trump’s own meme coin. LAPTOP is a meme coin named after the personal computer that has trailed Hunter Biden through American politics since 2020. A Delaware repair shop handed the machine over…