Monad: nine months after mainnet
Ex-Jump Trading engineers built a 10,000 TPS EVM chain. $889m of TVL and $198k a day in fees at nine months old. The usage is real; the supply schedule is the problem.
Chain deep dive · 14 Aug 2026Ex-Jump Trading engineers built a 10,000 TPS parallel EVM. Nine months in the usage is real — it is the supply schedule that should worry you.
$889m TVL · $198k/day in feesThe most efficient Bitcoin miner you can readily buy, and still a way to convert money into heat at a loss on a British tariff.
6.45p break-even · 0 of 48 windows843,775 bitcoin at a $75,476 cost basis. In June the mNAV fell below 1.0, and the company that never sold started selling.
mNAV 0.99× · $372 → $93Headlines, prices, mining economics and British tax rules — calculated live from public data, in pounds. We take no referrals from exchanges or hardware sellers, so nothing here is written to move you toward a purchase.
Latest from Cointelegraph, CoinDesk, Decrypt, The Block, Bitcoin Magazine and The Defiant. Refreshed every fifteen minutes.
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Three new pieces every week: a chain deep dive, a mining hardware review, and a listed company. All figures verified live on the day of writing.
Ex-Jump Trading engineers built a 10,000 TPS EVM chain. $889m of TVL and $198k a day in fees at nine months old. The usage is real; the supply schedule is the problem.
Chain deep dive · 14 Aug 2026234 TH/s, 3,510W, £5.43 a day. Break-even at 6.45p per kWh against a 13.77p Agile floor — the best machine you can buy, and still losing money here.
Hardware review · 14 Aug 2026843,775 bitcoin at a $75,476 cost basis. mNAV fell below 1.0 in June, and the company that never sold started selling.
TradFi deep dive · 14 Aug 2026Almost never at domestic prices. Five coins against live tariff data, and the three narrow cases where it still works.
14 Aug 2026Forty-eight prices a day, occasionally negative. Why a single average rate hides the answer entirely.
14 Aug 2026You pay it whether the rig runs or not, so it has no business in the switch-on decision.
14 Aug 2026Disposals, the £3,000 allowance, 18% and 24% rates, why mining is taxed twice, and what CARF changed in January.
Registration is anti-money-laundering, not consumer protection — and your holdings sit outside the FSCS entirely.
Prices your rig against live half-hourly electricity rates by region. GPUs and ASICs, ten proof-of-work chains.
Most-searched coins on CoinGecko in the last 24 hours. Attention, not endorsement — trending often means volatile.
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Your rig doesn't cost one electricity price. On a wholesale-linked tariff it costs forty-eight a day. This prices it against tonight's actual rates.
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Pulling live tariff and network data.
Method, ASIC caveats and the embeddable version are on the full calculator page.
Live network hashrate for the ten largest proof-of-work chains, and what a reference rig earns on each.
| Coin | Network hashrate | Price |
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| Coin | Revenue / day | Break-even power |
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Revenue is gross of electricity. Break-even is the unit price at which the rig covers its own power — compare it against your tariff, or use the full calculator for half-hourly pricing. Chains with no consumer-hardware row are ASIC-only.
2026/27 tax year. General information, not tax advice — your circumstances decide the treatment.
| Annual exempt amount | £3,000 |
| Basic rate taxpayers | 18% |
| Higher & additional rate | 24% |
| Report even if under the allowance | if proceeds exceed £50,000 |
More than most people expect. Selling for pounds is obvious, but swapping one coin for another is a disposal of the first, spending crypto on goods is a disposal, and so is gifting to anyone other than a spouse or civil partner. Moving coins between your own wallets is not.
The allowance fell from £12,300 in 2022/23 to £6,000, then to £3,000 — so gains that were comfortably covered three years ago now generate a bill.
Coins you mine are income at the moment you receive them, valued in pounds on that day, taxed at 20%, 40% or 45% depending on your band. That value then becomes your cost basis. When you later sell, any further gain is a separate capital gains event.
Whether HMRC treats mining as trading income or miscellaneous income depends on scale, organisation and commerciality — a rig in the spare room is usually the latter. It matters, because trading treatment allows expenses like electricity to be deducted more generously.
HMRC applies three rules in strict order. Same-day: disposals match acquisitions on the same day first. Then the 30-day “bed and breakfast” rule, matching against anything bought in the following 30 days. Anything left falls into the Section 104 pool, an average cost across all remaining holdings of that asset.
This is what makes manual crypto accounting painful, and why most people with more than a handful of transactions end up using dedicated software.
The Cryptoasset Reporting Framework took effect on 1 January 2026. UK platforms must collect and report user identity and transaction data to HMRC automatically, with international exchange of the same data between jurisdictions. Previously HMRC had to request information case by case.
You are also now required to give accurate personal details to platforms you use. Getting that wrong can attract a penalty of up to £300, and more from non-UK providers.
Gains go on the SA108 capital gains pages alongside your SA100; crypto income goes in the income section of the return. Online filing deadline is 31 January following the end of the tax year; paper returns are due 31 October.
Losses are worth recording even in years you owe nothing — once reported they carry forward indefinitely against future gains.
2026/27 rates. Everything stays in your browser — nothing is sent anywhere.
Capital gains do not have their own separate rate. They stack on top of your taxable income, and only the room left inside the basic rate band is charged at 18% — everything above it at 24%. A £20,000 gain costs £3,060 on a £30,000 salary and £4,080 on a £70,000 one. Same gain, a third more tax.
This is also why the £100,000 income mark hurts so much. The personal allowance tapers away above it, so mining income landing in that zone can be taxed at an effective 60%.
It will not work out your gain for you. That needs HMRC's matching rules applied in order — same-day first, then the 30-day rule, then Section 104 pooling — across every disposal you made. With more than a handful of transactions that is a job for dedicated software or an accountant, and the number it produces is what you type into the box above.
It also assumes English, Welsh or Northern Irish income tax bands. Scotland sets its own rates on earned income, which changes the income tax figure but not the CGT rates — those are UK-wide.
Sources: HMRC Cryptoassets Manual and current published rates. Figures change at each Budget. This is general information and not a substitute for an accountant.
A UK easy-access savings account currently pays somewhere around the base rate, with the first £85,000 protected by the FSCS if the bank fails. That is your baseline. Any DeFi strategy has to beat it by enough to compensate for smart contract risk, stablecoin depeg risk, and the complete absence of any compensation scheme.
Once you hold the two numbers side by side, most of DeFi stops looking like an opportunity and starts looking like a question: is the extra worth what you are underwriting?
| Strategy | Median APY | TVL | From emissions | Volatility |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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Sorting fifteen thousand pools by APY surfaces whatever is inflating its own token hardest. That number is not income — it is a protocol printing units and calling the dilution a yield. When emissions stop, so does the return, and the token you were paid in has usually fallen.
From emissions is the share of the headline rate coming from token rewards rather than genuine borrower interest or trading fees. High figures mean the yield is being subsidised and will not last. Volatility is how much the advertised rate has actually moved — a high reading means the number you saw is not the number you will get.
Ranked by size, not by yield — where the serious money actually sits. Each row splits the real return from the subsidised part.
| Pool | TVL | APY | Composition |
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You lend USDC or USDT to borrowers through a lending market and take the interest. No exposure to a volatile asset — the risk is the protocol code and the stablecoin issuer. Both have failed before, and when a stablecoin depegs it usually does so faster than anyone can exit.
Stake ETH or SOL through a provider and receive a token representing the position, so the capital stays usable while it earns validator rewards. The risks are slashing if the validator misbehaves, and the receipt token trading below the underlying asset when everyone tries to leave at once.
Pledge an already-staked position again to secure additional services, earning a second layer of rewards on the same capital. The appeal is obvious; the problem is that slashing compounds. One failure can hit the underlying stake and the restaked layer simultaneously.
Deposit two assets so others can trade against them, and take a share of the fees. The hidden cost is impermanent loss: if the two assets move apart in price, you can end up worse off than if you had simply held them. Fee income has to exceed that divergence, and often does not.
Some protocols pay materially more if you lock tokens for a fixed term — often up to four years. You are being paid for illiquidity, and the rate should be read as compensation for being unable to leave during a drawdown. Judge these by asking what happens if you need the money in month six.
HMRC treats DeFi returns as either income or capital depending on how the arrangement is structured, and the distinction turns on details most users never examine — whether beneficial ownership of the deposited token actually passes to the protocol. Lending and staking rewards are typically income at the point of receipt, valued in pounds on that day. Moving tokens into a pool can itself be a disposal for capital gains purposes, meaning you can owe tax before earning anything. See the UK tax page.
Yield data from DefiLlama, filtered to pools above $10m TVL with outliers excluded. Nothing here is a recommendation or an offer, and we take no referrals from any protocol listed. DeFi is unregulated in the UK: there is no FSCS protection, no ombudsman, and no recourse if a protocol fails or is exploited. You can lose everything.
Twenty chains, compared on the things that actually differ. Block time and consensus are protocol constants; everything else is live.
| Chain | Block | TVL | FDV | TVL/FDV | Fees 24h | 24h |
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Block time is how long until your transaction is in a block — not the same as finality, which is longer on most chains. TVL is capital sitting in contracts on the chain. FDV is what the market values the whole token supply at, including tokens not yet circulating.
TVL/FDV is the useful one. It asks how much real capital the chain has attracted relative to its valuation. A low number means the market is paying for expectation rather than deposits. It is a ratio, not a verdict — Bitcoin scores near zero because almost nobody locks BTC in contracts, which says nothing bad about Bitcoin.
Fees is the honest activity measure. A chain can rent TVL with incentive programmes, but nobody pays transaction fees for fun. When TVL is high and fees are near zero, the capital is visiting rather than living there.
TVL and fees from DefiLlama, valuations from CoinGecko, both in USD so the ratio compares like with like. Fees load in a moment after the table — twenty separate requests. Rollup TVL is counted on the rollup, not on Ethereum.
The forty most recent incidents. Amounts are disclosed losses — many are never confirmed, so the real totals are higher.
| Date | Target | Loss | Method |
|---|---|---|---|
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Not doom-scrolling. The patterns repeat, and reading a few months of them teaches you more about where money is actually lost than any security guide. Bridges and cross-chain messaging appear far out of proportion to the capital they hold. Access control failures — a leaked key, a permission never revoked — account for a large share of the biggest losses, and they are failures of operational process rather than clever cryptography.
If you hold crypto: the practical lesson is that protocol risk is real and uninsured. There is no FSCS here, no chargeback, and recovery is rare enough that the "returned funds" column is usually empty.
Data from DefiLlama's hacks database. Classification and technique are theirs.
Listed companies holding crypto on the balance sheet, ranked by size. This is where traditional finance and crypto actually meet — and where the leverage sits.
| Company | Holdings | Value | Price | 24h |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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840,000 bitcoin, a $75,476 cost basis, and an mNAV that fell below 1.0 in June — after which the company that never sold started selling.
14 August 2026A treasury company is a leveraged bet on the asset plus a capital structure you have to underwrite separately. Most funded their buying with debt or preferred stock carrying fixed obligations — those payments do not shrink when the price falls. That is why the shares routinely move two or three times as far as the coin on the same day, in both directions.
The mechanism that drove the whole trade was the premium to net asset value. While a company trades above the value of its holdings it can issue shares, buy more, and increase holdings per share without the price moving. Below that premium the flywheel runs backwards. Strategy crossed that line in June, and it is the single most important number to watch across the sector.
Nothing here is a recommendation. Under UK rules we take no referrals and name no brokers — these are listed equities you can research through any regulated platform.
Holdings data from CoinGecko's public treasury dataset, updated as companies file. Share prices, where shown, from the API Worker.
Accounts worth following, and the commentary those circles are reacting to.
X's API costs from around $100 a month for the tier that returns timelines, and every free mirror that used to work — Nitter and its instances — is now dead or gated. We checked before writing this.
The remaining free route is X's own embed widget, which works but loads third-party scripts and cookies. You can switch it on below; it stays off until you do.
Long-form analysis from The Block, Decrypt, The Defiant and Bankless — the writing crypto Twitter argues about.
Loads X's widget script, which sets third-party cookies. It stays off until you press this.
Hand-checked entries only. Edit airdrops.json to add them.
There is no free airdrop API worth trusting — the aggregators are largely unvetted, and fake claim pages are the most common way UK retail holders lose funds. Entries appear here only once checked by hand.
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