Crypto Highlights Today: US Supreme Court Weighs Sports Betting Regulation, Bitcoin ETFs Hit August Record, Core DAO Executes Emergency Hard Fork

New Jersey Escalates Prediction Market Regulation Dispute to the US Supreme Court

New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport together with state gaming officials filed a petition on Wednesday to the US Supreme Court aiming to overturn an April ruling by the Third Circuit Appeals Court that had favored the prediction platform Kalshi.

The Third Circuit concluded that the federal Commodity Exchange Act likely grants the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) exclusive regulatory authority over Kalshi’s sports event contracts, which could preempt state gambling laws.

New Jersey contends that sports contracts offered by prediction markets function as wagers and should be subject to state licensure, consumer protection, and gambling regulations.

Kalshi counters these claims, asserting that its contracts are federally regulated financial instruments and that operating under 50 different state regulatory regimes is infeasible for the company to sustain compliance nationwide, given the growing market for such products and unclear jurisdictional boundaries, the legal battle has intensified between federal and state regulators . A Supreme Court decision may ultimately establish whether the CFTC or individual states possess regulatory authority over sports prediction markets across the US.

Bitcoin ETFs Achieve Record Inflows in August as BTC Jumps 25%

US-listed spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) recorded their most successful month of 2026 in August, attracting $3.52 billion in net inflows — a dramatic increase from $172 million in July, according to SoSoValue data.

Bitcoin (BTC) itself surged approximately 25% during August, marking its highest monthly gain since a 37.29% rally in November 2024, based on CoinGlass analytics.

Despite this momentum, the start of September saw a reversal, with ETF inflows turning negative and Bitcoin briefly dropping below the $77,000 threshold.

Core DAO Initiates Emergency Hard Fork Following Validator Reward Exploit

Core DAO announced an emergency hard fork to address an exploit where several validators drew rewards substantially above the protocol’s intended issuance.

The development team stated the incident is contained and that malicious validators no longer can extract excess rewards. The upcoming fork is a forward network upgrade and will not rollback or reverse previously confirmed transactions.

Earlier updates revealed that the incident was confined to reward issuance alone and did not impact user assets, with a technical postmortem planned for public release.

In response to security concerns, multiple exchanges took precautionary measures: Coinbase paused sends and receives of CORE tokens; Bithumb and Coinone suspended deposits and withdrawals; Bitget halted CORE deposits and withdrawals citing wallet maintenance; LBank suspended deposits citing project requirements.

Uncertain Details of the Exploit and Core’s Next Steps

Core DAO has not yet disclosed the volume of excess CORE issued, the duration of the exploit, nor whether any of the extra tokens entered general circulation.

The root vulnerability enabling the malicious actions by validators remains undisclosed at this stage but will be addressed in the forthcoming technical report.

Cointelegraph reached out to Core for further details but received no reply at the time of publication.