Crypto’s latest aberration: Himalaya Coin, which could have a market cap of around USD 28.9 bn — roughly equivalent to that of dog-themed meme coin Shiba Inu — after its value skyrocketed since it started trading at the start of the month, Bloomberg reports. One HCoin has gone from being worth USD 10 cents to USD 28.88 in the past two weeks. Its launch was marked with the release of “HCoin to the Moon,” a bizarre music video featuring exiled Chinese b’naire and Communist Party critic Wengui Guo. Set to a montage of mansions, sports cars and suitcases bursting with USD bills, the song promises a world where “No one can take your wealth away from you.”

Anti-China politics seem to be at the core of HCoin: Guo is joined in his support for the currency by far-right talking head and former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon. “If you look at the institutionalization of the counteroffensive to the Chinese Communist Party, it’s pretty impressive,” Bannon said in an interview about HCoin with GTV, the anti-Chinese government media company he co-founded with Guo last year. China recently banned crypto trading as part of a wider crackdown on private tech firms in recent months.

It’s still unclear how legit HCoin is: The currency currently only trades on the Himalaya Exchange, a crypto platform with business links to Guo, and isn’t listed by CoinMarketCap in its definitive list of global cryptocurrencies, though a Himalaya Cat Coin (not the same thing) is 4.7% down today.

---

We’d be pretty embarrassed if we were the FBI right now: Hackers managed to compromise one of the FBI’s email systems on Saturday, sending fake emails to tens of thousands of recipients, according to an FBI statement. The emails warned of a possible cyberattack and ended with a sign-off from the Department of Homeland Security, reports KrebsonSecurity. The hacker that claimed responsibility for the attack, known on the cyberwebs as Pompompurin, said they were able to send the messages by abusing poor coding on an FBI portal, and had carried out the hack in order to point out vulnerabilities in the FBI’s system.

FOR ALL YOU MILLENIALS WHO CARE- Britney’s conservatorship is officially over: Britney Spears has won a legal battle against the conservatorship that saw a team led by her father control her finances, career and personal life for nearly 14 years. Fans of the early-noughties pop icon celebrated outside the Los Angeles court where a judge ruled to cancel the conservatorship on Friday, in the culmination of a months-long campaign by supporters, some media, and most recently Britney herself against the unusual arrangement.

The star’s case drew renewed attention earlier this year in the wake of the release of two documentaries, “The New York Times Presents: Framing Britney Spears” and Netflix’s “Britney vs. Spears.” The media storm appears to have prompted Spears to petition for the conservatorship’s cancellation, appearing in court earlier this summer, where she called the arrangement abusive. For the first time in nearly 14 years, Spears will now be able to live, work and spend as she chooses. (Washington Post | The Guardian | BBC | New York Times | CNN).