Manzambi's goal could boost Aston Villa's morale and investment confidence, potentially altering their season trajectory and market strategy.

The post Aston Villa takes lead against Tottenham with Johan Manzambi goal appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Equinix's increased investment highlights the critical role of AI-driven infrastructure in shaping future data center strategies and financing models.

The post Equinix plans $5B-$7B annual data center buildout amid AI demand appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The GOP's focus on football broadcasts could reshape voter engagement strategies, potentially influencing key Senate races and midterm outcomes.

The post GOP targets football broadcasts to boost support before 2026 midterms appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Monument Bank's tokenization initiative could democratize blockchain benefits for retail banking, potentially reshaping consumer finance dynamics.

The post Monument Bank plans to tokenize £250M in retail deposits on Midnight blockchain appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

AI's rapid problem-solving hints at transformative potential in research, yet human intuition remains crucial for guiding meaningful innovation.

The post OpenAI’s Noam Brown reveals how AI agents solved a Millennium Prize Problem in 88 hours appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

European Central Bank President Blocked Binance’s EU Entry: Report

European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde stopped Binance from operating in the European Union, according to a Wall Street Journal report. 

The newspaper on Thursday reported that the top crypto exchange was on the cusp of operating in the trading bloc but then was told it couldn’t after the central bank chief waded in. 

EU law requires that local Crypto-Asset Service Providers (CASP) have a MiCA license. Binance does not. Binance in June withdrew its MiCA application in Greece. 

“Lagarde wanted to keep the controversial crypto exchange, which pleaded guilty to financial-crime violations in the U.S., out of the European Union,” the newspaper report said, citing interviews with officials. 

Lagarde has long been anti-Bitcoin and pro-central bank digital currencies. Back in 2021, Lagarde said that the leading cryptocurrency was “a highly speculative asset” used for money laundering. She also criticized cryptocurrencies as a whole and said central banks would never hold bitcoin. 

On CBDCs, though, Lagarde takes a different approach. A CBDC is a digital form of fiat money, like the US dollar or euro; nations around the world are in different stages of researching and releasing them. 

The EU under Lagarde is fast moving forward with a digital euro. Lagarde has described the digital euro as key to Europe’s financial autonomy while taking aim at privately issued stablecoins. 

CBDCs have been criticized by bitcoiners and others in the crypto industry who think they could be used to surveil citizens. U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning CBDCs when he took office.

The WSJ report added, citing various interviews, that Lagarde was worried Binance would embed the dominance of dollar-based stablecoins in Europe, instead of encouraging euro counterparts.

Binance is the world’s biggest crypto exchange and billions of dollars in stablecoins are traded on its platform daily. 

A controversial company, Binance and its CEO, Chanpeng Zhao, in 2023 pleaded guilty to anti-money-laundering violations and paid a record $4.3 billion fine.

Binance in June said it was still working to pursue MiCA authorization in another EU Member State.

This post European Central Bank President Blocked Binance’s EU Entry: Report first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

CFTC Sends Proposal To Regulate Crypto Transactions Following Clarity Act Fail

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission on Thursday sent a proposal to the White House to regulate crypto transactions and markets. 

It isn’t clear what the regulations will look like from the post on the Office of Management and Budget’s website. The proposal is titled “Regulation Crypto Asset Transactions and Regulation Crypto Asset Markets.”

The CFTC’s move comes after lawmakers blocked the long-awaited crypto legislation Clarity Act on Tuesday. Despite the law not advancing, both the CFTC and Securities and Exchange Commission have said they would go ahead with crypto rulemaking anyway. 

CFTC Chair Mike Selig said on Wednesday that while the Clarity Act didn’t move forward, the watchdog would still help U.S. President Trump “get the job done” in regulating the crypto space. 

“The outcome of yesterday’s Senate vote was unfortunate,” Selig wrote on X, adding that the CFTC was “locked in and ready to ship its rules for the new frontier of finance.”

Before the procedural vote on the legislation this week, Selig had said would proceed with rulemaking whether or not the Clarity Act is enacted — with the aim of finalizing rules before the administration’s term is out.

Senators last year approved Selig as the regulator’s chair. Formerly chief counsel at the SEC’s Crypto Task Force, Selig was described by White House’s Crypto and AI Tsar, David Sacks, as “instrumental in driving forward the President’s crypto agenda” 

President Trump campaigned on a ticket to help the crypto space after regulators under the previous administration hit digital asset businesses with lawsuits — mostly for allegedly selling unregistered securities. 

Since Trump became president, the SEC and CFTC have taken a much friendlier approach to watchdogging the space. 

The CFTC isn’t the only regulator going ahead with rulemaking: the SEC earlier this week approved tokenized stocks trading. In August, it also proposed its own framework for crypto asset offerings, pressing ahead while the landmark legislation stalled. 

President Trump last month urged lawmakers to pass the Clarity Act, calling the legislation “very powerful” — but Republicans said that Democrats were deliberately holding it back.  

Democrats mainly took issue with the ethics side of the bill. Trump received backing from major industry players while campaigning and since becoming president, his family has made money from digital asset ventures. 

Some lawmakers have alleged conflicts of interest. The White House has always denied any wrongdoing. 

A new draft of the bill started circulating in July tackling the issue of ethics and banning officials from making money from crypto. But some Democrats said it didn’t go far enough. 

The Clarity Act wants to formally divide oversight between regulators, distinguishing which digital assets are securities, commodities or stablecoins. 

This post CFTC Sends Proposal To Regulate Crypto Transactions Following Clarity Act Fail first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Price Surges Over $81,000 Despite Clarity Act Fail and Interest Rate Hike

Bitcoin’s price on Friday shot above $81,000 — despite a week of setbacks for the crypto industry. 

The biggest coin was recently trading for $80,982, after jumping as high as $81,055 at one point Friday morning in New York. Over the past 24 hours, it has risen by nearly 6%. 

Its surge comes after lawmakers on Tuesday blocked long-awaited crypto legislation, the Clarity Act, and the Federal Reserve on Wednesday hiked interest rates. 

Digital asset industry bigwigs had long called for clear rules to regulate the crypto space and the Clarity Act — which wants to divide oversight between regulators — aimed to do that. But lawmakers blocked the landmark digital asset market structure bill in a procedural vote. 

And the Federal Reserve increased borrowing costs for the first time due to skyrocketing inflation in the U.S. The central bank’s chair, Kevin Warsh, said that price stability in the U.S. was the Fed’s number one priority. 

“The plain fact is that inflation is too high, and has been for too long,” Warsh said. “This summer’s inflation readings do not tell me that underlying trends have meaningfully improved.”

Bitcoin has in the past done well in a low interest rate environment because it means there is more liquidity to trade the asset. 

While Bitcoin’s price dipped initially news of the Clarity Act blockage and Fed’s move, it shot up on Friday. 

Bitcoin exchange-traded funds in the U.S. have so far this week experienced net negative flows, with investors cashing out nearly $427 million from the vehicles, according to Farside Investors data. 

Flows on Thursday turned positive, with investors chucking nearly $160 million at the funds following two days of consecutive outflows. 

In a research note Thursday, asset manager Grayscale said that it didn’t expect bitcoin’s price to be hurt by the Fed’s decision because the move reflects a mid-cycle adjustment, not a cyclical change. 

And despite lawmakers blocking the Clarity Act, regulators like the SEC are already pushing ahead with pro-crypto regulation. 

This post Bitcoin Price Surges Over $81,000 Despite Clarity Act Fail and Interest Rate Hike first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Community Recognizes Quantum Computing Risk: VanEck

Quantum computing is a risk to Bitcoin but the community recognizes the issue, according to asset manager VanEck’s Head of Digital Assets Research. 

Speaking to CNBC on Friday, Matthew Sigel said that while progress on addressing the issue may be slow because of the crypto network’s decentralized nature, the community was working on it. 

The crypto community has sounded the alarm about hypothetical advancements in quantum computers that could in the future be able to break Bitcoin’s cryptography. 

Some in the space — including Bitcoin developers — have started preparing for a post-quantum future by testing quantum-resistant signatures on live sidechains. 

“It’s a risk,” he said. “But the community has recognized the scope of the issue. There’s a lot of talent that’s now come together with a framework of how to upgrade the system.”

He added: “The upgrades don’t happen as fast because there’s no CEO who can tell the devs, ‘hey, do it now.’ There’s a governance process — it takes more time, it’s a little bit messier, but there are technological paths for quantum resistance, and I think you’ll see more of that over the next couple of years.”

Quantum computers do exist but make mistakes and a machine that can break Bitcoin’s cryptography currently does not exist. Bitcoin currently is the biggest computer network in existence. 

Major companies in the space — including America’s biggest crypto exchange, Coinbase, and Bitcoin infrastructure firm, Blockstream — are already working on solutions. 

Back in July, Coinbase said it plans to deliver a post-quantum signing pipeline using secure enclaves and threshold cryptography. 

A Bitcoin Security Consortium — made up of BlackRock, Fidelity Digital Assets, Block, and others — formed in July and donates funds and dedicates engineers to open-source work supporting proposals like BIP-360, which aims to introduce a new transaction output type to reduce long-exposure quantum computing risks.

This post Bitcoin Community Recognizes Quantum Computing Risk: VanEck first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

The Next 3-5 Years of Bitcoin Lending

SALT Lending CRO Hunter Albright says a growing number of Bitcoin holders may eventually borrow against their bitcoin rather than sell it, creating a new relationship between bitcoin, credit and stablecoins.

Bitcoin-backed lending could become an increasingly important part of how holders access the value of their bitcoin without selling it, according to Hunter Albright, Chief Revenue Officer of SALT Lending.

Speaking on BMTV, Albright said he expects borrowing against bitcoin to become more common as the market matures and holders become more comfortable using bitcoin as collateral.

“I’d like to think we will see a growing percentage of the population of bitcoin holders borrow against it,” Albright said.

For Albright, that shift could also change how bitcoin and stablecoins function alongside one another.

“I do believe people borrowing against their bitcoin and leveraging stables is the difference between money in motion and money at rest,” he said. “The speed of conversion really creates a utility and advantage for people willing to operate in that ecosystem.”

In that framework, bitcoin increasingly becomes “money at rest” – an asset held for the long term – while stablecoins serve as “money in motion,” providing liquidity that can be transferred and used more easily without requiring holders to sell their bitcoin.

A Behavioral Shift for Bitcoin Holders

Getting there, however, will require more than simply building lending products.

Albright said greater education around both Bitcoin itself and the mechanics of borrowing against bitcoin will be necessary before the behavior becomes mainstream – something SALT Lending has made part of its own efforts in the market.

It also requires a change in how Bitcoin holders think about the value stored in their assets.

Instead of viewing bitcoin only as something to accumulate and eventually sell, holders can potentially use it as collateral to access liquidity while maintaining their bitcoin exposure.

That model is already common elsewhere in finance, where owners of real estate, equities and other assets regularly borrow against their holdings rather than liquidating them.

For Bitcoin holders, there can also be tax advantages. In the U.S., borrowing against an asset generally does not itself constitute a taxable sale, whereas selling appreciated bitcoin can trigger capital gains taxes. Individual tax consequences depend on the structure of the transaction and the borrower’s circumstances, readers should consult a tax advisor.

Albright sees that combination – long-term bitcoin holdings, growing stablecoin adoption and easier access to credit – as part of a broader shift in how Bitcoin holders may eventually use their wealth.

Rather than bitcoin needing to move every time its value is put to use, bitcoin can remain at rest while liquidity moves around it.

SALT Lending is the Official Liquidity Sponsor of BMTV. Learn more about borrowing against your bitcoin and explore SALT’s BMTV offer at https://saltlending.com/bmtv/?utm_source=bmtv&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=52783658-BMTV%20article&utm_term=BMTV

Disclaimer: SALT Lending is a paid sponsor of BMTV and serves as BMTV’s Official Liquidity Sponsor. This article is sponsored content and does not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of Bitcoin Magazine. The information provided is for promotional purposes and should not be considered financial advice. Readers are encouraged to conduct their own research before making any investment decisions related to Bitcoin or other financial products mentioned herein.

This post The Next 3-5 Years of Bitcoin Lending first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Josh Plischke.

A new report from OKX and Token Terminal says real-world-asset (RWA) futures on trade.xyz edged past crypto futures on Hyperliquid in July. The headline numbers were $107.6 billion of RWA-contract volume against $105.7 billion of crypto-contract volume.

That was a selected-venue crossover, not an industry-wide change in market leadership. The underlying report treats trade.xyz and Hyperliquid as category-leading onchain venues. Broader datasets confirm that RWA perpetuals are growing quickly, but they do not show a comparable takeover of crypto derivatives as a whole.

RWA futures crossed crypto inside the report's sample

The report tracked July 1 through July 30 and found that RWA volume on trade.xyz reached $107.6 billion, slightly above $105.7 billion of crypto-perpetual volume on Hyperliquid. Its selected RWA series had climbed from $760 million in October 2025.

That is a significant change inside the measured sample. It is also narrower than the OKX summary suggests when it says RWA futures surpassed crypto futures by volume.

A category-leading venue is a proxy, not the whole market. Its data can show what is happening on that platform, but it cannot establish the size of every competing venue and contract outside the sample.

The report's open-interest figures reinforce the growth signal without resolving that scope problem. Its selected RWA series rose from $16.1 million to $1.72 billion over nine months. The page contains conflicting fold-change labels, so the endpoints are more reliable than any one multiplier.

Broader July measurements show how much the picture changes with the market universe:

CoinDesk Research reported $460 billion of July RWA perpetual volume on centralized exchanges and $3.03 trillion of total CEX derivatives. Dividing those figures puts RWA perpetuals at approximately 15.2% of CoinDesk's CEX denominator.

That calculated share is not a consolidated global estimate. Still, it shows why the trade.xyz-versus-Hyperliquid crossover cannot prove that traditional-asset contracts displaced crypto derivatives across the industry.

CoinMarketCap Research measured $792.2 billion of July RWA-perpetual volume across 19 centralized and decentralized venues. That total confirms the category's scale. It does not establish RWA's share of all derivatives because the report does not pair it with an equivalent all-crypto denominator.

One denominator can reverse the result

CoinMarketCap's DEX analysis demonstrates the effect directly. Across nine fully collected decentralized exchanges, RWA contracts remained below 20% of volume. When the HIP-3 venue group was added as a tenth venue, the measured RWA share crossed 50% on July 8.

The reason was structural. HIP-3 activity in that dataset was more than 99% RWA, while Hyperliquid's much larger main crypto book was excluded from the calculation. Adding an RWA-heavy venue without adding the related crypto venue changed the denominator enough to reverse the result.

That does not make the trading activity unreal. It means “overtook” describes a chosen sample, not a settled fact about the entire derivatives market.

Within the report's selected series, RWA trading grew from $760 million to $107.6 billion and open interest reached $1.72 billion. Separate CoinDesk and CoinMarketCap datasets found hundreds of billions of dollars in monthly RWA-perpetual activity across broader venue sets.

Those measurements establish that crypto exchanges are becoming substantial markets for derivatives linked to offchain assets. They do not establish market-wide displacement. Until researchers use like-for-like venue coverage, contract definitions, time windows and crypto denominators, any crossover claim should state the sample that produced it.

The post Did RWA futures really overtake crypto? Only if you ignore 90% of the market appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Brazil's central bank will bar virtual assets, including stablecoins, from settling one specific type of international payment flow starting Oct. 1.

Resolution 561 targets the settlement leg between regulated foreign-exchange providers and their overseas counterparties, requiring that leg to run through a licensed FX transaction or a qualifying non-resident real account.

Individual international transfers using virtual assets remain permitted under Brazil's existing framework.

A gap in stablecoins that the central bank decided to close

Oscar Guillermo Farah Osorio, founding partner at Zanella & Farah, described the move to CryptoSlate as resolving genuine ambiguity.

Brazil's 2022 virtual assets law had already given the central bank authority to decide which crypto operations count as foreign-exchange activity, but specific rules never followed, leaving a gap some market participants used to their advantage.

The eFX model these providers operate under lets them bundle many individual payments together, netting balances across an entire day before settling once with their foreign counterparty.

That structure suits high-volume, low-value flows like streaming subscriptions, online gaming payments and e-commerce transactions especially well. Farah said the new resolution directly closes that ambiguity, giving the central bank clearer visibility into flows it previously could not fully see within the formal exchange system.

What stays possible to do with stablecoins

Providers can still net and consolidate balances before settling with foreign counterparties. Farah framed the practical effect as removing one settlement method from an otherwise intact structure, since providers retain both the consolidated eFX model through permitted channels and the option of individual virtual-asset transfers outside it.

What disappears is the specific combination of stablecoin settlement with bulk aggregation, and Farah argued that combination is where much of the cost advantage lived.

Losing it could mean absorbing Brazil's financial transaction tax on conventional FX conversions. It could also mean paying correspondent-bank and SWIFT-network fees that stablecoin settlement previously avoided, real costs Farah expects will eventually land on Brazilian consumers and businesses.

Brazil's tax authority recorded R$1.13 trillion in declared stablecoin transactions between August 2019 and December 2025, roughly 72% of all declared crypto activity in that window. Stablecoins accounted for close to 80% of declared volume in 2025 alone, and USDT made up nearly 89% of that stablecoin total.

The cost problem

A July Bank of Italy study tested 200-dollar USDC transfers across ten international corridors, including Brazil, and found total costs ranging from 0.3% to nearly 9%, with no consistent advantage over conventional payment channels.

The study never examined Resolution 561 specifically, and it found something else worth noting. The blockchain transfer itself accounted for only a marginal share of total cost, while currency conversion and local payment infrastructure drove most of the expense.

Settlement finished in under 20 minutes where instant payment systems existed and stretched to one or two business days everywhere else. The Financial Stability Board reached a similar conclusion in July.

Stablecoins' near-term value may sit inside hybrid arrangements built around existing bank money and settlement systems, short of functioning as standalone global payment rails.

Cregis CEO Shawn Yan said the more consequential move is happening inside brokers' own infrastructure. He noted brokers are using stablecoins for treasury management, liquidity movement between entities and internal settlement, all invisible to the end client.

As volumes grow, Yan said the question shifts from whether to use stablecoins to how much of that infrastructure a broker wants to control directly, including fund location, transaction speed, and internal approval processes.

He said that the core business is still FX, and what's changing is the infrastructure underneath it. Yan expects the practical response to regulatory restrictions to stay architectural, well short of avoidant.

Brokers can keep wallets and treasury controls in-house wherever permitted, while routing specific legs through licensed intermediaries wherever a jurisdiction requires it.

Yan said:

“You can't build the model around one assumption about how stablecoins will be treated everywhere.”

The outcomes for the hybrid infrastructure

Farah also raised a question the resolution leaves open. Brazil's own virtual-assets law lists free enterprise, competition and operational efficiency among its stated goals.

He asked why individual international stablecoin transfers stay permitted while the aggregated eFX version does not, especially given that regulated providers could plausibly supply the same underlying transaction data the central bank wants either way.

He reads the rule mainly as an attempt to keep flows inside channels the central bank can already see and control, well short of any genuine conceptual break in how regulators classify stablecoins themselves.

The bull case has Brazil's explicit boundary reducing legal uncertainty, with larger firms obtaining the right permissions, partnering with licensed institutions, and building standardized compliance workflows around the restriction.

Under that path, stablecoins keep working for treasury management and cross-border liquidity everywhere outside the specific eFX leg now closed. Firms are starting to market them as operational infrastructure, offering faster reconciliation and programmable controls.

The bear case is that the required settlement path adds enough FX, banking, and correspondent costs that stablecoins lose much of their advantage for Brazil-linked flows specifically. Smaller payment firms may struggle to justify building separate architecture for one market.

In that scenario, the central tension becomes whether any meaningful efficiency survives once the full regulated payment chain gets priced into the transaction.

Brazil's October rule is a reminder that settling the value that stablecoins move across borders still depends entirely on which border it happens to cross.

The post Brazil blocks stablecoins from key cross-border payment rail as $1.1 trillion market faces new limits appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bitcoin hit an intraday high of $81,400 on Friday, approaching the low-$82,000 zone that has capped every recovery attempt since late August.

US spot Bitcoin ETF shares stop trading once American markets close for the weekend. Any further push through that ceiling over the next two days would occur in continuously open crypto markets, without US spot ETF-share trading.

The week's shocks already happened

Bitcoin absorbed two real setbacks before Friday's rebound. The Senate failed to advance the CLARITY Act, and the Federal Reserve delivered its first rate hike in three years, raising its target range 25 basis points to 3.75% to 4.00% on Sept. 16.

Policymakers' projections point toward a 4.1% median rate by year-end. Treasury yields have held near 5%, and oil has stayed above $100, keeping the inflation backdrop unresolved even as Bitcoin recovered.

US spot Bitcoin ETFs took in $433 million on Sept. 18, according to Farside’s latest figures, following $159.5 million in inflows on Sept. 17. Those gains followed $746.3 million in outflows over Sept. 15 and 16.

From the Sept. 18 close near $81,100, the immediate test sits at $82,000 to $82,200, a zone that has repeatedly rejected Bitcoin's advances and now sits roughly 1% to 1.4% away.

Clearing it and holding would open a path toward $84,000 to $85,000, with $86,000 cited in Friday's technical commentary as the next meaningful target beyond that. A break below that sends Bitcoin back toward $80,000, the round number it just reclaimed.

From there, $78,000 sits as a deeper retracement toward last week's trading range, with $74,000 to $75,000 standing as the major support zone buyers defended during this week's selloff.

A separate structural level near $70,000 remains part of the broader post-Fed downside conversation, outside the article’s immediate weekend scenarios.

Why the weekend changes the test

The ETF demand that has driven much of Bitcoin's recent institutional flow does not trade on weekends.

Nasdaq and other US exchanges run their regular sessions Monday through Friday. Any Saturday or Sunday move through resistance would occur through continuously open spot and derivatives markets, without the fresh ETF-share buying that showed up at week's end.

Kaiko's research into the ETF era found Bitcoin's weekend trading share had fallen to 16% of total volume in a 2024 study, down from 28% in 2019.

That decline suggests activity has concentrated on weekdays since institutional products launched. Thinner weekend conditions can exaggerate moves in either direction, which is why a breakout on Saturday or Sunday still needs Monday to confirm it once ETF trading resumes.

A genuine breakout needs more than a single green candle above $82,200. Spot volume should broaden across major venues, and open interest should climb gradually alongside price.

It is key to see whether the pullback comes from spot sellers taking profit or from leveraged long positions getting forcibly closed, and whether the move lines up with fresh macro headlines out of oil markets or geopolitics.

Whether Bitcoin's ceiling finally breaks or holds one more time

The bull case has Bitcoin clearing $82,200 and turning that level into support, with spot buying spread across venues and open interest building without funding rates running hot.

Under that path, $84,000 to $85,000 comes into view first, followed by the $86,000 level Friday's technical commentary already flagged. The real validation arrives Monday if price holds those gains once US ETF trading resumes and adds fresh institutional flow on top of whatever the weekend already built.

The bear case has Bitcoin failing near $82,000 for what would be another rejection in a pattern stretching back to late August. That would send it sliding back below $80,000 and testing $78,000 on the way toward the $74,000 to $75,000 zone that already proved its importance earlier this week.

In that scenario, ETF inflows from Sept. 17 and 18 would still need to be weighed against the $746.3 million withdrawn over the preceding two sessions. Thinner weekend liquidity can amplify a modest rejection.

Bitcoin needs acceptance above a level sellers have defended for weeks. Whether that acceptance holds without the ETF trading that helped build Thursday and Friday's rebound will not be fully clear until Monday morning proves it one way or the other.

The post Bitcoin survived the Fed and CLARITY, and now faces the next major test at $82,000 this weekend appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says laptop AI is approaching a practical turning point. Wallet software still needs a much higher bar before it can hand an AI control over crypto assets.

He said on Sept. 17 that Qwen 3.8 Flash and recent improvements in llama.cpp had brought local models close to handling a “large share” of tasks on his Strix Halo laptop.

For more advanced work, he described a local model coordinating requests to stronger remote systems while withholding the user's full personal context.

The benchmark image attached to the post showed 10 workloads. Its reported input-processing rates ranged from 109.82 to 373.22 tokens per second, while output generation ranged from 18.42 to 33.37 tokens per second.

Those figures support a practical claim about responsiveness on one high-end laptop. They leave model judgment, resistance to malicious instructions, and transaction authorization unanswered.

Local inference can improve privacy while the power to move funds remains behind separate, enforceable controls.

Ethereum co-founder shows what changed between April and September

In an April account of his local AI setup, Vitalik described a narrower role for laptop models.

He wrote that Qwen3.5:35B could handle bounded tasks and familiar programming work, while advanced independent agents that could keep working on a codebase remained beyond laptops' practical reach. Harder coding and intellectual work still called for stronger remote models.

The September post changes his assessment of where the practical boundary sits. A local model no longer appears limited to transcription, summarization, or other tightly bounded work. In the newer description, it can become the main interface for a larger share of activity and decide when a remote model is necessary.

A remote service receives only the question or context the local model selects, rather than every file, message, and wallet detail needed to understand the user's wider situation. The local system becomes both an information gatekeeper and an assistant.

April and September involved different model generations and different tasks. The September post provides token counts and throughput, but it omits prompt contents, quantization choices, and the full runtime configuration.

Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, released by Alibaba's Qwen team, is an open-weight multimodal mixture-of-experts model. Its main model has 125 billion parameters, plus another 51 billion in n-gram embedding tables, while 6 billion parameters are activated per token.

The official repository documents local text and vision inference through llama.cpp using quantized GGUF builds.

Activating a fraction of the model for each token lowers the compute burden. The user still needs enough memory for the chosen build and context, and the official materials provide no single hardware minimum that applies across quantization levels and workloads.

Capability benchmarks leave wallet authority unresolved

Qwen's technical report evaluates the base model across 14 benchmarks covering general knowledge, mathematics, science, reasoning, coding and multilingual understanding.

The Qwen team reported that Flash-Next beat the larger Qwen3.7-Plus base model on eight of those tests while using fewer activated parameters and less training compute.

The report covers model capability, efficiency, and training stability. Prompt-injection resistance, policy enforcement, wallet authorization, and the correctness of autonomous financial actions sit outside that benchmark set.

An assistant can privately explain a transaction, prepare calldata, or suggest a route. A signer can make an irreversible request that transfers assets or grants another contract permission to move them.

Better reasoning reduces some errors, yet a malicious instruction hidden in a website, message, or transaction description can still redirect the model's plan.

The Ethereum ecosystem is already testing an on-device version of the assistant concept. In its second-quarter allocation update, the Ethereum Foundation listed Steward, a fully local macOS smart-account wallet whose light client and AI assistant are intended to run on-device.

The disclosure establishes funding and project scope, but leaves production deployment, independent audit status, and autonomous transaction authority unestablished.

Vitalik's April wallet guidance placed that policy outside the language model. He described a human-confirmation firewall for risky actions, deterministic limits on transaction amounts, calldata, and transaction counts, and a human-plus-model 2-of-2 rule.

model may recognize a scam pattern that a distracted person misses, while a person may reject an action after malicious content manipulates the model. Requiring both approvals for risky transactions prevents either participant from quietly becoming the sole trust anchor.

Low-risk automation can remain available within software-defined permissions. Reading balances, preparing unsigned transactions, or operating under tightly capped limits can make an assistant useful without giving it open-ended spending power.

Wallet trust depends on rules the model cannot rewrite

EIP-7906, which remains a draft, proposes post-transaction assertion frames that inspect the final state differences produced by a transaction. An assertion can reject the application outcome when those changes violate a specified condition.

A wallet could use that mechanism to require that a swap changed only approved balances, that a hidden token approval never appeared, or that a protected account's state stayed untouched. Those checks compare the transaction's actual effects with explicit rules.

The draft also describes the edges of the protection. An assertion that checks too little can create false confidence. Wallet validation logic must require the intended assertion frame, and the assertion itself must cover every relevant state change for the protected operation.

Local inference and transaction assertions solve different parts of the wallet-agent problem.

The local model protects context and turns natural-language intent into a proposed action, deterministic permissions restrict recipients, contracts, value, and frequency, assertions inspect final state changes. Human confirmation remains the second factor for risky actions.

September's laptop result makes the first layer more credible. It suggests a private local model can respond quickly enough to coordinate daily work and selectively use remote intelligence. The remaining layers still carry the authority that protects assets.

A crypto wallet can treat the model as a capable interface, planner, and monitor. Trust belongs to controls the model cannot alter and to an approval path that keeps the user meaningfully in charge.

The post Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin argues that local AI can protect your privacy without losing speed appeared first on CryptoSlate.

A roughly $5.15 million outflow from US spot XRP exchange-traded products on Sept. 17 interrupted a $192 million inflow month. The reversal creates the first clean test of whether recent demand is cooling, yet the broader flow pattern still favors the buyers.

Maketo's five-fund series remained about $10 million positive for the rolling week through Sept. 17. Its rolling month contained 16 inflow days and two outflow days, and Canary Capital's official fund table showed that only part of the daily reversal coincided with a confirmed contraction in shares.

The base case is a narrow, one-session reset inside a positive trend. A broader multi-session wave that turns the weekly total negative would materially change that reading.

The reversal was concentrated in two funds

Maketo's cumulative net-flow total declined from $1,715,570,157 on Sept. 16 to $1,710,416,747 on Sept. 17. The exact change was negative $5,153,410, displayed by the tracker as a rounded $5 million outflow.

The tracker attributed about $1 million of redemptions to Canary's XRPC and about $4 million to 21Shares' TOXR. Bitwise's XRP fund, Franklin Templeton's XRPZ and Grayscale's GXRP were flat.

Maketo says it compiles the flow figures from published fund disclosures, making same-day issuer data the best available cross-check.

XRPC shares outstanding fell from 23.4 million on Sept. 16 to 23.3 million on Sept. 17. Canary's prospectus defines a basket as 10,000 shares, so the 100,000-share decline equaled 10 baskets.

The issuer also reported $319.86 million of net assets and a $13.73 net asset value per share on Sept. 17.

The share-count contraction confirms the direction of the XRPC move while leaving its settlement form and market effect unresolved.

As of Sept. 16, one day before the aggregate outflow, Bitwise's official snapshot for its XRP ETF reported 33.69 million shares outstanding, 376.29 million XRP in trust, and about $486.85 million in net assets.

That snapshot establishes the fund's scale, while its earlier date prevents a same-day check of the Sept. 17 reading.

Maketo showed about $10 million entering the covered funds over the rolling week through Sept. 17 and roughly $192 million over the rolling month. Money arrived on 16 days during that monthly window and left on two.

Maketo estimated that the five products held about 1.08 billion XRP worth a combined $1.39 billion, which is inventory associated with outstanding ETF shares. Creations and redemptions can change the inventory, while XRP price moves can change its dollar value even when net subscriptions are quiet.

The decisive signal is breadth over several sessions

ETF flows measure demand for fund shares, but they are an imperfect proxy for immediate XRP buying and selling.

In a cash creation, an authorized participant delivers cash and the trust or a liquidity provider may acquire XRP to back new shares. A cash redemption can prompt XRP sales to fund the withdrawal, so cash-settled baskets can add demand or supply to the underlying market.

In-kind baskets transfer XRP into or out of a trust without requiring a contemporaneous trust-level market order, while authorized participants may still trade or hedge elsewhere. The fund filings show why flow data alone cannot establish the timing, execution venue, underlying XRP transactions, or price impact for a particular day.

XRP price registered an intraday high of $1.41 for Sept. 18 and traded at $1.30 when checked on Sept. 17. Price and fund flows can be observed side by side, while the retained evidence supplies no causal bridge between them.

The Sept. 17 outflow followed the Senate's 49-50 rejection of cloture on the motion to proceed to the CLARITY Act by two calendar days.

The next useful signal is a shift from concentration to breadth. Additional outflows that push the rolling week below zero and spread beyond XRPC and TOXR would offer stronger evidence of a wider institutional retreat.

That framework is an analytical test: a negative week would strengthen the reversal case, while a longer series would still be needed to judge the monthly trend.

A return to positive sessions, particularly across several funds, would reinforce the current reading of Sept. 17 as a pause inside a strong inflow month. The five products had absorbed about $192 million across the rolling month and still held an estimated 1.08 billion XRP at the cutoff.

For now, the data show a concentrated redemption day against positive weekly and monthly totals. The next several sessions will determine whether the institutional bid broadens into a trend.

The post XRP ETFs hit a speed bump, but big investors aren’t dumping their tokens yet appeared first on CryptoSlate.

The cost average effect describes how, with constant instalments, you get more units for the same money when the price falls and fewer when it rises. What follows is an average price that lies below the average of the prices. How large that gap actually is goes unmentioned in most guides. So we calculated it ourselves: for twelve monthly instalments of 100 euros each in Bitcoin it comes to 3.67 percent, and against a lump sum purchase on the same starting day the savings plan portfolio is 33.6 percentage points ahead. This analysis was compiled by cryptoticker.io itself on September 19, 2026.

The figure alone does not yet say whether a savings plan is the right tool for you. The lead arose in a year in which the Bitcoin price gave up a good third from its high. In a rising market the result turns around. This article shows both sides using the same data.

What the cost average effect is and what it does not achieve

The term comes from the fund business and means a purely arithmetical consequence of fixed instalments. If you buy for 100 euros every month, then at a price of 50,000 euros you receive twice as many units as at 100,000 euros. Because the cheap months automatically carry more weight, your average price sinks below the arithmetic mean of the prices.

Two things the effect expressly does not achieve. It does not protect against losses: if the price falls lastingly, the value of your portfolio falls too, only more slowly than with a lump sum purchase at the starting price. And it does not generate a return out of nothing. What it delivers is a better entry price than the chance of a single buying day, as long as prices fluctuate.

Dollar cost averaging, DCA for short, is the English term for the same method and means the regular purchase of fixed amounts irrespective of the price level.

The calculation: what twelve instalments of 100 euros since October 2025 produced

How we calculated

The data basis is 366 daily closing prices for Bitcoin in euros from September 20, 2025 to September 19, 2026, retrieved on September 19, 2026 through the public price interface of CoinGecko. We simulated twelve instalments of 100 euros each, in each case on the first day of the month from October 1, 2025 to September 1, 2026, 1,200 euros in total. Valuation was at the price of September 19, 2026, which stood at 70,536.29 euros.

What this calculation does not contain: order fees, spreads between buying and selling price, the exact time of execution within the purchase day, and tax effects. Providers settle differently, and a savings plan is rarely executed at exactly the daily closing price. The values show the mechanics cleanly; they are not the statement of an actual portfolio.

What the figures show

The period was unusually eventful. The high was on October 7, 2025 at 107,019.40 euros, the low on July 1, 2026 at 51,473.91 euros. Between the two points lies a factor of 2.08. From the high to the cut-off date there is a decline of 34.1 percent.

At the end there are 0.01805258 bitcoin in the portfolio, bought at an average price of 66,472.48 euros. By the cut-off date that has become 1,273.36 euros, a gain of 6.1 percent on the 1,200 euros paid in. Eleven of the twelve purchase days lay below the price of the first purchase day.

Why the average price lies below the average market price

The arithmetic mean of the twelve purchase prices is 69,005.44 euros. At 66,472.48 euros your actual average price lies 2,532.96 euros below it, so 3.67 percent cheaper. That is the cost average effect in its pure form, and it is nothing more than that.

Mathematically what lies behind it is the harmonic mean, the average that results when you buy fixed amounts instead of fixed quantities. With fluctuating prices it always lies below the arithmetic mean, and the gap grows with the range of fluctuation. At an asset that more than doubles and halves again within a year, it turns out markedly larger than at a broad equity index.

A sober conclusion follows from this: the 3.67 percent is the price advantage the method itself generates. Everything beyond that in our calculation stems from the price path and not from the savings plan.

The honest counter test: when the lump sum purchase wins

Had you invested the 1,200 euros in one go on October 1, 2025, it would have become 0.01234369 bitcoin. By the cut-off date that is 870.68 euros, a loss of 27.4 percent. The savings plan is therefore 402.68 euros or 33.6 percentage points ahead.

The worst conceivable entry would have been October 7, 2025, the high of the period. From 1,200 euros there would have been 790.92 euros, a loss of 34.1 percent. The best entry was on July 1, 2026 at the low: 1,644.40 euros, a gain of 37.0 percent. This value is the most important in the entire analysis, because it shows the reverse side. Whoever hits the low beats every savings plan by a clear margin.

Nobody hits it reliably. The savings plan, by contrast, buys with certainty in July 2026 and in August 2026 as well, the two cheapest months of the year, without you having to make a decision about it. That precisely is its contribution. In a year of rising prices the same mechanism would have led to nothing but more expensive follow-up purchases, and the lump sum at the start would have won. Which of the two situations comes along you do not know beforehand. How to weigh the two routes against each other we wrote up using the example of a specific price level in our analysis of savings plan or lump sum when buying more.

What the calculation conceals about fees and spreads

A savings plan buys twelve times a year, a lump sum purchase once. With percentage fees that hardly matters; with fixed minimum fees per order it very much does. A flat rate of one euro per execution costs you one percent of the purchase amount on a 100 euro instalment, so around a quarter of the entire cost average advantage of 3.67 percent.

On top of that comes the spread, the gap between the price at which a provider buys and the one at which it sells. With crypto savings plans it frequently lies between 0.5 and 1.5 percent and appears in no fee table, because it is contained in the price. Count it in before you compare providers. Which houses offer Bitcoin savings plans in Germany and how their cost models differ can be found in our comparison of providers for Bitcoin savings plans.

What routes exist in Germany and how to tell them apart

For regular Bitcoin purchases, essentially three routes come into question in Germany, and the difference rarely lies in the price. It lies in what you actually own at the end.

When buying through a trading venue authorised under MiCA you acquire the coins themselves; MiCA is the EU regulation for markets in crypto assets which since 2024 has set uniform authorisation duties for service providers. With an exchange traded certificate on Bitcoin, usually called an ETN, you hold a debt security of the issuer that tracks the price. With an offering that has no option to withdraw into a wallet of your own, you hold in the end merely a claim against the provider.

The difference only becomes visible when it matters, that is in an insolvency or a disruption at the provider. Before your first savings plan, therefore, check whether a withdrawal to an address of your own is possible and which minimum amounts apply to it. The selection of regulated trading venues is set out in the overview of crypto exchanges.

Holding period, FIFO and December 31, 2026: why every instalment has its own clock

For tax purposes a savings plan is not a single event but a chain. Every instalment is an acquisition of its own with a date of its own. Under section 23 of the Income Tax Act, gains from private disposal transactions are tax free if more than a year lies between acquisition and sale; the wording can be found at Gesetze im Internet. With twelve instalments, then, twelve periods run in parallel.

If you sell part of the holding, in practice the FIFO method applies, first in, first out: what counts as sold is the holding bought first. In our simulation that would be the instalment of October 1, 2025 at 97,215.68 euros, the most expensive of the whole period. Anyone selling in September 2026 would thereby have realised a loss on paper and not the cheap July entry. The details on this are in our article on holding period and FIFO with a Bitcoin savings plan.

Added to that is a date currently under discussion. On September 8, 2026 the Federal Ministry of Finance submitted a draft bill for interdepartmental coordination which would treat crypto assets as income from capital assets and subject them to withholding tax. As the draft stands, only assets acquired after December 31, 2026 would be affected. A draft is not applicable law, and the further path through departmental coordination, cabinet and parliament is open. For a running savings plan it does mean, however, that instalments from January 2027 onwards may under certain circumstances be treated differently from those before. Keep the acquisition dates cleanly recorded.

How large the instalment should be and when you are better off pausing

A solid rule runs: the instalment has to remain bearable even if the price falls for twelve months. That very case occurred in our analysis, and the savings plan only worked because buying continued through the weak months. Anyone who had paused in March 2026 at just under 57,000 euros would have missed the three cheapest instalments of the year.

From this follows the most important practical pointer of this article. The instalment is not measured by what is possible in good months, but by the amount you can do without for twelve months at a stretch. You should pause a savings plan if you need the money for running costs or if debts at higher interest are outstanding. The price level, by contrast, is not a good reason, because pausing when prices fall inverts the mechanics exactly.

A common fallacy

Many investors raise the instalment after strong price rises and lower it after declines. That way you systematically buy more at high and less at low prices, and the cost average effect disappears. If you change the instalment, do it by reference to your income and not to the chart.

What speaks against the savings plan

Three objections are factually justified. First, the lump sum purchase regularly beats the savings plan in rising markets, because the entire capital is invested from the start; with equity indices this is the case in the majority of historical periods. Second, twelve purchases a year produce twelve acquisitions that you have to document, which noticeably increases the effort at tax return time. Third, the automation tempts you never to review the position.

The second point can be solved with tools that carry the acquisition dates and the FIFO order along automatically; we give an overview in the comparison of crypto tax tools. The first and third points remain a question of your investment horizon and your discipline.

Using the cost average effect: what to take away

1. Count on 3.67 percent, not on a promise. That is the advantage twelve equal instalments generated against the average market price in our analysis. Everything beyond that came from the price path. Check first whether this advantage is not already eaten up by fees and spread at your provider, and compare the models in the savings plan comparison.
2. Clarify before the first instalment what you are really buying. Coin, certificate or a mere claim against a provider are three different things, and the difference shows only when it matters. Check the authorisation and the withdrawal option of your trading venue using the overview of crypto exchanges.
3. Document every instalment with date and price. With twelve instalments twelve one-year periods run, and on a sale FIFO reaches for the oldest. Should the draft bill of September 8, 2026 become law, the acquisition date will additionally decide the taxation. A tool from the tax tool comparison takes this bookkeeping off your hands.

(As of September 19, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

If you lost more than 1,000 euros on the TRUMP token at Bitvavo, you can have around 200 $LAPTOP credited to you until October 10, 2026 at 23:59 CEST. Registration runs manually through a banner in your account, it costs nothing, and anyone who misses the date gets nothing afterwards. This guide shows you who meets the conditions, how the exchange calculates your loss, what the reward is actually worth and how German tax law treats allocations of this kind.

An airdrop is the free distribution of crypto assets to a previously defined group of users, usually as a marketing exercise by a project. The $LAPTOP airdrop at Bitvavo is a special form of it: it is aimed exclusively at customers who lost money on one particular other token. According to its own account, Bitvavo set the campaign up together with Phoenix Veritas Ventures Ltd., the company behind the token. How the price collapse that caused those losses in the first place came about, we wrote up on September 10 in our analysis of the crash of the LAPTOP coin.

One point up front, because it is the most common misconception: this credit is a promotional gift from the platform and not compensation. What that means in practice is set out further down in the section on the nature of the reward.

Who is eligible for the $LAPTOP airdrop: Bitvavo's five conditions

In its help centre the exchange names five criteria you have to meet together at the time of verification. If one of them falls away, no claim arises, and the campaign makes no provision for a review of individual cases.

• You are at least 18 years old.
• You have an active, fully verified personal account with the provider. Business accounts are therefore out.
• Your cumulative losses in TRUMP up to and including September 7, 2026 exceed 1,000 euros.
• You register manually within the campaign period. It runs from September 10, 2026 at 12:00 CEST to October 10, 2026 at 23:59 CEST.
• You are not classified as a major client. Under the terms of participation, market makers, brokers and liquidity providers are excluded.

What is expressly not required

According to the exchange, participation is voluntary and free of charge. You have to buy, deposit or trade neither $LAPTOP nor any other cryptocurrency in order to register or to receive the reward. Anyone telling you otherwise, for instance about a supposed unlocking fee, is trying to fleece you. Nor does the campaign require a minimum holding period or a further trade after the credit.

The TRUMP token whose losses are at issue here trades at around 1.77 euros on September 19, 2026; the development and the data behind it can be found on our TRUMP price prediction. The current price is irrelevant for participation, because the cut-off date for the loss calculation is already September 7.

How to register for the campaign in your Bitvavo account

The route is short and runs exclusively through the platform's own interface. There is no registration by email, through a form on an external website or via a link from a direct message.

1. Log into your account on the web or in the app. Take care to type the address yourself or to use a bookmark of your own.
2. Open the campaign notification or the banner on your dashboard.
3. Select "Take part now" to register.

The exchange then checks your eligibility. If the check comes out positive, the reward is, according to the company, usually credited directly to your balance within three business days. There is exactly one allocation per verified person and account, so several accounts gain you nothing and breach the terms of use.

If you see no banner although by your own assessment you meet the criteria, that is usually down to the internal loss calculation. How it works is set out in the next section. A look at your account's transaction overview is the quickest way to recalculate it yourself before you write to support.

How Bitvavo calculates your TRUMP loss: realised and unrealised PnL

This point decides participation, and so far it is explained nowhere in the German-language reporting on the token. The exchange determines your profit and loss on TRUMP as combined realised and unrealised PnL up to and including September 7, 2026. According to the help centre, your historical acquisition costs, the valuation of deposits, sale proceeds and any current holdings all feed into the calculation.

Realised loss is the loss you locked in through an actual sale. Unrealised loss is the paper loss on positions you still hold. That both figures are added together is the genuinely relevant news: anyone who never sold their TRUMP holdings and continues to hold them at a loss can still cross the 1,000 euro threshold and thereby be eligible.

The same logic applies in the other direction. If you sold at a profit in between and later bought back in, the amounts are netted off, and your reported net loss comes out smaller than it feels. Deposits of TRUMP from an external wallet are also entered at a value the platform determines itself. For your own check it is therefore worth exporting your transactions, which centralised trading venues and wallet providers usually offer as a CSV file. If you use several exchanges and want to keep a clean overview of such holdings, the tools from our comparison of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers, which read precisely these export files, will help.

What around 200 $LAPTOP are really worth today

The reward pool comprises 2,000,000 $LAPTOP, and roughly 200 tokens are earmarked per eligible person. Arithmetically the pot therefore stretches to about 10,000 people. On September 19, 2026 at 06:35 UTC the token was quoted by CoinGecko at 0.090019 euros, down 21.35 percent within 24 hours and ranked 601st by market capitalisation. For 200 tokens that works out at an equivalent value of around 18 euros.

That figure belongs in the decision unvarnished. Anyone meeting the participation threshold has lost more than 1,000 euros on TRUMP and receives for it an amount in the order of a restaurant bill. On top of that, the price can keep falling up to the credit and all the more so afterwards. The exchange itself points out expressly that the value can fluctuate considerably and fall to zero, and it gives no guarantee for value, liquidity or performance. We are not assessing the token as an investment here, and this text is not investment advice.

The effort involved in registering is nonetheless only a few minutes, and no costs arise. That is precisely why the matter is worth not sleeping through the deadline, without you expecting more from it than is there. We collect further ongoing campaigns of this kind on a rolling basis in the airdrop section; the current weekly overview of the most profitable airdrops puts into context where larger amounts are to be had.

What happens if you miss the deadline or the reward pool runs dry earlier

After October 10, 2026 at 23:59 CEST registration is closed. The campaign makes no provision for a grace period, a waiting list or a later payout to eligible people who did not come forward. Anyone cutting the number of days until then fine is taking an unnecessary risk, because verifying your claim also takes time on the exchange's side.

A second point goes unanswered in the terms of participation: what happens if the pot is used up before the deadline. At 2,000,000 tokens and roughly 200 rewards per person, it stretches arithmetically to around 10,000 eligible people. Whether distribution follows the order of arrival or is scaled back proportionally at the end is not stated in the publicly available information. As long as that question is open, registering early is the safer option.

Check the position exclusively at the source. What is binding is the notice in your logged-in account and the entry in the exchange's official help centre. Media reports, third-party advertising and emails to your email address may be out of date or forged, and none of these sources decides your claim. For the security of your account the same rule applies as for any other trade: the route runs through your own login, never through a link someone sends you.

Why the reward is not compensation for your TRUMP losses

Bitvavo puts this point so plainly in its help centre that it should stand here verbatim: the campaign is "a promotional reward programme and does not constitute compensation, a refund, restitution or damages for losses in connection with TRUMP trading". In legal terms it is therefore a marketing benefit and not redress for a loss.

That distinction has consequences going beyond the choice of words. No claim to more arises from a voluntary payment, and whoever accepts the reward is also giving nothing up. Conversely, you should not read the credit as confirmation that something went wrong in trading TRUMP for which someone would have to answer. The exchange provided a market, the price fell, and with crypto assets the price risk always lies with the user.

In practice that means: if you take the view that claims are due to you in connection with your trades, registering for this campaign is the wrong place for it. Registration is no substitute for a legal review and runs independently of one.

Anyone thinking about changing platform after this experience anyway will find in our comparison of the best crypto exchanges the criteria that matter: fees, trading volume, the selection of tradable assets and the question of who actually holds the crypto assets in custody.

Airdrop and tax: when section 22 number 3 of the Income Tax Act catches your reward

This question arises after the click, and in the German-language web it has so far gone unanswered for this case. What governs it is the Federal Ministry of Finance circular of March 6, 2025 on individual questions of the income tax treatment of certain crypto assets. It deals with airdrops in detail, and margin numbers 70 to 75 contain the rules the tax office goes by.

The distinction that matters

Under margin number 70, receiving additional crypto assets can lead to other income from a service under section 22 number 3 of the Income Tax Act. According to the ministry this applies, despite the marketing character of many airdrops, whenever a service has to be rendered by those interested, in particular through active conduct. Margin number 71 adds: if the allocation depends on taxpayers making data about themselves available that goes beyond what is necessary for the purely technical allocation, that constitutes a service. The ministry reasons that the public key suffices for the technical allocation of an airdrop.

Where the economic connection with a service is absent, margin number 74 allows for a gift, to which the gift tax rules then apply. And margin number 72 names a special case: if, alongside a service, chance also decides receipt, the attribution link between service and consideration is interrupted or overlaid.

What that means for this particular airdrop

The allocation here presupposes active registration in a verified account, and the exchange evaluates your transaction data for it. There is a good deal to suggest that this constitutes a service within the meaning of margin numbers 70 and 71. That is not a binding statement for your individual case, because the classification is made by your tax office, and we are not replacing tax advice here. What is solid, by contrast, is what you can prepare.

If section 22 number 3 of the Income Tax Act applies, the reward is to be entered at the market price at the time of acquisition; that is what margin number 73 says. If no market price can yet be determined at that time, an entry of 0 euros is not objected to. For $LAPTOP a price exists, so this relief does not apply here. What also matters is the exemption limit in section 22 number 3 sentence 2 of the Income Tax Act: income from services remains tax free if, added together, it comes to less than 256 euros in the calendar year. A reward with an equivalent value of around 18 euros lies well below that. The emphasis is on added together, because it is an exemption limit and not an allowance: other service income from the same year counts towards it, and from 256 euros the entire amount is taxable.

Note down, therefore, the date of the credit, the quantity and the price at the time of inflow. A screenshot of the transaction and the export of your account history are enough for that.

After the credit: the holding period under section 23 of the Income Tax Act and selling the tokens

If the allocation is made on the basis of a service, margin number 75 of the ministry circular says an acquisition takes place at the same time. The acquisition costs are to be entered at the value of the data surrendered or the action carried out, with a rebuttable presumption that this value corresponds to the market price of the consideration. The second consequence follows from the acquisition: a later sale can be taxable as a private disposal transaction.

The one-year period applies to private disposal transactions under section 23 of the Income Tax Act. If you sell the tokens at a profit within a year of acquisition, the gain is in principle taxable. After a year has elapsed it no longer is. Added to that is the exemption limit in section 23 paragraph 3 sentence 5 of the Income Tax Act: gains remain tax free if the total gain from all private disposal transactions in the calendar year comes to less than 1,000 euros; up to the 2023 assessment period it was 600 euros.

At an equivalent value of around 18 euros, neither will often be practically relevant. Anyone collecting several such allocations in the same year, staking or lending on top and trading on the side, however, reaches the limits in total faster than the individual amounts suggest. That is precisely what makes clean documentation across all networks and accounts worthwhile.

Does Bitvavo hold a MiCA licence? What the regulation means for your account

Yes. Bitvavo B.V., based in Amsterdam, received authorisation as a crypto service provider under the European regulation on markets in crypto assets from the Dutch financial markets authority AFM on June 27, 2025. Under the passporting principle of the MiCA rules, the company may therefore offer its services in all EU member states without applying for a separate licence in each country. For you as a customer in Germany that means: ongoing supervision of the platform is exercised by the Dutch authority, not by BaFin.

The MiCA licence says something about the provider and nothing about the individual token. What is required includes rules on segregating client assets, on handling complaints and on informing about risks. It guarantees neither that a listed crypto asset will hold its value nor that a promotional campaign is advantageous for you. A white paper drawn up to the regulation's requirements is likewise no substitute for checking things yourself. Anyone wanting to rely deliberately on platforms under European supervision checks the provider's entry in the competent authority's public register before depositing money.

Can I transfer the tokens to my own wallet?

The reward is distributed exclusively in $LAPTOP and cannot be exchanged for cash or another cryptocurrency at the point of distribution. Once the tokens have been credited, you can, according to the exchange, manage them as you wish, that is hold, trade or withdraw them.

Whether a withdrawal to an external address is actually possible depends on whether the platform supports the network in question for withdrawals. You can see that directly in your account's withdrawal dialogue: if the crypto asset is not offered there for selection, it stays in the exchange's custody for the time being. Before any transfer, also check the fees and the minimum amounts, because at an equivalent value of a few euros the withdrawal fee can eat up the reward entirely.

For custody the principle that always applies to crypto assets holds: as long as the tokens sit on the platform, you hold a claim against a company and not a key of your own. At an amount of around 18 euros that is bearable. For larger holdings of Bitcoin or other assets, moving to a wallet of your own is the markedly more robust solution, and that is a judgement you should make separately from the airdrop.

How to spot fake airdrop pages and attempted fraud

Every well-known airdrop campaign attracts imitations within days. The pattern is the same in all of them: a website or a message promises the same credit but demands something for it that the real campaign never demands. These features should stop you immediately:

• You are asked to enter your seed phrase, your private key or a wallet password. No reputable provider asks for these, under any pretext.
• You are asked to connect a wallet to an external site and confirm a signature whose content you cannot read.
• You are asked to transfer a fee, a deposit or a tax in advance in order to unlock the reward.
• Registration runs through a link from an email, a direct message or a comment under a post on social networks instead of through your own bookmark.
• Time pressure is built up beyond the official deadline, for instance with a countdown of a few minutes.

The most effective protection is unspectacular: the genuine registration takes place exclusively inside your logged-in account. Additionally activate two-factor authentication if it is not already switched on, and check the sender address of every email urging you to take part. Anyone wanting to guide you through the process by telephone or chat is attempting fraud, because the exchange does not handle this case that way.

Claiming the $LAPTOP airdrop: what to take away

1. Check by October 10 whether you reach the threshold. Pull the export of your TRUMP transactions up to September 7 and add realised and unrealised losses together. If the banner is showing in your account, registration is done in three clicks. If you are thinking about switching afterwards, the comparison of the best crypto exchanges helps with the choice.
2. Document the credit on the day it arrives. Date, quantity and price decide what you later have to declare, and the 256 euro exemption limit applies to all service income of a year together. The tools from our comparison of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers take the consolidation across several accounts off your hands.
3. Treat the reward as what it is. An equivalent value of around 18 euros does not replace a loss of more than 1,000 euros, and the price can fall further. Anyone not wanting to miss the next date of this kind keeps an eye on the airdrop section, where we collect ongoing campaigns together with their deadlines.

(As of September 19, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

The RAIN token costs $0.01339 on September 19, 2026 at 03:51 UTC. That is 5.5 percent more than 24 hours earlier, and it is enough for 16th place by market capitalisation. The number that matters more to you as an investor in Germany sits elsewhere: total daily turnover across all trading venues is around $29 million, and none of the exchanges retail investors here normally buy through currently runs a RAIN market.

This article puts both in context. It gives the figures with source and timestamp, explains what the project behind the token does, and then works through the points you can check yourself: the purchase route under MiCA, custody on Arbitrum, the tax consequence of a forced sale, and the levels the price is currently orienting itself around.

RAIN on September 19, 2026: price, market capitalisation and trading volume

All the values that follow come from CoinGecko, retrieved on September 19, 2026 at 03:51 UTC. The price is $0.01339. Against the previous day there is a gain of 5.5 percent, over seven days a loss of 12.7 percent and over 30 days a loss of 3.8 percent. The daily gain therefore falls within a week that has been negative overall.

The all-time high stands at $0.019464 and was reached on August 25, 2026 at 19:53 UTC. From today's price, that is 31.2 percent away. Market capitalisation comes to $9.5 billion. The fully diluted valuation, meaning the value of the entire supply that will ever be possible at the current price, stands at $15.3 billion.

Around 709.2 billion tokens are in circulation. Total supply is roughly 1.142 trillion and the cap is 1.15 trillion. A good 61 percent of the maximum possible supply is therefore circulating. The remaining not quite 39 percent can be added over time and arithmetically dilute the value per token. How quickly that happens depends on the project's unlock schedule and is one of the points you should read up on in detail before buying.

What Rain is: prediction markets as infrastructure on Arbitrum

A prediction market is a venue where what trades is not an asset but the outcome of a future event. Whoever buys there acquires a share that pays out a fixed amount if the event occurs and expires worthless if it does not. The price of that share can be read as the probability the market assigns to the event.

According to the project description that CoinGecko carries, Rain positions itself as the substrate for such marketplaces rather than as a single marketplace. The project provides developer tools and interfaces with which third parties can set up their own prediction platforms, and it handles the settlement of those markets. The token sits on Arbitrum, a layer 2 chain on Ethereum, under the contract address 0x25118290e6a5f4139381d072181157035864099d. CoinGecko lists no other chain for RAIN.

Where the token is meant to draw its value from

The project description names a mechanism under which part of the trading volume on the platforms is used to buy RAIN back on the market and destroy it. That is a statement by the project and not a result verified by us. Anyone wanting to assess it has to look up two things: how much volume actually runs through the platforms, and how many tokens have actually been destroyed. Both can be traced on chain, and both belong to the questions to put to a model like this before you pay a price for it.

One point matters for the legal classification in Germany. Depending on how they are structured, prediction markets touch on gambling law and on financial market law, and the European supervisor is currently looking into the matter. The token itself must be kept separate from that. It is a tradable crypto asset and not a share in a single betting market.

$9.5 billion in market capitalisation, $29 million in turnover: what that ratio tells you

Market capitalisation is price times circulating supply. It does not show how much money can actually be moved without shifting the price. Trading volume stands for that. CoinGecko reports an aggregated daily turnover of $28.9 million for RAIN. Adding up the individual trading pairs gets you to $30.5 million. The gap between the two figures arises because the aggregation strips out double counting and outliers. We are naming both here anyway rather than smoothing to a single number.

Put that into ratio and around 0.3 percent of market capitalisation turns over in a day. At the large, broadly traded assets this ratio is regularly several times higher. A low reading is not a verdict on the project. It does tell you something very practical about what happens when many holders want to sell at the same time, or when an exchange unwinds a larger holding in one go.

That is precisely the case that has just arisen at RAIN, and at an exchange that is widely used in Germany.

Kraken is liquidating RAIN: why the withdrawal window has been shut since September 15

Kraken has removed RAIN from trading. The exchange announced this on June 3, 2026 and switched off trading and deposits on June 17, 2026 at 14:00 UTC. Since then the token could be neither bought nor sold there. What remained was withdrawal to an address of your own outside the exchange.

That window is shut. On September 15, 2026 at 14:00 UTC Kraken switched off withdrawals, which was four days ago. From September 15 to 25 the exchange is realising remaining holdings itself. That period is running at this moment.

The exchange's dates at a glance

In its notice the exchange names itself what those affected have to expect. Prices could be "significantly below recent reference prices" and in some cases bring in "minimal or no proceeds", because there is not enough liquidity in the market at the time of execution. This can be read in the delisting notice for Rain (RAIN). That assessment therefore comes from the house carrying out the sale.

If you have a Kraken account and held RAIN there, now is the moment to look into the account. If the holding is still showing, it will be realised in the coming days. If a credit already stands in its place, the sale has gone through and you need the statement for your records. We described the process in detail in August, when the withdrawal window was still open: Kraken liquidates Rain (RAIN).

Twelve trading venues with a RAIN market: our count of September 19, 2026

This analysis was compiled by cryptoticker.io itself on September 19, 2026. Method: we retrieved the complete list of trading venues for RAIN at CoinGecko and summarised the 24-hour turnover reported there for each exchange. Fourteen trading pairs on 12 venues were examined, as of 03:52 UTC.

Three observations follow from this. Trading is heavily concentrated, as the four largest venues together carry around four fifths of turnover. The only decentralised venue on the list is Uniswap in version 3 on Arbitrum, which is precisely the chain the token sits on. And none of the exchanges retail investors in Germany normally buy through appears in this count: Kraken has given the asset up, while Coinbase, Binance and Bitpanda ran no RAIN market at the time of our retrieval.

What we could not check with this method: whether the turnover reported by the individual venues is reliable, whether particular exchanges exclude German users from trading this asset, and whether a venue has been added or dropped between our retrieval and your reading. The trading venue overview at CoinGecko shows you the current state at any time.

MiCA and the purchase route: why RAIN is hard to reach from Germany

Since the European crypto regulation MiCA applies in full, a provider addressing customers in the EU with trading or custody services needs authorisation as a crypto asset service provider. We have set out which obligations hang on that, and how the timetable has run, in our overview of the MiCA duties.

For you as an investor this has a very concrete consequence. For the route to a particular token it is no longer enough that some exchange lists it. What decides the matter is whether an authorised provider makes it accessible to you. At an asset such as RAIN, which in our count is carried mainly by internationally oriented venues, that selection turns out thin. Which houses hold an authorisation changes continually, and the only reliable source for this is the supervisor's public register. An overview of the authorised providers usable in Germany can be found in our comparison of the regulated crypto exchanges.

Before you open an account at a foreign trading venue merely to get this one token, a sober weighing up is worthwhile. You are handing funds to a house that may be subject to no European supervision, you go through another identity check there, and in a dispute a different law applies. The counter value is access to a market that, measured against its valuation, is thinly traded.

Custody on Arbitrum: what to check before withdrawing to your own address

RAIN sits on Arbitrum. Anyone moving the token off an exchange therefore needs an address reachable on that chain, and some ether on Arbitrum to cover fees, in order to be able to send a transaction at all later on. A withdrawal to an address on the Ethereum main chain will not reach the token. The address looks the same, the network is a different one, and this mistake is among the most common reasons for lost holdings.

A few points need clearing up before the first withdrawal. Does your wallet support Arbitrum as a network, and does it show the token under the contract address named above? Are your wallet's recovery words held outside every device that is online? And do you test with a small amount before moving the entire holding? The test amount costs a fee twice over and, in case of doubt, spares you a total loss.

Tax on a forced sale: what a liquidation by the exchange means for your holding period

A sale remains a sale for tax purposes even when you did not trigger it. If an exchange realises your holding as part of a delisting, that constitutes a disposal, and the decisive date is the day of execution. You did not choose it, and it counts all the same.

A holding period of one year applies in Germany to private disposal transactions in crypto assets. If you have held the tokens for longer than a year, a gain from the forced sale is left out of account. If less than twelve months lay between acquisition and the forced sale, the result is relevant for tax, and in both directions. Precisely where a realisation occurs at a price well below the reference rate, a loss frequently arises, and a loss also has to be declared so that it can be offset against gains from other private disposal transactions in the same year.

In practice that means: obtain the exchange's statement for this realisation, with date, quantity and proceeds, and file it with your acquisition data. If the acquisition date is missing, the holding period cannot be evidenced. Tools that consolidate your transactions across several exchanges take most of that reconstruction off your hands. For the assessment of your individual case, your tax adviser remains responsible.

Levels above and below: what the RAIN price is currently orienting itself around

On the upside the first level is the area the price came down from over the past week. Seven days ago RAIN stood around 12.7 percent higher than today, so at roughly $0.0153. Only above that would the weekly loss be worked off. The next level is the all-time high at $0.019464 from August 25, 31.2 percent above the current price.

On the downside the monthly comparison serves as an anchor. Over 30 days there is a loss of 3.8 percent, so the price is moving roughly around the level of mid-August. If it falls below that, this distance too is used up. How far a move carries in a market that turns over around 0.3 percent of its valuation in a day cannot be derived from the price chart alone.

We are not making a price target of our own here, nor are we reproducing anyone else's. What can be drawn from the figures are distances to points that actually took place.

Checking RAIN trading routes: what to take away

1. Look into your Kraken account today if you held RAIN there. The liquidation runs until September 25, and according to the exchange the proceeds may be well below the reference rate. Secure the statement. If you are looking for different access to the crypto market afterwards, our comparison of the best crypto exchanges supplies the starting point.
2. Clarify the tax consequence before the records disappear. A forced sale within the one-year period is relevant for tax, and so is a loss from it. Gather acquisition and sale data in one place; the comparison of crypto tax tools shows which programs take that on.
3. Decide deliberately about custody if you are keeping the token. RAIN sits on Arbitrum, and a withdrawal needs the right chain along with fee coverage. Which devices are suitable, and how to recognise a sound one, is set out in the hardware wallet comparison.

(As of September 19, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Crypto spent years and a reported fortune in lobbying money chasing one thing: a federal rulebook. This week it lost that fight in the US Senate. Then, three days later, Bitcoin jumped 6% for reasons that had nothing to do with Washington at all. Both facts matter, and they point in opposite directions.

What Happened to the Clarity Act in the Senate Vote?

The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act failed to reach the 60 votes needed to advance in the Senate, ending months of negotiation with a tally that did not even produce a simple majority. Only 49 senators voted yes. Fifty voted no, including every Democrat and four Republicans.

The bill was not a minor housekeeping measure. It would have built a framework for digital assets, split oversight between the SEC and the CFTC, set registration requirements and tightened anti-money-laundering protections. Critics objected that handing the smaller CFTC the bulk of the authority was the industry's way of dodging serious scrutiny, a claim crypto executives rejected.

Republican leadership tried to save it at the last minute. A revised version released on Sunday added new ethics restrictions aimed at Democratic concerns about public officials profiting from crypto. It was not enough.

The bill's main architect was blunt afterwards. Senator Cynthia Lummis said "I think we're done. It's over," noting the team had already conceded more than 120 Democratic requests. Asked whether the bill would return to the floor, she said no.

Why Are Crypto Insiders Blaming Trump for the Clarity Act Failure?

This is the part that shifted over the last 24 hours. The industry's first instinct was to blame Senate Democrats. By Friday, the finger-pointing had rotated toward the White House.

A growing debate inside the industry now centres on whether Trump's own crypto ventures turned a market-structure bill into a referendum on presidential ethics. Trump generated roughly $1.4 billion in income from crypto ventures last year. Paradigm senior adviser Justin Slaughter put it directly: "The failure of Clarity begins and ends with Donald Trump," singling out the meme coin launched just before his inauguration.

The opposition made the same argument from the other side of the aisle. Senator Elizabeth Warren dismissed the final Republican ethics offer as a weak fig leaf that would not stop the president from earning his next $1.4 billion in crypto profits.

And it was not only an ethics fight. Community bank leaders lobbied hard against the bill, largely over a provision that would have let stablecoin issuers pay interest to customers. Banks argued that would let crypto firms compete for deposits without carrying bank-level regulation. Ethics gave Democrats a reason to vote no. Banking gave a handful of Republicans one.

Why Did the Bitcoin Price Rise Instead of Falling?

Textbook logic says a dead regulatory bill is bearish. The market did sell off, briefly. $Bitcoin slid to a September low near $75,560 on Tuesday as rising global bond yields and higher oil prices squeezed risk assets. In the 24 hours after the vote, $XRP dropped 8.5%, $Ethereum fell 2.9% and Solana lost 3.3%.

Then Friday happened. Bitcoin gained 6% at the Wall Street open, printing a local high of $81,034 on Bitstamp as oil-supply fears pushed US bond yields back up. Traders sitting in short positions above spot got run over: CoinGlass data showed roughly $250 million in cross-crypto short liquidations in about four hours.

The lesson is unflattering for Washington. A failed bill moved Bitcoin about 4%. A pipeline problem and a bond auction moved it 6% in the other direction.

How Are Oil and Bond Yields Driving the Bitcoin Price Now?

The macro backdrop is doing more work than crypto policy right now.

The US 30-year yield hit 5.34%, up 90 basis points, as oil uncertainty returned. WTI crude sank to around $94.80 before climbing back toward $98 during the Asian session. Rising yields across multiple countries have already pushed central banks, including in the US and Japan, to raise rates this week. The International Energy Agency has warned that prolonged restrictions on Gulf supply could mean higher prices and weaker demand if commercial inventories keep falling.

For levels, two numbers are worth pinning to your chart. Analyst Rekt Capital flags $82,000 as the breakout test, warning that a failure there would form a double rejection pattern alongside the mid-May top. Bitcoin has meanwhile reclaimed its True Market Mean at roughly $76,660, while the cost basis for corporate Bitcoin treasuries sits near $80,500. TradingView

Translation: $76,660 is the floor bulls want to defend, $80,500 is where corporate holders break even, and $82,000 decides whether this is a squeeze or a trend.

What Happens to Crypto Regulation Without the Clarity Act?

Nothing changes for holders overnight. No new rules, no new taxes, no new exchange obligations. But the rulemaking simply moves from Congress to the agencies, which is exactly what the industry spent years trying to avoid.

The SEC proposed a package called Regulation Crypto Assets on 18 August, which would let crypto startups raise up to $5 million over four years without full securities registration, plus a safe harbour so a token stops being treated as a security once its issuer finishes its promised work. SEC Chair Paul Atkins urged Congress to pass Clarity but made clear the agency would keep modernising securities regulation regardless of the vote.

The catch is durability. Rules written by a commission can be unwritten by the next one, and only Congress can hand the CFTC genuine spot-market authority. That is the difference between a framework and a favour.

The calendar is also brutal. The House is out until after the midterms and both chambers are in session for only about five more weeks in 2026. The bill could return next year, but much of it would need reworking, with Democrats widely expected to take the House. Polymarket had the odds of the bill becoming law in 2026 down at 7% by 16 September.

What Should Crypto Investors Watch Next?

Three things, in order of impact.

First, oil and yields. Crypto is currently trading as a high-beta macro asset, not a policy asset. Second, the SEC comment process on Regulation Crypto Assets, which is now the real venue for US crypto rules. Third, the November midterms, which determine whether a market-structure bill has any path at all in the next Congress.

And one uncomfortable takeaway for the industry: the president who promised to be crypto's champion has become, in the view of some of its own senior figures, the single biggest obstacle to the rules it wanted most.

Stellar reclaimed the $0.19 mark overnight into September 19, 2026. The XLM price stood at $0.19544 at 02:48 UTC on September 19, 5.57 percent above its level 24 hours earlier. The trigger has two parts that are worth keeping apart: a broad recovery across the whole crypto market after the US Federal Reserve's rate decision, and a network upgrade that has genuinely been running on mainnet since September 16. Little drama follows from that for your portfolio, but a handful of concrete checks do, and at Stellar they look different than they do at Bitcoin or Ethereum.

XLM price today: 5.57 percent in 24 hours and a range of $0.1847 to $0.1960

The figures come from our own pull of CoinGecko market data on September 19, 2026 at 02:48 UTC. XLM traded there at $0.19544, the equivalent of 0.170118 euros. Over the past 24 hours the low was $0.184698 and the high $0.196013. On a weekly view there is a gain of 8.39 percent, and over 30 days one of 13.46 percent.

Market capitalisation comes to roughly $6.82 billion, which places Stellar 20th among the largest crypto assets. There are 34.87 billion XLM in circulation. Trading volume over the past 24 hours was $269.2 million, or about four percent of market capitalisation. That is an average reading for a coin of this size and no sign of unusual activity.

One figure puts the euphoria into perspective. The all-time high of $0.875563 dates from January 2, 2018. From the current price, that level is 77.7 percent away. Anyone who has held XLM since the last cycle is still sitting on a deep paper loss, whatever the past week looked like.

Market rally or Stellar story: how much of the XLM gain is really Stellar

The most honest part of this story is the comparison with the rest of the market. In the same pull at 02:48 UTC, Bitcoin showed a daily gain of 5.72 percent, Ethereum 6.42 percent, XRP 8.74 percent and Solana 10.67 percent. Further down the field the swings were sharper still, at Uniswap with 13.34 percent and at NEAR with 16.00 percent.

At 5.57 percent, XLM sits at the lower end of that move. That argues against a wave of Stellar-specific demand and in favour of a market moving as a whole. The Federal Reserve's rate decision is regarded as the trigger: according to its statement of September 16, 2026, the Federal Open Market Committee raised the target range for the federal funds rate by 25 basis points to 3.75 to 4.00 percent, the first increase since 2023. Once the decision was on the table and no further tightening was announced, the tension that had weighed on prices in the preceding days dissolved.

For you that means this: if you read this advance as confirmation of a Stellar thesis, you are reading more into it than the data supports. The coin rose with the field. What is genuinely new comes in the next section and initially has nothing to do with the price.

Protocol 28 "Adapter" is live: what the mainnet vote of September 16 changed

A protocol upgrade at Stellar is neither a fork nor a forced swap. It is a vote among validators on a new rule version that applies to everyone from a fixed point in time. According to the upgrade guide published by the Stellar Development Foundation, the testnet vote ran on August 27, 2026 at 17:00 UTC and the mainnet vote on September 16, 2026 at the same hour.

Whether the upgrade is actually active can be measured rather than believed. For that we queried the network's public Horizon endpoint on September 19, 2026 at 02:52 UTC. The most recently closed ledger, number 64,500,117, was confirmed at 02:52:43 UTC and carries protocol version 28. The node software reports itself as stellar-core 28.0.1 and the Horizon service as 28.0.1. That settles it: protocol 28 is in production on the main network.

One inconsistency on Stellar's own pages is worth noting. At 02:53 UTC on September 19, the official version overview in the developer documentation still listed protocol 27 for mainnet, while protocol 28 appeared there under testnet marked "TBD". The documentation, in other words, lags the network. If you want to know the state of a chain, ask the chain, not the status page.

CAP-83, CAP-85 and CAP-86: what the three changes mean for Soroban developers

A CAP is a Core Advancement Proposal, a formal change proposal to the Stellar core protocol. Protocol 28 bundles three of them, and all three are aimed at developers and operators rather than end users.

CAP-83 improves how the consensus mechanism behaves under heavy load. Validators can begin voting earlier instead of waiting for a complete transaction set, and can cleanly discard late or corrupted sets instead of leaving the ledger hanging. Technically this adds a dedicated type for empty ledgers. Those mainly affected are indexers and data pipelines that process ledgers.

CAP-85 introduces a new execution type for smart contracts that allows entire fleets of Soroban contracts sharing the same code to be updated in one go and simultaneously. Nothing changes for ordinary applications. The upgrade guide describes a narrow incompatibility that applies solely to custom account contracts which authorise the creation of contracts with an external reference.

CAP-86 adds what are known as sparse map functions to the contract environment. They make migrating contract data easier without breaking existing applications. According to the guide there are no backward incompatibilities here.

Anyone running a validator faced two hard deadlines: installing the protocol 28 release of Stellar Core and arming the node by September 9, 2026. Another change is that from protocol 28 onwards validators must run NTP time synchronisation. For you as a holder, the guide states something you rarely see put so plainly: no action is required. Your XLM stay where they are and your address stays the same.

Minimum balance and base reserve: why part of your XLM is never available

This is the point where Stellar differs from most other networks and where confusion arises regularly. A base reserve is a fixed amount of XLM that the protocol locks for every slot occupied on the chain. It currently stands at 0.5 XLM. We read the value directly from ledger 64,500,117 on September 19, 2026: it is recorded there as 5,000,000 stroops, and one XLM equals ten million stroops.

Every account must permanently hold at least two of these reserves, so 1 XLM. That amount is tied up and cannot be spent for as long as the account exists. Each additional entry costs a further half XLM. That includes trustlines for other tokens on Stellar, open orders in the built-in order book, additional signers and stored data entries. Anyone holding ten trustlines for various stablecoins has a further five XLM locked up.

In practice that means three things. First, a wallet showing you 12 XLM may only release 11 for sending, and that is not a bug. Second, if you want to empty your Stellar wallet completely, you have to merge the account explicitly rather than attempting an ordinary payment. Third, if you close a trustline you no longer need, you get the half XLM back.

The transaction fee, by comparison, barely registers. The base rate recorded in the same ledger is 100 stroops per operation, or 0.00001 XLM. At the current price that is around two hundred-thousandths of a cent. Stellar gets expensive for you elsewhere, namely in the spread and in your provider's withdrawal fees.

Sending XLM to an exchange: why your balance does not arrive without a memo

A memo is a short additional field that attaches an identifier to a Stellar payment. Many trading venues run a single shared deposit account for XLM and assign incoming payments to the right customer solely through this field. If you send XLM to such an address without a memo or with the wrong one, the money lands in the exchange's pooled account and is not credited to you.

Formally it is not lost, but recovering it runs through support, often for a fee and with a wait. The check costs you ten seconds: open your provider's deposit page and see whether a memo, a memo ID or a tag is listed alongside the address. If one is, it belongs in the corresponding field of your wallet app. For a withdrawal to your own wallet you will generally not need a memo.

You may know the same mechanism from XRP, where it is called a destination tag. The source of error is identical, and experience shows it tends to catch those sending a transfer for the tenth time on autopilot.

Stellar staking does not exist: what providers do with your XLM instead

Stellar once had a built-in mechanism that distributed new lumens to accounts on the network. The developer documentation on lumens is unambiguous on this point: network inflation was ended by a validator vote on October 28, 2019. Over the nearly five years it existed, at a growth rate of one percent a year, it created a total of 5,443,902,087.3472865 lumens.

Since then the protocol itself has paid no reward, neither for holding nor for running a node. Stellar secures its network through a voting procedure among known validators, and nobody has to post capital for it. Staking in the sense of Ethereum or Solana simply does not exist at XLM.

If a provider nonetheless offers you a yield on XLM, that return comes from a source other than the protocol. Usually there is lending to third parties behind it, occasionally a time-limited promotion funded from the marketing budget. Either can be perfectly fine, but it carries a counterparty risk that protocol staking would not. The check is therefore this: do the terms state who generates the return and what happens to your balance if that third party fails?

Buying XLM in Germany: which route is open under MiCA

Since the European regulation on markets in crypto assets applies in full, a trading venue that actively targets German customers needs authorisation as a crypto asset service provider in an EU member state. We have broken down the obligations that come with this on the provider side in our overview of the MiCA duties through 2026.

For you as a buyer, three things follow that can be verified. Whether the provider holds a European authorisation, and in which country, is stated in its legal notice and in the public register of the competent supervisor. Whether your XLM are held separately from the provider's own assets is set out in the custody terms. And whether you can move the coins to an address of your own is evident from whether the provider offers external withdrawals at all.

XLM is listed consistently across the large regulated trading venues, which is why the purchase route is rarely the problem here. A side-by-side comparison of fees and custody models can be found in our comparison of the best crypto exchanges, which also shows which venues hold a European authorisation.

If you do not want to leave the coins sitting at the trading venue, you need a wallet of your own. Stellar is supported by the common hardware devices, and the reserve rule above applies there just the same. Before buying a device, check whether the manufacturer's app supports Stellar along with the memo field, because without that field you cannot send back to an exchange from it.

Holding period and allowance: how the tax office treats XLM gains in Germany

For tax purposes, German law treats XLM like other crypto assets, namely as another asset within the scope of private disposal transactions under section 23 of the Income Tax Act. If you sell within a year of buying, the gain is taxable and is charged at your personal income tax rate. If more than a year lies between purchase and sale, the gain remains tax free.

An allowance of 1,000 euros applies to the sum of all private disposal transactions in a calendar year. The word threshold should be taken literally here: anyone staying below it pays nothing, and anyone exceeding it by a single euro pays tax on the full amount, not merely on the excess.

Two things are readily overlooked at XLM. Swapping XLM into a stablecoin or into another coin counts as a sale for tax purposes and starts a fresh period for the value received. And if you take part in a yield programme, the ongoing returns have to be recorded separately. Documenting that cleanly is only possible with complete transaction data from every platform you use. This data can be consolidated with a portfolio tracker that carries the acquisition date for each position. For binding advice on your own case, your tax adviser remains the right address.

Levels above and below: how to tell an XLM breakout from a pullback

The nearest level above is the daily high of $0.196013, followed immediately by the round number at $0.20. Round levels carry no technical meaning but attract orders, because many market participants have them in mind. A daily close well above would be the first solid signal that the market recovery is turning into a move of its own.

On the downside the daily low of $0.184698 serves as a first orientation. If the price falls back below it, last night's advance was an interim recovery within the broader market move rather than a breakout. More important than any single level is where the impulse comes from: as long as XLM moves largely in step with Bitcoin and Ethereum, the overall market decides the price, not the news flow at Stellar.

Keep in mind that protocol 28 does not touch the price question at all. The three changes improve consensus behaviour and developer tooling. Whether more applications and more demand grow out of that will show over months in the number of transactions and the assets issued, not in a single day of trading.

Putting the Stellar rally in context: what to take away

1. Separate the trigger from the price. The 5.57 percent comes from a broad market recovery after the Fed decision, in which other coins rose more. Protocol 28 is a real, measured event, but not a price driver. If it has you thinking about an entry, compare fees and custody at the regulated crypto exchanges first.
2. Check the minimum reserve and the memo before you transfer. Count 1 XLM per account as permanently locked, plus half an XLM per trustline, and before every deposit to an exchange check whether a memo is required. If you want to hold the coins yourself, you will find suitable devices in the hardware wallet comparison.
3. Document every movement with a date. The one-year period and the 1,000 euro allowance decide your tax bill at XLM, and every swap starts a new period. A tax tool takes the job of consolidating the data off your hands, but you still need the records.

(As of September 19, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

The filing seeks CFTC approval for contracts giving US traders 24/5 leveraged exposure to individual stocks without ownership.

A new upgrade would cut Zcash block time from 75 seconds to 25, while quietly rewriting how the network pays for its own security after 2031.

Kevin O'Leary believes Bitcoin could hit $1 million if crypto beats its quantum computing problem, and explained why he's ditching Ethereum.

XRP is roaring back as Bitcoin claws its way above $800,000 again, but the charts continue to give traders mixed signals.

The agency submitted a prerule on crypto asset transactions and markets to the White House for review, signaling it will build a derivatives framework on its own authority after the Clarity Act's collapse.

BTC has recovered above $80,000 after falling below $75,000, reversing losses linked to the Fed’s rate decision and the Senate’s Clarity Act setback.

XRP Ledger is experiencing a rapid surge in network activity after momentum turned bullish, processing over 2.34 million XRP transactions in the last 24 hours.

Morgan Stanley’s Bitcoin ETF hasn’t recorded single outflow this month.

A large Hyperliquid whale cut a massive short position, buying back 450,000 XRP at $1.44 as the token transforms key resistance into a solid floor.

Coinbase's CEO Brian Armstrong has called out the Wall Street Journal over a potential publication on the CLARITY Act targeted at blaming him and Coinbase for the bill's failure to pass.

TLDR:

• Bitcoin market cap reached approximately $1.635 trillion, placing the cryptocurrency nearly $197 billion above Tesla in global rankings.
• Bitcoin traded near $81,419 after gaining about 4%, while Tesla shares fell roughly 0.5% to $364.27 during the market comparison.
• Tesla reported 11,509 BTC at June 30, while the holding value rose to about $937 million at the cited September Bitcoin price.
• Tesla and SpaceX together held 30,221 BTC through separate corporate positions, worth approximately $2.46 billion at the cited price.

Bitcoin market cap reached approximately $1.635 trillion on September 19, placing the cryptocurrency above Tesla in global asset rankings. Bitcoin traded near $81,419 after rising about 4%, while Tesla shares slipped 0.5% to $364.27. The difference produced a gap of $197 billion, or nearly 14%.

CompaniesMarketCap ranked Bitcoin 13th among the largest global assets. Tesla ranked 14th with a valuation of $1.438 trillion. The comparison measures market value, but it does not equate a digital asset with an operating company.

Bitcoin market cap reflects price multiplied by circulating supply. Tesla market cap reflects shares outstanding multiplied by the stock price. The two figures can move at different speeds, as investors price monetary demand, corporate earnings, debt and future cash flows.

Bitcoin Market Cap Moves Nearly $200 Billion Above Tesla

Market rankings can change quickly when asset prices shift. Using the circulating supply implied by the comparison, Bitcoin would match Tesla’s valuation near $71,600 if Tesla shares remained unchanged. That calculation does not forecast price direction.

A separate move in either asset could alter the Bitcoin market cap gap. Bitcoin gained about 4% in the cited market reading, while Tesla shares declined around 0.5%. The differing moves helped widen the spread between the two valuations.

The comparison also shows why market capitalization needs context. Bitcoin does not issue quarterly revenue reports or carry factories and debt. Tesla operates manufacturing, software and energy businesses, with valuation tied to expected cash generation.

The Bitcoin market cap offers a scale comparison rather than a like-for-like valuation test. It places two large assets on one ranking, while leaving their underlying structures separate.

Bitcoin’s lead would narrow if its price fell while Tesla shares held steady. At the cited circulating supply, every $1,000 Bitcoin move would alter its implied value by $20 billion. The relationship works in reverse for Tesla, as share-price changes affect its valuation without changing Bitcoin’s supply.

The ranking also places asset classes in one comparison. CompaniesMarketCap lists gold, major technology companies and other financial assets alongside cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin’s position can change daily, as Bitcoin trades continuously while Tesla trades during stock-market hours.

Tesla Bitcoin Holdings Add Context to the Global Ranking

Tesla reported 11,509 BTC in its June 30, 2026, second-quarter filing. The filing listed a $386 million cost basis and a $674 million fair value at quarter-end. BitcoinTreasuries also listed 11,509 BTC on September 19.

At $81,419, the holdings were worth approximately $937 million. That estimate sits about $551 million above Tesla’s disclosed acquisition cost. It does not represent a new accounting gain, as earlier fair-value changes may have affected reported results.

The Bitcoin holdings represented about 0.07% of Tesla market cap. Tesla’s position also stood far below the $197 billion gap between the two assets. Its treasury exposure links the companies, but it does not explain the ranking.

The filing used a quarter-end date, while the market comparison used a later price. That timing difference explains why the fair value and September estimate differ. The figures do not represent exact simultaneous accounting measurements.

Tesla purchased $1.5 billion in Bitcoin during 2021. By the end of 2022, it had converted about 75% of the position into fiat currency, based on regulatory disclosures. The unchanged balance reported for June and listed in September suggests Tesla retained the remaining coins.

Another company linked to Elon Musk also appeared in corporate Bitcoin data. BitcoinTreasuries attributed 18,712 BTC to SpaceX. Combined holdings attributed to Tesla and SpaceX totaled 30,221 BTC, worth about $2.46 billion at the cited price. The companies hold their assets separately, and the total does not establish Musk’s personal ownership.

The post Bitcoin Market Cap Overtakes Tesla as Its Value Nears $1.64T appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Highlights

• Bitcoin bounced back above the $80,000 threshold following midweek declines.
• Senate blocked progress on the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act in a procedural vote.
• Federal Reserve implemented a 25 basis point rate increase, marking its first hike in over three years.
• SEC unveiled a five-year exemption framework for tokenized U.S. stock offerings.
• CFTC forwarded comprehensive crypto-asset regulations to the White House for evaluation.

Digital asset markets navigated a turbulent period as regulatory developments, monetary policy adjustments, and climbing Treasury yields influenced price action throughout the cryptocurrency sector.

Bitcoin experienced downward pressure during the week’s opening days before staging a notable comeback above $80,000 by Friday’s close. This resurgence occurred notwithstanding obstacles in cryptocurrency legislation and the Federal Reserve’s decision to tighten monetary conditions.

Senate Blocks Digital Asset CLARITY Act Progress

A significant development emerged when the Senate fell short of advancing the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act through a critical procedural hurdle.

This proposed legislation aims to establish more precise regulatory guidelines for digital currencies across the United States, specifically delineating authority between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The procedural motion concluded with a 50-49 tally supporting advancement, falling short of the required 60-vote threshold. Four members of the Republican caucus aligned with Democrats to prevent the bill’s progression.

Cryptocurrency valuations declined in response to the outcome, with associated equity positions in crypto-related companies experiencing similar downward momentum.

However, the legislative effort isn’t necessarily finished. Senator Thom Tillis employed a procedural mechanism that maintains the option for reconsideration during a future voting session.

BTC Pushes Back Above $80,000 Threshold

Bitcoin demonstrated significant strength during the latter portion of the week following multiple sessions trading beneath the $80,000 psychological barrier.

The flagship cryptocurrency gained over 5% during Friday’s trading session, breaking back above $80,000 after ranging primarily between $75,000 and $78,000 throughout earlier weekday sessions.

This price recovery materialized after the Senate voting results and coincided with market participants recalibrating expectations around the interest rate environment.

Alternative cryptocurrencies participated in the upward movement. Solana and Hyperliquid emerged as particularly strong performers as buying pressure expanded throughout the broader digital asset ecosystem.

Bitcoin’s reestablishment above $80,000 places this price level back under scrutiny as market participants evaluate whether momentum can persist heading into the following week.

Central Bank Implements Rate Increase

The Federal Reserve introduced another complication for cryptocurrency holders midweek.

The nation’s central banking authority raised its policy rate by 25 basis points to a target range spanning 3.75% to 4.00%.

This represented the Fed’s initial interest rate elevation in more than three years.

Monetary policymakers simultaneously signaled openness to additional rate adjustments as their campaign to moderate inflation pressures continues.

Elevated interest rates typically diminish appetite for speculative assets as government bonds and alternative conservative investments begin providing more competitive yields.

The benchmark 10-year Treasury yield approached 5% during this period, contributing additional headwinds across financial markets.

Despite these challenges, Bitcoin managed to rebound following the central bank’s announcement, concluding the week above the $80,000 mark.

Securities Regulator Advances Tokenized Equity Framework

The SEC simultaneously progressed with new regulatory provisions connected to blockchain-enabled financial infrastructure.

The agency revealed a five-year innovation exemption designed to permit qualifying tokenized U.S. equities to operate using blockchain-based systems.

Tokenized equities represent conventional corporate shares recorded on blockchain networks while maintaining connections to their underlying securities.

This initiative arrives as major financial institutions investigate applications of distributed ledger technology for equity trading and settlement processes.

The New York Stock Exchange is simultaneously developing infrastructure for tokenized U.S. stocks and exchange-traded funds, contingent upon regulatory clearance.

Commodities Regulator Advances Digital Asset Framework

The CFTC implemented its own regulatory initiative as the week concluded.

Friday saw the agency forward crypto-asset rulemaking proposals to the White House for administrative review.

This action followed one day after the SEC’s tokenized securities announcement.

Both initiatives demonstrated that federal regulatory bodies continue advancing cryptocurrency frameworks despite broader legislative proposals remaining gridlocked in Congressional proceedings.

The trading week concluded with Bitcoin reestablished above $80,000 notwithstanding tightened monetary conditions, elevated Treasury yields, and the legislative setback.

Market focus now shifts toward whether Bitcoin can maintain its position above $80,000 and whether Ethereum, Solana, and other major cryptocurrencies can extend Friday’s positive momentum.

The post Bitcoin Surges Past $80K Following Regulatory Turbulence and Federal Reserve Rate Decision appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Bitcoin ETF inflows reached $433 million on September 18, with Fidelity’s FBTC contributing $310.72 million, or about 72% of the total.
• Fidelity and BlackRock captured about 97% of the day’s net inflows, while total U.S. spot Bitcoin ETF assets stood at $102.53 billion.
• Bitcoin traded near $81,330 as the daily RSI rose to 64.48, with liquidation data showing a dense liquidity cluster around $81,800 to $82,000.
• A break above $83,000 would extend the recent recovery range, while a loss of $80,000 could shift attention toward $78,300 to $78,700 support.

Bitcoin ETF inflows accelerated on September 18 as U.S. funds attracted $433 million net. Fidelity’s Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund led with $310.72 million, equal to 72% of the total. BlackRock’s IBIT added $108 million, leaving the two products with about 97% of the day’s inflows. 

The surge arrived as Bitcoin price pushed toward $81,000 and tested technical resistance. Market data showed U.S. spot Bitcoin ETF assets at $102.53 billion, equal to about 6.29% of Bitcoin’s market value. The rebound followed nearly $746 million in midweek ETF outflows. It offset part of the selling pressure seen earlier in the week.

Bitcoin ETF Inflows Concentrate in Fidelity and BlackRock

The Fidelity Bitcoin ETF posted its strongest contribution to the September 18 session, exceeding other spot Bitcoin products. The $310.72 million daily inflow equaled three quarters of the fund’s nine-day August buying streak. That earlier run brought in about $413.1 million across consecutive sessions.

FBTC has gathered roughly $10.36 billion in net inflows since its January 2024 launch. That places the fund behind BlackRock’s IBIT among U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs by capital attracted. The market now holds more than $102 billion through these products.

Bitcoin ETF inflows show how demand can become concentrated across a small number of funds. Fidelity and BlackRock captured nearly all net additions during the session. Other products accounted for a small share of the $433 million total.

The September 18 reversal marked a change in daily flow direction after the earlier midweek selloff.

That shift coincided with a recovery in Bitcoin price. BTC traded near $81,330 on September 19 after moving above the 20-day Bollinger midpoint at $78,346. The upper Bollinger Band stood near $81,745, placing price close to a short-term test.

Bitcoin ETF inflows can support spot demand when funds create new ETF shares. However, daily flows do not guarantee continued price gains. Fund activity, derivatives positioning, macro policy, and profit-taking can all affect the next move.

Bitcoin Price Tests $82,000 Liquidity and $83,000 Resistance

Bitcoin’s daily RSI rose to 64.48, above its signal average of 57.25. The reading showed stronger momentum without crossing the 70 level often linked to overbought conditions. Other indicators also leaned positive, including a bullish Supertrend and a positive Aroon spread.

CoinGlass liquidity data showed a dense cluster between roughly $81,800 and $82,000. Additional liquidation zones appeared around $82,500 to $83,000 and near $84,000. These areas could attract price if buying pressure continues through the current range.

Bitcoin ETF inflows add another demand signal as BTC approaches those levels. Still, the market faces nearby downside liquidity around $80,000 and $79,400. A larger support zone sits between $78,500 and $79,000, close to the four-hour Supertrend and daily Bollinger midpoint.

Technical traders are also watching $83,000. A sustained break above that level would move Bitcoin beyond the upper part of its recent range. It would also place $85,000 in view as the next nearby level.

Failure to hold $80,000 would shift attention back toward $78,300 to $78,700. A deeper decline could reopen the $75,000 to $76,000 area, where liquidation data show another broad concentration.

Macro risks also stay active after the Federal Reserve raised rates by 25 basis points. The Bank of Japan then increased its benchmark rate to 1.25%. The U.S. Senate also rejected the CLARITY Act, delaying federal crypto market structure legislation.

The lower Bollinger Band stood near $74,948. CoinGlass data showed leveraged positions concentrated between $75,000 and $76,000, adding a liquidity zone below the current range.

The post Bitcoin ETF Inflows Hit $433M as Fidelity Leads With $311M Surge appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Polygon plans to permanently burn 100M POL after final Security Council approval for mainnet.
• The collector contract holds 121M POL generated through network base fees from user activity.
• Polygon reported $24.5M in 2026 revenue, ahead of figures cited for Arbitrum and NEAR.
• POL trades near $0.104 as Bitcoin-led market strength supports the broader crypto rally.

Polygon is preparing to permanently burn 100 million POL tokens after its network generated $24.5 million in 2026 revenue. The planned burn represents about 1% of POL’s total supply and targets tokens held by a collector contract.

Polygon CEO Sandeep Nailwal said the contracts are currently on testnet pending final Security Council signatures.

The collector contract currently holds 121 million POL generated through network base fees. Once approved for mainnet, anyone in the community will be able to trigger the initial 100 million POL burn.

The proposal adds a new mechanism to Polygon’s existing token economics. It also comes as Polygon reports rising network activity and continued deflationary conditions.

Polygon POL Nurn Moves closer to Mainnet

The planned Polygon POL burn will permanently remove 100 million tokens from circulation. These tokens cannot return to the market after the burn transaction executes.

Polygon collects POL through network base fees paid when users execute transactions. Those fees flow into the collector contract, which has accumulated 121 million POL.

After the required Security Council approvals, the contracts will move from testnet to mainnet. Anyone can then initiate the first burn without requiring Polygon to manually execute it.

The mechanism will also operate quarterly after the initial burn. Community members will be able to trigger subsequent POL burns as eligible tokens accumulate.

Nailwal said POL has remained deflationary since January 2026. He also said Polygon has continued handling significant activity across payments, trading, and consumer applications.

Polygon has scaled its network to 5,000 transactions per second, according to Nailwal. The planned burn therefore connects token supply mechanics directly with ongoing network activity.

POL Revenue Reaches $24.5M as Token Market Reacts

Polygon reported $24.5 million in revenue year-to-date during 2026. Nailwal compared that figure with $8.41 million for Arbitrum and $5.6 million for NEAR.

Those figures place Polygon’s reported revenue at roughly three times Arbitrum’s level. They also put it at roughly five times NEAR’s reported figure.

The revenue figures cited by Nailwal include specific activity within the other networks. Arbitrum’s figure includes the Robinhood chain, while NEAR’s figure includes Near Intents.

POL was trading at $0.104 after gaining 3.98% over 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap data provided. The move closely tracked a broader market rally led by Bitcoin.

The provided CoinMarketCap analysis attributed POL’s move primarily to its strong beta correlation with Bitcoin. It cited regulatory optimism and easing macro concerns behind Bitcoin’s strength.

No clear POL-specific catalyst was identified in that market data. However, the planned burn provides a separate token-supply development for traders monitoring POL.

An analyst, @venturefounder, sees POL potentially moving toward $0.17. The same analyst also expects a possible return toward CoinMarketCap’s top-40 ranking.

Those targets remain analysis rather than confirmed outcomes. Traders can instead monitor whether POL holds the $0.10 level during the current market move.

A sustained move above that level could keep $0.11 in focus. A break below $0.10 could expose the token to a pullback toward $0.095.

The core mechanism is straightforward: Polygon collects POL through base fees, stores those tokens, then permanently removes them quarterly. Hence, the 100 million POL burn will reduce the collector balance and establish a recurring community-triggered supply reduction.

The post Polygon POL Burn: 100M Tokens Set for Permanent Removal as Revenue Hits $24.5M appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Highlights

• The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 0.2% on Friday, marking its third consecutive weekly decline.
• The S&P 500 edged up 0.2%, and the Nasdaq Composite advanced 0.4%.
• The 10-year Treasury yield finished the week hovering just under the 5% threshold.
• This week saw the Federal Reserve implement a 25 basis point rate increase.
• Crude oil retreated below the $100 mark as chip stocks rebounded from mid-week losses.

U.S. equity markets closed Friday’s session with mixed results as market participants digested the implications of elevated interest rates, bond yields approaching 5%, and ongoing inflation concerns.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped approximately 0.2% to settle at 51,682.64.

This downturn extended the Dow’s losing streak to three straight weeks. The benchmark index also recorded its most challenging week since March.

The S&P 500 climbed 0.2% on Friday, finishing at 7,650.50, though it still registered a modest weekly decline.

The Nasdaq Composite advanced roughly 0.4%, securing a positive result for the week.

Bond Yields Climb Following Federal Reserve Action

Rising bond yields continued to weigh heavily on equity markets.

The benchmark 10-year Treasury yield concluded the week at 4.995%, stopping just shy of the psychologically significant 5% marker.

The 2-year Treasury yield settled at 4.741%. According to Dow Jones Market Data, this represented its highest 3 p.m. close since July 1, 2024.

The upward movement in yields came after the Federal Reserve’s announcement Wednesday to lift its key interest rate by 25 basis points.

This marked the central bank’s first rate hike in three years.

Market participants are now evaluating the likelihood of additional increases ahead. Data from CME FedWatch indicated a 47.1% chance of another quarter-point hike and a 42.4% probability of cumulative half-point increases extending through December.

Investor attention remains centered on inflation dynamics, particularly as recent energy price spikes have intensified cost pressures for both consumers and businesses.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, remarked to Yahoo Finance this week that uncertainty persists regarding whether inflation has been adequately contained.

Crude Retreats as Technology Shares Rebound

Oil prices offered some market relief Friday, pulling back below the $100 per barrel threshold after previously surpassing that benchmark.

Energy markets continue to react to potential supply disruptions associated with the conflict in Iran and transportation risks through the Strait of Hormuz.

Technology equities outperformed most other market segments.

Semiconductor shares bounced back from earlier weekly declines. The PHLX Semiconductor Index concluded the week with slight gains.

Chip manufacturers had faced selling pressure following statements from Anthropic and OpenAI advocating for reduced AI development speed due to safety considerations.

Daniel Skelly, a portfolio manager at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, noted that crude oil fluctuations, elevated bond yields, and the upcoming U.S. midterm elections may continue driving market turbulence in the near term.

Investors will now turn their attention to movements in Treasury yields, energy prices, and Federal Reserve policy expectations heading into the October meeting, following the Dow’s third straight week of losses.

The post Dow Slides for Third Week as 10-Year Treasury Yield Approaches 5% Mark appeared first on Blockonomi.

Bitcoin showed impressive resilience over the past several days, even as everything was seemingly going against it. From the CLARITY Act setback in the US Senate to the Fed and BOJ hiking rates, the cryptocurrency, being a risk-on asset, was expected to suffer.

And it did for a bit, slumping to a three-week low at $75,000 on Tuesday and Wednesday. However, the initial shock was quickly absorbed, and the bulls returned on Friday with a major push that drove the asset to over $81,000 for a two-week peak. Moreover, it has remained there on Saturday, unlike the previous breakout attempts, which has prompted some analysts to predict the start of the bull market – but only if this condition is met.

The Real Test

Crypto Rover and CryptoGoos jointly highlighted $81,000 as the immediate breakout level, arguing that a successful move through it could quickly put $100,000 back on the table, followed by potentially $120,000. The asset has already tested the first part of that highly optimistic scenario, but another closely watched technical barrier just sits above the current level.

CryptoGoos pointed to bitcoin’s 50-week moving average, positioned at around $81,700 at the moment. The analyst said reclaiming that line would represent confirmation that BTC has transitioned back into a bull market. Recall that bitcoin tested it on a couple of occasions several weeks ago, but to no permanent avail.

The level is particularly interesting because other data identifies the low-$82,000 region as an important resistance zone. Bitcoin’s 365-day MA has recently hovered there, reinforcing the idea that the current zone could be more significant than the psychological $80,000 mark itself.

As such, breaking past $80,000 and even $81,000 might not be enough for now, as BTC would need to overcome the $82,000 area to prove it has the power to turn this into something more than another failed breakout attempt.

Another Major Gate

Fellow analyst EGRAG CRYPTO offered an even higher threshold before declaring that BTC’s macro bullish structure has returned. He outlined the 100-period EMA on the asset’s five-day chart, which currently sits near $90,000. Falling below this indicator has historically coincided with bearish pressure, but reclaiming it, retesting it, and subsequently bouncing has provided much stronger bullish confirmation.

Consequently, the analyst believes a five-day close above $90,000 followed by a successful retest would be necessary before the bull can officially call it their own market phase.

The post Bitcoin Bull Market Confirmed If BTC Closes the Week Above This Key Level: Analysts appeared first on CryptoPotato.

It was difficult to imagine, after the developments that took place in the middle of the week, what would transpire on Friday, but BTC’s price somehow skyrocketed past $81,000 for the first time in half a month.

The altcoins have also turned green today, with ETH reclaiming $2,600, XRP bouncing above $1.40, and SOL rocketing past $110.

BTC Flies Above $81K

After the heightened volatility on the previous Friday following the release of the US CPI Data, bitcoin’s price calmed over the weekend at around $77,000. All eyes turned to the subsequent business week, which was expected to be a big one.

The first major event took place on Tuesday when the CLARITY Act was scheduled to be voted on in the US Senate. The vote didn’t go well, and the Senate rejected advancing the key bill. The largest cryptocurrency reacted with an immediate leg down that drove it to $75,000. More fluctuations ensued a day later when the US Federal Reserve hiked the rates for the first time in over three years, and BTC went down but then back up to $76,500 within minutes.

The bulls started to reemerge at this point and didn’t allow bitcoin to slip any further. In fact, the cryptocurrency jumped to $78,000 on Friday morning and then initiated a massive leg up during US trading hours, jumping past $80,000 and $81,000 for the first time in two weeks.

Unlike the previous such run, though, this one was maintained over the weekend as well, at least for now, and BTC now sits above $81,000 after a negative macro week. Its market cap is up to $1.630 trillion, while its dominance over the alts remains at 58.7% on CMC.

Alts See Green

Ethereum is up by 5% daily and has reclaimed the $2,600 level, which was tested earlier this month. XRP has jumped past $1.40 after a 6.4% increase, while SOL is above $110 now after a 5.4% pump. Impressive gains are also evident from the likes of XMR, RAIN, ZEC, LINK, TAO, AAVE, and SUI.

The double-digit price pump club consists of ENA, AVAX, MORPHO, SKY, INJ, PIEVERSE, and a few others. In contrast, BTW has slumped by over 9% and now sits below $0.60.

The cumulative market cap of all crypto assets has increased by $150 billion in a day and is up to $2.780 trillion on CMC.

The post Crypto Market Cap Adds $150B Daily as Bitcoin (BTC) Soars Past $81K: Weekend Watch appeared first on CryptoPotato.

It was a massive week for the entire cryptocurrency industry, with essentially nothing going its way, and yet bitcoin managed to seemingly weather the storm, especially from the bigger blow – the failure of the CLARITY Act.

The cryptocurrency’s price dropped to a multi-week low at $75,000 immediately after the US Senate voted against advancing the key bill on September 15, but has since recovered all losses and even exceeded $81,000 on Friday.

Uncertainty; Not a New Crackdown

CryptoPotato reached out to several prominent crypto experts to see what their take is on the vote, which fell short of the 60 senators required to move the legislation forward. Alvin Kan, COO at Bitget Wallet, noted that the result should not be interpreted as Washington reversing its stance on the digital asset industry by imposing new restrictions.

“The CLARITY Act’s failure to advance has preserved the current US regulatory patchwork,” he said.

The legislation’s core idea was to establish clearer boundaries between the SEC and the CFTC and create federal rules covering the crypto markets and intermediaries. Its failure, though, leaves much of that work with regulators instead of Congress.

Kan explained that the vote did not introduce new restrictions on self-custody or self-hosted wallets. However, protections included in the proposed legislation remain without the stronger statutory foundation the bill could have provided. Some of those included provisions covering users controlling their own assets and developers providing non-custodial software.

Bitget Wallet’s COO argued that continued uncertainty affects smaller companies disproportionately. For instance, recent data from Electric Capital indicated that the US share of global crypto devs has dropped from 38% in 2015 to 19%. The country also captured somewhere between 2% and 5% of centralized-exchange volume growth between 2024 and 2025.

What Comes Next?

The CLARITY Act is not technically dead, as a procedural vote by Senator Thom Tillis preserves the possibility of reconsideration, although the legislative calendar makes passage this year increasingly difficult. Meanwhile, the two main regulatory bodies in the country are expected to continue using their existing authority.

The SEC already moved this week to introduce a five-week exemption facilitating certain tokenized-stock trading, showing that regulatory development can continue even without Congress, something that Bitwise’s CIO predicted.

Iliya Kalchev, Nexo Dispatch analyst, commented on BTC’s price reaction, indicating that the $3,000 drop to $75,000 should not be dismissed easily. However, the subsequent rebound shows that the vote was “already priced in beforehand, as markets treated a failed vote as the likely outcome for weeks; so this looked more like confirmation than surprise.”

“The US has already shown it will legislate crypto piece by piece when the politics allow it, and there is little reason to think market structure ends up the permanent exception,” he concluded.

The post Bitcoin Survived the CLARITY Act Setback: What Happens Next? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The popular privacy coin has been unstoppable lately, briefly surpassing a 10-year high of $1,500. It currently trades at roughly $1,470 (per CoinGecko), up a staggering 190% in a month.

Check out where the next bullish targets stand.

Far From Being Done?

Zcash has become crypto’s rock star after starting a major bull run over the past several months and showing no signs of exhaustion. If you are curious to learn the main factors fueling the rally, check out our detailed article here. You can also find more information here.

X user Scient claimed that ZEC is practically in price discovery and doesn’t anticipate a cool-off anytime soon. The analyst suggested that the asset’s price could “easily” climb above $5,000 when Bitcoin (BTC) hits a new all-time high.

Ali Martinez argued that “momentum remains strong,” adding that the valuation continues to move toward his first target at $1,800. “That’s the level I’m watching next,” he said. The analyst initially made his bullish bet toward the end of August, when ZEC was trading around $820.

The biggest optimist appears to be Picolas Cage. The X user predicted that Zcash could skyrocket to $14,000 and stressed that this isn’t a sarcastic tweet.

“Just don’t think people have figured out where we are in the cycle or what’s going on with this trade,” they added.

The Bearish Take

Crypto with Harris ₿ is among the few to make a pessimistic prediction. He revealed that he opened a $100,000 short position on ZEC and explained why. The analyst noted that the asset has been pumping continuously from $500 without any major correction.

“ZEC is just not a random meme coin; it has real fundamentals and a strong privacy narrative, but that doesn’t mean price will go straight up forever,” he claimed.

Second, the analyst noted that too many people have become confident after the pump and are flocking to buy out of FOMO. This phenomenon typically occurs at cycle tops and often precedes a correction. Next, the X user said a big part of the recent rally came from short liquidations, arguing that the squeeze has slowed.

“There are still many reasons why I’m bearish on  ZEC. The price has already pumped too much, open interest is very high, most of the bullish news is already out, and from here it needs a lot more fresh money to keep going up. So be careful if you’re trading ZEC here, especially with high leverage. This is just my view and my trade, not financial advice. Always do your own research and manage your risk. My liquidation is above $7K, so I am safe,” he concluded.

Meanwhile, Lookonchain revealed that one trader who once won 26 trades in a row, had an 89% win rate, and made over $9 million has opened a $18.3 million short position on ZEC and is now down $7.66 million. The mysterious whale faces liquidation if the asset’s price reaches about $1,551.

The post Zcash (ZEC) Keeps Flying: What’s Next After Crossing $1,500? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Fresh moves from the two largest regulators in the United States suggest the local crypto industry is still advancing on the regulatory front even without Congress.

The CFTC’s move coincided with the broader market’s price resurgence on Friday, leading to the question of whether BTC and the alts jumped because of regulatory developments.

SEC and Tokenized Stocks

CryptoPotato reported on September 17 that the SEC introduced a five-year “Innovation Exception” program designed to make it easier for qualifying platforms to trade tokenized US stocks on-chain. It allows eligible trading venues relief from some exchange requirements and offers liquidity providers temporary exceptions from dealer-registration rules.

Although tokenized stocks must still provide the same core shareholder rights as traditional equities, including dividends and voting rights, synthetic products that simply track the share price will be excluded.

The agency argued that the framework could enable 24/7 trading, faster settlement, greater transparency, and self-custody, while lowering barriers for blockchain-based securities platforms.

The timing was quite interesting, as it came just after the CLARITY Act setback, and it could carry a more important message than just regulating tokenized stocks. SEC Chair Paul Atkins previously said that the agency would continue its crypto agenda regardless of whether Congress passed CLARITY.

CFTC Follows Suit

The commodity watchdog made a similar move by submitting “Regulation Crypto Asset Transactions and Regulation Crypto Asset Markets” to the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for review at the end of the business week. As such, it began the next step toward a formal crypto market framework under its existing powers.

The CFTC also issued a no-action position protecting certain software developers from being treated as introducing brokers when specific conditions are met. Chair Michael Seling commented even before the CLARITY vote that even if it stalled, his agency would use existing authority to begin building a crypto market-structure regime anyway.

It’s worth noting that neither of those propositions by the SEC and the CFTC replaces the CLARITY Act. Rules written by regulators are less durable than legislation passed by Congress since they can be changed easily by a future administration. However, the developments may have reassured markets that the regulatory process has not returned to square one.

Perhaps that’s why bitcoin’s price rallied on Friday after the CFTC news went live, and skyrocketed from $78,000 to a two-week peak of over $81,000.

The post Bitcoin Reclaims $80K as SEC and CFTC Push Ahead After CLARITY Failure appeared first on CryptoPotato.