Samsung's investment in AI chip alternatives highlights a shift towards diversifying suppliers, reducing dependency on dominant market players.

The post Samsung backs AI chip rival in $250M funding round as GPU alternatives rise appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The neobank boom highlights stablecoins' pivotal role in fintech, yet profitability challenges and regulatory shifts could reshape market dynamics.

The post Circle and Tether emerge as key beneficiaries of the neobank boom appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The surge in prediction market volumes highlights their growing role as information aggregation tools, despite operational challenges.

The post Polymarket sees 9X increase in NFL and college football volume appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

USDC's milestone highlights its pivotal role in DeFi, but Circle's revenue reliance on interest rates poses financial stability risks.

The post USDC surpasses $100T in all-time on-chain transaction volume appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

UEFA's decision will influence regional tourism, economic impact, and global football prestige, shaping future bidding dynamics and investments.

The post UEFA to decide Champions League final venue between Spotify Camp Nou and Wembley appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Swiss Bitcoin Pay Shuts Down Servers After Data Breach

Another day, another data breach. 

Swiss Bitcoin Pay, a non-custodial bitcoin payment processor, said that it had to temporarily shut down its servers following a data breach on Monday. 

The Neuchâtel, Switzerland-based company said that user funds were safe but customer email addresses, bitcoin addresses and IBANs, transaction history, and hashed passwords were believed to be breached. 

The announcement comes amid a run of breaches hitting bitcoin and fintech firms. Revolut confirmed last week that it handed customer passports, driver’s licenses, verification selfies and transaction histories to an unauthorized party that sent fraudulent requests from a legitimate government agency’s email domain. 

And top hardware wallet manufacturer Trezor last week warned that a data breach at the third-party marketing platform it uses for sending newsletters was leading criminals to target customers with phishing attacks. 

“A malicious user has likely gained access to Swiss Bitcoin Pay’s internal systems …As a precaution, we are temporarily shutting down our servers while we investigate and secure our infrastructure.” Swiss Bitcoin Pay said on Monday. 

The company added that; “User funds are safe, and any amounts owed to users will be fully returned.”

Swiss Bitcoin Pay did not immediately respond to Bitcoin Magazine’s request for comment. 

The company lets businesses accept Bitcoin payments quickly and easily using both on-chain transactions and the Lightning Network. 

Criminals have increasingly been targeting data in 2026. Scammers in January were able to get hold of customer information via crypto wallet Ledger’s payment processor Global-e to send phishing emails. 

Crypto wallet provider SafePal last month also announced a data breach that involved ​unauthorized access to about 39,798 customers’ order information, ‌including personal details such as names, addresses and purchase data.

This post Swiss Bitcoin Pay Shuts Down Servers After Data Breach first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Mallers: Bitcoin and AI Could Give Humans Back Their Time

Bitcoin — along with artificial intelligence — could help humans get their time back to create again, according to Strike CEO Jack Mallers. 

The reason: hard money doesn’t rob people of their time and energy and truly rewards people time and energy well spent, Mallers argued on Bitcoin Magazine’s debut TV show on Monday. 

“Money broadly is our time and energy in an abstracted form — it is the market good that represents the effort, the labor,” Mallers said. 

“If the money is bad, it’s very destructive to our time and energy: It robs us of our time and energy. You have to work longer and harder to get a house; you have to work longer and harder to get a vacation. You have to work longer and harder to have hours to pursue your artistic interests.”

“And if the money is good, it actually gives you and rewards back time and energy,” he continued, adding that Bitcoin and AI could free humans from the “drudgery” of bad money.

Mallers went on to cite the example of the creators of the airplane, the Wright brothers, who came up with their invention when the U.S. was on a gold standard. 

Mallers’ comments come following Bitcoin’s best run in years. Bitcoin gained about 25% in August, its strongest month of 2026 and its first positive August since 2021, closing the month near $78,000.

The run followed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s move to expand long-dated bond buybacks, which pulled yields down and triggered billions in short liquidations.

Since the news, the so-called debasement trade has been back in the headlines again: when traders buy assets like gold or bitcoin to hedge against a currency losing its value. 

The dollar slid on the Treasury buyback news and an announcement the same week that U.S. debt had hit the $40 trillion mark. 

Speaking about the state of the U.S. economy, Mallers added: “This level of debt is unsustainable, so when people debate, oh well, what if they hike rates? What if they cut rates? It doesn’t matter: it’s all inflationary and it’s all untenable.”

Data on Friday revealed that the consumer price index, excluding food and energy, climbed 0.3% in August from a month earlier — higher than expected.  

The U.S. is currently in the grips of an affordability crisis, and it’s widely expected that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates this week to tame inflation as oil prices have surged. 

This post Mallers: Bitcoin and AI Could Give Humans Back Their Time first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Lummis Credits Trump for Ethics Deal as Clarity Act Faces Tuesday Vote

Republican senator Cynthia Lummis has praised U.S. President Donald Trump for agreeing “to the toughest ethics restrictions” in order to get the Clarity Act over the line. 

The pro-crypto senator wrote on X Monday that Trump had agreed to tighter laws which give state attorneys generals standing to sue to enforce the conflict-of-interest rules on federal officials.

Lawmakers will vote on the Clarity Act tomorrow. The bill aims to formally divide oversight between regulators, distinguishing which digital assets are securities, commodities or stablecoins — rules crypto industry executives have long called for. 

“Back in July, Trump voluntarily put himself, the VP, every federally elected official, judges, and their spouses under the strictest ethics rules this country has ever seen. Most people in Washington never would’ve offered that. Democrats still wanted independent, outside enforcement, not DOJ alone — so Trump went back to the table and gave more,” Lummis said. 

She added: “A no vote tomorrow kills the toughest ethics reform this country has ever put on the books, kills consumer protections for every American holding digital assets, and hands the future of this industry to our foreign competitors.” 

Alongside senators John Boozman and Tim Scott, Lummis released a new draft of the Clarity Act on Sunday night that gives attorneys enforcement new powers. 

An updated draft of the Clarity Act banning government officials from promoting or making money from crypto started circulating in July but Democrats wanted more work on it.  

President Donald Trump campaigned on a ticket to help the crypto space but some Washington lawmakers have criticized the way the Trump family has profited from digital asset ventures, such as the President’s memecoin, $TRUMP, and World Liberty Financial project. 

Trump and the White House have always denied any conflicts of interest. 

Speaking in an interview with Punchbowl News in August, about the Clarity Act and ethics, President Trump pointed out the Democrats have also made money from stock trading. 

Though passed by the House of Representatives last year, the Clarity Act has been stalled this year, mostly because the banking lobby clashed with crypto companies over paying customers stablecoin yield. 

Republicans like Lummis have accused Democrats of deliberately holding back the bill. 

This post Lummis Credits Trump for Ethics Deal as Clarity Act Faces Tuesday Vote first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Morgan Stanley’s Bitcoin Investment Recommendation Explained w/ Amy Oldenburg

Morgan Stanley became the first global systemically important bank to launch a spot Bitcoin ETP and it crossed $600 million within months of its April debut. Amy Oldenburg, Head of Digital Assets at Morgan Stanley, joins host Spencer Nichols to explain how that product came together, why it was priced below competing spot Bitcoin ETFs, and what still stands between clients and their first Bitcoin allocation. She also details the firm’s 0–4% allocation framework across three investor risk profiles and why Morgan Stanley has no equivalent gold allocation. Plus: whether Bitcoin could land on Morgan Stanley’s own balance sheet.

Host: Spencer Nichols — Bitcoin Magazine
Amy Oldenburg, Head of Digital Assets at Morgan Stanley

Chapters:
0:00 — Morgan Stanley on Putting Bitcoin on Its Own Balance Sheet
1:14 — 26 Years at Morgan Stanley: Emerging Markets to Head of Digital Assets
2:10 — First Major Bank to Launch a Spot Bitcoin ETP Tops $600 Million
3:14 — Education, E-Trade Spot Crypto, and What Clients Actually Own
4:49 — Why Morgan Stanley Priced Its Bitcoin ETP So Low
6:40 — The 0–4% Allocation Framework and the Digital Gold Thesis
8:52 — Correlation Regimes: Digital Gold, High Beta Tech, and Volatility
11:41 — Gold 2.0, Market Cap, and Bitcoin on the Balance Sheet
14:37 — Institutional Market Structure, Quantum Risk, and Client Trust
18:02 — Global Off-Ramps, Tokenization, Stablecoins, and Morgan Stanley Research

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this show are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of BTC Inc., Bitcoin Magazine, or any affiliated entities. This content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice. Nothing contained in this show constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to buy or sell any securities or financial instruments. Viewers should consult their own advisors before making financial or business decisions.

This post Morgan Stanley’s Bitcoin Investment Recommendation Explained w/ Amy Oldenburg first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mark Mason.

Bitcoin Magazine

Strive Snaps Up More Bitcoin, Brings Holdings to 25,000 BTC 

Nasdaq-listed bitcoin treasury Strive now holds 25,000 BTC — worth nearly $2 billion — following its latest buy. 

The company said Monday that it bought 469 bitcoins at an average price of approximately $77,954. It is still the fifth biggest publicly traded bitcoin company, according to Bitcoin Treasuries. Strategy, Twenty One, Metaplanet, and MARA all hold more bitcoin than Strive. 

CEO Matt Cole wrote on X Monday that 100% of the capital raised during the week came through sales of SATA, Strive’s perpetual preferred stock.

Dallas, Texas-based Strive’s stock (ASST) was trading more than 6% higher following the news. 

Strive debuted as an official bitcoin treasury last year. The company was founded by former Ohio gubernatorial candidate and tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. 

In January 2026, it completed the acquisition of Semler Scientific in an all-stock deal — the first instance of a publicly traded Bitcoin treasury company acquiring another such company. 

Like with other digital asset treasuries, the idea is that investors can get amplified returns from Strive’s stock. The company buys bitcoin with equity, and maintains a debt-free balance sheet: no bonds, no credit lines, and no leveraged positions that could trigger forced liquidation in a downturn. 

The company is different to other major bitcoin treasuries because it has no debt. 

Other major bitcoin treasuries — like the biggest, Strategy — have used leverage to buy the leading cryptocurrency. 

Strive CEO Matt Cole has described the company as debt-free with zero margin requirements and zero encumbered bitcoin.

This post Strive Snaps Up More Bitcoin, Brings Holdings to 25,000 BTC  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Circle is tying major financial institutions to its Arc blockchain as operators, investors, and future users ahead of its Sept. 16 mainnet launch.

BlackRock, DTCC, Visa, Mastercard, and ICE are among 11 outside institutions Circle named as founding validators, alongside Circle itself, giving some prospective users a direct role in finalizing transactions. More than 100 institutional and ecosystem builders are already working on Arc’s private mainnet.

The relationships extend beyond network operations. BlackRock was among investors in Circle’s private sale of ARC tokens and is expected to deploy its BUIDL money-market fund on Arc. DTCC is both a founding validator and a planned integration partner, with a connection targeted for the second half of 2027 that would bring DTC-custodied assets onto the network.

Circle’s structure puts prospective customers inside infrastructure they may later depend on. It also creates a boundary for users: validators help determine which transactions become final, but their participation does not make third-party applications safe or create a claim against those institutions when an application fails.

Arc’s launch disclosures say neither Arc Network Services LLC nor its permissioned validators is responsible for the content, legality, or functionality of third-party applications and warn that blockchain use can involve transaction errors or losses without recourse.

Validator role stops at settlement

Arc is designed around deterministic finality, aimed at financial firms that need a precise point when a transaction can be treated as completed.

Its Malachite consensus engine uses a permissioned Proof-of-Authority model. A rotating validator proposes a block, and the validator set votes in two stages. More than two-thirds must pre-commit to the same block before it is finalized, after which Arc says the transactions cannot be reorganized or reversed at the consensus layer.

That gives BlackRock, Visa, DTCC, and other operators a role in maintaining a common transaction history. Responsibility for smart contracts, wallets, and financial products running on top remains separate.

The distinction matters because Arc combines permissionless application access with permissioned validation. Developers can deploy contracts and users can submit transactions without joining the validator set, while vetted institutions continue to produce blocks.

Circle’s documentation says the launch configuration is expected to use about 20 SOC 2-certified validators across multiple regions, more than the 12 organizations publicly identified in the founding cohort, including Circle.

Circle has said validator voting power is assigned through governance, but its public launch materials do not list individual weights for the announced institutions. The precise concentration of consensus power should become clearer once the public mainnet is live.

DTCC’s planned integration shows why validator status and user protection should be separated. Circle says DTC-tokenized assets would retain the protections, rights and safeguards associated with traditionally held assets. Those protections are tied to the planned DTCC structure rather than every application running on Arc.

Circle retains a controlled launch as ARC transition looms

Arc’s institutional model leaves another question beyond transaction safety: how control over the network changes after launch.

Circle is starting Arc with a permissioned validator set while allowing developers and users open access. The company has said it ultimately wants broader participation and distributed governance, including a possible transition from Proof-of-Authority to a permissioned Proof-of-Stake model.

The economic stakes around that transition have grown. Circle agreed during the second quarter to sell 807.5 million ARC tokens to institutional investors at 30 cents each, generating about $242.2 million in gross proceeds and implying a $3 billion fully diluted network valuation.

BlackRock, Apollo, ARK Invest, ICE and Standard Chartered’s venture arm were among investors Circle named in the original presale cohort.

The ARC token has not yet launched. Circle’s whitepaper describes the token as a possible coordination asset for staking, governance and fee mechanics, while warning that its timing and final structure remain subject to change.

The presale agreements put a firmer date around that roadmap. Circle’s regulatory filings say purchasers holding a majority of the presale allocation may be able to demand repayment if the tokens are not delivered or Arc has not transitioned to Proof-of-Stake or delegated Proof-of-Stake by May 2028, subject to the agreements’ conditions.

That gives Circle a financial incentive to move beyond the launch-day structure while preserving the institutional accountability it has used to pitch Arc to banks and market infrastructure firms.

Launch turns announced relationships into a live test

The first measure on Sept. 16 will be whether the validator network operates as described and which institutions are active when public access opens.

The larger commercial test will take longer. BlackRock’s BUIDL deployment remains expected rather than completed, while DTCC’s tokenization connection is scheduled for the second half of 2027.

Their arrival would deepen the overlap Circle is creating at launch: institutions securing the network while also moving assets and financial activity across it.

That overlap could help Arc solve an infrastructure problem by giving large prospective users a reason to trust the settlement layer they help operate. It also segments responsibility. A validator can help make a transaction final while the application provider, asset issuer or custodian remains responsible for what the transaction represents.

Circle now has to turn its announced validator cohort into an operating network, then show that those relationships produce real settlement activity.

The next disclosures around active validator participation, voting power and ARC’s transition path will determine how much of Arc’s trust model rests on the institutions operating the network and how much remains with Circle.

The post Circle’s Arc launch ties Wall Street firms to the network without making them its safety net appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Firelight is preparing to turn XRP-linked assets into capital that backs protection for DeFi users, offering holders a new source of yield in exchange for putting their collateral at risk.

The Flare-based protocol lets holders deposit FXRP, an XRP-linked asset on Flare, into a vault and receive stXRP representing their position. Firelight's next phase would use that deposited FXRP to back coverage sold to DeFi protocols. Customers pay premiums for the protection, and those payments generate income for the holders supplying the collateral.

The trade-off is that getting the collateral back could take much longer. Firelight's withdrawal rules say its current one-day periods produce a withdrawal wait of roughly one to two days. Once the protocol introduces 30-day coverage periods, the same process would extend that wait to just over 30 days and, depending on when a holder asks to leave, nearly 60 days.

Rewards also stop when the withdrawal process begins, while an eligible claim tied to the period when the holder's FXRP was backing coverage can still reduce the amount eventually returned.

That is the biggest issue for XRP holders: Firelight can turn otherwise idle XRP-linked assets into income-producing capital, but earning that income means accepting less immediate access to the collateral and the possibility of losing some of it to claims.

Firelight has already attracted substantial XRP-linked capital ahead of that transition. DefiLlama displayed $71.74 million in Firelight total value locked in a Sept. 13 snapshot captured at 12:07 UTC.

That figure measures FXRP held in the vault, however, not the amount of protection Firelight has sold or the premiums customers have paid. Deposits show how much capital is available to back coverage. They do not show whether the coverage business can generate enough income to make the risk worthwhile for depositors.

Firelight's Sept. 1 funding announcement scheduled the protocol and its first cover integrations for September without naming a launch day. Its withdrawal documentation still describes one-day periods as current, so the available evidence does not establish that coverage or the longer withdrawal setting has activated.

Why the exit gets longer

The longer withdrawal period comes from the role Firelight gives depositors' FXRP. Once the coverage system is active, that collateral can be used to support protection sold to DeFi protocols. A holder therefore cannot necessarily remove it the moment they decide to leave because claims may still arise from the period when that money was backing coverage.

Under Firelight's documented process, a holder initiates unstaking during one period and then waits until the end of the following full period before the FXRP becomes available to withdraw.

With one-day periods, that produces the current one-to-two-day window. With 30-day cover periods, the same rule would stretch the wait to just over a month for someone exiting near the end of a period and as much as 60 days for someone requesting an exit near the beginning.

The financial cost starts before the FXRP is returned. Initiating unstaking redeems the corresponding stXRP, records its redemption value, and stops the holder's rewards. The pending withdrawal earns nothing further while the process runs.

Claim exposure follows a different clock. During the remainder of the period in which the holder asks to leave, the collateral continues backing coverage and can take a proportional loss from an eligible incident. During the following period, it no longer backs new coverage.

However, a claim tied to an earlier period when the collateral was still backing cover can still reduce the pending withdrawal.

That means the redemption value recorded when unstaking begins is an accounting snapshot, not a guarantee of the final amount the holder will receive.

Once the waiting period ends, the holder must submit another transaction to withdraw the FXRP. The assets remain in the vault until the transaction is submitted.

Completing Firelight's redemption process therefore returns FXRP on Flare, not native XRP directly to the XRP Ledger.

Existing depositors also have a reason to watch the rollout. Firelight's staking overview says positions from its initial phase automatically become active positions backing coverage when Phase 2 begins.

That is when depositors begin receiving income tied to coverage and taking on the corresponding risk of losses, without needing to complete a separate migration.

What actually pays the yield

Firelight is not native XRP staking. Instead, it uses XRP-linked assets on Flare as capital for a DeFi coverage business. FXRP supplies the collateral, stXRP represents the holder's position in the vault, and FLR pays transaction fees on Flare.

Flare announced FXRP v1.2 on mainnet on Sept. 24, 2025. Its FAssets system creates representations of assets such as XRP that can be used in applications on Flare. That infrastructure made XRP-linked capital available to Flare applications. Firelight adds another use for it by putting FXRP behind protection sold to DeFi protocols.

The economically important source of income is the money customers pay for that protection.

Firelight's emissions documentation says settled premiums are converted into the vault's collateral asset and added to the value of depositor positions. Its July 23 Phase 2 explanation describes stablecoins being converted into FXRP and returned to staker positions. In practice, customers pay for coverage, and those payments can become additional FXRP for the holders supplying the collateral.

Firelight also has separate protocol incentives and Firelight Points. Those are different from income generated by customers buying coverage. Points track participation and provide no claim on premiums. They therefore cannot show how much customers are paying Firelight or how much income its coverage business is generating. That distinction is important because customer premiums are what could make the model sustainable after incentives fade.

For XRP demand, the premium conversion mechanism is also the most significant part of the model. Recurring customers paying for coverage could fund recurring purchases of FXRP, while holders who keep that income in the vault would leave more collateral available to back additional coverage.

But an FXRP purchase does not necessarily require a new purchase of native XRP. FXRP can already exist and change hands in a secondary market. Nor does issuing stXRP create another independent pool of XRP. stXRP represents a claim on FXRP already deposited in Firelight.

Counting XRP, FXRP, and stXRP as three separate additions to demand would therefore count different layers of the same capital more than once.

The test is whether paying customers bring in enough recurring income to retain and grow the collateral pool after withdrawals and claims.

The reserve comes before staker losses

The income comes with the possibility that some collateral will eventually be needed to pay a claim. Firelight does not send a valid claim directly to depositors first. It has a separate reserve designed to absorb losses before staked FXRP is affected.

Under Firelight's documented loss waterfall, a protocol-owned stablecoin reserve called the First-Loss Buffer absorbs validated claims first. Any amount remaining after that reserve is exhausted reaches vault positions proportionally. That means a holder can retain the same number of vault shares while the amount of FXRP those shares can redeem falls.

Slashed collateral is sent to a liquidation service and converted into stablecoins used to pay claims. A sufficiently large loss can therefore remove assets from the same collateral pool that premium income is intended to grow.

The size of the First-Loss Buffer is consequently as important as the fact that it exists. Without a verified current buffer balance and information about how much coverage it supports, the first-loss structure does not show how much protection depositors actually have.

The available documentation establishes the order in which losses would be absorbed. It does not establish the size of a current loss cushion or show that a paid claim has occurred. Firelight also limits how much coverage it can support relative to the assets available to absorb losses.

Its capital-adequacy framework compares the resources available to cover losses with the amount the protocol needs to support its coverage commitments. The documentation sets a target ratio of 1.75 to 2.0 at feature-complete launch and prevents new coverage from being allocated if that ratio falls below 1.2.

In simpler terms, Firelight is designed to stop taking on additional coverage when the assets available to absorb losses become too small relative to its existing obligations.

Collateral prices can affect that calculation even when no claim occurs. Because the value of staked assets forms part of Firelight's available capital, falling prices can reduce its financial cushion. For holders, the risk therefore goes beyond whether a claim occurs. Their FXRP can also remain unavailable during a sharp market move while the withdrawal process runs.

A secondary-market sale of stXRP could provide another way to leave, but that depends on available liquidity and the price buyers are willing to pay. It is not the same as immediately redeeming the position for its recorded value.

The demand test starts with paid cover

Firelight's roughly $72 million in deposited assets shows that XRP holders have been willing to supply collateral. It does not show whether Firelight has built a business around that collateral.

That distinction affects both the yield depositors can earn and any effect Firelight could have on demand for XRP-linked assets.

Dollar-denominated TVL can rise because more FXRP enters the vault, because FXRP's price rises, or both. The dollar figure alone therefore cannot show how much new XRP-linked capital has entered Firelight.

More importantly, deposits are only one side of the market. Firelight needs customers willing to pay for protection on the other side. If those customers repeatedly pay premiums and those premiums are converted into FXRP, the system could create recurring demand for the asset while adding income to depositor positions.

But TVL alone cannot show whether that is happening.

Paid coverage, settled premiums, the size of the First-Loss Buffer, claims and completed withdrawals would provide a clearer picture of whether Firelight is developing an income-producing coverage business around its XRP-linked collateral.

Those numbers would also show whether premium income is large enough to offset withdrawals and losses and leave more FXRP in the system over time. Until then, the proposition for XRP holders is easier to measure than its eventual effect on XRP demand.

They supply FXRP that Firelight can use to back DeFi coverage. Customers pay for that protection, creating a potential source of income for the people supplying the collateral. In exchange, holders give up some liquidity and accept the possibility of losses.

Once Firelight moves to 30-day coverage periods, withdrawals could take roughly 30 to 60 days. Rewards stop when the holder asks to leave, while an eligible claim tied to the period when the collateral-backed coverage can still reduce the amount eventually returned.

The question is whether customers will pay enough for DeFi protection to make that trade worthwhile.

Firelight's deposits show that it has attracted the capital. Its coverage business will determine whether that capital can earn enough to justify the wait and the risk.

The post XRP holders could earn new yield, but getting out may take up to 60 days appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Aave V4 lenders supplying wrapped Ether (WETH), USDC or USDT to its Core liquidity Hub on Ethereum would receive a bad-debt backstop under a Sept. 11 proposal from TokenLogic. The Umbrella plan would put Aave’s DAO first in absorbing losses, followed by volunteer underwriters, while limiting this initial coverage to those three lending markets.

The proposed underwriting targets are 800 ETH for Core WETH, 400,000 USDC for Core USDC and 400,000 USDT for Core USDT. TokenLogic sized them for six to eight weeks of expected loan growth. They are targets for a proposed configuration, not balances already committed to protecting lenders.

For suppliers, the boundary is the specific reserve, or asset pool, receiving their deposit. Coverage for Core USDC would not extend to USDC supplied to another Hub, even though the token is the same. Capital allocated to one Hub asset cannot clear another reserve’s deficit.

Who would absorb losses?

Bad debt arises when liquidation exhausts a borrower’s collateral but leaves debt unpaid. Under the proposed framework, Aave’s DAO would absorb an initial layer through “deficit offsets”: 33 ETH for Core WETH, 15,000 USDC for Core USDC and 15,000 USDT for Core USDT.

Umbrella underwriters could lose their committed capital to cover deficits beyond that layer. Their funds would keep earning supply yield until used, with coverage implemented by burning supplied Hub shares. Additional rewards compensate participants for accepting that loss risk.

Eligibility for that coverage would include all borrowing from each protected reserve. That includes loans originated through Spokes, the components where debt is created, whose collateral sits in other Hubs. Those credit lines still expose the Core reserve supplying the borrowed asset.

Underwriters would also face a delay when leaving. Each proposed market specifies a 20-day cooldown followed by a two-day withdrawal window. Aave’s withdrawal guidance says participants who miss the window must activate another cooldown and wait a further 20 days.

Starting that exit process does not remove the risk: Aave’s Umbrella documentation says staked assets remain exposed to slashing during cooldown while continuing to earn rewards. The extra yield therefore comes with both potential capital loss and restricted access to funds.

TokenLogic does not recommend initial general-purpose coverage for USDG or frxUSD. It cites uncertainty over incentive-sensitive lending activity and the ability to attract underwriters who transfer risk away from existing suppliers. For frxUSD, it highlights a concentrated, issuer-linked supplier base.

The assessment also leaves other Hubs’ reserves outside the initial plan, for varying reasons including limited incremental protection and narrow supplier bases. These exclusions do not mean the loans lack collateral or that losses are imminent.

TokenLogic proposes monitoring conditions after activation and reassessing the framework after three months, with excluded markets reconsidered as lending activity matures and supplier bases diversify.

The post Aave V4 proposal would put DAO funds first in line to absorb lending losses appeared first on CryptoSlate.

TRON’s draft quantum-signature design could leave some migrated accounts unable to replace their keys after network governance disables the signing scheme they depend on. Some of those accounts could still make payments through a separate permission.

The design includes a possible recovery route through a second quantum-resistant signature scheme. To use it, holders would need the surviving keys to meet the account’s existing owner threshold, the level of authority required to change permissions. A backup key authorized only for payments would leave that repair power out of reach.

That is the practical question behind Justin Sun’s quantum push. On Aug. 8, 2026, @justinsuntron said his goal was for TRON to become the first quantum-resistant blockchain network and referred to testing on the Nile test network. That dated statement of ambition provides the backdrop to a migration design whose governance switches can later withdraw approval for a signing scheme.

As of Sept. 12, TIP-899 remains labeled Draft. Nile’s June 30 software release included implementations of Falcon-based FN-DSA-512 and ML-DSA-44, each subject to its own activation setting. Each implementation still needs its own governance approval before the network accepts its signatures.

A Sept. 12 check of the Nile parameter endpoint returned getAllowFnDsa512 with a value of 1. The ML-DSA setting appeared without a value, providing no affirmative activation reading. The mainnet response contained neither setting. Developers had said in their July 15 call that mainnet timing was undecided; the current checks do not establish mainnet activation.

A network switch meets an account threshold

TIP-899 lets governance enable or disable each proposed scheme separately. TRON’s 27 elected Super Representatives govern through on-chain proposals. The proposed switches belong to that process.

The activation settings have also been renumbered. TIP-899 and the Nile implementation use codes 1000 and 1001, while the earlier migration discussion still contains 99 and 100. The July 1 developer call explains that the larger numbers were chosen to avoid conflicts with future mainnet numbering. Those numbers identify the proposed settings; activation requires a separate governance decision.

At account level, the question is which signatures remain acceptable. TRON assigns keys weights and requires a selected permission’s valid signers to meet or exceed its threshold. The proposed quantum-signature path uses that same permission calculation.

There is a consequential detail in the reference transaction verifier: a signature from a disabled scheme triggers rejection. A working fallback transaction must therefore use accepted signatures and omit the disabled scheme’s signature, even if the remaining keys carry enough weight.

Turning off a scheme can consequently remove a signing route without changing the account’s configured threshold. Nothing in that switch automatically grants another key the missing authority.

TRON’s permission documentation separates owner authority from active permissions. Owner permission can authorize any contract type and change the account’s permissions. An active permission is limited to the operations assigned to it, such as transfers.

A permission update must be signed under the existing owner permission. That makes owner configuration central to recovery: a key capable of sending a payment does not necessarily have the power to replace the account’s keys.

Consider an owner permission containing only a Falcon key with weight 1 and threshold 1. While Falcon is disabled, that owner permission cannot authorize a transfer or a permission update. A separately configured active permission might still permit transactions, so this does not necessarily make the entire account unable to spend.

Keeping a key for TRON’s existing ECDSA signing method alongside Falcon does not always restore access. With ECDSA weight 1, Falcon weight 1 and threshold 2, both signatures are required. After Falcon is disabled, the remaining ECDSA weight cannot meet the threshold.

The following examples apply the proposed rules to hypothetical configurations. They show deductions from the documented permission and verification rules; no observed lockout or executed rollback test underlies these examples. Assume Falcon has been disabled, any ML-DSA keys were configured beforehand, ML-DSA remains enabled and secure, and the holder can still use those keys.

These outcomes concern signature authority; other transaction requirements still apply. The distinction works in the other direction too. A surviving ML-DSA owner permission could authorize transactions directly and replace a disabled Falcon active permission.

A second quantum key helps only if it can act

The two-scheme owner example preserves a quantum-resistant route to permission repair if either key can independently meet the owner threshold. Requiring both keys creates a dependency on both schemes remaining available. The threshold determines which of those properties an account has.

Nor does a classical recovery route preserve the same security objective. The migration proposal explicitly says that adding a quantum-resistant key provides no quantum protection if an ECDSA-only signing set can still meet the threshold. An ECDSA-only owner route can also replace a quantum-protected active permission.

The relevant configuration is therefore broader than the key used for routine payments. Owner authority and every active route capable of moving the protected assets have to be considered together.

An either-scheme configuration also has a limit: it preserves an alternative after a scheme is disabled, but it does not protect against a compromised scheme while that scheme remains enabled and independently authorized. Availability after disablement and resistance to a still-accepted compromised key are separate properties.

ML-DSA’s standards status helps explain its place in the design. NIST finalized FIPS 204, which specifies ML-DSA, on Aug. 13, 2024. NIST still describes Falcon standardization as underway. TIP-899 presents ML-DSA as an implemented alternative to Falcon’s standardization and audit risk. That provides an alternative algorithm, rather than automatic recovery permission.

The remaining work extends beyond adding a signing button. TIP-899 calls for external cryptographic and implementation auditing, public audit material and bug-bounty coverage before mainnet activation. The reviewed proposal materials do not provide a completed independent audit report.

The proposal and July 15 developer discussion also identify wallet derivation, keystore, SDK and hardware-wallet adaptation work. Testnet implementation and key-generation tools do not establish that consumer wallets or custodians can already perform every migration and recovery operation.

A useful testnet demonstration would follow the permissions through the failure: disable the scheme, construct a transaction using only surviving signatures, show which transfers remain authorized, and show whether the existing owner can replace the affected keys. The outcome would need to match the configuration users actually hold.

If both proposed quantum schemes were disabled and no valid signing set could meet the owner or relevant active threshold, the described rules would provide no immediate ordinary path to spend or rotate keys. That does not establish permanent loss. Governance reactivation or a later protocol change would be a different recovery route; the faster emergency channel and zero-knowledge recovery ideas remain outside this proposal’s current scope.

For wallets and custodians, payment continuity alone would leave the central recovery question unanswered. A migration configuration needs a surviving owner-authorized path to replace keys as well as a way to move funds, with both paths preserving its quantum-resistance objective.

The post TRON’s quantum plan could leave some wallets able to pay but unable to replace their keys appeared first on CryptoSlate.

India’s securities regulator has launched a pilot that places corporate bonds and their cash settlement on linked digital rails, moving ₹1,025 crore through the first three issuances while preserving the securities’ existing legal and economic terms.

The Securities and Exchange Board of India announced Demat 2.0 on Sept. 10 after REC Limited, L&T Limited and IIFL completed tokenized bond issues on Sept. 7 and Sept. 9. The transactions comprised ₹500 crore from REC, ₹500 crore from L&T and ₹25 crore from IIFL, according to SEBI’s release. Further Stage I issuance is ongoing.

The central change is how the security and payment meet. A corporate bond is issued as a native digital token on a private, permissioned distributed ledger, while payment uses the Reserve Bank of India’s wholesale digital rupee, a central bank currency designed for financial institutions.

SEBI’s technical FAQ says the two legs are linked for atomic delivery-versus-payment. Either the bond and cash both settle, or neither does. That synchronization removes the interval in which a buyer could send funds before receiving the security, or a seller could deliver the bond before receiving payment. Issuer credit risk remains unchanged.

The token is the bond itself, rather than a digital claim on a conventionally held security. It keeps the same ISIN identifier, coupon, maturity, covenants, rating and security as a conventional dematerialized bond. Issuer obligations, investor rights and regulatory treatment also stay the same.

The network is private and institutionally controlled. India’s depositories own it and remain the statutory, authoritative records of beneficial ownership. Market infrastructure institutions developed and operate the system, with depositories and stock exchanges initially running the network’s validating computers. Depositories also hold and manage investors’ private keys, preserving an intermediated custody model.

That structure leaves the familiar custody chain in place. Investors gain access to the tokenized ledger without managing the bond tokens’ private keys or replacing the depository record that establishes ownership.

Secondary trading comes later

The live first stage covers institutional issuance and ledger-based asset servicing. SEBI reserves tokenized secondary-market trading and retail participation for Stage II.

During the interim, an investor may exit through a peer-to-peer or demat-to-demat transfer handled by depositories. Payment for that transfer may occur outside the atomic setup through the digital rupee or conventional banking channels.

The first deals show how regulated securities records and central bank money can be synchronized at issuance. The larger test for Stage II is whether the same architecture can support routine liquidity and a broader investor base after the bond has been issued.

The post India’s tokenized bond pilot starts with institutions, with retail access planned next appeared first on CryptoSlate.

When a copy of your ID document, your verification selfie and your complete Bitcoin transaction history all sit in one package in the hands of strangers, a new password achieves almost nothing. That has been the position of the Revolut customers who received a breach notification since September 14, 2026: the stolen documents have been published since the early hours of that day. Four things matter now. Establish in writing how far your own exposure goes. Close the routes through which a copy of an ID document turns into money. Take the link between your home address and your crypto holdings seriously. And enforce your rights against the bank while the deadlines are still running.

This piece builds on our first assessment. Whether you are among the affected customers at all, and what role your Bitcoin history plays in the incident, is covered in Revolut data breach: am I affected, and what about my Bitcoin history? from September 12. This article deals with the stage after that: the details are out, and that changes the question of what to do.

Revolut data breach: what to do now that the files are being published

Until the weekend, the security incident was an outflow of customer data. Since the night of September 14, Cointelegraph has reported that copies of identity documents and verification selfies belonging to Revolut customers have surfaced online. According to the outlet, the attackers are announcing on Telegram that they will release further data sets every day until Revolut pays. One affected customer confirmed to Cointelegraph that the published details match the documents held on file at Revolut, and that the neobank wrote to him on Friday.

One point matters for the assessment: the existence of a ransom demand is the attackers' own account, relayed by a trade publication citing a Telegram post. Revolut itself does not confirm any such demand. A specific Bitcoin sum is also circulating on aggregator sites as the alleged ransom. There is no solid evidence for that figure, which is why it does not appear as fact in this article.

The practical difference from last week is considerable nonetheless. As long as a data set sits only with one criminal group, it needs a buyer before it can be used against you. Once it is publicly retrievable, that intermediate step falls away, and the number of possible fraudsters grows from one group to anyone who finds the file.

Which data fields Revolut lists in its customer email

The trade publication BleepingComputer quotes the notification Revolut sent to affected customers verbatim. According to that text, the incident covers the full name, date of birth, occupation, postal address, email address and telephone number. On top of that come copies of an identity card or driving licence, the selfies from the identity check, account statements including the IBAN, withdrawal records and the complete transaction history including Bitcoin transactions.

Revolut speaks of a limited number of affected users but gives no figure. According to the company, neither its own systems were compromised nor were customer funds touched. Both statements are plausible and both change little about your position. The damage from this incident does not hit your balance. It sits in the paperwork.

The outflow was triggered, on the company's account, by a forged request that looked like an information request from a government authority. Such emergency data requests are an established procedure: where there is imminent danger, authorities demand subscriber data without waiting for the regular judicial route. The forged request came from a genuine government domain and passed the technical sender authentication checks. That is exactly where the weak point sat. A technically correct signed email proves that the domain is genuine. It proves nothing about whether the request behind it is lawful.

Why a leaked ID scan is not a case for Germany's 116 116 blocking hotline

Many affected people reach first for the same reflex: have the ID card blocked. In Germany that runs through the free blocking hotline 116 116, and in this case it is the wrong step. What gets blocked there is the online ID function, the eID on the chip of your identity card. That function requires the physical card plus the six-digit PIN. A scanned copy cannot trigger it.

Your ID card is still in your drawer, and the eID is not the way in. The risk sits with every provider that accepts an image file of an ID document as proof: credit brokers, mobile operators, mail-order retailers offering purchase on account, and some trading platforms with weak checks. Blocking the eID would have no effect there and would only cost you the use of digital government services.

A different set of measures does work. File a criminal complaint with the police, online through the digital police station of your federal state; the case number is later your evidence towards any creditor chasing a claim taken out in your name. Request a free copy of your data from the major credit reference agencies and check whether contracts appear there that you never signed. And set yourself a reminder, because identity abuse using copies of ID documents often only shows up months later. The German Federal Office for Information Security sets out the individual steps for victims of data breaches and doxing in detail.

ID scan and KYC selfie together: the problem with the liveness check

An ID scan on its own is a known risk. The combination of an ID copy and the selfie from the same identity check is a different order of magnitude, because that pair is the standard proof used to open an account. Many providers require a photo of the document and an image of the face, and some match the two automatically.

The safeguard against this is called a liveness check, and it is meant to establish whether a living person is sitting in front of the camera or a photographed image. Good procedures demand head movements, changing light patterns or depth capture; weak ones make do with an uploaded still image. Wherever only a still image is required, a leaked verification selfie is immediately usable.

That produces a concrete task for crypto users: look up which trading venues hold your ID document, and close the accounts you no longer use. Every dormant registration is one copy of your paperwork less in circulation. Where you stay active, switch on two-factor authentication through an authenticator app or a security key rather than by SMS, because the phone number is part of this breach. Which platforms in Germany operate under supervision at all, and how to check that, is covered in our overview of regulated crypto exchanges.

Bitcoin transaction history in someone else's hands: what address clustering makes possible

The part of the package that separates this incident from an ordinary bank data breach is the transaction history. Bitcoin is a public database: every transfer sits in the chain for anyone to inspect. What the chain lacks is the link between an address and a person. An account statement with withdrawal records delivers exactly that link, free of charge.

Address clustering is the name of the technique that derives a whole bundle of addresses from a single known one: when several addresses appear together as the inputs of a transaction, they very probably belong to the same wallet. Anyone who knows one of your withdrawal addresses can work outwards from there and often arrives at an estimate of your total holdings. The technique is neither new nor illegal; analytics firms and investigators have worked with it for years. What is new is that the starting point for it is now lying around in public.

The obvious question is whether you should change your addresses. For future payments yes; for the past it cannot be done. A transaction once written into the chain cannot be retrieved. In practice that means: use fresh addresses for new incoming payments, avoid merging old and new holdings in a single transaction, and for larger amounts do not pay in and withdraw through the same platform.

Home address plus crypto holdings: putting the physical risk in perspective

The on-chain investigator ZachXBT reads the incident as one where the breach looks small but appears deliberately aimed at wealthy users. That is his assessment and not an established fact, but it deserves attention because it fits the structure of the data: postal address, date of birth and occupation together with a traceable Bitcoin history produce a profile that goes beyond the usual phishing purpose.

We have described this pattern twice already in our coverage, most recently in the Trezor data breach in September, in which names, phone numbers and home addresses of hardware wallet buyers were exposed. The lesson from it applies here just the same. Do not talk about amounts in the neighbourhood or on the phone. Treat parcel notifications and supposed callbacks from the bank's service team with suspicion, even when your name, your date of birth and your most recent debit are quoted correctly. Those details are precisely what is in the package, and a caller who knows them has proved nothing by doing so.

In concrete terms that also means setting yourself a callback rule at your bank and at your trading venues. No process that begins on the phone is completed on the phone. Hang up and dial the number from the app or from your account statement. That single habit strips most of the value out of what a cybercriminal can do with your documents.

What to do if your Revolut account has been hacked

One important distinction first: no account was taken over in this incident. According to the company, documents were handed out; login credentials were not stolen. If your account really is being controlled by someone else, a different procedure applies, and it begins with blocking.

Block the card in the app and, if you no longer have access, through the bank's customer service. Report every unauthorised debit without delay; under payment services law you are as a rule reimbursed for an unauthorised payment as long as you have not acted with gross negligence, and the bank has to prove the authorisation. Then change the password of your email inbox, because it is the master key to every other login. Finally, check the connected devices and sessions in every account that uses the same email address, and throw out any session you do not recognise.

Record every one of these steps in writing, with date and time. Anyone who later claims damages or disputes a demand needs that record.

The coming weeks: a review plan with fixed dates

Identity abuse after a security breach rarely starts immediately. Weeks, sometimes months, pass between the outflow and the first attack made in your name, because the data sets first have to be sorted, merged and passed on. A review plan with fixed dates therefore works better than a single frantic afternoon.

This week: send off the Article 15 access request, file the criminal complaint, and switch two-factor authentication everywhere to an app or a security key. Note down as well which postal addresses and which phone number were held on file at the neobank. Anyone who later receives a message quoting exactly those details will recognise at once which source the sender is drawing on.

In four weeks: request a copy of your data from the credit reference agencies and check it for entries you do not recognise; every credit enquiry you never made is a warning sign. In the same pass, go through the login logs of your most important accounts and report every access from a region you were not in.

After three months and after six: the same again. As long as your passport is in circulation as an image file, it keeps its value for fraudsters until its expiry date.

One expectation is worth dropping along the way. Checking services that promise to track down your data on the dark web are in reality searching a database of collections that are already known. Such systems give usable pointers about older incidents and still offer you no all-clear about a fresh one, because all they can show is what has already been traded in public. Rely on the information from your own Article 15 response rather than on a green light.

Your rights under the GDPR: access under Article 15, complaint under Article 77

The notification Revolut sent out is an obligation under Article 34 of the General Data Protection Regulation: where a breach is likely to result in a high risk to those affected, the company has to inform them without delay. That email, however, only tells you that you are affected, not to what extent.

You obtain the extent through Article 15 GDPR, the right of access. Ask in writing for a copy of the data processed about you and, expressly, for a statement of which categories were disclosed to which recipients. The deadline is one month and can be extended by two months if the company gives reasons. That response is the only solid evidence of what was actually handed out in your case, and it is free.

If no answer arrives, or an unusable one, Article 77 GDPR applies: a complaint to a supervisory authority, expressly including the authority where you habitually reside. For German customers that is the data protection authority of your federal state. The fact that Revolut Bank UAB is based in Lithuania and that the authority there is competent under the lead supervisory authority procedure changes nothing; your state authority accepts the complaint and passes it on. The German branch in Berlin is additionally supervised by BaFin, which is not, however, responsible for data protection.

On damages under Article 82 GDPR, the position in Germany has been clearer since the Federal Court of Justice ruling of November 18, 2024 (case reference VI ZR 10/24): the mere loss of control over your own data can amount to compensable non-material damage, without any abuse having to be proven. You do have to set out that loss of control yourself. The amount depends on the individual case, and the sums awarded so far sit in the low hundreds.

Is Revolut monitored by the tax office? What applies under DAC8 since 2026

This question comes up after every incident of this kind, and the answer has nothing to do with the breach. Nobody is being monitored. What has been reported automatically since January 1, 2026 is something else: Germany's crypto asset tax transparency act transposes the European DAC8 directive into national law and obliges crypto asset service providers to record and transmit tax-relevant customer and transaction data. The first reporting period is the 2026 calendar year, and the data goes to the Federal Central Tax Office by July 31, 2027.

For you that has two consequences. The details crypto providers hold about you will grow rather than shrink, and keeping clean records of your own is no longer optional. A reported sum is also not your profit: what gets reported are proceeds and transactions, while the acquisition costs are known only to your own documentation. Anyone who does not keep it is later negotiating against a figure they have nothing to set against it. A portfolio tracker with tax reporting solves exactly that problem.

Extortion, ransom, millions of records: what is proven and what is not

Several narratives are running alongside each other around this security incident, and the differences matter for your own judgement.

Proven is the notification to those affected together with the list of data fields, because Revolut sent it out itself and a trade publication reproduces it verbatim. It is also proven that copies of identity documents and verification selfies have surfaced publicly; one affected customer confirmed the match to Cointelegraph.

Claimed is the extortion. The threat of daily publication comes from a Telegram post by the alleged perpetrators. A company being extorted rarely confirms it, and Revolut does not do so here. Anyone mentioning the demand should say who is making it.

Disputed is an older matter that is resurfacing: over the summer, a database allegedly holding tens of millions of Revolut records was offered on the dark web in the relevant forums. German media reported on it, Revolut denied its authenticity and pointed to material compiled from other sources. That episode has to be kept separate from the current one. Anyone who throws the two together arrives at a number of affected customers that nobody has evidenced.

For handling the days ahead, that means: expect phishing that looks very convincing. Whoever knows your name, date of birth, IBAN and most recent transactions no longer writes a clumsy spam email. The only reliable test remains the channel, not the content. A genuine bank never asks you by email or telephone to move funds to a security account, to enter a recovery phrase or to install remote access software. At the slightest doubt, go through the app you installed yourself.

Self-custody as a consequence: when a hardware wallet shortens the data trail

This case exposes a property of custody arrangements that stays invisible in everyday use: anyone holding crypto assets with a provider leaves behind a complete identity file there alongside the balance. That file is the actual subject of the incident. A hardware wallet does not change all of it, but it does shorten the trail at one decisive point: the balance no longer sits with a third party afterwards, and that third party's failure or data breach no longer separates you from your coins.

It is worth staying honest all the same. The purchase itself generates data again, as the Trezor breach mentioned above shows; so never order to an address that is also where you live, if you can avoid it, and buy only from the manufacturer or authorised resellers. The transfer from an exchange to your own wallet is also visible in the chain and can be linked to your account statements. And responsibility for the recovery phrase then lies entirely with you. Self-custody is a shift of risk, not its abolition.

For whatever is meant to stay on a platform, selection comes down to supervision and custody practice. Ask about segregated custody, about who the custodian is, and about the licence under which that custodian operates.

Revolut data breach: what to take away

1. Establish your exposure in writing. Request the Article 15 GDPR access response today and note the date you sent it. Without that list you will later be arguing over assumptions. In parallel, check which trading venues hold a copy of your ID document and close the accounts you do not use; our overview of regulated crypto exchanges shows what matters with the ones you keep.
2. Separate identity and holdings. Use fresh receiving addresses, do not merge old and new holdings in a single transaction, and move the part you hold long term into your own custody. Our comparison of hardware wallets names the devices along with their weaknesses.
3. Get your records in order before the first DAC8 report goes out. Complete acquisition data is your only counter-argument against a reported sum from the 2026 reporting period onwards. A tax and portfolio tracker takes over the collecting.

(As of September 14, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

When you buy Bitcoin with a market order, you rarely pay exactly the price the app showed you beforehand. The difference is called slippage, and it does not come from a fee but from the depth of the order book: your order works its way up through the sell offers on hand until it is filled. How expensive that gets depends on how much capital sits right next to the current price.

We measured this ourselves across five exchanges on September 14, 2026, in three time windows between 15:51 and 15:53 UTC. The headline result: for a purchase of 100,000 euros the markup in the third window ranged from 10.50 euros to 329.86 euros, depending on which exchange you pick. That is a factor of 31 for exactly the same action in the same minute.

This analysis was compiled by cryptoticker.io on September 14, 2026.

Slippage on a Bitcoin order: what the term means precisely

Slippage is the gap between the price you see when you submit the order and the average price at which it is actually executed. It is not a fee and never appears on a statement as its own line item. It sits inside the execution price.

The mechanism behind it is an order book. An order book is the price-sorted list of all open buy and sell orders on an exchange. On the sell side the cheapest offer sits at the top, with more expensive ones below. A market order takes those offers in turn until your amount is used up. If only a few Bitcoin sit just above the current price, your order reaches higher price steps quickly.

The first cost block here is the spread. The spread is the distance between the highest bid and the lowest ask. Even a tiny market order pays half the spread arithmetically, because it starts at the midpoint and executes at the upper end. On large orders the depth effect comes on top.

The distinction matters in practice. A trading fee of 0.25 percent is known to you in advance and you can look it up in a crypto exchange comparison. Slippage is written down nowhere, because it depends on the state of the book in the exact moment you tap buy.

Our own measurement: how deep the euro order books of the five exchanges really are

We queried the public order book interfaces of Kraken, Coinbase Exchange, Bitstamp, Bitvavo and Bitfinex, each for the Bitcoin against euro pair. From each book we formed the mid price, calculated the spread and then simulated how a market order of 1,000, 5,000, 25,000 and 100,000 euros eats its way through the sell side.

We measure depth as the sum of the capital sitting within half a percent of the mid price in the book. That figure says more about an exchange's resilience than trading volume does, because volume also arises from thousands of small orders that consume each other.

For Bitcoin against euro the picture across the three windows was as follows:

• Kraken: spread 0.0001 to 0.0041 percent, depth 12.98 to 13.97 million euros
• Coinbase Exchange: spread 0.0079 to 0.0195 percent, depth 5.66 to 6.09 million euros
• Bitstamp: spread 0.0006 to 0.0220 percent, depth 2.48 to 2.60 million euros
• Bitvavo: spread 0.0015 percent, depth 2.23 to 2.42 million euros
• Bitfinex: spread 0.3707 to 0.4590 percent, depth 0.58 to 0.84 million euros

Between the deepest and the shallowest euro book in our sample there is therefore roughly twenty times as much immediately available capital. The Bitcoin price itself stood at around 68,100 euros at the time of measurement, which is about 78,620 US dollars.

What the numbers mean for a concrete order

Converting the percentages of the third window into euros makes the difference tangible. A market purchase of 100,000 euros cost 10.50 euros in slippage at Bitvavo, 16.25 euros at Bitstamp, 19.15 euros at Kraken, 45.89 euros at Coinbase Exchange and 329.86 euros at Bitfinex.

On small amounts the picture partly reverses, because there the spread alone counts. An order of 1,000 euros cost around one cent at Bitvavo, six cents at Coinbase Exchange, eight cents at Kraken, eleven cents at Bitstamp and 2.02 euros at Bitfinex. Anyone trading small sums notices little of the depth problem. Anyone buying in four figures and up notices it immediately.

Market order or limit order: which order type caps the slippage

A market order is executed immediately, at whatever price the book provides. A limit order sets a maximum price and is only executed if the book offers that price. The difference between the two is precisely the quantity we measured.

In practice that means: set a buy limit at 68,150 euros while the price stands at 68,100 euros, and no execution above that value can happen to you. If the depth is not there, part of the order stays open instead of being filled expensively. You can leave that remainder standing or cancel it.

The price for this is uncertainty. A limit order can sit unfilled while the price runs away. In a calm market that is no problem. In the minutes around a central bank decision an unfilled order can mean you miss a move. Nobody can make that trade-off for you, but you should make it deliberately rather than reaching for the market order out of habit.

Euro against dollar: why the same Bitcoin order book is shallower in euros

The clearest finding of our measurement cuts across the exchanges: it concerns the currency of the trading pair. We additionally queried the Bitcoin against US dollar pair at the same providers. In the third window the depth within half a percent stood at 13.97 million euros at Kraken against 34.39 million dollars, at Bitstamp at 2.60 against 11.25 million, at Coinbase Exchange at 6.09 against 38.11 million and at Bitfinex at 0.58 against 10.24 million.

That works out at factors of 2.5 at Kraken, 4.3 at Bitstamp, 6.3 at Coinbase Exchange and 17.5 at Bitfinex. The dollar market is the main market at all four houses, the euro market a sideshow. This describes a property of European crypto trading as a whole and not a weakness of any single provider.

Bitfinex is the most instructive case here. The same exchange showed a spread of between 0.0089 and 0.0140 percent in the Bitcoin dollar book and between 0.3707 and 0.4590 percent in the euro book. The provider's technology does not explain that gap. What decides it is where market participants place their capital.

For you this carries an immediate consequence: the detour via a dollar or stablecoin pair can be cheaper than the direct euro purchase as soon as the order size noticeably strains the euro depth. Set against that, though, are the conversion costs and a possible second trading fee. We already counted how strongly euro pairs feature in an exchange's listings at Coinbase Exchange back in August 2026: at the time, 34 of 399 tradable assets there had a euro order book.

Spread, fee and slippage: which cost block dominates on small orders

Many investors optimise the trading fee and overlook the other two items. Our numbers show that this order of priority is usually right for small orders and no longer right for large ones.

On a purchase of 1,000 euros the slippage costs came to under twelve cents at four of the five exchanges measured. A trading fee of 0.25 percent would have amounted to 2.50 euros on the same order, twenty times as much. Anyone buying small and rarely does well to look at the fee schedule first.

From around 25,000 euros the relationship shifts. There the slippage reached 0.0346 percent at Coinbase Exchange and 0.2630 percent at Bitfinex, while at Bitvavo it stayed at 0.0013 percent in the third window. On six-figure amounts the depth difference can swallow a lower fee entirely.

Brokers without an order book: what Bitpanda, BISON and Trade Republic do differently

Some of the providers popular in Germany do not work with an open order book at all. There you buy against the provider itself, which quotes you a price. That is convenient and carries one drawback our method makes visible: there is nothing to measure.

Bitpanda's public price interface gave us a single Bitcoin price of 68,092.99 euros on the day of measurement, with no bid and ask side and no depth figure. How much markup sits in the actual purchase price cannot be checked from outside. At Coinbase the gap is at least visible: the retail interface quoted a buy price of 68,122.48 euros and a sell price of 68,093.28 euros at the same moment. Between the two lie 29.20 euros, or 0.0429 percent, and that is before any fee.

This is no reproach to the business model. A broker takes on the execution risk and charges for it. You should simply know that with a broker you cannot recalculate the price of that convenience, whereas on an exchange with an open book it is verifiable down to the decimal place. Anyone torn between the two worlds will find the differences broken down in the crypto broker comparison.

Checking order book depth yourself: how to look into the book before you buy

You need no software for this. Every exchange with an open order book displays it in the trading view, usually next to the chart and often collapsed.

Three steps are enough. First: look at the distance between the top bid and the top ask. If it is above 0.1 percent, the book is already conspicuously thin for a major asset like Bitcoin. Second: roughly add up the amounts in the first ten to twenty sell rows. If your planned order size is larger than that sum, you will be executed across several price steps. Third: compare the same view in the dollar or stablecoin pair of the same asset.

If you need more precision, you can query the interfaces yourself. Kraken documents retrieving the order book in its public API reference, and Bitfinex describes the same procedure for its book. Neither call needs an account or a key.

Ethereum order books compared: where the depth thins out further

We ran the same measurement for Ethereum against euro. The price stood at around 2,172 euros, and the pattern repeats in sharper form.

Kraken came in at a depth of 9.35 to 9.56 million euros, Coinbase Exchange at 1.46 to 1.59 million, Bitvavo at 1.18 to 1.37 million, Bitstamp at 0.86 to 0.91 million and Bitfinex at 0.44 to 0.49 million. A market purchase of 100,000 euros therefore cost between 0.0095 percent at Kraken and 0.4221 percent at Bitfinex.

At Bitstamp the euro depth fell by roughly two thirds from Bitcoin to Ethereum, and at Coinbase Exchange by about three quarters. The further you move away from Bitcoin, the more the choice of exchange weighs. For smaller altcoins in euro pairs you should expect considerably thinner books, even though we did not measure that in this survey.

Thin liquidity ahead of the Fed decision: what that means for your order

Our measurement fell in an unusual week. The US central bank decides on the policy rate on September 16, 2026, and market reports from the day of measurement consistently describe liquidity tightening in the run-up. According to reports by finanzen.net and wallstreet-online, citing the CME Group's FedWatch tool, a rate hike was most recently priced in with a probability of around 86.5 percent, after the producer price index for August rose by 5.4 percent.

Whether the books were thinner for that reason than on an ordinary Monday afternoon is something three time windows on a single day cannot establish. We lack the comparison figure from a quiet week, and so we do not claim it. What can be said: the differences between the exchanges were stable across all three windows, and the ranking stayed unchanged.

For the days around a central bank decision one principle holds anyway, independently of our numbers. In phases of high expectation many market participants pull their offers out of the book, because they do not want to be filled at a stale price. In exactly the moment when the price moves fastest, the least capital is there to absorb orders.

Limits of this measurement: what three time windows do not show

We are open about what this survey does not deliver. It is a snapshot of 42 order book retrievals on one afternoon, analysed across 217,454 individual order book rows. It shows the order of magnitude of the differences, not a daily, weekly or monthly average.

Three further limitations belong with it. First, we measured Bitfinex in the first two windows at a different retrieval depth before switching to the maximum row count. The spread values are untouched by that, and at this exchange they are the dominant cost factor. Second, we simulate execution against a standing book. In reality other participants react to a large order, which can turn out both cheaper and more expensive. Third, we calculated the buy side only; the same mechanisms apply to sales, but not necessarily the same numbers.

We were also unable to check what share of the offers in the books comes from automated trading programs. That cannot be separated out from public order book data, and we draw no conclusions from it either.

Checking slippage on Bitcoin orders: what to take away

1. Compare order book depth before you buy, not just the fee. On amounts from around 25,000 euros it was depth rather than the fee schedule that decided total costs in our measurement. Which houses come into question for euro trading at all is set out in the crypto exchange comparison.
2. Use a limit order rather than a market order for larger purchases. A limit set close above the current price costs you a delayed execution in the worst case, but protects you from slipping across several price steps. Anyone who would rather buy against a fixed price should weigh the markup in the crypto broker comparison.
3. Check whether your provider shows the book at all. Without an open order book you cannot recalculate the markup in the purchase price. If that verifiability matters to you, watch for it when choosing and factor in the provider's supervision, for instance via the overview of regulated crypto exchanges.

(As of September 14, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

If your swap on Solana shows up red in the explorer, the short answer is this: the transaction was included in a block, but its instruction was not executed. Your balance is unchanged, the fee was charged all the same, and a second attempt is allowed. How often that happens is something cryptoticker.io measured itself on September 14, 2026: across 36 consecutive blocks of the Solana mainnet chain, somewhere between one in eight and one in two transactions failed, depending on the block.

This is neither an emergency nor a network outage. It is the normal operating state of a chain where a large share of the traffic comes from automated trading programs that deliberately lose more often than they win. For you as an investor that carries one practical consequence: a red line in the explorer almost never means something is wrong with your wallet.

Solana transaction failed: what the status actually means

A Solana transaction clears two separate hurdles. The first is inclusion in a block: a validator accepts your transaction, checks the signature and writes it into the next slot it is responsible for. The second hurdle is execution: the program being addressed works through the instruction and decides whether it is valid.

Failed on Solana always means that the first hurdle was cleared and the second was not. The transaction sits permanently in the chain, with a timestamp, a signature and an error object. That makes it something different from a transaction that never arrived: the latter does not appear in the explorer at all, because it was discarded before any validator wrote it into a block.

That difference matters more than it sounds. With Bitcoin a transaction sticks in the mempool and waits for confirmation, sometimes for hours. On Solana that state of limbo barely exists: within a few seconds it is settled whether your transaction succeeded, failed or was never picked up in the first place.

Why your balance is unchanged after a failure

Solana executes every transaction atomically. Either all the instructions inside it go through, or none do. If one instruction aborts with an error, the runtime rolls back every account change the transaction made. The swap does not happen, the tokens stay where they were.

What does not get rolled back is the fee. It is the price of validators having checked your transaction and spent compute time on it, and that effort was incurred regardless of whether the instruction turned out to be valid.

Our own measurement: how many Solana transactions failed in the sample window

For this article we analysed three separate time windows of the Solana mainnet chain on September 14, 2026, all of them in epoch 1034 around slot 446,981,000. We queried the network's public RPC endpoint and examined every single transaction in those blocks for its error object.

Validator vote transactions were stripped out of the count. They make up a large part of Solana's volume, run fully automatically and practically never fail. In our first window there were 9,390 of them, of which 36 failed, a rate of 0.38 percent. Counting them in produces a number that is meaningless for users.

What remains are the transactions that people and trading programs actually send. We analysed 17,987 of those across 36 blocks:

• Window 1, 14 blocks, 7,905 transactions: 41.9 percent failed
• Window 2, 10 blocks, 4,133 transactions: 22.0 percent failed
• Window 3, 12 blocks, 5,949 transactions: 29.6 percent failed

Across all three windows together that works out at 33.2 percent. The figure should not be read as a constant. Individual blocks came in at 13.2 percent, others at 66.1 percent, and the spread between the three windows shows how sharply the value moves within a few minutes. What holds up is the order of magnitude: roughly one in three non-vote transactions on Solana does not go through.

Why a failed Solana transaction still costs fees

The base fee on Solana is 5,000 lamports per signature. A lamport is one billionth of a SOL, so the base fee comes to 0.000005 SOL. At a SOL price of 87.79 euros on September 14, 2026 according to CoinGecko, that is around 0.0004 euros, a fraction of a cent.

In our third window a total of 0.1371 SOL went to fees. Of that, 0.0416 SOL fell on transactions that subsequently failed, a share of 30.4 percent. Converted, that is about 3.65 euros across twelve blocks, which extrapolated over a day is an order of magnitude that counts for the network and does not count for you personally.

The economic damage of a failure therefore sits elsewhere. What hurts is the price rather than the fee: if your sale fails at a given price and you resend thirty seconds later, you trade at whatever price applies by then. Anyone who fails several times in a row in a fast market pays the difference.

Priority fee and failure rate: what the measurement says about the tip

The common rule of thumb says that when you run into trouble you should simply raise the priority fee. A priority fee is a voluntary tip on top of the base fee, signalling to the validator that your transaction should be processed ahead of others. In our third window we calculated the tip above the base fee for each of the 5,949 transactions and worked out the failure rate per price bracket.

The result cuts against the rule of thumb. Transactions with no tip at all failed least often in our window, and transactions with a small tip failed most often. Within the paying group the failure rate falls as the tip rises, yet it never drops to the level of the group that pays nothing at all.

That does not mean a tip does harm. What we are measuring here is composition rather than effect. Anyone paying a tip usually has a reason to: they are competing against other programs for the same price and accept that they will often lose the race. Anyone paying nothing is typically sending a simple transfer where there is nothing to lose. The two groups are doing different things, and that explains the gap better than the price does.

In practice this means a higher tip helps you get included at all when the chain is busy. It does nothing against an instruction that is rejected on its substance. The median tip in our window was 163 lamports, the ninetieth percentile 12,011 lamports, and 31.0 percent of all transactions paid no tip whatsoever.

Reading an InstructionError: what the error index and custom code reveal

Click a failed transaction in the explorer and you see an error object in a fixed shape, for example InstructionError: [3, {"Custom": 6001}]. It carries two pieces of information, and both are useful.

The first number is the error index: the position of the instruction inside your transaction that aborted, counted from zero. A three means the first three instructions ran through and the fourth failed. In a swap the first instructions are often preparations, such as setting the compute budget, and the actual trading instruction sits further back.

The second entry is the custom code: an error number that comes not from the network but from the program that rejected the instruction. The same number means two different things in two different programs. The most frequent codes in our first window were 11 with 631 hits, 6001 with 394 hits across two error indices, 1 with 173 hits and 7 with 124 hits.

Anchor error codes from 6000 up: why the number alone explains nothing

Some of these codes can be placed without knowing the program in question. Many Solana programs are built with the Anchor framework, and it assigns number ranges on a fixed scheme: instruction errors start at 100, constraint errors at 2000, account errors at 3000, and the program's own custom errors begin at 6000.

A code such as 6001 therefore comes from the range the program has claimed for itself. What it means in concrete terms is set out in that program's interface description, which the explorer displays alongside for programs it knows. Low codes such as 1 or 11, by contrast, mostly come from programs outside that framework, the network's token program among them.

For you that means: note down the error index and the code, but do not infer a cause from the number on its own. The explorer supplies the mapping, the number does not.

Checking transaction status yourself: signature, explorer and getSignatureStatuses

Before you repeat a transaction, establish its status. A second attempt while the first is still in flight can in the worst case leave both going through and you swapping twice.

The simple route runs through the signature, the unique identifier of your transaction. Every wallet displays it after sending, usually as a long string with a link to the explorer. Find the signature there with a green tick and the operation went through. If it shows as failed, it has definitively failed and you can safely send again.

If you cannot find the signature at all, your transaction was never included in a block. A second attempt is safe then too, because every Solana transaction carries a recent blockhash and expires once that hash is too old. The window for that is short and sits in the range of about a minute and a half.

If you need more detail, query the status from the network directly. The RPC method getSignatureStatuses in the Solana documentation returns the confirmation level for a signature and, where present, the error object. That is the same data set our measurement comes from.

Which view your wallet offers you here differs considerably. Some programs show only "succeeded" or "failed", others display the error code and the affected instruction step directly. A look at the software wallet comparison is worth it from this angle too.

Slippage, blockhash and account funding: the most common everyday causes

Three causes cover the bulk of the failures retail investors actually experience.

The first is the slippage limit: the price range you still accept on a swap. Trading programs on Solana check that limit at the end of the calculation. If the price has moved further between sending and execution than permitted, the instruction aborts. That is a safeguard, not a defect. A very tight limit protects you from bad prices and raises the number of failures at the same time.

The second is the expired blockhash. Every transaction references a recently produced block and is only valid for a limited number of blocks after it. Confirm in your wallet with a delay, because you put the device down in between, and it can expire before it arrives. In that case it never shows up in the explorer at all.

The third is insufficient account funding, and not in the token being traded but in SOL itself. Every transaction needs SOL for the fee, and opening a new token account requires a minimum deposit on top. Swap all your SOL and you cannot send a single transaction afterwards. Leaving a small reserve in the account spares you that state.

If your capital comes from a trading platform, it pays before the first swap to look at which withdrawal routes your provider offers at all and what fee it charges for them. Our crypto exchange comparison ranks the common providers on those points.

Transaction format v1: what the Solana upgrade changes about this and what it does not

Since September 9, 2026 a new transaction format has been active on Solana, raising the maximum size of a transaction from 1,232 to 4,096 bytes. We described the switch and its consequences in detail beforehand. Our measurement sits five days later and shows a chain in normal operation.

The format changes little about the failure rate, and that is what you would expect. A larger transaction may contain more instructions, but that does not make it any more likely to be accepted. Whether a program rejects your swap because the price ran away does not depend on how many bytes the instruction takes up.

The next larger intervention is the Alpenglow consensus mechanism, announced for October 2026, which is meant to shorten the time to finality of a transaction considerably. Operators of their own node need to prepare for it; for you as a user the sequence does not change. The same applies here: faster finality shortens the wait, it does not turn a rejected instruction into a valid one.

Limits of the measurement: what this analysis does not show

Our survey covers 36 blocks from three time windows on a single day. That is enough to establish the order of magnitude, and it is not enough for a statement about a weekly or monthly average. The spread from 13.2 to 66.1 percent between individual blocks shows how fast the value moves.

We were also unable to determine what share of the failed transactions came from private individuals and what share from automated trading programs. That distinction cannot be drawn cleanly from block data, because both address the same programs. The widespread assessment that the bulk falls on automated arbitrage matches the pattern in our data, but we cannot prove it with this method.

The real failure rate for a person who triggers a swap now and then is therefore likely to sit well below our overall figure. How far below is an open question.

What does not change is the mechanism, and that is the actual substance of this article: inclusion and execution are two steps, only the second decides your swap, and the explorer tells you unambiguously which of the two came apart.

This analysis was compiled by cryptoticker.io on September 14, 2026.

Checking the Solana failure rate: what to take away

1. Check the signature before you send again. A green tick means done, a red marking means definitively failed, no entry at all means it never arrived. In all three cases you know whether a second attempt would swap twice. Which wallet shows you the error code and the instruction step in the first place is set out in the software wallet comparison.
2. Treat the slippage limit as a dial, not as a source of errors. If your swap fails repeatedly at the same point, the limit is too tight for the current market movement. Widening it means more price risk, tightening it means more failures. Anyone swapping larger amounts regularly should check trading venue terms in the exchange comparison.
3. Keep a SOL reserve in the account. Without SOL for the fee and the account deposit no transaction goes through, including the one meant to fix the problem. Anyone running swaps on automation should budget that buffer in; which tools support it is shown in the trading bot comparison.

(As of September 14, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

In the United States you have been able to buy a spot ETF on XRP for a while now, one on Solana and one on Ethereum. In Germany you cannot. Type the ticker from a US headline into your broker's search box and you get either no results at all or a note telling you that the instrument is closed to retail clients. That is not your broker's doing and it is not a mistake at your end. It comes down to two European rulebooks that work independently of one another.

The good news is that for almost every cryptocurrency with a US spot ETF there is an exchange-traded security in Germany that does economically much the same job. It simply carries a different name, it is built differently in legal terms, and it brings a risk an ETF does not. This article works through the chain in order: why the US ETF is blocked, what you can buy instead, where the difference hurts, and when buying the coins outright on an exchange serves you better than holding a security in your brokerage account.

Why your broker does not list the US spot XRP ETF

The reason is called the PRIIPs Regulation. Regulation (EU) No 1286/2014 on key information documents for packaged retail investment products requires the manufacturer of any such product to draw up a standardised key information document before the product may be sold to retail investors in the European Economic Area.

The key information document, usually shortened to KID, is a short and strictly formatted document in the local language that sets out the costs, the risk rating and the possible performance scenarios of an investment product according to one common template.

US fund houses do not produce this document for their domestic ETFs. The effort does not pay off for them, because European retail distribution is not their market. Without a key information document, a broker supervised in the EU may not sell the security to a retail client. So it hides the instrument or blocks the order.

One point matters for your understanding: this is a regulatory block, not a tax one. It affects practically every ETF launched in the United States, from the broad equity index to the commodity fund, and crypto is only one special case among them. Anyone who reads online that US ETFs are "banned" in Germany is cutting a corner. What is banned is distribution to retail investors without the prescribed document.

ETF, ETP, ETN and ETC: what separates the four acronyms

The four abbreviations get mixed up in everyday use, and that confusion costs readers money. Here is the clean distinction.

ETF stands for exchange traded fund, a fund traded on an exchange. The assets of a fund are ring-fenced in legal terms: they belong to the investors and are untouched by the insolvency of the fund company.

ETP stands for exchange traded product and is the umbrella term for all exchange-traded index products, ETFs included.

ETN stands for exchange traded note and denotes an exchange-traded bearer debt security. In legal terms that is a debt the issuer owes you, not a share in a fund.

ETC stands for exchange traded commodity. The construction matches the ETN, but the security tracks a commodity, classically gold.

Every single-crypto security traded in Europe is an ETN, or an ETP built along ETC lines. It is not a fund. When an advertisement, a newsletter or a forum post talks about a "Bitcoin ETF on Xetra", either the label is wrong or the product is a basket construction holding several underlyings.

The UCITS 5/10/40 rule rules out the single-asset ETF in Europe

The second reason sits in fund law. A European ETF aimed at retail investors is as a rule a UCITS fund. UCITS stands for "undertakings for collective investment in transferable securities" and describes a fund that may be distributed across the EU provided it observes strict diversification requirements.

The best known of those requirements is the 5/10/40 rule: no more than 10 percent of fund assets may sit with a single issuer, and all positions above 5 percent together may not exceed 40 percent. A fund made up 100 percent of one single asset can never meet that requirement.

That is why Europe has no Bitcoin UCITS ETF, and for the same reason no pure gold ETF either. In the United States the diversification requirements for this product class are looser, and a fund with a single underlying is permitted there. So the rule is not meant as hostility towards crypto; it simply hits crypto particularly hard.

For you one simple rule of thumb follows. Anything you can buy in Germany in a brokerage account as a single bet on Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP or Solana is a debt security. If you want to hold the coins themselves, you buy them on a crypto exchange and keep them in your own wallet.

How to spot a physically backed crypto ETN

Physical backing means that the issuer actually buys the matching quantity of the cryptocurrency for every security it issues and deposits it with a custodian. The counterpart is synthetic backing, where a swap agreement with a counterparty merely replicates the price.

Three entries reveal the construction, and all three appear in the product factsheet or the key information document:

• Type of backing. Look for the wording "physically backed" or "100 percent collateralised". If it says "synthetic" or "swap-based", you are also carrying the risk of a further counterparty.
• Custodian. Reputable issuers name the custodian and the form of custody. If the entry is missing altogether, treat that as a warning sign.
• Trustee or security trustee. With most European crypto ETPs an independent trustee holds the deposited coins and may realise them for the benefit of investors in an insolvency.

Backing is no legal substitute for ring-fenced fund assets; it does not turn your security into a fund unit. What it does is something else: in the worst case a pool of assets is ready for investors to claim against. We worked through exactly that difference, with the concrete checks to run, in our article on issuer risk in crypto ETNs.

Issuer risk: what happens to your ETN if the issuer fails

Issuer risk is the risk that the party issuing a debt security becomes insolvent and can no longer meet its obligation towards you. With a fund unit that risk does not exist, because fund assets are held separately from the assets of the company.

With a crypto ETN it very much does exist. Backing softens it; it does not remove it. In an insolvency, the quality of the trust construction decides whether the deposited coins are distributed to investors promptly or whether they first fall into the insolvency estate and proceedings rule on them. That can take years, and the price keeps moving through that time without you being able to act.

In practice that means spreading larger amounts across several issuers instead of bundling everything with one house. Someone putting 20,000 euros into a Bitcoin security has a different problem from someone with a 500 euro monthly savings plan. And anyone unwilling to carry issuer risk at all has no way around buying the coins directly.

Which crypto ETPs can you actually buy on Xetra?

The European market is broader than many readers assume. Securities on Bitcoin and Ethereum have been available from several providers for years. For XRP, market overviews indicate that several issuers have by now listed products on German and Swiss exchanges, among them 21Shares, WisdomTree, CoinShares, VanEck and Virtune. For Solana there are both plain price trackers and versions that collect staking income.

Which of these securities you can actually trade is decided by your brokerage provider. Some brokers carry the full product range, others only a selection, and others again exclude crypto ETPs for new clients. You will find an overview of providers and their product ranges in our broker comparison.

Never rely on the product name alone when you buy. Several providers use similar labels, and individual issuers run two securities on the same underlying with different expense ratios. The ISIN is the only unambiguous identifier. Copy it from the issuer's factsheet into your account's search box and then compare the name that comes back.

Staking versions are separate products

On Ethereum and Solana several issuers offer securities that collect the staking income of the deposited holdings. Staking means locking up coins to secure a network, for which the protocol pays an ongoing reward. That income can stay inside the security and lift its value, or it can be distributed, and the two carry different tax consequences.

Tax: why the delivery claim decides the one-year holding period

This is where the most important practical difference between the product versions sits, and many investors do not know it.

Crypto assets held privately fall under section 23 of the German Income Tax Act in Germany, which covers private disposal transactions. Hold for longer than a year and you pay no tax on the gain. Sell within a year and the gain is taxed at your personal income tax rate, with an annual exemption threshold of 1,000 euros covering all private disposal transactions together. Once that threshold is passed, the entire gain becomes taxable, not only the part above it.

A conventional security is treated under section 20 instead: flat-rate withholding tax of 25 percent, plus the solidarity surcharge and church tax where applicable, regardless of how long you have held it.

Which of the two worlds applies to your crypto ETP depends, on the reading of issuers and several tax firms, on the delivery claim: the right documented in the prospectus to demand the surrender of the deposited coins instead of a payout in euros. Where that claim is documented and the security is physically backed, they treat the investment like directly held crypto assets with the one-year period. Where the delivery claim is absent, the flat-rate withholding tax stands.

The basis for this classification is set out in the German Finance Ministry circular on individual questions of the income tax treatment of certain crypto assets of March 6, 2025, file reference IV C 1 – S 2256/00042/064/043, which replaced the version of May 10, 2022. What binds your specific case in the end is your tax office. Where larger amounts are involved, tax advice is cheaper than a correction after the fact.

FIFO applies to your brokerage account too

FIFO stands for "first in, first out" and means that on a sale the units bought first count as the ones sold first. With a monthly savings plan that means each instalment has its own clock, and a partial sale always takes the oldest units. Lose track of the individual tranches and your figures go wrong. A portfolio tracker that carries purchase dates and deadlines along saves real work here. We compared which tools do that job in our review of crypto tax tools.

One note on the timing. A German Finance Ministry draft bill became known in September 2026 that would remove the one-year holding period for crypto assets acquired from January 1, 2027 and subject gains to the flat-rate withholding tax instead. Holdings bought up to December 31, 2026 would stay in the old system under the draft. This is a draft and not law in force. We wrote up what it provides for in detail and which cut-off dates it names in our article on grandfathering for the crypto holding period.

Costs: TER, spread and trading hours against buying direct

Three cost blocks determine what a crypto ETP really costs you over a year.

The first is the TER, the total expense ratio: the annual percentage the issuer takes out of the security, which feeds into the price pro rata every day. Market overviews put the range for Bitcoin securities at roughly 0.15 to 1 percent a year, and for securities on smaller cryptocurrencies at around 1.5 to 2.5 percent. The premium is explained by the smaller market volume and the higher custody costs.

The second is the spread, the gap between the bid and the offer in the order book. On liquid Bitcoin securities during a trading day with normal volume it barely registers. On thinly traded securities on smaller coins, and outside core trading hours, it becomes the real cost factor.

The third is your broker's order fees, which come as a flat charge, a percentage or a tiered scale depending on the house.

On top of that sits a point that is not a fee and still costs money: trading hours. An exchange-traded security can only be traded while the exchange is open. The crypto market runs around the clock, weekends included. If the price drops 12 percent on a Saturday evening, as an ETP holder you cannot react until Monday, while the buyer of real coins can trade at any time. In calm phases nobody notices. In hectic ones it decides the outcome.

ETP or coin on an exchange: which route suits you

There is no route that is better across the board, but two profiles with different strengths.

The security in your brokerage account suits you if you want your investments bundled in one place, if the tax statement from your custodian bank takes work off your hands, if you would rather not manage your own keys, or if you want to buy automatically through a savings plan and your broker offers that for crypto ETPs.

Buying directly on a crypto exchange suits you if you want to avoid issuer risk, if you need to be able to trade around the clock, if you actually want to use the coins or move them to your own wallet, if ongoing management fees bother you, or if you want to buy cryptocurrencies for which no listed security exists in Europe at all.

Many readers run both tracks: the core holding on an exchange with their own custody, a smaller position in the brokerage account because it fits the familiar asset overview there. That is a fair approach, but it demands clean records, because different tax rules can apply to the two parts.

Three mistakes that cost the most money when buying

The ticker from the US headline. American ticker symbols do not carry over to European securities. Type a symbol from a news story into the search box and at best you land on no results, at worst on a completely different instrument such as a leveraged certificate. Search by ISIN.

Overlooking the currency. Many crypto ETPs are quoted in euros, some in US dollars, a few in Swiss francs. If your security is quoted in dollars and you buy in euros, you carry currency risk on top of the price risk of the cryptocurrency. On a security with a high expense ratio the currency effect over a year can turn out larger than the fee.

Confusing distributing and accumulating. With staking securities it makes a difference whether the income stays in the price or is paid out. A distribution is a tax-relevant inflow in the year it happens, even if you keep holding the security. Fail to plan for that and you have a tax bill without the matching cash.

Buying a crypto ETF in Germany: what to take away

1. Stop searching for the US ETF and search for the European ETP. For Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP and Solana there are securities listed on German exchanges. Whether your brokerage provider carries them is a five-minute question; if it does not, the broker comparison helps you pick a house that does.
2. Check three lines in the factsheet before you buy, then keep your purchase data: backing, delivery claim, expense ratio. The first two decide default risk and tax treatment, the third the running costs. To keep the one-year period traceable per tranche, pick one of the tools from our review of crypto tax tools.
3. Decide deliberately between the brokerage account and your own custody instead of leaving it to chance. If you want to hold the coins yourself and trade at any hour, the route runs through a trading platform; the comparison of the best crypto exchanges shows which providers are worth considering.

(As of September 14, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Ethereum spent most of the last three weeks doing very little, then packed an entire month of drama into a single session. On 11 September, $ETH ripped from roughly $2,437 to as high as $2,667, printed its first move above $2,600 in around eight months, and then handed most of it straight back. As of 14 September, the Bitstamp ETHUSD pair is trading near $2,505, up a rounding-error 0.19% on the session.

That combination, a violent spike followed by three days of nothing, is the whole story right now. $Ethereum has the buyers. What it does not yet have is the follow-through. Below is the macro picture and the technical picture, and where the two collide.

What Happened to the Ethereum Price This Week?

The trigger was the August US Consumer Price Index, released on 11 September. Headline inflation came in at 3.4% year over year, matching expectations, while core CPI rose 0.3% month over month, slightly hotter than forecast. On paper that is a mildly hawkish print. Crypto rallied anyway.

The reason is positioning, not economics. Traders had been leaning short into the data, and the move detonated them. Roughly $665 million in crypto positions were liquidated across the market in 24 hours, with about $400 million of that on the short side. Ethereum alone accounted for around $250 million, more than Bitcoin's roughly $170 million. Ali Martinez also flagged that ETH transfers above $1 million jumped 14% on the day, which points at large holders adding rather than retail chasing.

So the spike was real demand meeting thin liquidity above the range. The problem is what happened next: ETH closed the week near $2,619 and has since slid back under $2,500 before stabilising around $2,505. A breakout that cannot hold its breakout level is a test, not a trend.

Why Does the Fed Rate Hike Matter for the Ethereum Price?

Here is the part most ETH holders are underweighting. The Federal Reserve meets on 15 and 16 September, and the market is not debating the size of a cut. It is pricing a hike.

Futures and prediction markets have been assigning roughly 80% to 87% probability to a 25 basis point increase, which would lift the federal funds rate off the 3.50% to 3.75% range it has held all year. Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan have both moved their forecasts to include the hike. J.P. Morgan's team pointed at two drivers: energy costs kept elevated by ongoing supply disruption tied to the Iran conflict and the Strait of Hormuz, and investor doubt about the Fed's inflation credibility after it held in July. Separately, prediction markets put the odds of zero rate cuts across all of 2026 at above 90%.

For a duration-sensitive risk asset like ETH, that is a headwind, full stop. Higher policy rates and a 10-year Treasury yield hovering near 4.8% raise the opportunity cost of holding a non-yielding asset, and they compress the multiple the market is willing to pay for future growth.

The interesting wrinkle is that ETH rallied into this anyway. Goldman Sachs analyst Jonathan Shugar has argued that risk assets can still appreciate through a hiking move, which is one explanation for why institutional demand for ETH products has not flinched. Either the market has fully digested the hike and is looking past it, or it is about to get a reminder. Wednesday settles the argument.

Are Ethereum ETF Inflows Still Supporting ETH?

This is the strongest leg of the bull case, and it is not close.

Spot Ethereum ETFs absorbed $216.41 million on 11 September alone, according to SoSoValue data, with BlackRock's ETHA taking $148.8 million of that, its biggest single day since January. Combined trading volume across ETH ETF products topped $2.56 billion, nearly matching Bitcoin's $2.6 billion. Ethereum was the only major crypto fund category to record net inflows that day. Bitcoin and Solana products both saw money leave.

Zoom out and the divergence gets sharper. Ethereum spot ETFs sit at roughly $863 million in net inflows for 2026, while Bitcoin spot ETFs are around $1 billion net negative on the year. ETH also outperformed BTC on price from 11 August to 10 September, gaining about 33% against Bitcoin's 23%.

There is a corporate bid underneath it too. Bitmine, chaired by Fundstrat's Tom Lee, had accumulated roughly 5.9 million ETH by September, around 4.9% of circulating supply, with most of it staked. Lee has been publicly calling for what he describes as a face-ripper rally for short sellers. Treat the commentary as talking a book, but the accumulation itself is a genuine supply constraint.

What Does the Ethereum Technical Analysis Show on the 3-Hour Chart?

The 3-hour chart is unusually clean right now.

• The 200 EMA has caught up to price. The 200-period EMA sits at $2,403.7, and it has spent the last four weeks grinding higher from the $1,900 area while price went sideways. It has now converged almost exactly with the horizontal $2,400 level. When a moving average and a historical horizontal stack on top of each other, that level stops being a line and becomes a decision point.
• The breakout base is intact. The green arrow on the chart marks the 19 August ignition around $1,870. ETH added more than 30% in roughly 48 hours, clearing the descending trendline that had capped every rally since the August 2025 peak near $4,958. Everything since has been consolidation above that breakout, not a failure of it. Higher lows have held since the 3 September dip to the $2,370 zone.
• Momentum is flat, not weak. RSI (14) reads 50.09 with its signal line at 49.58. That is textbook neutral. The 11 September spike pushed RSI into the low 70s and it has since unwound back to the midline without price giving up the range, which is a healthy reset rather than a distribution signal. It also means neither side currently has an edge from momentum alone.
• The rejection candle matters. The 11 September wick to roughly $2,667 with a close back under $2,600 left a clear upper shadow. That is a supply print. Until ETH closes a candle above $2,600 and holds it, that wick is the ceiling.

Where Are the Key ETH Support and Resistance Levels?

Resistance:

• $2,550 is the immediate ceiling and the level analysts are watching for a weekly close. Clear it and $2,600 comes back into play quickly.
• $2,600 is the marked horizontal on the chart and the level that rejected on 11 September. It is the line that separates chop from trend.
• $2,700 to $2,800 is the real problem. Ali Martinez has pointed out that roughly 10 million ETH changed hands inside that band, creating a heavy supply wall. Every one of those holders is close to break-even, and break-even is where people sell. Clearing that zone is the precondition for any serious $3,000 conversation.

Support:

• $2,490 to $2,450 is the near-term shelf where the current range has been holding.
• $2,400 is the one that counts, because it is the horizontal and the 200 EMA together. Holding it keeps the August structure alive.

Below that, the chart offers very little until the $2,000 horizontal, with the next marked level all the way down at $1,800. That gap is thin air, which is exactly why $2,400 is worth defending.

What Is the Ethereum Price Outlook From Here?

Three scenarios, in rough order of probability as the chart currently sits.

1. Range continuation (most likely near term). ETH keeps chopping between roughly $2,450 and $2,600 through the Fed decision. RSI at 50 and fading volume since the breakout both argue for this. Boring, but it is what consolidation above a breakout usually looks like.
2. Bullish resolution. A daily or weekly close above $2,550, ideally confirmed by another heavy ETF inflow day, opens $2,600 and then the $2,700 to $2,800 supply wall. Getting through that band on volume is what would put $3,000 on the table. The ETF bid and the Bitmine accumulation are the fuel for this path.
3. Bearish resolution. A close below $2,400 breaks both the horizontal and the 200 EMA in one move, which would invalidate the higher-low structure built since 3 September. A hawkish Fed surprise on 16 September, a hike plus language pointing at more, is the obvious catalyst. The measured downside from there runs toward the $2,220 area where the 50-day EMA sits, with little structural support before $2,000.

One more calendar item worth keeping on the radar: the Glamsterdam upgrade has slipped to Q4 2026, with the Sepolia testnet fork scheduled for 28 September and developers cautioning that the date can still move. It is not a this-week catalyst, but a confirmed testnet fork would give bulls a narrative to work with heading into October.

The short version: Ethereum has the institutional bid, the broken trendline and the higher lows. What it does not have is a close above $2,600 or a Fed that wants to help. Watch $2,400 and watch Wednesday.

Eight trade associations say exceptions for interest-like rewards could pull deposits from banks and reduce lending.

The OpenAI chief called for safeguards during training and shared industry standards, saying developers can act before legislation arrives.

Aboard Air Force One, the president threw his support behind the AI-powered license plate readers that have drawn a Senate investigation and a pledged bill from Bernie Sanders.

Mustafa Suleyman's AI unit wants feedback for six weeks before the document guides model training in 2027.

The president dismissed calls for tighter AI controls as industry leaders push to slow development and address safety failures.

The Clarity Act is facing a fresh wave of opposition just hours before a crucial Senate vote that could determine the fate of the landmark cryptocurrency legislation.

XRP traders are bracing for a bigger-than-usual move over the coming week, with Coinbase options data showing the token priced for the largest volatility jump relative to its own history among major cryptocurrencies.

Cardano has landed a major payments integration after gaining native support in the official x402 codebase, making it easier for developers and AI agents to settle internet payments on the network using standardized tooling.

Zcash and Litecoin achieve a new European listing amid ZEC’s $1K rally, opening a compliant trading window ahead of the 2027 AMLR ban.

Binance's CZ considers a new target, which seems like a long road for BNB Chain, after the blockchain flipped Solana in a major DeFi milestone.

TLDR:

• Ethereum trades at $2,543 as a triangle pattern points toward a potential $3,000 breakout.
• Ali Charts says a similar Ethereum pattern previously preceded a 31% surge in three days.
• Around 140,000 ETH worth $350 million left exchanges over a 96-hour period.
• Declining exchange reserves could reduce immediate selling pressure if the trend continues.

Ethereum is trading at $2,550.49 on as of writing, posting a 1.86% gain over the past 24 hours. The asset has also advanced 2.0% across the last seven days, according to current market data. Trading volume over the same 24-hour window reached $16.5 billion, reflecting steady market activity.

Source: Coingecko

The price movement follows fresh commentary from crypto analysts pointing to a potential breakout pattern. Analysts also point to data showing a notable reduction in Ethereum held on exchanges.

Triangle Pattern Points to Possible Breakout Toward $3,000

Chart analyst Ali Charts pointed to a triangle formation building on the Ethereum price chart. The account noted that a similar pattern preceded a 31% surge within three days.

That earlier breakout took place after the triangle pattern completed its formation. A new triangle is now forming on the chart, according to the analysis.

If Ethereum breaks out of the current pattern, the analysis suggests a move toward $3,000. That target would represent a substantial gain from current price levels.

Triangle patterns are commonly used by traders to identify potential breakout points. A confirmed breakout typically requires a decisive move above the pattern’s upper boundary.

Ethereum currently trades at $2,550.49, sitting below the $3,000 target level. Reaching that level would require a gain of close to 18%.

The cryptocurrency has already posted gains over both the daily and weekly timeframes. Momentum in the broader market could influence whether the pattern plays out as expected.

A breakout above resistance would need to hold to validate the pattern.

Volume during a potential breakout is typically monitored to confirm strength. The $3,000 level marks a key psychological threshold for Ethereum.

Exchange Outflows Signal Reduced Ethereum Selling Pressure

A separate post from Ali Charts pointed to substantial Ethereum outflows from exchanges. Roughly 140,000 ETH, valued near $350 million, left exchange wallets over 96 hours.

That volume of withdrawals suggests holders are moving Ethereum into private storage. Exchange outflows are often tracked as an indicator of holder behavior.

When Ethereum leaves exchanges, it typically becomes less available for immediate selling. Fewer coins sitting on exchanges can reduce potential sell-side pressure.

Holders moving assets off exchanges often signal an intent to hold long term. This pattern has been observed during previous periods of price strength.

Ethereum’s price has moved higher alongside the reported decline in exchange reserves. The 1.86% daily gain and 2.0% weekly gain accompany the outflow trend.

Trading volume over the past 24 hours totaled $16.5 billion. That level of activity indicates continued participation from both buyers and sellers.

Exchange balance data is commonly used alongside price charts to assess market conditions. Analysts often combine outflow figures with technical patterns for a fuller picture.

Both data points released this week point toward reduced available supply. Ethereum’s next move will depend on how these factors develop further.

The post Ethereum Could Surge to $3,000 as Triangle Pattern Takes Shape appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Wyoming migrated FRNT fully to Chainlink CCIP after LayerZero security failures were discovered.
• LayerZero lost control of a critical private key tied to a live FRNT deployment.
• Chainlink CCIP uses 16 node operators and holds SOC 2 Type 2 certification for security.
• LayerZero CEO called the issue minor, but Wyoming proceeded with the full migration anyway.

Wyoming has switched its state-issued stable token from LayerZero to Chainlink after uncovering repeated security lapses at LayerZero Labs.

The Wyoming Stable Token Commission cited a mishandled production authorization and lost control of a critical private key tied to its Frontier Stable Token, known as FRNT.

The decision follows a $292 million LayerZero bridge exploit connected to North Korean hackers. The migration to Chainlink’s CCIP is now complete across all eight blockchains supporting FRNT.

Why Wyoming Made the Switch

The Wyoming Stable Token Commission began its security review after a LayerZero bridge used by KelpDAO was exploited in April 2026.

Hackers linked to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea compromised offchain infrastructure that LayerZero’s verifier used to monitor blockchain activity.

That breach allowed attackers to forge a cross-chain message, releasing funds on Ethereum based on an event that never occurred on Unichain.

Chief security officer Keith Lawhorn explained the Commission’s findings in a post on X. He wrote that the agency uncovered “a repeated pattern of major operational security failures at LayerZero Labs.”

He added that the company also failed to maintain proper control of a private key managing a live FRNT deployment.

Lawhorn said the protocol “places too much responsibility on individual developers to assemble their own security,” leaving many projects dependent on a small verifier set. He pointed to limited independent verifier options as a structural weakness across the ecosystem.

LayerZero CEO Bryan Pellegrino responded publicly, arguing the primary issue was a minor view-only feature that his team resolved quickly.

Wyoming moved forward with the switch regardless after comparing LayerZero against alternative infrastructure providers on security grounds.

What Chainlink Offers Over LayerZero

The Commission reviewed LayerZero, Chainlink CCIP, and other cross-chain options across six evaluation categories before finalizing its switch.

Lawhorn wrote that Chainlink CCIP was “the only cross-chain infrastructure solution that met the Commission’s strict security requirements.”

Chainlink’s oracle network secures close to 70% of decentralized finance activity and has processed more than $33 trillion in onchain transaction value, per the Commission’s assessment.

The network reportedly remained functional during the October 2025 AWS outage that took down LayerZero’s Stargate bridge.

CCIP distributes verification across 16 independent, security-reviewed node operators on every supported chain. Transactions move through an OCR consensus process and a separate signing stage, a design meant to stop a small operator subset from forging messages.

CCIP also carries SOC 2 Type 2 certification from a major accounting firm and has passed 50 security audits, the Commission reported.

Configurable rate limits by token, lane, and direction act as circuit breakers, restricting how much value can transfer within a set window.

Following the switch, FRNT now runs exclusively on Chainlink CCIP across all eight blockchain networks, with added reserve verification built into the new setup.

The post Wyoming Stable Token Commission Ditches LayerZero for Chainlink’s CCIP appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Ethereum L1 and Base end joint account abstraction standards effort last week.
• Ethereum prioritizes censorship resistance and privacy over L2 scalability needs. 
• Base favors compliance and scalability via EIP-8130 and Tempo Transactions.
• Wallet developers must now bridge fragmented account abstraction standards across chains. 

Ethereum L1 and Base have parted ways on account abstraction after a joint standards effort collapsed last week. Ethlabs researcher Derek Chiang confirmed that EIP-8130 and EIP-8141, called Frame Transactions, will now proceed as separate proposals.

Both chains still want gasless transactions and passkey wallets, but their priorities no longer align closely enough for one shared standard.

Why the Collaboration Fell Apart

Ethereum L1 and Base spent weeks trying to align their account abstraction proposals into a single framework. Chiang said engineers reviewed multiple technical paths during that period.

Every option identified required one chain to soften goals central to its roadmap. Neither Ethereum L1 nor Base accepted a compromise significant enough to finalize.

Ethereum L1 focuses on censorship resistance, privacy, and long-term security for its base settlement layer. Base instead prioritizes scalability, configurability, and compliance features suited to commercial applications.

These differing priorities made the account abstraction talks harder to resolve over time. Chiang described the resulting split between Ethereum L1 and Base as a predictable outcome.

Chiang addressed the outcome directly on X, confirming the collaboration between the two proposals had ended. He wrote that Base and Ethereum were now going separate ways to implement different standards.

The post confirmed publicly what had been circulating among developers following the talks. Both chains can now build account abstraction features independently of one another.

The Ethereum L1 and Base split shifts responsibility toward wallet providers and application builders. Users may not directly notice the fragmentation if wallets successfully hide the technical differences.

Chiang acknowledged this outcome places more work on developer teams going forward. He still viewed the split as acceptable given each chain’s distinct technical requirements.

Technical Differences Driving the Standards Apart

Ethereum L1’s account abstraction work favors transaction formats built for post-quantum signature aggregation. These requirements support standards including ERC-4337, EIP-7701, and the newer EIP-8141 Frame Transactions proposal.

Developers on Ethereum L1 want account models that can be extended without needing permission from the chain. This approach fits Ethereum’s broader decentralization priorities closely.

Base requires a different technical foundation suited to processing transactions at much larger scale. Its account model needs enforceable rules that clearly separate permitted transactions from restricted ones.

These needs shaped standards such as Tempo Transactions and the newly proposed EIP-8130. Compliance obligations tied to enterprise partners also influenced Base’s technical direction throughout.

Chiang explained that shared account standards previously kept Ethereum L1 and Layer 2 chains aligned for years. Common formats like EOA accounts and EIP-1559 transactions once let wallets work consistently everywhere.

Account abstraction pushed those shared foundations beyond what both chains could support together. The compliance and security gap between Ethereum L1 and Base proved too wide to close.

Both chains still share overlapping goals despite their technical differences over standards. Gasless transactions and passkey wallets remain priorities for Ethereum L1 and Base alike.

The engineering paths toward those features, however, now diverge substantially between the two networks. This divergence could complicate wallet development across chains in coming months.

What Comes Next for Wallets and Standards

Chiang outlined two paths forward following the Ethereum L1 and Base split on account abstraction. One option involves creating a coordination process that includes more stakeholders beyond core Ethereum developers.

This would let Layer 2 networks help shape shared infrastructure like the EVM directly. Decisions currently rest largely with the Ethereum client development process known as ACD.

The second path accepts that some fragmentation between Ethereum L1 and Base is likely permanent. Under this approach, resources shift toward wallets capable of bridging the differing transaction formats.

Developers would build tools that speak each chain’s native standard without requiring manual switching. This method reduces friction for users even as protocols continue to diverge.

Chiang said he has grown more supportive of the wallet-bridging approach following this experience. Reflecting on the divergence between the two chains, he wrote that “we sometimes just gotta let the chains cook.”

Teams that manage the added complexity well may gain a competitive edge. This opportunity extends to both established wallets and newer application developers entering the space.

Coordination between Ethereum L1 and Base remains possible in areas where compromise avoids core trade-offs. Chiang said dialogue should continue even as some standards proceed on separate tracks.

Ethereum’s ecosystem has balanced independent innovation with shared standardization efforts before. How future proposals unfold will likely determine wallet compatibility across chains going forward.

The post Ethereum L1 and Base Split on Account Abstraction Standards as EIP-8130, EIP-8141 Diverge appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Cardano has gained native support in the official x402 codebase through an implementation contributed by Cardano Foundation engineers.
• The integration includes client, server, and facilitator components, with support for mainnet, preprod, and preview environments.
• Developers can now use Cardano more easily for x402-based applications, AI agents, APIs, and digital payment services.
• Official x402 support reduces the need for custom Cardano integrations and improves access for multi-chain payment applications.
• x402 continues to gain adoption across major technology, payments, and blockchain companies, expanding its role in internet-native payments.

Cardano has gained native support in the official x402 codebase, giving developers direct access to the network through the protocol’s reference tools. Cardano Foundation engineers contributed the implementation, which adds support for applications and AI agents that use x402 to request, send, and settle online payments. The repository added the Cardano TypeScript implementation on September 9, 2026.

Cardano Joins Official x402 Tooling

The new implementation includes client, server, and facilitator components, along with working examples. It supports Cardano mainnet, preprod, and preview, giving developers several environments for building and testing payment flows before wider deployment. The update moves Cardano beyond separate third-party implementations. Projects such as Masumi had already enabled x402 payments on the network, but official codebase support gives developers a standard starting point within the protocol’s shared development framework.

x402 uses the HTTP “402 Payment Required” status code to connect payment requests directly with internet services. A service can state a price for access, while another application or automated agent can respond with payment through a supported network. The model can support payments for APIs, data, computing services, and other digital resources. Because x402 aims to work across networks and currencies, developers can add different settlement options without creating a separate payment process for every blockchain.

Developer Access Becomes More Direct

Native support reduces the amount of custom work needed to add Cardano to an x402-based application. Developers can use reference components and examples from the official repository rather than building an independent Cardano connection from the beginning. The approach also supports multi-chain applications. Developers can offer Cardano alongside other supported networks while using a common HTTP payment flow. This can make integration more consistent for services that accept several payment methods and settlement networks through one application structure.

The x402 protocol began as a Coinbase project and later moved under the x402 Foundation. The Linux Foundation announced the foundation’s operational launch in July 2026, describing x402 as an open standard for internet-native payments. The wider ecosystem includes companies from payments, technology, cloud services, and cryptocurrency. The launch member list included Amazon Web Services, American Express, Circle, Coinbase, Google, Mastercard, Ripple, Shopify, Stripe, Visa, and several blockchain organizations. Cardano’s code integration adds another settlement option to that expanding framework for developers building automated online payment services and tools.

The post Cardano Gains x402 Integration, Opening a New Door appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Eight U.S. banking groups are urging senators to tighten stablecoin reward restrictions before the Clarity Act vote.
• Banks argue that rewards tied to stablecoin balances or holding periods could function like traditional deposit interest.
• The coalition wants Congress to close rules that still allow exchanges and intermediaries to offer stablecoin rewards.
• Banking groups also criticized the proposed deposit-flight circuit breaker, saying regulators may act too late.
• Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent defended the safeguards, saying authorities could step in if stablecoins hurt community banks.

U.S. banking groups are pressing senators to tighten rules on stablecoin rewards before the Clarity Act vote on Tuesday. Eight financial trade groups say the current draft could still allow crypto companies to offer rewards that resemble interest on bank deposits.

The coalition includes the American Bankers Association, Bank Policy Institute and Independent Community Bankers of America. The groups sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer on Monday, asking lawmakers to revise the bill before the vote.

Banks Seek Changes Before Clarity Act Vote

The banking groups argue that the bill leaves room for exchanges and other intermediaries to offer stablecoin rewards. They say those programs could encourage customers to move funds from banks into digital dollars, especially when rewards depend on balances or holding periods.

Federal law already prevents stablecoin issuers from paying yield directly. However, exchanges and other platforms can still structure rewards around stablecoin holdings. Banks want Congress to close that gap and create a clearer limit on programs that resemble deposit interest.

The coalition also criticized a proposed deposit-flight circuit breaker in the legislation. That measure would allow regulators to act if stablecoin transfers begin causing major losses of deposits at community banks.

The groups said regulators should not wait until banks have already lost large amounts of deposits. ICBA said the proposal would cover 18 months after the law takes effect and apply to community banks with less than $10 billion in assets.

Treasury Defends Current Safeguards

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent defended the latest draft in a post on X. He said the bill gives the Treasury secretary added authority to respond if stablecoin activity begins harming community banks.

Bessent said he would use those tools if needed while supporting the Clarity Act as part of the administration’s digital-asset policy. He also pointed to the GENIUS Act as part of the government’s effort to build stablecoin infrastructure in the United States.

The crypto industry has pushed back against claims that stablecoin rewards threaten bank deposits. Industry leaders argue that banks are overstating the competitive risk as the stablecoin market continues to grow.

The Clarity Act vote now places that dispute before the Senate. Lawmakers must decide whether the final bill should further restrict rewards based on stablecoin balances and holding periods as lawmakers weigh bank and crypto industry concerns.

The post Banks Push Senate as Clarity Act Vote Approaches appeared first on Blockonomi.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has said that the anti-collusion mechanisms he mapped out for blockchain governance back in 2020 might turn out to matter more for AI safety than for crypto itself.

He was responding to an essay by researcher Eric Drexler that used a recent OpenAI security test, in which thousands of AI agents built an unauthorized coordination network and attacked Hugging Face’s production systems, as a live example of the same dynamic he described six years ago.

A Familiar Problem With a New Set of Players

In a September 14 X post, Buterin described a “deep duality” between crypto governance and multi-agent AI systems. In his comparison, the principal in crypto is a static algorithm dealing with human agents, while an AI safety system could involve humans and weaker large language models managing stronger ones.

He pointed to his September 11, 2020, essay, “Coordination, Good and Bad,” where he suggested that systems can produce better outcomes when limits exist on how much agents can collude.

The developer contrasted the abundance of Nash equilibria in individual-choice game theory with cooperative game theory, where stable “cores” can be absent because coalitions can profit by changing the outcome.

Harmful coordination is not always visible from individual behavior. Buterin used examples, including sellers agreeing on prices, voters selling votes and blockchain miners coordinating an attack. His defenses included decentralization, secret ballots, privacy protections, whistleblowers, communication limits, and mechanisms that make participants bear the cost of decisions they support.

The comparison also fits Buterin’s broader AI safety views, having earlier criticized large political campaigns around AI safety, warning that they could produce centralized or authoritarian outcomes. He instead advocated for defensive technology and systems that make misuse harder.

AI Safety Puts the Same Idea in a Different Setting

The September 10 essay by Eric Drexler argues that AI collusion becomes easier when agents are similar, share objectives, communicate freely, observe one another’s actions, and retain information across repeated interactions.

Its countermeasures include using diverse agents, constraining communication between them, and imposing critics (production auto-review models, safety classifiers, and chain-of-thought monitors) with the authority to intervene and disrupt potential collusion.

Drexler cited the July 2026 OpenAI agent evaluation, drawing on an investigation published a month later that found roughly 1,200 agents had used an unauthorized message board and about 700 had participated in an attack on Hugging Face’s production systems.

Some agents objected and even took concrete action, including blocking data transfers and vetoing a proposed social-engineering email, but they lacked the authority to halt runs or escalate concerns.

According to the researcher, that happened because the setup “violated nearly every condition” he had flagged in a past report in 2019 as necessary to keep multi-agent systems from colluding. However, a retrofitted monitoring harness, tested afterward on the same model, cut the behavior by more than a hundredfold.

The post Vitalik Buterin Says Crypto Anti-Collusion Rules Could Apply to AI Safety appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Solana is gaining attention as tokenized stocks bring trading onto the blockchain outside traditional market hours, with CryptoRus pointing to after-hours activity and more than 727,000 holders as signs to watch.

But the bigger question is whether that usage can spread across Solana’s network and eventually show up in SOL’s price.

Solana’s After-Hours Stock Market Faces a Token Test

CryptoRus argues that tokenized equities give crypto a practical use case because markets can keep trading after Wall Street closes. Solana says 63% of tokenized-equity activity on its network came after the closing bell, while the number of holders has passed 727,000.

That does not, by itself, prove lasting demand for SOL. As the analysis account puts it, “The decision now is whether Solana’s activity becomes durable network growth, and whether SOL’s chart begins to reflect it.”

One way to test that broader story is through chain TVL, or the value held across decentralized applications on a network. Solana’s TVL was up 6.6% to $5.86 billion, compared with Ethereum at $49.97 billion after a 56% increase. BSC, Base, Tron and Bitcoin also posted gains similar to Solana’s, at 6.7%, 6.3%, 6.2%, and 4.7%, respectively, which still kept them well below Ethereum.

The second signal comes from Ethereum itself, with spot ETH ETFs recording more than $216 million in net inflows last Friday, making it a fourth straight week in the green for the funds. According to CryptoRus, that shows that institutional crypto demand is not limited to one network, and that investors should use those flows to check if the demand persists.

“A continuing inflow trend strengthens the broader adoption case,” the analyst wrote. “A reversal would weaken this particular signal.”

The third is the wider tokenization market. As CryptoPotato reported last week, tokenized stocks such as SPY, rGOOGL and HOODb posted large gains in market capitalization, while QQQb recorded $4.5 billion in 90-day decentralized exchange volume. Across the category, DEX volume reached $15.9 billion.

“That adds weight to the 24/7 market narrative, but it is not evidence that all resulting activity will accrue to Solana,” noted CryptoRus.

SOL Still Has to Clear Its Own Price Test

SOL was around $101 at the time of writing, according to CoinGecko data, having barely moved over 24 hours, although trading volume reached roughly $2.4 billion, up 34.8% from the previous day.

The asset is down more than 3% in seven days, but was up nearly 35% across 30 days, even though the price is still below the $105 top of its seven-day range.

CryptoRus’s setup calls for a long position only above $105.32, with $98.30 as the level where the upside case can fail, and at its current value, SOL sits between those levels.

That makes the price action an important part of the tokenized-stock story. If Solana keeps attracting stock trading activity but the token stays stuck below its trading trigger, then that, according to the analyst, means that “the infrastructure story may be advancing faster than the token trade.”

The post Three Signals to Watch as Solana Pushes 24/7 Tokenized Stock Trading appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Circle’s Arc network is set to open its public mainnet on September 16, and the question already circulating among analysts is whether it will see anything like the meme coin frenzy that hit Robinhood Chain right after its own launch.

SoSoValue’s breakdown of Arc argues that the answer is no, because the same structural features built to satisfy banks and regulators also strip out the exact mechanics that made Robinhood Chain’s boom possible in the first place.

Why Robinhood Chain’s Playbook Doesn’t Transfer to Arc

SoSoValue pointed to four conditions that lined up for Robinhood Chain: the network operator earned revenue from meme trading and tolerated it, an existing retail user base gave speculators an easy entry point, a native token’s buyback-and-burn mechanism supported prices, and a fully public mempool let bots front-run and sandwich trades for profit.

None of that lines up for Arc. Its validator set is Visa, Mastercard, BlackRock, DTCC, Circle itself and seven other regulated institutions, all of which have more to lose reputationally from hosting meme speculation than they’d gain in fees.

Arc’s distribution channels run through card networks and asset managers rather than retail traders. Furthermore, the ARC token hasn’t launched, gas is paid in USDC, and there’s no buyback mechanism to prop anything up.

Arc has also closed its public mempool entirely, so the front-running infrastructure that funds a lot of launchpad activity elsewhere is simply not there.

Crypto analyst Adam Cochran put the underlying critique rather bluntly, calling Arc “a private consortium chain with preapproved validators” rather than a real layer 1.

But SoSoValue didn’t dismiss the possibility outright, since Arc is EVM-compatible and Uniswap v4 and Aerodrome are launching on it on day one, but it treats any meme rally on Arc as harder to start and easier to unwind than what happened on Robinhood Chain.

Robinhood Chain’s Own Boom Already Cooling

The comparison matters because Robinhood Chain’s boom has already turned over, with daily revenue falling from a peak of $4 million to $1.06 million by the end of last week.

That was an 83% drop that came as gas prices collapsed once meme congestion eased and a 90-day fee subsidy nears its September 29 expiration. CEO Vlad Tenev had originally pitched tokenized real-world assets as the chain’s intended direction, then, once meme trading took over the network, said it was “good for memes, too.”

As CryptoPotato reported, Robinhood had already become the largest blockchain by RWA holder count within weeks of its July 1 launch, and the network has gone on to expand its UK offering, introducing crypto trading with zero fees in August.

The post Can Circle’s Arc Repeat Robinhood Chain’s Meme Coin Boom? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

SUI trades well below its peak levels, and its double-digit decline over the past week has only worsened its condition. It is currently worth around $0.71, representing an 80% crash on a yearly basis.

However, certain indicators suggest that a resurgence could be just around the corner.

The Factors in Question

Renowned analyst Ali Martinez revealed that the TD Sequential has flashed a buy signal on SUI’s 12-hour chart, noting that it has been “remarkably accurate at identifying major trend shifts.”

“Its previous signal came after a 17% rally and accurately anticipated the next shift in momentum. Now, with SUI trading near $0.71, the indicator has flashed a fresh buy signal. This could mark the beginning of the next leg higher,” he stated.

His analysis follows a previous comment on SUI. Last week, Martinez argued that the asset appears to have entered a trading channel with a lower boundary set at $0.71. He claimed that if this area holds, he plans to buy SUI again, targeting the top of the structure at around $0.84.

At the beginning of September, another ray of hope emerged for the token. Back then, Martinez said SUI’s TD Sequential flashed a buy signal on the asset’s daily chart, hinting that the correction could be nearing its end.

The asset’s exchange netflow should also be observed. Over the past few days, outflows have dominated inflows, suggesting some investors have moved away from centralized platforms toward self-custody. This, in turn, reduces immediate selling pressure.

Top Forecasts

The list of market observers projecting SUI to fly high in the near future is quite lengthy. X user Michael van de Poppe believes that a pump to $0.85 could trigger a more substantial surge beyond $1. Crypto With Gopal also shared a similar thesis lately, saying:

“Buyers have defended the $0.72-$0.73 zone twice, showing strong support and a potential momentum shift. A reclaim of $0.84-$0.85 resistance could open the way toward the $1.00 target.”

Sui Intern was more optimistic, saying the asset has entered “a trampoline mode” and that “the deeper the market sentiment hits, the higher it will bounce up.” That said, they expect SUI to trade above $30 in Q4 2026.

In the meantime, you can check our video below for the overall market state and the major macro events coming up.

The post Sui (SUI) Flashes a Buy Signal After a 10% Weekly Drop: What Are the Potential Targets? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The landmark crypto legislation, known as the CLARITY Act, seeks to establish a clear regulatory framework for digital assets in the USA, and many industry participants view it as a potential game-changer.

The Senate’s cloture vote on the bill is scheduled for tomorrow (September 15), and advancing the debate will require at least 60 votes. Although lawmakers recently revised the legislation to attract more Democratic support, the outcome remains far from certain.

Still, we wanted to check whether Bitcoin (BTC) or Ethereum (ETH) will pump more if the CLARITY Act formally moves to the Senate. To do so, we asked three of the most widely used AI-powered chatbots for their take, and here are their answers.

ChatGPT + Perplexity

OpenAI’s platform claimed that ETH is more likely to rally harder in percentage terms if the bill advances. It predicted that BTC would benefit from the broader sentiment improvement, but added that the asset already has relatively clear commodity status and the legislation would not fundamentally change its regulatory position.

ChatGPT also suggested that ETH has considerably more to gain because the CLARITY Act will reduce uncertainty over whether the asset and other network tokens could be treated as securities. In conclusion, the chatbot estimated that BTC could jump 5-10% after a potential successful vote, while the second-largest cryptocurrency might soar 10-20% immediately after the news.

Perplexity shared a similar thesis, projecting that ETH could print a sharp move toward the high-$2,000s to low-$3,000s after such a development. It went even further, arguing that this could set the stage for a major bull run toward a new all-time high above $5,000.

For BTC, the chatbot expects its valuation to initially surge beyond $83,000. At the same time, it warned that if the bill clearly fails, the asset could plunge to a local bottom of around $55,000.

Gemini’s Take

Google’s chatbot also picked ETH, arguing that it is generally expected to experience a larger percentage rally than BTC if the CLARITY Act clears its hurdles.

“While both assets stand to gain from regulatory progress, the structural dynamics of the CLARITY Act favor ETH for sharper upside potential,” it explained.

Gemini suggested the bill would generally benefit altcoins more than BTC, noting that their lower relative market capitalization (compared to the industry leader) means the same volume of institutional capital inflow triggers larger percentage price swings.

Meanwhile, you can find all details regarding the upcoming vote in our video below.

The post Bitcoin or Ethereum: Which Will Rally More if CLARITY Act Moves to Senate? 3 AIs Analyze appeared first on CryptoPotato.