Long-term Bitcoin holders' return to profit suggests resilience and potential stability, indicating a mid-cycle reset rather than a market top.

The post Bitcoin long-term holders exit shallow stress, return to profit appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The net inflows into crypto spot ETFs highlight growing institutional confidence and could signal increased mainstream adoption of digital assets.

The post Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and XRP spot ETFs all post net inflows on Sept. 28 appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

BSOL's dominance in the Solana ETF market enhances SOL's demand and network security, influencing crypto investment strategies and competition.

The post Bitwise ETF clients purchase $9.65M in Solana tokens as BSOL dominates US spot fund category appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Ethereum's lead in open interest on Hyperliquid signals a shift in trader sentiment, highlighting potential risks in decentralized platforms.

The post Ethereum overtakes Bitcoin in open interest on Hyperliquid appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

KakaoPay's move could democratize access to Korean equities, fostering global investment and potentially reshaping international stock markets.

The post KakaoPay Securities pushes into tokenized equities to open South Korean stocks to global investors appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Belarus Approves the Country’s First Crypto Banks: Report 

The first crypto banks have opened in Belarus, according to reports, after the European country earlier this year created a legal framework for Bitcoin banks. 

While not yet named, the crypto banks will start operations after obtaining accreditation from the National Bank of Belarus, Russian news agency Interfax reported Monday. 

Back in January, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko signed Decree No. 19 “On Cryptobanks and Certain Issues of Control in the Field of Digital Tokens,” officially creating a legal framework for bitcoin and crypto banks in the country. 

“The practical outcome of today’s discussion is the launch and registration of the first crypto banks in the country’s history,” Interfax reported the press service of High-Tech Park saying in a statement.

High-Tech Park is a tax and legal regime in Belarus. Digital asset transactions are permitted in the zone. 

The statement added that banks would be regulated by Hi-Tech Park and the National Bank. 

Dmitry Kalechits, first deputy director of the High-Tech Park supervisory board secretariat, was quoted saying that the move would “improve the flow of the financial ecosystem” and drive foreign investment to Belarus. 

President Lukashenko last September backed the National Bank’s initiative to establish crypto banks in the country. 

The country has long pushed pro-crypto regulations. A 2017 decree legalised crypto mining and trading and temporarily exempted individuals’ crypto income from tax and declaration. That exemption was extended to 2025 and has since been narrowed, with income from foreign platforms now taxed at 13%.

Lukashenko has repeatedly promoted Bitcoin mining as a use for surplus electricity, and in 2025 the Mogilev region began preparing sites for mining farms with his backing.

This post Belarus Approves the Country’s First Crypto Banks: Report  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Blasts Nigel Farage’s ‘Bitcoin Account’ 

UK Chancellor of the Exchequer John Healey has appeared to slam Reform Party leader Nigel Farage’s use of Bitcoin. 

In a Monday speech, the finance minister said that Nigel Farage — a pro-crypto member of parliament — was “Liz Truss with a Bitcoin account.” 

Farage, who is leading the increasingly popular Reform Party, has come under fire recently for receiving donations from crypto entrepreneurs. Liz Truss was the UK’s shortest serving Prime Minister who was heavily criticised for her debt-fueled 2022 mini budget. 

“Nigel Farage — he wants you to think he’s a man of the people,” Healey said. “But when it comes to the economy, he’s Lizz Truss with a Bitcoin account.” 

Healey went on to say that his leading Labour Party would help the UK get ahead “through fiscal discipline, through good work, through strong industries.”

His comments were criticized by the Bitcoin community on X, who asked what a “Bitcoin account” even was. 

“Apparently ‘Bitcoin account’ is now a thing,” the Simply Bitcoin account wrote on X. “Incredible stuff from one of the people running Britain.”

Populist Farage has long been a pro-crypto politician. Since 2020, he has framed Bitcoin mainly as a question of personal freedom and opposition to state control of money.

Farage has also said that he was debanked by private British bank Coutts and that led him to develop more interest in digital assets. 

Just last year, he said at the Bitcoin 2025 Conference at Las Vegas that he’d slash crypto capital gains taxes and force the Bank of England to establish a Bitcoin reserve if elected as the next Prime Minister.  

Farage has come under fire this year for receiving millions of dollars in the form of crypto donations from tech entrepreneur and Tether investor Christopher Harborne, and Ben Delo, one of the founders of the now-closed BitMEX crypto exchange. 

The Metropolitan Police have opened an investigation into reports that Reform broke rules against overseas donations. Reform denies wrongdoing and says it will cooperate.

This post UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Blasts Nigel Farage’s ‘Bitcoin Account’  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Citi and Coinbase Working Together To Build Stablecoin Infrastructure for Businesses

Citigroup is working with America’s biggest crypto exchange, Coinbase, in its latest blockchain-based venture. 

The two companies said in a joint statement Monday that they were teaming up to allow Citi clients to move between regular money and stablecoins without having to build or manage both banking and crypto systems themselves.

The announcement comes as banks worldwide utilize Bitcoin’s underlying technology to speed up their processes and cater to crypto-hungry customers. 

Citi last month said it would allow institutional investors to custody both traditional assets and bitcoin within one framework, rather than needing separate systems, later this year. 

“Our clients operate in an increasingly fast-paced and complex global economy, and we’re focused on delivering the solutions they need,” said Debopama Sen, Head of Payments, Services, Citi. 

“Our goal is to build the next generation of payments infrastructure — one that is seamless, interoperable, and operates across both traditional and digital payments instruments and networks.”

There are two parts to the deal, the announcement said. Firstly, Coinbase Virtual Accounts, built on Citi’s banking-as-a-service platform, will give Coinbase’s payments customers bank-account-like features so they can accept, hold, send funds. Citi will provide the regulated banking backbone so that incoming fiat can be automatically converted to stablecoins. 

Secondly, Citi’s merchant platform, Spring by Citi, will use Coinbase’s infrastructure so that Citi’s enterprise clients can accept stablecoin payments at checkout. Coinbase will convert the stablecoins to fiat, and Citi settles the funds, so merchants never have to hold or manage crypto directly.

“Fintechs building on Coinbase have always needed a fast, compliant bridge between fiat and stablecoins, and Citi gives us that at scale,” Coinbase’s Head of Infrastructure Product, Alec Lovett, said. 

Coinbase and Citi first announced last year that they would partner to enhance digital asset payment capabilities for institutional clients.

Citi has a number of blockchain offerings, including Citi Token Services, which enables real-time cross-border payments using tokenized deposits.

The firm since last year has also been working with other top banks — including Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America — to explore issuing a stablecoin product.

This post Citi and Coinbase Working Together To Build Stablecoin Infrastructure for Businesses first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Strategy and Strive Scoop Up More Than 2,700 Bitcoin in a Week

Bitcoin treasuries are loading up again. 

Strategy, the largest corporate holder of bitcoin, announced Monday that it had bought 1,665 coins last week for $142.7 million — its second buy in a row after a brief hiatus. 

The Nasdaq-listed company added that it had also bought back $152 million in its preferred stock, STRC. Strategy now holds 847,666 bitcoins worth $70.5 billion, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. 

Elsewhere, the fifth biggest bitcoin treasury, Strive, said it had last week snapped up 1,107 BTC for a total cost of  $94.5 million — bringing its holdings to 27,462 coins. 

The two companies have continued to stack coins despite the bitcoin treasury model taking a hit. Major treasuries like Strategy, Satsuma, Smarter Web Company, Sequans, Nakamoto, and Empery Digital have all sold bitcoin this year to repay debt, fund operations or finance buybacks, while others have folded or pivoted to AI infrastructure as their share prices collapsed. 

Strategy stock (MSTR) has lost over 50% of its value over the past year. Strive (ASST) is down by more than 30% over the same period. 

Still, both Strategy and Strive have reassured investors that it’s just business as usual and bitcoin will bounce back. 

Strive CEO Matt Cole has repeatedly said that the company is debt-free, with zero margin requirements, and zero encumbered bitcoin, calling it a balance sheet built to thrive through volatility. 

Strategy has defended having to sell bitcoin this year, with CEO Phong Le boasting that the company now has a “bullet-proof balance sheet” because of the sales, and that it was the “right trade at the time” to sell when it did.  

The software company last week announced it plans to pay investors daily dividends on four of its preferred stocks — STRF, STRC, STRK, and STRD.

Bitcoin’s price recently stood at close to $83,409, down 3% over the past week. 

This post Strategy and Strive Scoop Up More Than 2,700 Bitcoin in a Week first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Dollars In, Bitcoin Out: Breez SDK Debuts New Stablecoin Feature

Despite being so-called digital dollars, stablecoins aren’t always simple to use. They run on various crypto networks that need different digital wallets — the type of thing that can put crypto newbies and seasoned bitcoiners alike off. 

But Bitcoin software provider Breez has come up with a solution: Apps built on its Breez SDK can now let users with a bitcoin balance accept stablecoin payments from over 30 networks. 

Breez’s SDK is a developer toolkit that lets apps add bitcoin payments without building the payment infrastructure themselves. It handles wallet creation, sending and receiving and Lightning Network payments. Developers can offer bitcoin features with a few lines of code instead of running nodes or managing liquidity.

Breez said Monday that with the new feature, the receiver picks the sender’s network and an amount. The SDK generates a deposit address and shows what will arrive, and the sender pays from their usual wallet as normal. 

Flashnet converts the payment in the background, and the funds land in the receiver’s non-custodial wallet as bitcoin, or as dollars if they use the stable balance feature. 

Breez released its send USDT/USDC feature in June, allowing a single Breez-powered balance to now move stablecoins in both directions across nearly any network. 

It’s the latest in a series of usability upgrades, after Passkey Login, instant Cash App onboarding, and Stable Balance.

Breez has been layering on features to make bitcoin apps feel more like regular fintech apps: passkey login instead of seed phrases, instant onboarding, dollar-denominated balances, and now cross-chain stablecoin payments. Breez’s Glow, which debuted in August, is its reference app for showing what the SDK can do.

Breez in July announced it was working with Turnkey in a deal letting developers add non-custodial Bitcoin to apps running wallets from their own servers — solving a custody problem that has kept many of the largest consumer platforms from integrating Bitcoin at all.

This post Dollars In, Bitcoin Out: Breez SDK Debuts New Stablecoin Feature first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Chainlink's CCIP 2.0 lets a token issuer require an additional verifier before tokens finish moving from one blockchain to another. A sending pool may already have locked or burned the tokens when that check becomes decisive: without the verifier's attestation, the receiving chain cannot release or mint them.

Announced on Sept. 28, the feature adds optional Cross-Chain Verifiers (CCVs) alongside CCIP's default Committee Verifier. An issuer or third party can operate one and make its approval a condition of delivery.

That gives the operator's rules and uptime a direct role in a holder's exit path. Chainlink's launch material does not identify a named production asset and lane using an issuer-run required CCV, so the mechanism is not evidence of a holder's transfer being blocked.

The point where a transfer can wait

CCIP's OnRamp assembles the applicable verifier requirements of a token transfer, and the token pool locks or burns the tokens. The OnRamp then records the message for offchain verifier services.

Those services watch the source event, apply their finality and verification rules, and publish attestations tied to the message ID.

On the destination chain, CCIP's OffRamp checks the required attestations before the pool releases or mints tokens. Its checks draw on the lane and token-pool settings and, when a receiver contract is involved, that receiver's requirements.

Sender preferences can add to the source-side verifier set. A token-only transfer has no receiver callback whose verifier preferences must be checked. This sequence places the lock or burn before verification and the destination release after it.

A source transaction may have succeeded while destination delivery remains pending, so Chainlink says all required CCVs must return valid results before execution proceeds. Its trust model warns that an unresponsive verifier can stall every message requiring its attestation.

If an issuer runs such a verifier and makes it required for its token pool, the issuer's service becomes one of the parties able to delay completion. A third-party operator would create a similar dependency under that operator's control.

That is a control the design permits, not evidence that an issuer has deliberately blocked a holder's transfer.

Chainlink says the default Committee Verifier comprises 16 independent node operators, with additional CCVs sitting alongside that baseline.

An issuer or application choosing one gains another check but must also assess who operates its contracts and offchain service, what rules that service applies, and whether it stays available.

Chainlink assigns external CCV operators responsibility for implementation, maintenance, and uptime. The key question for a holder is which attestations are mandatory for this token on this route, and who can produce each one.

What a holder can do when delivery stops

Execution on the destination chain is permissionless once every required proof exists and any optional verifier quorum has been met.

Chainlink's default executor normally submits the transaction, but anyone can submit it, including through the manual execution path. Changing the executor or paying destination-chain gas does not waive a missing required CCV attestation. The OffRamp still checks the proofs before releasing or minting tokens.

The recovery path depends on where a message stopped. If the required attestation has not been assembled, the destination message can remain UNTOUCHED, meaning no execution has been recorded. If a submitted destination attempt fails inside the OffRamp's protected path, it can be marked FAILURE.

Chainlink says a failed attempt can be retried after the underlying problem is fixed. Its default executor retries failures within a configured window currently set at eight hours, and that limit describes the automated service.

A holder has a usable manual route only after the necessary proofs are available and any destination-side failure is fixed. The manual execution guide describes how to inspect verifier status and execution state, including cases where the indexer has not collected an external verifier's result.

Chainlink's published manual execution route does not specify a general automatic cancellation, refund, or return of source-chain tokens when a required verifier never attests. Any issuer-specific remedy would depend on that asset's arrangements.

On EVM chains, a configured Chainlink Automated Compliance Engine hook can reject an outbound transfer before the source pool locks or burns anything. That preflight failure reverts the source transaction.

A separately configured destination postflight hook can reject release or mint after the source-side transfer has started, leaving the tokens undelivered until the policy condition is resolved and execution is retried. The ACE integration guide describes these as distinct, optional configurations.

A live release, with deployment questions

Chainlink's mainnet directory lists supported networks and tokens, but a listing does not show whether a given production lane requires an issuer-operated verifier or has enabled a destination ACE gate. Nor does a partner announcement or an earlier asset migration establish those settings.

Without the token pool, route, and verifier configuration, this new power cannot be attributed to the issuer of a named asset.

The release separately offers faster-than-finality transfers. Full source-chain finality remains the default, while the faster option can expose a transfer to duplicate destination execution after a deep enough reorganization, according to Chainlink's FTF guide.

Other required CCVs may apply their own reorganization rules, but that speed choice does not change the need for required attestations.

CCIP 2.0 gives issuers a stronger way to set cross-chain delivery conditions. For holders, the essential questions are which checks apply to their asset, who controls them, and what remedy exists if one cannot be completed after the transfer starts.

The post Chainlink CCIP 2.0 exposes bridge risk, and issuer gates trigger stalls appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Citi institutional clients can now accept stablecoin payments through Spring by Citi using Coinbase's payments infrastructure, Coinbase said on Sept. 28.

The exchange also said its Virtual Accounts can automatically convert incoming fiat into stablecoins using Citi's Virtual Account Wallet. The announcement gives the companies' earlier digital asset payments partnership two defined uses, one for receiving stablecoins and the other for moving money received in a conventional currency into them.

For Citi's institutional clients, the relevant service is Spring by Citi, as Coinbase supplies the infrastructure that enables stablecoin acceptance through it. A business using that route would begin with a stablecoin payment.

Coinbase describes the capability as available now, but its announcement does not identify a client that has processed a payment through Spring or disclose how much has been transacted.

Coinbase Virtual Accounts address the other side of the exchange between traditional money and stablecoins. Citi's Virtual Account Wallet powers the accounts, which Coinbase says give customers fiat wallets that automatically convert incoming fiat.

The described flow starts with a traditional currency payment and ends with stablecoins in the customer's account. The company has not specified the eligible currencies or stablecoins in the public summary, so the precise conversion choices remain unclear.

The two routes serve different customers and begin with different forms of money. Citi's institutional payment clients gain a stablecoin acceptance option, while Coinbase Virtual Account customers gain an automated route from fiat receipts into stablecoins.

Coinbase has not outlined market-specific eligibility or prices for either Citi-linked path in its blog summary. The functions may be complementary, but the announcement does not establish that a single customer can use both.

The partnership predates these named services. In October 2025, Citi said it and Coinbase intended to develop institutional digital asset payment capabilities, initially focused on fiat pay-ins and pay-outs for Coinbase's on- and off-ramps and payment orchestration.

Citi said specific initiatives would follow, and the Sept. 28 description sets out two of those initiatives as customer-facing payment paths.

The stated availability leaves open whether institutions are using either path and at what scale. Coinbase's summary gives no customer count, payment volume, or named live merchant for the Citi integration.

Those missing operating details limit any assessment of the partnership's reach, even as the companies have moved from an exploratory plan to specified payment capabilities.

The post Coinbase powers Citi’s new stablecoin rails, and corporate banking faces a major shift appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bank-owned US payments operator The Clearing House has chosen Quant to supply software for a planned network for tokenized bank deposits.

The September 24 deal gives Quant a role in moving digital representations of bank deposits between institutions, but it doesn't address whether those transactions require Quant's QNT utility token.

QNT registered an intraday high of $373 on Sept. 27, but retraced heavily on Sept. 28, registering an intraday low of $195.35 before rebounding.

What Quant will provide

The Clearing House announced its On-Chain Money Initiative in June as a way for banks to clear and settle tokenized commercial-bank deposits across institutions. Unlike a publicly issued stablecoin, a tokenized deposit remains a claim on the issuing bank.

The planned network would connect this activity to established fiat payment systems, so bank money could move between on-chain and conventional infrastructure. The Clearing House says it aims to support immediate settlement and payments that trigger when agreed conditions are met.

On Sept. 24, The Clearing House selected Quant for the layer that connects systems, orchestrates activity and manages transactions. Its technology is also intended to link the network to RTP and CHIPS, two existing Clearing House payment systems.

Quant's announcement described the same role and said it will offer Tokenized Deposits-as-a-Service to US institutions using The Clearing House that lack their own tokenized-deposit capability.

The network is expected to become available to participating institutions in the first half of 2027. Neither September announcement reports a live rollout nor names banks that have subscribed to Quant's additional service.

A technology selection then provides no published schedule of transaction volume or service revenue.

Quant's general terms define QNT as a utility token customers may use for Quant products and services. The Clearing House and Quant do not say that participating banks must acquire or hold QNT, pay a network fee in it, use it as a settlement asset, or burn it.

Banks backed the initiative when it was unveiled in June, before Quant was named. Their support for the network is not a disclosed commitment to buy QNT or subscribe to Quant's bank-side service.

How a bank payment could reach QNT

Quant's public payment options say fees may be agreed during ordering, shown on a subscription dashboard, or specified in an order form. Transaction fees can be paid monthly or annually in advance, with possible overage invoices.

The agreement allows card payment and invoices where Quant agrees. Although QNT is normally the only digital asset accepted for access to the Quant ecosystem, that condition leaves fiat payment open.

Quant's FAQ explicitly says platform fees can be paid in US dollars or subscriptions can be made with QNT.

The announcements omit a rule tying a bank's deposit transfer to a purchase or lockup of QNT. Revenue to Quant from selling software or services would be a separate proposition from demand for the utility token.

An older product description offers context for QNT's role elsewhere in Quant's business. A 2022 explanation of Overledger says transactions on that interoperability platform are powered by QNT, with fiat payment options for corporate customers.

Overledger is Quant's technology for connecting different ledgers, and that explanation predates the bank-network selection by four years. The 2026 announcements do not specify whether its token mechanism applies to this implementation.

The Clearing House's September release says existing wire, ACH, check-image and real-time-payment networks clear and settle over $2 trillion each day.

A defensible token-demand estimate would require a project-specific rule for QNT use, the fee or conversion mechanics, a forecast or observed volume on the new network, and clarity about who would source the tokens.

Disclosures on those points could change expectations for QNT demand. Until then, the selection supports Quant's role in a planned bank infrastructure project while leaving the path from its future activity to QNT demand unresolved.

The post US bank group taps Quant for tokenized deposits, but QNT’s role is left in doubt appeared first on CryptoSlate.

A new on-chain reconstruction says COMP acquired, through Compound DAO reserves, a majority of all delegated voting power at a May snapshot. That position did not change the recorded result that Proposal 582 passed with zero votes against.

Bitquery says 344,780 COMP arrived in a DAO reserve wallet at 09:46 UTC on May 5, 58 minutes before the snapshot fixed voting power. That wallet had delegated its votes to the Compound Foundation, which backed the plan.

The link between the reserves spent and the COMP received runs through a Binance account, and public chain data alone cannot prove the withdrawal's funding account.

The purchase has reopened a dispute over the Foundation's authority to use DAO assets in governance. Compound forum delegate ugurmersin alleged on Sept. 27 that the conversion and delegation breached the reserve mandate.

In a Sept. 28 response, the Foundation said the conversion was consistent with the mandate's governance-continuity purpose, the COMP remained DAO-owned, and none of the assets had been spent on Foundation operations.

Why the extra votes were key in the Compound proposal

Bitquery counted 1,883,966 votes eventually cast for the plan out of 3,757,805 total delegated votes at the May 5 snapshot. Supporters controlled 50.1% of the voting power available for that vote, so even if every other delegate had voted no, they could not have outvoted the supporters.

By subtracting the 344,780 COMP from the reserve wallet, the same supporters would have held 1,539,186 of a reduced 3,413,025-vote total (45.1%), leaving enough voting power outside their bloc to defeat the plan.

Tally recorded roughly 1.88 million votes for Proposal 582 and none against, so the plan would still have cleared its 400,000-vote quorum without the reserve-wallet COMP.

The $52 million figure describes an approved V4 program budget. Proposal 582 designated $14 million for a Foundation-controlled operational wallet and $38 million for a Treasury Management Committee pool, with releases tied to milestones.

The earlier Proposal 536 placed approximately 8.42 million DAI of old protocol reserves under Foundation stewardship for protocol operations and governance continuity. It kept the assets DAO-owned and excluded discretionary trading and Foundation-specific expenses.

The Foundation and the delegate disagree over whether converting those reserves into voting power fit those limits. The May vote's outcome is settled, but the authority to make that conversion remains contested.

The post Compound DAO used protocol reserves to buy $52 million worth of COMP, and delegates call it a mandate breach appeared first on CryptoSlate.

A second suspected memecoin rug factory has surfaced on Robinhood Chain as the fast-growing network attracts increasingly coordinated scam activity.

On Sept. 28, blockchain security firm GoPlus said it identified a high-risk operation behind hundreds of memecoins that routed more than $9 million through a common fund-consolidation network over the past 30 days.

The operation used batches of freshly created wallets to accumulate and sell tokens before sweeping the proceeds into related addresses, according to GoPlus. Its main consolidation wallet recorded about 3,589 ETH, worth roughly $9.49 million, of two-way flows across its latest 400 transactions as of Sept. 28.

GoPlus noted that the figure represents gross flows rather than net profits or investor losses. The security firm said the wallet activity nonetheless exposed a repeatable structure in which proceeds from one group of launches appeared to finance the next.

Operators would create a token around a popular narrative, distribute supply among fresh wallets with little transaction history, and sell through contracts including PonsV2Helper and UniversalRouter. ETH generated from those sales was then routed through local sweep wallets before reaching the wider consolidation cluster.

That structure can obscure how much of a token one operation effectively controls. Instead of one wallet dumping a concentrated position, dozens of seemingly unrelated addresses sell in stages, creating the appearance of independent market activity before the proceeds converge elsewhere.

GoPlus said the setup does not resemble a traditional rug pull, in which liquidity suddenly disappears, or buyers are prevented from selling. Its concern is the coordinated ownership and exit process behind apparently separate wallets, followed by recycling of the proceeds into subsequent launches.

Earlier operation extracted $18.4 million from 53 launches

The findings come after on-chain researcher Wazz identified another suspected serial-rug operation on Robinhood Chain that allegedly extracted about $18.43 million from at least 53 memecoin launches over roughly two months.

That operation used a different variation of the same broad playbook. Groups of 70 to 200 wallets would acquire large portions of supply shortly after launch, often leaving the cluster with over 70% of a token.

Wazz also identified links between successive launches, including funds from one project moving into wallets used to seed another. The pattern suggested proceeds were being recycled rather than withdrawn after each individual trade.

GoPlus said the two operations share several characteristics, including heavy use of Pons V2 infrastructure, large wallet batches used to disguise supply concentration, and capital moving from one launch into the next.

The security firm cautioned that there is no evidence the two clusters belong to the same operators. The newer operation relies more heavily on fresh wallets followed by consolidation, while the Wazz-linked group used larger clusters positioned to control supply early in the launch.

The distinction suggests the activity is broader than a single crew. Similar economics can be reproduced with different wallet structures, giving operators multiple ways to make coordinated dumping resemble normal trading.

That raises a harder detection problem for wallets, launchpads and trading interfaces. Identifying malicious code alone would not necessarily flag a token whose contracts function normally while its supply is quietly concentrated across dozens of related addresses.

Robinhood Chain’s rapid growth raises the stakes

The suspected factories are emerging as Robinhood Chain expands at a pace few new networks have matched.

The Ethereum layer-2 went live July 1 and has crossed $1.5 billion in total value locked as of press time, per DeFiLlama data. It reached that milestone in less than 90 days, showing how quickly it has grown.

Token Terminal estimates Robinhood Chain has generated about $50 million in revenue in roughly three months, underscoring the trading activity already moving through the network.

Robinhood's larger opportunity extends beyond fees generated by crypto-native users. The brokerage has 28.6 million funded customers and about $384 billion in assets, giving developers the prospect of building on-chain products that could eventually reach a large existing financial customer base.

That distribution advantage also raises the cost of missing abusive token launches early.

A permissionless network can let external developers deploy products without Robinhood approving every contract, but the applications and interfaces through which users encounter those products can still add screening, wallet warnings, and concentration analysis.

The emergence of a second suspected rug factory makes those safeguards more important before Robinhood pushes more of its brokerage audience on-chain.

For Robinhood, the commercial question is whether it can preserve the open environment helping its chain grow while preventing organized token operators from using that same distribution layer to reach a much larger pool of retail capital.

The post Robinhood Chain’s $1.5 billion boom is attracting memecoin rug factories appeared first on CryptoSlate.

For September 29, 2026, several data services list a fresh release of HYPE, the token of the Hyperliquid trading venue. How large that tranche actually is, though, is a question they answer very differently. The figures range from around 330,000 to 14.18 million HYPE. At a price of $86.15, roughly $28 million sits at one end of that range and $1.22 billion at the other. Anyone who wants to know what can reach the market on that date is left with a range, not a single number.

The picture only firms up where the holdings themselves are counted. cryptoticker.io compiled this analysis on September 29, 2026. It rests on the supply data that Hyperliquid publishes for HYPE: maximum supply, total supply, circulating supply, future emissions and the four addresses listed there as non-circulating. The headline result: 700,219,817 HYPE, or 70.10 percent of the entire supply, is currently not in circulation at all. Measured against that, any single monthly instalment is a marginal figure.

Unlock, vesting and cliff: the three terms behind the September 29 date

Three technical terms keep surfacing around dates like this, and they do not mean the same thing.

Unlock

An unlock is the release of tokens that were contractually or technically locked until that point. Only from then on can the recipient move them, meaning hold, transfer or sell them. An unlock is not a new issuance: the tokens already exist, they merely shift from a locked state to a freely available one.

Vesting

Vesting is the schedule under which an allocation is released step by step, usually in equal instalments over months or years. The purpose is to stop founders, staff and early backers from selling their entire allocation on a single day.

Cliff

The cliff is the initial lock-up period at the start of a vesting plan, during which nothing is released at all. For HYPE that cliff ran for one year; the allocation for core contributors only began paying out in instalments afterwards. Keeping the three terms apart also explains why a release date on its own says nothing about selling pressure.

HYPE unlock estimates range from 330,000 to 14.18 million tokens

The spread between the published figures is not a rounding problem, it is a definition problem. Three numbers circulate side by side:

• Around 9.92 million HYPE. This figure matches the monthly instalment for core contributors as several unlock calendars report it. It is often quoted as 4.46 percent of circulating supply, which at a price of $86.15 works out at roughly $855 million. When the number made the rounds in late September, HYPE was trading higher, which is why most accounts spoke of around $904 million.
• 14,175,778 HYPE. Other calendars list this value for the same date, some 1.42 percent of total supply and therefore around $1.22 billion. The difference arises because further allocations are counted here alongside the core contributor instalment.
• Around 330,000 HYPE. The data service Tokenomist explicitly asks in its own analysis whether roughly 330,000 or roughly 9.9 million HYPE are released on a date like this, and weighs the two readings against each other. At the lower end that would be around $28 million at the current price.

All three numbers can be justified, depending on which allocations you count towards the tranche and which circulating supply you use as the reference. For you as a holder, one thing follows above all: a headline with a dollar sum does not replace checking which reference sits behind it. The precise figures from the individual calendars can be found in the Tokenomist analysis.

700.2 million HYPE are not in circulation

Hyperliquid's own supply figures paint a clear picture. Maximum supply stands at one billion HYPE. Total supply sits below that at 998,900,666.73 HYPE; 1,099,333 HYPE have therefore been permanently removed, which on this network happens through fees. Of the total supply:

• 298,680,849.52 HYPE are counted as circulating supply,
• 289,039,730.49 HYPE are holdings listed as non-circulating, spread across exactly four addresses,
• 411,180,086.72 HYPE are future emissions that have not been issued at all yet.

The three values add up exactly to total supply, which makes the data internally consistent. Add the two latter items together and 700,219,817.21 HYPE are outside circulation, or 70.10 percent. Even the largest of the three circulating tranche estimates, 14.18 million HYPE, therefore amounts to a good two percent of what is still outstanding overall. For comparison: trading recently turned over roughly $850 million worth of HYPE in a single day.

Circulating supply in conflict: 76.2 million HYPE between two sources

This is where it gets interesting for anyone reading percentages. Hyperliquid itself reports a circulating supply of 298,680,849.52 HYPE. The widely used market data provider CoinGecko lists 222,445,714 HYPE for the same day. The gap between the two is 76,235,135 HYPE, or around $6.6 billion at a price of $86.15.

Such divergences are not unusual, because data providers apply different levels of strictness: some deduct holdings that are technically movable but plainly not available to the market. The consequence is tangible all the same. The same tranche of 9.92 million HYPE works out at 4.46 percent of circulating supply using CoinGecko's number, but only 3.32 percent using Hyperliquid's. On the first reading the news sounds roughly a third more dramatic, without anything about the tranche itself having changed.

241.5 million HYPE sit in a single locked address

The holdings listed as non-circulating are spread across four addresses, and they are very unevenly sized. By far the largest holds 241,480,853.16 HYPE, or 24.15 percent of maximum supply. That order of magnitude matches the published allocation to core contributors, which is given as 23.8 percent of total supply. It is from exactly this pool that the monthly instalments at release dates are drawn.

The second address holds 47,557,200.82 HYPE, or 4.76 percent of maximum supply. Behind it sits a system address of the network, which among other things holds repurchased tokens. The two remaining addresses barely register: the null address holds 1,673.79 HYPE, the burn address 2.72 HYPE. Anyone talking about locked HYPE holdings is therefore talking about two addresses in practice.

Why concentration in a few addresses cuts both ways

Heavy concentration means the schedule is predictable: there are few sources from which new supply can come, and their cadence is known. It also means that a small number of parties can move large amounts as soon as their lock expires. Both hold true at the same time, and neither reading can be refuted from the holdings data alone.

411.2 million HYPE in future emissions: the part nobody holds yet

The largest item outside circulation is future emissions at 411,180,086.72 HYPE. These are tokens that have not been allocated at all yet and are only due to come into existence over the coming years, earmarked above all for network rewards. They appear in no unlock calendar as a tranche, because there is nothing to release in their case.

For putting a single date into context, this item is nonetheless the most important one. It means that the amount of HYPE theoretically available to the market still grows considerably over the long run, quite independently of what happens on September 29. An investor who looks only at the next release date is taking in the smaller part of the picture.

What was distributed at launch

HYPE went live on November 29, 2024. The entire maximum supply of one billion tokens had already been allocated to 94,023 addresses at that point, a large share of it as a distribution to early users of the platform. The holdings that count as locked today are therefore not tokens created after the fact, but parts of that original allocation that are not yet free.

What dilution means for the HYPE price

Dilution describes the way an individual token's share of the total stock falls when new tokens enter circulation. Whether that turns into price pressure depends on whether the newly available tokens are actually sold. That is precisely what supply data cannot show, and it cannot be forecast responsibly either.

What is observable is the starting position. HYPE trades at around $86 and therefore some twelve percent below the record high of $97.96 set on September 23, 2026. Over 24 hours the price lost 4.4 percent. Market capitalisation stands at roughly $19.2 billion. Traders who use leveraged products around release dates often trade HYPE as a perpetual futures contract on specialised venues; which those are and how their fees differ is set out in our comparison of the best perp DEXs.

Bull and bear case side by side

Those who look at HYPE optimistically point out that the schedule has been known for a long time and should therefore be priced in, and that part of the fees is used to buy back tokens, which works against the new supply. Sceptics counter that the instalments keep running for years and that the core contributor allocation alone is larger than four fifths of today's circulating supply. These assessments stand against each other, and neither can be proven at present.

Hyperliquid holds no MiCA licence for Germany

Before position sizes come up, a sober look at the legal framework is worthwhile. The EU's MiCA regulation has set uniform rules since 2024 on who may offer crypto services in the European Union; providers need authorisation from a national supervisor, in Germany that is BaFin. Hyperliquid is a decentrally operated trading venue without such a licence. What that means for you in practice is set out in a separate piece on how Hyperliquid can be used from Germany.

Holding period, leverage and liquidation around a release date

Holding period

In Germany, gains from selling cryptocurrencies are tax-free after a holding period of one year; within that year they count as a private disposal transaction. Selling early because of a release date can break that deadline. Before reacting, it is worth looking up when your own HYPE was bought and how close the one-year mark is.

Leverage and liquidation

Anyone trading HYPE with leverage should know that a liquidation is the forced closure of a position as soon as the posted collateral no longer suffices. Dates on which the market expects a large release are often accompanied by wider price swings, and swings hit leveraged positions first. A smaller position survives a move that ends a large one.

Custody

If you intend to hold HYPE for longer, the question of custody matters more than any single date. Holdings on a trading venue are exposed to that venue's failure risk; a wallet whose keys only you know shifts the risk onto your own diligence in keeping those keys.

HYPE unlock: The key points for your decision

The September 29 date is a small slice of a long schedule. More important than the daily headline is that 70.10 percent of the entire HYPE supply still sits outside circulation and will be added in instalments over years. Three steps help you place it:

1. Question the reference figure. When a report gives a tranche as a percentage of circulating supply, check which circulating supply is meant. The two common values for HYPE are 76.2 million tokens apart, and the same unlock looks roughly a third larger or smaller as a result. Where you trade in the first place and under whose supervision is covered by our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.
2. Settle custody before the date arrives. If your tokens sit on a trading venue without European authorisation, decide calmly whether they should stay there. Which devices are suitable for self-custody is covered in the hardware wallet comparison.
3. Recalculate your holding period instead of reacting to the headline. Check the purchase date of your HYPE and the one-year deadline before you sell because of a release date. Tools that track purchase dates and deadlines cleanly can be found among the crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers.

You can verify the supply figures in this article yourself at any time, for example via the public Hyperliquid explorer for HYPE.

(As of September 29, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

The Chainlink network's treasury has passed a round mark. According to several industry outlets reporting on September 26 and 27, 2026, the Chainlink Reserve holds exactly 6,047,498 LINK. In September alone, 373,791 tokens were added, worth a good $4.3 million at the price at the time. Alongside that, the price of Chainlink has risen sharply: in the early hours of September 29, 2026, LINK trades at $15.56, up around 10.6 percent within 24 hours and 16.7 percent over the week.

For you as an investor in Germany these are two different things, and they need to be kept apart. The reserve is a structural change on the supply side. The price jump is a day's move. What follows sets out what lies behind the reserve, which levels the price has just marked, and what you need to keep an eye on when buying, on the holding period, on staking and on leveraged positions.

Chainlink Reserve: 6,047,498 LINK now sit in the network treasury

The Chainlink Reserve is an on-chain treasury of the network into which part of the revenue from the oracle services flows, where it is converted into LINK and held. It is not a fund you can buy units in, and it is not a foundation handing out money. What is meant is simply a holding that grows as long as the network takes in revenue.

The current level of 6,047,498 LINK is cited consistently by several specialist services, among them Coingabbar with the date September 26 and Coin-Turk with the same figures. Both also list the same September increase: 373,791 LINK. You can look up the holding yourself on the project's official reserve page, which tracks the development continuously.

More interesting than the absolute number is the pace. At the end of the first quarter of 2026, according to the same reports, the reserve held around 3.06 million LINK. The holding has therefore almost doubled in a good six months. Anyone watching the project over a longer period will read one thing above all into that: the revenue feeding the reserve now comes in regularly, not just in isolated cases.

Payment Abstraction: where September's 373,791 LINK come from

Payment Abstraction is the mechanism with which Chainlink collects payments in any token and converts them into LINK automatically. A company booking a data service therefore does not have to buy LINK on the market itself. It pays in whatever currency suits it, and in the background the equivalent value lands in the treasury as LINK.

That sounds technical, but it has a very tangible consequence. Every new large customer raises the ongoing buying pressure on LINK, without that customer ever making a purchase decision about the token. This is precisely where the reserve connects with the corporate news of recent weeks that we have already covered, such as the inclusion of Chainlink in a banking standard from Infosys on September 24.

One caveat belongs with this. How much revenue actually accrues, and what share of it moves into the reserve, is not published by the project as a line item per customer. The inflow is documented; its origin in detail is not. Anyone extrapolating an annual revenue figure from 373,791 LINK in September is working with a number nobody has verified.

What 6 million LINK mean for the circulating supply

Of the 1,000,000,000 LINK that will ever exist, around 748.1 million are currently in circulation. The reserve's 6,047,498 LINK work out at roughly 0.8 percent of that. It is noticeable, yet it is no supply shock, and anyone selling it as one is overstating the case.

Here is one way to place it: with trading volume of around $1.44 billion in 24 hours, the reserve's $4.3 million of purchases across the whole of September move less than the market turns over on an average morning. The effect lies in duration, not in day-to-day trading. A holding that grows every month and is not sold takes supply off the market piece by piece.

LINK price at $15.56: the 24-hour high and low compared

In the early hours of September 29, 2026, LINK stands at $15.56. The range of the past 24 hours runs from a low of $13.54 to a high of $15.49. Around 14 percent lies between those two points, and the price is quoted at the upper edge of that range.

Over a month the gain comes to just under 34.8 percent, over a week to 16.7 percent. With a market capitalisation of about $11.6 billion, LINK ranks 13th among the largest cryptocurrencies. The all-time high of $52.70 from May 2021 is still around 70 percent away.

These figures are snapshots. The price changes while you read, which makes it useless as a forecast. What the values do deliver is something else: reference points you can pin your own decision to instead of pinning it to a headline.

Buying LINK in Germany: MiCA authorisation, spot purchase and custody

If you want to buy LINK in Germany, the simplest route runs through a trading platform holding an authorisation under the EU regulation MiCA. MiCA is the European legal framework for crypto assets, which obliges providers to hold authorisation and own funds, to segregate client money and to supply comprehensible information sheets. A platform without that authorisation may no longer address retail clients in the EU through regular channels.

Three things differ considerably between providers in practice: the trading fee per purchase, the mark-up in the price itself, and whether you are allowed to move the purchased tokens to a wallet of your own at all. The third point tends to be overlooked and is the most important one if you intend to hold for the long term. If you then want to keep the tokens in your own custody, you need a device or software of your own for that; which devices are suitable is shown in our hardware wallet comparison.

One more thing applies to a spot purchase: you buy the token itself and no certificate on it. That matters for tax, and it is the reason why the question of the withdrawal route to your own wallet is not a side issue.

Chainlink Staking v0.2: why the community pool is usually closed

Many readers ask about staking at this point, and the answer turns out differently from what other networks have taught them. Staking at Chainlink means you deposit LINK as security for the correct operation of the oracle services and receive a payment for it. The programme runs in version v0.2 and has a fixed cap.

That cap stands at 45 million LINK in total, of which 40,875,000 LINK sit in the community pool. This pool was full within a few hours of launch. Since then the rule is: new room only opens up when an existing participant withdraws their tokens. There is no waiting list and no allocation, only first come, first served. The terms are set out on the project's staking page.

Anyone still looking for an ongoing yield almost inevitably ends up with third-party offers, meaning exchanges or custodians paying a return on deposited tokens. That is something entirely different from staking in the protocol: there you also carry the provider's default risk. Anyone using such offers should therefore establish first who holds the tokens during that time and what happens to them if the provider becomes insolvent.

A one-year holding period: the tax on LINK gains in Germany

For private investors in Germany, a sale of LINK counts as a private disposal under section 23 of the Income Tax Act. If more than twelve months lie between purchase and sale, the gain stays tax free. Sell within that period and the gain is taxable at your personal income tax rate, as soon as the sum of all private disposal gains in a year reaches the threshold of €1,000.

Threshold here really does mean a threshold and not an allowance. Anyone reaching €999 of gains in a year pays nothing. Anyone reaching €1,001 pays tax on the full amount and not merely on the one euro above it. This difference costs money regularly, because it gets overlooked.

What matters in practice is the allocation of the individual purchases. If you have bought in tranches over months, every tranche has its own acquisition date, and on a sale it has to be clear which of them is going out. For that, the tax authorities accept the first-in-first-out method, under which the oldest tokens count as sold first. Without clean records it can hardly be reconstructed after the fact, and in case of doubt the tax office estimates to your disadvantage.

A note on staking through third parties: payments from such offers are as a rule other income and are taxed in the year they are received, independently of the one-year period. Anyone mixing the two should keep the positions separate.

Leverage and liquidation: what a tenfold leverage withstands at $15.56

A price running from $13.54 to $15.49 within 24 hours attracts leveraged positions. A sober calculation is worth doing here. The liquidation price is the price at which the security deposited is used up and the position is closed by force.

With tenfold leverage, a counter-move of around ten percent is arithmetically enough for that, with twentyfold leverage around five percent, in each case before fees and financing costs. Measured against this Wednesday's daily range, which alone came to around 14 percent, a long position with tenfold leverage would have been liquidated at that day's low, even though the price ended up considerably higher.

That is the real point: in a strong move, the result is decided by the path taken and not by the direction. Anyone working with leverage should know the liquidation price before entering and not go looking for it once the position is already running.

Levels above and below: $13.54, $15.49 and the all-time high at $52.70

Three values serve as orientation, all of them drawn from the price data itself and carrying no opinion. On the downside, the low of the past 24 hours at $13.54 is the first level; below it the previous week's price territory begins. On the upside, the daily high at $15.49 is the point at which the current move was last halted.

The third level is historical: $52.70 from May 9, 2021. That value shows how far the way to the previous peak still is, and it puts this week's jump in perspective. A gain of 34.8 percent in a month is a lot; measured against the all-time high, around 70 percent is still missing.

We are deliberately leaving out analysts' price targets. For the figures circulating in recent days, no originator attributable by name could be established, and a number without a sender is not information.

What the reserve does not deliver

Finally the counter-check, because a growing network treasury is readily declared a price guarantee on social networks. It is nothing of the kind. The reserve does not buy prices, it collects revenue. There is no obligation to support the price when it falls, and the project likewise publishes no plan for when tokens might be released again.

Just as little does the reserve say anything about the quality of the individual integrations. An inflow of 373,791 LINK in one month documents that revenue is accruing. It does not document that this revenue will accrue again next month. Anyone wanting to follow the development looks at the holding across several months, not at the report of a round number.

Chainlink Reserve: your next three steps

1. Look up the holding yourself. Open the project's reserve page and compare the holding shown there with the 6,047,498 LINK from this article. If the number differs, something has been added or has flowed out since, and you have the more current value. Your own holdings are best tracked in a portfolio tracker with a tax function.
2. Settle the buying route and the withdrawal before you buy. Check in our exchange comparison whether your platform holds a MiCA authorisation, what fee applies per purchase and whether a withdrawal to a wallet of your own is possible.
3. Note the purchase date and keep yield offers separate. Record the acquisition date for every tranche so the one-year period can be proven. If you are also looking at yield offers, compare them in the overview of staking platforms and treat them separately from plain holding for tax purposes.

(As of September 29, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

The price of Stellar has gained a good eight percent in 24 hours and stands at $0.2329, or €0.2048. The obvious question is whether there is more behind the jump than market sentiment. So instead of writing up the price again, we measured the network itself: 999 consecutive ledgers from September 28, 2026, a window of 83 minutes, plus 2,000 individually settled transactions. Over that period 211,994 successful transactions passed through the Stellar network, an average of 41 per second, at a load of just over one fifth.

Two findings appear in no price report. Just over one in five submitted transactions fails and pays its fee anyway. And the famous minimum fee of 0.00001 XLM is not an advertising figure: 57.2 percent of all transactions are settled at exactly that rate, while the bids behind them run at almost five hundred times as much at the median.

cryptoticker.io collected this analysis itself on September 28 and 29, 2026. We examined 999 ledgers and 2,000 transactions.

Stellar climbs to $0.2329: the numbers behind the price jump

XLM trades at $0.2329. That is 8.1 percent more than 24 hours ago and also 8.1 percent more than a week ago. Over 30 days the gain comes to 29.6 percent. The daily range ran from $0.2071 to $0.2343, so 13.1 percent lies between the low and the high. Anyone who bought at the daily low is sitting on a different result today than someone who came in at the high.

With a market capitalisation of $8.16 billion, Stellar ranks 20th among the largest crypto assets. Daily turnover is $814 million. Of a total 50.00 billion XLM, 35.01 billion are in circulation. The all-time high of $0.8756, reached on January 2, 2018, is still 73.4 percent away.

There is no single documented trigger for the move. What is documented is that Stellar activated Protocol 28 on its main network on September 17, 2026, an upgrade to consensus and contract management. The trade publication Blockonomi reported on September 20, 2026 that the network had reached 211 transactions per second in a test window covering more than 100 blocks. Whether that upgrade is carrying the price ten days later cannot be proven. What the network actually delivers today can be measured.

41 transactions per second: the measured throughput of the Stellar network

Across the 999 ledgers we measured, throughput came to a median of 41.2 successful transactions per second and an average of 42.4. The weakest ledger in the window managed 15.0 transactions per second, the strongest 84.0. That peak ledger processed 420 transactions with 875 operations in five seconds.

The gap to the 211 transactions per second from the test window is wide, and it is no contradiction. A test window measures what the technology delivers under full load. Our measurement shows the real load of an ordinary evening. The two figures answer different questions, and for you as an investor the second one matters more, because it describes how much headroom the network has right now.

Ledgers on a five-second beat: the heartbeat of the Stellar network

A ledger is to Stellar what a block is to Bitcoin: a closed set of transactions that the validators confirm together and that stands unchangeable afterwards. It comes about through the Stellar Consensus Protocol, or SCP, a federated Byzantine agreement procedure in which every node decides for itself which other nodes it trusts.

In our window a ledger closed exactly every 5.0 seconds, at the median as at the maximum, without a single outlier to the upside. In practice that means a Stellar transfer is normally final after five to ten seconds, because it waits for the next ledger and is settled from then on. Confirmation chains as with Bitcoin, where recipients wait for several blocks, do not exist here.

206 of 1,000 slots per ledger: how busy the Stellar network is

In the current network every ledger has room for up to 1,000 transactions. At the median, 206 of those slots were taken, so 20.6 percent. The fullest ledger in the window reached 420 transactions and with that 42.0 percent. The network ran throughout at around one fifth of its capacity.

That figure is interesting for two reasons. First, it explains why transfers go through promptly: whoever has room does not have to push. Second, it shows that a markedly rising payment volume on Stellar would not create congestion to begin with. Anyone who uses network load as an argument for or against an investment should therefore keep looking at it, because a single reading ages quickly.

Failed transactions: 22 percent pay their fee anyway

In the measured window, 273,139 transactions were taken into ledgers. Of those, 211,994 succeeded and 61,145 failed, a failure rate of 22.4 percent. That sounds like a broken network, and it is not one.

A failed transaction on Stellar is one that was taken in and executed, but whose condition was not met. The typical case is trading on the network's own order book function: one program bids on a price difference, a faster program got there first, and the transaction runs into nothing. Of the 2,000 transactions we examined individually, 303 had failed, and the operation types over the same period consist half of contract calls and just under a quarter of buy and sell offers. For an ordinary payment from address to address none of this matters.

There is one thing you should take away from it, and we checked it in every single case: all 303 failed transactions in our sample paid a fee, a median of 100 stroops. Stellar collects it as soon as the transaction has been taken into a ledger, whatever the outcome. Anyone who sends a payment on a tight balance or with a time condition loses the fee even when nothing arrives at the other end.

0.00003 XLM at the median: what a Stellar transaction actually costs

Stellar is often advertised with the line that a transaction costs 0.00001 XLM. That figure describes the base fee of 100 stroops per operation, which is the minimum price; a stroop is one ten-millionth of an XLM. Whether the minimum price also holds in practice can be measured.

It holds in the majority of cases. 57.2 percent of the 2,000 transactions we examined were settled at the minimum rate down to the last unit, meaning 100 stroops for every operation contained. The median across all transactions comes to 300 stroops, which is 0.00003 XLM or about 0.0006 euro cents. A thousand payments of that kind cost less than one cent together.

The distribution is heavily skewed, though, and the average is no use here: it sits at 9,343 stroops and so at thirty-one times the median. The top tenth pays from 13,952 stroops, the top percent from 132,571 stroops, and the most expensive case in the window cost 139,028 stroops, or around 0.28 euro cents. Almost all of these outliers are automated processes; ordinary transfers do not reach such levels.

Fee bidding on Stellar: bids at a median of 144,757 stroops, 300 settled

Fee bidding is the procedure by which Stellar hands out space in a ledger. Every transaction names an upper limit that the sender is willing to pay at most. If all applicants fit into the ledger, they all pay the minimum rate. If there are more applicants than slots, the higher bids go first, and settlement follows the lowest bid still taken in. The rules for this are set out in Stellar's technical documentation.

Exactly this mechanism can be read off our figures. The median bid stood at 144,757 stroops, while the median amount settled was 300. Senders therefore offered around four hundred and eighty times what they paid in the end. Only 8.6 percent of transactions were actually settled at their own maximum bid.

For your own transfer that means two things. A high bid in the wallet does not make the payment more expensive; it protects against load spikes and nothing else. It gets critical the other way round with software that hard-codes the upper limit at a low level: payments like that drop out of the ledger during a spike. Anyone who buys XLM through an exchange and leaves it sitting there sees none of this, because the trading venue books internally; the fee question only comes up on withdrawal to an address of your own. Which venues offer what terms is set out in our crypto exchange comparison.

Buying XLM in Germany: MiCA authorisation and where XLM trades

Since the European regulation on markets in crypto assets took effect, trading venues may serve retail clients in Germany only with an authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider. The companies that BaFin lists are set out in its register of crypto institutions. Under the regulation XLM counts as a crypto asset with no issuer behind it and is traded by the large authorised venues; a delisting risk of the kind seen with some stablecoins does not apply here.

In practice you buy XLM in ordinary spot trading, against the euro or against an authorised stablecoin. Watch the spread and not the order fee alone, because with a coin turning over $814 million a day the spread is the bigger cost block at smaller venues. Anyone who comes in through a certificate or an exchange-traded product ends up holding a claim against an issuer and no coins, with a default risk of its own and a different tax treatment.

Holding period under section 23 of the German Income Tax Act: one year and the €1,000 threshold

Gains from selling XLM count in Germany as private disposals under section 23 of the Income Tax Act. Sell within a year of buying and the gain is taxable, charged at your personal income tax rate. Once a year has passed it stays tax free. The threshold for all private disposals in one year is €1,000; once it is exceeded, the entire gain is taxable and not merely the part above it.

A price rise of eight percent in a day shortens no deadline. Anyone taking profits after the jump should look up first when the individual lots were bought, because a sale a few weeks before the one-year mark can turn out expensive. Where there were several purchases at different times, the first-in-first-out method applies per wallet or account.

There is no staking on Stellar: SCP instead of proof of stake

One widespread expectation we will clear up here, because it leads to mistaken purchases again and again: XLM cannot be staked. The Stellar Consensus Protocol works without any capital deposited. It is a voting model among validators who put nothing up and receive no reward for it either. A yield from the network itself does not exist on Stellar.

The earlier inflation of one percent a year, paid out to wallet addresses, was switched off by the validators in October 2019. In November 2019, 55.5 billion XLM were destroyed, and the total supply has stood at 50 billion since then. So when a platform offers you a yield on XLM, it does not come from the network but from that platform's own business: from lending, from trading or from a bonus programme. What you carry with it is counterparty risk, not protocol risk.

Storing XLM: minimum reserve, memo and the choice of wallet

Two particulars apply to custody on Stellar. Every address must first hold a minimum reserve that stays tied up in the network and cannot be paid out; it rises with every additional entry, such as one further token held. Second, many exchanges ask for a memo on deposits, an extra identifier alongside the address. A transfer without that memo lands in a collective account and has to be assigned by hand.

On an exchange the coins sit in the provider's holdings, with its insolvency and attack risk. A software wallet on your phone suits the amounts you move day to day. For holdings meant to sit until the one-year mark has passed, the way leads to a device that the private key never leaves. The minimum reserve applies just the same in both cases.

Stellar price and network load: the key points for your decision

The price jump is the occasion, the network figures are the finding. Three steps follow from them.

1. Look up the trading venue's authorisation. Buy XLM where an authorisation under the European crypto-asset regulation is in place. Our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges gives an overview.
2. Keep a record of your purchase dates. For the one-year period under section 23 of the Income Tax Act, the day of each individual purchase is what counts. A tax tool or portfolio tracker logs this as you go, not in hindsight.
3. Fit custody to your holding period. Anything meant to sit for more than a year does not belong in an exchange account. The devices for that are in our hardware wallet comparison.

(As of September 29, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Zcash costs around $1,464 on the evening of September 28, 2026, 8.5 percent less than 24 hours earlier. There is no trigger in the project: no upgrade was postponed, no exchange halted trading, no authority intervened. What changed is the amount of borrowed money sitting on the price. Open interest in ZEC futures contracts on the OKX exchange shrank by 13.5 percent within 24 hours, considerably more than the price itself. This piece shows where those numbers come from, what they say about the days ahead and which three things hang on them for you as a holder in Europe.

Zcash falls to $1,464: the numbers on the pullback

CoinGecko price data show Zcash at $1,464.12 on the evening of Monday, September 28, 2026, the equivalent of €1,287.77. That is 8.5 percent less than the previous day. Within those 24 hours the high stood at $1,601.85 and the low at $1,449.25, so the range amounts to a good 10 percent of the price. Trading turnover adds up to $1.12 billion, market capitalisation to $24.82 billion. That puts ZEC ninth among the largest crypto-assets.

The pullback only looks large inside the daily window. Over seven days Zcash is up 0.78 percent, over 30 days 74.51 percent and over 60 days 209.95 percent. Individual market reports from the same day put the month at around 83 percent; the divergence from our figure arises from the chosen reference date. What is dependable is the range between 74 and 83 percent, not the single number. ZEC remains 54 percent away from its all-time high of $3,191.93 set in October 2016.

Supply matters for context. Of a maximum 21 million ZEC, 16,954,919 units are in circulation. Zcash shares that ceiling with Bitcoin, and as there, new issuance falls over time. A price pullback changes nothing on that supply side.

In its assessment of September 28, the analysis service FXStreet describes bullish momentum easing and a decline below $1,500 as possible. That level is precisely the point at which the coming days will decide whether the market holds its September gain. On Monday evening the price stood below it.

Open interest on the OKX perpetual: 13.5 percent lower in 24 hours

Open interest is the sum of all futures contracts currently open and not yet closed. The measure captures how much capital is riding on a price through derivatives. About the direction of those bets it says nothing.

cryptoticker.io compiled this analysis itself on September 28, 2026. It rests on public data from the OKX exchange for the perpetual futures contract ZEC-USDT-SWAP: open interest, its notional value and the funding rate. The series covers 720 hourly readings over the past 30 days, from August 29 to September 28, 2026. A single trading venue was examined.

The result: the most recent hourly reading stands at $164,953,265. The day before it was $190,686,317. That is a decline of 13.5 percent in exactly 24 hours. Against the high of the past 30 days, $236,835,430 on September 18, it is now 30.4 percent short. The contract's notional value on Monday evening stood at 110,895.86 ZEC, the equivalent of $162.3 million.

The steepest drop falls within a single hour. On Monday evening open interest sank from $174,821,842 to $163,904,108, down 6.2 percent in 60 minutes. Jumps like that do not come from the calm closing of positions; they come from forced liquidations.

The 30-day view reads differently at the same time: on August 29 open interest stood at $125,324,830. Despite the slide of recent days, the measure is therefore 31.6 percent higher than a month ago. Leverage in the market has shrunk without disappearing.

Falling open interest is not a sell-off: the difference

Many readers read every falling measure as flight. With derivatives that is rarely the case. When a price falls while open interest falls with it, leveraged positions are leaving the market. The money vanishing in the process was borrowed money, not coins held in a portfolio. Where the price falls while open interest rises, participants are actively building fresh bets on lower prices. That is the more dangerous situation, because it adds pressure instead of releasing it.

For Zcash the combination from our measurement looks like the former: price down 8.5 percent, open interest down 13.5 percent. The measure falls faster than the price. In that constellation the market is shedding leverage. After a month up 74 percent this is an ordinary process, and it leaves the price less exposed to downward chain reactions over the following days.

What our measurement does not show

Three limits belong to this survey, and we name them openly. First, it covers one trading venue. The futures markets of Binance and Bybit could not be queried. A whole-market figure for open interest in ZEC is therefore not contained in our numbers.

Second, the measure does not distinguish between closed long positions and closed short positions. How much of the $25.7 million in vanished interest falls on forced liquidations of long positions cannot be read out of this series. Market reports from that evening put single-digit million amounts on it across several trading venues, which we were unable to verify ourselves.

Third, the funding rate of the OKX contract was unremarkable on Monday evening. The value stood at 0.01 percent per period, the standard value, within a permitted range of minus one to plus one percent. A strongly positive rate would have signalled overheated long positions. The market is not offering that finding right now.

Leverage, funding and liquidation: the mechanics behind the slide

A perpetual futures contract, known in the market as a perpetual or perp, is a derivative without an expiry date that is held close to the spot price through a regular settlement payment between the buy and sell sides. That payment is called the funding rate, or funding. Anyone trading with leverage posts only a fraction of the position value as collateral. If the price falls below a calculated threshold, the exchange closes the position itself. That is liquidation.

At leverage of ten, around ten percent of price movement against the position suffices; at leverage of twenty, around five percent. Zcash has run through a range of a good ten percent between the day's high and low in the past 24 hours. Every long position at leverage ten opened near the high of $1,601.85 was therefore on the edge arithmetically. Positions of exactly that kind explain the 6.2 percent jump in open interest within a single hour.

If you trade ZEC with leverage yourself, three figures matter more right now than any forecast: your liquidation price, which every exchange shows in the position window, your free collateral, and the funding rate of your trading venue. The third decides how expensive holding over several days becomes. Fee models and funding rates diverge considerably between venues for perpetual contracts, and over several days that difference adds up.

Buying route in Europe: spot, ETP and the limits under MiCA

For buying ZEC directly, a clear framework has applied in Germany since the European regulation on markets in crypto-assets, MiCA for short. Providers need authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider, and supervision sits with the BaFin. The authority lists the licensed institutions in a public register that you can inspect on the BaFin's pages. Anyone buying on a trading venue without that authorisation has no German supervisor behind them in a dispute. Which licensed venues come into question for buying is set out in our comparison of crypto exchanges.

Besides buying directly there is the route through an exchange-traded product. In Europe crypto-assets come to market as an ETP, meaning a collateralised security with an issuer behind it. A classic fund it is not. The advantage lies in the familiar brokerage account and in settlement through the exchange. The difference lies in taxation and in the issuer's default risk. What that means in detail is set out in our overview of crypto ETFs and ETPs for European investors.

AMLR Article 79: July 10, 2027 and shielded balances

Zcash has a property no other asset in the top ten shares: shielded transactions, in which sender, recipient and amount do not appear publicly on the blockchain. A European deadline hangs on precisely that. The European Union's anti-money-laundering regulation, Regulation 2024/1624, prohibits anonymous accounts and anonymity-enhancing crypto-assets at credit institutions, financial institutions and crypto-asset service providers in Article 79. The provision applies from July 10, 2027.

Two points are regularly confused here. The rule addresses providers, not you as a private individual. Holding ZEC remains permitted, as does transferring between your own wallets. What falls away is trading at regulated providers in the EU. Anyone wanting to hold ZEC beyond July 2027 needs a custody route by then that does not hang on a European exchange. The particulars and the open questions are written up in our analysis of the privacy coin ban of September 28, 2026.

For today's pullback that deadline is no trigger. It has been known since 2024 and lies more than 21 months away. It still belongs in every consideration reaching beyond the coming trading week.

Holding period under Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act: a pullback does not extend a deadline

When buying crypto-assets directly, Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act applies in Germany. Gains on a sale are tax-free where more than one year lies between purchase and sale. Within the year, an exemption threshold of €1,000 applies to all private disposals taken together. Exceed it and the entire gain is taxable, not only the part above the threshold.

A price pullback changes nothing about the deadline. The period runs per purchase and from the day of purchase. Anyone who bought more in August and in September has a separate date for each tranche. For tax purposes, settlement in Germany usually follows the first in, first out method, so the coins bought first count as sold first. A sale into weakness can therefore dissolve precisely the oldest and thus most tax-favoured holding.

A different system applies to derivatives. Gains from perpetual futures contracts are treated as investment income. The one-year period does not apply there. Anyone running both in parallel is best served by two separate sets of records. Those records have to keep purchase dates, deadlines and derivative positions apart from one another. Assessing the individual case for tax remains a matter for your tax adviser.

Custody: shielded pools and the November deadline

Zcash knows several balance types. Alongside transparent addresses there are shielded pools, which have been renewed several times over the years. Older pools are retired step by step with network upgrades, and any balance still sitting there has to be moved beforehand. According to our analysis of September 23, 2026, this affects holdings in the old Sprout pool before November 5, 2026 in particular; the particulars are set out in our piece on moving old ZEC balances from the same day.

Anyone wanting to hold ZEC for the long term should not leave the holding on an exchange anyway. Because of the European deadline in 2027 that applies more strongly here than with other assets. A hardware wallet supporting shielded Zcash addresses is the usual route for it. A small test transfer belongs before every transfer, and the recovery words belong in neither a photo nor a cloud.

Zcash after the pullback: Your next three steps

1. Leveraged positions first. Open your position window and read off the liquidation price and your free collateral. With a daily range of a good ten percent, leverage of ten or more no longer survives a night without a buffer. Which venues charge which funding rates and fees is shown by the perp DEX comparison.
2. Sort your purchase dates. Write down the purchase date and price for each tranche before you think about selling. The one-year period under Section 23 of the Income Tax Act often decides more about your result than the day's move. A tool from the overview of crypto tax software takes the sorting off your hands.
3. Settle the custody route. Decide whether your ZEC holding should sit on a European trading venue until 2027. If not, set up self-custody now and not in the summer of 2027. Suitable devices are listed in the hardware wallet comparison. FXStreet's assessment of the $1,500 level can be found in the original at FXStreet.

(As of September 28, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Alpenglow, the new consensus mechanism for Solana, did not go into operation on mainnet on September 28, 2026. The date that had been running through calendars and headlines for weeks comes from a schedule entry that means something else. Anza, the development house behind the most important Solana validator client, has expressly denied that an activation took place that day.

For you as a holder of Solana, the first consequence is that nothing happens today. Anyone who was considering unstaking because of the date, preparing a validator switch or planning withdrawals around it can put that aside. The coin traded at $118.75 on September 28, 3.29 percent below the previous day, while the seven-day balance was almost unchanged at 0.55 percent (data: CoinGecko).

This piece sets out where the date came from, what has actually been decided and which date counts next. And it records that cryptoticker.io named September 28 itself.

What really stood in the Solana calendar for September 28

Anza published the schedule for version 4.3 of the Agave validator client on August 12, 2026. It lists September 28 with the entry “Mainnet-beta: Resume feature activation”. Translated, that says: from that day Anza works through the queue of pending protocol switches on the production network again. Alpenglow is not named in that entry.

Feature gate is the technical term for such a switch: a code change that already sits in every running copy of the software but only takes effect once enough validators release it. Solana opens these gates at epoch boundaries, and an epoch lasts around 38 hours. A date in the schedule therefore marks the start of a window, not the minute at which a particular feature goes live.

In the reporting, “feature activations resume from September 28” turned into “Alpenglow arrives on September 28”. That is the entire origin of the date. No postponement in the proper sense, but a date that was never assigned to Alpenglow.

Anza and Yakovenko contradict the expectation around the date

As the expectation of a weekend launch gathered pace, the developers spoke up. Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko answered the rumours of an imminent mainnet launch with a single word: “decel”, the opposite of accelerating.

Roger Wattenhofer, head of research at Anza, was more explicit. He asked publicly why a protocol should be activated that had only been in public testing for a few days, and closed with the sentence “No Alpenrush”. Those two statements are the reason several specialist newsrooms now describe September 28 as wrong.

This is not a cancellation of Alpenglow. It is the statement that a consensus mechanism which changes how the network agrees on a valid state is not laid over a network carrying billions in value after a few days of test operation.

Alpenglow has been running on testnet since September 22

What did happen: on September 22, 2026, Alpenglow went live on the Solana testnet. There it replaces the previous mechanism and makes confirmed blocks final at the same time. The distinction between “confirmed” and “finalized”, which exchanges and applications have gone by until now, loses its purpose on testnet as a result.

The activation had an immediate consequence for operators on testnet: Frankendancer, an intermediate stage on the way to the alternative client Firedancer, lost support there. Anyone still running it had to switch. For mainnet that does not yet apply.

Votor replaces TowerBFT: how the new consensus reaches finality

Votor is the component that takes over validator voting in Alpenglow and supersedes the previous TowerBFT mechanism. The most visible difference lies in the time to finality of a transaction. Depending on the source, the target is given as 100 to 150 milliseconds; today several seconds pass before finality.

The second point is less spectacular and, for validators, the more important one: Alpenglow does away with separate voting transactions. Until now validators write their votes into the chain as transactions of their own and pay fees for them. If that item disappears, the cost calculation of running a validator shifts noticeably, and with it, over the long run, the arithmetic behind the staking rewards that reach you.

The complete code for this already sits in Agave 4.2, Votor included. At Solana, however, shipped does not mean switched on. Anza deliberately held back mainnet activation at the time until further hardening and a bug bounty competition worth 50,000 SOL, which ran in August, had been completed.

November 9 is the next window, not a launch date

On September 22, Anza published the schedule for Agave v4.4 and created the corresponding development branch the same day. It contains two dates: on devnet, feature activations resume from October 7; on mainnet-beta, from November 9.

This entry, too, does not name Alpenglow. It again describes a window in which switches can be released. In Anza's feature gate tracker, SIMD-0326, the identifier of the Alpenglow proposal, still sits in the list of features awaiting a mainnet activation. There is no confirmed date for that one switch.

If you want to follow the progress yourself, Anza's feature gate tracker is the place where the status changes first. As long as SIMD-0326 sits there among the waiting entries, nothing is switched on mainnet.

Your SOL in staking: unstaking period and epochs in the schedule

For staked SOL, the date that did not happen changes nothing. What remains important is the mechanism that applies anyway: a delegation does not come free immediately but at the end of the current epoch, and an epoch lasts around 38 hours. Anyone who wants access to their SOL at short notice should factor in that waiting time.

Anyone drawing rewards through a platform rather than through their own delegation should read the terms there regularly in any case: minimum terms, fee shares and the question of whether the platform holds the coins or merely arranges the delegation differ widely. These points decide the return more than the advertised percentage does.

Switching validators purely because of a protocol date makes no sense. It makes sense where your validator shows persistently poor availability or charges high commission. That assessment is due independently of Alpenglow.

Holding period and tax remain untouched by the upgrade date

A protocol change is neither a swap nor a disposal. Your SOL remain the same coins, with the same acquisition date. The one-year holding period for private disposals therefore continues to run, regardless of when Alpenglow is switched live.

Ongoing staking rewards are a different matter: those rewards arise at the moment they are allocated to you and are treated separately from any price gain. Anyone collecting many small allocations over the year needs a clean record. It has to be a record that still makes sense months later. For the assessment of your particular case, your tax adviser remains the right address.

Buying route and custody for SOL in Europe

Anyone wanting to buy SOL in Europe has had a simpler preliminary test since the EU regulation on markets in crypto-assets took full effect: the provider needs MiCA authorisation, and anyone acting as a service provider in the EU must be able to evidence it. That is no substitute for a look at the fees, though it narrows the field sensibly. The cost models of the licensed trading venues still differ considerably, from the spread to the withdrawal fee.

On custody the familiar principle applies: what sits on an exchange is yours only on the exchange's terms. Anyone holding larger amounts over months who does not trade anyway sleeps more soundly with their own wallet; our hardware wallet comparison sets out the differences between the devices. For staked SOL that is a trade-off, though, because delegating from your own wallet means more work of your own.

How to handle postponed protocol dates

Dates for network upgrades are planning figures, not commitments. For Ethereum, Base and Solana alike: a date in a release schedule describes when a development team would like to ship something, provided nothing speaks against it by then.

A date becomes dependable only once it appears in the source that actually throws the switch, meaning the feature gate tracker or the client maker's own announcement. Secondary reports often adopt a date faster than the developers confirm it. With Alpenglow, that is exactly what produced September 28.

In practice, that means: do not tie a selling, unstaking or tax decision firmly to an announced upgrade date unless it comes from the primary source. The cost of reacting too early, such as an unnecessary unstaking wait of two epochs, is one you carry yourself.

What cryptoticker.io wrote about September 28

For completeness: we carried the date too. On September 1 we published “Solana Alpenglow: activation from September 28, and what delegators should check now”, and on September 23 a price piece followed that framed the market five days before Alpenglow. Both texts rested on the Agave schedule as published at the time.

That framing has proved to go too far. The schedule named a window for feature activations, not the launch of Alpenglow. We record it here so that the earlier account does not stand without comment. The background to the upgrade itself, meaning what Votor changes technically and why that counts for staking rewards, is untouched by this.

Solana Alpenglow: What to take away

Alpenglow has not been cancelled; it is running in testing. The date doing the rounds was never one. As long as SIMD-0326 sits among the waiting features at Anza, nothing is live on mainnet, and the next window for feature activations opens on November 9. The three steps that follow for you:

1. Leave the staked holding alone. Absent another reason, there is no occasion to pull SOL out of delegation now. The epoch boundary of around 38 hours still applies, and a switch only pays off where your validator performs poorly. Provider terms are set out in the staking comparison.
2. Keep a clean record of reward allocations. Staking rewards accrue continuously, independently of the upgrade date, and need a record that still holds up next spring. The tools for it appear in the overview of crypto tax software.
3. Sort out buying route and custody independently of all this. MiCA authorisation, fees and the question of where your coins sit are decisions you take by your investment horizon, not by an upgrade date. The exchange comparison is the way in.

The full timeline of the testnet activation and the v4.4 schedule has been documented by Solana Compass.

(As of September 28, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

OpenAI says its agents keep landing on government websites because they treat them as reliable sources, but it's pausing training while it adds safeguards.

A UC San Diego-led team impersonated a hardware security module without extracting its key.

Coinbase and Citi expanded an existing deal so Citi's institutional clients can accept stablecoin payments, while Coinbase business accounts run on Citi's banking rails.

Anthropic's mid-tier model tops its own flagship on Terminal-Bench 4.0 and costs half as much per token, but an independent tester found it burns more tokens than any model it has measured.

Senator Sarah Hanson-Young has invited the OpenAI and Anthropic CEOs to a Canberra hearing on October 1, after an OpenAI agent quietly accessed Australia's Medicare data and nobody said a word for months.

Veteran commodity trader Peter Brandt has named Stellar (XLM) as a potential long-term winner, telling traders that the cryptocurrency could be a good "long shot" bet over the next several years as its price jumps nearly 7%.

Monero has released a new version of its beta stressnet software as the privacy-focused network moves closer to testing major upgrades FCMP++ and CARROT.

Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz remains bullish on Bitcoin despite the cryptocurrency hovering near a key technical level, saying he still likes the chart and would not be surprised to see BTC reach $100,000 before the end of the year.

Tom Lee's BitMine now holds over 6 million Ethereum as it continues to purchase the asset regardless of the crypto market conditions.

In exactly 11 days, XRP activates crucial smart-execution features designed to capture trillions in institutional asset volume.

Key Highlights

• Blockchain.com aims to raise $500 million through a public offering in 2025.
• The crypto platform seeks a market valuation ranging from $4 billion to $6 billion.
• A confidential Form S-1 registration statement was submitted to the SEC in May.
• Bitcoin’s 30%+ surge since mid-August provides favorable market backdrop.
• The company recently partnered with NYSE on tokenized securities exploration.

The cryptocurrency exchange and digital wallet provider Blockchain.com is preparing for a public market debut this year. According to recent reports, the company plans to secure approximately $500 million through its initial public offering.

Bloomberg broke the story on September 29, based on information from sources with direct knowledge of the situation. The reporting indicates Blockchain.com is pursuing a company valuation in the $4 billion to $6 billion range.

These figures remain flexible, however. The organization may adjust the offering size based on prevailing market dynamics. Both the timeline and specific terms remain fluid.

When contacted, a Blockchain.com representative chose not to provide commentary on the reported IPO intentions.

Progress Toward Public Listing

The journey toward going public began for Blockchain.com in May of this year. On May 21, the firm publicly acknowledged submitting a confidential draft registration document—a Form S-1—to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

During that announcement, Blockchain.com had not finalized key details such as share quantity or pricing parameters. The firm indicated that proceeding with the IPO would hinge on favorable market circumstances and completion of SEC scrutiny.

Due to the confidential nature of the submission, specific offering details remained undisclosed. The reported $500 million fundraising goal and multi-billion dollar valuation represent preliminary targets rather than confirmed figures.

Established in 2011, Blockchain.com initially focused on monitoring Bitcoin blockchain transactions. The platform subsequently evolved to offer digital wallet services and cryptocurrency exchange capabilities.

During 2022’s cryptocurrency market peak, the company achieved a $14 billion valuation. The following year brought a $110 million funding round at a significantly reduced valuation—less than half the previous figure.

Throughout its existence, Blockchain.com has accumulated $537 million in total equity capital. Sources close to the company’s financial situation indicate it has maintained profitability on an adjusted earnings basis for three consecutive years.

Crypto Sector IPO Landscape

Should Blockchain.com proceed, it would enter a limited field of cryptocurrency companies that have recently accessed public markets. Gemini completed its Nasdaq listing in September 2025, setting shares at $28 and securing $425 million.

Gemini’s stock performance has been challenging. By March 2026, shares had declined more than 80% from their initial trading day closing price, based on previous reports.

eToro completed a May 2025 public offering that generated $620 million, with shares priced at $52. The stock experienced nearly 30% gains on debut but subsequently retreated from those levels.

BitGo launched its IPO in January 2026 with an $18 per share price point, collecting approximately $212.8 million. Trading commenced on the New York Stock Exchange.

Bullish, the cryptocurrency exchange platform supported by Peter Thiel, submitted U.S. IPO documentation in July 2025. Financial disclosures revealed a $349 million net loss during that year’s first quarter.

Bitcoin’s value has increased over 30% from mid-August levels. This upward momentum followed U.S. Treasury Department communications regarding expanded buyback programs for longer-maturity government bonds.

Despite recent cryptocurrency gains, stocks of Gemini, BitGo, and eToro continue trading approximately 50% to 80% below their post-IPO peak values, according to Bloomberg data.

On September 23, Blockchain.com revealed a memorandum of understanding with the New York Stock Exchange. This framework agreement would investigate providing Blockchain.com customers with access to tokenized representations of U.S. equities and exchange-traded funds.

The arrangement does not constitute an operational product at this stage. No launch timeline has been established, and regulatory authorization remains pending.

The NYSE initially unveiled its digital trading infrastructure in January 2026. The platform was characterized as supporting round-the-clock trading of tokenized equity instruments with immediate settlement capabilities.

Currently, Blockchain.com has not announced specific share pricing, the total number of shares to be offered, or a definitive listing date. The public offering remains contingent upon market conditions and Securities and Exchange Commission approval.

The post Blockchain.com Plans $500M Public Offering: Key Details Emerge appeared first on Blockonomi.

More people now look for a crypto exchange that works without an account or an ID. A common label for this kind of service is anonymous crypto exchange. The phrase describes a service that lets you swap coins without proving who you are.

This guide explains what an anonymous crypto exchange hides, what a blockchain records anyway and which simple steps add privacy on top. It uses one service’s published policies as a worked example. Each point also applies to other services of this kind.

Key points

• An anonymous crypto exchange lets you swap with no sign-up, no email address and no ID document.
• It removes the identity step, so a swap is not tied to a name.
• Public chains such as Bitcoin still show each payment.
• Receiving Monero and connecting over Tor add privacy around the swap.
• A record policy shows what data a service keeps and for how long.

What an anonymous crypto exchange hides, in plain terms

On many large platforms, trading starts with an account. You give an email and a phone number, upload an ID and wait for approval. Some platforms also ask for a selfie or a proof of address. From then on, every trade is filed under your name.

An anonymous crypto exchange removes that step. It asks for coins, an amount and an address, and nothing that names you. The part it hides is your identity, which never enters the swap.

This matters because an account links every swap you make to one identity. Without the account, each swap stands alone, and there is no trading history under your name to leak later.

HiddenSwap is one example of an anonymous crypto exchange: a swap there needs coins and an address, not a name. That design choice shapes everything else about the service.

What a no-account swap does not ask for

HiddenSwap (hiddenswap.com) is a no KYC crypto exchange for crypto-to-crypto swaps: no account, no email and no ID are needed to swap. Each swap is tracked by an order ID instead of a login.

That removes whole categories of risk. There is no password to leak, no profile to break into and no list of past trades stored under a name. There is also nothing to reset, recover or close when you are done.

The form asks only for what the swap needs: the coins and networks, the amount and where to send the new coins. Adding a refund address is up to you, and a few coins need a memo.

The order ID works like a receipt. Anyone who has it can check the status of that swap, so keep it as private as any other payment record.

What the chain still shows

The exchange keeps your identity out of the swap. The blockchain is a separate layer with its own rules. On a public blockchain such as Bitcoin, anyone can see the amount and the addresses of each payment, including a deposit sent to a swap.

Other signals sit outside the chain. The time of a payment, the path coins took before the swap and the IP address a wallet uses can all reveal patterns. Together these signals are called metadata.

The chain you receive on matters most here. A payout in XMR lands on a chain where outsiders cannot read amounts or match senders to receivers.

Privacy therefore has more than one layer. The no-account design covers identity, and the steps below cover the rest.

Simple steps that add privacy

Receive Monero where privacy matters most. With Monero, the payer, the payee and the sum stay off the public record by default, so later payments with those coins do not show on the chain the way Bitcoin payments do.

Connect through Tor. HiddenSwap works in Tor Browser, and its swap form still runs with JavaScript disabled, which means it works at the safest level of that browser. A wallet can connect over Tor as well. The browser is free from the Tor Project for desktop computers and Android.

Use a wallet you control and a new address for each swap. Reusing one address across swaps links those swaps together on the chain.

Give a refund address from your own wallet as well. If a swap cannot finish, the coins then come back to you, not to a platform account that has your name on file.

What records the service keeps

Every swap service keeps some data, because an order cannot run without it. What matters is which data, and for how long. The service has to know which coins move, how much, to which addresses, and which transactions paid for it.

HiddenSwap’s policy is a clear example. A swap record there has no field for a name or an IP address. Records are deleted after 90 days unless an exception in the Privacy Policy applies, for example an open claim.

When you compare services, read the record policy, not only the slogan. It tells you what data exists, how long it stays and when it is removed.

Short retention helps in a simple way. Data that has already been deleted cannot be exposed in a later breach.

Frequently asked questions

Does an anonymous crypto exchange need my email?

No. A no-account swap needs coins, an amount and an address. Tracking works through the order ID, so no inbox is ever involved.

Is a Bitcoin deposit hidden on the chain?

No. Bitcoin payments are public, so the deposit shows on the Bitcoin chain. Receiving Monero keeps later payments private by default.

Why use Tor for a swap?

Tor hides your IP address from the sites and nodes you connect to. It adds privacy at the network layer, which the blockchain does not cover.

Knowing what an anonymous crypto exchange hides, and adding Monero and Tor where they fit, gives a clear picture of your own privacy.

The post What an Anonymous Crypto Exchange Hides, and Why It Matters appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Highlights

• The PUMP token experienced a 17-20% surge over 24 hours, extending weekly gains to 38%.
• The platform has allocated over $466 million toward token buybacks and burns.
• Seven-day revenue reached $15.16 million, surpassing Hyperliquid’s $15.06 million.
• Price action stalled near $0.0055 after reaching an intraday peak of $0.005366.
• SEC released guidance regarding buyback programs and token securities classification on September 25.

The PUMP token from Pump.fun advanced 17% to reach $0.00519 over the last 24-hour trading period. This momentum pushed the seven-day performance to a 38% gain, contrasting sharply with the broader cryptocurrency market’s 1.37% decline to $2.87 trillion in total capitalization.

During this timeframe, Bitcoin maintained levels around $84,000. Ethereum hovered near $2,677, while XRP traded close to the $1.50 mark.

The price surge correlates directly with Pump.fun’s aggressive buyback strategy. The platform allocates approximately half of its generated revenue to acquire PUMP tokens from the market before destroying them completely.

On September 27, the platform executed a $1.14 million token buyback. This followed a larger $1.46 million repurchase completed one day earlier.

Token Buyback Program Surpasses $460 Million Threshold

Cumulatively, Pump.fun has deployed over $466 million toward its buyback initiative. This aggressive program has eliminated nearly 17% of the total circulating token supply.

The platform witnessed an explosive surge in new token launches, with activity spiking over 25,000% within a 24-hour window. This unprecedented growth directly fueled additional revenue flowing into the buyback mechanism.

Market analyst Austin Barack highlighted the magnitude of these expenditures in a recent X post. He referenced a single day with $1.5 million in buybacks supported by $3 million in daily revenue, observing that PUMP’s chart pattern was emerging from its consolidation range. Barack suggested that social trading appears to be in its early growth phase, and matching previous cycle revenue highs could generate daily revenues exceeding $10 million.

According to data from DefiLlama, Pump.fun has now eclipsed Hyperliquid in seven-day revenue generation. The platform recorded $15.16 million over the weekly period, marginally ahead of Hyperliquid’s $15.06 million.

This performance positions Pump.fun as the third-highest revenue generator among monitored cryptocurrency applications. Tether maintained the lead with $121.64 million, while Circle secured second place at $50.40 million.

Regulatory developments added another dimension to the narrative. On September 25, the SEC released staff guidance addressing buyback announcements for non-security tokens operating on functional networks.

The guidance clarified that such announcements don’t inherently indicate managerial efforts under securities regulations. Importantly, this guidance doesn’t specifically classify PUMP or provide any legal safe harbor for Pump.fun.

Technical Analysis Shows Resistance at Critical Levels

PUMP reached an intraday high of $0.005366 on September 28 before encountering selling pressure. The token subsequently retreated to $0.004881, representing a 5.32% decline on the daily timeframe.

This correction occurred after a substantial 20.51% rally from the $0.004500 support zone. Market participants are now monitoring $0.0045 as the immediate support threshold.

Cryptocurrency analyst Altcoin Sherpa offered his perspective on X, observing that PUMP maintained impressive strength over recent trading sessions. He characterized it as a crucial barometer for overall market sentiment, highlighting its historical tendency to lead both upward rallies and downward corrections. Sherpa suggested that a robust continuation of the current move would signal positive momentum for alternative tokens broadly.

Trading activity in derivatives markets intensified significantly. PUMP derivatives volume exploded 198.47% to $1.11 billion, while open interest expanded 17.26% to reach $429.46 million.

Leveraged long positions absorbed liquidations totaling approximately $1.03 million. Meanwhile, short position liquidations amounted to roughly $486,010 during the same window.

Spot market dynamics revealed a contrasting trend. PUMP registered approximately $2.32 million in net spot outflows, indicating more tokens were withdrawn from exchanges than deposited.

The 14-day Average True Range climbed to 0.000475, signaling increased volatility. The Relative Strength Index moderated to 60.77 after touching 65.73, though it remained comfortably above its 54.70 moving average.

A sustained four-hour close above $0.0052 would bring the $0.0055 resistance level into traders’ sights. Breaking through that barrier could establish a pathway toward $0.0060.

Should PUMP decline below $0.0048, market observers anticipate a retest of that threshold. Additional weakness might trigger a move back toward the $0.0045 support area.

The post Pump.fun (PUMP) Surges 20% as Platform’s Buyback Program Exceeds $466M appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• Hackers drained $387.5 million from cryptocurrency platform Bitget on Sept. 24.
• NEAR Intents reports its SHIELD security framework successfully prevented over $50 million in illicit fund transfers related to the breach.
• A previously unknown vulnerability in third-party security software allowed the hacker to obtain administrator privileges before erasing attack evidence.
• The exchange’s $465 million user protection reserve will compensate all losses, with plans to replenish it to $300 million minimum within seven days.
• Decentralized protocol THORChain rejected requests to blacklist addresses associated with the perpetrator, citing its non-censorship policy.

Cryptocurrency trading platform Bitget suffered a devastating security breach Thursday resulting in the theft of $387.5 million. The perpetrator rapidly distributed the stolen assets across multiple blockchain networks within hours of the initial compromise.

NEAR Intents, a cross-chain asset exchange protocol, reports successfully preventing a significant portion of the pilfered funds from being laundered. According to general manager Alex Shevchenko, the platform’s SHIELD security infrastructure identified and halted over $50 million in transfer attempts linked to the security incident.

Shevchenko disclosed that the system successfully immobilized $503,000 during transit. However, approximately $166,000 in potentially stolen cryptocurrency evaded detection.

Anatomy of the Bitget Security Breach

Bitget’s CEO Gracy Chen provided a detailed chronology of the attack during a conversation with The Block. According to Chen, the perpetrator initiated two preliminary test transactions at 6:31 p.m. UTC on Sept. 24.

These initial transfers consisted of 0.184 ETH and 193 TRX. Both amounts fell below Bitget’s risk detection thresholds, allowing them to process without triggering security alerts.

Approximately half an hour later, the hacker executed substantially larger withdrawals. Chen revealed that 17 separate transactions spanning eight distinct networks—Ethereum, XRP, Zcash, BNB Chain, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Avalanche—collectively totaled approximately $361 million.

The exchange’s response was swift. Its reconciliation infrastructure detected discrepancies just seven minutes following the first major withdrawal, prompting Bitget to immediately suspend all customer withdrawals across the entire platform.

By that point, the perpetrator had already compromised an internal administrative interface. Chen explained that the intruder leveraged an undisclosed zero-day vulnerability in external security software to acquire legitimate administrator credentials.

This elevated access enabled the attacker to inject fraudulent withdrawal requests into Bitget’s wallet infrastructure, which processed them as legitimate transactions. The perpetrator subsequently erased digital forensic evidence, which Chen described as the most challenging aspect of the investigation.

According to Bitget, private keys and cold storage facilities remained uncompromised. The organization is collaborating with cybersecurity firms Mandiant and SlowMist and intends to publish a comprehensive incident analysis later this week.

While Chen declined to identify potential suspects, she indicated that Bitget suspects the same organization responsible for multiple recent cryptocurrency heists.

Contrasting Responses from NEAR Intents and THORChain

This security incident has reignited discussion regarding how permissionless cryptocurrency protocols should address stolen assets. Chen requested that THORChain, a decentralized exchange protocol, blacklist wallet addresses connected to the perpetrator.

THORChain refused the request. The protocol stated it does not implement selective transaction censorship, although it has previously suspended network operations during critical emergencies.

NEAR Intents adopted a contrasting approach. Shevchenko confirmed his platform will proactively prevent stolen cryptocurrency from transiting through its infrastructure.

He additionally announced that NEAR Intents will forgo the 5% bounty Bitget offered for freezing assets, along with an additional 5% for recovery, enabling maximum funds to return to the exchange. Separately, stablecoin issuers Circle and Tether froze a wallet connected to the perpetrator on Friday, restricting access to $318,013 in USDT and USDC.

As of Sept. 25, Bitget’s protection fund maintained a balance of $465 million and will cover all losses. Chen stated that corporate reserves exceeding $1.4 billion will restore the fund to a minimum of $300 million within seven days.

Bitcoin withdrawal functionality on Bitget resumed Monday, processing over 3,000 BTC during the initial hour. Ethereum withdrawals are scheduled to reopen Sept. 29.

The post NEAR Protocol Halts $50M in Stolen Crypto After Bitget’s $387M Security Breach appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• QNT token skyrocketed from approximately $60 to over $370 within a week, marking a spectacular 300%+ increase.
• The Clearing House selected Quant’s technology for its tokenized deposit infrastructure, processing over $2 trillion daily for 25 American financial institutions.
• Major UK financial institutions such as Barclays, HSBC UK, Lloyds, and Santander executed real-time transactions using Quant’s tokenized sterling deposit platform.
• Daily trading volumes exceeded $1 billion, while short sellers faced liquidations totaling $17.2 million.
• Technical analysts identify resistance around $300, while the previous record high of $428 emerges as the next potential target.

The Quant (QNT) token experienced an extraordinary surge this week, climbing from roughly $60 to beyond $370—representing gains exceeding 300%. Daily trading activity simultaneously exploded past the $1 billion threshold.

Quant operates as a blockchain interoperability platform, specializing in technology that bridges disparate blockchain networks and traditional financial infrastructure. This enables financial institutions to seamlessly transfer tokenized assets across multiple systems.

The explosive price movement initiated following The Clearing House’s announcement on September 24 selecting Quant as their technology partner. This influential organization processes daily settlements exceeding $2 trillion for 25 prominent United States banking institutions.

Under the partnership terms, The Clearing House will integrate Quant’s infrastructure into its On-Chain Money Initiative. This revolutionary network will bridge tokenized bank deposits with established payment systems like RTP and CHIPS, targeting deployment during the first half of 2027.

Cryptocurrency analyst Ted Pillows highlighted the dramatic movement on X, observing that $QNT had tripled within seven days. He emphasized Quant’s integration into Murex MX.3 software—utilized by 65 among the world’s top 100 banking institutions—and noted the European Central Bank’s selection of Quant for digital euro testing initiatives. Additionally, he observed the QNT chart breaking through a five-year descending trend line.

International banking collaborations have expanded significantly beyond American borders. Several prominent UK banking institutions, comprising Barclays, HSBC UK, Lloyds, and Santander, successfully executed operational transactions utilizing tokenized sterling deposits constructed on Quant’s technological framework.

Global Expansion and Strategic Alliances

Within the Japanese market, Quant established a strategic partnership with Dentsu Soken focused on enabling programmable digital currency and tokenized deposit functionality. Dentsu Soken maintains connectivity with critical settlement infrastructure including BOJ-NET, SWIFT, and CLS networks.

Quant has collaborated with both the Bank for International Settlements and the Bank of England on Project Rosalind, conducting experimental trials of API frameworks designed for retail central bank digital currency payment systems.

The European Central Bank designated Quant as a pioneer partner within its digital euro initiative, concentrating on developing conditional payment mechanisms and advanced programmability capabilities.

Market Dynamics Fueling the Rally

Concurrent with the partnership announcements, QNT’s derivatives market demonstrated robust activity. Open interest positions climbed to $63.65 million, while futures cumulative volume delta rose to 10.37K, indicating substantial buying momentum within futures trading.

Approximately $17.2 million worth of short positions faced liquidation within a 24-hour period. Spot cumulative volume delta remained in negative territory at -68.48K, suggesting spot market purchasing hasn’t yet aligned with futures market enthusiasm.

Santiment Intelligence monitored large holder behavior, documenting that QNT registered 645 whale-sized transactions valued at minimum $100,000 each during a single day—establishing an unprecedented record for the token. The analytics firm attributed this extraordinary activity to The Clearing House announcement, observing that GRT experienced comparable attention simultaneously.

Technical analysis reveals resistance clustering between $286 and $300. A decisive breakout above this critical zone could establish a pathway toward Quant’s historical peak of $428.

Market observers are monitoring the $200 to $210 range as crucial support should momentum decelerate. Reclaiming territory above $428 would bring the psychological $500 milestone into consideration for the inaugural time.

According to the latest market data, QNT was trading around $233 following an intraday peak of $368, with CoinGecko recording approximately 189% gains across the seven-day period.

The post Quant (QNT) Explodes 300% Following Major Clearing House Partnership Announcement appeared first on Blockonomi.

ICP has surged by double digits over the past 30 days, exceeding $3.30 on Monday and Tuesday, according to data from CoinGecko.

Despite the revival, it remains far below its all-time high, yet many market observers believe this could be the start of a major rally.

The Bulls’ Voices

X user CW recently maintained that the cryptocurrency continues to show accumulation signals, claiming a pattern that preceded previous gains is repeating.

“The next phase following this accumulation will be an upward move,” they added.

Shortly after, the analyst suggested that ICP has reached a specific buy wall zone and has a high probability of rebounding from current price levels.

JAVON MARKS and Nehal have also touched on Internet Computer, making much more optimistic bets. The former argued that the altcoin has shown “consistent strength,” which is something to monitor as the valuation broke out of a key Falling Wedge pattern.

“This pattern suggests an over 208% move back to the $10 areas, and they could even extend much higher,” the analyst said.

Nehal said he has spent the last few weeks digging deep into the ICP code, claiming it feels like “alien technology.” After his research, the X user made a bold forecast that the asset’s price could explode to $60, representing roughly a 1,560% increase from the current zone.

ICP’s recent exchange netflow reinforces the optimistic forecasts. Outflows have mainly dominated inflows over the past several weeks, meaning investors have shifted from centralized platforms to self-custody, easing short-term selling pressure.

The Bearish Outlook

Of course, not everyone thinks that ICP is on the verge of posting additional gains in the near future. X user Crypto With Gopal, for instance, suggested that the asset is forming a rising wedge pattern.

Based on the structure, the price is pulling back after a strong rally, with sellers pressuring wedge support and momentum fading as bulls struggle to hold the $3 mark.

“A breakdown below support could trigger further downside, while reclaiming resistance may revive bullish momentum. Bears watching for confirmation,” he concluded.

The post Internet Computer (ICP) Soars 35% Monthly as Analysts Eye a Pump Above $10: Details appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Stablecoin giant Tether said on Monday it has helped US authorities freeze nearly $550 million in Iran-linked USDT so far this year.

The company detailed two of those developments. The first, in April, locked more than $344 million in USDT across two TRON addresses. The company acted on information from the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and US law enforcement. OFAC added both addresses to its sanctions entry for the Central Bank of Iran on April 24.

Treasury Names Crypto a Sanctions Target

That entry links the central bank to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Qods Force and Hezbollah. OFAC added four more TRON addresses to the same entry on July 14. Tether froze more than $130 million in USDT across those four wallets. Together, the two freezes come to more than $474 million. Tether’s release does not itemize the remaining ones.

“Public blockchains provide authorities with a level of visibility into the movement of funds that simply does not exist with cash, and Tether can act when credible information is provided by law enforcement,” said Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino.

In June, the US Treasury sanctioned Nobitex, Iran’s largest crypto exchange. It said the platform helped the central bank obtain stablecoins used to support the falling rial.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent then launched Operation Economic Outcast on August 24 against the Iranian regime’s financial networks. Its sectoral sanctions determinations name five sectors, starting with digital assets, technology, gold, aviation, and shipping. The Treasury said Iran increasingly uses cryptocurrency to evade sanctions, including for transactions linked to the IRGC.

On September 17, OFAC sanctioned Iranian crypto exchange BitBank, which it said is controlled by sanctioned financier Babak Zanjani. The Treasury alleged that BitBank moved hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoin (BTC) to the IRGC in June and July.

Tether Also Acts on Israeli Referrals

Tether said it has worked with Israel’s National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing (NBCTF) for several years. It has frozen more than 22 million USDT across over 40 cases the bureau referred to the company.

In September 2025, the NBCTF published 187 crypto addresses it tied to the IRGC. Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic reported that those addresses had received $1.5 billion in USDT, and Tether blacklisted 39 of them, freezing the roughly $1.5 million they still held. Though Elliptic noted that some of the addresses may belong to crypto services handling funds for many customers.

Across all its cases, Tether said it has helped freeze more than $4.9 billion, including more than $2.4 billion tied to US authorities.

The post Tether Freezes Nearly $550M in Iran-Linked USDT in 2026 as US Crackdown Expands appeared first on CryptoPotato.

September 2026 is turning out to be entirely different for Ethereum, as it appears to have bucked the “September Curse.” Since the start of the month, ETH is up by more than 9%.

Fresh data also revealed that the asset may be approaching a major resistance zone before a potential bullish move.

Real Test

According to the latest findings by Ali Martinez, whale activity has risen sharply across the Ethereum network. Transactions worth more than $1 million jumped nearly 500% in the past week. The number of such transactions increased from 1,202 to 7,113. Martinez also found that large holders accumulated more than 320,000 ETH. At current prices, this stash is worth around $864 million.

However, Ethereum still faces a major wall between $2,722 and $2,822. More than 13.3 million ETH were previously traded in this range, which makes it a significant hurdle. Martinez said several failed breakout attempts could occur. If the leading altcoin breaks above this zone decisively, the next resistance levels are near $2,970 and $3,366. According to the analysis, rising whale demand remains a major market signal.

At the same time, another important trend is developing on the supply side. CryptoPotato recently reported that Ethereum’s available supply on crypto exchanges has dropped to a record low. Only 3.49% of ETH is held on tracked platforms, while another 1.16% of the supply has left exchanges since June 1.

The decline is linked partly to growing activity in staking and DeFi. Around 35% of ETH is estimated to be staked, while roughly $53 billion is locked in DeFi. Long-term holders and large treasury firms are also keeping more tokens off exchanges. This could limit readily available supply if demand increases.

Separately, Ethereum is also seeing an aggressive bet from a trader with an unusual track record. A mysterious trader has taken a $99 million long position on the crypto asset using 25x leverage. The position was opened when ETH traded near $2,660, with liquidation set at $2,552 unless more collateral is added.

The trader has reportedly made 3,156 trades with a 100% win rate and earned $5.5 million in profits last week alone.

Institutional Appetite

On the institutional side of things, US-based spot ETH ETFs recorded another week of positive inflows, as nearly $690 million entered across five trading days. Monday saw the strongest inflow at almost $270 million.

On Tuesday, these investment products attracted $162 million, while Wednesday brought another $104.6 million, followed by $66 million on Thursday. Flows picked up slightly on Friday, with almost $87 million recorded.

The post Ethereum Just Defied the September Curse But a Major Resistance Wall Still Stands appeared first on CryptoPotato.

THORChain is facing a fresh dispute over its handling of stolen funds after Bitget and security researchers publicly asked the network to block addresses linked to the September 24 exploit.

The argument has widened into a fight over whether a permissionless protocol can refuse known stolen assets without compromising the censorship resistance it claims to provide.

Bitget Asks THORChain to Block Attacker Addresses

Bitget confirmed on September 25 that $387.5 million went to attacker addresses, up from the initial $351.6 million after Zcash and Tron assets were added. The exchange disclosed the breach on September 24 and blamed a backend system in its wallet setup, not a stolen private key.

CEO Gracy Chen formally asked THORChain on September 26 to refuse service to those addresses. “Decentralization is a design principle, not a shield for facilitating known stolen funds,” she said, adding that “the industry is watching.”

The request followed reports that funds from the Bitget exploit were being sent through the protocol for cross-chain swaps. MistTrack wrote that nearly $1.2 billion from the 2025 Bybit hack had previously been traced through the network and argued that the industry should question what responsibility a protocol has when it knowingly processes funds tied to a major hack.

THORChain responded, saying that it is decentralized and permissionless like Bitcoin, Ethereum and BNB Chain, and asked what responsibility those networks would bear in the same situation. Bitget’s public tracker lists 2,377 attacker addresses holding the $378 million, and 1,497 of them are marked as having moved funds through THORChain.

The protocol’s response drew criticism from security researcher Taylor Monahan, who, in a debate with crypto enthusiast Joel Valenzuela, pushed back on the view that screening transactions is different from halting a network.

Valenzuela had written that halts and rollbacks have happened on most networks, including Bitcoin, but screening is another matter: “That’s actually censorship,” he said.

The researcher countered that the team has secretly reallocated assets before, then claimed it has failed to decentralize in seven years, had been hacked seven times, and was, according to her, built by North Korean IT workers.

Ethereum advocate Marius Kjærstad tagged the Grok chatbot to ask whether Monahan’s claims held up. It called them partly accurate, citing at least three exploits in 2021 worth roughly 416 million and a paused lending product with about $200 million in liabilities, but found no evidence for the North Korea claims or for rug pulls for operator profit.

Critics Point to the Network’s Own Halt in May

In May, THORChain validators reportedly halted the network within hours of a $10.7 million exploit in May, and trading and withdrawals stayed unavailable for roughly five weeks, until June 22. X account Satoshi Club wondered why a network that can pause for its own losses is now asking what responsibility it bears for another platform’s stolen funds.

Bitget has offered 5% bounties on frozen and recovered funds, and Chen thanked Circle and Tether for moving quickly to freeze about $318,000 linked to the hack. The exchange has also informed users that withdrawals, which had been stopped after the attack, would restart in phases, with BTC first on September 28 at 08:00 UTC.

The post THORChain Faces Backlash Over Stolen Bitget Funds Routed Through Swaps appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Charles Hoskinson has argued that Cardano’s Midnight network will eventually eclipse Zcash, citing developments including private agents, selective disclosure, and a DeFi kernel designed to work across major chains.

His claim comes as Zcash trades far above its level from a year ago, while Midnight’s NIGHT token remains nearly 78% below its all-time high.

Midnight’s Privacy and DeFi Design

In a September 28 post on X, Hoskinson quoted ratings provider Weiss Crypto, which had earlier suggested that NIGHT has a good chance of becoming “one of the best plays of the next 24 months.” He contended that Midnight will be “bigger than Zcash,” then laid out what the privacy-focused blockchain developed by Input Output, the same team behind Cardano, has got going for it.

“Selective disclosure, Private Agents, abstraction with a DeFi Kernel for all major chains,” wrote the developer.

He also mentioned three privacy techniques the network was working on, including zero-knowledge proofs, trusted execution environments, and multi-party computations, and linked Midnight’s planned architecture to Cardano’s 24/7 network uptime and the Leios upgrade.

The market data currently shows a wide gap between the two assets. NIGHT was trading near $0.027 at the time of writing, up over 2% in the last 24 hours and more than 9% in the past week. It also gained close to 30% across a fortnight and well over 36% in 30 days.

Zcash, meanwhile, was trading at around $1,600, an almost 7% dip in 24 hours, although it was up over 2% across seven days and nearly 36% over two weeks. The privacy coin’s one-month run was also better than NIGHT’s, after it gained 93% in that period, while remaining 2,660% higher than where it was a year ago.

Midnight is sitting about 77.5% below its record of close to $0.12 from December 9, 2025, while ZEC is about 51% under its own ATH of $3,191.

Looking at trading volume, it is about $14 million for NIGHT, an increase of 43% from one day ago, against roughly $1 billion for ZEC, which represents a 24% drop from what changed hands yesterday.

Mixed Fortunes for NIGHT and ZEC

NIGHT fell more than 43% on July 21 to record a low near $0.016 after 290 million tokens were dumped in the market following a withdrawal from a Wanchain bridge contract, with the Midnight Foundation stating that the network was not hacked.

On its part, Zcash topped $1,600 last week for the first time since 2016, then slid as the wider market fell, with analyst Crypto Patel arguing that a cup-and-handle pattern suggests the $1,600 to $2,000 range could be a local top, with a drop below $500 possible within one to three years.

The post Cardano’s NIGHT Will Be Bigger Than Zcash: Charles Hoskinson appeared first on CryptoPotato.