Netanyahu's stance may deepen geopolitical tensions, affecting U.S. policy on Palestine and altering international diplomatic dynamics.

The post Netanyahu to deliver defiant UN speech amid protests and isolation appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The Binance listing of HYPE could enhance its global liquidity and market presence, but also introduces volatility risks for new investors.

The post Hyperliquid’s native token listed for spot trading on Binance appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

UniX AI's rapid global expansion and Unitree's IPO highlight the growing investor confidence and competitive dynamics in the robotics sector.

The post UniX AI expands globally as Unitree Robotics prepares for IPO appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The US-China AI talks highlight the delicate balance between competition and cooperation, influencing global tech policies and market dynamics.

The post Trump and Xi discuss AI superpower ambitions amid global rivalry appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The deal underscores the growing trend of major asset managers investing heavily in AI infrastructure, reshaping the data center landscape.

The post BlackRock and IFM in exclusive talks for $25B data center deal appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Price Slips While US Treasury Yields Soar, Oil Prices Climb

Bitcoin’s price slid on Wednesday, just as U.S. Treasuries surged, with the 10-year yield climbing above 5% and reaching — its highest level since 2007. 

The price of the leading cryptocurrency was down 2% over a 24-hour period Wednesday afternoon in New York, and was trading hands for $84,357. 

Bitcoin’s price had surged earlier in the week as investors piled into exchange-traded funds. At one point, it soared as high as nearly $87,330. 

But its rally has since cooled. It dropped further on Wednesday afternoon around the time the U.S. Treasury said it will purchase up to $6 billion of longer-dated government debt on Thursday. 

Bitcoin previously benefited from the Treasury Department’s announcement of buybacks — having its best run in months — but this time dropped.

The 10-year Treasury yield climbed above 5% on Wednesday for the first time in 19 years, after September’s flash PMI data came in well ahead of forecasts and pushed the composite index to a five-year high.

Inflation details added to the pressure: input costs across manufacturing and services rose to their highest level since October 2022, driven largely by fuel and transportation, while wage pressure also strengthened. 

Rising yields are typically a headwind for bitcoin’s price. When safe government bonds pay 5%, holding an asset that generates no income becomes more expensive. 

Higher rates also tend to strengthen the dollar and dampen appetite for risk-on assets. Bitcoin has repeatedly retreated this year when yields rose on inflation fears, often with ETF outflows and forced selling by leveraged traders amplifying the move.

This post Bitcoin Price Slips While US Treasury Yields Soar, Oil Prices Climb first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

CFTC Chair Selig Says Regulator Is Preparing for ‘24-7, On-Chain’ Markets

Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Mike Selig has said that the regulator was preparing for the transition of markets moving “24-7, on-chain.” 

Speaking to CNBC on Wednesday, the regulator said that it was an exciting time to be regulating markets related to crypto and artificial intelligence. 

The CFTC is fast pushing ahead with rulemaking for the crypto space, despite lawmakers last week blocking the long-awaited Clarity Act. Following the vote on the landmark crypto legislation, Selig said that the watchdog would still help U.S. President Trump “get the job done” in regulating digital assets. 

“Our markets are rapidly evolving,” Selig said. “We really have to reevaluate all of our rules and regulations to make sure that we’re ready and prepared for this transition to 24-7 on-chain and these automated markets that are facilitated through the use of algorithms and agentic finance.”

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

But the bill stalled and stumbled this year as the banking lobby had issues with crypto companies paying customers stablecoin rewards and some lawmakers — mostly Democrats — were concerned about the ethics side of the legislation. 

Trump received backing from major industry players while campaigning and since becoming president, his family has made money from digital asset ventures. 

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

Despite lawmakers blocking the Clarity Act, the CFTC and Securities and Exchange Commission have charged ahead with rulemaking. The CFTC last week sent a proposal to the White House to regulate crypto transactions and markets. 

And the SEC went ahead and approved tokenized stocks trading the same week. In August, it also proposed its own framework for crypto asset offerings, pressing ahead while the landmark legislation stalled.  

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

President Trump in August urged lawmakers to get the Clarity Act over the line, referring to the legislation as “very, very powerful.” 

This post CFTC Chair Selig Says Regulator Is Preparing for ‘24-7, On-Chain’ Markets first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

NYSE and Blockchain.com Working Together To List Tokenized Stocks

The New ​York Stock Exchange and crypto exchange Blockchain.com have signed a memorandum of understanding to debut tokenized stocks. 

According to a Wednesday statement, if approved, Blockchain.com users would be able to trade tokenized U.S.-listed stocks and exchange-traded funds on NYSE’s planned digital alternative trading system. 

It comes as Wall Street increasingly eyes up Bitcoin and its related infrastructure. NYSE’s  parent company, Intercontinental Exchange, earlier this year announced it had invested in crypto exchange OKX. 

“People shouldn’t be limited in owning stocks based on where they happen to live or the brokerage and information they may or may not have access to,” Peter Smith, Blockchain.com’s executive chairman and CEO, said in a statement. 

“Connecting to the NYSE digital alternative trading system will enable us to extend the opportunity to invest in these digital assets to tens of millions of Blockchain.com users around the world.”

And NYSE Group President Lynn Martin added: “The future of capital markets belongs to institutions that unite the trust of traditional finance with the innovation and accessibility of digital assets.” 

In January, the NYSE said it was building a platform allowing traders to buy and sell tokenized versions of U.S.-listed equities and exchange-traded funds and settle those trades on the blockchain, 24/7. 

Wall Street has been eying up crypto companies and their infrastructure particularly because it’s interested in tokenizing assets like stocks. Traditional finance titans like BlackRock and Franklin Templeton for years have used blockchain rails to tokenize money funds.

But things have accelerated since the U.S. elected pro-crypto president Donald Trump and regulators have taken a more friendly stance to watchdogging the space. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last week approved tokenized stocks trading. 

In January, the S&P 500 gave crypto platform Trade[XYZ] the green light to debut a new derivative contract on decentralized exchange Hyperliquid, giving traders the ability to trade the stock index 24-7. 

And Last month, Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, and fintech company SoFi Technologies, announced a deal to route SoFi customers’ crypto orders through Kraken’s institutional trading platform and list SoFi’s stablecoin on the exchange.

This post NYSE and Blockchain.com Working Together To List Tokenized Stocks first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

The Quantum Issue: You Never Really Know The Future

People have been debating whether a quantum computer presents a realistic threat to the Bitcoin network for over a decade. It was a serious topic of conversation over 13 years ago when I first discovered Bitcoin myself. 

There has been quite a lot of progress, both in terms of theory and real-world engineering, since long ago when I was just a bumbling idiot trying to figure out what was going on here. 

Two major milestones have been reached since then that make a material difference in the likelihood of a viable quantum computer actually being produced sometime in the next decade or so. That doesn’t inherently mean that it will reach a point of ubiquity, or even relative ease of access for those with large amounts of capital. 

But it is very possible that a number of viable machines will be produced in the near future. 

Error Correction Improvements

The first major improvement has been in error correction. To account for the inherent noise in working with things at this kind of tiny scale, to get a logical qubit that is useful in computation in practice requires the use of multiple redundant physical qubits. 

The prior state of the art way of doing this was surface codes, a way of bundling multiple physical qubits together in a grid and using some of them as check qubits that periodically “check on” their neighbors to ensure no internal errors in the superposition have occurred (without collapsing the superposition). Each grid’s empty spaces need to be filled with check qubits. 

This check qubit requirement creates an extra overhead that can get close to 1,000 physical qubits per logical qubit in total, and it gets bad at scale because check qubits can only check on the qubits immediately next to them. So every grouping of qubits needs to have checkers in equidistant spacing. 

Quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes remove this bottleneck, allowing check qubits to check other qubits at large distances (either through traces interwoven to communicate across chip sections, or by physically moving atoms like with the neutral atom design) across the device. This has allowed a 10x reduction in the amount of physical qubits necessary to produce a reliable logical qubit. 

That is not something to sneeze at. While it might not be a fully functional machine making progress at gaining more efficiency, it is material efficiency gains in the engineering processes that underlie the production of a fully functional quantum computer. 

Progress In Proving Fundamentals

The second has to do with a more fundamental question around the assertion that adding more physical qubits leads to a reduction in overall noise in the system rather than an increase. This is really at this point still theory, and you have to keep in mind that to this day there has never been a fully functional quantum computer that has end-to-end performed a computation a classical computer is incapable of. 

Google performed an experiment using their Sycamore (and later Willow) chips to experimentally verify the effect of adding more physical qubits. To be very clear, this was not a demonstration of performing computations, but simply a demonstration of storing information in memory without it decaying. 

They demonstrated through the use of logical qubits composed of a bundle of 17 physical qubits, a bundle of 49 physical qubits, and a bundle of 101 physical qubits that the logical error rate, the frequency of data corruption, decreased as the physical qubit count went up. This test passed a critical threshold, where the logical qubit being created out of the independent physical qubits maintained coherence longer than any individual physical qubit it was composed of. 

Now again, this is not a jump to a fully functional quantum computer performing computations that classical machines are incapable of, but it is material progress proving one of the fundamental assumptions underlying quantum computers. 

AI

These aren’t the only things that we are finding better solutions to in this problem space either. Artificial intelligence has become a big component in these systems. It is being used in the actual process of reading and decoding information from a quantum computer, a big bottleneck for actually making use of it at scale. 

AI is also being used in the development of new quantum algorithms optimized for these types of machines, and given the recent spate of AI helping to solve (or even disprove existing conjectures) major problems in the field of mathematics, this isn’t really that crazy of a leap to consider the possibility of major breakthroughs brought about by AI. 

They are being put to the same use in actually designing the actual physical quantum circuits that are built using different architectures. This is a very complex problem, actually, finding the optimal way to lay out quantum gates in a physical space to minimize noise at the quantum level, without creating so much empty space that you introduce latency, inefficiency, and other problems to solve. 

This is a factor that very well could hypercharge progress at solving the necessary fundamental problems. 

Outlook Ahead

Ultimately, in my opinion, this comes down to one question: does the assumption that adding more physical qubits reduce noise actually hold when it comes to computation and the active manipulation of quantum information. 

If that assumption does hold, and isn’t experimentally disproven sometime in the near future, then I think there is a very realistic case for a viable quantum computer being produced in the next ten years. 

There is a massive amount of resources being thrown at this problem, significant (but not overwhelming) progress at solving pieces of the problem, and if there fundamentally is a way to do something, human beings usually figure it out. 

I’m not saying that it’s time to panic, but don’t discount the possibility. 

This piece is featured in the latest Print edition of Bitcoin Magazine, The Quantum Issue. We’re sharing it here as an early look at the ideas explored throughout the full issue.

This post The Quantum Issue: You Never Really Know The Future first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Shinobi.

Bitcoin Magazine

Raiffeisen Bank International to Roll Out Bitcoin Services Across Europe in Expanded Bitpanda Deal

Austrian banking group Raiffeisen is rolling out bitcoin trading for its 18 million customers.

The firm said in a Wednesday statement that it was working with brokerage Bitpanda as part of the initiative. 

Raiffeisen’s announcement comes as top banks worldwide launch crypto trading and custody services. BBVA, Santander’s Openbank, Germany’s cooperative and savings banks, SoFi, PNC, Charles Schwab and Morgan Stanley have all either launched or announced retail crypto trading over the past 18 months.

RBI chief executive Michael Höllerer pointed to customer demand as the driving force. “We are seeing growing demand for crypto assets in our markets, which we are addressing with a strong, reputable partner,” he said, adding that the bank is committed to “meeting our customers’ needs in the best possible way.”

The deal builds on an arrangement that began in Austria. In 2024, Raiffeisen Landesbank Niederösterreich-Wien (RLB NÖ-Wien) became the first traditional bank in the European Union to offer crypto trading within its existing banking environment, using Bitpanda’s technology. 

The new agreement moves away from striking separate integrations market by market and instead sets up a single approach for the whole group.

Bitpanda Enterprise provides banks, fintechs, brokers, trading firms and family offices with the tools to offer digital asset products to retail and corporate clients. Its services include investment infrastructure, liquidity, custody, payments, stablecoins and tokenisation, with an emphasis on compliance and scalability.

RBI treats Austria and Central and Eastern Europe as its home market, with subsidiary banks in 11 countries in the region. The group has about 42,000 employees serving 18.8 million customers through roughly 1,300 branches, most of them in CEE. Its shares trade on the Vienna Stock Exchange, and the regional Raiffeisen banks own about 61.2 per cent of the company, with the rest in free float.

This post Raiffeisen Bank International to Roll Out Bitcoin Services Across Europe in Expanded Bitpanda Deal first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Neutron voters passed proposal #9 on Sept. 22, with 11 “Update Admin” actions listed on the chain explorer. The same day, security tracker SlowMist recorded estimated losses of $4.9 million at Astroport and $4.4 million at Drop.

The tracker’s combined estimate of $9.3 million reflects the reported incidents.

Neutron’s governance documentation calls its DAO the network’s highest governing authority and describes its power to execute messages through governance. “Update Admin” is the action identified on the proposal index.

In practical terms, the network’s governance process can change control of a contract’s administrator, even when users experience Astroport or Drop as separate services.

The proposal was titled “AIATO: AI Agent Takeover. Phase 1: Agent Admin Registration.” The explorer marks it as passed and lists 11 administrator updates.

That count describes the proposal’s administrative scope. SlowMist names Astroport and Drop in its Sept. 22 records.

The proposal shows the chain-level route to changing administrators, while the SlowMist entries show the reported financial impact at two applications. Together they point to a risk that is easy to overlook when assessing an application only by its procedures: network governance may retain consequential authority over the software it hosts.

What remains recoverable

The incident estimates leave the final loss unsettled. Protos reported on Sept. 23 that network halts stranded most of the initially affected assets and that the attacker had extracted around one-fifth at the time of its report.

A network halt can contain assets without returning them to users. The reported extraction share measures movement beyond halted networks, but it gives a different view from the incident estimates for application funds.

A final recovery figure requires knowing which assets remain contained, which have been restored, and which have left defenders’ reach. Withdrawal from an application, movement between networks, containment during a halt, and eventual return to a user account are key steps.

For affected users, the unresolved issue is how much of that reported value can actually be returned.

The post Neutron DAO passes a new proposal, and $9.3M in crypto disappears appeared first on CryptoSlate.

MoonPay has signed a definitive agreement to buy North Capital Investment Technology, a deal that would bring an existing private-securities trading venue into the crypto payments company's group if it closes.

The companies announced the agreement on Sept. 23, and said both boards had approved it. Regulatory approvals and other closing conditions still stand between the agreement and a completed acquisition.

For MoonPay customers, the announcement changes nothing about stated access to private-securities trading. It gives no launch date, eligibility rules, or path into the venue.

The question for customers is whether MoonPay will eventually offer access to North Capital, and under what terms.

What the MoonPay deal would bring

North Capital supplies technology and regulated services to private securities issuers, professional intermediaries, fund managers and investors. Its business spans investor onboarding, transaction processing, custody and secondary trading.

The subsidiary North Capital Private Securities Corporation is a registered broker-dealer and, according to the company's announcement, operates PPEX, an alternative trading system where eligible securities can trade outside a traditional stock exchange.

The SEC's June 30 ATS list named the firm and PPEX before this proposed acquisition.

The deal would add an operating securities venue and brokerage business to MoonPay's existing infrastructure for moving money between conventional and digital assets. North Capital also has an investment-advisory business.

The companies have yet to describe a MoonPay customer-facing securities product. The regulated entities, trading system and customer interface are distinct pieces of that potential offering, and the announcement describes the first two as existing North Capital capabilities.

The deal announcement calls for North Capital to become a wholly owned MoonPay subsidiary upon completion. Until then, its businesses remain the target of a proposed transaction. The companies did not disclose the purchase price or provide a firm closing date.

The key near-term milestone is regulatory clearance and merger completion. MoonPay and North Capital said the transaction also depends on other customary conditions and cautioned that there is no assurance it will close, or when.

Even after a close, customers would need a separate announcement explaining what securities could be offered, through which entity, to whom and when.

PPEX shows what MoonPay may add to its platform if the deal succeeds: infrastructure for secondary trading in private and other exempt securities, including tokenized securities.

The announcement describes existing capability and a plan to combine businesses. MoonPay user access remains a prospective step, with no announced terms.

The post MoonPay targets $8.7B trading venue, but the features remain unrevealed appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Galaxy Digital has added $100 million of sUSDS, Sky Protocol's yield-bearing savings token, to its corporate treasury and approved it as collateral for institutional clients, the companies said Sept. 23.

Galaxy and Sky described the treasury position as complete, but their announcement gave no figure for client lending secured by sUSDS or the first completed loan. The decision makes the token eligible across Galaxy's institutional trading business, with actual client uptake still undisclosed.

The attraction is a token that continues to accrue a savings return when pledged. Under the announced arrangement, clients who post sUSDS against a loan keep accruing the Sky Savings Rate on the full position while the loan runs.

Sky says governance sets that rate and funds it from aggregate protocol surplus, and that holders keep the same number of sUSDS tokens as the amount of USDS redeemable for each token increases as it accrues. The savings rate can change, so future accrual is not fixed.

For a borrower, that design could offer access to credit while retaining a savings position. The financial result would depend on the loan terms and the rate available over its life. The announcement does not provide those details for any completed sUSDS-backed borrowing, and it also leaves open how much collateral clients might eventually post.

The earlier Galaxy and Sky lending link

The companies' relationship already includes credit financing through Grove, a Sky ecosystem agent. In July, Grove announced a $500 million warehouse facility that supplies capital for institutional loans Galaxy originates.

Grove is the warehouse lender, supplying USDS capital, while Galaxy originates and services the loans. Borrower collateral in that facility is limited to Bitcoin and Ethereum, including staked forms of Ethereum.

A Sky Frontier Foundation update published Sept. 17 said Sky agents held about $304 million with Galaxy as of Sept. 1, driven by the Grove facility. That figure describes Sky-side exposure to Galaxy before the new announcement.

The treasury allocation gives the partnership a stated balance-sheet footprint today. The collateral approval could extend sUSDS into Galaxy's client lending, where an identified loan or disclosed outstanding balance would show whether institutions use the token beyond Galaxy's own holdings.

The post Galaxy adds $100M Sky token and institutional adoption is tested appeared first on CryptoSlate.

A new Cardano governance action proposes cutting the minimum from 170 ADA to 75 ADA, this time without the Plutus memory-limit change that brought stake pool operators into the previous ballot.

The proposal drops one voting requirement that stopped the earlier action. Approval is pending, and each pool would still set its own declared fee.

Delegators in a small pool can lose a large share of a thin epoch reward to its fixed charge before their share is calculated. Meanwhile, operators rely on that charge for income, and those with little delegated stake already face uneven block production.

A lower floor would give them more room to compete on price, while leaving each operator to decide whether to use it.

A different ballot leaves the reward question open

The earlier action paired the same pool-cost reduction with higher Plutus memory limits. It expired on Sept. 1 after DRep yes votes reached 68.6%, above the 67% threshold, and five of seven Constitutional Committee members voted yes.

Stake pool operator support reached only 34.5% of counted stake, short of the required 51%. The memory-limit component made an SPO vote necessary for the combined action.

The standalone proposal, submitted Sept. 11, changes only minPoolCost. Cardano's parameter glossary classifies that as an economic parameter that needs DRep and Constitutional Committee approval, but no SPO ballot when changed alone.

That is the governance route for this type of change. DRep and committee votes still determine whether it passes, while operators continue debating its economic effects.

In a cached DRepTalk tally checked Sept. 23, yes votes for the new action represented 11.7% of counted DRep stake, against a 67% threshold. Two of seven committee members had voted yes, or 28.6%, against a 66.7% threshold.

Those figures can change before voting ends in epoch 661 on Oct. 11. A pool's fixed cost is taken from its gross reward each epoch before its margin, and the remainder is distributed across stake. The present mainnet minimum is 170 ADA.

If the proposal passes, an operator could declare 75 ADA, continue charging 170 ADA, or keep a higher fee. Delegators receive a benefit only if a pool with rewards to share actually lowers its charge.

The proposal illustrates the pressure on a small pool with an approximately 300 ADA gross reward from one block. At a 170 ADA fixed cost, about 57% of that reward goes to the fixed charge before margin. At 75 ADA, the share would be 25%.

If an operator charging 170 ADA chose 75 ADA in an epoch with sufficient rewards, 95 ADA more would remain before margin and allocation across stake. Each delegator's gain would depend on stake, margin, and the pool's actual rewards.

The strongest caution comes from how operators reacted to the last floor reduction. An Input Output Research study found that 340 ADA was still the most common declared fixed cost across active pool sizes after Cardano lowered the minimum from 340 to 170 ADA in October 2023.

The 170 ADA fee became a second tier used by smaller challengers. The prior cut expanded pricing options without prompting a network-wide shift to the new minimum. Past fee choices leave the response to a 75 ADA floor uncertain, and the parameter change alone would leave existing declared fees in place.

Small-pool relief has an operator cost

The same study classified pools using a 36-epoch window (epochs 548 through 583) and a viability benchmark tied to 3 million ADA of stake and 5,500 ADA of cumulative rewards. It put 627 active pools in a struggling category below both benchmarks, alongside 246 viable small pools and 741 pools at or above 3 million ADA.

A person or organization can control more than one pool, so pool totals alone cannot show whether ownership is becoming more decentralized.

If a pool lowers its fixed fee, more reward can remain for distribution, but the operator gives up part of a predictable charge. The trade-off is sharpest where block production is irregular and operating income is already thin.

The proposal's author argues that a lower floor could help smaller pools attract stake and describes the change as an interim step toward broader fee reform. Future delegation and operator income will determine whether the lower fee helps those pools become sustainable.

Cardano's wider reward-funding problem also sits outside this vote. Transaction fees covered less than 1% of staking rewards over a 73-epoch period, so changing the floor would alter who may receive a share of rewards in pools that cut their charge.

The immediate test is governance: whether DReps and the committee clear their thresholds by Oct. 11. If they do, the next test is operator behavior.

The measurable benefit for delegators would depend on how many pools actually declare a lower fixed cost, how often those pools earn rewards, and whether the income they retain can support independent operation.

The post Cardano proposal slashes fees by 55%, but it comes with a cost for small pools appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Coldcard owners can publicly check whether white hats recovered coins from their wallets. Galaxy researcher Alex Thorn linked a Sept. 21 Bitcoin transaction carrying a Crypto Recovery Trust claims reference to roughly 52.37 BTC from Coldcard-related clusters.

He directed owners to search their public Bitcoin addresses at the trust's site. A match can begin an ownership claim, with any return subject to verification. The check calls for a public address, never a seed phrase or private key.

Mempool's status record confirmed the transaction in block 967,948. In his Sept. 21 tracing report, Thorn said the amount represented 2.8% of the exploit funds Galaxy tracked.

Thorn also flagged 3.0134 BTC entering the destination from addresses Galaxy had not previously tracked. He considered them possible additional white-hat recoveries, but their Coldcard origin remains uncertain.

In an Aug. 17 report, digital-asset recovery firm DART said it and independent researchers had secured just over 50 BTC, according to its internal ledger, and placed the rescued Bitcoin with Crypto Recovery Trust.

The Sept. 21 transaction gives owners a public trail for a recovery DART had described a month earlier.

What happens after a Bitcoin address match?

DART says its trust process checks recovery records, chain of custody, and proof of ownership, including source-of-funds and exchange records. Sanctions, competing claims, or other restrictions can affect any return.

The Coldcard entropy flaw made some older wallet seeds easier to reconstruct. DART says an existing seed created under affected firmware remains exposed after a firmware update, and owners with exposed funds should follow the manufacturer's migration guidance.

DART also warns against sending seeds, private keys, PINs, or recovery codes through a web form. The initial address check Thorn described needs a public address, while proving ownership is a separate step.

The post White hats recover 52 Bitcoin from Coldcard exploit, and a new public portal lets victims check eligibility appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Litecoin is the only larger crypto asset in positive territory this Thursday morning, while almost everything else is losing ground. Anyone holding Litecoin or about to buy in should read the move not as a buy signal but as a prompt to check three things: which route you actually use to obtain LTC in Germany, what happens to holdings that sit in the MWEB privacy layer, and which deadline European anti-money laundering law sets from July 10, 2027. This article works through exactly those three points.

Litecoin up 5 percent: the only gainer in a field of losses

We pulled the market data ourselves twice on September 24, 2026, at 03:47 and at 03:56 UTC, each time from the public CoinGecko market list for the 25 largest crypto assets. After stripping out the stablecoins and two special cases without a free market price, 19 positions remained for scoring. Of those 19, exactly one carried a gain of more than one percent: Litecoin, up 5.0 to 5.4 percent over 24 hours at a price of roughly $66.80 to $67.20. Bitcoin Cash hovered around the flat line in the same window, between minus 0.4 and plus 0.3 percent. The remaining 17 assets were in the red.

This assessment was compiled by cryptoticker.io itself on September 24, 2026. Method: two retrievals of the market list for the 25 largest crypto assets by market capitalisation, both answered with HTTP 200, followed by manual removal of the stablecoins and of the two assets without a freely tradable price. What we could not check is how prices moved after 03:56 UTC, or whether individual exchanges quote different levels. The figures are a market average, not an execution price.

The counterpart to Litecoin is the breadth of the decline. Uniswap lost 13.5 percent over the same 24 hours, Dogecoin 10.2 percent, Stellar 9.3 percent and Cardano 8.1 percent. Bitcoin gave up 3.2 percent to around $83,900, Ether 3.6 percent to around $2,675. The contrast with the weekly balance is striking: over seven days almost all of these assets are firmly higher, Uniswap by some 38.6 percent, Cardano by 22.3 percent, Bitcoin by 10.5 percent. So the market is handing back part of a very strong week.

Litecoin falls outside that pattern because it leads on the weekly view as well, up 26.1 percent, and over a month by around 25.4 percent. Market capitalisation stood at about $5.19 billion, with 24-hour turnover of roughly $815 million. Trading volume on that scale against that market capitalisation suggests the move is carried by real flow rather than resting on a few thin order books.

Why a single winning day is not yet a turning point

A day on which one asset runs against the market means only that its buyers are acting on a different motive from everyone else right now. That motive can be structural, and it can equally be a short-term reallocation that disappears again within days. What is solid here is the observation itself, and not the interpretation placed on it. What follows therefore keeps the two apart: first the documented figures on the MWEB layer, then the legal position, then the points you can check against your own holdings.

MWEB explained: what Litecoin's optional privacy layer actually does

MWEB stands for Mimblewimble Extension Blocks. It is an extension of the Litecoin network, live since 2022, into which you can deliberately move LTC so that the amounts and addresses of a transaction are no longer readable in plain text on the public blockchain. The decisive word is optional. The ordinary Litecoin blockchain remains as transparent as it ever was. If you do nothing, your balance stays in the open chain and is as traceable as before.

Technically, two operations are involved that are worth knowing, because they matter later for tax and at exchanges. The peg-in is the transfer from the open chain into the MWEB layer. The peg-out is the way back. Both are ordinary Litecoin transactions and both appear on the blockchain. What is therefore visible is that something moved into or out of the layer, but not which amounts moved between which addresses inside it.

From that follows a property often lost in the debate. MWEB does not automatically turn Litecoin into an anonymous coin. It gives it a switchable confidentiality layer that the holder activates. For the legal assessment, precisely that distinction is the heart of the matter, and it becomes important again further down.

How to tell whether your own balance sits in MWEB

The simplest test is the address. MWEB addresses are noticeably longer than ordinary Litecoin addresses and carry their own prefix. If your wallet shows you two separate balances for the same holding, one normal and one labelled MWEB or confidential, then part of your funds sits in the layer. If your wallet shows a single balance and you have never actively triggered an MWEB transfer, your holding is in the open chain. Hardware wallets still support MWEB only partially, which gives you a check of its own.

MWEB holdings at a record high: which figures are documented and which are not

The reason most often given for the Litecoin move is the growth of funds held in the MWEB layer. The figures come from the specialist analytics service MWEB Explorer, and they differ depending on the cut-off date. For September 11, 2026, a balance of 563,117 LTC is reported, worth around $29.5 million at the time. More recent summaries cite roughly 519,000 LTC. We are deliberately not smoothing that over: the documented range for September 2026 lies between about 519,000 and 563,117 LTC, with an interim high on September 11.

For context, the comparison with earlier years says more than the daily figure. Through most of 2024 the balance in the MWEB layer sat below 100,000 LTC. Even at the lower end of today's range, the amount has more than quintupled since then. The number of addresses holding MWEB balances also reached a record in September 2026.

One caveat belongs with this. The analytics service that maintains the series does not answer automated requests; our own retrieval of the balance chart was refused with HTTP 403. For readers the page loads normally in a browser, and the figures quoted are confirmed by several independent reports. So we did not compute them from the chain ourselves, and you should know that before you base an investment decision on them. The source is linked here: MWEB Explorer, balance history of the MWEB layer.

What the figure does and does not say is equally a question of precision. A rising MWEB balance shows that more LTC are parked in the confidentiality layer. It does not show that a corresponding number of people have bought afresh, because a peg-in shifts existing holdings and creates no demand in the market. Reading the balance curve as a demand indicator confuses two different things.

Peg-in and peg-out: why some exchanges refuse deposits from the MWEB layer

This is the point that matters most in practice for anyone who moves LTC rather than simply leaving it alone. A trading platform has to be able to check the origin of incoming funds. Where a deposit arrives from the MWEB layer, the platform sees the peg-out but not the chain before it. Some providers solve this by declining deposits from MWEB addresses outright at the technical level, or by holding them after arrival for manual review.

The consequences are unpleasant and avoidable. In the better case a rejected deposit is returned; in the worse case it hangs in a review queue for days, precisely when you wanted to sell. So the rule is this: check your platform's deposit terms before you send LTC there from an MWEB address, not afterwards.

The three questions to put to your platform in advance

1. Does the platform accept Litecoin deposits from MWEB addresses at all? The answer is usually in the help page on deposits and withdrawals, not in the fee schedule.
2. Will the platform pay out to an MWEB address on request, or only to ordinary Litecoin addresses? Both practices exist, and this determines whether you can reach the layer at all after buying.
3. What evidence does it require for a deposit whose history is invisible on the blockchain? A platform that answers this clearly up front is the better choice at this point.

If you still need a suitable venue: our overview of the best crypto exchanges puts fees, deposit routes and withdrawal terms side by side, so you can work through the three questions above against specific providers.

Buying Litecoin in Germany: checking MiCA providers, purchase route and fees

Since the European regulation on markets in crypto-assets came into full effect, crypto-asset service providers in Germany may only deal with retail clients under an appropriate authorisation. For you as a buyer that is a relief, because it narrows the field to supervised providers, and an obligation, because you ought to know your provider's status. Anyone wanting to know which duties sit behind that and by when they bite will find the background in our overview of MiCA licensing obligations for crypto companies.

On the purchase route itself, what matters is less the headline trading fee than the sum of the fee and the spread between the bid and the ask. For an asset such as Litecoin with daily turnover of around $815 million, that spread is tight at large venues and noticeably wider at small platforms and on instant-buy functions. A surcharge of one percent on a purchase of 2,000 euros is 20 euros that you have to earn back before your first gain on the price.

If you move larger sums, it is also worth checking the public register of Germany's Federal Financial Supervisory Authority: it shows whether your provider actually holds the authorisation it claims on its website.

What a crypto ETP changes at this point, and what it does not

An exchange-traded product tracking the price now exists for Litecoin too. Convenient access through a securities account comes with two catches worth knowing. First, a product of that kind holds the coins for you, so you get neither a wallet nor access to the MWEB layer. Second, different tax rules apply to ETPs than to directly held coins, particularly around the holding period. The existence of such a product also does not mean it is being used: inflows have so far stayed small.

Article 79 of the EU anti-money laundering regulation: what applies to anonymity-enhancing crypto-assets from July 10, 2027

Regulation (EU) 2024/1624, the European anti-money laundering regulation, contains a rule in Article 79(1) that bears directly on this subject. It states that credit institutions, financial institutions and crypto-asset service providers may keep neither anonymous crypto-asset accounts nor any other accounts that otherwise allow the holder of the customer account to be anonymised or transactions to be anonymised or, in the wording used, highly obfuscated, expressly including through anonymity-enhancing coins. Under Article 90 the regulation applies from July 10, 2027. You can read both in the official text: Regulation (EU) 2024/1624 on EUR-Lex.

What matters is what the text says and what it does not. The provision addresses supervised service providers, not you as a private individual. It does not prohibit a private individual from owning a coin, and it contains no list of banned crypto-assets either. What it forbids service providers to do is keep accounts that anonymise holders or transactions or heavily obscure them.

How a supervisor will classify a coin with a switchable confidentiality layer under that wording is the open question. Two readings stand side by side, and both are assessments rather than settled law. The first looks at the coin as a whole and would place Litecoin close to the category named, because the MWEB function exists. The second looks at the individual account: a balance in the open, transparent Litecoin chain anonymises nothing, so the rule would bite only on deposits whose origin has been obscured. The second reading fits the wording better, since it speaks of accounts and of the ability to anonymise by means of them. No binding interpretation from the competent authorities exists so far.

In practice what matters most to you is how the platforms react, because they decide earlier than any court. With crypto-assets that have anonymity built in permanently, European venues have repeatedly delisted as a precaution in recent years, long before any deadline ran. For Litecoin no such step has been announced, and there is no documented indication that one is planned. None of this calls for panic. It calls for a monitoring task: keep an eye on your platform's notices, and do not rely on a delisting being announced with plenty of warning.

Holding period and tax: what a peg-in means for your one-year clock and your FIFO records

In Germany, crypto-assets held as private wealth count as other economic goods. A sale within one year of acquisition is a private disposal transaction, the resulting gain is taxable, and an exemption threshold of 1,000 euros applies to all private disposal transactions in a given year taken together. Once the threshold is exceeded, the whole gain is taxable, not merely the excess. After one year has passed, a sale out of private wealth is tax free.

For MWEB the decisive question is whether a peg-in restarts the clock. On the prevailing view, moving funds between your own addresses is neither an acquisition nor a disposal, because the beneficial owner does not change; the holding period therefore continues to run. We are not aware of any explicit statement from the tax authorities specifically on MWEB, and for an individual case this article is no substitute for tax advice.

The real problem lies elsewhere, and it is a documentation problem. The tax authorities expect a traceable record of which unit was acquired when, usually on a first-in-first-out basis per wallet. That traceability is exactly what the MWEB layer removes from the public chain at the moment of the peg-in. A tax tool that would otherwise reconstruct your history from the blockchain cannot see the movements inside the layer.

The records you have to keep yourself

• Date, time, amount and euro value for every peg-in and every peg-out, each with the transaction ID from the open chain.
• The mapping of which originally acquired tranche you moved into the layer, so that the acquisition data can still be matched up after the peg-out.
• Purchase and sale confirmations from your trading platform evidencing the acquisition date, irrespective of where the coins travelled afterwards.
• An export of your wallet history at year end, because wallet software does not necessarily restore the full record after a reinstallation.

Anyone who fails to keep this running log reconstructs it later from memory, and that rarely survives a query. Which tools maintain and export these histories is covered in our overview of crypto tax software and portfolio trackers; pay particular attention there to whether a tool permits manual correcting entries, because without them you cannot record MWEB operations cleanly.

Storing LTC: hardware wallet, MWEB support and the seed as your only way back

A balance in the MWEB layer hangs on the same recovery phrase as the rest of your Litecoin holdings, but it is not handled identically by every wallet application. This is where custody and privacy meet: a wallet that does not know MWEB will simply not display that part of your holdings after a recovery. The funds are not lost in that case, but you cannot see them, and without suitable software you cannot reach them.

Three things to check before your next peg-in:

1. Does your wallet support MWEB today, and does it also support it in the version you would reinstall if the worst happened? For hardware wallets this is the most common gap.
2. Have you ever practised the recovery, with a small amount and on a second device? An untested backup is an assumption.
3. Is your recovery phrase kept away from every device connected to the internet? A photo in the cloud is not a backup. It is a second route of attack.

Which devices cover which functions and what they cost is set out in our hardware wallet comparison. Check Litecoin support explicitly before buying, because on some devices it is loaded through an additional application.

Levels above and below: which Litecoin price marks decide the next few days

The starting points of the move can be worked back from the measured rates of change, and those serve as orientation better than round wish-list levels. The daily move started at around $63.60. Seven days ago Litecoin stood at about $52.90, and 30 days ago at about $53.30. The entire upward move of the past month therefore rests on a zone around $53.

On the downside that gives two steps: first the starting point of the day at around $63.60, and below it the zone around $53, a break of which would mean the monthly move had been given back in full. On the upside the next notable mark is the round threshold at $70, which Litecoin has yet to reach in the current advance. These are orientation points drawn from the measured price action and no forecast; where the price actually goes, nobody can tell you responsibly.

For practical handling, the level itself matters less than what you do at it. Anyone setting a sell threshold should know in advance whether the sale would fall within the one-year period, because a taxable gain changes the arithmetic. Anyone planning to add should check the value of the fee and the trading spread before splitting an order into parts.

Privacy rotation in the market: what Zcash and Monero reveal about the Litecoin move

The rise in Litecoin is frequently explained by a rotation into assets with privacy features. Our own measurements do not support that for the day itself. Zcash lost 6.6 percent over the same 24 hours to around $1,503, and Monero gave up 2.8 percent to around $553. Had money been flowing deliberately into the privacy narrative this morning, those two would hardly have had to give ground at the same time.

Over a longer horizon the picture differs. Across 30 days Zcash is up around 82 percent, from about $826, and Monero around 25 percent. So there is indeed a privacy theme in the market; it simply does not explain Litecoin's move on the day. Anyone looking for an explanation for today will find it closer to Bitcoin Cash, which has gained 54 percent over seven days and also barely slipped this morning. Both are old, large-capitalisation networks with long histories, and both have recently outperformed the broad market.

For you as a holder, one sober conclusion follows. A narrative that explains a move after the fact is still no reason to send money after it. What is documented this morning: Litecoin is the only one of the 19 scored top assets with a meaningful gain, and the balance in the MWEB layer stands at a historically high level. Everything beyond that is interpretation.

Checking Litecoin and MWEB: what to take away

1. First establish where your LTC sits and whether your platform accepts it. Check in your wallet whether part of your holdings is carried as an MWEB balance, and read your venue's deposit terms before you transfer anything. Suitable providers with the associated deposit and withdrawal routes are in our overview of the best crypto exchanges.
2. Start logging your peg-in and peg-out operations today. Date, amount, euro value and transaction ID are enough as long as you keep the log complete; that keeps your holding period evidenced even when the chain no longer shows the route. Tools that maintain and export such histories are in the comparison of crypto tax software and portfolio trackers.
3. Test your recovery before you move more into the layer. Restore your wallet with a small amount on a second device and see whether the MWEB balance appears there. Which devices cover Litecoin and the layer is shown in the hardware wallet comparison.

(As of September 24, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

A trading bot does exactly what you switch it on to do: it trades. Twelve decisions a year quickly become twelve hundred, and in Germany every single one of them is a separate event for tax purposes. That is the point at which many bot users start to think twice, usually in March, when the tax return is due and the trading platform's export button produces a file with a four-digit number of rows.

This guide answers the question behind that: what does a crypto trading bot trigger for tax purposes, and what do you have to set up before it makes its first trade? It is about the holding period, about the FIFO allocation rule, about the tax-free threshold, about the line to commercial trading and about the record-keeping duties that the Federal Ministry of Finance has expressly described since March 2025. At the end there is a setup list you can work through.

Why a bot changes your tax position before it makes any profit

The decisive difference between manual and automated trading lies not in the size of the profit but in the number of transactions. Anyone who buys Bitcoin and leaves it alone for three years has two events for tax purposes: a purchase and a sale. A bot that lays a grid of buy and sell orders across a price range may produce a thousand events in the same period.

Not a single rule changes as a result. What changes is the effort required to comply with them, and the likelihood of making a mistake that gets noticed. Whether running a bot pays off at all we have worked through elsewhere, in our piece on whether crypto trading bots are worth it. This text starts one step later: the bot is already running, and now it is about the tax office.

The principle: every swap is a disposal under section 23 of the Income Tax Act

In Germany crypto assets count as other economic goods within the meaning of the Income Tax Act. Gains from their sale therefore fall under private disposal transactions pursuant to section 23 of the Income Tax Act and not under the withholding tax you know from equities and funds. That has two consequences pulling in opposite directions: there is a holding period after which a gain remains tax-free, but within that period the gain is taxed at your personal income tax rate, which can be higher than the flat 25 percent.

A disposal is to be understood more broadly than the word suggests. It covers every swap, not merely a sale for euros: Bitcoin for Ether, Ether for a stablecoin, a stablecoin back into Bitcoin. That is precisely where bot trading is special. A grid bot that shifts back and forth between two coins without ever triggering a payout in euros still produces a tax-relevant event at every step. That nothing arrives in your bank account is irrelevant to this.

The gain per transaction is calculated as the disposal price less the acquisition cost and the directly attributable costs. In a swap, the disposal price is the market value of what you receive, converted into euros at the time of the transaction. That conversion is the point at which a spreadsheet breaks down at a thousand rows.

The one-year holding period and why a bot practically never reaches it

If more than twelve months lie between acquisition and disposal, the gain remains tax-free under section 23 of the Income Tax Act. That period is the reason many German investors hold crypto assets at all rather than trade them.

A bot works structurally against that period. Its job is to capture price moves within hours or days. Every successful trade resets the holding period of the units concerned to zero. In practice that means you will almost always pay the full tax rate on the holdings the bot moves, and you should factor that into your return expectations before switching it on.

From that follows a design rule that sounds simple and is often ignored in practice: separate the holdings the bot is allowed to touch from the holdings you keep for the long term. That is done most cleanly through separate accounts or separate wallets, because units are allocated on a per-wallet basis. If both run through the same pot, the bot also reaches your older units in the calculation, and then you lose holding periods you had already earned.

FIFO: which unit the bot sells is not up to you

If you have bought Bitcoin at five different points in time and the bot sells part of it, the question arises which of those units it gives up in the calculation. Your instinct may say the most expensive one, so that the gain comes out small. That is not how it works.

FIFO stands for first in, first out and means that the unit acquired first always counts as the one disposed of first. The Federal Ministry of Finance provides for this method of allocation, applied to the respective wallet or account. The consequence is uncomfortable: when the bot sells, it reaches your oldest units in the calculation, that is, the ones with possibly the lowest acquisition cost and the highest gain. What exactly distinguishes FIFO from other methods we have taken apart in our explainer on FIFO and LIFO for crypto assets.

For bot operation the same conclusion follows as in the section before, only from a different direction: separate wallets are not tidiness for its own sake but the only lever with which you steer at all which units the bot reaches.

The 1,000 euro threshold, and why an exemption limit is not an allowance

An annual exemption limit applies to private disposal transactions. Since the 2024 assessment period that limit has been 1,000 euros; before that it was 600 euros.

The difference between an exemption limit and an allowance is regularly confused and, in case of doubt, costs real money. An allowance would always stay tax-free, and only the excess would be taxed. With an exemption limit it is different: if it is exceeded by even one euro, the entire gain is taxable, not merely the excess. On an annual gain of 999 euros you pay nothing; on 1,001 euros you are taxed on 1,001 euros.

For bot users that is more relevant than for buy-and-hold investors, because a bot produces many small gains that add up inconspicuously. Anyone close to the limit towards the end of the year has a solid reason to switch the bot off for the final weeks — or, conversely, with accumulated paper losses, a reason to realise those before the turn of the year. Losses from private disposal transactions can, however, only be offset against gains of the same income type, not against your salary and not against equity gains.

When private trading becomes commercial trading

The question that sooner or later comes up with high trade counts: does the trading become commercial at some point, with trade tax, accounting obligations and the loss of the holding period?

There is no fixed number at which that happens. The much-quoted three-object rule comes from property law and does not apply here. For securities trading, case law has developed a fairly generous standard over decades: even a high trading volume and a high number of transactions regularly remain private asset management, as long as you trade for your own account and do not appear in the market like an investment services firm. Signs pointing the other way are, for instance, trading for the account of others, the systematic use of borrowed capital in the manner of a dealer, or an outwardly visible business operation.

Whether that standard can be transferred one to one to crypto assets has not been conclusively settled by the highest courts, and that is precisely why caution is in order with blanket statements — in both directions. Anyone running a bot for third parties, charging fees for it or co-managing several accounts belonging to other people is visibly moving out of private asset management. We have dealt with the delimitation in more detail in our piece on the difference between private and commercial crypto trading. If your set-up comes anywhere near those features, that is the moment for advice and not for an internet search.

Record-keeping duties: what the finance ministry has expressly required since March 2025

With its circular of March 6, 2025, the Federal Ministry of Finance revised its administrative position on crypto assets and replaced the earlier circular from May 2022. The most important addition for bot users concerns the tax return, cooperation and record-keeping duties, which are now described there separately.

The practical core is this: you must be able to evidence your transactions without gaps. That includes the complete transaction statements of the trading venues used, the allocation of holdings to wallets and accounts, the exchange rates at the relevant time and the origin of the funds deployed. If you cannot do that, the tax authority may estimate the basis of assessment. An estimate is not a formality to be smoothed over later but, as a rule, more expensive than the correct declaration would have been.

The catch with automated trading lies in the transience of the data. Trading venues often keep exports available only for a limited time, bot providers disappear from the market, and API keys expire. What you do not secure today may be impossible to obtain in three years — and three years is a short span in tax matters. That is why the export belongs in the monthly rhythm and not in the week before the return is filed. Which tools take that over automatically and connect directly to the trading venues is shown in our overview of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers.

What running a bot costs and how those costs are classified

Besides the trades, a bot produces running costs of its own: the trading venue's fee per execution, often a monthly subscription for the software, sometimes the cost of a server on which the strategy runs.

Trading fees directly connected with a single transaction reduce the gain on that transaction — so they belong inside the calculation and not on a separate list. Considerably less clear is the treatment of running costs such as the subscription or the server, because they cannot be allocated to any single transaction. Do not count firmly on being able to deduct them in full here, and have the point clarified rather than deciding it yourself. More important than the tax outcome is the commercial question anyway: a bot whose subscription and fee load eats up the gross return is a loss-making exercise even with perfect tax treatment. Which models bill in which way you can set side by side in our comparison of crypto trading bots.

What to set up before the bot makes its first trade

Five things can be dealt with in advance, and every one of them is laborious to impossible to catch up on later.

1. Separate accounts or wallets for the bot holdings and the long-term holdings. This protects earned holding periods from FIFO access and is the single most effective step of all.
2. A monthly, automatic export of all transactions. Store it somewhere that exists independently of the trading venue and of the bot provider.
3. A tax tool that connects to the trading venues directly. At four-digit trade counts, manual work is no longer a serious option.
4. A note on the strategy and on the period in which the bot ran. A year later you will otherwise no longer know why a hundred trades arose on a particular day.
5. A tax reserve kept separate from the trading capital. Gains within the holding period are taxed at your personal rate, and that amount is not available to you for further trading, even if it is sitting in the account.

Trading bots and tax: what to take away

1. Separate the holdings before you start the bot. Separate wallets for trading and long-term holdings prevent FIFO from using up your old units that are ripe for the deadline. Which provider allows which account and sub-account structure you can see in the trading bot comparison.
2. Set up the monthly export, not the annual one. The record-keeping duties fall on you, not on the trading venue, and exports are available only for as long as the provider keeps them. The suitable tools are in our overview of tax tools.
3. Check your annual position against the 1,000 euro threshold before the turn of the year. One euro above makes the entire gain taxable. Where the figures end up in the return later is explained in our piece on where to enter crypto in your tax return.

The authoritative texts in the original: the wording of the law on private disposal transactions in section 23 of the German Income Tax Act and the Federal Ministry of Finance circular of March 6, 2025 on individual questions of the income tax treatment of certain crypto assets.

This text is a general classification and does not replace tax advice. How your case is to be treated depends on your set-up, your volume and your other income; settle that with your tax adviser or your tax office.

(As of September 24, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

On September 27, 2026 a deadline expires at the US Securities and Exchange Commission about which nothing has yet been written in German. It does not concern the approval of another crypto fund but the rail beneath it: the question of the conditions under which US exchanges will in future be allowed to list options on crypto ETFs without asking the regulator separately each time. If you hold a crypto ETP on Bitcoin, Solana or XRP in a German portfolio, there is nothing you can do on that day. You will notice the consequence all the same, and in a place few investors watch: in the bid-ask spread of your own security.

This guide explains what the filing numbered SR-ISE-2026-42 contains, why September 27 will in all likelihood not be a decision day at all, and which four things you can check on your own product instead of waiting for a US authority.

What actually happens at the SEC on September 27

The filing comes from the options exchange Nasdaq ISE and was printed on August 13, 2026 in the Federal Register, the official gazette of the US federal agencies. That printing starts a statutory clock.

A 19b-4 filing is the technical term for a rule change that a US exchange submits to the SEC. The regulator then has 45 days to approve the filing, to reject it or to institute formal proceedings. Counted from August 13, that period ends on September 27, 2026.

Three routes are open to the agency on that day. It can approve, it can institute so-called proceedings and thereby take up to 90 days from the date of printing, or it can reject. The second option is the usual course for filings of this magnitude. Running the 90 days through, one arrives at November 11, 2026. Anyone writing September 27 into the calendar as decision day will probably have to strike it out again afterwards.

SR-ISE-2026-42 explained: from case-by-case filing to a rule test

To understand why the filing was made at all, it helps to look at the current state of affairs. Options on spot Bitcoin ETFs have existed on US exchanges since 2024. The road there was laborious: every single listing needed its own filing with the SEC, its own comment period and its own approval. The options on the largest Bitcoin fund were cleared by exactly that route through Nasdaq ISE in the autumn of 2024.

How slow the procedure is can be seen in the counter-example from the same year: the NYSE withdrew its plan to list options on Bitcoin ETFs. We described the episode in our report on the NYSE withdrawal. Taken together, the two events produce the picture of a rail that does exist but has to be laid anew for every additional fund.

That is precisely what SR-ISE-2026-42 seeks to replace. In place of the case-by-case review, a rule test is to apply: a list of measurable criteria a fund has to meet. If they are met, the exchange may list the options without going back to the regulator for that one product. The filing expressly names funds holding Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP, Chainlink and Hedera.

The two thresholds in the filing: 85 percent of NAV and $700 million daily market value

At its core the rule test consists of two numbers, and both are set so that only large, liquid products reach them.

The first concerns the composition of the fund. NAV stands for net asset value: the sum of what the fund holds, less its liabilities. Under the filing, at least 85 percent of NAV must be accounted for by assets for which a tradable futures market exists. For the remaining 15 percent there is a buffer in which other digital commodities may also sit. A fund one quarter of which consists of exotic tokens therefore fails the test.

The second number concerns each of those assets individually. Per digital commodity, the filing requires an average worldwide daily market value of $700 million. That is the hurdle that turns a catalogue of criteria into a selection: this threshold separates the two dozen largest assets from the long remainder.

There is a third condition on top, less conspicuous in daily practice but the decisive one in supervisory terms. The derivatives on the fund's holdings must trade on a market monitored by a member of the Intermarket Surveillance Group — an association of exchanges and supervisory bodies that share trading data with one another in order to detect market manipulation. That surveillance, too, must cover at least 85 percent of NAV. Without that evidence, the SEC has in the past hardly ever given its consent.

Why 'digital commodity' instead of 'crypto asset' is more than a change of wording

One change in the filing reads like cosmetics and is not. The term crypto asset is replaced by digital commodity, borrowed from an existing Nasdaq rule for commodity trusts.

Behind it lies a question of jurisdiction that has been unresolved in the United States for years: is a crypto asset a security and therefore a matter for the SEC, or a commodity and therefore a matter for the futures regulator, the CFTC? Classifying a product as a commodity places it in a framework for which tried and tested options and surveillance rules have existed for decades. The filing thus anticipates a classification that the US legislature actually meant to make itself and to this day has not conclusively made. How slow that process is we described in our piece on the new SEC approval rules for crypto funds.

For you as a reader, that is why this inconspicuous filing deserves attention: it moves no prices, but it moves the category in which regulation happens.

Why you as a German investor cannot buy any of these US ETFs

Here the US part of the story ends and the German one begins. The funds whose options are at issue cannot be bought through your broker in Germany, and that is not the broker's doing.

The reason is the European UCITS directive. It requires investment funds sold to retail investors to hold a minimum spread of assets. A fund holding one single asset does not meet that requirement. A pure Bitcoin ETF in the legal sense therefore cannot be set up in the EU.

What trades in Europe instead are ETPs and ETNs. An ETN is in legal terms a debt security: a bond issued by the provider whose redemption is measured against the price of an asset. That is an important difference from a fund, because fund assets are ring-fenced and protected if the management company becomes insolvent. With a debt security they are not. Most European issuers address this issuer risk by actually buying the underlying coins and depositing them with a regulated custodian. Which securities those are in detail, and how to recognise a properly collateralised one, is set out in our guide to what you can actually buy in Germany instead of a crypto ETF.

These securities trade on Xetra, Gettex, Spectrum and the regional exchanges, that is, through the same account that holds your equities. Whether your provider offers all those venues is not a side issue, and the differences are larger than many expect; a look at our comparison of crypto brokers shows which venues are available where.

The transmission path: how options trading works through market makers on your spread

That leaves the question of why a US rulebook for options should reach a German portfolio at all. The route runs through the dealers who quote your prices.

A market maker is a trading firm that undertakes to quote a buying and a selling price continuously. The difference between the two is the spread, and it is the price you pay on entry and exit without seeing it on the statement as a fee. That spread is not arbitrary: it covers the risk the dealer takes on when buying a security from you and holding it on his own book for a while.

That risk is precisely what he hedges, and the cheaper the hedge, the tighter he can quote. A deeper options market on large crypto funds gives him more tools for that: more maturities, more counterparties, lower cost per dollar hedged. That cheapening does not stay confined to the US products, because the same firms often also serve the European ETPs and hedge against the same underlying markets.

A word of caution is in order here: this is a mechanism, not a promise. Spreads also depend on the time of day, on market conditions and on how many dealers serve a particular security at all. Anyone promising you that your bid-ask spread will narrow after an SEC decision is claiming more than can be evidenced. What can be said is that the direction of this relationship is well understood, and it points downwards.

What to check on your crypto ETP: spread, trading venue and collateral

Instead of waiting for September 27, you can measure the four quantities at issue on your own security. None of them requires a paid tool.

First, the bid-ask spread. Open your broker's order screen and look at the bid and ask price of the same security. The difference, divided by the mid-price, gives the spread in percent. Measure it twice: once in the morning and once after the close on the German exchanges. With many crypto ETPs there are worlds between those two readings, and that is information about your security, not about the market.

Second, the trading venue. The same security can cost different amounts on Xetra and at an over-the-counter venue. Compare the two before your next order instead of accepting the default setting's suggestion.

Third, the collateral. The key information document and the prospectus state whether the security is physically backed, who the custodian is and whether you have a claim to delivery of the coins. This point determines your tax position later, see below.

Fourth, the running costs. The total expense ratio is in the key information document. Set it against the spread: with a security you hold for a long time the running costs weigh more heavily; with frequent switching it is the other way round.

Tax: why the claim to delivery decides the holding period on an ETP

In the taxation of crypto ETPs in Germany a great deal hangs on a single feature of the security, namely whether it grants you a claim to delivery of the coins deposited.

The common reading in advisory practice: if the security grants a claim to delivery of the coins and is physically backed, it tends to be treated for tax purposes like the asset itself — that is, as a private disposal transaction under section 23 of the Income Tax Act, with the familiar one-year holding period, after which a gain remains tax-free. If that claim is absent, classification as a capital claim under section 20 of the Income Tax Act is the closer fit, and then withholding tax applies regardless of how long you have held the security.

The words 'tends to' and 'closer fit' are deliberate. This classification is contested in the individual case, it hangs on the specific design of the particular security, and it has shifted several times in recent years. What applies to your product belongs settled before the purchase and not in the year of disposal, when nothing about the design can be changed any more. Evidence for both sides is best collected as you go; which tools take that off your hands is set out in our overview of crypto tax tools. Binding advice on the matter, however, comes neither from a tool nor from this article, but from your tax adviser or your tax office.

A marginal point that is often confused: the European crypto regulation MiCA governs crypto service providers and certain tokens. An ETP is a financial instrument under MiFID II and falls into the securities world. So anyone checking an issuer's MiCA status is not checking the security in their portfolio.

The two caveats you have to read along with this

Two limitations to close with, without which this text would look wrong in four weeks.

The first caveat concerns the date. September 27 is the 45-day mark, not the date of a decision. If the SEC institutes formal proceedings, the matter shifts to the 90-day mark around November 11, 2026, and even that can be stretched further in certain constellations. Extensions are the rule with filings of this kind. So if nothing happens at the end of September, that is not a failure of the filing but the expected course.

The second caveat concerns the subject matter. This is about options on crypto ETFs, not about the funds themselves and certainly not about the approval of new spot products. An SEC approval therefore brings not a single new fund to market and changes nothing about the fact that these funds remain unavailable to you in Germany. The filing makes hedging cheaper for those who trade it anyway. Anyone reading the episode as the starting gun for a new wave of products is reading it wrongly. How an expiry date on the futures market, by contrast, feeds straight through to leveraged positions, we worked through using the example of the Bitcoin options expiry in September.

Options on crypto ETFs: what to take away

1. Measure your spread before you think about the SEC. Two readings on a single trading day, morning and evening, tell you more about your actual trading costs than any US headline. If you find conspicuous spreads, compare the security and the trading venue against the alternatives in the crypto broker comparison.
2. Check the collateral and the claim to delivery of your ETP in the key information document. Both are set out there in black and white, and both determine issuer risk and tax treatment later on. Which security serves which purpose in Germany is sorted out in our guide to crypto ETFs and their tradable alternatives.
3. Put November 11 in your calendar instead of September 27. Until then the matter is open, and until then nothing changes in your portfolio. Anyone thinking about an entry in that period should compare the trading routes beforehand in our overview of crypto exchanges.

The full wording of the filing is in the official notice in the Federal Register of August 13, 2026; the complete submission including the catalogue of criteria is in SEC release 34-106067.

(As of September 24, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Xi Jinping arrives at the White House today, Thursday, September 24, 2026, on an official state visit. For investors that means one thing above all: over several hours, headlines will be produced that the crypto market reacts to immediately, and in both directions. Anyone running leverage should know where their liquidation price sits before that starts. Anyone holding spot has nothing to do today, and no reason to do anything.

The market comes into this appointment with an unusually large profit on the books. Bitcoin traded at $84,339 at around 00:50 UTC on September 24, down 2.47 percent on the day but up 11.59 percent over the week (CoinGecko). Working the weekly figure back, the price stood at roughly $75,600 seven days ago. That calculation is our own derivation from the CoinGecko weekly change and not a figure published there.

The state visit on September 24: what is on the White House schedule

The White House has published the programme itself. President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump receive Xi Jinping and Peng Liyuan for an official state visit; the arrival took place on Wednesday, September 23, at Joint Base Andrews. The State Arrival Ceremony follows on Thursday morning on the South Lawn, on the State Floor and in the Rose Garden, with 479 members of all branches of the armed forces.

A word of context, because it makes the difference: a state visit is the highest form of visit in protocol terms and includes a ceremony, a state banquet and, as a rule, a joint statement. A plain working visit would have neither the programme nor the stage. According to the White House, the last visit of this kind by Xi and Peng lies more than a decade back. What counts for the market is mainly the calendar: there is a fixed window in which statements can be made.

Taiwan, trade and AI: the three flashpoints that can move the price

NBC News names three areas of tension for this summit: Taiwan, trade and artificial intelligence. All three act on crypto only indirectly, through risk appetite in equity markets and through the semiconductor chain. If the tone hardens on Taiwan or on export controls for AI chips, investors first sell whatever trades fastest, and crypto assets are part of that. If the tone softens, the same mechanism runs in reverse.

Exactly that was visible at the two leaders' last meeting in South Korea in October 2025. Announced at the time were the resumption of Chinese rare earth exports under a one-year agreement, purchases of American soybeans and talks on chips; the United States cut tariffs from 57 to 47 percent.

Why the crypto market is sensitive right now

Last week was one of the strongest of the year, and that is the real reason for the nervousness. Among the top 25 by market capitalisation, weekly gains at the time of measurement on September 24 sit far above the normal range: Near Protocol up 68.45 percent, Bitcoin Cash up 54.98 percent, Uniswap up 44.11 percent, Cardano up 23.67 percent, Litecoin up 21.28 percent (all figures CoinGecko, September 24, 00:50 UTC).

On a 24-hour view the picture has already turned. Uniswap is down 9.89 percent, Dogecoin 7.72 percent, Stellar 6.79 percent, Cardano 6.49 percent, Zcash 6.21 percent, Chainlink 5.85 percent and XRP 5.16 percent. The large caps are holding up better: Ethereum trades at $2,684.55, down 2.80 percent, Solana at $115.03, down 3.26 percent.

Large unrealised gains and a dated event are an uncomfortable combination. They generate selling pressure out of pure caution, regardless of what is actually said at the White House. How this altcoin pullback has developed since midweek, we wrote up on September 23 in a separate analysis of the altcoin pullback; this article looks at the scheduled event rather than at the move itself.

What earlier Trump-Xi meetings did to the crypto market

For the meeting of October 30, 2025 there is a usable measurement. FXStreet reported at the time that the market recovered step by step in the early European session after the meeting, with Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP each adding just under one percent. Substantial liquidations accrued at the same time: the report carries $150 million of long liquidations in its headline, but cites more than $800 million for the market as a whole over the same 24 hours. We give both figures and do not smooth them, because different things can be read from them.

The lesson is uncomfortable for both camps. The price can rise after an event of this kind and leveraged positions can still be closed out by force on a large scale. That happens in the minutes around the first headline, before any direction has formed at all. The only defence against that sequence is a distance between entry price and liquidation price wide enough to absorb such a spike. A view on the negotiating outcome is of no help whatsoever.

We explicitly draw no forecast for today from this. A single meeting in October 2025 is not a sample from which a rule can be built, and the starting position was a different one then.

Liquidation price and funding rate: the arithmetic before the event

How to find your actual liquidation price

The liquidation price is the level at which the collateral behind a leveraged position no longer suffices and the exchange closes it automatically. It hangs on three things: leverage, collateral posted and your provider's maintenance margin. A rough orientation with isolated margin: at ten times leverage it sits around ten percent away from the entry, at twenty times around five percent. The exact figure comes from your provider, and only that one counts. We have set out the arithmetic step by step in our guide to calculating the liquidation price.

Keep an eye on the funding rate alongside it. This is the periodic payment between the long and the short side of perpetual futures, the contracts without an expiry date, which ties the contract price to the spot market. If it is strongly positive, the long positions are paying and the book is one-sided. That one-sidedness is precisely what makes a liquidation cascade more likely when a headline briefly turns the price against the majority. Which platforms disclose their funding history and how the fees differ is shown in our comparison of perp DEX platforms.

A note on the legal position in Germany: perpetuals with high leverage are available to retail investors through EU-licensed providers only to a limited extent, and many of the well-known platforms do not direct their offering at German retail clients. Anyone using them regardless carries the risk of standing without European supervision in a dispute.

Holding period and tax: why selling out of fear can be expensive

Before you sell holdings today, look at the purchase date. In Germany, gains from the sale of crypto assets are tax-free after a holding period of more than one year under section 23 of the Income Tax Act. Within that one-year window they are taxable as a private disposal transaction as soon as total gains in the calendar year reach the allowance of 1,000 euros.

For last week's rally that means something concrete: positions built up in this year's uptrend are, with high probability, not yet a year old. A panic sale on summit day may therefore cost you twice: once in the further course of the price, and on top of that income tax on a gain that would have been tax-free once the period had run. That is not an argument for sitting still at any price, but it belongs in the calculation.

Holding period with several purchases: FIFO in practice

Anyone with several purchases at different prices needs documentation that reflects FIFO, meaning the sale of the oldest holdings first. Which tools output that cleanly for German tax rules is set out in our overview of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers. Settle that before the sale, not in May of the following year.

Custody and choice of exchange: what MiCA is worth to you on a day like this

Volatile days are the days on which withdrawals slow down and trading interfaces come under load. Where your balance sits is what pays off here. Since July 1, 2026, anyone offering crypto services in the EU needs an authorisation under the MiCA regulation; a provider without that permission may not continue the business. Licensed firms of this kind are called CASPs, crypto-asset service providers.

The most important point for you is the segregation of client holdings: client tokens must be held separately from the firm's own assets and legally ring-fenced, so that they do not fall into the estate in an insolvency. You can check whether your provider is authorised yourself, Europe-wide in the ESMA register and, for German firms, additionally with BaFin. It is a two-minute job and should not wait until the day a problem arises.

For long-term holdings, self-custody remains the answer to provider risk. For amounts you want to trade at short notice, the route runs through a licensed exchange or a regulated broker; which firms operate in Germany with permission and what they cost is set out in our broker comparison.

Levels above and below: how to read the reaction

Two areas give you orientation today, both drawn from verifiable figures and not from chart patterns. On the downside, the calculated start of the week at around $75,600 is the point at which this week's gains would be given back in full. On the upside lies the area around $86,200, where Bitcoin closed on September 22 according to Rio Times Online, before the pullback set in.

The market has been moving between the two for two days. More important than the levels themselves is what you attach to them: a stop sitting just below a round number will be taken out on a news day with high probability, before the direction becomes clear. Anyone setting stops at all today should place them further down than on a quiet day, or reduce the position size and work without a stop entirely.

What probably changes nothing today

For completeness, here is what you can safely ignore. A state banquet and a joint statement as a rule contain no statements on crypto assets, and regulation in Germany and the EU is not up for negotiation today. The MiCA obligations, the holding period and your exchange's reporting duties are untouched by this appointment.

So for anyone holding spot only, with an investment horizon of years and without borrowed leverage, this Thursday is a day like any other. The event is a risk for positions financed with debt and for short-term trades, and there too only for a few hours.

Where you will see the results first

The White House publishes the schedule and the statements on its own briefing pages, and this visit is there with its programme. That is the source with the least delay and without interpretation in between. News agencies and specialist media report interim positions faster, but at the risk of shortening a statement that is clarified shortly afterwards.

In practice that means: do not react to the first line that runs through a feed. On a day with this stage, wordings are corrected within minutes, and each of those corrections produces a price move of its own. Anyone who still has an intact position at the third impulse has fared better than anyone who traded on the first.

Putting summit risk in context: what to take away

1. Check your liquidation distance before the ceremony begins. Open every leveraged position and read off the liquidation price your provider shows. If it is less than ten percent away from the current price, cut leverage or size. Which platforms disclose funding and maintenance margin transparently is set out in the perp DEX comparison.
2. Check the purchase date before you sell. Holdings under one year of holding period trigger tax on a sale within the one-year window as soon as you are above 1,000 euros of gains in the calendar year. Sort your purchases by FIFO before you take a decision to sell; suitable tools can be found under crypto tax tools.
3. Check your provider's authorisation. Look up in the ESMA register and with BaFin whether your trading venue holds a MiCA permission, and move long-term holdings into your own custody. Regulated alternatives for Germany are set out in our broker comparison.

(As of September 24, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Solana's decentralised exchanges booked more individual trades in a single trading week than the New York Stock Exchange. The tracker flipthe.market, which builds on data from Blockworks Research, counts roughly 208 million spot trades on Solana for the week of September 14 to 20, 2026, against 189 million on the NYSE. It is the first documented case of a blockchain overtaking one of the world's largest securities exchanges on trade count alone.

The number is real, and it is still easy to misread. A trade on a Solana DEX and a trade on the NYSE are economically two very different things, and that difference decides whether this record concerns you as an investor at all. This article separates the two questions: first what was measured, then what you should check if you swap on a decentralised marketplace.

Solana DEX versus NYSE: what the count of 208 million trades actually measures

What is measured is the number of trades, meaning how often a buy met a sell at all. What is not measured is how much money moved in the process. Both sides of the survey put the Solana figure at roughly 208 million, but they differ on the comparison value and on the dating: the tracker based on Blockworks data cites 189 million NYSE trades for the week to September 20, while a second analysis built on a Kobeissi Letter chart arrives at around 190 million for the week to September 13. The range is therefore 189 to 190 million, and the sources do not agree on which calendar week saw the first overtake.

A DEX is a decentralised exchange: a program on a blockchain that settles swaps directly between two wallets, without a company holding user funds or matching the orders. That design is precisely why the trade count can run so high, and why the rest of this article is necessary.

Anyone who has ever run a swap on Solana knows the practical difference. The trade settles in under a second, costs a fraction of a cent in network fees and needs no brokerage account. That very many very small trades arise under such conditions is no surprise; it follows from the cost structure.

Memecoin platforms account for roughly 57 percent of trades: why the comparison limps

In the same analysis, about 118 million of the 208 million trades fall to a single memecoin launchpad, roughly 57 percent. These are mostly micro purchases of freshly minted tokens, often worth a few dollars, frequently triggered by automated programs. On the NYSE, a trade as a rule sits behind an equity order of a markedly larger size.

The headline is therefore not wrong, but it describes a different process from the one most readers assume. The blockchain wins the comparison on the number of transactions. On the question of how much capital changes hands, it remains orders of magnitude behind. How wide that gap is can be calculated, and that is what I did.

Own measurement: $3.2 billion in DEX volume in 24 hours across 125 protocols

cryptoticker.io collected this analysis itself on September 23, 2026. Method: a call to DefiLlama's open interface for the trading volumes of every decentralised exchange recorded on Solana, on September 23, 2026 at around 22:10 UTC, HTTP 200, with no post-processing of the raw values. Objects checked: 125 individual DEX protocols on Solana.

The finding: across all 125 protocols together, roughly $3.20 billion was swapped in the preceding 24 hours, roughly $21.22 billion in the preceding seven days and roughly $79.96 billion in the preceding 30 days. Against the previous day, daily volume was 6.8 percent lower. The five largest protocols account for roughly $2.04 billion between them, just under 64 percent of daily volume; the single largest platform came to $634 million.

The distribution is more interesting than the total. The two marketplaces belonging to the memecoin complex stand together for roughly $755 million, around 24 percent of daily volume. On trade count, though, the survey cited at the outset puts them at roughly 57 percent. An average memecoin trade is therefore markedly smaller than a trade on the remaining Solana exchanges. What I could not verify is how many of these trades come from automated trading programs and how many from human beings; the interface does not supply that breakdown.

Roughly $100 per trade on average: what separates trade count from trading volume

Setting the weekly volume against the weekly number of trades produces the figure that puts the record in perspective. On the weekly value of $17.3 billion cited in the survey, the average trade comes to about $83. Using my own seven-day figure of $21.22 billion instead gives roughly $102. The two values refer to slightly shifted time windows, which is why the range appears here and not a smoothed average.

An average trade between $83 and $102 describes a market made up of very many very small transactions. For you as an investor, that is the actual news, because the entire checklist part of this article follows from it. Anyone active on such a marketplace produces, in case of doubt, several hundred transactions a year rather than five. And every single one of them is a separate event for tax purposes.

24 hours against 6.5 trading hours: the structural advantage of the blockchain

The NYSE trades on weekdays from 9:30 to 16:00 New York local time, so 6.5 hours on five days. A blockchain runs continuously, on seven days, holidays included. That alone yields a multiple of the possible settlement time before a single user trades any more than before.

This difference carries half the explanation of the record. Putting the two numbers side by side compares a market with opening hours against one without. That says nothing against the performance of the network; it merely limits what may be inferred from the comparison.

A DEX without CASP authorisation: why MiCA and BaFin do not protect you on a swap

The EU Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, MiCA for short, governs providers of crypto-asset services. Such providers need authorisation, in Germany from BaFin, and are bound by duties on custody, complaint handling and disclosure. Recital 22 of Regulation (EU) 2023/1114 states expressly, however, that services provided in a fully decentralised manner without any intermediary should fall outside its scope.

In practice that means the following. If you buy on a regulated exchange, an authorised company stands behind the transaction. If you swap straight out of your own wallet against a smart contract, nobody stands there. No deposit protection, no complaints body, no supervisor that steps in if there is a dispute. Where exactly the line between "still a service provider" and "fully decentralised" runs in an individual case has not been settled to this day; the indicators include administrator keys, custody of user assets and marketing by an identifiable company. We have broken down which duties apply on the regulated side in our overview of MiCA obligations for crypto companies.

For the choice of your entry point, this is the decisive fork. Anyone who prefers the regulated route will find the providers available in Germany in our comparison of crypto exchanges; anyone who deliberately goes to decentralised marketplaces takes on the checks themselves.

Every swap is a disposal: how Section 23 EStG captures DEX trades

Swapping one token for another is not a neutral event for tax purposes but a sale of the one and a purchase of the other. The governing provision is Section 23(1) sentence 1 no. 2 of the German Income Tax Act, the Einkommensteuergesetz. In the wording that applies today, private disposal transactions are disposals "of other assets where the period between acquisition and disposal is not more than one year". Crypto-assets fall under those other assets.

From that follows the one-year holding period many investors know. Hold a token for longer than a year and then sell it, and there is no taxable event any more. Swap within the year, and there is one. In a market averaging around a hundred dollars per trade, that means practically every active user trades inside the period and therefore sits in taxable territory.

The order is not arbitrary either. Anyone who bought the same token several times at different prices has to determine which holding counts as sold first. How swaps, liquidity pools and pool income are to be classified in detail, we have taken apart in our breakdown of DeFi taxes on swaps and liquidity pools.

The 1,000 euro exemption threshold and the one-year period: what is left after hundreds of swaps

Section 23(3) sentence 5 EStG provides: "Gains shall remain tax-free if the total gain realised from private disposal transactions in the calendar year was less than 1,000 euros." Two details of this are regularly overlooked.

First, this is an exemption threshold and not a tax-free allowance. If your total gain comes to 999 euros, it stays tax-free. If it comes to 1,000 euros, the full amount is taxable, and not only the part above the line. Second, the threshold applies to all private disposal transactions of the calendar year taken together, including gains from other transactions that fall under the same section.

Anyone making several hundred small swaps spread across the year accumulates many individual gains and individual losses that net into an overall result. The fact that the individual amounts are small is no help there. What counts is the sum, and the sum cannot be determined at all without clean records.

Loss offsetting under Section 23(3): why DEX losses count only against a narrow pot

Sentence 7 of the same provision limits what happens to losses. They may be offset "only up to the amount of the gain that the taxpayer realised from private disposal transactions in the same calendar year" and may not be deducted under Section 10d. Under sentence 8, however, they do reduce income from private disposal transactions of the immediately preceding or the following assessment periods.

Translated: a loss from a memecoin swap cannot be set against your salary or against interest income. It works only inside the same pot, that is against other private disposal gains, and it can be carried into other years. Anyone running mostly losses in the current year gains nothing from them for tax purposes as long as no gains of the same type stand against them.

No tax certificate from a smart contract: why the record-keeping falls to you

A German custodian bank issues you a tax certificate at the end of the year. A smart contract does not. Every transaction does sit permanently and publicly on the blockchain, but in the form of addresses, token amounts and timestamps, not in euros and not sorted according to German tax law.

The conversion into euros at the relevant moment, the matching of acquisitions to disposals and the determination of the holding period are work you have to do yourself or have done for you. Specialised software exists for exactly that, reading wallet addresses and preparing the events; the providers relevant to the German market are listed in our comparison of crypto tax software and portfolio trackers. What matters most is that you keep the records continuously and do not start in the following year. Anyone who has to reconstruct hundreds of events after the fact is working against themselves.

DAC8 reports service providers, not your wallet: the gap that does not let you off

Under the EU directive DAC8, providers of crypto-asset services report their customers' transaction data automatically to the tax authorities. Data collection has been running since January 1, 2026, and the first transmission is scheduled for 2027. Anyone trading through an authorised exchange must therefore assume that the tax administration sees their activity there in any case.

On a swap out of a self-custodied wallet against a smart contract there is no reporting service provider. Tax exemption does not follow from that. The duty to declare stays entirely with you; what is missing is merely the party that would take it off your hands and confirm your figures. In practice that means a higher burden of proof, not a lower one.

On top of that, the chain as a rule does not run seamlessly outside the reported world. Whoever deposits euros buys from an authorised provider, and that event is recorded. What happens afterwards in your own wallet is something you have to be able to connect to it.

Slippage, priority fee and failed transactions: the costs beside the price

On a decentralised marketplace you rarely pay the price alone. The executed price deviates from the quoted one when other trades pass through between order and execution; that deviation is called slippage and can be capped in the wallet. On Solana there is also a voluntary priority fee, which at times of high network load decides whether your order makes it into the next block at all.

If the transaction fails, the network fee is spent anyway while the swap has not happened. What causes it in an individual case depends on the network load, on the slippage tolerance that was set and on whether the chosen trading route still had enough liquidity at the moment of execution. On an average trade of around a hundred dollars, these side costs can make up a noticeable share of the stake, and they arise on every single attempt.

From euros onto the Solana DEX: which buying route stays regulated in Germany

A decentralised marketplace does not accept euros. The usual route runs through a provider authorised in the EU, where you buy SOL or a stablecoin against euros, from there to a wallet in your own custody and only then onto the DEX. Each of these steps carries its own costs and its own risks.

The move into self-custody is the critical point. From the moment the keys are with you, there is no longer any party that can undo a mistake. A mistyped address, an approval granted carelessly to a contract or a compromised seed phrase lead to a final loss. Anyone moving larger amounts should keep the keys on a device that has never been connected to the internet.

Solana price levels above and below: what the rally is measured against now

SOL was quoted at $114.69 on September 23, 2026 at 22:01 UTC according to CoinGecko. Over 24 hours it shows a decline of 2.97 percent, over seven days a gain of 16.29 percent. The price has therefore ridden the broad weekly upswing and has lately been giving ground again along with the wider market; the all-time high dates from January 19, 2025 and is far away.

To the downside, the mark of $100 is the next psychologically round level; to the upside sits the area around $120, where the price failed most recently. These are reference points and no forecast. You will find the ongoing price development together with analysis on our Solana price prediction. Whether the record number of trades supports the price is open, because a large part of those trades takes place in tokens that share only the infrastructure with SOL itself.

Checking your Solana DEX trading: what you take away from this

The record describes a real shift in market structure, and it describes it in a metric that favours small transactions. What counts for you is less the headline than the question of what you do when you trade on this market. Three steps are worth taking straight away.

1. Count your swaps for the current year before the year ends. Every swap inside the one-year holding period is a separate taxable event, and the exemption threshold of 1,000 euros applies to the sum of all private disposal transactions. A tool that reads your wallet addresses and prepares the events in euros is in our comparison of crypto tax software and portfolio trackers.
2. Establish which authorised provider your entry runs through. The euro route as a rule goes via a regulated exchange, and its fees and withdrawal options determine the bulk of your costs. The providers available in Germany are in our comparison of crypto exchanges.
3. Separate trading funds and long-term holdings physically from each other. What you move on a DEX belongs in a wallet with a limited balance, and the long-term holding belongs on a device with no network connection. Suitable models and their differences are in our hardware wallet comparison.

The figures on the trading week come from the flipthe.market analysis based on Blockworks Research data, the quoted statutory wording from Section 23 EStG at gesetze-im-internet.de. The volume figures in this article rest on the own data call described above.

(As of September 23, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Anthropic says Claude autonomously found a new CRISPR-like enzyme system. Even Dario Amodei admits nobody knows what it actually does.

Anthony Albanese said the agent accessed public and non-public files on a Medicare statistics portal in June, calling OpenAI's three-month delay in disclosing the breach "unacceptable."

OpenAI is giving Ukraine's government access to Daybreak, its AI vulnerability-hunting system, as the country's cyber defenders face a record wave of attacks on hospitals, power grids, and government networks.

China's internet regulator is investigating DeepSeek and Moonshot AI after Anthropic accused both of secretly routing millions of user exchanges through Claude to train their own models.

A tech columnist declined to give Meta's new AI agent access to his messages. It read them anyway, then invented an explanation for how it knew.

A 23-year-old Brooklyn man who stole nearly $16 million from roughly 100 Coinbase users in a sprawling social engineering scheme has been sentenced to four to 12 years in prison.

Bitcoin ETFs are refusing to lose momentum even as the cryptocurrency itself comes under renewed pressure.

Bitcoin Cash explodes toward $350 on CME futures plans, Zcash pushes its massive rally into overbought territory, while Uniswap and Shiba Inu face sharp resistance after their latest breakouts.

Coinbase has disabled trading for IoTeX (IOTX), dealing another blow to the struggling blockchain token after a brutal 85% plunge over the past year.

Coinbase Markets has flagged unusually strong bullish demand in XRP options.

Key Takeaways

• Sam Altman from OpenAI addressed the UN Security Council, highlighting AI’s potential benefits while cautioning that development may outpace humanity’s capacity for oversight.
• Anthropic’s Dario Amodei emphasized that inadequate AI governance could threaten global security.
• International leaders advocated for unified testing protocols and incident monitoring systems for AI technologies.
• US officials resisted proposals for international oversight, citing concerns about innovation slowdown.
• Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy expressed alarm over autonomous military AI systems making combat decisions independently.

Leading figures from the artificial intelligence sector appeared before the United Nations Security Council Wednesday, presenting testimony about emerging technological dangers. The session convened AI company executives, international diplomats, and governmental representatives in New York City.

Sam Altman, who heads OpenAI, drew parallels between AI’s transformative potential and historical periods like the Renaissance. However, he cautioned that mismanagement could trigger significant societal disruption.

Altman identified two critical threats: the possibility that AI advancement could outstrip humanity’s control mechanisms, and the danger of excessive power consolidation among limited stakeholders.

Industry Leaders Present Warnings to International Body

Anthropic’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, delivered similar concerns to council members. He characterized inadequately governed AI as a potential existential threat requiring immediate attention.

Amodei pressed for international consensus on prohibiting AI applications in biological weapons development. He additionally advocated for standardized evaluation frameworks to assess AI system capabilities.

Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue participated remotely via video link. Technical difficulties disrupted portions of his testimony during the proceedings.

Ed Miliband, representing Britain’s Foreign Office, interpreted the technology executives’ message as a clear signal that corporate self-regulation proves insufficient. He announced the United Kingdom’s intention to prioritize AI safety during its upcoming G20 presidency.

International Division Emerges Over Regulatory Approaches

Universal support for global AI governance remains elusive. American representatives argued against using AI concerns as justification for development moratoriums or establishing new international regulatory bodies.

Michael Kratsios, representing the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, articulated the US position. He emphasized Washington’s preference for technology access expansion among allied nations rather than implementing restrictive measures.

China’s UN representative, Ambassador Fu Cong, participated in the discussions as well. He cautioned against technological fragmentation and defended national sovereignty in determining AI development pathways.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres addressed autonomous weapons systems the day preceding the council session. He characterized so-called killer robots as a present-day challenge rather than a hypothetical future scenario.

France’s foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, drew analogies between contemporary AI development and the dawn of nuclear technology. He argued for regulatory frameworks that maximize advantages while minimizing potential dangers.

Liberia’s UN Ambassador, Lewis G. Brown II, warned that postponing AI governance decisions could amplify future challenges exponentially.

Military Applications Raise Urgent Questions

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy delivered remarks at a separate UN General Assembly session. He stressed the urgent necessity of maintaining human control over AI systems, particularly in military contexts.

Zelenskyy revealed that Ukraine has already witnessed AI’s growing influence in tactical battlefield decisions. He appealed for peace initiatives before autonomous systems assume command-level responsibilities in warfare.

Documentation presented during deliberations described an incident involving a Russian drone that apparently executed an independent targeting sequence, killing three Ukrainian individuals. Security analysts confirm that autonomous weapons technology already exists.

Data science expert Rumman Chowdhury reframed the debate away from speculative scenarios. She emphasized practical questions of authorization protocols and accountability structures when machines engage in target selection.

These discussions coincided with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit to Washington. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent revealed bilateral conversations regarding incident reporting mechanisms for AI-related national security events.

President Donald Trump stated this week that America would oppose any initiatives constraining AI development amid strategic competition with China. Meanwhile, European and Asian regional organizations are independently formulating distinct AI policy frameworks.

The post Tech Leaders Urge UN to Implement AI Regulations Amid Growing Safety Concerns appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• Recent Visa research indicates US consumer willingness to use stablecoins could jump from 36% to 56% with added bank-style fraud coverage and deposit insurance.
• Morning Consult conducted the research for Visa, surveying 2,192 American adults from February 24 through March 2, 2026.
• Nearly two-thirds (64%) of participants indicated their confidence in payment systems relies more heavily on the service provider than the underlying technology.
• More than half (56%) of survey participants reported no prior knowledge of stablecoins before participating in the study.
• The current market capitalization of dollar-backed stablecoins exceeds $295 billion, with USDT and USDC commanding the largest shares.

Payment giant Visa published fresh research this week revealing significant potential for increased stablecoin adoption among US consumers if these digital assets included banking-style consumer protections. The study, titled Money Travels 2026, drew from Morning Consult polling data involving 2,192 American adults.

Results showed consumer interest in stablecoin usage could surge from 36% to 56% if these assets included bank-equivalent fraud protections and deposit insurance schemes. Survey participants received clear explanations of financial terminology, including stablecoin definitions, prior to providing responses.

Provider Reputation Drives Consumer Confidence

Visa’s research highlighted that 64% of participants place greater emphasis on the entity providing a payment service rather than the technical infrastructure supporting it. Consumer openness to stablecoin adoption increased from 36% to 45% when these digital currencies were presented as offerings from established financial institutions like their current banking partners.

Established commercial banking institutions and international payment processing networks emerged as the most credible sources for digital currency offerings. Visa’s data showed 61% of participants expressed confidence in banks, with 60% trusting global payment processing companies.

Public awareness of stablecoins remains limited across the United States. Visa’s findings revealed that 56% of participants had no previous exposure to the stablecoin concept. Among those with some familiarity, misconceptions persisted, with some incorrectly assuming stablecoins experience price volatility comparable to bitcoin.

Regulatory Framework Continues to Evolve

This research emerges as industry participants anticipate implementation of the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins Act, commonly referenced as the GENIUS Act. Federal financial regulators are still finalizing implementation guidelines for this legislation. Full enforcement is anticipated to begin in January 2027.

The GENIUS Act framework will not automatically extend FDIC insurance coverage or explicit fraud protections to US-issued stablecoins at launch. However, the legislation does establish protocols designed to combat illicit financial activities involving stablecoin transactions.

Across the Atlantic, European authorities are revising stablecoin regulatory standards. This Tuesday, the European System of Central Banks put forward modifications to existing requirements mandating stablecoin issuers maintain a minimum of 30% of reserves in bank deposits, or 60% for higher-volume tokens. The central banking system recommended shifting to liquidity-based thresholds instead, highlighting concerns about rapid withdrawal scenarios.

These recommended modifications operate within the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulatory structure, which initiated stablecoin rule enforcement in June 2024. Payment processor Decta documented that euro-denominated stablecoins complying with these standards experienced market capitalization growth exceeding 100% between 2025 and 2026.

US dollar-backed stablecoins maintain commanding market dominance globally. According to The Block’s tracking data, aggregate dollar stablecoin supply surpasses $295 billion. Tether’s offering accounts for approximately $183.4 billion of this total, with Circle’s product representing nearly $76 billion.

Visa’s report also highlighted that stablecoin settlement transaction volume exceeded a $20 billion annualized pace earlier this month. This metric represents more than a fifteen-fold increase compared to the prior year, with stablecoin-integrated card programs now numbering over 160 across global markets.

The post 56% of Americans Ready to Adopt Stablecoins With Bank-Style Protections, Visa Survey Reveals appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Highlights

• Bitcoin declined more than 2%, hovering around $83,900 to $84,150 amid rising Treasury yields.
• Dogecoin suffered the steepest losses among top cryptocurrencies, plummeting approximately 8%.
• The 10-year Treasury yield reached 5.11% at close, marking its peak since 2007.
• Weak demand at a $70 billion five-year Treasury auction intensified market pressures.
• Crude oil prices surged more than 4%, fueling inflation and interest rate anxieties.

Bitcoin experienced significant downward pressure on Thursday. The leading cryptocurrency retreated more than 2%, settling near $83,900 after reaching nearly $87,300 earlier this week.

The selloff coincided with U.S. Treasury yields climbing to levels unseen since 2007. The benchmark 10-year yield finished at 5.11%, marking a 15 basis point jump in one trading session.

Dogecoin experienced the most severe downturn among prominent digital assets. The meme-based cryptocurrency plunged roughly 8%, settling just above the 9-cent threshold.

Drivers Behind the Yield Increase

Multiple catalysts converged to drive borrowing costs upward throughout the week. Energy prices emerged as a significant contributing factor.

Brent crude rallied over 4%, approaching $104 per barrel. This reversed a six-day decline that had temporarily alleviated inflation concerns among market participants.

Economic data further intensified the pressure. S&P Global’s preliminary report indicated U.S. economic output expanding at its most rapid rate in more than half a decade.

The composite index climbed to 58.4, representing its strongest reading since July 2021. Bitcoin’s most pronounced decline occurred immediately following this economic release.

During afternoon trading, the Treasury Department auctioned $70 billion worth of five-year notes. The auction encountered tepid demand, settling at 5.033%, marking the highest auction yield since 2006.

Investors demanded additional compensation to absorb the debt. This development indicated diminishing willingness to hold government securities at prevailing interest rates.

Impact Across the Cryptocurrency Sector

Elevated yields diminish the attractiveness of non-yielding assets. Bitcoin and numerous other digital currencies fall within this classification.

ZEC, XRP and HYPE each surrendered between 5% and 6%. Ether, Solana and BNB declined in the 2% to 3% range.

XRP experienced additional losses during later trading hours, falling 7.5% to $1.5052. Cardano retreated 7.1%, while the $TRUMP memecoin tumbled 11.4%.

Bitcoin currently trades beneath the $85,000 threshold. Ledn co-founder Mauricio Di Bartolomeo highlighted substantial call option positioning at that strike price in advance of Friday’s approximately $14 billion options expiration on Deribit.

Increasing Treasury yields extended beyond American borders. Japanese 10-year yields also reached a three-decade peak on Thursday.

Expectations for additional rate increases intensified following the Federal Reserve’s 25 basis point hike last week. The central bank reaffirmed its 2% inflation objective, which market participants interpreted as signaling potential future tightening.

The crude oil rebound stemmed from remarks by Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. He spoke at the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Wednesday, delivering critical statements regarding the United States and President Donald Trump.

Notwithstanding Thursday’s decline, bitcoin maintains positive momentum for September. Market participants had responded favorably to enhanced regulatory support from U.S. authorities earlier this month.

The SEC’s decision to authorize a five-year exemption for blockchain-based equity offerings had triggered rallies throughout the altcoin market. This occurred despite the Clarity Act’s failure to advance through Congress.

The post Bitcoin (BTC) Plunges Below $84K as Treasury Yields Spike to 17-Year High appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• The TRON blockchain has surpassed $30 trillion in cumulative transaction volume since its 2018 inception.
• TRX is currently valued at $0.3436, experiencing a 0.23% decline while maintaining positions above critical 20, 50, and 200-day moving averages.
• With $94 billion in circulating USDT, TRON hosts the largest stablecoin supply across all blockchain networks.
• Canary Capital introduced the Staked TRX ETF (TRXS) in September 2026, broadening institutional investment opportunities.
• Technical analysts have identified TRX at a pivotal “make-or-break zone” suggesting potential for significant price movement.

TRON DAO announced this week that its blockchain infrastructure has facilitated over $30 trillion in aggregate transaction volume since its inception in 2018. The network’s founder, Justin Sun, drew parallels between this achievement and the United States’ total economic output for 2025.

The platform now serves more than 405 million registered user accounts and has executed upward of 15 billion cumulative transactions. According to TRONSCAN metrics, the total value locked within the TRON ecosystem exceeds $28 billion.

TRON dominates the stablecoin landscape with $94 billion in USDT circulation, representing the highest concentration across all blockchain platforms. Token Terminal analytics reveal that TRON commands the leading position in USDT transfer activity this year, processing approximately $6 trillion with daily average transfers reaching $25 billion.

Transaction activity in the payments sector continues accelerating. According to CoinDesk Research findings, cryptocurrency payment card volumes expanded from $2 billion during Q1 2026 to $2.4 billion in Q2. TRON’s proportion of this volume increased from 33% to 34%, representing the largest share among monitored blockchains.

Growing Institutional Adoption

In September 2026, Canary Capital introduced the Canary Staked TRX ETF under the ticker TRXS. Additionally, Bitnomial, a regulated U.S. derivatives platform, now offers TRX spot and futures trading products.

Anchorage Digital has broadened its TRON infrastructure by implementing native TRX staking capabilities and providing custody services for TRC-20 tokens. Meanwhile, the Tokenized Hamilton Lane SCOPE Fund achieved a milestone as the inaugural Securitize-issued product deployed on TRON’s network.

S&P Dow Jones Indices and Pantera Capital recognized TRON as one of five featured protocols in their recently unveiled S&P Pantera Digital Asset Index, establishing it as a benchmark holding.

Market analyst Team LAMBO Charts (@TehLamboXcharts) shared on X that “$TRX is sitting right at the make-or-break zone,” suggesting that any breakout from current levels “could get seriously explosive.” This assessment highlights the technical formation market participants are monitoring after the volume achievement.

TRX is presently trading at $0.3436, representing a 0.23% decrease from the prior session. Today’s price action has been confined to a narrow band between $0.3421 and $0.3432.

Technical Position Above Critical Levels

TRX continues trading above its 20-day moving average ($0.3380), 50-day moving average ($0.3357), and 200-day moving average ($0.3294). The nearest support level is positioned at $0.3355, with overhead resistance identified around $0.3500.

The daily MACD configuration displays a Buy signal, with the majority of momentum oscillators aligned in the same direction. Technical projections indicate an anticipated trading range between $0.3376 and $0.3497 for the upcoming five-day period.

Viktoras Karapetjanc, an analyst at Traders Union, characterized the $30 trillion achievement as evidence of TRON’s strengthening fundamental position. He interpreted the present price consolidation as a stabilization phase potentially preceding upward momentum.

Short-term forecasts suggest TRX could appreciate 0.7% to $0.3457 within 24 hours, while the seven-day outlook projects a 2.24% increase to $0.351. Extended projections show greater variance, with the 12-month estimate indicating a potential 2.18% decline to $0.3358.

The post TRON (TRX) Surpasses $30 Trillion in Volume: Breakout on the Horizon? appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Highlights

• MoonPay has entered a $60 million all-stock agreement to acquire North Capital, a regulated private-markets investment platform
• North Capital holds multiple SEC registrations including broker-dealer, alternative trading system, transfer agent, and investment advisory licenses
• The acquisition strengthens MoonPay’s strategic expansion into tokenized real-world assets (RWAs)
• North Capital’s platform has facilitated approximately $9 billion in primary and secondary market transactions
• This deal represents MoonPay’s latest strategic acquisition in 2026, joining previous purchases of DFlow, Sodot, and Entendre

MoonPay has announced the acquisition of North Capital, a fully SEC-registered private-markets infrastructure provider, through an all-stock transaction exceeding $60 million as part of its strategic pivot toward tokenized real-world assets.

The cryptocurrency payments leader is positioning itself to enter the tokenized securities sector through this strategic purchase of North Capital, marking a significant departure from its core business model into regulated investment infrastructure.

Wednesday’s announcement detailed the transaction, which carries a valuation exceeding $60 million in stock consideration. The boards of both organizations have granted approval, though the deal remains contingent upon receiving necessary regulatory clearances.

North Capital’s Strategic Value

Headquartered in Midvale, Utah, North Capital maintains a comprehensive suite of SEC-registered entities including broker-dealer operations, an alternative trading system platform, transfer agent services, and investment advisory capabilities.

The platform has facilitated more than $8.7 billion in combined primary and secondary market transaction volume. Its technology infrastructure enables securities tokenization and supports private issuers and fund managers across capital formation, asset administration, clearing operations, custody solutions, and secondary market trading.

Upon transaction completion, North Capital will operate as a fully owned subsidiary under the MoonPay corporate structure.

Ivan Soto-Wright, MoonPay’s Chief Executive Officer, explained that this acquisition will enable the firm to “connect different parts of the financial system through modern, programmable infrastructure.”

Aggressive Expansion Strategy Into Asset Tokenization

MoonPay has pursued an aggressive acquisition strategy throughout the current year. Previous strategic purchases included Sodot, a key management solutions provider, DFlow, an onchain trading infrastructure company, and Entendre, an AI-powered finance operations platform.

The company has also introduced its Trade platform, designed to integrate banks and fintech companies with tokenized assets, decentralized finance protocols, and stablecoin liquidity pools.

According to Traxcn data, MoonPay currently maintains a corporate valuation of $3.4 billion. The company’s most recent capital raise was a $2.18 million seed round completed in October 2021, backed by investors including Karlani Capital and Fiduciary Trust International.

Asset tokenization—the process of creating blockchain-based digital representations of traditional assets such as equities, fixed income securities, and commodities—has emerged as a leading blockchain application among established financial institutions.

Through the North Capital transaction, MoonPay gains immediate access to comprehensive SEC-registered infrastructure, which management indicates will establish the regulatory framework necessary to drive widespread adoption of tokenized real-world assets.

Soto-Wright emphasized that this strategic move introduces capabilities to the MoonPay platform that can accommodate both cryptocurrency-native participants and conventional financial market stakeholders.

Following regulatory approval, the acquisition is anticipated to enable MoonPay to provide issuance services, custody solutions, and secondary trading capabilities for both private and tokenized securities.

The companies have not disclosed a projected closing date in their public announcement.

The post MoonPay Acquires North Capital for $60M to Enter Tokenized Securities Market appeared first on Blockonomi.

Earlier this week, Bitcoin briefly tapped $87,000 for the first time since January before retracing and stabilizing near $84,000.

But the “smart money” tier has continued to build its positions.

Heavy Accumulation

According to Santiment, Bitcoin’s whale wallets are stepping up accumulation. Wallets holding between 100 and 1,000 BTC have added 113,950 units since July 15. Their total holdings have increased 2.22% to around 5.24 million. Santiment has tracked this wallet group for five years and found that its activity has often aligned closely with the broader crypto market. In the past, periods of heavy accumulation have appeared before or during stronger Bitcoin price moves.

This trend has continued as the crypto asset climbed sharply from mid-August. The data not only indicates that large holders have continued buying during the rally but also shows that the recent surge is not being driven only by retail traders.

The recovery and the subsequent rise in optimism come as Bitcoin cleared an important level after moving back above its 365-day moving average, which was around $80,500. The last time it made a similar move was back in March 2023, when the price later pushed much higher. The latest break could be a sign that the longer-term trend is turning positive.

Bitcoin also climbed through a heavy supply zone between $76,000 and $81,000. The next area to watch is $88,000 to $90,000. A large amount of BTC is concentrated there, which makes it the next major test for the rally.

Still, the current cycle may not produce the kind of extreme fluctuations Bitcoin became known for previously. Ki Young Ju expects the current cycle to bring a 3-to-5x rally, rather than another huge 10x surge. CryptoQuant founder recently said that he sees a softer bear market ahead while adding that the growing market and rising institutional interest are reducing extreme price swings.

Behind BTC’s Rally

But not everyone sees the latest move as a broad return of risk appetite. While speaking to CryptoPotato, Trace Finance co-founder Bernardo Brites said that the speed of the recovery was partly driven by a short squeeze. The bigger question, he said, is where the new money is coming from.

It is important to note that US spot Bitcoin ETF inflows attracted almost $1 billion on Monday. Smaller inflows were also recorded in the two trading sessions that followed. This suggests that much of the fresh capital is entering through traditional financial markets rather than directly through crypto.

“I wouldn’t read this as a broad return of risk appetite. Bitcoin rallying through a rate hike, $100 oil, and elevated yields suggests some investors are treating it as a hedge against inflation, fiscal and geopolitical risk rather than as a bet on easy money.”

For Brites, the next test is whether ETF inflows continue. If demand stays strong and stablecoin supply starts growing again, the exec anticipates a stronger base for the rally.

“If ETFs remain the only engine, the move is vulnerable, and Bitcoin could give back a good part of these gains as positioning normalizes.”

The post Bitcoin Whales Bought the Dip – Now They’re Doubling Down on the Rally appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The latest market resurgence has greatly benefited Ripple’s native cryptocurrency, whose price has spiked 22% over the past week. Meanwhile, Pi Network’s PI has risen 8% over the same period but remains below $0.10.

We wanted to see which of these tokens could perform better in the final quarter of the year, so we consulted three of the most popular AI-powered chatbots. Here are their answers.

PI is Like a Lottery Ticket

According to ChatGPT, XRP looks better positioned for steady performance in Q4, while PI has more room for a sharp percentage gain if sentiment turns. OpenAI’s platform noted that the cross-border token has already amassed a substantial valuation, meaning a strong market alone doesn’t guarantee that it will outperform smaller altcoins.

Specific factors that could fuel an XRP rally during that timeframe include increased adoption, growth in Ripple’s broader ecosystem, and sustained demand through XRP-related investment products. Spot XRP ETFs are a perfect example of such financial vehicles. These funds have posted 10 consecutive green weeks, with total cumulative inflows surpassing $1.7 billion.

On PI, ChatGPT said its potential bull run in the final quarter of the year will depend heavily on further Mainnet migrations and milestones reached by the Core Team.

In conclusion, the chatbot said XRP is the more defensible pick for Q4 performance, while PI is the higher-volatility bet and could win on percentage returns if its ecosystem gains traction.

Perplexity shared a similar thesis. It described XRP as the more likely relative outperformer in the last quarter, whereas PI has the higher lottery-ticket upside.

“PI is cheaper and smaller, so a successful DeFi bootstrapping phase could produce a much larger percentage move.”

At the same time, the chatbot warned that Pi Network continues to struggle with serious issues, such as constant delays, which is fueling growing distrust among community members.

“PI’s user base is large, but its near-term price problem is supply: around 11% of supply is circulating, while daily unlocks create persistent sell pressure. Protocol 27 and the DEX are genuine positives, but they must create real transaction volume, liquidity, and app usage before PI can sustain a re-rating. Without that shift, PI is more likely to remain range-bound near $0.08-$0.12 than to follow XRP higher in a broad market recovery,” it concluded.

Gemini’s Take

Google’s chatbot argued that XRP is “structurally and fundamentally” positioned to outperform PI in the fourth quarter of 2026. It noted that both tokens attract passionate communities, but their market depth, institutional backing, and liquidity profiles create completely different environments.

First, Gemini reminded that XRP is listed on almost every major global exchange, but PI remains unavailable on heavyweights such as Binance and Coinbase.

Second, Ripple has positioned itself as a solid entity with global reach after inking strategic deals with banks, payment providers, and prominent companies over the years, while this is not the case for Pi Network.

Last but not least, Gemini warned that PI faces ongoing sell pressure from continued token unlocks, which could lead to a price pullback in Q4.

The post Ripple (XRP) vs Pi Network (PI): Which Will Perform Better in Q4? (3 AIs Weigh in) appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is reportedly reviewing unusual trading on Kalshi’s Ethereum perpetual futures market. This is according to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), which found close to one million trades clustered around the same $5,500 order size since August.

The pattern, which the WSJ said accounted for more than $5 billion in volume, has drawn allegations of wash trading that Kalshi flatly denies, arguing the repeated sizes stem from ordinary market-making activity.

What the Trading Data Shows

In a September 22 report, the WSJ said it had found that more than a third of trades in the market over recent weeks clustered around that same $5,500 figure, although Kalshi’s public data does not disclose who is behind individual trades. According to them, the CFTC is reviewing the activity before deciding whether to open a formal enforcement investigation.

Wash trading, which is the practice of making trades with no real economic purpose in order to create a misleading activity, is the specific concern the clustering pattern has raised. However, per the report, Kalshi did respond, saying hundreds of distinct traders took part and that the repeated order sizes reflect market makers keeping fixed resting orders that faster traders keep hitting.

Additionally, the company said self-trading is mechanically blocked and coordinated, while wash trading is barred and monitored. Also, its liquidity programs pay market makers for holding orders at set sizes and spreads rather than for raw volume.

Meanwhile, a separate, temporary program refunds trading fees to qualifying self-clearing members, though never more than what they paid in.

The report identified Jump Trading and Wintermute as among the firms involved in the rapid trades, although Jump said it trades its own profit and uses self-match prevention tools. Furthermore, the firm insisted that it does not coordinate activity with other traders.

A Pattern of Regulatory Friction

The scrutiny has come at a time when Kalshi is pushing further into perpetual futures, a business it opened to crypto in May and is now trying to extend to contracts tied to individual US stocks.

As CryptoPotato has reported numerous times, the company is already fighting legal battles on several fronts. For one, Baltimore sued Kalshi and Polymarket in August over allegedly offering unlicensed sports betting dressed up as event contracts.

New York Attorney General Letitia James also sought to shut down the firm’s operations in the state before the CFTC used emergency powers to keep the platform running there.

Kalshi has also shown it will police its own users when it catches them gaming contracts tied to themselves. It handed former Congressman George Santos a lifetime ban and a $71,356 penalty in late August after finding he traded on whether he would attend the State of the Union, and it separately banned three political candidates for five years each earlier this year after they bet on their own races.

The post Report: CFTC Eyes Unusual $5B Trading Pattern on Kalshi ETH Perpetuals appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has welcomed Trueo’s planned migration from Base to Ethereum mainnet, describing it as a new prediction-market contender focused on decentralization and ethical design.

The move puts Trueo’s dispute-resolution system and plans for wider DeFi integration at the center of its pitch as prediction markets face legal scrutiny and competition.

Trueo Says Ethereum Fits Its Long-Term Plans

In a post on X, Buterin praised the project for being “dedicated to decentralization, and being ethical and not corposlop,” adding that he was glad to see a team trying to do “interesting and meaningful things” with prediction markets.

Trueo announced the move on September 21, explaining that it first launched on Base in March 2025. The team described the Layer 2 network as a useful environment for early experimentation, when the Ethereum mainnet gas costs were higher and parts of the application were still experimental.

But Trueo now wants to build a platform that is “widely adopted, broadly integrated, fully permissionless, mostly immutable, and highly credible.” It believes Ethereum is a better fit for that goal because of its network effects and global integrations, as well as alignment with the project’s philosophy.

The team’s immediate priorities after migration are to attract liquidity in major market categories and release the next generation of its oracle. Trueo argues that prediction markets depend heavily on how outcomes are resolved, and that existing systems lack adequate due process when disputes arise.

Its oracle is designed to process evidence from a broad range of legitimate data sources to reach outcomes. Trueo says user feedback has reinforced its view that this system is one of the application’s main attractions for traders.

The project also sees Ethereum as a route to integrations involving oracle services and yield opportunities for its TYD asset. According to Trueo, the migration will not interrupt trading on Base, and TYD will continue accruing yield.

Existing Base markets that expire after migration will still be accessible through the official app and will use the current resolution system. However, the team advised Base users not to create additional markets expiring after January 31, 2027, and instead to create them on Ethereum once its mainnet instance goes live.

TRUE Skyrockets Following Buterin’s Endorsement

TRUE, which will remain the protocol’s native token, saw its market cap jump from around $1.7 million to more than $12 million in the hours after Buterin’s post.

At the time of writing, CoinGecko data put it around $0.15, up 699% over the past day and nearly 750% across one week, although it is still nearly 50% below the $0.26 all-time high it hit in August 2025.

The announcement has come at a time when rival prediction market operators are facing legal disputes and uneven trading activity, with well-known trader Machi Big Brother declaring “Kalshi dead. Long live $TRUE.”

As CryptoPotato reported in August, Baltimore officials sued Kalshi and Polymarket over alleged unlicensed sports betting. Meanwhile, the former is also facing a separate lawsuit by the New York attorney general, who argued its event contracts violated state gambling laws.

The post Vitalik Buterin Endorses Trueo as Prediction Market Moves to Ethereum appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Cardano’s native token has been thriving amid the latest green environment, with its valuation climbing to a peak not seen since May.

Naturally, the major ascent has drawn multiple bullish predictions from analysts, but certain elements suggest a correction could also be in the cards.

The Next Upward Move?

As of press time, ADA is worth around $0.25, up about 30% in a week. X user CW claimed that the asset is showing an accumulation signal while gradually rising.

“Accumulation is taking place at the current level. It is gathering energy for its next upward move. MACD and EMA trends are forming a bullish momentum,” they added.

For his part, Jesse Olson argued that Cardano’s cryptocurrency has flipped “ultra bullish” on the daily chart, with the price breaking above a vital zone and continuing to make higher highs and higher lows. Shortly after, the analyst estimated that ADA has a pending buy signal on the weekly chart, noting that it hasn’t been bullish on the seven-day timeframe in 14 months.

More Crypto Online also weighed in, saying the token continues to follow a specific bullish price channel and setting $0.315 as the next target to watch.

Somewhat expected, X user Sssebi, who has issued optimistic price predictions even when ADA traded at much lower levels over the past several months, couldn’t stay silent amid the rally. They simply claimed the token could do “something really crazy” without providing a specific target.

Those who want to explore additional forecasts can read our detailed article here.

Short Setup?

X user Mork differentiated themselves from the overall bullish sentiment, describing ADA as one of their favorite short setups right now. The market observer noted the asset’s strong recent performance but said they won’t rush to chase the first move away from resistance.

“I’m waiting for another move into the level. If buyers don’t step in there, I’ll take a closer look at the short,” they said.

Meanwhile, ADA’s Relative Strength Index (RSI) suggests that the asset may indeed experience a short-term correction. The ratio has risen into overbought territory above 70, meaning the price has soared too much in a short period, and it might be time to cool off. Conversely, readings below 30 are usually interpreted as buying opportunities.

The post Top Cardano Price Predictions as ADA Explodes 30% in a Week appeared first on CryptoPotato.