Despite macroeconomic challenges, improving Bitcoin network health suggests a reduced likelihood of a prolonged bear market.

The post CryptoQuant analysis suggests bear cycle return is unlikely despite macro headwinds appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The shift in trading dynamics highlights the growing influence of cryptocurrency on traditional markets, challenging established investment norms.

The post Strategy’s trading volume surpasses Berkshire Hathaway’s, marking a new era for Bitcoin proxy stocks appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The escalation in Black Sea tensions threatens commercial shipping and complicates Ukraine's strategic goals, impacting Crimea recapture odds.

The post Russian drone strike on Tanzania-flagged ship kills one, injures three: Ukraine appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Ripple's integration into AI payment protocols could significantly enhance XRP's role in automated transactions, boosting its utility and adoption.

The post Ripple adds XRP payments to Stripe and Coinbase’s x402 AI standard in new developer kit appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Ripple's integration of XRP into AI-driven systems could accelerate its adoption, signaling a shift towards innovative financial solutions.

The post Ripple integrates XRP payments with Stripe and Tempo’s AI standard appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Peter Schiff: “The Fed Has Already Lost The Battle Against Inflation” & BTC vs GOLD Debate

Peter Schiff says the bond market didn’t break recently, it broke in 2020, and everything since has been a slow unwind. Across this conversation with Grace Remington and Sean Hagan, he connects rising Treasury yields, the Fed’s expected rate decision, the dollar’s loss of purchasing power, and the central bank rush into gold. He argues that a stock selloff driven by higher rates would be deeply bearish for Bitcoin and the broader crypto market, and that political capital in Washington has already turned against it. The episode ends with Schiff and the hosts going head to head on whether anything actually backs Bitcoin.

00:00 — Peter Schiff says the bond market already broke in 2020
01:44 — How long the Treasury bear market could realistically last
04:18 — What Schiff would enact to actually bring inflation down
06:32 — Spending cuts, higher rates, and the recession nobody will accept
07:39 — Are we in the early stages of a dollar crisis?
08:26 — Rate hike odds and whether Warsh surprises the market
10:51 — Why Schiff calls it a cosmetic hike with no credibility behind it
12:33 — Why gold ran to 5,500 while Bitcoin lagged 23% off its highs
14:20 — Bitcoin priced in gold and the case that it peaked in 2021
17:29 — Tokenized gold vs Bitcoin: counterparty risk and what backs money

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

This post Peter Schiff: “The Fed Has Already Lost The Battle Against Inflation” & BTC vs GOLD Debate first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Patrick Green.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Price Wobbles Before Settling After Fed Raises Rates 

Bitcoin’s price swung before settling largely unmoved over a 24-hour period after the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates — as expected — for the first time since 2023. 

The leading cryptocurrency was recently priced at nearly $75,813 after dropping as low as $75,355 in the hour after the U.S. central bank gave its decision to increase the benchmark federal funds rate to a range of 3.75% to 4%. 

Over a seven-day period, the coin is down nearly 4%. 

Traders had bet there was a more than 90% chance that the Fed would raise interest rates ahead of its September meeting. Major Bitcoin trades therefore likely happened before Wednesday. 

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh didn’t reveal much about the central bank’s next moves but made it clear that price stability in the U.S. was its number one priority. 

“The decision we made today was a sober decision, serious decision, responsible decision, one that we have been preparing for and thinking about in my 110 or 120 days here,” Warsh said. 

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

Wash — who has previously praised Bitcoin — said last month in his first major speech as head of the U.S. central bank that inflation was too high and had to be brought down. 

The new chair is seemingly going against President Donald Trump’s wishes; the president has repeatedly called for lower interest rates and even threatened to fire the ex-Chair of the Federal Reserve for refusing to do so. 

In a post on his Truth Social platform last week, the president wrote: “We should have the LOWEST RATE of any country in the World, like ‘the old days.'”

When asked by reporters about what he would say to the president, Wash replied: “I’ve got nothing for you on a discussion with the president.”

Bitcoin typically does well in a low interest rate environment because there is more liquidity to buy the asset. 

The U.S. is currently in the midst of an affordability crisis and war in the Middle East has pushed up the price of oil, in turn compounding the problem as the cost of everyday goods in the world’s largest economy rises.

This post Bitcoin Price Wobbles Before Settling After Fed Raises Rates  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

CFTC Chairman Says Agency Will Write Crypto Rules After Clarity Act Vote Fails

Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Mike Selig has said that the top regulator will go ahead and use its powers to advance crypto legislation despite the Clarity Act being blocked. 

In a Wednesday statement released on X, Selig said that the regulator would still help U.S. President Trump “get the job done.” 

Lawmakers blocked the Clarity Act on Tuesday in a procedural vote, with the long-awaited legislation missing the 60 votes needed to advance it. The bill aims to formally divide oversight between regulators, distinguishing which digital assets are securities, commodities or stablecoins. 

“Americans deserve regulatory clarity, legal certainty, and consumer protections in crypto asset markets,” Selig wrote. 

“President Trump promised to deliver a future-proof crypto asset regulatory market structure one way or the other, and we will help him get the job done using our existing statutory authorities.

“The U.S. is and will remain the crypto capital of the world. The CFTC is locked in and ready to ship its rules for the new frontier of finance.”

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

Regulators are now more crypto-friendly since President Trump appointed them and took the White House and are widely expected to continue pushing rules that help the crypto space. 

The Securities and Exchange Commission last month proposed its own framework for crypto asset offerings, pressing ahead despite a vote on the Clarity Act stalling. 

Despite being passed by the House of Representatives last year, the Clarity Act was in a deadlock for most of this year after the banking lobby clashed with lawmakers and crypto businesses over whether platforms like Coinbase should be able to pay customers yield. 

Some lawmakers have sought to change wording in the bill regarding ethics, and a new bill started circulating in July. The draft bans government officials from promoting and making money from crypto. 

But other Democratic lawmakers said it still fell short; a number of pro-crypto Republicans accused Democrats of deliberately playing politics and delaying the bill. 

This post CFTC Chairman Says Agency Will Write Crypto Rules After Clarity Act Vote Fails first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Is on Sale and Should Be Accumulated, Says Morgan Creek Capital CEO

Morgan Creek Capital CEO Mark Yusko has said that bitcoin’s fair value is $105,000 based on Metcalfe’s Law. 

Speaking on Bitcoin Magazine TV on Wednesday, the investment management firm said that now was the best time to buy the leading cryptocurrency as it is “on sale.” 

Metcalfe’s Law, an observation by Internet entrepreneur Robert Metcalfe, states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users. Bitcoin touched a high in October 2025 of $126,080 but was recently trading 40% lower than that, at $75,701. 

“So the fair value of bitcoin today, based on Metcalf’s law — Tim Peterson runs a model that tracks this really nicely — it’s about $105,000, but it’s $75,000,” Yusko said.  

“Okay, so it’s on sale — you should accumulate things that are on sale.”

Yusko went on to say that bitcoin was the best way to protect one’s value and that investing in companies wasn’t good for the long-term. 

“The problem is over a 30-year period, equity, 85% of companies disappear over 30 years. It’s amazing stat,” he said. 

“What you really need is something to protect your value — and historically, for 5,000 years, there was one asset: gold.”

“Now we’ve got gold and bitcoin,” he added. 

Bitcoin started rallying in August following news that the U.S. Treasury would at least double the size of its liquidity-support buyback operations. The announcement hurt the dollar but non-yielding assets have benefited.  

Since then, some experts have said that the so-called debasement trade — when investors buy an asset as a way to hedge against a currency losing value — is back and will benefit bitcoin. 

The trade was hot last year, and helped bitcoin’s run, but the digital asset lost steam after October as traders turned their attention to stocks related to artificial intelligence. 

This post Bitcoin Is on Sale and Should Be Accumulated, Says Morgan Creek Capital CEO first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

The Quantum Issue: To Freeze Coins Or Not

Bitcoin’s quantum debate is quite a quagmire. This is not merely a technical debate regarding the trade-offs of different types of cryptography and their strengths against a theoretical quantum computer. It is a debate about which properties of Bitcoin’s ethos are strongest when it is faced with a difficult dilemma: uphold the promise that valid coins remain spendable by their owners, or favor supporting the security of the system by not allowing a significant portion of its monetary supply to be raided via a vulnerability that was well known for many years.

The conundrum at the crux of this controversy is that every serious option violates a principle that Bitcoin users care about. Doing nothing may preserve today’s consensus rules while allowing future quantum-capable actors to take coins whose owners never consented. Freezing vulnerable coins may prevent that theft, but it retroactively invalidates long-standing spending conditions. A forced migration to quantum-resistant signatures may be prudent engineering, but it can also look like a deadline-backed confiscation regime. The debate is ugly because there is no clean path that perfectly preserves property rights, economic predictability, censorship resistance, backward compatibility, and user sovereignty all at once.

This is why I consider the problem to be fascinating. It’s multifaceted: simultaneously technical, sociological, philosophical, and economic in nature. Thus any serious discussion of the problem must consider every angle.

Throughout this essay I’ll be making the case that the quantum migration debate is far more nuanced than just a question between freezing or not freezing vulnerable bitcoin. Rather, it’s a question of how to minimize total property-rights violations once elliptic curve signatures no longer reliably authenticate rightful ownership.

The Quantum Threat

Bitcoin’s current authorization scheme to ensure that funds are only spent by their rightful owners depends on elliptic-curve cryptography. Legacy ECDSA signatures and Schnorr signatures both use the secp256k1 elliptic curve. Under ordinary classical computing assumptions, deriving a private key from a public key is computationally infeasible. A cryptographically relevant quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm changes that assumption: once a public key is available, a sufficiently capable quantum attacker could derive the corresponding private key and sign a transaction to spend the funds that would be accepted as valid by the network. Quantum computers threaten to break the public-key-to-private-key hardness assumption behind ECDSA and Schnorr.

That distinction matters because not all Bitcoin outputs expose the same information at the same time. Some output types reveal a public key immediately and remain vulnerable indefinitely. Others hide the public key behind a hash until the owner spends. This creates two broad attack classes. A long-range attack targets outputs whose public keys are already visible on-chain, such as old pay-to-public-key outputs and Taproot outputs. A short-range attack targets coins at the moment of spending: the owner broadcasts a transaction, the public key becomes visible, and a fast quantum attacker attempts to derive the private key quickly enough to replace or front-run the transaction.

The mining threat is different. Grover’s algorithm can in theory speed up brute-force searching for a valid block hash, but it only provides a quadratic speedup while Shor’s algorithm provides a superpolynomial speedup. Thus the competitive advantage is far less practical to bother using a quantum computer for mining.

The Quantum Quantum Threat

Amusingly, the threat of quantum computers is itself in a quantum state of superposition. A quantum computer worth worrying about may or may not be built and no one can prove or disprove that it will happen. Quantum skeptics don’t dispute that Shor’s algorithm could break ECC. They claim there is no good reason to believe we will ever build the kind of powerful, fault-tolerant quantum computer needed to run Shor’s algorithm at a cryptographically relevant scale.

Everyone agrees that breaking ECC isn’t possible with today’s noisy quantum processors. It requires many reliable logical qubits, extremely low error rates, lengthy computations with high coherence, and quantum error correction running successfully at scale.

A strong skeptical argument is that the quantum fault-tolerance threshold theorem depends on assumptions that may not be physically satisfiable with the required precision. Such assumptions include sufficiently independent noise, sufficiently accurate gates, limited unwanted interactions, and the ability to keep errors below an acceptable threshold across a huge system. Mikhail Dyakonov argues that the theorem assumes idealized conditions and does not tell us the real engineering precision needed to satisfy every assumption in an actual device.

Gil Kalai’s criticism is more structural. His argument is that realistic quantum systems may suffer from correlated noise and noise accumulation that prevent the formation of high-quality quantum error-correcting codes. In his 2011 paper, he proposes that physical realizations of quantum codes, correlations in stochastic systems, and accumulated noise could lead to failure of scalable quantum computers.

This may be the strongest skeptic argument: quantum error correction works only if the noise is tameable. If real high-qubit systems generate adversarially correlated errors, then adding more qubits may very well make the computer more fragile and unreliable.

Quantum scalability is a major unknown. Skeptics argue that progress from 50, 100, or 1,000 physical qubits does not automatically extrapolate to millions of physical qubits or thousands of logical qubits. Quantum systems are analog, delicate, and coupled to their environment. The engineering challenge is not just “make more qubits”; it is “make more qubits while suppressing crosstalk, leakage, correlated errors, calibration drift, thermal effects, measurement errors, fabrication variation, and control noise.” This is why critics reject simple timeline extrapolations. They view “we increased qubit count by X this decade, so we will break ECC by year Y” as weak reasoning.

Finally, quantum computer demonstrations have shown that current devices can only outperform classical simulations on carefully selected sampling tasks. Critics have a good point that this says little about executing long, structured algorithms like Shor’s algorithm with enough reliability to recover a 256-bit ECC private key.

Why Post-Quantum Migration Matters

Assuming that a cryptographically relevant quantum computer appears, merely adding the option for Bitcoiners to use post-quantum cryptography won’t be sufficient to stop a quantum attack. The total set of quantum-vulnerable bitcoin includes early pay-to-public-key coins, coins controlled by reused public keys, Taproot outputs, and cases where public keys or extended public keys have been revealed outside the chain. One striking figure is the concentration of BTC in old P2PK outputs, which are a tiny fraction of UTXOs by count but represent a much larger share of value, about 1.7 million BTC. Broader estimates via on-chain analysis of output types, activity patterns, and known ownership lead us to believe that at least 2.6 million BTC would remain vulnerable even if all active Bitcoin users migrated their wallets to post-quantum cryptography.

As such, even with opt-in post-quantum (PQ) cryptography, we should expect there to be a systemic risk sized pool of vulnerable coins lingering indefinitely. These coins could be employed by a quantum attacker to harm the system in a wide variety of ways – not just via selling them and dropping the spot price of BTC. Thus, protecting those vulnerable coins from a quantum threat requires some sort of rule changes that would effectively “lock out” a quantum attacker.

The rhetoric around this issue often uses terms like “confiscation,” “burning,” “freezing,” “stealing,” or “recovery,” but these describe different mechanisms. A freeze would not transfer coins to the state, miners, developers, or some recovery fund. In its most basic form, it would mean changing consensus rules so that certain outputs can no longer be spent using vulnerable ECDSA or Schnorr signatures. That is why advocates sometimes say “burn” rather than “confiscate”: the coins are not reassigned; they become unspendable via their private key. But for a rightful owner who still has the original key, the practical effect can still feel confiscatory: a spend that used to be valid is no longer valid.

BIP-361 divides the migration concept into phases. First, once a quantum-resistant address type exists, the Bitcoin network would stop allowing new coins to be sent to quantum-vulnerable addresses. Later, after a multi-year window, legacy ECDSA and Schnorr spends would become invalid. Finally, there remains the question of recovery options for users who can prove, without solely relying upon broken ECC, that they are the legitimate owner – such as through a zero-knowledge proof derived from a seed phrase or HD wallet structure. The proposal’s primary purpose is not to pick a post-quantum signature algorithm; rather the goal is to create incentives and deadlines so that users, exchanges, custodians, wallets, and institutions actually migrate in a timely fashion and thus allow us to deprecate ECC in order to prevent a quantum attack.

The Case for Freezing

The strongest pro-freeze argument starts from a simple claim: a quantum attacker who derives a private key from a public key is not the legitimate owner in any morally meaningful sense. Under this view, “just let vulnerable coins be taken” is not neutrality; it is allowing a new class of actors to loot old outputs because the protocol failed to strengthen a lock that is known to be weak. Freeze advocates argue that the resulting harm from allowing quantum theft is not just to negligent owners but to all holders, because a successful quantum sweep would redistribute wealth to whoever possesses early quantum capability. This is problematic because that amount of bitcoin in a single actor’s hands who spent relatively little resources to obtain them can be quite dangerous for the ecosystem’s security. Bitcoin’s security model assumes economically rational participants that are incentivized to protect the value of their coins, but a quantum-capable actor has the potential to break that assumption. The pro-freeze position is that Bitcoin should not reward the first entities to break ECC with ammunition that could be leveraged to harm the system.

This argument is especially true for coins believed to be lost. If lost coins are suddenly recoverable by quantum attackers, the circulating supply effectively increases. That does not violate the formal 21 million cap, but it does change the economic landscape: coins that the market may have treated as inert can re-enter circulation, possibly rapidly and in concentrated hands.

The pro-freeze side also argues that the threat is not limited to ordinary profit-seeking. A quantum-capable adversary could attack Bitcoin politically, destabilize markets, undermine public confidence, grief the network for many years, or even acquire enough hashrate to 51% attack the network. Analysis of the game theory in play shows that we can’t simply assume an attacker sweeps vulnerable BTC to sell it and ride off into the sunset; there is a far wider range of strategies and undesirable outcomes.

A related argument is about market panic. Pieter Wuille’s comments in the mailing-list debate sharpen this point: the medium-term danger may be not only an actual cryptographically relevant quantum computer, but the credible belief that one may exist soon. If markets come to believe that a large share of Bitcoin’s supply can be seized at any moment, merely offering voluntary post-quantum outputs may not be enough to restore confidence. A credible plan to disable vulnerable spends could itself be a sufficient reassurance mechanism.

The pro-freeze camp also sees deadlines as necessary because voluntary migration is likely to be slow. People procrastinate; institutions move slowly; hardware wallets, exchanges, custodians, estate plans, multisig coordinators, and cold-storage procedures all need time to implement changes and plan for migrations. Matt Corallo has argued that Bitcoin should add a simple post-quantum capability well in advance of it being necessary, because wallets need to start embedding or committing to quantum-resistant public keys long before any later emergency decision about freezing vulnerable UTXOs becomes credible.

There is also a fiduciary responsibility argument. Public companies, ETFs, custodians, and exchanges will be unable to ignore a known migration deadline. A locked-in consensus change gives compliance departments and risk committees something concrete to act on. It also turns an abstract future threat into a project plan: upgrade software, generate new addresses, move funds, verify backups, communicate with customers, and complete migrations before a known date. BIP-361 explicitly argues that exchanges and custodians would face fiduciary and legal pressure to act once a deadline exists.

It’s also worth noting that all of this migration planning is applicable to more situations than just the emergence of a cryptographically relevant quantum computer. Most of the arguments in this debate apply to ANY situation where ECC is known to have been weakened. Generally speaking, cryptography tends not to withstand the test of time and any given cryptographic algorithm tends to be weakened over long time frames (decades) as researchers find flaws and develop new techniques that break prior assumptions.

Finally, freezing advocates argue that Bitcoin has always depended on users enforcing rules that protect the system as a whole. A soft fork that objectively disables a known-insecure spend path is not the same as arbitrary political confiscation, in their view. The proposed line is not “these people are disfavored” but “these script types require cryptography that no longer meets the bar for Bitcoin’s security assumptions.” If the rule is mechanical, objective, announced years in advance, and paired with a viable migration path, proponents argue that it is more akin to replacing a broken lock than blacklisting an owner.

Anti-freeze Arguments

The strongest anti-freeze argument starts with the opposite premise: Bitcoin’s social contract is that a valid coin remains spendable by the holder of the corresponding key under the consensus rules accepted when the coin was received. Retroactively invalidating that spend path crosses an inviolable line. It turns “not your keys, not your coins” into “not your upgraded-by-deadline, not your coins.” Even if no one else receives the frozen coins, the original owner loses practical control. That is why critics describe forced freezing as confiscatory, not merely protective.

This objection is not just sentimental. Bitcoin’s credibility depends heavily on the expectation that developers and node operators will not pick winners and losers among UTXO owners. A freeze aimed at “vulnerable coins” may be technically objective, but it still targets a subset of owners based on past address choices, wallet design, dormancy, or inability to act. Critics worry that once the network accepts retroactive invalidation for one reason, future coalitions may find other reasons: sanctions, theft recovery, inheritance disputes, state pressure, “obviously” lost coins, or other emergencies.

A second objection is that freezing cannot distinguish between lost coins, careless owners, dormant owners, imprisoned owners, dead owners with heirs, users in hostile jurisdictions, timelocked arrangements, forgotten cold storage, and deliberately long-term savers. Bitcoin has many users whose goal is to avoid being forced to stay online and responsive to policy changes. A person who stored coins safely for decades should not necessarily lose them because the rest of the network later declared their storage method obsolete. It’s worth noting that there is an incentive conflict between active current holders who benefit from reducing the effective supply and inactive rightful owners who may be unable to take action to defend themselves.

A third objection is uncertainty. A cryptographically relevant quantum computer may arrive later than expected, may not arrive in the form feared, may remain secret for some time, or may be countered by less drastic tools. If Bitcoin permanently burns millions of coins and the threat does not materialize on the assumed timeline, the network will have committed an irreversible self-inflicted property-rights violation. Critics therefore argue that premature freezing is worse than measured preparation.

A fourth objection is governance and legitimacy. Freezing vulnerable coins would be one of the most controversial consensus changes in Bitcoin’s history. Some have warned that announcing a freeze of old UTXOs could damage Bitcoin’s image more than a quantum attack itself and could produce a major fork in which one side accepts the freeze and another preserves old spendability. In that scenario, the “solution” creates a new political attack surface: exchanges, custodians, miners, and users must choose which chain’s property-rights model they prefer.

A fifth objection is legal risk. Some participants in the mailing-list debate warned that developers, companies, or miners involved in consciously changing code to freeze funds could face liability claims from owners whose coins become unspendable. Even if those claims ultimately fail, the legal process itself could chill development, divide institutions, and make consensus coordination harder.

A sixth objection is technical humility. Post-quantum cryptography is real, but not free. NIST has standardized ML-DSA, SLH-DSA, and ML-KEM, with more work continuing, yet Bitcoin has unusual constraints: every byte matters, verification cost matters, wallet compatibility matters, and consensus failures are catastrophic. Chaincode’s comparison of candidate schemes in their quantum deep dive report shows why the choice is not trivial: post-quantum signatures and keys can be much larger than Schnorr or ECDSA, and schemes differ sharply in maturity, signature size, public-key size, signing cost, verification cost, and assumptions.

That makes critics wary of forcing migration before the destination is mature. A bad post-quantum migration could reduce throughput, raise fees, bloat the UTXO or witness data burden, introduce new cryptographic assumptions, or force another migration later if the chosen algorithm weakens. Conventional Schnorr signatures are tiny compared with many hash-based post-quantum signatures, while lattice based cryptography has other trade-offs and maturity questions. On a related note, given the larger data sizes of signatures, this will increase the cost of transacting on chain and could price out less wealthy users.

Doing Nothing vs Doing Something

As I stated over a year ago in my first essay on this topic: if quantum computing becomes a threat to Bitcoin’s elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), an inviolable property of Bitcoin will be violated one way or another.

You’re probably familiar with the fundamental principle coined by Andreas Antonopoulos:

“Not your keys, not your coins.”

I posit that the corollary to this principle is:

“Your keys, only your coins.”

The point is that keys don’t merely authorize spending, but that signatures are supposed to be unforgeable evidence of control by the legitimate keyholder. A quantum-capable entity breaks the corollary of this foundational principle. We secure our bitcoin with the mathematical probabilities related to extremely large random numbers. Your funds are only secure because truly random large numbers are safe from being discovered by anyone else in the world.

The do-nothing position is often caricatured as “let quantum thieves steal everything.” Taking a noninterventionist stance against quantum theft is certainly principled: Bitcoin is a voluntary bearer asset governed by rules, and users are responsible for managing known risks. If a coin is encumbered by a script that becomes weak over decades, perhaps that is no different from losing a seed phrase, using weak entropy, trusting an insecure custodian, or failing to follow any number of other best practices. Under this view, the network’s job is not to guarantee the security of every historical locking script forever; rather it’s to enforce the rules as written.

This camp can also state that total supply is the only guarantee of the network, not effective circulating supply. The 21 million cap does not say “21 million minus coins assumed lost.” It says no more than 21 million coins will be issued. If a lost-looking coin later moves because its key is found, inherited, cracked through poor entropy, or recovered through quantum attack, the total issued supply has not changed. That argument is unsatisfying to people who see quantum funds sweeping as theft, but it is internally consistent: protocol rules define validity, not subjective moral beliefs about rightful ownership.

The do-nothing side also values operational simplicity. Any freezing rule requires defining what constitutes a vulnerable bitcoin redeem script, choosing activation dates, coordinating wallets and miners, communicating to users, handling edge cases, and absorbing political fallout. Doing nothing avoids a contentious consensus change. If post-quantum tools become available, users who care can migrate voluntarily, while users who do not migrate bear their own risk.

But the weakness of the “pure do-nothing” perspective is that it treats quantum theft as an individual-risk problem when it may actually become a system-risk problem. If enough coins are exposed, and if the market believes a capable attacker can use them to harm the ecosystem, the damage is not confined to owners who failed to migrate. It affects public confidence in the system which then cascades into negative pressure on the exchange rate, thermodynamic security (miner revenue,) and the revenue of many Bitcoin businesses. That is why even many people uncomfortable with freezing still support early preparation.

Apathetic “code is law” Bitcoiners are free to do nothing, but they should not delude themselves into thinking that they can stop others from trying to do something.

Alternative Proposals

Because “freeze all vulnerable UTXOs” and “do nothing” are both brutal in their own ways, much of the interesting work is in alternative proposals that would help users retain their property rights in the face of a quantum threat.

1. We could prevent new vulnerable outputs while not yet freezing old ones. This is the least coercive part of forced migration. Once a safer output type exists, consensus or policy rules could discourage or even disallow sending bitcoin into vulnerable locking scripts. That reduces future damage without immediately invalidating old property claims. BIP-361 includes this as Phase A, and several critics are more open to this kind of forward-looking restriction than to permanent retroactive burns.
2. Alternatively, the network could enforce a temporary lock rather than permanent burn. Boris Nagaev suggested that if old EC spends must be disabled, the lock could include a future re-enable height or some other mechanism that gives the community time to build recovery paths. Conduition explored how such a phase might interact with P2QRH/P2MR-like outputs and warned that simply banning all EC checks could accidentally affect hybrid constructions unless the rule is designed carefully. The appeal of a temporary lock is political as much as technical: it signals emergency containment rather than permanent confiscation.
3. Another option is rate-limiting, represented by the Hourglass proposal. Hourglass V2 focuses on old P2PK coins and would restrict spending so that only one P2PK input could be spent per block, with a net limit of one BTC per block from those outputs. Its authors present it as a way to avoid both immediate burning and unconstrained quantum liquidation: coins are not destroyed, but their ability to flood the market is throttled. The proposal estimates that unconstrained P2PK sweeping could be extremely fast, while the one-BTC-per-block design would stretch full P2PK movement over decades.
   
   Hourglass has its own critics. Opponents argue that it still violates permissionless spending by imposing special restrictions on a class of otherwise valid coins. It may also create a long-running race between legitimate owners and quantum attackers rather than resolving ownership. Some critics say that if the quantum threat is real, taking decades to clear exposed P2PK outputs gives attackers plenty of time; if the threat is not real, the rule is needless interference.
4. There is the concept of commit-delay-reveal, sometimes discussed through Guy Fawkes-style constructions. The basic idea is that a user first commits to a future spend in a way that a quantum attacker cannot exploit immediately, waits for the commitment to become deeply confirmed, and later reveals the secret needed to validate the spend. This can prevent a short-exposure quantum attacker from seeing a public key and instantly stealing the coin before confirmation. Chaincode describes commit-delay-reveal as opt-in and potentially useful, while the Optech summary notes that these schemes can let safely spendable bitcoins avoid destruction and reduce migration urgency.
5. Quantum safe funds recovery without EC signatures, especially for HD wallets, should be feasible. Or Sattath and others discussed “signature lifting” ideas where the owner proves knowledge of a seed or derivation path rather than proving control through the vulnerable public key. Olaoluwa Osuntokun built a proof-of-concept using zk-STARKs to prove that a Taproot BIP-86 output key was generated from a BIP-32 seed path. This would certainly be a last resort scenario for procrastinators to recover funds, given that the latest optimized version of the scheme requires a 200 KB proof. It would certainly price out recovery of small UTXOs, because a best case scenario would likely cost several hundred dollars in transaction fees but could easily run into the thousands or tens of thousands at higher transaction fee rates.
   
   This recovery path is attractive because it changes the moral shape of the debate. If rightful owners can later recover frozen coins through non-EC proofs, freezing no longer has to mean permanent destruction. But the costs are serious: large proofs, complex verification, privacy leakage, wallet-derivation assumptions, inability to cover every historical wallet type, and the danger of adding novel cryptography to Bitcoin consensus. Critics of the zk-STARK approach emphasized that megabyte-scale proofs and multi-second verification times are difficult to reconcile with Bitcoin’s conservative design.Though further research is already finding optimizations that are more efficient.
6. Dual-signature or market-driven migration. Marc Johnson and others suggested enabling quantum-resistant outputs, allowing optional dual signatures, giving fee or policy incentives, and letting users choose their own risk instead of imposing a hard loss deadline. This approach preserves property rights better than forced freezing, but it won’t solve the systemic-risk problem if too many high-value coins remain exposed.

Tricky Technical Trade-offs

The migration debate cannot be fully separated from the choice of quantum-resistant signatures because the size of signatures will affect the system throughput. NIST’s post-quantum standards provide a serious foundation: FIPS 204 standardizes ML-DSA, FIPS 205 standardizes SLH-DSA, and FIPS 203 covers ML-KEM for key establishment. But Bitcoin needs digital signatures and script-compatible ownership proofs, not just general-purpose cryptographic standards. A scheme suitable for TLS or government communications is not automatically ideal for a blockchain with limited block space and global verification requirements.

Hash-based signatures are conservative and appealing because their assumptions are simple, but they are large. Lamport-style signatures can be enabled in some form with script upgrades such as OP_CAT, but the Taproot key-path problem remains: if a Taproot output has a quantum-vulnerable key path, placing a Lamport signature in the script path does not make the whole output quantum safe unless the vulnerable key path is removed or disabled. BIP-347’s OP_CAT discussion explicitly notes this problem.

Lattice signatures such as ML-DSA offer more compact signatures than many hash-based options, but they bring different assumptions and implementation risks. Falcon-style signatures are compact but historically more delicate to implement. SPHINCS+/SLH-DSA is conservative but large. Experimental schemes may be attractive on paper but too immature for Bitcoin consensus. This is why a credible migration plan likely needs algorithm agility, test deployments, wallet experiments, careful fee modeling, and perhaps multiple acceptable post-quantum paths rather than a single rushed winner.

The block space problem is severe but not intractable. Chaincode estimates that migrating all UTXOs would take roughly 76 to 142 days if migration consumed all block space, and 305 to 568 days if it consumed 25% of block space. That is just raw migration throughput; it does not include human coordination, wallet upgrades, institutional approvals, support for air-gapped signing, hardware replacement, accounting workflows, etc.

A full timeline for UTXO set migration is measured in years, not weeks. Chaincode’s high-level estimate sketches a best case of roughly five years and a worst case closer to fifteen years for research, BIP work, implementation, deployment, and migration. The same report notes that in an emergency the timeframe could potentially be accelerated to 2 years, but historical emergency protocol fixes are not really analogous because the quantum migration problem touches every layer of the ecosystem.

The Ethics of Property Rights

The moral disagreement comes from two competing definitions of ownership.

The anti-freeze side supports a “code is law” perspective: ownership means control under the consensus rules. If an output is spendable by an ECDSA or Schnorr signature, then disabling that spend path violates the owner’s property rights. The network does not know whether a coin is lost, abandoned, inherited, intentionally dormant, or inaccessible for temporary reasons. Therefore, freezing is collective punishment imposed on a subset of users for failing to follow a new migration demand.

The pro-freeze side says ownership cannot mean “anyone who can break the cryptography gets the coin.” Bitcoin’s signatures are intended to authenticate the legitimate keyholder, not to create a prize for whoever first builds a machine that defeats the authentication scheme. If quantum capability turns public keys into private keys, then an EC signature no longer carries the same moral information it carried before. Under this view, refusing to freeze is not neutrality; it is a security failure to knowingly allow a compromised authentication mechanism to transfer wealth.

Both positions are coherent. The first protects rule stability and bearer-asset finality. The second protects the deeper intent of the locking script. The painful point is that Bitcoin’s consensus rules are the only practical arbiter. The protocol cannot read intent. It can only accept or reject transactions according to rules. Any attempt to encode “rightful ownership” after ECC breaks either becomes overly broad, relies on new proofs, or leaves some victims behind.

I submit that property rights have been violated on Bitcoin before. Allow me to introduce you to the Value Overflow Incident as it is commonly known.

On August 15 2010, it was discovered that block 74,638 contained a transaction that created 184,467,440,737.09551616 bitcoin for three different addresses. Two addresses received 92.2 billion bitcoins each, and whoever solved the block got an extra 0.01 BTC that did not exist prior to the transaction. This was possible because the code used for checking transactions before including them in a block didn’t account for the case of outputs so large that they overflowed when summed.

A new version of the client was published within five hours of the discovery that contained a soft-forking change to the consensus rules that rejected output value overflow transactions. The blockchain was forked. Although many unpatched nodes continued to build on the “bad” blockchain, the “good” blockchain overtook it at a block height of 74,691 at which point all nodes accepted the “good” blockchain as the authoritative source of Bitcoin transaction history.

The bad transaction no longer exists for people using the chain with the greatest cumulative proof of work. Therefore, the bitcoins created by it do not exist either.

Thus, from a pure property rights perspective, the person who followed the rules of the network at the time had their property confiscated from them because the overwhelming majority of other actors on the network considered their action to be undesirable and a threat to the network.

Anti-freeze folks will likely say that this is not a problem because the INTENT of protocol rules is what matters, and the intent was for the network to guarantee a maximum supply of 21 million BTC. I would tend to agree, and make the counter-claim that the INTENT of using ECC to secure BTC is to ensure that it’s infeasible for anyone to guess your private key.

Economic Stakes

A sudden sweep of funds by a quantum-capable entity could affect Bitcoin through several channels.

1. Coins thought dormant would re-enter circulation, increasing the effective bitcoin supply.
2. Markets could panic before any actual sweep if credible evidence appears that a CRQC exists or is near.
3. Miners could be affected if price falls sharply, because their budget is tied to block subsidies and fees in BTC terms converted into operating revenue.
4. Exchanges and other businesses could face operational stress and massive drops in revenue if customer deposits are exposed or if market structure breaks under uncertainty.

“Lost coins only make everyone else’s coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone.” – Satoshi Nakamoto

If true, the corollary is:

“Quantum recovered coins only make everyone else’s coins worth less. Think of it as a theft from everyone.”

If a large amount of BTC is permanently lost, remaining holders benefit from a lower effective circulating supply. If quantum attackers revive those coins, remaining holders lose that benefit. Critics of freezing respond that this is exactly why active holders have a conflict of interest: they may prefer burning dormant coins because it makes their own coins scarcer. That is not a trivial objection. A freeze can be framed as protecting the network, but it can also be framed as enriching active holders at the expense of inactive ones.

That conflict is why the specific definition of vulnerable coins matters greatly. Freezing only ancient P2PK outputs with already exposed public keys is easier to justify than freezing every vulnerable output, because the funds are far more likely to be lost. Freezing Taproot outputs is more complicated politically because Taproot is recent and intentionally adopted by users who were following modern wallet guidance. Freezing reused outputs raises another problem: the vulnerability may come from user behavior rather than address type. Freezing based on on-chain public key leakage is also a half measure because the chain can not know what was leaked off-chain; many wallets share their xpubs with third parties, for example.

A broad freeze could therefore be both underinclusive and overinclusive. It could miss off-chain exposed keys while capturing dormant but legitimate owners. A narrow freeze could reduce the worst risk but leave enough vulnerable value to sustain panic. This is why I believe the optimal solution is complex and requires a multi-phased approach, rescue proofs, and objective script rules rather than discretionary address lists.

Herding Cats

Bitcoin is an anarchic system of rules without rulers. It has no authority that can dictate changes to consensus rules. A rule to deprecate ECC would need broad agreement among node operators, miners, exchanges, wallets, custodians, merchants, and users. In formal terms, many proposals are soft forks: they make previously valid spends invalid under stricter rules. But in social terms, a soft fork that disables old coins is much heavier than an ordinary tightening rule. It directly affects property expectations.

This governance problem gets worse under emergency conditions. If Bitcoin waits until there is credible proof of a CRQC, the community may have to act during panic, misinformation, market stress, and adversarial pressure. But if Bitcoin acts too early, it risks freezing coins before the threat is real enough to justify it. Chaincode explicitly warns that planning and communication should happen before the threat becomes acute, while also acknowledging that stakeholder coordination, regulation, taxation, and user communication are major obstacles.

This creates a paradox. The best time to design a quantum migration is before it is urgently needed. The hardest time to persuade people to accept controversial measures is also before they are urgently needed. Once the emergency is obvious, technical and social options narrow dramatically. In short, because: Bitcoin moves slowly, some action must happen before the relevant computer arrives if we want a non-chaotic outcome.

A credible process therefore matters almost as much as the final rule. The community would need clear definitions, simulations, reference implementations, wallet support, testnet deployments, activation thresholds, recovery research, and communication to nontechnical users. Without that, an ECC deprecation proposal would look like coordination against dormant holders. With it, even opponents could at least evaluate concrete trade-offs instead of reacting to abstractions.

Governance Game Theory

The threat of a quantum attacker is similar to The DAO incident that Ethereum had to deal with in 2016. In other words: the ecosystem had time (about a month) to take action to stop an attacker from getting away with taking ownership of 5% of all ETH at the time. For 5% of all ETH to go into the hands of a malicious actor was considered to be a systemic risk.

To put this in context, from my own analysis of the blockchain I think a reasonable estimate for the number of lost coins with exposed public keys is roughly 2,600,000 BTC, or 13% of the current total supply. In other words, this is about how much BTC I expect would be unable to migrate to a quantum safe locking script if we come to consensus on implementing a post-quantum signature scheme.

However, note a crucial difference between the DAO situation and this one. With the DAO, the Ethereum community had to hard fork in order to regain control of stolen tokens. With a BIP-361 style change, it would be a soft fork. Which is to say:

Opposing the DAO fork was relatively easy: needed not to do anything and stayed on the chain with the original set of rules. That chain is now known as Ethereum Classic.

Opposing a quantum migration soft fork, assuming it has a supermajority of hashrate, would require dissenting users to coordinate a User Rejected Soft Fork, which has never been done before.

The Slippery Slope of Centralization

Some have stated that a forced migration proposal like BIP-361 is untenable because it would set precedent for “centralized planning” over who gets to use Bitcoin. In other words, this could lead to similar types of freezing to stop anyone who is considered a “bad actor” from using the system, such as in response to major thefts and hacks.

We already know that nothing about Bitcoin’s rules is truly immutable. It’s not possible to create a protocol that is impossible to change – the best you can do is to align incentives that make it unlikely to change. In the case of proposing changes as controversial as altering ownership / the money supply, you should expect that such proposals only have the slightest glimmer of being accepted if the alternative is expected to be detrimental to nearly all Bitcoiners.

As for the claim that it will lead to protocol-level confiscation in response to hacks and such, it’s simply not possible for an ecosystem as distributed as Bitcoin to coordinate a response fast enough to outpace an individual actor. To be more precise: trying to blacklist a specific address / set of addresses is infeasible because the “target” of such a protocol-level blacklist would simply move their funds faster than the ecosystem could coordinate freezing them.

Prior Precedents

The DAO was a special case in which a decentralized community actually had time to react to a massive theft, because The DAO’s smart contract essentially had a “cooldown rule” that made them have to wait for a month after initially redirecting funds into their own control before they could send them anywhere else, such as to “cash out.” As such, there was time to gather consensus from the wider ecosystem (they even conducted coin voting) in order to pass a pretty controversial hard fork.

What was the end result? We can actually observe how the market reacted. Despite all of the controversy, the economic reality was clear. Ethereum Classic, which abided by “code is law” and “do nothing” perspective, allowing the attacker to retain control of 5% of the network’s tokens, struggled to even reach 10% of the market value of interventionist Ethereum, which changed the rules of the network in order to return funds to their rightful owners.

As previously mentioned, Bitcoin also had the Value Overflow Incident in which bitcoin created by someone who was just “following the rules of the protocol” had them taken away by a coordinated consensus change.

These are stark examples of why I believe that economic incentives can and will trump moral and philosophical principles. Some will surely say that Ethereum and Bitcoin have little in common, and it’s certainly true that these different networks tend to have very different ethos and driving factors. But from an economic perspective, they share the same incentive structures with regard to a malicious entity controlling a substantial portion of the market cap. Bitcoin in 2026 is a very different ecosystem from Bitcoin in 2016. Consider all of the new entrants, many of which did not adopt BTC as a result of the libertarian standpoint.

It’s a pretty tough sell to get mainstream audiences to believe that bad actors should not be stopped if there is a means to do so. It’s an even tougher sell to tell companies and institutions that are making millions if not billions of dollars off of managing an asset that they should stand idly by and watch an existential threat to their business line carry out an attack that can be prepared for not just months, but potentially years or decades ahead of time.

Framing Matters

I think the worst possible framing of this debate is “quantum safety versus irresponsible users.” That trivializes the property-rights objection. Another terrible framing in my mind is “freezing is always theft, therefore no preparation is needed.” That trivializes the systemic-risk problem and overlooks the options we have to help protect property rights.

Matt Corallo has astutely pointed out that the debate over deprecating the use of vulnerable signatures is interesting because it can be framed in very different ways that sound the same on the surface.

1. “Protect people’s property rights to the greatest extent possible.”
2. “Don’t freeze anyone’s coins.”

The first perspective supports freezing ECC spends while also adding the maximum number of ways to safely recover funds (BIP-32 proofs, pre-Q-day commitments for non-BIP-32 wallets and timelocked coin wallets, etc).

The second stance actually minimizes the number of people who get to keep their coins and maximizes theft exposure. But it’s far simpler and avoids a controversial fork.

Thus I think this is not a binary debate of “to freeze or not to freeze.” Rather, a superior framing of the problem is: what is the optimal set of rules that minimizes property rights violations under conditions where the original cryptographic authentication mechanism is no longer reliable to authenticate rightful ownership?

Under that framing, deprecation of ECDSA signatures becomes more defensible if several conditions are met.

1. There must be a widely reviewed quantum-resistant destination. Users cannot be coerced to migrate into a half-baked or experimental mechanism. The destination may be P2MR plus future PQ script paths, a standardized and well-vetted PQ signature type, a commit-reveal construction, or a hybrid. But it must be usable by ordinary wallets and institutions, not just technically imaginable.
2. The migration window must be long enough for real-world users. Our block space throughput estimates show that raw transaction capacity is only one bottleneck. A serious deadline must account for wallet upgrades, hardware devices, multisig coordination, inheritance, institutional controls, cold storage logistics, and fee spikes. A five-year window may sound long in software terms but may be short for global bearer-asset migration.
3. The deprecation rule should be as objective and narrow as possible. Freezing by named addresses or presumed identity would be poisonous. Freezing by clearly vulnerable spend conditions is more defensible, though still controversial. Even then, designers must avoid accidentally disabling hybrid or recovery constructions that still use EC operations in non-dangerous ways.
4. Frozen funds rescue options are mandatory. A permanent burn maximizes clarity but also maximizes moral injury. Temporary locks, seed-knowledge proofs, commit-reveal paths, or other non-EC ownership proofs may preserve more of Bitcoin’s property-rights ethos. The current recovery ideas are not mature enough to rely on, but they are critical because they change a binary burn-versus-steal choice into a more humane migration path.
5. The community should define warning criteria in advance while accepting that perfect evidence may never arrive. A public CRQC demonstration against secp256k1 would be too late for some attack classes. But vague fear is not enough to justify burning coins. Reasonable criteria might include credible advances in fault-tolerant quantum error correction, government migration deadlines, expert cryptanalytic consensus, observed market stress, or other public signals. The NSA and NIST transitions show that major institutions already consider post-quantum migration a serious planning problem, but institutional caution is not the same as proof that Bitcoin must freeze coins now.

A Goldilocks Problem

A common critique of BIP-361 (other than “quantum computers aren’t real”) is that it is “rushed.” I think this is due to people making incorrect assumptions around activation. No one is claiming that BIP-361 should be activated today or even soon… it’s not even possible until a PQC scheme is activated. Rather, the point of BIP-361 is to have a contingency plan in place in case it looks like the threat is real and a migration becomes desirable.

We settled on a five year migration timeframe for BIP-361 because there are cons to migrating too early and to migrating too late. Migrate too early and we may be imposing great costs upon the ecosystem when it’s not necessary. Also, since post-quantum schemes and quantum safe funds rescue schemes are under active research, migrating too soon could lock us into a suboptimal solution. Migrate too late and we leave the ecosystem open to a systemic threat that could cause massive harm and loss of confidence in the network. We also know it needs to be a multi-year approach because of how long it takes for protocol changes to propagate throughout the ecosystem.

I don’t expect anyone to seriously suggest BIP-361 for activation unless it looks highly likely that a cryptographically relevant quantum computer is less than 10 years away.

Deprecation of ECC could eventually become defensible, but only as a last-resort consensus choice after a viable migration path exists, after objective rules are specified, after a long public deadline is published, and after rough consensus is achieved that allowing vulnerable coins to remain spendable via ECC would create greater rights violations than disabling it.

The most intellectually honest conclusion is that both sides of this debate are defending Bitcoin’s principles, just with slightly different interpretations. The ECC deprecation side defends protocol security, system survival, and property rights against quantum attacks. The do-nothing side defends protocol rule stability, censorship resistance, and the rights of inactive users.

The Path Forward

Bitcoin’s quantum problem is not urgent in the sense that users should panic today. It is urgent in the sense that decentralized systems must solve hard coordination problems before they become emergencies. Waiting until a quantum attacker is visible will leave us with the worst set of possible choices.

The next steps for the foreseeable future do not include BIP-361. Rather, we should focus on preparation:

1. reduce address reuse
2. research recovery proofs
3. reduce reliance on xpub sharing
4. research more optimized PQ schemes
5. activate opt-in quantum safe locking scripts
6. develop multiple contingency plans to prepare for various scenarios

Bitcoin’s quantum migration debate is not a choice between respecting property rights and violating them. It is a choice between competing kinds of property-rights failure. We should treat the quantum threat as a realistic but unquantifiable systemic risk, but not use uncertainty as a premise for premature controversial changes.

Even if a cryptographically relevant quantum computer fails to emerge, showing that Bitcoin takes tail risks seriously will boost confidence in the network and reduce uncertainty about its future.

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: To Freeze Coins Or Not first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Shinobi.

Bitcoin fell to an intraday low of $75,064.82 on Sept. 16, but recovered and reclaimed the $76,000 zone after Fed Chair Kevin Warsh's press conference wrapped up.

The S&P 500 fell roughly 0.7%, the Dow dropped 1.2%, and the 2-year Treasury yield climbed to 4.734% in the same window, while Bitcoin held its ground.

Warsh's real signal sat well past the hike itself

The Fed raised its target range 25 basis points to 3.75% to 4.00% in a unanimous 12-0 vote, but fixed-income derivatives had already priced in odds above 90% of that move before the meeting began.

Warsh then said at his press conference that he would be “hard pressed” to call broad financial conditions restrictive. A dot plot released alongside the decision showed 16 of 18 policymakers projecting at least one more hike this year.

That combination raises the bar for every liquidity-sensitive asset well beyond what a single quarter-point move could settle on its own.

Markus Levin, co-founder of XYO, argued the hike itself was never the number worth watching.

In a note to CryptoSlate, he said:

“Rates are likely to stay restrictive for longer than investors had hoped.”

Levin pointed to the median year-end rate near 4% to 4.25%, and also said that he is watching Treasury yields and liquidity conditions more closely than the Fed's headline decision, since Bitcoin has already absorbed much of the higher-rate expectation built into this meeting.

He said that if yields stabilize, the asset can continue to trade on institutional demand and improving liquidity, while adding that a run of additional priced-in hikes would weigh on risk assets broadly.

Four demand gauges have all turned in the same direction for Bitcoin

Glassnode's latest on-chain report shows Bitcoin trading just below its $76,700 True Market Mean, the average price paid by active investors, and every major demand channel weakening at once.

Realized Cap posted its first negative daily reading, breaking a 27-day growth run. US spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded $450.4 million of net outflows on Sept. 15, led by $214.8 million out of FBTC and $161.7 million out of IBIT.

Stablecoin supply sits near $301 billion, flat for the week and roughly 4% below its April peak. Corporate treasury purchases have slowed to just 5,900 BTC over the past three months, a fraction of the 89,000 BTC bought in July 2025 alone.

That leaves those buyers' $80,500 average cost basis sitting overhead now as resistance.

Fabian Dori, chief investment officer at Sygnum Bank, framed that slowdown as a structural liquidity question that outlasts any single Fed meeting.

He said:

“Treasury cash balances, private credit creation and stablecoin supply set conditions on a longer clock than any single meeting.”

In his view, the more relevant question is whether those broader liquidity channels tighten alongside monetary policy itself.

The $76,700 line decides which story is true

Glassnode's criteria require daily closes to settle the question, well beyond any single intraday print.

A second daily close below $76,700 would confirm a genuine range break, opening a path toward $71,300, the short-term holder cost basis, and potentially the $62,000 to $65,000 zone where this year's deeper accumulation took place.

Two daily closes back above $76,700, paired with renewed Realized Cap growth, would restore the prior range and put the $80,500 corporate cost basis back in play as the next test higher.

Martin Lee, market insights lead at DWF Labs, sees the immediate danger sitting just below the current price. Lee said that the vulnerable longs sit between $75,000 and $76,000, warning that a sustained hawkish stance would force risk-on assets to reprice around a higher-for-longer reality well past the idea of a single completed hike.

Lewis Huang, an analyst at Bitget, noted that Bitcoin has historically absorbed roughly four times the S&P 500's move on major rate-driven days. Core annual inflation hit a five-year low Sept. 11, with the headline number driven almost entirely by gasoline prices up 3.9% in a month and diesel up more than 60% on the year.

Huang said that those pressures can reverse faster than underlying inflation, adding that there is a real risk that the Fed keeps tightening well past the point where the energy shock that justified it has already faded.

Bitcoin resilience could turn into accumulation or delayed distribution

The bull case has Bitcoin closing back above $76,700 on consecutive days, with Realized Cap growth resuming and ETF inflows returning now that the Fed decision sits in the past.

Matt Mena, senior crypto research strategist at 21Shares, placed his $100,000 year-end target inside exactly that scenario. He pointed to more than $3 billion in Bitcoin ETF inflows over the past two months, and to Bitcoin's history of finding a floor near current levels before reaching fresh highs, as it did once last April's tariff selloff passed.

That target depends entirely on demand data turning, beyond the fact that the hike now sits behind the market.

The bear case has a second daily close below $76,700 arriving alongside continued ETF redemptions and stablecoin supply that stays flat without any real growth.

Under that path, Bitcoin's calm this week gets reread as quiet distribution well short of genuine strength. A break of the $71,300 short-term-holder floor would expose thinning order-book liquidity that Glassnode shows is largely evaporating below $68,000, leaving the deeper $62,000 to $65,000 accumulation zone as the next real test.

Bitcoin passed its first test simply by not falling with everything else this week. Whether that counts as strength depends entirely on numbers that will not be visible until fresh capital either shows up or continues to stay away.

The post Bitcoin holds $76,000 after Fed rate hike, but 4 demand signals flash warning appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Chainflip will set affected liquidity providers’ active TRON USDT balances to zero under a restart plan responding to the 736,442.17 USDT exploit it disclosed on Sept. 12.

The cross-chain swap protocol will first record each provider’s pre-migration balance separately on-chain, preserving the amount Chainflip says it owes even though the active account will read zero. Repayment remains pending.

By Sept. 16, Chainflip said swaps and quoting had resumed across the rest of the network while TRON remained excluded. The service restart leaves providers on the affected route waiting for both the accounting migration and a recovery process.

Chainflip said the attacker removed the USDT from its TRON vault between 01:44 and 03:10 UTC on Sept. 12 by causing six liquidity-provider withdrawals to be paid twice.

The attack exploited how the protocol read instructions attached to TRON transfers. Chainflip said the attacker submitted a transaction its validators had already signed and added a malformed memo. Software monitoring the transfer interpreted the memo as a failed swap and issued a refund on top of the ordinary withdrawal.

The protocol said the TRON vault now holds far less USDT than providers are owed. The restart plan therefore separates the live account balance from the amount tracked for recovery.

How Chainflip will account for the shortfall

Chainflip’s migration plan calls for closing its open TRON/USDT orders and strategies and unwinding related loans and lending positions. The protocol and its software release use the label “trxUSDT” for USDT on TRON.

Each provider’s pre-migration trxUSDT amount will then be written to a separate on-chain balance before the active account balance is reset. Chainflip said this separate record keeps the amount owed available for future payouts.

The recorded amount is distinct from a completed reimbursement, and the provider’s live trxUSDT account will display zero after the migration.

Chainflip has pledged to make affected providers whole. Its public updates do not identify a funding source or payout schedule, document completed payments, or state a definitively recovered amount.

The protocol said it patched the vulnerability by limiting which TRON transfers can carry swap instructions in a memo. The new logic accepts memos attached to a plain TRX transfer or a direct TRC-20 token transfer. It excludes transfers wrapped inside another contract call, blocking the route used to trigger the extra refund.

Chainflip said all other funds were unaffected. The disclosed shortfall, position unwind, and balance reset apply specifically to trxUSDT liquidity providers.

The post Chainflip to reset TRON USDT provider balances to zero following $736,000 exploit appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Avalanche’s Helicon upgrade is scheduled to give validators shorter, auto-renewing commitments while raising the uptime cutoff for rewards and reducing returns at the shortest durations.

The network upgrade is set to activate on Avalanche Mainnet on Sept. 22 at 15:00 UTC. Validators must install AvalancheGo v1.15.0 beforehand to remain compatible with the upgraded chain.

What changes for validators

Helicon will cut the minimum Primary Network validation period from 336 hours to 48 hours. It will also let eligible validators automatically begin another cycle when the current one ends, reducing manual signing work and potential reward gaps from repeatedly leaving and rejoining the validator set.

Operators can choose how much of each cycle’s reward to compound into the next one and can update the configuration for a future cycle. That creates a way to combine brief capital commitments with continuous validation, instead of choosing between a long lockup and repeated manual restaking.

The feature applies only to the validator’s own stake. Delegations will not auto-renew, and each delegation must fit inside one validator cycle because the validator is not guaranteed to continue beyond that boundary.

Validation periods that start on or after Helicon activation must achieve at least 90% uptime to earn rewards, up from 80%. The rule is not retroactive: periods that began before activation remain subject to the existing 80% requirement even if they extend beyond Sept. 22.

Avalanche's uptime measurement will not change, and rewards will remain all or nothing. Falling below the applicable threshold forfeits the full reward for that period, though the validator’s principal is not slashed.

For a validator using auto-renewal, missing the threshold has an additional consequence. The position will not roll into another cycle, and the validator will exit. Its principal and rewards accrued in earlier cycles are returned, but the failed cycle’s reward is lost.

Short cycles reduce how long capital is committed, while the higher threshold raises the operational reliability required to collect each cycle’s reward and continue automatically. For operators, that links continuity to cycle-by-cycle performance without changing how Avalanche measures peer responsiveness or adding a partial-reward buffer.

How short-duration Avalanche rewards change

Helicon will also begin a 90-day adjustment to Avalanche’s reward curve. The protocol’s minimum consumption rate, an input that helps determine staking rewards, is scheduled to decline linearly from 10% to 7.5%. The maximum rate at the one-year duration will remain unchanged.

Avalanche’s modeling estimates that this adjustment will reduce the annualized reward rate at the shortest duration by about 1.3% after the phase-in. The exact realized yield will remain variable because it depends on factors including AVAX supply, duration, and compounding choices.

The same modeling projects annual AVAX inflation falling by roughly 0.5% to 1% and the stake-weighted average duration increasing by about two months. Those outcomes are estimates depending on how validators and delegators respond.

The mechanical trade-off is more certain: Helicon makes short, renewable validator commitments easier to use, but sets a lower reward at the short end while preserving the one-year rate and demands more reliable uptime for new validation periods.

The post Avalanche’s Helicon upgrade cuts validator lockups from 14 days to 48 hours appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Ethereum validators rely on independently built consensus clients to agree on the chain, and that diversity is a safety feature. If a defect affects a client used by too much of the network, Ethereum can stop finalizing blocks or, under more extreme conditions, finalize the wrong chain.

Yet a Sept. 16 snapshot of one client-diversity dashboard offered three incompatible answers about which client had the largest share. Clientdiversity.org showed Blockprint estimating Teku at 99.83%, Miga Labs estimating Lighthouse at 51.32%, and Rated estimating Teku at 53.86%.

Those are readings coming from different proxies, and one is attached to a tool its developer now calls defunct. Ethereum researchers are exploring stronger validator privacy.

A Lean-chain research proposal would use fresh validator keys each day and hide links between deposits, validator activity and withdrawals, weakening some of the traces used to measure operator and stake concentration.

The central question is whether Ethereum can replace imperfect surveillance with authenticated aggregate reporting before those persistent identifiers disappear.

Why the disputed numbers matter

Ethereum.org’s client-diversity guidance describes two distinct failure levels.

A bug in a consensus client used by more than 33% of nodes could prevent finality, a liveness failure that leaves users unable to rely on transactions as irreversible.

A critical bug in a client with a two-thirds majority could cause an incorrect split chain to finalize, a safety failure that could leave validators facing slashing or an expensive exit-and-re-entry process.

The public guidance uses node share as shorthand. Researchers seeking a consensus-risk measure care about the distribution across validators and their voting weight, because a simple count of visible machines does not show how much stake backs each client.

The Sept. 16 snapshot did not provide that clean, stake-weighted answer.

Sigma Prime’s archived repository says the classifier is no longer accurate after Ethereum’s Electra upgrade and considers the project defunct. Clientdiversity.org nevertheless labeled the Blockprint panel as updated daily.

Miga measures a different signal. Its Ant crawler discovers peers and requests client metadata. Firewalls, refused connections, discovery gaps, and rotating peer IDs can limit coverage. One node can serve many validators, so a node sample does not reveal how much stake is behind each observation.

Rated’s documentation shows a separate attribution problem. For operator-level analysis, Rated groups validator keys by deposit address, then maps those groups to entities using transaction research, block graffiti and voluntary disclosure.

Rated says there is no standard method for that higher-order mapping. Its operator attribution is not an explanation of the client estimate displayed on clientdiversity.org, but it shows how much concentration analysis can depend on persistent public links.

Client concentration, operator concentration and stake concentration are related but not interchangeable. A large operator can diversify across clients, while nominally separate validators can share one operator, hosting provider, or software stack.

Ethereum Lean privacy would change what observers can measure

Buterin’s July research post proposes moving much of Ethereum’s per-validator accounting into zero-knowledge proofs. Under its privacy phase, the active validator registry would be rebuilt each day, validators would register fresh keys, and no long-term validator index would remain.

Balance updates and withdrawal conditions would be proven with ZK-STARKs. Deposits would use hiding commitments so a withdrawal address is not publicly linked to earlier validator activity.

Buterin described the result as strong validator anonymity. In the discussion, he also acknowledged that privacy can hide centralization, while suggesting that large operations may still leak enough aggregate data to be identifiable.

Ethereum’s broader privacy roadmap describes several protocol changes as active work or candidates under consideration, and says the roadmap is unfinished and subject to change.

Daily key changes would disrupt methods that assume a validator can be followed over time. Hiding deposit and withdrawal links would also erode deposit-address grouping used in some operator attribution.

Miga’s crawler observes network peers rather than relying on long-lived validator keys. A block classifier looks for behavior rather than identity. Neither method would automatically disappear because keys rotate, although new protocol and client behavior could make their signals less reliable.

Blockprint’s failure after Electra already shows how a protocol change can invalidate a fingerprint.

A 2025 USENIX study reported that four observer nodes located more than 15% of Ethereum validators in the peer-to-peer network during a three-day measurement. That experiment shows how network traces can reveal hosting concentration, but also why preserving those traces creates privacy and targeting risks.

A research path exists for publishing aggregate client shares without revealing each validator’s choice, but it does not yet solve authentication.

A Nethermind research project explored private voting for client reporting. Validators could encrypt their client choices, prove their ballots are structurally valid, and allow a set of authorities to recover only the aggregate. The design considered homomorphic encryption, distributed key generation, and zero-knowledge proofs.

An IETF research draft on verifiable distributed aggregation describes related cryptographic tools for private sums, histograms, groupings, and heavy hitters. These primitives can validate the form of a submitted measurement while hiding the individual input.

Multiplexed setups and distributed validators may also use more than one consensus or execution client, making an honest report more complex than a single label. Nethermind’s post identifies sampling, fake data, software attestation, decryption authorities, and performance as unresolved design questions.

Private client aggregate reporting could show whether a client crossed a warning threshold without revealing individual validators, yet still miss that one company controlled many unrelated keys. Client share and operator share need separate authenticated measurements. Neither the Lean post nor the private-reporting research specifies a complete operator-concentration system.

Ethereum can make validators more private without abandoning its client-diversity safety discipline, but measurement must become an explicit part of the privacy design. That means stake-authenticated reporting, verifiable aggregation, published uncertainty, and separate treatment of client, operator, and stake concentration.

Daily re-anonymization would expose how much the current picture already depends on incompatible estimates and public traces that privacy research is meant to remove.

The post Ethereum’s client diversity picture fractures under incompatible estimates appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Circle has scheduled the public launch of Arc for Sept. 16, giving USDC a network where the same dollar balance can fund both payments and transaction fees. That could remove a common obstacle to using stablecoins, giving Circle a possible way to attract additional USDC demand as it competes with Tether.

The public-mainnet rollout follows a private network that Circle said had more than 100 ecosystem and institutional builders in August.

Arc's public testnet opened on Oct. 28, 2025. Today's scheduled milestone is the move to a public production network, where its design can face a broader commercial test.

One balance for payments and fees

Arc is a layer-1 blockchain, meaning it operates its own network. Its documentation describes an Ethereum-compatible environment built around stablecoin transactions, with USDC as the asset used to pay network fees and transactions designed to become final in less than a second.

On many Ethereum-compatible chains, someone can have enough USDC to make a payment yet lack the separate token needed to pay the network fee. Acquiring that second asset adds another step before the payment can move.

Arc's USDC model combines those functions. A user holds USDC, sends USDC, and pays the fee from the same underlying balance. Developers can use familiar Ethereum tools while building an application whose spending and fee requirements are expressed in the same asset.

For a payment product, that could simplify onboarding and balance management. It gives USDC an operational role in every fee-paying transaction on the network, beyond being an asset an application happens to support.

The wallet integration guidance also makes clear that USDC's native and token interfaces represent the same holding. They are two ways for software to access one balance, so displaying them as separate pots of money would double-count the user's funds.

This makes the fee payable in the asset the user already intends to spend.

Arc combines open developer access with a permissioned validator set. Anyone can build applications under that model, while the operators responsible for validating the network are selected.

Circle's announced founding validator cohort includes BlackRock, DTCC, Visa, Mastercard, Standard Chartered, and other financial companies alongside Circle. That places institutional participation within the network's operating design.

For businesses considering blockchain settlement, the proposed role of those institutions is part of what distinguishes Arc. It also means that permissionless application access should not be confused with permissionless participation in validation.

The roster and private-mainnet builder count describe participation, but they cannot show how much demand a public launch will generate.

Arc also advertises opt-in privacy, but its execution documentation still lists Arc Privacy Sector and Stablecoin Services as planned and unavailable.

Arc's route to additional USDC demand

Circle reported $73.3 billion of USDC in circulation at the end of June, while Tether reported approximately $184.6 billion of USDT issued at the same quarter-end. These quarter-end figures show the difference in scale entering the scheduled launch.

Arc gives Circle a possible route to greater use: make USDC the balance that customers need for both financial applications and the transactions powering them. Payments and institutional settlement could give users reasons to keep funds available in USDC.

But additional activity on Arc and additional USDC demand are different outcomes. Moving an existing USDC balance from another chain to Arc changes where it is used, and paying fees in USDC likewise establishes a use for the token without proving a market-share gain.

The competitive test is whether easier transactions encourage customers to bring additional money into USDC and keep using it. A public network can provide the infrastructure for that change, but the launch alone cannot demonstrate it.

The post Circle opens Arc mainnet as it seeks an edge for USDC utility appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Two events inside 24 hours reset the entire crypto market this week, and neither of them went the way the industry wanted. The Senate killed the biggest piece of crypto legislation in years on Tuesday, and the Federal Reserve raised interest rates on Wednesday for the first time since 2023. $BTC is still standing at around $76,452, which tells you more about how much of this was already priced in than about how bullish anyone feels.

Here is what actually happened and where every major coin sits right now.

Why Did the CLARITY Act Vote Break Crypto Market Sentiment?

The Senate voted 49 to 50 on the motion to invoke cloture on the CLARITY Act on September 15, falling short of the 60 votes needed and short of even a simple majority. The bill would have built a federal regulatory framework for digital assets, splitting oversight between the SEC and the CFTC.

The failure was not about market structure at all. Democrats objected mainly to the bill's ethics language around presidential crypto holdings, and four Republicans, Susan Collins, Josh Hawley, Jerry Moran and Thom Tillis, also voted against the motion. Republican leaders had released a revised version on Sunday adding new ethics restrictions, but it was not enough.

The industry did not see it coming. The vote was described as a stunning loss for a sector that had been confident enough senators would move the bill forward. Technically the bill is not buried, but with midterms approaching, the calendar is brutal.

One thing worth telling readers: nothing changes for holders tonight. No new rules, no new taxes, no new exchange obligations, and the SEC's Regulation Crypto Assets framework is still open for public comment until October 20, 2026.

What Did the Fed Rate Hike Do to the Bitcoin Price?

Less than you would expect. The Fed raised rates by 25 basis points to a 3.75% to 4.00% target range, the first hike since 2023, on a unanimous vote. $BTC pushed toward $76,300 after the statement, then faded through Chair Warsh's press conference and settled near where it started, around $75,700.

That is the tell. A 25 basis point move that sits at 92% odds going in is not a surprise, it is a scheduled event. The pattern all through 2026 has not been hike equals down and hold equals up. It has been surprise equals move. Majors have since traded back up, with the Fed projecting limited further tightening from here.

The bigger risk sits in October. Goldman is already forecasting another 25 basis point hike in October, pointing to the Fed's own hawkish near-term rate projections.

Why Are Bitcoin ETF Outflows Getting Worse?

This is the part that should worry anyone watching flows rather than headlines. US spot Bitcoin ETFs shed $450 million, the largest outflow since June, as the CLARITY vote sent regulation-sensitive tokens sharply lower. The same move triggered roughly $570 million in liquidations of long positions.

$XRP took the worst of it among the large caps, which makes sense given how much of its thesis depends on US regulatory outcomes. It dropped close to 8% in the 24 hours around the vote while $ETH fell about 3%. Both have recovered part of that since.

Why Is the Zcash Price Still Climbing While Everything Else Bleeds?

$ZEC is the single strangest chart in crypto right now. It is up 16.88% in 24 hours to $1,385 and up 163.90% year to date, on a day when the rest of the market is fighting to stay flat.

The catalyst is institutional, not retail. Grayscale's Zcash Trust ETF (ZCSH) launched on NYSE Arca on August 25 as the first US spot ETF for a privacy coin, pulling in roughly $414 million to $463 million within two weeks. It crossed $500 million in assets under management by September 10.

The regulatory overhang cleared too. The SEC closed its multi-year investigation into the Zcash Foundation without enforcement action in January 2026, and rising shielded-pool adoption, institutional accumulation and concerns around AI-driven surveillance have lifted the whole privacy sector. Privacy is now up 213% since Bitcoin's October 2025 top, with $ZEC alone accounting for roughly 62% of the sector.

There is also a governance upgrade in motion. Token holders voted almost unanimously to cut target block times from 75 seconds to 25 seconds as part of the NU7 update, while keeping the Bitcoin-style halving schedule intact. 

Context for readers who need it: only 25 of the 200 largest crypto assets are positive for the year, and the median asset is down 55%. $ZEC is the outlier, not the template.

Crypto Price Update: Where Do $BTC, $ETH and the Majors Stand Today?

Green across most of the board on the 24 hour, red almost everywhere on the year.

🟢 $BTC: $76,452 | +1.25% (24h) | -2.14% (7d) | -12.64% YTD
🟢 $ETH: $2,442 | +2.04% (24h) | -1.19% (7d) | -17.69% YTD
🟢 $BNB: $725.58 | +2.86% (24h) | +0.94% (7d) | -15.95% YTD
🟢 $XRP: $1.30 | +1.75% (24h) | -5.80% (7d) | -29.25% YTD
🟢 $SOL: $100.14 | +3.57% (24h) | -1.05% (7d) | -19.55% YTD
🟢 $ZEC: $1,385.37 | +16.88% (24h) | +13.55% (7d) | +163.90% YTD
🟢 $HYPE: $80.15 | +3.48% (24h) | -3.60% (7d) | +215.18% YTD
🟢 $TRX: $0.3350 | +0.10% (24h) | -1.38% (7d) | +16.93% YTD
🟢 $LINK: $11.20 | +4.71% (24h) | -4.81% (7d) | -8.08% YTD
🟢 $DOGE: $0.08142 | +2.77% (24h) | -4.56% (7d) | -30.58% YTD
🔴 $XMR: $493.00 | -1.84% (24h) | -3.88% (7d) | +13.80% YTD
🟢 $ADA: $0.1992 | +3.46% (24h) | -6.44% (7d) | -40.13% YTD

What Should Traders Watch Next?

Three things. Minutes from this FOMC meeting land on October 7, and they will tell you how close the committee is to a second consecutive hike. The SEC comment window on Regulation Crypto Assets closes October 20, which is now the main US rulemaking channel with the legislative route stalled. And ETF flows, both the Bitcoin outflows and the $ZEC inflows, are the cleanest read on whether institutions are repositioning or leaving.

$BTC holding $76,000 through a failed bill, a rate hike and a $450 million ETF outflow week is not a bullish signal on its own. It does suggest sellers are exhausted rather than eager.

On Tuesday, September 22, 2026 at 3:00 p.m. UTC, Avalanche activates its Helicon network upgrade. For you as an AVAX holder, one thing changes above all: anyone delegating their coins will from that moment have to look more closely at which validator they hand them to. The minimum lock-up in staking falls from two weeks to 48 hours, and at the same time the bar at which a validator still earns rewards at all rises from 80 percent uptime to 90 percent. Together the two shift a slice of the risk onto you.

On September 17, 2026 at 06:57 UTC we queried the validator list directly from the P-Chain and counted how many active operators would fail the new bar. The result follows further down, along with the method. The headline figure first: 37 out of 593.

Helicon on September 22: what changes in Avalanche staking

Helicon is a hard fork, a rule change that every node in the network has to adopt at the same moment. On the Fuji testnet the upgrade has been running since July 28, 2026. For the main network the documentation names September 22, 2026, 3:00 p.m. UTC, which corresponds to 5:00 p.m. Central European Summer Time.

Technically Helicon bundles six so-called Avalanche Community Proposals. An ACP is a numbered proposal to change the protocol, comparable to an EIP on Ethereum. Four of them bear directly on staking, two on transaction execution:

• ACP-273 lowers the minimum duration of a validation.
• ACP-267 raises the required uptime.
• ACP-236 introduces automatic renewal of a validation.
• ACP-285 lowers the minimum consumption rate and with it the reward on a short lock-up.
• ACP-194 decouples the acceptance of a block from its execution.
• ACP-283 makes the minimum gas price on the C-Chain demand-dependent.

For the large majority of AVAX holders who keep their coins on an exchange and do nothing further there, nothing visible happens on September 22. The upgrade becomes relevant the moment you delegate yourself or enter into a new delegation.

From 336 hours to 48: the minimum lock-up for validators falls

Until now a validator on the main network had to commit for at least 336 hours, so for two full weeks. After Helicon, 48 hours are enough. The upper limit stays at one year.

What a validation period actually is

A validation period is the span for which an operator locks its stake into the protocol. Unlike Ethereum, Avalanche has no exit queue and no withdrawal on request: start and end are fixed when the position is opened, the stake is bound until the end, and the reward is paid out only afterwards. How widely such periods differ from network to network is something we measured across five chains in our overview of staking lock-up periods.

The minimum stakes stay unchanged. Anyone validating themselves needs 2,000 AVAX. Anyone delegating, meaning assigning their stake to somebody else's validator, needs 25 AVAX. A validator's total weight remains capped at the smaller of two values: three million AVAX, and five times its own stake.

The shorter lock-up sounds convenient at first, but it has a flip side that touches you directly as a delegator. That is the subject of the section after next.

The uptime bar rises from 80 to 90 percent: who that hits

Uptime describes the share of the validation period during which a node was reachable for the network. Until now a validator had to hold this threshold above 80 percent in order to receive rewards at the end. For all periods beginning on or after September 22 it sits at 90 percent.

Running periods keep the old threshold of 80 percent. So there is no cut-off date on which existing delegations become worthless in bulk. The change takes effect only at the next commitment, and that is precisely why it is easy to miss.

For you as a delegator this is the single most important point of the whole upgrade. You run no node, yet you carry its outcome: if the validator you delegated to misses the threshold, the reward for that cycle lapses. The staked amount itself is untouched and comes back when the period ends. What is missing is the yield.

Our P-Chain measurement: 37 of 593 validators sit below 90 percent

Whether the new bar is a theoretical problem or a practical one can be counted. On September 17, 2026 at 06:57 UTC we called the method platform.getCurrentValidators on the public node api.avax.network/ext/bc/P and evaluated the full response. This analysis was carried out by cryptoticker.io itself on September 17, 2026.

The response covered 593 active validators on the main network. Of those, 37 sat below an uptime of 90 percent, which is 6.2 percent of the field. 24 of them are even below 80 percent and therefore already miss today's threshold. That leaves 13 operators in the new risk band between 80 and 90 percent. Those thirteen still earn rewards today and would no longer do so after September 22 if nothing changes about their availability.

The rest of the field stands solid. The median sits at 99.92 percent, the tenth percentile still at 95.96 percent. The worst value measured was 0.01 percent. 24 nodes were not connected at all at the time of the query.

How the stake is distributed

The 593 validators held 166.16 million AVAX of their own stake between them. On top came 38.70 million AVAX from 32,405 individual delegations. Their concentration is remarkable: only 250 of the 593 validators had even a single delegator. The remaining 343 run without outside money.

On period lengths the measurement confirms the old rule. The shortest validation period found ran exactly 14 days, the longest 365 days, with a median of 90 days. 74 cycles end before the upgrade, a further 236 in the thirty days after it. For those 310 operators the decision about the new rules is therefore imminent.

What this measurement does not show

The uptime value comes from the perspective of the node queried. The protocol assesses availability from the perspective of many nodes, which is why the value at a single endpoint can deviate. Equally impossible to check was which operator intends to move to the new software version in time, and how individual exchanges handle the date. Anyone wanting to reproduce the figures can issue the same call themselves; the endpoint is public and requires no key.

A delegation has to fit inside one validator cycle: the new trap

Delegating used to be a fairly carefree business, because the validator you assigned your coins to was running for at least two weeks anyway. After Helicon its period can end after 48 hours. Your delegation, however, has to sit entirely within a single validator cycle, because beyond the end of that cycle nothing is guaranteed.

In practice this means: before you delegate, you check when the current period of your chosen validator ends. If that is in three days, you cannot enter into a delegation running three months. Skip that look and you get an error message in the best case and a shorter lock-up than planned in the worse one.

On Avalanche you delegate out of your own wallet, and the coins never leave your control in the process. Which wallets support this and what you should watch out for in key management is set out in our software wallet comparison.

Check the delegation fee: 147 validators take the full reward

The delegation fee is the share of your reward that the validator keeps for its work. The protocol prescribes a minimum of two percent, and the range is open at the top. Our count from September 17 shows a very uneven field: 252 of the 593 validators stood at the minimum of two percent, 105 at twenty percent, 49 at five percent, and nine each at three and at ten percent.

What stands out are 147 validators with a delegation fee of 100 percent. With them, nothing would remain of your delegation reward. As a rule this is no booby trap but the customary way an operator signals that it does not want outside delegations. A display error in the wallet or one inattentive click is still enough to end up there. The fee is openly listed in the validator list, and it is the first value you read before every delegation.

Auto-renewal for validators, no extension for delegations

Auto-renewal means a validation rolls automatically into the next cycle instead of ending. ACP-236 introduces this procedure, and it answers the problem the short minimum duration would otherwise create: without automatic renewal an operator would have to re-stake by hand every two days.

The operator can determine what share of the reward from the expired cycle it carries into the next, and can change that setting for future cycles. If it misses the 90 percent in a cycle, the position expires instead of rolling on, and that cycle's reward is then lost.

For delegations this explicitly does not apply: a delegation never extends itself. If you want to continue your delegation, you enter into a new one once it has run out, and the rule from the previous section applies again.

Lower yield on a short lock-up: what ACP-285 turns on the consumption rate

On Avalanche, the consumption rate governs what share of the theoretically possible reward is actually paid out, depending on how long somebody commits. Whoever stays longer gets more. Until now the lower value sat at ten percent; after Helicon it falls to 7.5 percent and rises linearly from there over 90 days.

In effect that means the reward, annualised, comes out around 1.3 percentage points lower than today at the shortest possible lock-up. The maximum value on a one-year commitment stays unchanged. Short durations are therefore not forbidden, they are priced.

As a side effect the developers expect annual AVAX inflation to be roughly 0.5 to one percent lower, and the weighted average lock-up duration to rise by around two months. These are forecasts from the protocol side rather than measured values; whether they materialise will only show after the upgrade.

For your own calculation that simply means: if you optimise for yield, the long lock-up remains the better route. If you optimise for flexibility, that will cost you somewhat more from September 22 than it does today.

AvalancheGo v1.15.0: what node operators need to do before September 22

Anyone running their own node has a hard task with a hard deadline. Version AvalancheGo v1.15.0 has to be installed before activation, otherwise the node follows the old rules and drops out of consensus. A node that drops off the network at the wrong moment loses uptime, and uptime has become more expensive from September 22.

Anyone building on Avalanche should additionally go through three things in their code. Removed debug methods have to be replaced. Calls to eth_accounts, eth_coinbase and eth_etherbase are dropped. And because of ACP-194, the state returned by a query using latest can lag behind block acceptance, depending on how long the execution queue currently is.

Dynamic minimum gas price on the C-Chain: what changes when you send

ACP-283 makes the minimum gas price on the C-Chain demand-dependent instead of fixing it. The C-Chain is Avalanche's Ethereum-compatible chain, on which most ordinary transactions and applications run.

In everyday use you notice little of this as long as your wallet works out the fee itself. It becomes relevant for applications and scripts that have a fixed gas price hard-coded. After the upgrade, such calls can produce transactions that get stuck or are rejected. If a transfer of yours hangs on September 22, the fee setting is the first place you look.

Staking through an exchange: why the protocol date does not automatically apply there

A large part of AVAX holdings sits not in a personal wallet but with a provider that handles the staking in the background. In that case your contract applies to you before the protocol does. The provider decides whether it passes on the shorter minimum duration, which deadline it quotes you and what share of the reward it keeps.

Experience shows those shares are considerably higher than the two percent the protocol knows as its floor. It is worth holding your provider's terms up against the protocol values before you enter into a new commitment. A look into the terms and conditions under the heading of payout periods usually answers both questions at once.

Staking income in Germany: the 256 euro exemption limit

In Germany, staking rewards count as other income under section 22 number 3 of the Income Tax Act. What matters is the market value at the moment of receipt, meaning when the reward reaches you. An exemption limit of 256 euros a year applies, and exemption limit means: if it is exceeded, the entire amount becomes taxable, and not merely the part above it.

Two points are often confused here. The holding period of your staked coins is not extended to ten years by staking; the Federal Ministry of Finance confirmed this in its circular of March 6, 2025 on individual questions of the income tax treatment of crypto assets. For the rewards themselves, a separate one-year period under section 23 of the Income Tax Act begins on receipt.

Because a delegation can be settled considerably more often after Helicon than before, correspondingly more individual receipt dates arise. Anyone who had four settlements a year until now quickly reaches a multiple of that. Note the date, quantity and price of every reward while the data is still within reach.

Avalanche staking after Helicon: what to take away

1. Check which validator you delegate to before September 22. Look at the uptime of the current period and hold it against the new threshold of 90 percent, and read the delegation fee before you confirm. 37 of the 593 active validators were below it in our measurement, and 147 took the full reward. If you would rather not delegate yourself, our comparison of staking providers puts the platforms' terms side by side.
2. Settle where your keys are before you enter into a new commitment. Delegating works out of your own wallet, and your stake stays under your control while it does. How to store the keys for that safely is shown in our hardware wallet comparison.
3. Record every reward with its date and price. The shorter cycles generate more receipt dates, and each one counts towards the 256 euro exemption limit. A portfolio tracker takes that off your hands; providers and prices are listed in our overview of crypto tax tools.

The details of the upgrade come from the Avalanche staking documentation and from the technical overview of the Helicon upgrade, the validator figures from our own P-Chain query of September 17, 2026.

(As of September 17, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

The European Central Bank has opened its digital euro pilot project to applications, and two dates in October 2026 are now fixed. Merchants selling online can express their interest in taking part until October 27, 2026. Before that, on Tuesday, October 6, 2026 at 3:00 p.m. CET, an online information session on the pilot takes place. The ECB has deliberately opened this session to anyone interested, consumers included.

Both dates appear on the English-language version of the ECB pilot page. The German version of the same page does not list them at the time of writing, and carries a note at the top directing readers to the English version for current information. Anyone informing themselves in German walks straight past both dates.

One point for context: the pilot is a test, and it is not a launch. The ECB is examining a beta version, and by its own account it will decide whether to issue a digital euro at all only once the digital euro regulation has been adopted.

What the ECB is testing in the digital euro pilot project

The digital euro is central bank digital money, known in English as a central bank digital currency, or CBDC. The definition in one sentence: electronic money issued by the central bank itself, as opposed to the balance in your current account, which is a claim on your commercial bank.

In the pilot, the ECB says it wants to examine a beta version of the digital euro under real conditions. The underlying infrastructure is to be tested in everyday situations, such as payments in shops or between private individuals. The central bank names its three test questions itself: is the system robust, is it user-friendly, is it scalable. The results are meant to feed into the further preparations.

The pilot is due to begin in the second half of 2027 and to run for twelve months. The application window in October 2026 therefore sits roughly a year ahead of the actual start. The gap is the usual lead time: payment service providers and merchants have to connect their systems before anyone pays with it.

One term that comes up often here is the digital euro rulebook. It sets out the technical and contractual rules under which banks, payment service providers and merchants would process the digital euro. In July 2026 the ECB published a new draft of this rulebook, version 0.91, which took up feedback from a large market consultation. A version number below 1.0 is an honest signal: the rulebook is a draft.

Digital euro, Bitcoin and stablecoins: why the pilot matters to crypto investors

For readers who hold crypto assets, the digital euro is no competing investment product. The ECB intends it as a means of payment; it is not designed as a store of value, and that is precisely why it touches the crypto side at all. It targets the same use case as euro stablecoins, namely digital payment in a stable unit of account.

Three things can be kept cleanly apart. Bitcoin is a scarce, volatile asset with no issuer that you can hold yourself. A euro stablecoin is a privately issued token pegged to the euro that falls under the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation inside the EU. The digital euro would be central bank money, a claim on the Eurosystem. We have set out the differences between the digital euro and stablecoins in detail elsewhere.

In practice this means that if the digital euro arrives, you get a state-issued alternative for payments that today run over cards, payment service providers or stablecoins. The ECB is open about its reasoning, pointing to Europe's dependence on international card schemes and citing a concrete figure: 13 of the 20 euro area countries rely on international card schemes for card payments. Anyone buying crypto assets through an exchange and moving euros in and out notices little of that dependence day to day, but still pays for it through the payment rails. Which trading venues in Europe operate under supervision is set out in our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.

Two digital euro dates in October 2026: information session and application deadline

The two dates differ in what they ask of you.

October 6, 2026, 3:00 p.m. CET, online information session. The ECB calls it a focus session. According to its announcement, it covers the aims of the pilot, the timetable and the selection procedure for merchants. The decisive sentence on the page: the session is open to everyone who wants to learn more about the pilot, and the ECB explicitly lists merchants, payment service providers, technical service providers and consumers. Registration via the ECB page is required to attend.

October 27, 2026, close of the merchant call for expressions of interest. It is aimed at merchants in e-commerce and mobile commerce. Those merchants are to help design and test the digital euro payment flows for online and mobile platforms. This is a call for expressions of interest, not a binding sign-up for the pilot itself: the ECB makes the selection afterwards.

Who takes part in the digital euro pilot: 36 payment service providers, merchants and central bank staff

The participant side is already partly filled. Following the call for expressions of interest aimed at payment service providers in March 2026, more than 50 providers applied, according to the ECB. Of those, 36 payment service providers authorised in the euro area were selected. The central bank justifies its choice with broad coverage by business model, size and geographical spread.

Added to them are selected merchants, now being sought, along with staff of the ECB and of the 19 national central banks. This group is to try out the beta version in everyday use, in the ECB's own examples when paying in the staff canteen. The figure 19 is no typo and no contradiction of the 20 euro area countries: in this list the ECB counts itself separately from the national central banks.

What is missing from the list is the general public. Going by the ECB's description, there is no general sign-up for private individuals wanting to join the pilot.

Can you take part in the digital euro pilot as a consumer?

The honest answer has two parts. You can attend the information session on October 6, because the ECB names consumers explicitly as a target group. You cannot apply for the pilot itself as the announcement currently stands: the participant groups are payment service providers, selected merchants and central bank staff.

This distinction is easily lost in the coverage, because the whole process runs as a merchant story. For you it means that the October date is a chance to hear first hand how the central bank presents its timetable and its selection, and to put questions where they can be answered. It amounts to no more than that, and anyone expecting an early issuance of digital euro to private individuals will be disappointed.

Why the German version of the ECB page leaves out the two dates

A detail that matters more in practice than it sounds for German-speaking readers: the ECB maintains its pilot page in every official language, but keeps only the English version up to date. The German page carries a note at the top saying that current information is to be taken from the English language version.

The result is that the German version does carry the timeframe of the pilot and the description of the beta version, while its news section still shows the March 2026 call to payment service providers. The call to merchants and the focus session on October 6 are absent there. The description of the participants is also less precise: the German version speaks generally of selected payment service providers, while the English one names the figure 36.

So anyone wanting to check the state of the project reads the English page. That is more than a technicality: it explains why these two dates have barely surfaced in German-speaking countries so far.

The digital euro timetable to 2029: regulation, pilot and possible first issuance

The ECB names three milestones, and each one comes with a caveat.

• 2026: adoption of the digital euro regulation. The ECB frames its entire timetable as an assumption rather than a fact: the central bank assumes the regulation will be adopted in 2026.
• Second half of 2027: start of the twelve-month pilot project.
• 2029: possible first issuance of the digital euro. The central bank wants to be ready for it, but will decide whether it actually issues only once the regulation has been adopted.

The legislative process runs in parallel and lies with the European legislators rather than with the ECB. Where the procedure stands and which points remain contested, above all the question of a cap on your balance, we have set out in our piece on the digital euro holding limit. That cap is the point at which the project becomes concrete for your current account.

What the beta version of the digital euro is and what it is not

A beta version is a working pre-release tested under real conditions before any go-live. In the pilot that means real behaviour in real situations feeds in, while the scope stays limited to the group of participants.

From that follows what the pilot explicitly is not. It is no launch of the digital euro, no preliminary stage conferring a legal entitlement and no decision on issuance. The ECB states in its own account that the preparatory work remains flexible so that it can be aligned with the legislative process. As long as the regulation has not been adopted, the legal framework is not settled either, including any obligations for merchants.

For your financial planning that means, soberly: nothing changes for your account this year or next. What can change is the framework in which payment service providers and merchants build their systems, and that will later shape the routes over which you move money.

What merchants with an online shop should weigh up now

If you run an online business yourself, the expression of interest by October 27 is a genuine decision. Three points speak for it, all of them named by the ECB: you can help shape the payment flows, you see the technical requirements earlier than your competitors, and you test against an infrastructure that, if it succeeds, works the same way in every euro area country.

Against that stands the effort. A beta integration ties up development time in a project whose legal basis has yet to be agreed, and the pilot only starts in the second half of 2027. Anyone with scarce development resources is pushing back work on things that bring in revenue tomorrow.

A sober middle course: the information session on October 6 costs an hour and supplies the basis for the decision that falls due three weeks later. Anyone accepting crypto assets in their own shop knows the trade-off from practice anyway, because the same questions of settlement, chargebacks and costs have to be answered there.

Digital euro and self-custody: what changes for your wallet

The short answer: the digital euro changes nothing about your self-custody. Going by the ECB's description it will sit in an account with your bank or with a public intermediary, so with an intermediary in either case. A wallet whose keys only you hold therefore remains the only way to move digital assets without anyone else's consent.

Two points are still worth keeping an eye on. First the offline function: the ECB holds out the prospect of payments without a network connection, which comes closer to cash than any card payment does. Second the planned cap on your balance, which has no equivalent for self-custodied crypto assets and which marks the digital euro clearly as a means of payment rather than a form of saving.

Anyone holding crypto assets today takes a separate decision about how to secure the keys. The choice between custody with a provider and your own hardware is a topic in itself, and our hardware wallet comparison shows what matters in practice for self-custody.

How to tell whether the digital euro timetable holds

Timetables in this project have slipped before, so it is worth looking at the points where slippage shows up early. Three observation points are enough.

1. The regulation. The legal act is the condition the ECB places ahead of its entire timetable. If the legislative process runs beyond 2026, everything behind it moves back.
2. The rulebook. As long as the draft stays below version 1.0, the technical and contractual rules are not final. A jump to a first full version would be the signal that the pilot is getting concrete.
3. The selection of merchants. After October 27 the ECB has to choose from the expressions of interest. A participant field that drags on is an early hint of a later start.

None of these points works as a signal for crypto price moves. The digital euro is a payments project with a horizon out to 2029, and anyone deriving a price call for the coming weeks from it is overstretching the evidence.

Digital euro and the ECB pilot project: what to take away

1. Put October 6, 2026, 3:00 p.m. CET, in your diary if you want the state of play first hand. Registration runs via the ECB pilot page, and the session is open to consumers as well. If you also want to know how European supervision applies to trading venues, you will find that context in our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.
2. Check the expression of interest by October 27, 2026 if you work in online retail. It is a non-binding expression, with the ECB making the selection afterwards. For the payments side of your shop it is also worth looking at settlement via crypto credit cards, which raise the same questions of cost and chargebacks.
3. Change nothing about your custody because of the pilot project. Until a possible issuance in 2029 the digital euro remains a plan under reservation. If you wanted to review how your keys are secured anyway, our hardware wallet comparison will help you choose.

The two primary sources to read up on: the English ECB page on the pilot project carrying both dates, and the German version of the same page, which describes the framework but leaves the dates out.

(As of September 17, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Robinhood Chain went live on 1 July 2026, and the mainnet launch came with a 90-day gas rebate for transactions sent from the Robinhood Wallet (Arbitrum documented the launch itself). That window closes at the end of September; crypto.news puts the date at 29 September. After it, every transaction on the chain pays a network fee in ETH again. For the memecoins that set the tone on this chain, it is the first real stress test.

How big the chain has become

The numbers have grown sharply. On 17 September, value locked stands at around $929 million, DEX volume at roughly $1.54 billion over 24 hours and $39.1 billion over 30 days, with about $67.4 billion cumulative since launch (DefiLlama, retrieved 17 September). On 13 September it was $1.88 billion in a single day, which Bloomingbit counts as more than half of Uniswap's entire volume.

In fees, the chain took in around $7.8 million over 24 hours and $303.6 million over 30 days (DefiLlama). On 2 September, $4.01 million of chain revenue stood against $81,714 at Solana the same day (crypto.news, 4 September). Anyone reading that as Robinhood Chain overtaking Solana is comparing a subsidised launch phase with a settled network. That is precisely what this deadline is about.

Why the gas is the thing that decides it

Most of the fee-generating activity does not run through the tokenised equities Robinhood built the chain for. It runs through the memecoin launchpad Pons and through trading bots (crypto.news). Pons collected around $35.0 million in fees over seven days, $128.8 million over 30 days and roughly $151.3 million all time (DefiLlama, retrieved 17 September). Around 25,000 new tokens were created through it on 2 September alone, against an average of roughly 10,000 a day (Bloomingbit, 14 September).

An operation at that scale depends on a very low cost per attempt. Launching twenty tokens to hit one works out differently once every launch and every swap costs gas again. On top of that, the trading barely comes from the Robinhood app itself: Bloomingbit estimates its share of chain trading at one to two percent. The subsidy has therefore mostly pulled in outside usage, and that usage has no reason to stay other than the numbers.

What happens afterwards is open. There is no reliable forecast for how much activity survives, and any figure someone quotes you for it is a guess.

What it means for investors

The point that matters in practice is not a price question but a liquidity question. Memecoins on a young chain depend on thin pools. If transaction counts fall, those pools get thinner, and the gap between the quoted price and the price you actually exit at widens. That barely touches small positions and hits larger ones immediately.

How fast it moves in both directions is visible in CASHCAT, the chain's best-known token: on 3 September it set a new all-time high at around $0.3143, and on 17 September it trades near $0.1912. That is a gain of some 82 percent over 30 days and a drawdown of roughly 39 percent from the high (CoinGecko, retrieved 17 September). Both numbers describe the same token two weeks apart.

This is also where the difference between watching and trading becomes obvious: Dexscreener and TradingView give you charts, not execution. One mobile alternative is the trading app FOMO Family, which lets you discover, swipe through and trade meme and low-cap tokens directly in the app, with a fast deposit flow. Download the app through the link and you get ten percent off trading fees. There is also community speculation about a possible airdrop for active users - that is unconfirmed, the provider has promised nothing, and it is not a reason to deposit money. None of this changes the risk: meme and low-cap trading stays highly volatile, and losing the entire position is possible at any time.

What to measure in the days after 29 September

1. Daily transactions. The interesting number is not the price but how many swaps are left once they cost something again.
2. New tokens on Pons. If the count falls well below ten thousand a day, the supply this segment feeds on disappears.
3. Pool liquidity rather than market capitalisation. Check how much actually sits in the pool and whether it is locked. At a valuation in the hundreds of millions with a few million in the pool, exiting at the quoted price is effectively impossible.
4. Value locked. It sits just short of a billion dollars. Whether it stays there after the deadline is the single most honest answer to the question of whether the chain carries without a subsidy.

The background to all of this - what Robinhood Chain technically is, how the memecoin wave came about and how investors get access - is set out in full in our Robinhood Chain guide. If you are interested in how individual meme tokens are valued over a longer horizon, see our prediction pages for Pump.fun, the launchpad token Pons will most likely be measured against, and for BONK from the Solana ecosystem.

And the distinction that still holds after 29 September: memecoins are a zero-sum game in which earlier buyers' gains come out of later buyers' losses. That is not a moral judgement but arithmetic. Decide in advance what amount you could write off entirely without it changing your plans.

Disclosure: some of the providers named in this article work with us through partner programmes. This has no influence on our editorial assessment.

(As of 17 September 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy. Memecoins can lose their entire value; invest only amounts whose total loss you can absorb.)

On Friday, September 18, 2026, at around 05:01 UTC, the Solana network tightens its own beat: a slot will then last 250 milliseconds instead of 300. The switch for it is already set and takes effect automatically at the boundary into epoch 1037. For you as a holder of Solana, that mainly means three things: delegations and unstaking take effect faster, staking rewards arrive more often and in smaller portions, and the window in which a signed transaction stays valid shrinks to roughly 38 seconds. If your SOL simply sits on an exchange, you need do nothing. If you sign offline, delegate, or run a validator yourself, read this to the end.

The change is no surprise but the third step of a roadmap that began in August. The only thing new is that the 250 millisecond step now has a concrete date. Solana's official overview page still listed this step without a mainnet date when we checked on September 17, while the development team Anza had already flagged the activation as imminent on September 16. That gap between announcement and documentation is why the figure has barely surfaced so far.

What is actually being changed at Solana on September 18

A single number in the protocol is being changed: the target time for a slot. That value drops from 300 to 250 milliseconds. The number looks small, but almost everything in the network that looks like time hangs off it. Epoch length follows it, the validity period of a blockhash follows it, and the ceilings for compute per block follow it too.

The improvement proposal responsible is SIMD-0525. It describes a staircase from 400 through 350, 300 and 250 milliseconds to a target of 200 milliseconds. Two steps have already been taken on mainnet: the move from 400 to 350 milliseconds on August 19, 2026, at the start of epoch 1019, and the move from 350 to 300 milliseconds on August 25, 2026, at the start of epoch 1023. The third step is the one at issue here. A fourth is still to come after it.

What explicitly does not happen: there is no token swap, no migration, no deadline by which you would have to pull something out of a contract, and no confirmation you would have to grant in your wallet. Anyone asking you to approve a Solana upgrade wants something from you other than your consent to a protocol parameter.

Slot, epoch and feature gate: the three terms behind the date

The slot is the time window for one block

A slot is the time window in which exactly one validator may produce a block. Once it expires, the next one is up, whether the previous one delivered or not. Slot time is therefore not a speed limit for transactions but the clock rate at which the network puts out its blocks.

The epoch is the accounting period

An epoch is Solana's accounting period and covers a fixed 432,000 slots. At its boundary the network does the bookkeeping: delegations take effect, rewards are settled, prepared protocol switches are armed. Because the number of slots is fixed while the duration of a slot falls, the epoch gets shorter. At 400 milliseconds it worked out at 48 hours, at 300 milliseconds it is 36 hours, at 250 milliseconds it is 30 hours. At the final target of 200 milliseconds it lands at 24 hours.

This is the point at which the figures in circulation deserve a look: several reports give an epoch length of 24 hours for Friday's change. That is the value for 200 milliseconds, meaning the step after this one. For 250 milliseconds the same calculation gives 30 hours, and the official formula based on 432,000 slots arrives at that value too.

The feature gate is the switch with a delay

A feature gate is a switch in the validator code that keeps an already shipped function dormant until enough stake weight is behind it. When it flips, it never does so mid-epoch but at an epoch boundary. For this change the chain ran across three epochs: in epoch 1035 the switch stood at pending, in epoch 1036 it became active at protocol level, and with the start of epoch 1037 the new timing rules apply.

Why the switch flips at epoch boundary 1037 and not at midnight

Solana has no clock. The network counts slots, and a time of day can only be estimated from slots. That is precisely why every serious announcement puts an "around" in front of the time: the boundary into epoch 1037 falls on a particular slot, and when that slot is reached depends on how fast the network actually runs in the hours beforehand.

That imprecision is why two sources can say 05:01 UTC and a third 05:06 UTC without any of them being wrong. If you want something done by the exact moment, plan with an hour of buffer. If you only want to know whether you are affected, the calendar day will do: Friday, early morning European time.

Our own measurement: 317 milliseconds per slot the day before the change

cryptoticker.io collected this analysis itself on September 17, 2026. Method: ten consecutive performance samples of 60 seconds each via Solana's public mainnet node, retrieved shortly after 00:50 UTC, plus a query of the current epoch status. That covered 1,893 slots across ten minutes of network operation.

The result: on average 317.0 milliseconds elapsed per slot, with individual samples between 312.5 and 326.1 milliseconds. The value therefore sits above the current target of 300 milliseconds. That is normal and no sign of a problem. What is measured is elapsed clock time divided by the number of slots actually filled, and every slot a validator does not serve stretches that average.

The date could be recalculated from the same query. The network stood in epoch 1036 at slot 111,540 of 432,000, leaving 320,460 slots to go. At the measured 317 milliseconds that gives 28.2 hours of remaining runtime, and therefore September 18 at around 05:06 UTC. Our own calculation confirms the announced time of 05:01 UTC to within a few minutes. The node queried reported client version 4.3.0-rc.0.

What we could not check: how large the share of validators already running the recommended version is, and whether the switch actually takes effect on Friday. Both only show up after the fact. The compute ceilings mentioned further down also rest on a specialist report rather than on the official overview page.

Solana staking: what shorter epochs mean for delegation, unstaking and rewards

For anyone who has delegated SOL, epoch length is the practically most important quantity in this whole change. Delegations and their withdrawal take effect at epoch boundaries, not immediately. If the epoch shortens from 36 to 30 hours, the typical wait until a new delegation earns rewards, or until deactivated SOL is freely available again, shortens with it. How that process works in detail, and why a waiting period is not a penalty, we took apart in our article on lock-up periods and unstaking duration.

With rewards, the rhythm changes, not the amount. Payouts happen per epoch. More epochs in a year therefore mean more credits, but smaller ones. The annual yield on your delegation does not rise as a result. Anyone logging earnings by epoch gets more rows in the same spreadsheet from Friday, and anyone comparing providers by payout frequency will find the differences between the platforms in our overview of staking providers.

One common misunderstanding should be cleared up here: Friday's date has nothing to do with Alpenglow. That is a different and considerably larger overhaul of the consensus mechanism with a roadmap of its own, which we described in our article on the Alpenglow activation at the end of September. Two switches, two dates, two different sets of consequences.

Blockhash expiry at 250 milliseconds: why you have to be quicker when signing

The blockhash is the timestamp of a Solana transaction: a reference to a recently produced block that prevents the same instruction from being submitted again later. The lifetime of that stamp is measured not in seconds but in blocks. According to Solana's documentation, 151 blockhashes are valid. The documentation still converts that using the old target time of 400 milliseconds and thus arrives at roughly 60 to 90 seconds.

That span falls with the beat. At the 317 milliseconds measured today, roughly 48 seconds remain; at 250 milliseconds, roughly 38. A specialist report on the upcoming change puts the window at 37.5 seconds, which is the same calculation using 150 blocks instead of 151. The order of magnitude is the same either way: a good half minute.

This matters wherever a human being or a device stands between creating and sending a transaction. Signing with a hardware wallet burns those seconds on unlocking, paging through the display and confirming. So does preparing a transaction, then checking the address once more at leisure, and only sending afterwards. The consequence is not a lost payment but a rejected one: the network discards a transaction with an expired blockhash, and the wallet reports an error. How to tell whether such an attempt really failed or went through after all is covered in our guide to failed Solana transactions.

In practice that means: unlock the device before sending, check the address beforehand rather than inside the running window, and do not treat the confirmation dialogue as reading time. Which devices have short confirmation paths and which send you through several menus is shown in our hardware wallet comparison.

Compute limits per block fall too: what that means for swaps at peak times

Shorter blocks mean less compute time per block. So that throughput per second stays constant, the ceilings fall in the same proportion as the slot time. A specialist report on the change puts the block limit after the switch at 37.5 million compute units instead of the previous 45 million, and the ceiling for a single writable account at 15 million instead of 18 million. Those values were not on the official overview page on September 17, which is why we explicitly mark them as that report's figures.

For you as a user, the number matters less than its consequence. When a single account in heavy demand gets fewer compute units per block, transactions compete more tightly for the same pool. In quiet phases you will notice nothing. At peak times, say at the launch of a new token, the priority fee more often decides whether your swap makes it into the next block or waits. Anyone who has permanently set their fee ceiling in the wallet to the lowest possible value should know that setting before noticing it for the first time during a rush.

Validator operators: Agave 4.3 by Friday evening

Anyone running a validator has the only real deadline in this whole business. The recommended version is Agave v4.3.0-rc.1, released on September 11, 2026. Anza has asked operators to install the update by the end of Friday, meaning by the close of the same day on which the switch takes effect.

That is not an alarm but routine. Running an older version does not immediately cut you off, but it risks missing blocks once the timing rules change. For delegators that creates a quiet task: if your validator skips a conspicuous number of slots in the days after the change, the likely reason is a version that has not been installed, and your rewards fall with it.

If you only hold SOL on an exchange: why you need do nothing

For the great majority of investors the honest answer is: nothing. If your SOL sits with an exchange or a broker, their operator takes care of client versions, blockhashes and epoch boundaries. You do not have to confirm an update, change an address or meet a deadline.

Two edge cases remain. First, around a change like this a provider may pause deposits and withdrawals on the Solana network for a few hours. That is a precaution taken by the individual house and will then appear in its status notice. Second, a date like this is a well-known occasion for attempted fraud. Neither Anza nor an exchange will message you asking to enable an upgrade in your wallet.

What the official documentation does not yet say

The roadmap on Solana's site still listed the move from 300 to 250 milliseconds on September 17 as active on devnet and testnet, with a mainnet date still to be determined. The two steps already taken, by contrast, are recorded there with date and epoch. Anza's announcement of September 16 is therefore more current than the documentation page describing it.

A simple rule follows for you: go by the epoch number, not by a date in an article. The number 1037 is verifiable, and any wallet with network details, as well as any public block explorer, will show you which epoch the network is currently in. If it says 1037 or higher, the switch has flipped.

Solana slot time: what to take away

1. Check by Friday morning where your SOL sits and who is responsible for it. On an exchange you are in the clear. If you delegate yourself, note that from Friday your next change to the delegation takes roughly 30 hours instead of 36 to become effective, and that your rewards arrive more often. Which platform settles how is set out in our overview of staking providers.
2. Set your signing routine to a good 38 seconds. Check address and amount before you create the transaction, and only then reach for the device. If you notice in the process that your hardware wallet sends you through too many menus, it is worth a look at the hardware wallet comparison.
3. Check your rewards in the week after the change. More frequent, smaller credits are to be expected; earnings that stay away permanently or drop conspicuously are not. Such a drop points to a validator not running the new version. A switch is possible at any epoch boundary, and you will find suitable places to go in the provider overview.

Sources to read up on: the official page on reduced slot times with the staged plan, and the developer documentation on transaction confirmation with the figure of 151 valid blockhashes.

(As of September 17, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

The bill would exempt qualifying crypto fees from gain-or-loss calculations and restrict tax-loss deductions on tokens sold and quickly repurchased.

Meta is reportedly developing a version of its smart glasses without a camera, potentially addressing one of the biggest privacy objections to AI wearables.

An independent researcher found the agents hijacked Hugging Face accounts and mapped the platform's defenses as early as May 13—activity OpenAI's own incident report never fully described.

Chair Kevin Warsh credited Trump's economy, then ignored his rate-cut wishes entirely.

Bitcoin Core 32.0 has entered final testing, bringing faster block checks and changes to how wallets prepare payments.

Ripple’s David Schwartz exposes how the US Senate killed the landmark CLARITY Act to protect traditional bank profits, not rural economic interests.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is pushing back against fears that increasingly capable AI will make cybersecurity unwinnable.

Synapse (SYN) has returned to the spotlight after a breakout pushed the token above $0.20 intraday.

Franklin Templeton’s XRPZ continues to stand out as a steady anchor for institutional demand, pulling in $3.5M in fresh net inflows even as a broader market selloff hit XRP.

Solana, XRP, Bitcoin and Tron are facing key technical levels as short-term momentum weakens across the market.

TLDR

• Hackers claim they used a compromised Italian government email system to pose as law enforcement and pull Revolut customer data.
• The group, calling itself iamnotavillain, says it holds files on 680 Revolut customers spread across 31 countries.
• The hackers first asked for bitcoin, then switched their demand to 6,000 monero, worth about $3 million.
• Revolut says its own systems and customer funds were not touched, and it has blocked the fraudulent channel.
• Italian officials are investigating how the government’s PEC email system was used to pull off the scheme.

A hacking group says it tricked Revolut into handing over customer data by pretending to be Italian law enforcement. The group is now demanding 6,000 monero, worth roughly $3 million, to keep the files private.

The group calls itself iamnotavillain. It says it first reached out to Revolut a couple of months ago, claiming to represent an Italian law enforcement agency.

The messages reportedly went through Italy’s La Posta Elettronica Certificata system, known as PEC. This is a certified email network used by Italian government offices, companies, and citizens for official communication.

How the Scheme Worked

Because the emails came through a real government channel, they carried valid domain authentication. Revolut had no easy way to confirm the sender wasn’t actually an authorized official.

Over several weeks, the hackers say they repeatedly asked Revolut for account details tied to specific customers. Revolut allegedly complied, sharing names, addresses, phone numbers, and transaction histories.

The targets were not chosen randomly. The group says it used onchain analysis to find Revolut users with large crypto holdings, describing them as “whales.”

According to reporting from the Financial Times, 680 customer accounts were affected. Most of those customers are based in Switzerland and France, though people in 31 other countries were also impacted, including the UK, Germany, and Spain.

The data allegedly obtained includes passports, selfies used for identity checks, account IDs, and records of crypto deposits and withdrawals. Fiat transfers were reportedly included too.

The Ransom Demand

The hackers first floated a demand for 10,000 bitcoin on Telegram. They later said that figure came from an impersonator, not the group itself.

On September 16, iamnotavillain posted a new demand on a website using the group’s name. It asked for 6,000 monero within 24 hours, or the files would be sold to other criminal groups.

Monero is a cryptocurrency built to hide transaction details, unlike bitcoin, which is traceable on a public ledger. That makes it a common choice for extortion demands.

Revolut has said it had not received a direct ransom demand from the group as of when the countdown appeared. The company says its core systems, databases, and customer funds were never breached.

In a statement, Revolut said the incident involved “the fraudulent misuse of an official, state-regulated legal communication channel to impersonate legitimate authority requests.” The company says it identified the scam, blocked the address involved, and notified law enforcement and regulators.

Italian officials, including postal police and the interior ministry, have confirmed an investigation is underway but declined further comment. Opposition lawmaker Giulia Pastorella called the breach of a government email account “alarming” and said she plans to raise the issue in parliament.

Revolut first disclosed the incident on September 12. The investigation into how the government email system was compromised is still ongoing.

The post Revolut Data Breach Hackers Demand $3 Million in Monero appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• The Senate rejected a cloture vote on the CLARITY Act, 49-50, falling short of the 60 votes needed to advance.
• Seven Democratic senators, led by Kirsten Gillibrand, said they remain committed to passing the bill despite the setback.
• The senators involved include Alsobrooks, Booker, Cortez Masto, Gallego, Warner, and Warnock.
• Analysts at StoneX say the bill is likely dead for this Congress due to limited legislative days left.
• Bernstein and JPMorgan analysts expect the SEC and CFTC to step in with rulemaking to fill the regulatory gap.

A group of seven Democratic senators says the fight to pass federal crypto legislation is not over, even after the Senate blocked a key procedural vote this week.

The CLARITY Act failed to clear a cloture vote on Tuesday. The final tally was 49 in favor and 50 against, missing the 60 votes required to move forward.

Senators Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Ruben Gallego of Arizona, Mark Warner of Virginia, and Raphael Warnock of Georgia issued a joint statement on Wednesday.

“This week was a setback, but not the end of that important work,” the senators wrote. “We remain committed to working in a bipartisan fashion to get this legislation passed.”

What the CLARITY Act Would Do

The bill aims to create a clear regulatory structure for digital asset markets in the United States. It would divide oversight duties between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Supporters say the legislation would give crypto companies clear rules to follow. It would also outline consumer protections and ethics requirements for elected officials.

The senators said Democrats have spent two years working on the bill. Their goal was to expand opportunity, protect consumers, and create regulatory certainty for the industry.

All seven senators who signed the statement voted against the cloture motion this week. They argued the current version still needed changes before it could earn their full support.

Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming said the final text already included more than 120 Democratic requests. Disagreements remained over banking rules, stablecoin rewards, and state enforcement powers.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Ripple chief executive Brad Garlinghouse had both pushed publicly for the bill ahead of the vote. Ripple later said the failed vote does not change XRP’s legal status in the United States.

Analysts Question the Bill’s Path Forward

Financial analysts at StoneX said the bill is effectively dead for this session of Congress. They pointed to the limited number of working days left before lawmakers shift focus to campaign season.

Analysts at Bernstein expect regulators to act instead of Congress. They said the SEC and CFTC may issue specific rules covering token classification, DeFi protections, and self-custody guidelines.

JPMorgan analysts echoed that view in a recent report. They said agency rulemaking could offer some short-term guardrails for the industry, though it would carry less legal weight than a full law.

Until new legislation passes, digital asset markets in the United States remain under the oversight of existing federal agencies. There is currently no single federal law that defines how tokens should be classified.

The senators say talks with Republicans will continue despite the failed vote. No new timeline for another vote has been announced.

The post Senate Rejects Cloture on Crypto Bill CLARITY Act appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Polish state energy firm Orlen lost up to $424 million after a $230 million USDT payment for Venezuelan crude disappeared.
• The deal began in late 2023 when Orlen Trading Switzerland tried to buy discounted Merey 16 crude using tether.
• Funds were converted into crypto through Dubai intermediaries, then handed off on USB drives in Caracas hotel rooms.
• Contact with Venezuelan brokers was lost after the handoffs, and PDVSA could not deliver the promised oil cargoes.
• Three former Orlen executives now face criminal charges and up to 25 years in prison.

Poland’s state-controlled energy company Orlen has lost hundreds of millions of dollars in a failed cryptocurrency deal for Venezuelan crude oil.

The loss stems from a covert 2023 plan to buy oil using tether, a dollar-pegged stablecoin known as USDT.

According to a report from the Financial Times, the scheme began in Abu Dhabi in November 2023. Samer Awad, then head of Orlen Trading Switzerland, met with Kam Ho “Alex” Tse, founder of Dubai-based trading firm Hannon International.

At the time, the United States had temporarily eased sanctions on Venezuela’s energy sector. This created a short window for buyers to purchase heavy Merey 16 crude at a discount.

Why Crypto Was Used for the Deal

Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA was largely cut off from Western banks. This meant buyers needed to make partial prepayments using USDT instead of standard wire transfers.

Within days of signing a contract for 6 million barrels of crude, Orlen Trading Switzerland sent an uncollateralized $230 million advance to Hannon International.

The written contract did not mention cryptocurrency directly. Still, Hannon was expected to convert the cash into USDT to help secure oil cargo allocations from PDVSA.

Hannon then worked with several Dubai intermediaries and Venezuelan brokers to turn the dollars into digital tokens.

Court records and blockchain data cited by the Financial Times show the conversion process was costly. One transaction alone cost $400,000 in fees to obtain 80 million USDT.

Another transfer of $135 million produced just 85 million USDT, leaving a shortfall of roughly $50 million before the deal even reached Venezuela.

USB Drives and a Broken Deal

Hannon representatives then traveled to Caracas to meet local brokers connected to PDVSA.

Over several weeks in early 2024, private keys controlling tens of millions of dollars in USDT were physically handed over on USB flash drives.

These handoffs reportedly took place in restaurants and hotel rooms. The first drive, holding 60 million USDT, was delivered on January 5, 2024.

A second drive with 50 million USDT followed on January 28. More drives containing 22 million USDT were passed along between February and March.

After the transfers, communication with the Venezuelan brokers stopped. PDVSA was unable to release most of the promised oil.

Only one ship was loaded, carrying about 500,000 barrels of fuel oil worth $28.8 million. Orlen canceled the contract in March 2024.

When accounting for lost payments, shipping costs and legal fees, Polish authorities estimate Orlen’s total losses at between $378 million and $424 million.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk called the deal a “disgrace in front of the entire world.”

Polish prosecutors have charged three former Orlen Trading Switzerland executives, who face up to 25 years in prison.

Orlen’s current management has since launched international arbitration in Dubai to try to recover the $230 million advance. Hannon International says it acted on Orlen’s instructions and denies responsibility for the missing funds.

The post Orlen Loses $230 Million in Tether Payment for Venezuelan Oil appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• The Fed raised rates by 25 basis points on September 16, its first hike since 2023, lifting the target range to 3.75%–4%.
• Bitcoin held steady around $75,000 to $76,000 and showed little immediate reaction to the announcement.
• 16 of 18 Fed officials expect at least one more rate hike before the end of the year.
• US spot Bitcoin ETFs saw roughly $746 million in net outflows over the two sessions around the Fed meeting.
• Key levels to watch are $75,000 support and $77,000 to $78,000 resistance.

The Federal Reserve raised interest rates by 25 basis points on September 16, 2026, its first hike since 2023. Bitcoin held near $75,000 to $76,000 after the announcement, avoiding a sharp drop.

The Federal Open Market Committee voted unanimously to lift the federal funds rate to a target range of 3.75% to 4%. The move was aimed at addressing inflation that remains above the Fed’s 2% goal.

Fed Chair Kevin Warsh said the economy is strengthening and that he was “hard-pressed” to call financial conditions restrictive. He said the central bank remains focused on returning inflation to target.

The Fed’s updated projections showed 16 of 18 officials expect at least one more rate hike before the end of the year. Andrew Melville, head of research at Block Scholes, said a further hike would be a “more hawkish surprise” than Wednesday’s move.

Bitcoin ETF Outflows Add Pressure

US spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded $295.98 million in net outflows on September 16. That followed a $450.33 million outflow on September 15, according to SoSoValue data.

Combined, roughly $746 million left the funds across those two sessions. ETFs posted outflows in six of the seven trading sessions between September 8 and September 16, totaling about $1.05 billion.

Total ETF net assets fell to approximately $95.19 billion on September 16, down from $100.09 billion on September 14. That drop reflects both outflows and Bitcoin’s price changes.

Key Price Levels to Watch

Bitcoin’s immediate support sits near $75,000, with resistance at $77,000 to $78,000. A move above that range would need to happen before the short-term picture improves.

Below $75,000, the next support zone runs from $71,500 to $73,600, with $70,000 marking a larger structural level. On the upside, $81,600 stands as the bigger resistance target.

Momentum indicators show a mixed picture. The MACD histogram remains below zero, pointing to seller control, while the RSI sits closer to neutral than oversold.

Cooper Duschang, research analyst at Talos, said the price reaction suggests the Fed’s decision was largely expected by crypto markets. He noted Bitcoin held broadly around pre-announcement levels even as equities moved lower.

Duschang said perpetual futures shifted toward net selling, led by about $82 million in Bitcoin and $68 million in Ether over the past hour. Spot markets told a different story, with around $15.5 million of net Bitcoin buying.

He also pointed to exchange flows, with about 2,170 Bitcoin moving onto exchanges after the rate hike, followed by a withdrawal of 1,260 Bitcoin. Duschang said investors appear to be repositioning rather than exiting the market outright.

Martin Lee, market insights lead at DWF Labs, said the Fed’s “higher for longer” stance could lead risk assets to reprice around that outlook.

As of the latest update, Bitcoin traded at $76,663, up 1.35% over 24 hours.

The post Bitcoin (BTC) Price: BTC Holds Near $76K After Fed Raises Rates 25 Basis Points appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• South Korean police investigated 3,506 stock-tip chatroom cases involving $250 million in losses during the first half of 2026.
• Fraud losses rose 19.8% year over year, while the number of cases grew only 4.1%.
• Seoul police arrested 10 suspects linked to a Cambodia-based scam that took 9.9 billion won from 59 victims.
• Scammers used fake brokerage apps, AI stock claims, and promises of 600% returns to lure investors.
• South Korea’s Financial Services Commission launched a nationwide fraud awareness campaign that runs through the end of 2026.

South Korean retail investors lost about $250 million to stock-tip scams during the first half of 2026. Police data reviewed by Reuters shows the losses came from chatroom-based schemes that promised big returns on stock picks.

Police investigated 3,506 cases tied to these chatrooms between January and June. The cases involved a combined 336 billion won, which equals roughly $246.57 million at current exchange rates.

The money lost grew by 19.8% compared to the same period last year. The number of cases only rose 4.1%, meaning each case is costing victims more money on average.

Police said the 3,506 figure counts cases, not individual victims. A single case can involve several people, so the true number of victims is likely higher.

How the Scams Worked

South Korea’s stock market known as the KOSPI was the world’s best-performing benchmark in the first half of 2026. It then fell as much as 44% from its June 19 peak.

Lawyers who work with fraud victims said scammers used the excitement of the rally, and later the market drop, to pressure inexperienced investors into sending money. Fear of missing out was a common tactic.

Scammers often left comments under videos posted by real brokerage analysts or financial influencers. These comments directed viewers to private chatrooms on apps like Naver Band.

Inside the chatrooms, some operators charged subscription fees for stock tips. Others convinced members to transfer money directly for investments.

A Cambodia-based ring became one of the clearest examples of these tactics. Seoul police arrested 10 people in June accused of taking 9.9 billion won from 59 South Koreans between February 2024 and February 2026.

Members of that group posed as securities-company employees. They directed victims to fake brokerage apps that showed fabricated balances and returns, while promoting AI-selected stocks with claims of returns up to 600%.

One victim, a 47-year-old logistics worker who asked to be identified as Jay, joined a Naver group after seeing a TikTok video he thought came from a securities firm executive. He eventually sent 60 million won after being told his money could grow by 600%.

The group went silent and disappeared in April. Jay has since filed a criminal complaint with police and a civil claim against the bank account holder who received his money.

Regulators Respond

South Korea’s Financial Services Commission announced a nationwide fraud prevention campaign on September 2. The effort targets impersonation, fake news, and guaranteed-return pitches, and will run through the end of 2026.

Earlier in the year, the Financial Supervisory Service issued warnings about fake stock-tip rooms impersonating brokerage staff. A January alert told investors to be careful when strangers pushed them toward closed chat groups or unfamiliar trading apps.

In March, the FSC opened an investigation period focused on financial influencers suspected of front-running stock picks or spreading false information. Cases with enough evidence could be referred to investigators.

Police have also been sharing scam tactics with platforms like Naver and Kakao so they can improve detection. Naver said it acts on fraudulent chatrooms once it receives reports.

Monthly losses tied to stock-tip rooms fell to 41.3 billion won in May. That was down 26.1% from the average monthly level in the first quarter of 2026.

The Cambodia-linked case has been referred to prosecutors and is awaiting a court date. Police said they are still working to trace higher-ranking members of that organization.

The post South Korea Stock Scam Losses Hit $250 Million in 2026 appeared first on Blockonomi.

Bitcoin and crypto markets turned volatile on Wednesday after the US Federal Reserve raised interest rates by 25 basis points. The Fed lifted its target range to 3.75%-4%. The move was widely expected, but BTC still briefly dropped below $75,000 before recovering to around $76,400.

Analysts remain divided on what could come next.

BTC Recovers After Fed Shock

Doctor Profit dismissed the bearish reaction. According to the analyst, Bitcoin’s bottom was already in at $57,000. He also said he is holding the BTC he bought between $60,000 and $64,000 and has no plans to sell. Earlier, the market commentator had pointed to $71,000 as the market’s “max pain” level while maintaining a bullish outlook toward $88,000.

Meanwhile, Ali Martinez also said he is prepared for another sell-off. While identifying Bitcoin’s Short-Term Holder Realized Price near $71,200 as a major level to watch, the analyst explained that he would consider that area a potential accumulation zone if BTC falls further.

Santiment, on the other hand, flagged a sharp rise in social discussions around the FOMC, interest rates, and the 25-basis-point move as the meeting approached. Bitcoin was already facing several pressures before the rate decision.

The crypto asset’s price pulled back after the previous day’s CLARITY Act setback. ETF outflows, higher Treasury yields, and liquidations had also added to the pressure. The bigger issue now is whether this rate hike remains an isolated move or becomes the start of another tightening cycle. The Fed’s latest projections point to at least one more hike in 2026. That keeps future policy decisions in focus for crypto traders.

One More Hike Remains in Focus

Santiment noted that traders had recently considered much more aggressive rate-hike scenarios. The latest projections provide a less aggressive baseline, with another 25-basis-point move effectively at the center of the current outlook.

For Bitcoin, the next phase will therefore be about expectations around future Fed policy. Softer inflation, lower energy prices, or weaker economic data could change those expectations. However, persistent inflation could push them in the opposite direction.

“The bullish case is that traders had already priced a much uglier path, the first hike is now behind us, and one additional move may prove manageable if inflation finally begins cooling. For crypto, the direction of expectations from here could matter far more than the 25 basis points that just arrived.”

The post Bitcoin (BTC) Reacts to Fed Rate Hike: Analysts Split on What Comes Next appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin’s expected price volatility ahead of and after the FOMC meeting indeed took place, with the asset posting a few major moves, but it has overall survived the first rate hike in three years, currently trading above $76,000.

The altcoins are also well in the green today, with SOL touching $100 and ZEC exploding by over 14%.

BTC Above $76K as the Dust Settles

The current business week was expected to be a big one for the cryptocurrency industry, and it was quite eventful, even though it’s far from over. At the end of the previous one, BTC plunged to $76,000 after the release of the CPI data, before it suddenly rocketed to almost $80,000, where it was rejected and driven south to $77,000. It spent the weekend there and dipped again on Monday to $76,500.

However, the bulls went on the offensive later that day and pushed the cryptocurrency to $79,500. Another rejection followed as the market braced for the upcoming cloture vote on the CLARITY Act. The Senate vote ultimately failed, and BTC went from $77,250 to a month low of $75,000 in minutes.

It recovered to $76,000 on Wednesday as all eyes turned to the Fed. For the first time in three years, the US central bank raised the rates unanimously with a 12-0 vote. At first, BTC dipped to $75,000 before it shot up by $1,500. It failed there again, slipping by a grand before it rebounded and now sits at $76,500.

Its market cap has recovered to $1.530 trillion on CMC, while its dominance over the alts has retreated slightly to 58.7%.

ZEC Flies Again

Ethereum is up by just over 1.5% daily and sits close to $2,450. BNB has posted a similar increase, currently trading at $725. SOL has neared $100, while XRP, TRX, HYPE, DOGE, and LINK are also in the green. ZEC stands in a league of its own again. The privacy token has rocketed by over 14% and now trades above $1,350. In contrast, RAIN has plummeted by nearly 8%.

NEAR, CRO, PUMP, UNI, CC, DOT, ENA, and ONDO are well in the green among the larger-cap alts, with gains of up to 14.6% in the case of NEAR.

The total crypto market cap has increased by over 1% daily, and it’s up to $2.610 trillion on CMC.

The post Bitcoin Survives First Fed Rate Hike in 3 Years, Zcash Explodes Again: Market Watch appeared first on CryptoPotato.

XRP’s recent 70% rally may have had an early on-chain signal. Santiment found 85 new wallets holding at least 1 million tokens appearing just two days before the August 17-21 surge.

That matters because these larger wallets can absorb supply and strengthen bids while shifting liquidity faster than retail traders. Changes in their numbers have often appeared ahead of XRP’s sharpest moves.

Millionaire Wallets Were Already on the Move

There is also more happening around the XRP Ledger. Ripple backed an RLUSD credit fund focused on fintech and payments lending on XRPL. ZILO and Licuido investments brought tokenization plus transfer-agency and collateral-mobility rails into Ripple’s stack.

Looking toward the rest of the year, Santiment considers the setup to be constructive. Whale wallet numbers remain high, while RLUSD adds settlement utility and institutional tokenization gives XRP a story beyond retail hype.

Separately, AI is also moving further into Ripple’s treasury operations. Just last week, the company announced expanding GSmart to handle a wider range of work for enterprise finance teams. The new capabilities cover forecasting, liquidity, risk, reconciliation, and reporting, and are already being used by Ripple’s enterprise customers.

Despite the gains it had made previously, XRP took the biggest hit among major cryptocurrencies following the Senate’s failure to move the CLARITY Act forward. This is a major blow to an industry that has spent years pushing for a comprehensive US regulatory framework. Over the past day, the token has shed more than 8%.

The broader crypto market was awash in red by Tuesday afternoon as well.

Bullish Setup Takes a Hit

Crypto analyst Diana said XRP could face further downside after the token lost the $1.34 support level and fell quickly toward $1.26. The move weakened its earlier bullish setup, which had pointed toward the $1.70-$1.78 range. The bulls now need to defend the $1.24-$1.26 area.

If that level fails, the analyst said that $1.14-$1.10 could come into focus, followed by the $1.00 mark if XRP drops below $1.1. Diana also flagged that its one-hour RSI had fallen close to 21, which put the token in deeply oversold territory. That could trigger a short-term bounce.

On the institutional front, US-based spot XRP ETFs continued to attract capital. So far in August, they have raked in over $43 million in inflows. If the trend continues, these funds could extend their inflow streak to 10 consecutive weeks.

The post XRP’s 70% Breakout Had a Warning Sign: 85 Millionaire Wallets Moved First appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Trader Matthew Hyland says Bitcoin is sitting at a daily cycle low with a bullish divergence forming on the charts, and he’s calling for prices above $90,000 by early November.

He’s making that call even as BTC trades near $76,000, down sharply since the Senate failed to advance the CLARITY Act, and while most of the market’s loudest voices are still leaning bearish.

One Analyst Sees a Bottom, Bears See a Trap

Hyland posted on X that bears were getting excited right at what he considers a daily cycle low, with a bullish divergence setup forming underneath the price action.

“See ya at $90k+ by early November,” he wrote.

Swing trader Roman replied, “Yeah, part of me really thinks this was a low,” with Hyland acknowledging that the RSI could fall further, although he pointed to liquidity around $75,000.

“So far it was just a liquidity grab IMO,” he stated, adding that there was “not really much liquidity below” that level. Additionally, he said current prices look solid to him, even though most bears still aren’t buying it and are hoping for a much deeper decline.

That view runs against more pessimistic calls on X, including from analyst Ted Pillows, who pointed out that BTC has lost its 50-week EMA and wrote that “a drop to $70K-$72K zone is highly likely before any reversal.”

Fellow market watcher Crypto Patel has been calling the bearish move since Bitcoin fell from $82,500 to about $74,900 after being rejected near an $83,000 bearish order block on the daily chart, and he’s holding a $50,000 target unless Bitcoin closes above $83,000 on a higher timeframe.

Meanwhile, CryptoQuant contributor IT Tech took a different approach, focusing on Bitcoin holdings rather than price structure. They pointed out that the 6- to 12-month supply band has climbed to 30.8% of realized cap, up from 16.2% in December last year, a pattern that lined up with the last three Bitcoin bottoms.

The analyst called it a bullish setup but stopped short of calling it the cycle low outright, noting that the OG cryptocurrency is still down nearly 40% from its peak and that “this reads as mid-cycle floor building, not the cycle low.”

Bitcoin’s Price Action and the CLARITY Act Fallout

BTC was trading near $76,000 at the time of writing, down about 1.5% in 24 hours and nearly 5% over the past week, although it’s still up close to 19% across 30 days.

The drop follows Tuesday’s Senate vote, when cloture on the CLARITY Act failed to gather the 60 votes needed to move the bill forward. As CryptoPotato reported earlier, Bitcoin short-term holders sent more than 23,000 BTC to exchanges at a loss in the aftermath, worth close to $1.8 billion, marking the largest capitulation event in about a month.

The post Analyst Says This Setup Could Send Bitcoin Above $90K by November appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Solana is holding a major support area even after its latest correction. After reports that the CLARITY Act failed to advance in the US Senate, the crypto asset took a plunge from over $101 to under $96 before a minor recovery.

Ali Martinez found that 72 million SOL previously traded around this level, which makes the zone significant.

Other Signals

Institutional demand is also strengthening through US spot SOL ETFs. It has now recorded nine straight weeks of net inflows, and more than $200 million entered these investment vehicles over the past month. Almost $28 million in inflows were recorded in August alone.

At the same time, exchange supply continues to fall as more than 3 million SOL have been withdrawn from exchanges during the same period.

Network activity remains elevated as well. Solana reached a peak of 12 million new addresses on September 11, and it is still adding roughly 10.8 million new addresses each day. According to Martinez, these factors – the strong support level, ETF demand, lower exchange supply, and continued network growth – indicate that the current correction could be short-lived.

Solana has been seeing growing activity from tokenized stocks, especially after traditional markets close. CryptoRus recently said that 63% of the network’s tokenized-equity activity happens after Wall Street closes. There are now more than 727,000 holders. Additionally, Solana’s TVL rose more than 18%, from around $4.82 billion to roughly $5.7 billion.

Corporate treasuries are building exposure too. DeFi Development Corp. now holds about 2.39 million Solana tokens and SOL equivalents after adding 55,491 since August 27. It has also established a $300 million at-the-market program for its CHAD perpetual preferred stock.

Most of the proceeds will be used to purchase more of the crypto asset. CHAD carries an initial annual dividend rate of 13%. DeFi Development Corp. recently restarted regular purchases of SOL and now has the second-largest Solana treasury, behind Forward Industries.

Volatility Incoming?

Despite the recent choppy price, SOL is almost 30% up over the past month. Market watcher Ella believes that a move back above $100 would take some pressure off the crypto asset. The focus should be on reclaiming $102.5.

However, if $95 breaks, the price could fall toward $93-$94. With the Fed decision still ahead, Ella expects volatility to pick up.

The post Solana (SOL) Correction or Short-Lived Dip? Here’s Why Bulls Aren’t Giving Up appeared first on CryptoPotato.