GAM Esports faces strategic challenges and potential performance impacts in the upcoming tournament due to the sudden roster change.

The post GAM Esports parts ways with jungler Draktharr ahead of Demacia Cup Global Invitational appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The $50B valuation for Discovery Loop highlights the escalating value of AI talent, potentially reshaping investment norms and scientific research.

The post Jeff Dean seeks $50B valuation for new AI startup Discovery Loop appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

KIOXIA's potential US listing highlights the strategic shift towards global capital markets to fund AI-driven growth in the memory chip sector.

The post KIOXIA considers raising $10B through US listing as AI-fueled stock surge continues appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Geopolitical tensions may sustain elevated oil prices, impacting global economies and potentially leading to increased energy costs worldwide.

The post Asia’s oil traders bullish on prices amid Middle East conflict appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Europe's AI funding strategy aims to boost competitiveness and sovereignty, reducing reliance on US and China by enhancing infrastructure.

The post Margrethe Vestager calls for balanced EU AI funding model to close compute gap with US and China appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin’s ‘Unusual Mix’: Bearish Inflation Print, Bullish Buyback Failure

Bitcoin’s path higher just got harder in the short term, but the setup further out may be improving, according to a new report. 

In a Friday note, European asset manager CoinShares’ Head of Research, James Butterfill, said firmer-than-expected core inflation raises the odds of tighter Fed policy and could cap bitcoin below $80,000 for now. 

But the longer-term case, he argued, rests on the U.S. Treasury’s bond buyback programme failing to bring down long-end yields — a failure that could ultimately feed the debasement narrative that has supported both bitcoin and gold.

“The result is therefore a somewhat unusual policy mix for Bitcoin,” the report read. “Today’s CPI data is negative at the margin, increasing the probability of tighter monetary policy and potentially limiting the immediate upside. 

“But the apparent failure of the Treasury’s current buying programme increases the likelihood of much more substantial intervention further ahead.”

It continued: “If that happens, it could become one of the more powerful medium-term catalysts for Bitcoin.”

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

According to CME’s FedWatch tool, traders think there is a 85% chance interest rates will be higher after the Federal Reserve meets next week. Bitcoin has typically performed well in a low interest rate environment. 

But the U.S. Treasury’s expanded bond buyback programme has so far failed to materially suppress long-term yields. 

If yields stay stubbornly high, Butterfill said, pressure will build on Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to escalate to a much larger, “bazooka-style” buying programme aimed at forcing borrowing costs down.

Bitcoin in August had one of its best runs in years after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the department would double the size of its long-dated bond buybacks. 

The announcement and subsequent price surge has led some to say the much talked-about debasement trade is back. The so-called debasement trade is when investors buy an asset as a way to hedge against a currency losing value. 

Bitcoin and gold have both benefited as part of the trade as the dollar weakens. 

This post Bitcoin’s ‘Unusual Mix’: Bearish Inflation Print, Bullish Buyback Failure first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Blockstream Tells Hackers To Return Remaining Bitcoin Stolen in Liquid Theft

Bitcoin infrastructure firm Blockstream has refused to negotiate further with hackers who last week stole 4,000 bitcoins from its Liquid network. 

Writing on X Friday, Blockstream said that the hackers still had time to return the funds before the company would work with law enforcement. 

White-hat hackers on Sunday withdrew about $320 million from the federation wallet that backs Liquid, a sidechain by Blockstream. After negotiating with Blockstream, they returned most of the funds but kept 598.5 coins worth over $46 million — demanding it as ransom. 

“Blockstream will not pay a ransom for the return of stolen funds,” the post read. “Taking assets without authorization and withholding their return is a crime, not responsible disclosure. It is not white-hat activity. It is theft.”

It added: “We will work with law enforcement, exchanges, service providers, forensic specialists, and other relevant parties to trace and recover the assets and identify those responsible.”

“We will not pay for the return of stolen property. We will not abandon our users. The Bitcoin community will not stop pursuing the funds.”

Liquid, or L-BTC, is a layer-2 created by Blockstream that allows users to fast move assets backed 1:1 with bitcoin. One of the assets, LBTC, is a token backed by bitcoin that allows for quick settlement — a bit like the Lightning Network. 

Hackers were able to get the funds by exploiting an inflation bug on the Liquid sidechain to create over 4,000 LBTC that did not exist before and cash them out for real, on-chain bitcoins. 

The hackers then had an exchange with Blockstream via messages written into Bitcoin blocks. 

In one message, the white hats wrote: “Please fix the bug first. The chain is under risk at latest commit right now. Make sure every node is patched. Then we will transfer the money back safely after confirming the fix.”

In the latest message, the hackers slammed Blocksteam as “delusional, greedy, and arrogant,” and threatened to reveal all of Blockstream’s encrypted messages in the exchange unless the company allowed thieves to keep 10% of the bitcoins. 

“You SHALL pay 10% using your own money as bug bounty or you will cause all your holders a 15% loss for your irresponsibility and stinginess,” the message read. 

The Bitcoin community is still reeling after hackers in July were able to steal over 1,800 bitcoins worth close to $140 million from Coldcard wallet holders. 

Users of the popular hardware wallet, created by Coinkite, were targeted because the product’s manufacturer did not use a true random number generator, allowing hackers to essentially guess investor seedphrases. 

This post Blockstream Tells Hackers To Return Remaining Bitcoin Stolen in Liquid Theft first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Italy’s Second Biggest Bank UniCredit Is Weighting up Crypto Custody: Report

Italy’s second largest bank is considering expanding into digital asset offerings, including custody, according to reports. 

According to a Friday Bloomberg report citing people familiar with the matter, Milan-based UniCredit is selecting a technology provider that would allow it to build the infrastructure needed to hold digital assets and facilitate their buying and selling. 

Bloomberg’s reporting added that tokenized investment products and fixed-income securities, the use of stablecoins and exposure to cryptocurrencies were all on the cards. 

The news comes as other banks in Europe expand crypto offerings. Spain moved first on retail, with BBVA rolling out bitcoin trading and custody to all customers via its app, using its own custody infrastructure rather than a third party; Santander’s Openbank followed with its own trading service.

Cecabank — a Spanish custodian with over €400bn under management that acts as backbone for 100+ financial institutions — went live with crypto custody in June via a partnership with Bit2Me.

And in Germany, Deutsche Bank is building custody with Bitpanda’s technology arm, while Taurus and DZ Bank got BaFin approval in January for its meinKrypto platform. 

New regulation in the European Union — Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) — gives banks a legal definition, a supervisor, and a familiar set of obligations to launch crypto services. 

UniCredit is one 37 lenders across 15 European countries working together to create a company called Qivalis with the aim of issuing a euro-denominated stablecoin.

Last year, the bank said it was offering professional clients a structured product tied to BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust exchange-traded fund, with full protection against losses.

This post Italy’s Second Biggest Bank UniCredit Is Weighting up Crypto Custody: Report first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Government Defeated as Lords Back UK Digital Assets Strategy

The UK government suffered a defeat in the House of Lords on Wednesday as peers backed an amendment requiring the Treasury to draw up a national strategy for regulating digital assets.

The upper chamber approved the measure by 194 votes to 138, with Conservative and Liberal Democrat peers combining against a near-solid bloc of Labour votes. Baroness Neville-Rolfe, a Conservative former Treasury minister, moved the amendment to the Financial Services and Markets Bill.

The new clause, titled “Digital assets strategy,” would require the Treasury to prepare, publish and consult on a strategy for regulating and developing digital assets and related digital financial market infrastructure in the UK.

The regulation of digital assets includes “cryptoassets, qualifying stablecoins, Central Bank Digital Currencies, tokenised securities and other digital and tokenised financial assets,” according to the draft. 

The UK is in the process of drafting a sweeping new crypto bill. The country’s Financial Conduct Authority finalised its regulatory framework for cryptoassets in June, with the regime due to take effect on 25 October 2027. The authorisation gateway for firms opened on 30 September and runs to 28 February 2027. 

Britain is trailing behind Brussels and Washington with digital asset regulation. The EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation has applied to service providers since 30 December 2024. 

And the U.S. under President Donald Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law in July 2025, establishing a federal framework for dollar-backed tokens. Broader market-structure legislation remains unfinished: the Clarity Act cleared the House in July 2025 by 294-134 but has been stuck in the Senate over DeFi, stablecoin yield and ethics provisions, with a procedural vote set for next week. 

This post Government Defeated as Lords Back UK Digital Assets Strategy first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Price Spikes, Shrugs off Hot US Inflation Data

Bitcoin’s price rose on Friday — despite data revealing that U.S. inflation had risen. 

The biggest cryptocurrency by market cap was recently trading for close to $78,749 after jumping 2% over a 24-hour period. At one point on Friday morning in New York, bitcoin rose as high as $79,607. 

Bitcoin’s price spike came after news dropped that U.S. consumer prices accelerated in August, reinforcing ​expectations that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates next week.

The consumer price index, excluding food and energy, climbed 0.3% in August from a month earlier, which was higher than expected. 

Inflation in the U.S. has been difficult to tame due to the war with Iran, which has lifted oil prices, in turn raising the costs of food, gasoline and other goods. 

Higher inflation typically means the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates, which in turn could stop bitcoin’s price climbing higher. 

According to CME’s FedWatch tool, traders think there is a 85% chance interest rates will be higher by next week. The Federal Reserve will meet next week and reveal what it will do with borrowing costs. 

Bitcoin has typically performed well in a low interest rate environment because it means people can buy more of the cryptocurrency with increased liquidity. 

Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh, who took the helm in January, last month gave his first speech as head of the U.S. central bank and said he had “more work to do” to fight inflation. 

The U.S. is currently in the grips of an affordability crisis and rising oil prices are a hot topic ahead of the midterm elections. 

U.S. President Donald Trump has reassured voters that prices will get under control and repeatedly put pressure on the central bank to lower interest rates. 

Bitcoin in August had its biggest run in years following positive regulatory news and an announcement from the U.S. Treasury. 

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the department would double the size of its long-dated bond buybacks, helping non-yielding assets like bitcoin and gold. The cryptocurrency then benefited from President Trump urging lawmakers to get key crypto legislation, the Clarity Act, over the line. 

This post Bitcoin Price Spikes, Shrugs off Hot US Inflation Data first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

If you want to sell Ethereum in Germany, the purchase date decides first and the price only after that. Where the purchase goes back more than a year, the gain stays tax free under section 23 of the Income Tax Act. Where it does not, the gain counts towards taxable income and is charged at your personal tax rate. That is precisely why the question raised by the price jump of September 11, 2026, is a calendar question rather than a chart question: which of your units are old enough, and which of those are actually showing a gain? This article works through both, drawing on the text of the law, the guidance issued by the tax authorities and our own analysis of two years of daily Ethereum closing prices.

What Happened on September 11 and Why It Turns Into a Tax Question

On September 11, 2026, Ether rose to an intraday high of 2,664.81 US dollars on the Kraken exchange. That was the highest level since January 31, 2026, when the price last reached 2,710.35 dollars. Measured by the daily closing prices of the same trading pairs, not a single day in between closed higher. The figures come from Kraken's public OHLC interface, retrieved on September 14, 2026, at 06:40 UTC; they describe trading on this one venue and may differ by a few dollars on other exchanges.

Half of that move has since been given back. At the same retrieval time, Ether was quoted at around 2,519 US dollars and 2,179 euros. Anyone who reads the headline about the eight-month high and concludes that their holding now sits at that level is working with a price that existed for only a few hours. For tax purposes the high is irrelevant in any case. What counts is the price at the moment you sell.

The trigger came from inflows into the US spot ETFs on Ether. The data service SoSoValue reported net inflows of 216.41 million dollars for September 11, of which 148.82 million went into BlackRock's ETHA fund; the Bitcoin ETFs recorded their fourth consecutive day of outflows on the same date, at a net 13.29 million dollars. These figures are attributable to the data service and were reported on September 12, 2026, among others by Bitcoin.com News in German. A reallocation of institutional money indicates demand. It is no promise of a further price rise. How the market read the level before this move is set out in our analysis of the test of the 200-day moving average at 2,100 dollars from August 19, 2026.

How Long Does the Holding Period Run on Ethereum, and When Is a Sale Tax Free?

Holding period means the span between the acquisition and the disposal of an asset. For crypto assets held as private assets it is one year. The wording of section 23 (1) sentence 1 no. 2 of the German Income Tax Act refers to disposal transactions involving other assets where the period between acquisition and disposal is no more than one year. Only these transactions are taxable. Anything held for longer falls outside the provision, regardless of the size of the gain.

The usual calculation of deadlines under the German Civil Code applies: the day of acquisition itself does not count, and the one-year period ends at the close of the day corresponding to the day of acquisition. Someone who bought on September 13, 2025, was able to sell tax free on September 14, 2026. Someone who bought on September 14, 2025, has to wait until September 15, 2026. A single day decides the full tax exposure here, as an all-or-nothing threshold with no pro-rata gradation whatsoever.

What Counts as a Disposal

It is not only a sale for euros that triggers the test. Swapping Ether into another coin or into a stablecoin is a disposal as well, as is paying for goods or services with Ether. The circular issued by the German Federal Ministry of Finance on March 6, 2025, treats the price agreed in euros as the disposal proceeds when tokens are exchanged for goods and services, falling back on the market price where that is unavailable. Anyone parking a holding in a stablecoin in order to swap back later has therefore already triggered the taxable event and starts a fresh one-year period for the new holding.

The 1,000 Euro Exemption Limit: What It Protects and Where It Tips Over

For taxable sales within the one-year period there is an exemption limit, meaning a threshold above which the entire amount becomes taxable. Under section 23 (3) sentence 5 of the Income Tax Act, gains stay tax free where the total gain from private disposal transactions in the calendar year came to less than 1,000 euros. The word less is to be taken literally: at 999 euros of gain you pay nothing, at exactly 1,000 euros the full amount becomes taxable, not merely the euro above the line.

Two subtleties are regularly overlooked. First, the limit applies to all private disposal transactions of the year taken together, so it also covers the sale of gold or the gain on a different coin. Second, it is an annual figure: anyone realizing 900 euros of gain in December and another 900 in January stays below it twice over. Put both into the same December and you are above it. A tax report of the kind the providers in our comparison of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers produce shows this annual total before you sell, and that is exactly what matters when planning.

FIFO, Average Method, Individual Allocation: Which Ether the Tax Office Sells

Anyone who has bought over a span of months does not own a single uniform position but many tranches with different purchase dates and purchase prices. Which of them counts as disposed of when you sell is governed by the order of use. The Ministry of Finance circular of March 6, 2025, places the principle of individual allocation first in paragraph 61: where the individual unit can be specifically identified, that unit is decisive. Where this is not possible, the crypto assets of a trading designation acquired first count as disposed of for the purposes of the holding period, and the average method is to be applied for the valuation. For reasons of simplification, the valuation may also assume that the units acquired first were disposed of first. That is the FIFO procedure, short for first in, first out.

What matters in practice is a sentence in the same paragraph: A wallet-based approach applies. Every wallet and every exchange account is therefore considered on its own. The method once chosen must be retained within a wallet until all units of that trading designation there have been disposed of in full; only afterwards, and following a new acquisition, may it be changed. For coins with a different trading designation in the same wallet, a separate election exists in each case.

What This Means in Practice

The wallet-based view is a lever that many people do not even know about. If the old, tax-free Ether sit on a hardware wallet and the young, taxable ones on the exchange account, a sale on the exchange reaches only the holding held there. The period running on the older units remains untouched by it. Conversely, a problem arises when you consolidate everything onto a single address: the tranches then mix, and the order determines what gets sold. Anyone shifting holdings around should document these movements; paragraph 103 of the circular expressly requires documentation of reallocations within wallets for the wallet-based application of the average or FIFO method.

Run the Numbers: Which Ethereum Purchases Are Actually in Profit Today

The decision between selling and waiting hinges on a question that is rarely asked: is the tax-free tranche showing a gain at all? For this article we analyzed the daily closing prices of the Ether against euro pair from Kraken, retrieved on September 14, 2026, at 06:40 UTC. The interface window reaches back 721 trading days, that is to September 24, 2024. Each daily close was compared with the current price of around 2,179 euros. The method is deliberately rough, assumes a purchase at the respective daily close, and leaves fees out of account.

The result is unambiguous. Of the 355 purchase days in the window from September 24, 2024, to September 13, 2025, meaning those days whose one-year period has now expired, only 89 sit below today's price. That is 25 percent. Three out of four tax-free purchase days are therefore currently under water. In the following window from September 14, 2025, to September 13, 2026, whose purchases are still taxable, 225 of 365 days lie below today's price, or 62 percent.

The price history itself supplies the reason. In September 2025 an Ether cost between 3,324 and 4,014 euros, with a median of 3,686 euros. Anyone who bought back then is down around 41 percent today. The low point of the window, by contrast, fell in the summer of 2026, and those cheap purchases are not yet twelve months old.

The Trap: Tax Free Is Usually Exactly the Tranche That Is Under Water

An uncomfortable constellation follows from these two data series, and it affects many portfolios right now. The units you could sell tax free are predominantly the ones you bought expensively. The units showing a gain are predominantly young and therefore taxable. So anyone who hears that they can sell tax free after a year and reaches for the oldest tranche on that basis realizes a loss in many cases, while simultaneously giving away the tax exemption they spent twelve months earning.

A loss from a tax-free sale is worthless for tax purposes: what lies outside the one-year period is simply not taxable, neither in gain nor in loss. A loss within the period, by contrast, can be offset, though only within narrow limits. Section 23 (3) sentence 7 of the Income Tax Act permits the offset only up to the amount of the gain from private disposal transactions in the same calendar year; a deduction from other income is excluded. Under sentence 8, the carry-back to the previous year and the carry-forward to subsequent years remain available, in each case again only against private disposal transactions.

The Order of Checks Before You Sell

What makes sense, then, is a sequence that starts with the calendar and looks at the price only at the end. First: which tranches are older than a year, and which wallet are they on? Second: what is the cost base of those tranches, are they in profit or at a loss? Third: how much gain from private disposal transactions have you already realized in this calendar year, and where do you stand relative to the 1,000 euro exemption limit? Only after that does the question of the price level become answerable at all. Our newsroom made the same calculation for XRP on August 24, 2026, back then after a weekly gain of 53 percent; the structure of the decision is identical, only the figures differ.

What a Sale Within the Period Actually Costs

The gain from a taxable sale is not charged at the 25 percent flat-rate withholding tax that would apply to interest or dividends. It counts as other income under section 22 no. 2 in conjunction with section 23 of the Income Tax Act, forms part of taxable income, and is charged at your personal tax rate, plus the solidarity surcharge and, where applicable, church tax. Anyone already in the top tax bracket therefore loses considerably more than a quarter of the gain, while anyone on a low income loses correspondingly less.

The gain itself is defined by section 23 (3) sentence 1 of the Income Tax Act as the difference between the disposal price on one side and the acquisition costs plus income-related expenses on the other. Transaction fees on purchase and on sale therefore reduce the taxable gain, provided you can evidence them. On a sale through an exchange the fee appears in the statement; on a sale out of your own wallet the network fee belongs in the calculation. Which venues charge which fees depends heavily on volume and changes continuously.

Staking and Lending: Does the Period Extend to Ten Years?

This worry has haunted forums for years, and it has a real background. Section 23 (1) sentence 1 no. 2 sentence 4 of the Income Tax Act extends the period to ten years where income is generated in at least one calendar year from the use of an asset. Applied to crypto that would mean anyone who stakes or lends their Ether and collects rewards for it would have to wait ten years.

The tax authorities have cleared this up. The Ministry of Finance circular of March 6, 2025, states verbatim in paragraph 63: For currency or payment tokens, the extension of the disposal period under section 23 (1) sentence 1 no. 2 sentence 4 of the Income Tax Act does not apply. For Ether as a currency and payment token, the one-year period therefore stands, even where the units generated income in the meantime.

The rewards themselves are to be considered separately. This income counts as income in its own right, and the units received are treated as acquired. A separate one-year period begins for them from the day of receipt, valued at the market price at that moment. Anyone receiving staking rewards weekly therefore accumulates new tranches with their own periods every week. Which providers withhold how much of that reward is something our newsroom broke down for fourteen providers on September 12, 2026.

What the Draft With Its December 31, 2026 Cut-Off Date Would Change

The future of the holding period is currently the subject of political argument. Reports describe a draft from the Federal Ministry of Finance that provides for a cut-off date of December 31, 2026: for crypto assets acquired after that date the one-year period would fall away, while holdings acquired before it would remain under the law as it stands. None of this has been enacted. As long as no statute appears in the Federal Law Gazette, section 23 of the Income Tax Act applies in its present form, and it is under that form that you settle your sale this year.

For your decision today this means two things. First, a sale brought forward solely because of a possible change in the law is a bet on a draft. Second, such grandfathering would be an argument for leaving existing tranches intact, precisely because a newly purchased replacement holding could fall under the new rules. How the debate has developed since the summer was traced by our newsroom on September 8, 2026, in its article on grandfathering and the cut-off date.

Exemption Limit, Losses, Turn of the Year: The Three Levers

Once the decision for a partial sale has been made, three variables remain under your control. The first is the timing within the calendar year. Because the exemption limit applies afresh for each calendar year, splitting a sale across the turn of the year can push the taxable gain into two years and keep it below the limit twice. The second is the wallet you sell from, because the order of use operates on a wallet basis. The third is the offset against losses from other private disposal transactions in the same year, which section 23 (3) sentence 7 of the Income Tax Act expressly permits.

Two things, by contrast, are not levers. Switching exchanges changes nothing about the period, because what counts is the acquisition and not the place of storage. And a transfer to another address of your own is no disposal, so it neither resets the period nor ends it; it can, however, make the allocation of tranches harder if it goes undocumented.

Which Records You Need for the Sale

The burden of proof lies with you. In paragraphs 102 and 103 the Ministry of Finance circular lists what the tax offices may request. That includes the time of acquisition, the quantity acquired and the type of acquisition, the acquisition and incidental costs in euros, the time of disposal with quantity and trading platform, the disposal proceeds and disposal costs in euros, as well as the market price used together with its source where trading did not take place in euros. Expressly required on top of that is documentation of the chosen order of use per wallet and documentation of reallocations between wallets.

In practice this means the tax report is no retrospective paperwork exercise. It is the precondition for being able to evidence the tax exemption of an old tranche at all. Anyone who no longer holds purchase records from 2021 because the exchange has since shut down is left without proof in case of doubt. The statements of the bank account the money left at the time often help as supporting evidence.

When a Sale Can Be Worth It Despite the Tax

Tax is a cost factor, not a prohibition. There are cases in which a taxable sale is the more sensible decision. Anyone servicing a loan at high interest earns a certain return by repaying it, while the price remains open. Anyone holding a single position so large that a fall by half would touch their life planning buys peace of mind with the tax. And anyone who needs money for a fixed expense in a few months should not leave it sitting in an asset that has swung between 1,405 and 2,881 euros this year.

Conversely, the blanket rule of taking profits after a rise as a matter of course is expensive in Germany while the one-year period is still running. Between a taxable sale today and a tax-free sale in a few months lies almost half the gain at a personal tax rate of 42 percent. The price has to deliver that difference first.

Ethereum Gains and the Holding Period: What to Take Away

1. Check purchase dates before prices. Pull a list of your tranches with date, quantity and cost base per wallet, and mark which are older than a year. A tax report from the comparison of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers delivers this overview in a few minutes and documents the chosen order of use at the same time.
2. Sell out of the right wallet. Decide deliberately which holding is disposed of, and factor the venue's fees into the calculation; the terms differ considerably, so a look at the comparison of the best crypto exchanges pays off before you place the order.
3. Let the rest run to a plan. Anyone who does not want to exit completely should establish when the next tranches come free for the remaining holding, and continue regular purchases in an orderly way; how to set up a recurring purchase is shown by the comparison of savings plan providers.

This article describes the legal position on the basis of the statute and the circular from the tax authorities; it is no substitute for tax advice in an individual case. Anyone who has to bring together several wallets, staking income and purchases from several years is better off with a tax adviser than with an estimate.

The sources in full: the text of section 23 of the Income Tax Act and the Ministry of Finance circular of March 6, 2025, on specific questions of the income tax treatment of certain crypto assets.

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

If you have ever swapped a token on a decentralized exchange, deposited one in a lending pool or sent one through a bridge, an approval you forgot about long ago is very probably still live today. It allows a contract that is not yours to move your tokens out. It does not end with the swap, it does not expire after a year, and it does not lapse when the project behind it is abandoned. It ends only when you revoke it yourself.

The objection to clearing them up was the same for years: every revocation is a separate transaction, every transaction costs gas, and anyone sitting on twenty old approvals pays twenty times over. That objection no longer holds in this form. We ran the numbers on September 14, 2026, and revoking a single approval on Ethereum mainnet currently costs around half a cent.

Token Approval Explained: Why an approve Keeps Running After the Swap

A token approval, also called an allowance, is permission granted to an external contract address to take a certain quantity of a token out of your account. This is no flaw in the design. It is the mechanism without which the ERC-20 standard would not work at all.

The reason lies in how the standard is built. An ERC-20 token is its own contract with its own ledger. When you want to hand tokens to another contract, that contract cannot simply take them, it has to collect them itself. That requires two steps: first the approval through the approve function, then the actual operation, in which the contract pulls the tokens via transferFrom. You can read it up in the EIP-20 standard description, which has set out this split since 2015.

What matters is what does not happen in the second step. The standard makes no provision for the approval to expire once it has been used. It is reduced by the amount that was pulled, and if the approved amount was high enough, a remainder stays in place. That remainder is exactly the problem at issue here.

Unlimited Approval: What the uint256 Maximum Means for Your Balance

Many interfaces do not ask for an amount at all. They set the approval straight to the highest value the standard permits. That value is known as the uint256 maximum and is a 78-digit number. In practice it means unlimited, forever, covering the full size of your current and any future balance of that token.

For the operator of the interface this is convenient, because you only have to approve once and can trade afterwards without any further confirmation. For you it shifts the ceiling on the damage. An approval capped at 500 USDC can cost you 500 USDC in the worst case. An unlimited approval costs you everything held in that token at that address, at the moment the approved contract is compromised.

That moment is no theoretical one. In recent weeks we have reported repeatedly on cases in which users lost balances without ever giving away a seed phrase: through manipulated signature requests from wallet drainers as well as through tokens with a built-in freeze and clawback function. An old approval works in the same direction, only more quietly: once it is in place, it never asks you for another click.

It helps to be clear about what an approval is not. It gives nobody your private key, it grants no access to your Ether balance, and it only ever covers the one token you granted it for. Anyone holding ten tokens who has granted an unlimited approval for each of them has ten separate points of entry, not one.

Our Own Measurement: 5,910 Approvals in One Hour, 13.9 Percent of Them Unlimited

So that the scale does not remain a claim, we measured it. This analysis was carried out by cryptoticker.io itself on September 14, 2026.

The method in one sentence: through a public Ethereum node we read out every approval event for the five most used ERC-20 tokens across a contiguous window of 300 blocks and sorted them by the size of the approved amount. The window covers blocks 25,972,833 to 25,973,132, that is the period from 02:54 to 03:55 UTC on September 14, 2026, a good hour of network operation. The contracts examined were those of USDT, USDC, DAI, WETH and LINK.

In that hour there were 5,910 approval events, spread across 3,301 transactions. Of these, 820 stood at the uint256 maximum, meaning unlimited. That is 13.9 percent. A further eleven approvals sat below the maximum but above 10 to the power of 30 units, which for each of these tokens amounts to an unlimited approval. Together that gives 14.1 percent.

The distribution across the individual tokens diverged sharply. For WETH, 477 of 2,140 approvals were unlimited, a share of 22.3 percent. For USDC it was 203 of 2,475, or 8.2 percent. USDT came in at 130 of 1,181, or 11.0 percent. The smaller samples for DAI (7 of 83) and LINK (3 of 31) contribute little to the finding given their low case numbers and appear here only for the sake of completeness.

A second figure from the same measurement deserves attention because it points the other way: 1,241 of the 5,910 events were approvals set to zero, in other words revocations. One in five approval transactions in this window was therefore a clean-up. Awareness of the issue exists, and a measurable share of users acts on it.

What we could not establish with this method belongs here just as much. We did not assess the receiving addresses for whether a reputable protocol or a fraudulent contract sits behind them, since an unlimited approval granted to an established exchange interface is a different matter from one granted to an unknown address. We also measured only approvals newly granted within this window, leaving out the existing stock of open approvals that has built up over years and cannot be read out with this type of query. Finally, the figures exclude all approvals on layer-2 networks such as Arbitrum, Base or Optimism, as well as signature-based approvals following the Permit2 pattern, which generate no approval event at all. The true number of open approvals therefore lies above what is shown here.

Gas at 0.049 Gwei: What Revoking on Ethereum Really Costs Today

The second half of the measurement concerns the price. Here too the figures are queried values rather than an estimate. For six reference dates we read out ten blocks each, spaced 50 blocks apart, and took the median of the base fee.

On September 14, 2026, this median stands at 0.0492 Gwei, with a range of 0.0389 to 0.0540 Gwei across the ten samples. Seven days ago it stood at 0.0493 Gwei, 30 days ago at 0.0616 Gwei. Going back three months produces a different picture: on June 15, 2026, the median stood at 0.2097 Gwei, on March 17 at 0.1155 Gwei, and on September 12, 2025, at 0.1539 Gwei. Today's level is therefore barely a quarter of the value from three months ago and around a third of the value from a year ago.

That leaves the question of how much gas a revocation actually consumes. We measured this as well instead of taking it from a rule of thumb: out of the transactions in the measurement window we filtered 23 that produced exactly one event, meaning pure approval operations with nothing else attached. Their gas consumption ranged from 24,080 to 55,906 units, with a median of 48,837.

From this the calculation follows. 48,837 gas units at 0.0492 Gwei come to 0.0000024 Ether. At a price of 2,170.21 euros per Ether, retrieved on September 14, 2026, from Kraken, that equals 0.52 cents. Across the measured gas range the price moves between 0.26 and 0.60 cents. Clearing up ten approvals therefore costs around five cents. For comparison: on June 15 the same revocation would have cost 2.22 cents, which supports the point rather than undermining it. Even back then the operation was not expensive.

This is where the actual finding of the analysis lies. Cost does not work as a justification for leaving old approvals in place, and it has not worked as one for some time. Even so, 13.9 percent of all newly granted approvals still sit at unlimited. The transaction fee is not what stands in the way. What is missing is the habit of clearing up once the swap is done.

Checking Token Approvals: How to See What Is Open in a Few Minutes

Getting started is unspectacular. You need your public address, no seed phrase and no installation.

The quickest route is an approval checker. The best known one is Revoke.cash, which was reachable when we called it up on September 14, 2026, and which breaks down the open approvals of an address by token and contract address. Etherscan also runs a tool of its own under the name Token Approval Checker that produces the same list; the page blocks automated requests, while in a normal browser it is readily accessible.

You can start by simply typing in the address and looking at the list without connecting a wallet. For a plain look-up that is entirely sufficient, and it is the safer route: an interface you are using for the first time does not need immediate access to your account. You only have to connect once you actually want to revoke, because that requires a transaction and therefore a signature.

How to Spot a Risky Approval

Three characteristics tell you most. If the amount column points to an unlimited quantity, the approval is open regardless of your current balance. If the grant date goes back months or years and you cannot remember the protocol, there is no reason to let it keep running. And if the receiving address carries no known contract name, only a bare hex address, it deserves particular attention.

One qualification belongs here: the fact that an approval goes to a well known, heavily used protocol does not make it harmless. The large losses of recent years arose predominantly at established contracts that only revealed a gap later on.

Revoking Approvals: The Process Step by Step

A revocation is technically the same thing as an approval, only with the amount set to zero. You call the same approve function and set the permitted quantity to nothing. After that the contract can pull nothing more.

In practice it runs like this: you open the approval checker, connect your wallet, select the approval you want gone from the list, and confirm the transaction. Pay attention to what your wallet shows you before you sign. It has to be an approve on the token contract you are currently clearing up, and the amount has to be zero. If your wallet shows you a transfer of your balance instead, or a signature with no recognizable function, abort.

Every approval needs its own transaction, and that holds even when the interface offers several at once. So reckon with the measured half a cent per operation, not with a flat price for the whole list. Anyone with a great many old approvals can work by the size of the balance and start with the tokens that actually hold something. An unlimited approval on a token of which you hold zero units is untidy, yet at that moment it has no effect. It becomes dangerous only once something arrives at the address again.

Limited Approval Instead of Unlimited: What a Fixed Amount Really Achieves

The more effective step comes before the revocation, namely at the moment of granting. Most wallets let you overwrite the proposed unlimited amount when confirming and enter exactly the quantity this particular operation is about.

The price for that is convenience. If you want to trade again next week, you have to approve again, and that costs another transaction. At the gas price measured today, this price is five tenths of a cent per operation. Anyone trading regularly therefore pays a few euros a year for the assurance that no open approval is left behind.

Against that stands the benefit. A limited approval caps the possible damage at the amount entered, and it effectively expires by itself because it is used up during the operation. Precisely this property makes the difference between an annoying and an existential loss when a contract is compromised years later.

The Special Case of Permit2 and Signatures

A newer pattern works with a signature in place of a transaction. Under the name Permit or Permit2 you grant permission by signing a message that the contract later submits itself. This saves you the gas cost of the approval and therefore also generates no approval event on the blockchain, which is why these permissions are missing from our measurement.

For you that means two things. A signature request can have the same effect as an approval, even though it looks more harmless and costs nothing. And a permission granted by signature will show up in some approval checkers only if the tool explicitly supports Permit2. Check that before you take an empty list for a clean list.

What Revoking Does Not Protect: Seed Phrase, Signatures and Phishing

Tidy approvals limit the damage. They are no shield. They help you against exactly one attack pattern: a contract you once granted access to that later uses this access against you.

They do not help you if your seed phrase goes missing, because whoever holds the key needs no approval. They do not help you against a freshly signed transaction on a spoofed page, because in that moment you are granting a new permission rather than using an old one. And they do not help you with tokens whose contract brings its own blocking or clawback function, as many regulated and tokenized assets have built in.

Revoking therefore belongs alongside the other habits rather than in their place: separate addresses for trading and custody, a hardware wallet for the holdings that stay put, and the habit of reading every signature request before you confirm it.

Separate Addresses: Why an Approval Only Costs What the Account Holds

There is a way to defuse the topic structurally, and it manages without any tool at all. An approval can only ever reach what sits at the address it applies to. Anyone who separates their holdings limits the damage regardless of how clean their approval list is.

In practice that means one address on which you trade and use contracts, and a second one on which the holdings you do not touch are kept. The second address connects to no decentralized interface and therefore never grants an approval. If you also manage it through a separate wallet instead of the same software installation, you separate the risk that a compromised interface reaches both accounts at once.

This split has a side effect you should be aware of: moving holdings between your own addresses counts as a transfer for tax purposes rather than a sale. You should still document it cleanly, because your exchange has been reporting these movements to the tax authorities since the beginning of 2026, and an unexplained outgoing transfer raises questions later on. What exactly gets transmitted is something we have broken down in our overview of the crypto reporting obligation.

Revoking Token Approvals: What to Take Away

1. Check today what is open. Enter your address into an approval checker without connecting the wallet, and get yourself a list. Anyone who finds an unlimited approval to a protocol they have not used for a year has already spent the afternoon usefully. For the holdings that are meant to stay put afterwards, our hardware wallet comparison is worth a look.
2. Clear up in the order of your balances. Begin with the tokens you actually hold something in, and work your way down. At a measured price of around half a cent per revocation, the list is a question of half an hour of your time rather than of cost. Which wallet shows you the approvals in plain language when you confirm them is set out in our software wallet comparison.
3. Change the habit at your next approval. Overwrite the unlimited proposal and enter the amount the operation is about. That costs you one more transaction on your next trade and in return caps every future loss at a sum you have set yourself. Anyone who wants to keep a clean overview of their holdings and movements will find the right tools in our portfolio tracker comparison.

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

Crypto airdrops in week 38: these claim windows are running now

This week holds only one date that really bites, and it is now eleven days away. Anyone who held Beldex or Humanity at the crypto exchange Kraken has already been credited with the respective replacement token by airdrop. The only thing left to do with it is to withdraw it, and that option closes on September 25, 2026 at 14:00 UTC. After that the exchange liquidates whatever is left. This is the last full calendar week before that date, and there are two separate notices for two separate tokens: anyone who held both has two things to do.

As in the previous week, a warning belongs at the top, because the pattern has repeated itself. Last week it was Holoworld AI, whose claim from September 2025 was circulating through search results as a fresh airdrop. This week it is Meteora (MET). The project confirmed its TGE and airdrop in an announcement dated September 10, from September 10, 2025. The TGE took place on October 23, 2025. Two weeks, two prominent “live” airdrops that actually date from the previous year. That is no coincidence. It is the basic pattern of this field: airdrop announcements display the day and the month prominently and the year almost never. Check it first.

This overview lists the airdrops that either have a claim window open this week or have a confirmed date within the next 14 days. Every figure comes from the source linked alongside it, retrieved again on September 14, 2026. Where a project has published no end date, that is stated explicitly. There are no estimated deadlines here. For the state of play a week ago, see our piece on the airdrops of week 37.

The dates at a glance

1. Beldex and Humanity: eleven days until forfeiture

This entry is the most unusual on the list, because nobody here had to claim anything. Both projects were attacked in June 2026, both responded by rolling out a new token contract and distributing the replacement one for one to holders as of the snapshot. Kraken handled the distribution for its customers and credited it automatically, which is why two additional lines have been sitting in those accounts ever since. An airdrop you never had to claim can still expire.

The key data differ by project, and that is the reason for the two separate notices. For Beldex, the snapshot was taken on June 10, 2026 at 23:36 UTC, and the new token was credited on July 10, 2026 at 14:00 UTC. For Humanity, the snapshot came earlier, on June 8, 2026 at 17:25 UTC, set by the Humanity team itself, and the new $HUMANITY was credited as early as July 1, 2026 at 14:00 UTC. Anyone who bought the token in question only after the snapshot is not entitled to it according to the exchange, and in neither case is there an application portal through which that could be sorted out after the fact.

The ending, by contrast, is identical for both. Trading and deposits have already been switched off for all affected tickers, withdrawal remains the only function, and it closes on September 25, 2026 at 14:00 UTC. From September 28 to October 2, 2026, the exchange will liquidate any remaining balances itself. In the same notice it points out explicitly that the proceeds may fall well below recently seen prices and, in individual cases, may be minimal or zero. When the notices were retrieved again on September 14, 2026, neither carried any reference to an extension.

What has to be done this week therefore comes down to a single action with a date attached: withdraw before the window closes, and do it separately for each of the two tokens. We have written up the full procedure, including the contract addresses that distinguish the old token from the new one, under “Kraken withdrawal deadline on September 25”. The separate route for Humanity and the unlocking of the token are covered under “Humanity unlock: the H deadline at Kraken”.

Sources: Kraken Support, “Notice of Beldex ($BDX) delisting and $BELDEX airdrop” and Kraken Support, “Important update regarding Humanity (H)” (both retrieved again on September 14, 2026; snapshots, credits, withdrawal deadline and liquidation window are set out there verbatim)

2. Plume (Season 2): claim open, end date still unpublished

Plume is a layer 1 chain for tokenised real-world assets. Season 2 of the points programme ended on March 31, 2026, and registration for the distribution ran from April 29 to May 27, 2026. Anyone who missed that step is excluded according to the project, and there is no way to fix it retroactively. Eligibility required wallets with at least 10,000 Plume Points, in some cases plus verification through Human Passport.

The claim has been running through the official portal since the end of May 2026, and the gap of recent weeks remains unchanged: Plume has at no point named an end date. The announcement text gives the registration deadline and says of the claim itself only that it is planned for “later in May”, with the exact date to follow through the official channels. To this day it has not followed. When the site was retrieved on September 14, 2026, the project blog carried three newer posts than a week earlier, dated September 8, 9 and 10, 2026, and all three concerned partnerships and product launches rather than the airdrop.

The figure circulating in secondary reports, a window of roughly three months that would arithmetically have run out at the end of August, still does not come from Plume. We carry it only because it is circulating, and explicitly not as a deadline. In practice that changes nothing about the advice. If anything it sharpens it: a claim with no published end date can be closed at any time without prior announcement. Anyone eligible and registered should claim rather than wait.

Source: Plume, “Plume Points Season 2 Airdrop Registration Is Now Open” (retrieved again on September 14, 2026; the announcement still names no end date for the claim, and the project blog carries no post on the subject)

3. Grass (Stage 2): deadline of January 22, 2027

The Solana project Grass has been paying out its Stage 2 rewards since July 22, 2026. Epochs 1 to 19 are covered, meaning the period from October 14, 2024 to June 8, 2026. The claim runs through the project's official dashboard.

Grass is one of the few projects with a cleanly published deadline. The claim is open until January 22, 2027, a full six months. Whatever has not been claimed by then stays with Grass. That is the literal wording in the project documentation, and it was still there unchanged when the page was retrieved again on September 14, 2026. This is the most comfortable entry on the list and, experience suggests, still the one where most value is left on the table, because half a year feels like unlimited time. Four of the six months have now passed. Put the date in your calendar if you are eligible.

Source: Grass, “How Your Stage 2 Rewards Allocation Works” (retrieved again on September 14, 2026; the January 22, 2027 deadline and the forfeiture clause carry unchanged wording)

4. GRVT: every tranche runs its own 30-day clock

The derivatives exchange GRVT held its token generation event on July 30, 2026 and is distributing a total of 280 million GRVT. The mechanics are the strictest on this list. The distribution runs in tranches over twelve months, and every unlocked tranche carries a claim window of 30 days. Once it expires, the tranche is permanently lost according to the project.

Two points are decisive here and are regularly confused. First, registration: it closed on July 27, 2026 at 00:00 UTC, and anyone who missed it has forfeited their allocation, which no later claim can undo. Second, automation: only the first tranche that falls due is sent automatically, and even that only where registration happened before July 17, 2026. Anyone who signed up later has to claim every tranche themselves through the Reward Portal, according to the wording of the help text, and to do so within the 30 days.

GRVT publishes no unlock schedule, and when the help section was retrieved again on September 14, 2026 it carried no date for the second tranche. For allocation and vesting schedule the text refers exclusively to the Reward Portal of your own account. We deliberately do not calculate the date here. What counts is the expiry date the portal displays for your specific tranche. This is precisely where forfeited entitlements arise, so set yourself a reminder. The project recommends as much itself.

Source: GRVT Help Center, “How to Receive and Manage Your $GRVT Airdrop” (retrieved again on September 14, 2026)

5. dappOS (DOS): phase 2 open, phase 3 still without a date

The DOS token launched with its TGE on August 10, 2026, and phase 2 has been running since August 11, 2026, in which eligible wallets can claim transferable DOS. A phase 3 has been announced, but without a date, and no end date has been published for any of the phases so far. Nothing has changed there since last week. The claim portal on the project domain is the only official route.

What comes afterwards is the real decision. A freshly distributed token with a small market capitalisation swings wildly in its first weeks, and the selling pressure from an ongoing claim hits it on top of that. Anyone who wants to trade such a position at all needs access that covers the small pairs. Pure charting tools such as Dexscreener or TradingView only display prices; no trading happens there. One alternative is the mobile app FOMO Family, which lets you discover, swipe through and trade meme and low-cap tokens directly in the app, with fast deposits. Download the app through the link and secure yourself a 10 percent discount on trading fees. Sobriety belongs with that: trading meme and low-cap tokens is highly risky, volatility is extreme and a total loss is possible at any time. Where else DOS is traded can be seen in our comparison of crypto exchanges.

What has changed since last week

• The Kraken deadline has moved into close range. The withdrawal window closes on September 25, 2026 at 14:00 UTC, eleven days from the publication of this edition. Newly documented in this edition are the separate key dates for Humanity: snapshot on June 8, 2026 at 17:25 UTC, credit on July 1, 2026 at 14:00 UTC, both earlier than for Beldex.
• Plume, Grass, GRVT and dappOS unchanged. All four sources were retrieved again on September 14, 2026, and none carries a new or amended deadline. Plume has added three new blog posts, none of them about the airdrop.
• A new case for the year check: Meteora (MET). It replaces Holoworld AI as the example of the week, and there is more on it in the next section.

What is deliberately missing this week

These candidates did not make the list. The reason differs in each case, and each reason is worth as much as an entry:

• Meteora (MET), wrong year, and the second week in a row for this pattern. The report “Meteora confirms TGE and airdrop” is circulating prominently at the moment and carries the announcement date of September 10. The year, however, is 2025, the TGE took place on October 23, 2025, and the allocation checker went online on October 16, 2025. There is nothing left to collect here.
• AVANT, a period instead of a date, and now past its own time frame. When retrieved on September 14, 2026, the project documentation still says only that the TGE is “currently targeted for September”, with the final date to be announced through the official channels, and that the claim is to open “around TGE”. It names no deadline. The previously communicated “mid-September” has thus been reached without a calendar day on the table. As soon as a day is named, the entry follows.
• Midnight (NIGHT), source unverifiable for the fourth week running. The key data carried so far, thawing until December 4, 2026 followed by a 90-day grace period, come from a check in mid-August. Since then the server has responded from our environment only with a bot-protection interstitial, on September 14, 2026 again with HTTP 429, for both the project blog and the developer documentation. There is no indication of a change, but we can no longer document the deadline, and an undocumented deadline does not belong in the table in this format. Anyone who depends on it should call up the project page themselves.
• Ink (INK), a time window, not a deadline. A period rather than a date continues to circulate for the Kraken layer 2. Collecting points is not a claim date.
• Arcium (ARX), open, but without a deadline. The retroactive token grants have been running in rolling waves since the Solana launch in June 2026. Neither the project site nor the documentation names a point by which a claim has to be made. Not to be confused with an exchange's Airdrop+ programme, which ran from June 22 to July 6, 2026 and finished long ago: that was a trading promotion, not a project airdrop.
• Canopy (CNPY), RISEx and mint.io (MNTD), points programmes without a TGE date. Unchanged from last week; none of these candidates has published a date since.
• ARC (Circle), a mainnet launch is not an airdrop. The public mainnet launch on September 16, 2026 falls in this week and is therefore frequently listed among airdrops. A TGE has no date and a community or airdrop allocation is not confirmed. Without both, it does not belong here.
• Exchange dates with no airdrop connection. The end of trading for 21 Kraken tokens and comparable deadlines are real, but they are not airdrops. They appear in our pieces on exchange dates and do not belong on this list.

Alongside that, the standing rule of this format: projects listed as “live” on aggregator sites but naming neither a snapshot nor a claim window at the project source do not get in. “Airdrop confirmed, date open” is not a deadline.

What to watch on every claim

Airdrops are the preferred hunting ground for wallet drainers, and the patterns repeat:

• Check the year first. For two weeks running, a prominently traded “current” airdrop stood here that actually dated from the previous year, and an expired claim is the perfect template for a cloned scam page.
• Always open the claim page through the official project domain, never through links in direct messages, comments or search ads.
• No legitimate airdrop asks for your seed phrase or your private key.
• Check which permission you are granting before you sign. An unlimited token approval is not necessary for a claim.
• Weigh the network fee against the value of the allocation. For very small amounts, claiming can cost more than it returns.
• Put every deadline in your calendar, and with staggered distributions such as GRVT's, put in every single tranche rather than only the first.
• And the point that carries this week too: a claim without a published end date is not a claim with unlimited time. It is one whose closure does not have to be announced.

Think about the tax position straight away

An airdrop is not by definition a tax-free gift. Whether the allocation has to be treated as other income under Section 22 No. 3 of the German Income Tax Act depends above all on whether you provided something in return, which is also how the still authoritative circular of the German Federal Ministry of Finance of March 6, 2025 draws the line. This week's Kraken case also shows that two events have to be kept apart: the inflow of the replacement token in July, and the later withdrawal or sale. A forced liquidation by the exchange is likewise an event you have to document, even if you did not trigger it.

So when you claim, record the time, the quantity, the market value, the price source, the transaction hash and the terms of participation straight away. The last of these tends to disappear first once a campaign page is taken down. That a token you have not sold can also trigger a tax liability is something we explain separately.

The Optimism case shows that a distribution once promised can also be reallocated, which you can read in our piece on the reallocation of the Optimism airdrop. For an overview of further campaigns, see our section on crypto airdrops.

Conclusion

Week 38 is a week with exactly one task and four observation posts. The task is called September 25: anyone who held Beldex or Humanity at Kraken has long had the replacement token in their account and eleven days to withdraw it, twice over where both tokens are affected. After that the exchange decides on liquidation, and it says itself that little or nothing may come of it.

The four remaining entries stand unchanged: Plume, GRVT and dappOS with open windows and no published end, and Grass as the only project with a clean closing date of January 22, 2027, of which four of the six months have now elapsed.

The methodological finding of the week is the same as last week's, and that is exactly what makes it matter: once again a prominently traded “live” airdrop turned out to be a year old. When a mistake repeats twice in a row, it is the rule rather than a slip. Check the year before you connect a wallet.

And the necessary sobering note: most allocations run into double or triple digits, the fee for claiming eats a noticeable share of that, and a substantial proportion of all allocated tokens is never claimed at all. The effort pays off above all where you are already eligible.

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

On Wednesday, September 16, 2026, the US Federal Reserve publishes its interest rate decision, and futures markets mostly expect a hike. If you have a savings plan running on Bitcoin, the honest answer to the question of what you have to do now is: probably nothing. Two things are still worth checking, and beforehand rather than afterwards: exactly when your next instalment is executed, and how much headroom a running crypto loan still has.

This article explains what actually happens on September 16, which mechanism connects a US policy rate to your monthly Bitcoin purchase, and where the meeting day gets expensive for retail investors. It contains no price forecast, because nobody can seriously predict how the market will react to a decision that is already largely priced in.

What the Fed decides on September 16, 2026, and when the number arrives

The body that sets the US policy rate is called the Federal Open Market Committee, or FOMC: the monetary policy committee of the Federal Reserve, which meets eight times a year and sets the target range for the overnight rate between banks. The meeting runs over two days, September 15 and 16, 2026. The decision comes on the second day.

The Federal Reserve meeting calendar marks the date with an asterisk. That asterisk looks like a footnote and carries the most important information on the page: it flags the meetings at which the Fed publishes a Summary of Economic Projections. Those projections are the collected expectations of the central bankers on growth, unemployment, inflation and the future level of rates, and they reach several years ahead. After September, only two meetings remain in 2026, on October 27 and 28 and on December 8 and 9.

The time that matters

The decision is published at 18:00 UTC, which is 20:00 in central European summer time. The press conference starts half an hour later. For you that means: Wednesday evening between 20:00 and 21:00 CEST is the window in which prices on crypto exchanges get most turbulent. The Frankfurt stock market has long since closed by then; the crypto market keeps trading.

Where is the US policy rate now, and what does a 25 basis point step change?

The current target range for the overnight rate is 3.50 to 3.75 percent. It has been in place since July 30, 2026, as recorded in the Fed's implementation note for the July meeting. A basis point is one hundredth of a percentage point, so 25 basis points are 0.25 percentage points. If the step goes through, the range would afterwards sit at 3.75 to 4.00 percent.

Why expectations flipped at all can be pinned to a single number. US consumer prices in August were 3.4 percent higher than a year earlier, with the core rate at 2.4 percent; the largest single driver was petrol, up 3.9 percent. After the release on September 11, the probability of a September hike priced into futures markets jumped. The figures different houses quote for the CME FedWatch reading sit in a range of roughly 86 to 90 percent, after around 70 to 72 percent the day before. I am deliberately not smoothing that range: the value moves with every trading day, and the spread itself is the more honest piece of information.

The numbers come from CNBC's report on August consumer prices, which carries the FedWatch readings. Important for context: a priced-in probability reflects what the market has in the price. The value is a bet by futures traders and carries no predictive power beyond that, and that is exactly why prices move less on the expected step than on the deviation from it.

Why does the Bitcoin price react to a US Federal Reserve decision at all?

The connection is less mysterious than many headlines make it sound. A higher policy rate means that parking money risk-free earns more. Anyone getting four percent on overnight deposits or short-dated government bonds demands a higher compensation for anything riskier. Bitcoin pays no interest and consists exclusively of price movement. As the risk-free return rises, so does the bar Bitcoin has to clear.

On top of that comes the funding channel. A large share of short-term trading volume in the crypto market runs on borrowed money. When money gets more expensive, leveraged positions shrink and the market gets thinner. That explains why price moves on central bank days are often more violent than the news itself warrants.

What this means in practice for the coming days

At the time of writing, Bitcoin trades at around 76,700 US dollars, or roughly 66,200 euros; retrieved on September 14, 2026 at 00:40 UTC via CoinGecko's public price interface. In the preceding 24 hours the change was under one percent. That figure is a snapshot and no basis for a decision meant to work over years.

Should I pause my Bitcoin savings plan before the rate decision?

The short answer is no, and the reason lies in the purpose of a savings plan. A savings plan buys a fixed amount at fixed intervals, regardless of the price. It is the decision to stop making individual decisions. Anyone who pauses it ahead of a scheduled event has abolished it at exactly the moment it was built for.

What does make sense is checking once whether the instalment still fits your circumstances. If rising rates make your mortgage or your overdraft more expensive, the instalment is the lever, not the execution date. Which providers allow which minimum instalments, intervals and fees is set out in our comparison of Bitcoin savings plan providers, and with small instalments the fee side quickly becomes the largest cost block.

The difference between pausing and adjusting

Pausing means: you do not buy this month. Adjusting means: you keep buying, but with an amount you can sustain through a bad quarter as well. The first is a market forecast in disguise, the second is household budgeting. Only one of the two is something you can do reliably.

What dollar cost averaging achieves on a meeting day and what it does not

Dollar cost averaging describes a simple arithmetic phenomenon: anyone buying regularly for the same amount gets more units at low prices and fewer at high ones, so the average price ends up below the mean of the prices. No promise of returns comes with that, and no protection against losses either. The effect is a procedure that prevents timing errors.

On a central bank day the benefit shows particularly clearly, because the price move after the decision can go either way and the counter-move often follows within hours. A savings plan simply does not take part in that question. If you want to know how it stacks up against a lump sum purchase, we worked it through in our article on savings plans and lump sum purchases when buying more of August 24, 2026.

Crypto loans before September 16: what buffer your loan-to-value ratio needs

This is the part where a meeting day can do real damage. Anyone who has pledged crypto assets as collateral and taken out a loan against them is working with a loan-to-value ratio: the relation of the loan amount to the current value of the collateral. If the price of the collateral falls, that ratio rises. Once it crosses the provider's limit, an automatic sale follows. This forced sale is called liquidation, and it does not ask whether the move will be over again an hour later.

Two figures determine how well you sleep here. The first is the distance between your current ratio and the liquidation threshold. The second is the interest rate you pay on the loan, because variable rates in crypto loans track market rates and demand for the borrowed asset. Our overview "Crypto lending: interest rates and risks" of August 16, 2026 describes these mechanisms in detail.

The check that takes ten minutes

Log in once before Wednesday evening and note down two numbers: the price at which your position would be liquidated, and the distance between that price and today's level in percent. If that distance is in single digits, it is a state you should change regardless of the Fed. Either by topping up collateral or by repaying part of the loan.

Why the projections matter more than the rate step itself

Because a 25 basis point hike is around nine tenths priced into the market, the actual information sits in the projections. Their best-known component is the dot plot: a scatter of points in which every member of the committee anonymously marks where they see the policy rate at year end. If that cloud shifts upwards, the committee is signalling further steps. If it stays where it is, the September step was a one-off response to the price data.

For a savings plan that is the only relevant question of the evening, and it is a question about months, not hours. A rate peak reached in December looks entirely different for long-term investors than a path pointing upwards well into 2027.

What analysts say and how to handle it

Around every meeting, price targets appear from institutions and individual analysts. Take them for what they are: expectations attributable to a name. Anyone quoting a price target should be able to name its source; without a name, all that remains is sentiment. And where expectations diverge, both sides belong side by side, the optimistic one and the cautious one.

Execution date, trading hours and spread: where the meeting day can cost you money

The spread is the gap between the price at which you can buy and the price at which you could sell. It is the part of the cost almost nobody calculates, because it does not appear on the statement. In turbulent market phases it widens, and that is exactly what happens in the hour after a central bank decision.

If your savings plan executes on the 16th or 17th of the month anyway, that is no reason to change anything; over years it evens out. But if you were planning to change the execution date regardless, a date in the quieter middle of the month between two central bank meetings is the less conspicuous choice. While you are at it, check whether your provider executes at a fixed time or at some point during the day; in the latter case the timing is out of your hands.

What runs differently with exchange-traded products

Anyone holding Bitcoin through an exchange-traded product rather than directly gains a second layer: those securities only trade during exchange hours. If the decision lands at 20:00 CEST, while German trading is closed, you only see the move the next morning at the open, and then all at once.

What the rate decision has to do with your holding period and your tax bill

Directly nothing, indirectly a great deal. Anyone holding Bitcoin as private assets in Germany can realise gains tax free once a year has passed; that one-year period is called the holding period and runs separately for every purchase. With a savings plan that means: you have as many holding periods as executed instalments.

The connection to the Fed arises the moment a price move tempts you to sell. Anyone selling after a violent evening move may realise gains from instalments that have not yet reached the one-year mark, and pays their personal income tax rate on them. The order in which the tax office assigns the units sold follows the first-in-first-out principle: the units bought first count as sold first. What that looks like in concrete terms with monthly instalments is set out in our article "Bitcoin savings plans and tax: holding period, FIFO and the exemption limit" of August 11, 2026.

The mistake that costs the most on central bank days

The most expensive mistake is rarely bad timing. What gets expensive is the unintended: a decision to sell in the evening, taken in reaction to a headline, which only reveals its price in the following year's tax return. What helps against that is a rule you write down before Wednesday, not on Wednesday.

Bitcoin savings plans and the rate decision: what to take away

1. Let the savings plan run and check the instalment instead. Whether your amount, your interval and your fees still fit your situation decides more over the years than any single purchase date. You will find the providers' terms in our comparison of Bitcoin savings plans.
2. Look at your loan buffer before Wednesday evening. Note the liquidation price and the percentage distance to today's price. If that distance is tight, top up collateral or repay part of the loan before the decision lands. The providers' terms and limits are in our comparison of crypto lending platforms.
3. Keep your purchase records clean before you sell anything. With a savings plan, the date of every single instalment decides the tax on the sale. A portfolio tracker with a tax function takes that allocation off your hands; the selection is in our comparison of crypto tax tools.

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

An Ethereum address that belongs to you has been able to execute someone else's program code since the Pectra upgrade, without its address, its balance or its key changing at all. EIP-7702 is what makes this possible: one signature from you is enough, and from that moment on your address behaves like a contract. This is the basis for many convenient wallet features, and it is also the route by which attackers keep a drained account permanently under their control. This article shows you how to check in two minutes whether your own address carries such a delegation, and what to do if the contract sitting there is one you do not recognise.

The basis for this is our own measurement on the Ethereum chain, taken today. It shows how widespread these delegations have become and what they mostly point to. The answer is more uncomfortable than wallet marketing suggests, but also more nuanced than a bare percentage implies.

What an EIP-7702 delegation does to your Ethereum address

EIP-7702 is an extension to Ethereum that lets an ordinary key-controlled account run the program code of a contract without becoming a contract itself. The account keeps its private key, its address, its balance and its nonce. All it gains is a pointer to a contract whose code runs on the account's behalf on every call.

The technical term for this is delegation. The pointer is written into the account's code field, which until then was empty for a key-controlled account. From that moment on, anyone calling the account calls the stored contract, and that contract reaches the account's storage and balance.

The benefit is obvious. A wallet can bundle several steps instead of asking you to sign three times. A provider can cover the fee on your behalf. An app can set up a tightly bounded spending permission that expires after an hour. These are exactly the features wallet makers have been selling under the Smart Account label since 2025.

The price sits in the same sentence: the stored contract acts with your account's full authority. It can move funds, grant approvals and trigger further calls. A delegation is therefore not a setting but a power of attorney, and it stays in place until you replace it or revoke it.

The 0xef0100 code prefix: how to spot a delegation in a block explorer

A delegated account carries exactly 23 bytes in its code field: the fixed marker 0xef0100 followed by the 20 bytes of the target address. That marker is the only reliable evidence. Everything else an interface shows you is interpretation.

In practice you see it in two places. A block explorer suddenly lists your address as a contract, or displays a note about a delegated account, even though you have never deployed a contract. And the code lookup that every explorer offers returns, instead of an empty value, a short string beginning with ef0100.

The 20 bytes that follow are the address you have to check. They decide everything. If your wallet maker's contract address is sitting there, the delegation is probably intended. If something unfamiliar is sitting there, you have a problem that goes well beyond a misplaced click.

One point matters for context: an empty code field is the good news. If you find nothing there, you have no active delegation, regardless of whether one existed in the past.

How to check an EIP-7702 delegation: four steps in this order

The check takes a few minutes and needs neither a tool nor an installation.

1. Open the address in a block explorer. Enter your Ethereum address and look at whether the page lists it as an ordinary account or as a contract. A note about a delegated account is already the result.
2. Look at the code field. Open the tab with the stored code. Empty means no delegation. A short string beginning with ef0100 means the delegation is active.
3. Read out the target address and look it up. The 20 bytes after the marker are the target address. Look it up and check whether verified source code is available and what name that source code carries.
4. Interpret the result before you move anything. If you do not know the contract, send no further funds to the address, not even a fee. The next section explains why that is the most important rule on this list.

The same check works on every chain where EIP-7702 is live. An authorisation signed for chain ID zero is even valid on all chains at once. Anyone using several networks is better off checking more than once.

Our own measurement of September 13, 2026: 4,035 delegations in 40 minutes

This analysis was carried out by cryptoticker.io itself on September 13, 2026. Method: we pulled 200 consecutive blocks in full from a public Ethereum node, blocks 25,971,139 to 25,971,338, and evaluated every transaction of type 0x04 in them together with its authorisation list. The window runs from 21:14:35 to 21:54:23 UTC and covers 39.8 minutes of chain time.

The numbers from that window:

• 41,110 transactions in total, of which 1,229 were delegation transactions. That is 2.99 percent of total transaction volume.
• 4,035 individual authorisations, since a single transaction may carry any number of them. 889 transactions carried exactly one; the largest carried 110.
• 56 distinct target addresses. Of the 55 actual contracts among them, 15 had publicly verified source code and the remaining 40 did not.
• 140 authorisations, or 3.5 percent, pointed to the zero target address. Those are revocations, not new powers of attorney.
• The four most frequent targets account for 71.7 percent of all authorisations between them.

What we could not measure is how many accounts currently carry a delegation in total, because that would require a full state dump of the chain rather than a time window. Nor can these data show how much money was moved through the contracts we found. And a 40-minute window is a snapshot: another day may show a different distribution.

Poisoner and CrimeEnjoyor: what the verified source code of the largest targets says

In this measurement the names say more than the shares do. Publicly verified source code is available for two of the three most frequent targets, and both describe themselves as tools used by criminals.

The most frequent target, with 2,007 authorisations, or 49.7 percent of the window, carries the name Poisoner in its verified source code. The comment in the source names the purpose outright: the contract is used for address poisoning, that is, to trick inattentive users into sending funds to a wrong address that looks visually similar. As the party behind the publication, the source names the trading firm Wintermute, which says it rebuilt and disclosed the contract. The program code itself is short: it executes a list of arbitrary calls, but only if the transaction was triggered by exactly the address that created the contract.

The third most frequent target, with 170 authorisations, carries the name CrimeEnjoyor. Here too the explanation sits in the source code, and it is set in capital letters: anyone who finds this contract in an authorisation list has a compromised account; no further funds may be sent there, because they will be swept immediately. The code is shorter still than that of the first contract. It does precisely one thing: every incoming amount is forwarded straight away to a target address fixed at setup.

For comparison, the legitimate side of the same list: in eighth place sits a verified contract from a well-known wallet maker with 110 authorisations, alongside several contract accounts from the account-abstraction world with 10 to 49 authorisations each. Those contracts run to several thousand bytes, while the two conspicuous targets get by on 772 and 1,042 bytes. A contract that only sweeps needs little code.

Why a 49.7 percent share does not mean 2,007 victims

Care is needed here, because the percentage invites a false conclusion. So we looked at who actually sent these transactions.

The result: the 2,007 authorisations pointing at the top-ranked contract come from 186 transactions, and those 186 transactions came from a single sender. With 176 distinct senders across the whole window, almost half of all authorisations therefore trace back to one address that registers bundles of up to 110 powers of attorney at a time, minute after minute.

Our reading of this, and it is explicitly a reading rather than an established fact: the pattern does not fit 2,007 freshly harmed users, but rather an operator kitting out their own throwaway addresses. Besides the single sender, the design of the contract supports that view, since it only executes calls for its own creator. In address poisoning the attacker generates the deceptively similar addresses themselves and needs no one else's key to do so. What we are measuring in this case is infrastructure rather than loot.

The second conspicuous contract looks different. Its 170 authorisations are spread across 170 separate transactions from two senders, so one power of attorney per transaction. A collection contract that forwards incoming amounts immediately only makes sense for an account whose key is already in someone else's hands. For you as a reader the difference is decisive: the first case almost certainly does not concern you, the second concerns you directly if your account appears on that list.

Found a sweeper contract? Why revoking alone is not enough

A sweeper is a contract or program that forwards incoming amounts to an outside address automatically and within seconds. If you find a delegation to such a contract on your address, the delegation is not the cause but the consequence. Someone was able to sign in your name, and that requires your private key or your recovery words.

From this follows an order of operations that runs against the first reflex. The reflex says: revoke the power of attorney and move on. The correct view is this: the account is lost, and every amount you send there, including the fee for the revocation, will very likely go to the attacker. A revocation you pay for yourself funds the other side, in case of doubt.

So set up a new account first, ideally on a device whose key has never sat on a computer. Which designs come into question, and how the devices differ, is laid out in our software wallet comparison alongside the device selection. Only afterwards do you deal with whatever is left on the old account, and you do so with help.

For exactly this case there is a free point of contact, one that the sweeper contract's own source code names: the Flashbots whitehat hotline. It helps get remaining balances past a sweeper by settling the rescue and the fee in a single bundle that the sweeper cannot pick off separately. That is no guarantee, but it is the only serious route that requires no payment up front.

Revoking it properly: the zero target address as the only ending

If the account is clean and the delegation is merely unwanted, because you no longer use a wallet feature for instance, then revoking it is simple and still easy to misunderstand.

A delegation does not end because you delete the app, change device or withdraw an approval. It ends solely through a new authorisation pointing at the zero target address, that is, an address made up entirely of zeros. Only then does your account's code field become empty again. Our measurement shows that this step does occur in practice: 140 of the 4,035 authorisations in the window were revocations of this kind.

Check the code field once more after revoking. An interface reporting success to you is not evidence. The evidence is an empty code field in the explorer.

A second point is easily overlooked: a new delegation replaces the old one entirely. Anyone switching from one wallet provider to another ends up with the new provider's power of attorney in the account, not both. That is reassuring, but it does not remove the need to check, because which contract ends up sitting there is decided by the most recently registered authorisation.

Authorisation without gas: why a signature on someone else's site is enough

The most dangerous part of EIP-7702 is its price. An authorisation is a pure signature. It costs you nothing, it shows up in no fee summary, and you do not even have to submit it yourself: any third party may wrap it into a transaction of their own and cover the fee.

For honest providers that is an advantage, because a new account becomes usable straight away without holding funds. For a fraudulent site it is a gift. It needs no transfer from you, no approval and no balance on the account. A single signature in a window that looks like a login, a claim for free tokens or a security check is enough.

From this follows a rule for everyday use: treat every signature request whose content you cannot read as if it were a transfer. That applies in particular to requests asking you to update, migrate or secure an account. You already know this trick in its classic form from the world of manipulated payment recipients; how it plays out there was covered in our August analysis of address poisoning.

Legitimate delegations: how to recognise a genuine wallet account

It would be wrong to conclude from all this that every delegation is an attack. Alongside the conspicuous targets, our measurement also shows a number of clearly attributable wallet contracts, among them the contract of a large browser wallet provider and several account templates from the account-abstraction world.

Three characteristics separate the two groups fairly reliably in practice:

• The source code is publicly verified and carries a name that matches the provider. In our window that applied to 15 of 55 target addresses. Missing source code is no proof of anything malicious, but it is a reason not to proceed.
• The contract is substantial. Account templates weigh in at several thousand bytes, because they bring signature checking, permission management and interfaces with them. The conspicuous targets in our measurement came in under 1,100 bytes.
• You triggered the delegation yourself. A wallet switching to a smart account says so in advance and displays the target address. A delegation you do not remember is a finding.

Anyone working with several wallets regularly should note down their own provider's target address once. The check then becomes a comparison of twenty bytes next time, rather than a research task.

Hardware wallets and blind signing: why the device does not automatically protect you here

A common misconception holds that a hardware wallet makes this question moot. That is true for the key, but not for the power of attorney. An EIP-7702 authorisation is also signed with the private key, and in the worst case the device displays only a target address and a nonce, without being able to explain what follows from them.

What matters, then, is whether your device presents the content of a signature request in plain text and whether you have switched off the signing of unreadable data. What counts here was set out in our article on blind signing on hardware wallets. The recommendation from there applies unchanged: what the device cannot display, you do not sign.

The second protection is the separation of duties. One account for day-to-day dealings with applications, a second for holdings that stay put, and no signature from the second account on any website. A delegation on the everyday account is annoying; a delegation on the holdings account is expensive. If you need the technical wording of the specification, you can read it in the text of EIP-7702, in particular the rules for chain ID zero.

How to check an EIP-7702 delegation: what to take away

1. Look at the code field of your main address today. Empty means you are fine. A string carrying the marker ef0100 means: read out the target address and look it up. Start with the addresses that actually hold something, and then set those holdings up on a device you pick from the hardware wallet comparison.
2. If you do not know the contract, send nothing further to that address. Not even a fee for a revocation. Treat the key as lost, set up a new account and handle the rest through the whitehat hotline. Whatever you want to move to safety in the short term is for now better placed in an account at a supervised trading platform than at an address whose power of attorney you do not control; the selection for that is in our overview of crypto exchanges.
3. Actively revoke intended but unused delegations. Only an authorisation pointing at the zero target address ends one, and only an empty code field in the explorer proves it worked. Anyone running several wallets in parallel should note down their own providers' target addresses; which programs display this feature cleanly is covered in the software wallet comparison.

(As of September 13, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

SEBI and the RBI's "Demat 2.0" pilot issues corporate bonds as digital tokens and settles them with the wholesale digital rupee, with three companies already raising about $107 million.

The Crypto Valley pioneer is moving up to 60 Zug jobs to Bratislava or Vietnam as it pivots from a Swiss crypto specialist into a global wealth manager.

TRM examined roughly $52.7 million across 198.9 million settlements using the x402 protocol. Most of it isn’t coming from AI agents, it says.

The fintech company fulfilled a fraudulent information request sent from a government agency's own email domain, exposing ID documents and full crypto transaction histories for a "limited" number of users.

A week after launch, complaints are rolling in from users that GPT-6 Astra has been nerfed. OpenAI's last model went through the same cycle in July.

LINK is seeing another major increase in trading activity as the asset attempts to recover from its latest correction.

As whales withdraw $300 million in Ethereum ETH), Shiba Inu (shib) flashes spot accumulation signals.

XRP has managed to stabilize above $1.30 after its August comeback, keeping its broader recovery structure intact.

Bitcoin, XRP and Ethereum are recovering after Senate Republicans unveiled a revised Clarity Act with major White House-backed ethics concessions.

The XRP Ledger has apparently set a new record after processing 3,254 transactions in a single ledger.

TLDR

• Micron (MU) shares declined 5.2% during pre-market hours on Monday, sliding to $924.90, representing a 26% retreat from its $1,255 52-week peak
• Remarks from Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Sam Altman of OpenAI, and Elon Musk advocating for decelerated AI advancement sparked the semiconductor selloff
• Competitor stocks including SanDisk, SK Hynix (declining 6%), and Western Digital each tumbled over 5% pre-market; South Korea’s KOSPI index fell more than 3%
• The Trump administration is evaluating comprehensive semiconductor tariffs potentially affecting data center servers and laptop computers
• Treasury yields approaching 5%, crude oil surpassing $100 per barrel, and elevated inflation readings intensified macroeconomic headwinds before the FOMC gathering on September 15-16

Micron Technology (MU) shares tumbled 5.2% during Monday’s pre-market session, settling at $924.90. This price level represents approximately 26% beneath the stock’s 52-week peak of $1,255.

Micron Technology, Inc., MU

The decline forms part of a sweeping memory semiconductor retreat that swept through SanDisk, SK Hynix, and Western Digital, with each company experiencing losses exceeding 5% ahead of market opening.

The catalyst emerged from weekend remarks by leading artificial intelligence executives. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, advocated for decelerating the pace of sophisticated AI model development. Sam Altman, heading OpenAI, endorsed this perspective, receiving additional support from Elon Musk.

These statements rattled investors holding positions in memory and storage equities. Micron and SK Hynix serve as primary providers of high-bandwidth memory utilized in AI acceleration hardware. SanDisk and Western Digital furnish NAND flash solutions and data-center storage systems.

The apprehension doesn’t stem from immediate demand deterioration. Instead, concerns center on how a decelerated AI development trajectory might diminish the urgency for companies to scale their computing infrastructure, ultimately impacting future memory chip orders.

AI Executives Put the Brakes On

The market retreat extended far beyond American exchanges. South Korea’s KOSPI index plummeted over 3% as semiconductor equities drove the downturn. SK Hynix experienced a decline exceeding 6% throughout Monday’s session. Samsung Electronics and Kioxia similarly faced downward pressure.

Analyst communities continue rating Micron, SanDisk, and SK Hynix as Strong Buys on Wall Street. Western Digital maintains a Moderate Buy designation. Consensus price objectives from analysts persist substantially above present trading levels.

Micron confronts additional challenges from a patent infringement lawsuit initiated by Netlist concerning its DDR5 memory offerings, introducing legal complications. A technical sell indicator that activated approximately September 9 has contributed additional downward pressure.

The company’s forthcoming earnings announcement is scheduled for September 30. Certain investors are reducing positions ahead of the release, despite the underlying narrative surrounding AI-powered memory demand remaining solid.

Macro Pressure Piling On

Macroeconomic circumstances are compounding difficulties. Brent crude advanced beyond $100 per barrel following energy infrastructure disruptions across Middle Eastern regions. Elevated oil prices can stoke inflation and complicate Federal Reserve rate reduction plans.

The 10-year Treasury yield has also climbed toward 5%, creating pressure on high-growth technology equities. Stronger-than-anticipated U.S. core inflation statistics heightened speculation about a potential rate increase during the September 15-16 FOMC conference.

Broader market indices reflected these challenges. The Nasdaq retreated 1.8% while the S&P 500 decreased 0.75%.

The Trump administration is seriously examining semiconductor tariffs that might encompass downstream offerings including servers and laptop systems, which technology firms caution could elevate AI infrastructure expenses.

Industry analysis has highlighted that Micron’s capital expenditure intensity stands at historically high thresholds as the memory sector transitions from order-growth projections to tangible revenue generation.

The post Micron (MU) Stock Plunges 5% Amid AI Development Slowdown Concerns and Memory Chip Sector Rout appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Highlights

• Meta shares declined approximately 1% to $640 in early Monday trading, wiping out previous session gains
• CPO Christopher Cox offloaded 20,000 shares valued at roughly $13 million on September 9
• Additional executive sales by COO Javier Olivan and CAO Aaron Anderson added millions in transactions
• Wedbush and Oppenheimer analysts expressed skepticism regarding Muse Agent’s revenue-generating capabilities
• Despite concerns, Wall Street maintains a Strong Buy rating with an average target of $759.43, suggesting approximately 17% potential gains

Meta Platforms shares retreated nearly 1% to approximately $640 during Monday’s pre-market session, eliminating the modest 0.57% advance recorded in the previous trading day.

Meta Platforms, Inc., META

The decline came after securities filings revealed that Christopher Cox, the company’s Chief Product Officer, divested 20,000 shares on September 9 for an aggregate value of approximately $13 million. These transactions occurred under a Rule 10b5-1 trading arrangement that Cox established in May 2026.

The executive disposed of 18,578 shares at a weighted average price of $650.21, with an additional 1,422 shares sold at $651.15. Following these transactions, Cox maintains ownership of 244,516 shares held in a revocable trust alongside 55,046 shares in an irrevocable remainder trust.

The CPO wasn’t the only executive trimming positions. Chief Operating Officer Javier Olivan liquidated 5,354 shares for approximately $3.3 million, while Chief Accounting Officer Aaron Anderson sold 3,240 shares valued at roughly $2 million. Each of these sales was executed through pre-established trading plans.

Notwithstanding the cluster of executive sales, TipRanks’ Insider Trading Activity tool registers a Neutral sentiment for Meta based on current insider transactions. Company insiders have simultaneously purchased approximately $2.3 million in stock during the trailing three-month period.

Wedbush Maintains Hold Stance Following Muse Debut

The stock encountered additional headwinds as two Wall Street analysts refrained from upgrading their positions despite the introduction of Meta’s AI agent, Muse.

Wedbush analyst Ygal Arounian sustained a Hold rating on META on September 11, though he elevated his price objective 9% from $595 to $650. This revised target suggests minimal upside of just 0.30% from present trading levels.

Arounian recognized Muse as a notable advancement in Meta’s artificial intelligence initiatives but cautioned that the financial returns remain uncertain. He holds the #2,929 position among 12,499 analysts monitored on TipRanks.

Oppenheimer Identifies Three Major Obstacles for Muse

Oppenheimer analyst Jason Helfstein assigned a Buy rating without establishing a price target, expressing uncertainty about Muse’s capacity to generate meaningful revenue for Meta.

Helfstein highlighted three particular challenges: insufficient consumer appetite to pay for the offering, intense rivalry from Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT platforms, and consumer reluctance to entrust Meta with sensitive password information.

His assessment concluded that Muse Agent doesn’t represent “a game changer” for Meta’s business.

However, not every analyst shares this reserved outlook. Evercore ISI reaffirmed its Outperform designation with an $860 price objective. JPMorgan elevated META from Neutral to Overweight while boosting its target to $820, highlighting AI advancements and products including Muse and Meta Model API access. KeyBanc maintained its Overweight rating with a $780 projection.

The company also unveiled Muse Spark 1.3, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg characterized as representing the firm’s most substantial advancement in coding and agentic functionality to date.

Throughout Wall Street, META commands a Strong Buy consensus derived from 38 Buy recommendations and 6 Hold ratings issued during the past three months. The consensus price target stands at $759.43, indicating potential upside of approximately 17% from current trading levels.

The post Meta (META) Stock Dips 1% as Executives Dump Shares and Muse Agent Draws Skepticism appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• SanDisk shares declined approximately 6% during Monday’s premarket session, reaching $1,542.06
• DeepSeek’s V4.1 Flash model launch demonstrated substantial reductions in memory and storage requirements
• Comparable memory sector stocks including Micron, Western Digital, Seagate, and SK Hynix declined 4%-7%
• S&P 500 futures slipped 0.79% while Nasdaq futures tumbled 1.78% amid widespread tech sector weakness
• Wall Street maintains a Buy consensus on SNDK with a mean price target of $2,190.50

Shares of SanDisk experienced a sharp decline of nearly 6% during Monday’s premarket session, sliding to $1,542.06 as investors retreated from memory and storage stocks amid emerging concerns regarding AI hardware requirements.

Sandisk Corporation, SNDK

The catalyst behind the selloff was the introduction of DeepSeek’s V4.1 Flash model. This innovative AI framework demonstrated the capability to operate with substantially reduced High Bandwidth Memory and solid-state storage compared to earlier iterations. This development prompted a critical question among market participants: how will widespread adoption of such efficient architectures impact future NAND flash requirements?

The uncertainty surrounding this issue triggered selling pressure across the entire sector rather than being isolated to SanDisk alone.

Widespread Weakness Across Memory Names

Micron Technology experienced approximately 5% losses in premarket activity. Both Western Digital and Seagate registered declines exceeding 4%. SK Hynix suffered the steepest drop, falling over 7%. The consistent downward pressure throughout the memory industry underscores that investor anxiety extends beyond any single company.

SanDisk’s elevated beta coefficient means the stock typically exhibits more pronounced movements compared to industry peers during shifts in sector sentiment. This characteristic magnified Monday’s downturn relative to other memory stocks.

Broader market conditions added to the pressure. Nasdaq futures tumbled 1.78%, while S&P 500 futures declined 0.79%. Tech stocks spearheaded the weakness as market participants reevaluated AI infrastructure investments following calls from prominent technology leaders to decelerate AI advancement due to safety considerations.

Chart Analysis and Wall Street Sentiment

Looking at the technical landscape, SanDisk currently trades approximately 3.5% beneath its 20-day simple moving average of $1,602.13 and marginally under its 100-day SMA of $1,555.75. However, the stock maintains significant distance above its 200-day SMA of $1,033.67, which remains 49.6% below present levels. While the extended uptrend stays intact, short-term momentum has deteriorated.

The Relative Strength Index registers 52.52, indicating a neutral zone that provides no decisive advantage to either buyers or sellers at this juncture.

Important resistance exists around $1,696.50. A critical support level to monitor stands near $1,416.50 should the selloff persist.

Regarding analyst coverage, Wall Street sentiment leans bullish. The consensus recommendation is Buy with a mean price objective of $2,190.50. In August, Mizuho maintained its Outperform stance but reduced its target to $1,875. RBC Capital increased its target to $1,600 while maintaining a Sector Perform designation. Wells Fargo elevated its target to $1,550 alongside an Equal-Weight recommendation.

Benzinga assigns SNDK a momentum score of 99.9, indicating robust long-term performance, although its Value score of 11.12 suggests the stock carries a valuation consistent with growth expectations rather than value characteristics.

Monday’s downturn pushes SNDK toward intermediate technical support levels following impressive gains earlier this year. Prior to the session, the stock had been trading at levels nearly 50% above its 200-day moving average.

The post SanDisk (SNDK) Plunges 6% as DeepSeek’s Efficient AI Model Threatens Memory Demand appeared first on Blockonomi.

Quick Summary

• Analysts have elevated SpaceX’s revenue projections for 2027 to $100 billion, a significant increase from the previous $70 billion estimate, fueled by accelerating AI sector expansion.
• The company’s AI division is anticipated to contribute $60 billion in 2027 revenues, substantially higher than the prior forecast of $38 billion.
• Revised analyst models position SPCX shares in a range of $140 to $200, considerably above the initial post-merger projection of $90.
• Looking toward 2031, financial analysts anticipate AI-generated revenues reaching $530 billion for SpaceX, compared to earlier projections near $150 billion.
• Finance expert Aswath Damodaran from NYU cautions that leasing computational infrastructure to companies such as Google and Anthropic may constrain future value creation.

SpaceX stock (SPCX) experienced a 2.2% decline in premarket trading Monday, settling at $147.90, despite financial analysts significantly increasing their valuation targets for the aerospace company.

Space Exploration Technologies Corp., SPCX

Financial analysts on Wall Street have increased their 2027 revenue projections for SpaceX to $100 billion, representing a substantial jump from the $70 billion forecast issued just several months earlier. Simultaneously, anticipated 2027 core earnings have been revised upward from $28 billion to $59 billion during this period.

The catalyst behind these upgraded forecasts is the company’s artificial intelligence segment. SpaceX’s AI operations are now anticipated to generate $60 billion in 2027 revenues, a marked increase from the July projection of $38 billion.

This rapid growth trajectory has fundamentally altered the company’s long-term financial outlook. Earlier in the year, analysts predicted SpaceX would experience cash depletion of $24 billion through 2030. Current models now indicate the company will achieve positive free cash flow instead.

Extending the timeline further, analysts are forecasting $530 billion in AI-derived revenues by 2031. Initial projections for that same timeframe hovered around $150 billion.

Revised Valuation Frameworks

Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at NYU, had previously assessed SpaceX at approximately $100 per share back in June, incorporating 2036 AI revenue expectations of $160 billion into his analysis. That projection now appears understated.

Applying revised AI revenue projections of $500 billion by 2036, the equity value could approach $140. Should 2036 AI revenues hit the $1 trillion mark, valuation estimates climb toward $200.

These calculations suggest that each additional $100 billion in annual AI revenue achieved by 2036 translates to approximately $10 in current share value.

At present trading levels, SPCX is valued at roughly 34 times projected 2027 Ebitda. This compares with GE Aerospace and GE Vernova, which command multiples closer to 25 times.

According to TipRanks, SPCX holds a Moderate Buy consensus recommendation, reflecting 26 Buy ratings, six Hold ratings, and two Sell ratings. The consensus price target stands at $231.68, suggesting potential upside exceeding 53% from present levels.

Damodaran’s Word of Caution

Notwithstanding the enhanced financial projections, Damodaran remains hesitant to update his valuation framework immediately. His primary concern centers on the revenue composition within the AI segment.

A significant portion of SpaceX’s existing AI revenue stream derives from leasing computational resources to external customers, including Google and Anthropic. Damodaran suggests this business model presents inherent limitations.

“That actually takes away from their AI story, since to win in that story, you have to be generating revenues from creating AI agents and collecting subscription or usage revenues,” he explained to Barron’s.

He drew a parallel to a manufacturing company constructing a massive production facility for a high-demand product, only to rent the majority of capacity to rival firms.

Starlink’s customer base has experienced a doubling from fewer than 6 million subscribers in June 2025 to surpassing 12 million by June 2026. Falcon rocket family launches expanded from under 50 missions in 2021 to exceeding 150 in 2025.

SpaceX now commands 80% of worldwide orbital mass deployment, up substantially from 45% in January 2021.

The post SpaceX (SPCX) Stock: Analysts Boost 2027 Revenue Projections to $100B Amid AI Expansion appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Revised Clarity Act includes 126 Democrat-requested changes after a year of negotiations 
• New ethics rules require crypto divestment or blind trusts for federal officials
• Treasury Secretary gains circuit-breaker power to protect community bank deposits 
• BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and major law enforcement groups back the final bill 

The Clarity Act has reached its final stage in the Senate, with Republicans releasing revised text they call their last offer to Democrats before Tuesday’s cloture vote.

Senate Banking Digital Assets Subcommittee Chair Cynthia Lummis, joined by Chairmen John Boozman and Tim Scott, unveiled the updated draft.

The text reflects over a year of bipartisan talks and includes 126 substantive changes requested by Democrats, covering ethics, stablecoins, and consumer protections.

Ethics Rules and Stablecoin Safeguards Anchor the Revised Text

The revised Clarity Act narrows protections under the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act. Coverage now focuses on the Bank Secrecy Act and civil enforcement matters.

Developers still receive shielding from money transmission registration requirements under the updated framework. A civil safe harbor remains part of the package for software builders.

New ethics provisions require lawmakers to divest substantial crypto holdings or place them in blind trusts. The language reflects most of the Tillis-Gallego ethics proposal from earlier negotiations.

State attorneys general gain a meaningful enforcement role under the updated draft. Lummis said, “President Trump voluntarily agreed to unprecedented ethics restrictions, holding every federally elected official, judge, and their spouses to some of the toughest ethics restrictions in U.S. history.”

Stablecoin provisions include a circuit breaker mechanism tied to community bank deposits. The Treasury Secretary would gain authority to act if deposits shift sharply into stablecoins.

This safeguard aims to protect community banks, farmers, and small businesses. Tighter guardrails on vertical integration and affiliate trading also appear in the text.

The bill clarifies that state consumer protection laws remain applicable to digital asset markets. Developer protections do not exempt activities from derivatives laws under the revised language.

Prediction markets remain unaffected by the developer carve-outs included in the draft. Lummis added that the text “is truly bipartisan and includes more than 120 of Democrats’ demands.”

Bipartisan Momentum Builds Ahead of the Senate Vote

Chairman Boozman, who led the Agriculture Committee’s portion of the bill, praised the collaborative process. “We have an opportunity to establish clear rules of the road that will protect consumers, strengthen our markets, and ensure we remain a global leader in digital asset innovation,” he said.

Boozman credited Lummis for her sustained leadership throughout the negotiations. He called the current moment critical for maintaining American leadership in digital assets.

Chairman Scott framed the bill around everyday financial security for American families. “Growing up with a single mom in South Carolina, I learned that every dollar matters,” he said.

Scott said the bill “will protect Americans’ hard-earned money, keep innovation and jobs in America, and strengthen our national security.” He thanked Boozman and Lummis for their partnership on the effort.

Major financial institutions have voiced support for the legislation, including BlackRock and Goldman Sachs. Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, Charles Schwab, and SoFi also back the current text. Law enforcement groups, including the National Fraternal Order of Police, support the bill as well.

The National Sheriffs Association and the Majority County Sheriffs Association recently dropped their opposition. Together, these groups represent law enforcement protecting more than 130 million Americans nationwide.

Lummis said a “no” vote Tuesday would mean “leaving Americans with zero protections in the digital asset markets.” The Senate is expected to hold its cloture vote Tuesday afternoon.

The post Senate GOP Unveils “Final” Clarity Act Text Ahead of Tuesday Cloture Vote appeared first on Blockonomi.

Ripple’s cross-border token posted a modest 3% daily gain, which was enough for analyst Ali Martinez to suggest it “appears to be breaking out” and to predict a much larger increase.

Meanwhile, institutional interest in the asset remains solid and could indeed set the stage for a further upside.

Ready for a Big Jump?

Less than a month ago, XRP surged to almost $1.70 but quickly lost momentum and currently trades at around $1.39 (per CoinGecko). Still, Martinez argued that the ongoing setup may be more bullish than it seems. He said a sustained close above $1.38 would confirm a breakout and could open the door to a rally toward $1.60.

It is important to note that he hasn’t been entirely positive about XRP lately. Just a few days ago, he claimed that the asset’s pullback from the local top to around $1.35 was likely driven in part by profit-taking, with whales selling or redistributing around 90 million units in a week. He also warned that network activity has fallen sharply, with daily active addresses down more than 90%.

Other market observers who have recently given their two cents include X user STEPH IS CRYPTO and Crypto Bitlord, as both stand in the bulls’ corner. The former noted the formation of a “cup and handle” pattern on XRP’s price chart and projected a potential ascent to $2.50.

The latter was even more optimistic, suggesting that the asset’s volatility appears to be stabilizing. The analyst said they are 99% certain that a push toward $2 is coming next, followed by an explosion to a new all-time high.

ETFs Keep Impressing

Growing institutional demand may support the bullish long-term outlook for XRP. Recently, spot XRP ETFs smashed another all-time high, with total net inflows reaching $1.7 billion.

Last week was the ninth consecutive one that finished in the green, attracting nearly $19 million. Companies that have launched such products so far include Bitwise, Franklin Templeton, Canary Capital, 21Shares, and Grayscale. Bitwise has attracted $608 million to date, while Canary Capital ranks second with roughly $490 million.

Meanwhile, T. Rowe Price recently updated its crypto ETF filing, which will enable exposure to multiple digital assets. Following the amendment, XRP sits at a 9.15% weight, while Bitcoin (BTC) leads at 39.54%.

For its part, Exchange Listed Funds Trust filed the “CYBER HORNER S&P 500® and XRP 75/25 Strategy ETF” with the SEC. If the watchdog approves it, the investment vehicle will let investors gain exposure to both the stock market and Ripple’s native cryptocurrency in a 75/25 ratio.

The post Ripple on the Move: Is XRP Ready for a Double-Digit Pump? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin’s price dipped below $77,000 on Sunday but has managed to recover about a grand since that local low, and now sits closer to $78,000 ahead of what is expected to be its most important week this year.

Ripple’s XRP is trying to take down the $1.40 resistance once again, while ZEC has rebounded past $1,130. BTW is today’s top performer, surging by 36%, and it’s followed by FIL.

BTC Begins Crucial Week

Bitcoin entered the previous business week on the right foot, as it tried to overcome the $80,000 mark for the third or fourth time in the past 10 days. However, the bears were once again more persistent and didn’t allow it. Instead, the cryptocurrency started to lose value gradually and dipped to $77,600 by Wednesday.

It bounced to $79,600 twice on Thursday morning, but each attempt was halted, especially after the PPI data came out. More volatility was expected on Friday with the release of the CPI data, and it didn’t disappoint. Once the number came out, bitcoin went from over $77,000 to $76,000, before it shot up to $79,800 – all within just over an hour.

It was rejected at $80,000 once again and returned to its starting point at around $77,000. The weekend was less eventful, as usual, with BTC dipping to $76,400 yesterday and this morning. However, it has bounced to almost $78,000 as of press time as it begins arguably its most important week this year, with the Fed’s decision and the voting on the CLARITY Act.

Its market cap is back at $1.560 trillion, while its dominance over the alts is up to 59% on CMC.

FIL, BTW on a Roll

Ethereum has rebounded to over $2,500 today, while BNB remains north of $720. Ripple’s XRP is up by more than 3%, and it’s knocking on the $1.40 door. ZEC is up to $1,140 after a 5% increase, while XMR has slipped by almost 4% to $515.

The two top gainers from the 100 largest altcoins are BTW and FIL. The former has skyrocketed by more than 32% to $0.77, while the latter has tapped the $1.00 level after a 25% surge.

The cumulative market cap of all crypto assets has increased by 1% daily to $2.650 trillion on CMC.

The post Filecoin (FIL) Rockets 25% to $1, Bitcoin (BTC) Maintains $77K as Big Week Begins: Market Watch appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin (BTC) is heading into one of its most consequential weeks of the year so far, with the Federal Reserve announcing its September rate decision on Wednesday and the Bank of Japan following two days later.

Markets are pricing in roughly an 85% chance of a 25-basis-point Fed hike, and according to XWIN Japan, the real question isn’t whether rates move but how hawkish both central banks sound once they do.

Fed, BOJ, and a Trade Threat Collide

XWIN Japan laid out the scenario that worries it most: US yields and the yen rising together. Higher US rates tighten global liquidity, and a stronger yen risks speeding up the unwind of yen-funded carry trades, pushing investors to cut risk across stocks and crypto at once.

Brent crude has traded above $100, and the US 10-year yield has approached 5%, keeping inflation worries alive going into the decision. Once the meetings pass, XWIN wants traders watching US yields, USD/JPY, spot Bitcoin ETF flows, and underlying demand, since, according to them, that’s where the real test begins.

As CryptoPotato reported previously, the setup shifted fast, with August payrolls coming in at 162,000, triple what economists expected, and producer prices accelerating to an annual 5.4%. Last week’s CPI print confirmed headline inflation at 3.4%, and BTC reacted, sliding from about $82,400 to under $78,000 since Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s Jackson Hole speech and the hot data that followed.

Tuesday brings its own catalyst too, a Senate cloture vote on the CLARITY Act that needs 60 votes to advance.

There’s a political wrinkle too, as a result of President Donald Trump threatening to stop trading with countries running a US trade deficit if the Fed didn’t cut rates, and markets are now leaning toward a hike instead, which is the opposite of what he wants.

Spot On Chain’s Hupzy called it “a binary macro catalyst with asymmetric cross-asset risk,” warning that a hike pressures non-yielding assets while a political bend raises questions about dollar credibility.

Price Action Still Choppy Heading In

BTC changed hands a few hundred bucks away from $78,000 at the last check, up slightly in 24 hours but down about 2.5% over one week, even as it still gained approximately 23% in the last 30 days. It is also nearly 39% below its all-time high of more than $126,000 from last October.

ETF flows, meanwhile, split in opposite directions, with spot Bitcoin funds shedding $462.73 million across four trading days last week, their first negative week since mid-August, while ETH ETFs kept gaining, capped by a $216.41 million Friday inflow as the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency touched an eight-month high.

The post Japanese Yen, US Yields Pose Biggest Near-Term Bitcoin Risk: Analysts appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The CLARITY Act has received another round of changes as Senate Republicans try to secure enough Democratic support for Tuesday’s procedural vote on the cryptocurrency market structure bill.

The latest version, which consists of 635 pages, includes an ethics framework backed by President Donald Trump that would restrict public officials from issuing or sponsoring digital assets. The revised text allows both the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the state attorneys general authority to enforce the rules.

Last-Minute Revisions

The change addresses one of the main issues Democrats had raised during negotiations. They had previously objected to an arrangement in which the DOJ would be responsible for enforcing the ethics provisions. The debate over the rules also came from concerns surrounding Trump and his family’s financial involvement in the crypto sector.

US Senate Banking Digital Assets Subcommittee Chair Cynthia Lummis stated,

“After a year of intense daily bipartisan negotiations, this bill is ready. President Trump voluntarily agreed to unprecedented ethics restrictions, holding every federally elected official, judge, and their spouses to some of the toughest ethics restrictions in US history… Democrats got what they wanted; now they need to take yes for an answer.”

The ethics section incorporates much of the Tillis-Gallego proposal. Among its provisions, officials would have to either sell substantial crypto-related financial holdings or move them into a blind trust.

Changes to the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act (BRCA) now limit its scope to the Bank Secrecy Act and civil enforcement. Language that would have extended its protections to criminal proceedings, including cases brought under Section 1960, has been taken out. The changes would also bring miners and validators under those protections.

Other Key Details

The bill’s stablecoin yield section has also been revised with a “circuit breaker” mechanism first floated by Tillis in July. It would give federal regulators the ability to step in if stablecoins were causing significant withdrawals from community banks.

Stricter limits on vertical integration have also been introduced, such as rules covering affiliate trading and potential conflicts involving digital commodity exchanges, brokers, and dealers. The text also confirms that state consumer protection laws remain in effect. Developer protections would not override derivatives regulations or change the rules governing prediction markets.

Last week, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong voiced support for the CLARITY Act ahead of the Senate vote. Speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box Asia on September 10, the exec said the bill was ready for approval and claimed support from law enforcement groups, banks, and crypto companies. He also said Coinbase’s main concerns with the legislation had been addressed after the company previously raised several issues it considered essential.

The post Last-Minute Changes to the CLARITY Act: Will Democrats Finally Back the Crypto Bill? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Although there are several major economic events taking place in the following five business days, the reality is that only a handful of them could (and most likely will) impact the cryptocurrency market. That impact, though, is expected to be quite vicious in either direction.

The Kobeissi Letter highlighted an auction of 20-year securities, August retail sales, and, most importantly, the Federal Reserve’s September interest rate decision on Wednesday. The latest data shows that markets assign an 85%-90% probability that the central bank will hike rates by 25 basis points, following contrasting economic data.

Fed in Focus

The Fed setup has changed dramatically in just a few weeks, starting with the August employment data from early September, which showed that the US economy had added 162,000 jobs last month, triple expectations. Later on, the PPI numbers indicated that the annual producer inflation had accelerated to 5.4%. Last Friday’s CPI report subsequently confirmed headline inflation at 3.4%, with monthly core CPI slightly hotter than expected.

This combination, plus the fact that oil prices remain above $100 and diesel hit a new record in the States, has strengthened the Fed’s case for tighter policy.

Bitcoin and the altcoins have already demonstrated their sensitivity to this shift, dropping sharply following Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s speech from Jackson Hole several weeks ago, and again as rate-hike odds increase after the latest economic data.

The only question is whether this highly expected rate hike has been priced in, with BTC sliding from $82,400 to under $78,000 as of now. As such, investors will closely watch Warsh’s press conference after the meeting for clues as to whether the Fed’s decision on Wednesday is a one-off adjustment or the start of another tightening cycle.

The Tuesday Test

Before all eyes turn on the Fed on Wednesday, the crypto industry has another major event on Tuesday. The Senate’s cloture vote on the CLARITY Act is scheduled for 2:15 P.M. that day, and it requires 60 senators to advance the debate on the key bill.

The CLARITY Act aims to establish a comprehensive US crypto market structure and shed further details on the respective roles of the SEC and the CFTC.

Republicans released an updated text last week, adding new rules for non-decentralized DeFi protocols and clarifying how credit unions can deal in crypto. Moreover, they published their “last, best, and final” draft of the legislation on Sunday, including an ethics proposal backed by the POTUS.

The post Bitcoin’s Biggest Week of 2026 Is Here: Fed and CLARITY Vote Take Center Stage appeared first on CryptoPotato.