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Bitcoin Magazine

A Bitcoin Berkshire Model: Orange Juice

The corporate Bitcoin landscape is currently dominated by a single, aggressive playbook. Companies following this model rely almost exclusively on capital markets and financial engineering—issuing debt, preferred stock, and common equity at premiums—to turn their corporate balance sheets into amplified, high-beta proxies for Bitcoin.

Now, Orange Juice, a firm launched by partners at ego death capital, is introducing a brand-new corporate strategy to the mix. Rather than acting as a financial engineering vehicle reliant on capital markets, Orange Juice plans to acquire profitable American businesses, hold them indefinitely, improve their operations, and direct part of their excess cash flow into a Bitcoin treasury. While the dominant model turns investor demand for credit securities into Bitcoin, Orange Juice wants to turn sustainable operating earnings into Bitcoin.

To understand the value of this new approach, you have to understand its primary departure from the prevailing meta: Orange Juice is deliberately not “max long” Bitcoin. By anchoring its balance sheet to traditional operating earnings, the company trades away explosive bull market leverage in exchange for a decorrelated return stream that acts as a vital ballast during bear market winters.

Bear market ballasts and countercyclical purchasing power 

The core argument for the Orange Juice model becomes clearest during a Bitcoin bear market. Bitcoin companies that are driven by capital markets flows work best when investors are eager to finance them. Strong Bitcoin prices support higher equity valuations, which makes share issuance highly accretive, while healthy credit markets lower the cost of borrowing. However, during market downturns, this dynamic reverses. Equity premiums compress, credit becomes expensive, and capital markets become far less receptive. As a result, pure-play Bitcoin balance sheets lose their purchasing power precisely when Bitcoin is trading at its cheapest valuations.

Orange Juice, in theory, would be able to use its non-Bitcoin enterprise value as a buffer against these “very awful months”. A durable operating business like a pest control firm, a managed IT provider, or an industrial maintenance contractor can all continue to collect customer payments and generate free cash flow even during a 50% Bitcoin drawdown. This steady operational cash provides the company with unencumbered, countercyclical purchasing power when external capital markets are closed. At its core, the non-Bitcoin business serves as a diversification venue, providing a decorrelated return stream that smooths out enterprise volatility and protects the firm from a fearful capital market. It is also applicable to leveraged financing, because free cash flow can be used to pay preferred dividends or debt coupons, which can eliminate the need to issue equity at bear market lows. 

The trade-off: cost of capital and the Bitcoin hurdle rate

Because Orange Juice isn’t purely a Bitcoin balance sheet company, its downside protection comes with a clear structural trade-off.

Every acquisition Orange Juice makes introduces a cost of capital and an implicit hurdle rate: Bitcoin itself. If Orange Juice has $20 million in capital, it must decide whether to deploy that $20 million directly into Bitcoin on day one or use it to acquire a business generating (as an illustration) $3 million in annual cash flow. Even if the business yields an attractive 15% initial cash return, Orange Juice still has to answer whether that business will ultimately create more Bitcoin-denominated value than simply holding the underlying asset.

In a sustained bull market, this model obviously creates an inherent drag. A business returning 12 – 15% annually can prove to be a poor capital allocation decision if spot Bitcoin compounds much faster, and Orange Juice’s equity will naturally lag the explosive returns of amplified pure-play amplified “digital equity.” Orange Juice is effectively betting that the ability to aggressively buy the dip during bear markets (or at least service liabilities without selling Bitcoin or issuing equity) using operational cash will ultimately compensate for the opportunity cost of not putting every dollar directly into Bitcoin.

Execution risk and acquisition quality

For this countercyclical engine to work, the model depends heavily on acquisition quality and operational execution.

Unlike strategies that focus primarily on marketing to the capital markets and on financial engineering, Orange Juice’s success would depend on management’s ability to execute M&A and manage operating businesses. The ideal subsidiary must generate recurring revenue, require minimal maintenance capital expenditures, carry modest leverage, and remain resilient through broader economic recessions.

Weak or highly cyclical businesses damage the core thesis by losing its cash flow at the exact moment Bitcoin and the capital markets come under pressure. If an acquired subsidiary fails during a downturn, it could turn into an operational drain. Therefore, management must excel at both acquiring businesses at attractive free-cash-flow multiples and running them efficiently enough to maintain a predictable stream of excess cash for Bitcoin accumulation.

The bottom line 

Corporate Bitcoin strategy no longer has to be a game dominated by “digital securities.” While pure-play Bitcoin companies operate as high-beta vehicles designed to maximize upside during favorable market regimes, the Orange Juice model offers an alternative framework designed for resiliency through decorrelation.

By accepting lower beta and sacrificing maximum leverage in a bull market, Orange Juice, in theory, creates an operational foundation for unconditional purchasing power through every stage of the market cycle. 

Disclaimer: This content was prepared on behalf of Bitcoin For Corporations for informational purposes only. It reflects the author’s own analysis and opinion and should not be relied upon as investment advice. Nothing in this article constitutes an offer, invitation, or solicitation to purchase, sell, or subscribe for any security or financial product.

This post A Bitcoin Berkshire Model: Orange Juice first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Allard Peng.

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 lost to fraud: what the Austrian tax office recognises as a loss

Fake investment platforms, phishing or supposed crypto advisers: anyone who loses bitcoin to fraud may be facing a total loss in economic terms. For tax purposes in Austria, however, that does not automatically mean the original acquisition costs can be claimed as a loss.

For privately held cryptocurrencies the basic rule is this: losing coins to fraud is not a disposal for tax purposes. What is missing is therefore a realisation event, the thing that would trigger a capital loss you could offset against tax.

20,000 euros gone – and still no tax loss?

An example:

• Bitcoin bought for 20,000 euros
• the coins are transferred to the perpetrators as a result of fraud
• no repayment follows

In economic terms the loss amounts to 20,000 euros.

For tax purposes, those 20,000 euros held as private assets generally cannot simply be offset against share gains, dividends or other crypto gains. What is decisive is that the owner did not sell or swap the bitcoin in the course of a normal taxable disposal.

Fraud, theft and hacking are treated along similar lines

Austrian administrative practice groups several cases together in broadly the same way:

• theft of cryptocurrencies,
• loss through fraud,
• a hacking attack,
• loss of the private key.

Outside a business context, none of these on its own generally produces a loss realised for tax purposes. That sets a case of fraud distinctly apart from a voluntary sale below the original purchase price.

A genuine sale at a loss is different

Anyone who buys bitcoin for 20,000 euros and later sells it in the ordinary way for 12,000 euros generally realises a tax loss of 8,000 euros. Under the Austrian loss-offsetting rules, that loss can be set against certain positive capital income in the same year.

Anyone who loses the same bitcoin entirely to fraud suffers the same economic damage – but for tax purposes the necessary realisation is generally absent.

Compensation can trigger fresh tax consequences later on

A further layer arises where the investor holds a claim for repayment or damages.

An example:

• original acquisition costs: 15,000 euros
• the bitcoin is lost to fraud
• a responsible party later pays 18,000 euros in damages

The compensation payment can then become relevant for tax. Depending on the case, it may realise unrealised gains or losses that were present until then.

Document the fraud case fully all the same

Even where no usable tax loss arises at first, investors should secure all the evidence:

• wallet addresses,
• transaction IDs,
• the original purchase receipts,
• chat and email correspondence,
• the police report,
• reports to supervisory authorities,
• records of attempts to recover the funds,
• possible claims for damages.

This documentation becomes especially important if bitcoin or money is repaid after all at a later stage.

Business assets can look different

The restrictions described here apply in particular to privately held cryptocurrencies. Where bitcoin was part of business assets, different rules on profit determination and valuation apply. A business owner should therefore have a fraud loss assessed separately for tax.

Conclusion

A bitcoin loss caused by fraud is economically real in Austria, but where the assets are held privately it generally does not automatically lead to a capital loss that is deductible for tax.

Fraud does not count as a normal disposal. Only later repayments or compensation payments can trigger events that are relevant for tax once more.

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

When you move funds from a Layer 2 network back to Ethereum, your wallet tells you after roughly twenty minutes that the process has been finalized. Your money has still not arrived on Ethereum at that point, and depending on the network it takes anywhere from just under two hours to more than ten days afterwards. This gap between what the display says and what is actually happening is why withdrawals started shortly before an exchange deadline regularly arrive too late.

I measured the waiting times myself on September 14, 2026, directly against the contracts on Ethereum and against the public nodes of six Layer 2 networks. The short answer: on the optimistic networks Arbitrum One, OP Mainnet and Base, the finalized marker sits some eighteen to twenty-four minutes behind the current state, yet the waiting period written into the contract runs to between 1 and 7 days. On the ZK networks zkSync Era, Linea and Scroll, the marker lags by 1.7 to 4.1 hours, and there it roughly describes the moment your funds become claimable on Ethereum. Same term, two entirely different meanings.

Layer 2 withdrawal explained: what really happens on the way back to Ethereum

A Layer 2 is a network of its own. It processes its transactions itself and then posts the results to Ethereum in batches. The benefit shows up in the cost; the price is paid at withdrawal. Anyone pulling funds back has to wait until Ethereum has accepted the Layer 2 result as valid.

The route has three steps, and only the first one is quick. You begin by starting the withdrawal on the Layer 2 itself. The network then has to submit the corresponding state to Ethereum, and only after that does the real waiting period begin. At the end comes a second transaction on Ethereum, the one with which you claim the funds. Anyone who completes only the first step and then waits may be waiting indefinitely, because on most networks the claim does not happen by itself.

State root, proof and claim

A state root is a single check value that summarises the entire balance sheet of a Layer 2 network at one point in time. That check value is the anchor against which Ethereum later verifies whether your withdrawal really belongs to a valid state. As long as no state root has been posted to Ethereum for the block containing your withdrawal, you cannot prove anything at all, however long you wait.

Only once the root is in place do you submit the proof. After that, the window runs in which other participants may object. If it expires without objection, you claim the money.

The finalized stamp: why "finalized" in the block explorer means two different things

Every node on an EVM network knows a block marker called finalized. That marker describes the state the network regards as irreversible. On Ethereum itself this is unambiguous. On a Layer 2 the meaning depends on how the network is built, and this is precisely where the misunderstanding arises.

On the optimistic networks, the marker refers to the data from which the Layer 2 state is derived. Once that data is final on Ethereum, the Layer 2 block derived from it counts as finalized. That says nothing about your withdrawal. The fraud window keeps running independently.

On the ZK networks, the marker is tied more closely to what actually matters to you: there a batch is only carried as final once the corresponding proof has been verified and executed on Ethereum. Anyone reading their withdrawal out of that marker on Arbitrum or Base is off by a factor of several hundred.

Our own measurement: what the contracts of six Layer 2 networks prescribe as withdrawal periods

This analysis was carried out by cryptoticker.io on September 14, 2026. The measurement was taken at 06:56 UTC against Ethereum block 25,974,039, via a public node, with no account and no keys. In each case I queried the parameters that sit in the contract on Ethereum and set the waiting period.

One methodological detail makes the difference: I did not take the contract addresses from a list but resolved them starting at the canonical bridge contract. On Arbitrum One, the bridge leads to a different rollup contract from the one many older guides name; the older one reports a confirmation state from February 2025 and has therefore been superseded. Query the wrong address and you get an answer that looks like a measurement.

The maturity period is the time that has to elapse between your submitted proof and the permitted claim. The lock period is an additional wait that the operator has written into the contract as a safety buffer. Both values sit in the same contract. Whether they add up or overlap in an emergency depends on how the dispute procedure runs, and I did not verify that with a withdrawal of my own. Anyone planning conservatively adds them together.

Optimistic rollups: why the fraud window on Arbitrum runs to 6.4 days

An optimistic rollup assumes the submitted results are correct and grants everyone else a window in which they may prove the opposite. That window is the fraud window, and it is the real reason for the wait. It is sized so that an honest participant can still object even if someone tries to push them off the network for a while.

On Arbitrum One, the rollup contract holds a value of 45,818 Ethereum blocks. Converted at the target time of 12 seconds per block, that gives 549,816 seconds, or 6.36 days. The conversion is the only place in my measurement where an assumption is buried: Ethereum blocks arrive on a twelve-second rhythm on average, and individual slots can be missed. In practice that lengthens the window rather than shortening it.

On top of that comes a grace period of 14,400 blocks, around two days. In normal operation this grace period does not apply; it becomes relevant only if there is an actual dispute. For your planning that means 6.4 days is the standard case and 8.4 days is the upper bound you should work with if you have no buffer.

OP Mainnet and Base compared at contract level: 7 days against 1 day on the same technology

The most interesting finding of the measurement sits between two networks running on the same software. OP Mainnet carries a maturity period of 604,800 seconds in its portal contract, exactly seven days, plus a lock period of 302,400 seconds, or three and a half days. Base carries 86,400 seconds in the identically built contract, so one day, and a lock period of zero.

Both values come from the same query at the same moment, and both networks run on the same software. The difference is therefore a decision taken by the respective governance, not a technical necessity. That is also why you should not rely permanently on a figure you read once: what stands at one day today can be back at seven after a contract update. The number sits publicly in the contract and can be looked up at any time.

What this means for the network you choose

If you regularly move back and forth between a Layer 2 and Ethereum, withdrawal duration is a hard selection criterion alongside fees. The duration determines how quickly you can react to a cut-off date, such as a withdrawal deadline at your crypto exchange. Anyone simply holding funds for the long term never feels the difference. Anyone working with them feels it every time.

ZK rollups: why zkSync, Linea and Scroll settle in hours rather than days

A ZK rollup does not present Ethereum with a claim that would have to be contested, but with a mathematical proof that the contract itself recomputes. If the proof passes, the state is valid. No fraud window is needed, because there is nothing to challenge.

The remaining wait arises because a proof is always generated for whole batches of blocks and generating it costs computing time. That lag is exactly what I measured, by querying each network for its current block and its block carried as final, then comparing the timestamps.

At first glance the table reads the wrong way round, and that is its value. The three optimistic networks sit at the top because their marker shows the least lag, even though it is precisely there that the longest real wait is coming for you. The three ZK networks sit at the bottom, even though their figure is the only one that gives any indication of when you get to your money.

Submission rhythm measured: every 60 minutes on OP Mainnet, every 19 minutes on Base

Ahead of the fraud window sits a wait that most guides leave out: your withdrawal can only be proven once the state containing it has been submitted to Ethereum at all. To gauge this, I read out the 24 most recent submissions for OP Mainnet and Base via the relevant contract and compared their timestamps.

On OP Mainnet the median is 60.4 minutes, with a range of 60.2 to 60.4 minutes. The window ran from September 13, 07:23 UTC to September 14, 06:30 UTC. The rhythm is therefore effectively hourly and barely fluctuates. On Base the median is 19.2 minutes, but the range runs from 4.4 to 35.2 minutes, measured from September 13, 23:08 UTC to September 14, 06:43 UTC. Base submits more often, but less regularly.

For planning purposes you add this time on top. On OP Mainnet, waiting for the next submission alone can cost you a full hour, on Base up to a good half hour. Set against a seven-day window, that barely registers. If you start a withdrawal on the last possible day, that hour is what decides it.

Layer 2 withdrawal before an exchange deadline: how to count backwards

The practical occasion is on the table right now. KuCoin has delisted 25 tokens and closes withdrawals on October 7, 2026 at 08:00 UTC; we have listed the withdrawal deadline and the affected tokens individually. Anyone who still has to pull funds out of a Layer 2 for a cut-off date like this and then send them to an exchange is best advised to count from the end.

For October 7, 08:00 UTC, the measured values give the following latest start times, in each case without a buffer and without the crediting time at the receiving exchange:

• OP Mainnet: 7.00 days of maturity period plus 3.50 days of lock period give 10.5 days on a conservative reading. Latest start: September 26, around 20:00 UTC.
• Arbitrum One: 6.36 days of fraud window plus 2.00 days of grace period give 8.36 days. Latest start: September 28, around 23:20 UTC.
• Base: 1.00 day of maturity period. Latest start: October 6, 08:00 UTC.
• Scroll, Linea, zkSync Era: 1.7 to 4.1 hours. The day before is enough.

A buffer belongs on top of these values, for four reasons: the wait until the next submission, the crediting time at the receiving exchange, possible network congestion, and the plain fact that you have to trigger the second transaction yourself. Anyone who starts over a weekend and only notices the claim on Monday loses two days that appear in no contract period.

The two transactions many people forget

On the optimistic networks it is usually two signatures on Ethereum: one for the proof, one for the claim. Both cost fees on Ethereum, not on the Layer 2. So keep enough ether ready on the address you are withdrawing from. What ether is currently worth is shown on our Ethereum page. A withdrawal left hanging on an empty gas balance waits beyond the seven days, and goes on waiting until you top it up.

Fast bridges as a shortcut: what you take on in exchange for the time saved

There is a route that bypasses the wait. So-called fast bridges pay you the funds out on Ethereum immediately and sit out the waiting period themselves. They charge a fee for this, and you trade a wait for counterparty risk.

That risk is not theoretical. cryptoticker.io reported on the outflow of funds at the Symbiosis bridge on September 12, 2026, and on the shutdown of the Silicon Network bridge, with a deadline of its own, on September 4, 2026. The canonical bridge of a Layer 2, by contrast, is the one operated by the network itself; it is slow, but it has no counterparty that can disappear.

That makes the trade-off an honest one to weigh. For small amounts and a tight deadline, the fast bridge can be the right choice. For amounts whose loss would hurt, the wait is the price of safety, and the moment to pay it is before the cut-off date.

What the measurement does not show: the limits of this analysis

The values come from the contracts and from the nodes, not from a withdrawal of my own with a stopwatch. What I can evidence are the periods the network prescribes and the rhythm in which submissions are made. What I cannot evidence is the actual duration of a specific withdrawal from start to finish.

Further open points you should be aware of: the submission rhythm rests on a single day's sample of 24 submissions per network, not on a long-term average. The marker for the final state is set by each node provider individually, and I queried exactly one public endpoint per network. Layer 3 networks, non-EVM chains and all third-party bridges are not measured. And whether the maturity period and the lock period on OP Mainnet add up in an emergency is the conservative reading, not an established fact.

The technical foundations of both designs are publicly documented, at Ethereum itself for optimistic rollups and in the developer documentation of the OP Stack networks for the course of a withdrawal. Anyone wanting to recompute the figures in this article will find there the contract names I queried.

Planning a Layer 2 withdrawal: what to take away

1. Count backwards, not forwards. Put the cut-off date at the start and subtract your network's period: 10.5 days on OP Mainnet, 8.4 on Arbitrum One, 1 day on Base, a few hours on the ZK networks. If the cut-off comes from an exchange, check at the same time whether your exchange supports the network directly at all; which providers are licensed in the EU is set out in our overview of regulated crypto exchanges.
2. Do not rely on the finalized stamp. On the optimistic networks it describes something other than your withdrawal. What governs is the contract value, and that can be queried publicly. Anyone holding funds in self-custody should plan firmly for the second transaction; the equipment for that is covered in our hardware wallet comparison.
3. Document the process while it is running. A withdrawal spread over several days produces two transactions on Ethereum and one on the Layer 2, and come January you will want to know which of them belong together. A portfolio tracker takes the piecing-together off your hands.

(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 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.)

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.

Strategy halts Bitcoin buys to launch a $139 million stock buyback, while competitor Strive issues preferred shares to cross the 25,000 BTC milestone.

Shiba Inu is trying to secure a proper recovery but fresher inflows are needed.

Senate vote on the CLARITY Act puts $9.46 million in XRP shorts at risk of a massive squeeze on a mere 5% price move.

Morgan Stanley joins the list of big banks buying heavily into Bitcoin as its latest Bitcoin purchases have pushed its holdings to surpass $609 million of Bitcoin.

Cardano will need to rally 1371.43% to reach this high if taken from current price levels.

Key Takeaways

• Elon Musk has expressed strong confidence that SpaceX will deploy Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 AI computing systems to orbit by 2027
• The company’s representation in the Nasdaq 100 index is expected to surge from 1.28% to 2.82%, which could drive substantial passive investment inflows
• SpaceX has committed to an Nvidia-only approach for building its artificial intelligence infrastructure
• The space-based AI platforms, designated Starmind, will operate using solar energy, radiator-based thermal management, and laser communication systems derived from Starlink
• The aerospace company has secured computing service contracts with Anthropic and Google, while Nvidia maintains a significant $21 billion stake in SpaceX as of mid-2026

Speaking on X, Elon Musk stated he holds high confidence that SpaceX will launch Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 artificial intelligence computing platforms into space during 2027. This declaration arrived as analysts reported SpaceX’s Nasdaq 100 index representation could more than double by month’s end.

Shares of SpaceX finished Friday’s trading session up 2% at $151.21. The stock recorded its third consecutive weekly advance, climbing 2% over the five-day period.

Space Exploration Technologies Corp., SPCX

According to Bloomberg’s analysis of preliminary index figures, SpaceX’s Nasdaq 100 representation is forecast to climb from 1.28% to approximately 2.82%. Official confirmation of the final percentage will arrive later this month.

Approximately $1.7 trillion in investment capital tracked the Nasdaq 100 as of the second quarter’s conclusion. This figure encompasses the $481 billion Invesco QQQ Trust. An elevated index weighting would likely channel billions of additional dollars into SpaceX equity through index fund rebalancing.

When SpaceX entered the Nasdaq 100 in July, its weighting remained relatively modest due to lockup restrictions on the majority of shares following its public offering. As these restriction periods lapsed, the available trading float expanded significantly. Anticipated heavy insider liquidation during the initial two lockup expiration windows in August never materialized.

SpaceX Commits Fully to Nvidia Partnership

SpaceX has chosen to construct its entire artificial intelligence computing ecosystem using Nvidia hardware exclusively. The partnership has produced a space-optimized version of the Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 system, modified to handle weight constraints, radiation exposure, and thermal management challenges.

The NVL72 architecture integrates 72 Rubin graphics processing units alongside 36 Vera central processing units. Musk has characterized the space-adapted configuration as “simpler, lower cost, denser and lighter than a traditional rack.”

SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen confirmed earlier that the organization is utilizing Nvidia processors exclusively. He indicated the company aims to launch its inaugural orbital computing satellite next year, with expanded deployment phases scheduled for 2028.

SpaceX’s original IPO documentation had indicated a launch timeframe of “as early as 2028.” Musk subsequently accelerated that timeline to the final quarter of 2027.

Data Centers Beyond Earth

SpaceX has designated these orbital platforms as Starmind. Initial deployments are anticipated to house one computing rack each, powered by solar arrays and cooled through radiator systems, while employing laser communication links adapted from Starlink infrastructure.

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell described the spacecraft as “to some extent simpler than the next-gen V3 Starlink satellites.” The platforms will utilize the identical bus architecture as V3 Starlink units, substituting communications hardware for computing components.

SpaceX contends that orbital data center placement circumvents the terrestrial constraints of real estate availability, power grid capacity, and water resources that conventional facilities encounter. Musk has forecasted that space will emerge as “by far the cheapest place to put AI” within a two-to-three-year horizon.

The organization has pursued regulatory authorization for a constellation potentially numbering up to one million AI-focused satellites. The Starship launch system is anticipated to be instrumental in reducing deployment costs for massive quantities of computing infrastructure.

SpaceX has finalized computing capacity rental arrangements with Anthropic and Google. As of mid-2026, Nvidia maintained a $21 billion equity position in SpaceX.

The post Elon Musk Expresses Strong Confidence in SpaceX’s 2027 Nvidia Space Computer Launch appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Western Digital plans to redeem its entire outstanding balance of $109.5 million in 3.00% Convertible Senior Notes maturing in 2028 on November 16, 2026.
• Redemption will occur at full face value plus accumulated interest through the redemption date.
• Bondholders can elect to convert their holdings at 26.5231 shares per $1,000 of principal through November 12, 2026.
• Cash will cover the principal value of conversions, while amounts exceeding principal will be paid in shares.
• Shares of WDC declined 2.98% to $447.18 following the announcement.

On September 14, 2026, Western Digital (WDC) revealed its intention to retire the complete outstanding amount of $109.5 million in 3.00% Convertible Senior Notes scheduled to mature in 2028. The company set November 16, 2026, as the official redemption date.

Western Digital Corporation, WDC

Shares closed at $447.18 when the announcement was made public, representing a 2.98% decrease for the trading session.

The redemption terms specify full face value payment at 100% of principal. Additionally, the company will include any interest that has accumulated and remains unpaid through the day before redemption.

Bondholders seeking to exchange their notes for equity have a designated conversion period. The window opens September 14 and closes at 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time on November 12, 2026.

Each $1,000 of principal value converts at a predetermined rate of 26.5231 common shares of Western Digital. The redemption process includes no additional share adjustments.

Company executives anticipate that the majority of bondholders will opt for conversion ahead of the redemption deadline. However, conversion remains entirely voluntary.

Those selecting conversion will receive settlement distributed across 40 consecutive trading days throughout the designated observation period. Any partial share amounts will be paid in cash.

Western Digital’s Conversion Settlement Method

Management selected a 0% cash percentage for handling conversions. Under this framework, Western Digital will distribute cash equal to the principal balance of converted notes. Any value surpassing the principal threshold will be paid out in common shares.

This arrangement enables the company to decrease outstanding debt while preserving operational cash reserves. The equity dilution from new share issuance represents the offsetting cost.

The company previously established capped call arrangements with select financial counterparties when these notes were initially sold. Management indicated these derivative contracts will remain unaffected by the current redemption plan.

Analyst Outlook

Current analyst consensus rates WDC stock as a Buy, accompanied by a $740.00 price objective. This target significantly exceeds the trading level reached on announcement day.

U.S. Bank Trust Company, National Association, serves as the trustee, paying agent, and conversion agent under the governing indenture for these notes.

After-hours trading saw WDC shares fall to $418.96, marking an additional 6.31% drop beyond the regular session close.

The post Western Digital (WDC) Stock Slides 3% Following $109.5M Convertible Note Redemption Plan appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• Korea Electric Power Corp’s proposal for $18.7 billion in upfront power payments has been declined by Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix
• Samsung would have contributed approximately 20 trillion won while SK Hynix’s share was estimated at 5 trillion won
• Both semiconductor manufacturers expressed concerns about unpredictable long-term chip market demand
• KEPCO now faces challenges in securing alternative funding sources for semiconductor cluster power infrastructure development
• Stock prices dropped significantly in Seoul trading, with Samsung declining 3.7% and SK Hynix falling 5.3%

In a significant setback for South Korea’s power infrastructure planning, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix have declined to participate in Korea Electric Power Corp’s ambitious proposal that sought 25 trillion won—approximately $18.7 billion—in advance payments to finance electricity infrastructure for upcoming semiconductor manufacturing facilities across the nation.

KEPCO, the government-controlled electricity provider, had pitched this advance payment structure as a mechanism to secure funding for power infrastructure connected to new chip production facilities. The utility company intended to use these prepayments to accelerate construction of the electrical systems required by expanding semiconductor operations.

Details of the Rejected Proposal

According to the plan’s terms, Samsung was expected to provide roughly 20 trillion won, with SK Hynix contributing an additional 5 trillion won. KEPCO positioned this funding mechanism as essential for accelerating infrastructure development aligned with South Korea’s strategic goals to strengthen its position in global semiconductor manufacturing.

Following careful evaluation, both corporations informed KEPCO that accepting the proposal would not be feasible. An industry source based in Seoul, who requested anonymity given the delicate nature of ongoing discussions, indicated that the chipmakers questioned whether such substantial advance commitments were warranted.

The primary obstacle centered on unpredictability surrounding sustained semiconductor market demand. Given the industry’s historical pattern of alternating between expansion and contraction periods, both manufacturers demonstrated reluctance to lock in multi-billion dollar commitments predicated on demand forecasts that may not materialize.

Stock Market Impact

Financial markets reacted swiftly once the rejection became public knowledge. Samsung Electronics shares decreased by 3.7% during Monday trading sessions in Seoul. SK Hynix experienced a more pronounced decline, with shares dropping 5.3% the same day.

The information regarding the proposal’s rejection was provided to Reuters through South Korean lawmaker Lee Chul-gyu’s office. When contacted for official statements, representatives from both Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix declined to provide commentary on the situation.

South Korea confronts increasing electricity demands driven by semiconductor production expansion and growing artificial intelligence infrastructure requirements. With the chipmakers’ rejection of KEPCO’s funding proposal, the utility company lacks a definitive strategy for financing the infrastructure enhancements it deems critical.

KEPCO faces the challenge of identifying alternative funding mechanisms or restructuring the arrangement in ways that might prove more acceptable to the semiconductor manufacturers.

Earlier this month, the Chosun Ilbo newspaper in South Korea had reported on KEPCO’s efforts to advance this prepayment concept, presenting it as a solution for constructing power infrastructure on timelines that match the chipmakers’ expansion schedules.

As of September 14, 2026, no modified proposal has been formally presented.

The post Samsung and SK Hynix Reject KEPCO’s $18.7B Power Infrastructure Prepayment Deal appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• The $LAPTOP meme coin plummeted approximately 98% in value just minutes after its debut
• Insufficient liquidity of only $5,000 was provided at launch, creating extreme volatility against overwhelming demand
• A single unidentified trader converted $250,000 into $1.18 million amid the turbulent launch
• Over 15,000 digital wallets sustained losses, representing roughly 80% of all participants
• Hunter Biden acknowledged the failure and promised to “make it right,” though specific remediation plans remain unclear

The Wednesday launch of Hunter Biden’s $LAPTOP meme coin turned into a financial disaster, evaporating value for the vast majority of early participants within mere minutes of going live.

The cryptocurrency took its name from the laptop scandal that shadowed Biden throughout recent years. According to Biden, the symbol had evolved into a representation of “resilience, redemption and recovery” in his personal journey.

The initial trading session was chaotic. Token prices rocketed from approximately $2.39 to a peak of $316 on certain exchanges before plunging beneath the $4 threshold. Alternative data sources recorded the maximum price around $190. Regardless of the exact figure, the decline was devastating.

Biden attributed the catastrophic failure to the project’s market maker, who allegedly provided merely $5,000 in liquidity at the time of launch despite substantial buyer interest. This inadequate liquidity pool created conditions for extreme price volatility.

“There was a f–k up. The f–k-up occurred in the first 30 seconds of launching the coin,” Biden acknowledged in a video statement shared on X Friday.

During its momentary spike, the token’s theoretical fully diluted market capitalization soared to $144 billion, as reported by CoinDesk, notwithstanding virtually nonexistent liquidity to justify such valuation.

Biden observed that the market capitalization temporarily surpassed BlackRock’s valuation, which exceeds $175 billion. He described the price trajectory as resembling “Mount Everest.”

Massive Profit for Single Trader

An unidentified trader successfully converted approximately $250,000 into $1.18 million in a matter of minutes. This represented roughly $930,000 in gains excluding transaction fees, based on analysis from blockchain intelligence firm Datavault AI.

In stark contrast, another investor who deployed around $200,000 near the price zenith was left holding tokens valued at merely $2,000 following the collapse.

Analysis from blockchain analytics company Bubblemaps revealed that approximately 80% of participants sustained financial losses. In excess of 15,000 wallets recorded negative outcomes, with the majority of individual losses remaining below $1,000.

A minority group profited significantly. According to CryptoSlate, 88 wallets collectively generated $5.6 million from the launch event.

Biden Accepts Accountability

Biden disclosed that he had devoted six months to developing the project and participated in all aspects of its development, including the token’s architecture and public presentation strategy.

He emphasized that neither he nor his collaborators liquidated any tokens during the launch. Team members were reportedly subject to a six-month lock-up period, prohibiting them from selling during the price spike.

“This is my f–king token,” Biden declared. “At the end of the day, it’s my responsibility, and there was a f–k up.”

He indicated the team was taking steps to enhance liquidity and trading activity moving forward.

Biden stopped short of announcing a compensation plan for affected investors, but pledged his continued involvement with the project.

“I am in this to the end 100%, and I promise you that we’re gonna make it right,” he stated.

The post $LAPTOP Meme Coin Disaster: How Hunter Biden’s Token Lost 98% Value in Minutes appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Highlights

• Technology-heavy Nasdaq 100 futures declined 1.5%, while S&P 500 contracts retreated 0.6% and Dow futures lost 0.2% in Monday’s pre-market session
• Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, released a lengthy essay advocating for reduced speed in AI model advancement due to safety considerations
• Both Sam Altman of OpenAI and Tesla’s Elon Musk endorsed Amodei’s position on tempering development velocity
• OpenAI’s potential public offering could be postponed to 2027, while Anthropic maintains its autumn Nasdaq listing timeline
• Energy market pressures intensified as Brent crude approached $108 per barrel

American equity futures experienced significant declines Monday morning following unprecedented calls from prominent artificial intelligence executives to decelerate technological advancement, creating anxiety among technology sector investors.

Contracts tied to the Nasdaq 100 index tumbled 1.5%. The S&P 500 futures contract retreated 0.6%, while Dow Jones Industrial Average futures shed approximately 114 points, representing a 0.2% decline.

Semiconductor and memory manufacturers bore the brunt of the downturn. Pre-market sessions saw losses for Nvidia, Intel, Marvell, and Micron. Across Pacific markets, Samsung and SK Hynix similarly declined.

Catalyst Behind Market Weakness

Over the weekend, Anthropic’s chief executive Dario Amodei released an extensive 3,800-word essay. The piece contended that artificial intelligence firms should reduce the velocity of model enhancement to more effectively manage safety concerns, encompassing potential loss of system control and economic destabilization.

I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks.

Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We’ll have more to share soon. https://t.co/1YhhIybZX7

— Sam Altman (@sama) September 12, 2026

Sam Altman, who leads OpenAI, offered swift agreement. During a Fortune interview, he affirmed Amodei’s position, stating “Dario is right.” Elon Musk, heading both SpaceX and Tesla, voiced identical support through a message on X.

This uncommon consensus among artificial intelligence pioneers caught financial markets off guard. Investment communities have channeled substantial capital into rapid AI advancement over recent years, making any indication of deceleration problematic for growth and spending projections.

Deutsche Bank’s analyst Jim Reid highlighted the significance. “For markets, the key question is whether this is the first sign that the extraordinary AI investment cycle might eventually moderate,” he commented.

Public Offering Uncertainty and Energy Market Tensions

Discussions about slowing AI development also revived concerns regarding initial public offering timelines. Altman informed Fortune that OpenAI might delay its market debut until 2027, extending beyond earlier projections.

Conversely, Anthropic continues targeting an autumn public listing. Reports indicate the company has chosen Nasdaq as its preferred exchange.

Oil prices contributed additional market strain Monday. Brent crude hovered around $108 per barrel, advancing approximately 3%. West Texas Intermediate increased 2.6% to roughly $102.67 per barrel.

The petroleum surge followed Saudi Arabia’s closure of a critical pipeline combined with ongoing Middle Eastern conflicts interrupting crude availability.

These developments establish a challenging environment for investors this week. The Federal Reserve convenes its monetary policy meeting Wednesday.

Market participants now assign 86% probability to an interest rate increase following Friday’s elevated inflation data. Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh has indicated he won’t provide advance guidance regarding future rate actions, amplifying market uncertainty.

The convergence of artificial intelligence development concerns, elevated energy costs, and potential rate increases created challenging conditions for equities entering the week.

The post Tech Futures Plunge as AI Leaders Advocate for Development Pause appeared first on Blockonomi.